Four Souls

TWELVE. The Fortune Polly Elizabeth

THERE WAS NO packing of the house, since its entire contents would be sold at auction. John James Mauser had fled, leaving me to clean up the copious mess of his belongings, but it was after all part of the agreement. He was to wander the earth. I was to count his handkerchiefs. After I had totaled them up I was to then mark them with a price. I would handle the sale of his accumulated goods, and with the proceeds I would satisfy as many of his creditors as I possibly could. Fleur had taken the automobile, her clothing, and the boy. They had departed before dawn and would take back roads in case they should be followed by those who were alerted to the entire desertion of John James Mauser — the abandonment of his ruined accounts and the bled carcasses of his books and the plucked spars of the solid edifice that once had been his moneyed life.

And here I was, counting handkerchiefs. To add strangeness to surprise, I was not alone. I was joined. He was polishing a table spread with silver. He had brown eyes and a smile that I now saw as one of unbounded attraction, for it was cast upon me out of love. When Fantan looked at me, the sun came out in any room, and when I looked back at him, I could feel soft fire rise in my own face. What astounding things can happen to us, what change, what absurd luck.

We’ve lost a fortune, for Mauser’s money of course was the stipend upon which my sister and I lived. But I have gained more than a fortune. I have Fantan. We have plans, grand plans. We are heading north to live in a town just outside the reservation boundary. A little place with a railroad spur and two bars, a piano shop, a newspaper, and a grain elevator. Fantan has saved a small bundle of money, and Mauser secretly added to it before he was picked clean. With it we’ve bought a share in a trading store located on the reservation. Eventually we’ll buy out the half still belonging to the old Lebanese, and then we’ll move into the store’s back rooms. We will live at the ends of the earth. We will sell dried peas and shovels. Fabric and spools of thread. I’ll train a bean vine around the back door and I’ll have a garden filled with squash. Fantan will play cards with Fleur as often as he can, and I’ll read sweet poems to the boy, no matter how big he grows.

Fantan touches my shoulder and my arm glows. My hand is in his hand. With our box of pens and tags, we’re moving on to the bedside clocks. The racks of ties. The unwrapped boxes of cigars.

All that Mauser left. Wherever I go in the house, now, Fantan is at my side and the little dog follows us both. I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this. Warm sun falls on us through diamonds of lead glass as we work. If I am a fool, I am proud to be one. I have married one servant and declared another my sister. My husband and I do not speak in flows of words, but we connect by the heartstrings and by laughter and by signs. I am that rare thing thought only to exist in death. I am a happy woman.