Four Souls

FIVE. Under the Ground Nanapush

ON THE NIGHT that Fleur decided it was time to kill James Mauser, she cleaned her knife on her hair and tested its edge. He was well enough, she thought, he valued his life sufficiently, to suffer as she took it away. She’d grown tired of the long wait, and wanted to go home. So she bundled together all that she owned, set it out by the back door, and slipped like a shadow up the service staircase and down the wide hall of the main entry. From there to the stairs that led up to the ballroom. Stairs that didn’t creak at all if you trod their edges. She glided down the upstairs hall to the door of his bedroom. The dark was a quiet blanket. Everyone was asleep. Turning the crystal doorknob with a stealthy hand, she entered Mauser’s bedroom and stood in the entryway, regarding him. A low lamp burned just beside the man, who slept lightly. A book was splayed open on his chest. Small professorial reading glasses perched half askew on the bridge of his nose. Fleur edged soundlessly close to the bed and, as he turned in his sleep, frowning, sensing her proximity, she nestled close to him as a snake to a warm rock. His frown changed to a dreamy smile. She gently coaxed his head to the pillow of her breast. He groaned happily in his dream and she put her knife to his throat. She woke him by breathing into his ear.

“I have come here to kill you.”

“What took you so long,” said Mauser. He was not asleep after all. He had been waiting without sleep for many nights on end. He had rehearsed what he would say to her so that he wouldn’t tremble, yet he could not control a slight quiver as her knife creased his throat.

“Do you know who I am?” said Fleur.

“Of course I do,” said Mauser.

“Who am I?”

“You’re a relative of one of the women I wronged.” His breath caught as Fleur’s knife cut a little deeper.

Her voice thickened with rage. “One of them? Awenen? I am the woman whose land you stole.”

Mauser was silent. He’d taken the land of so many it was impossible that he should remember just who they were. His mind was reeling back through titles and false transfers and quitclaim deeds. He thought he’d had her figured. Who could she be?

“Who are you?” he asked, then, very humbly.

Fleur answered in a sarcastic, angry voice. “I am the sound that the wind used to make in a thousand needles of pine. I am the quiet at the root. When I walk through your hallway I walk through myself. When I touch the walls of your house I touch my own face. You know me.”

“No, I don’t,” said Mauser, now thinking that she was crazy and supposing himself to be in even more danger than he had imagined.

“I’m going to slice you open,” said Fleur, all in Ojibwe, which she knew well he understood, “and take out your guts and hang them on the walls. Then I’m going back home to live on the land you took. If you send your spirit there to look for me, I’ll kill your spirit too.”

“I won’t send my spirit,” said Mauser, “it is meant to serve you.”

He was a hardened man, a much different sort of man than the one who presented himself to his wife’s family, and to society at large. Still, though he had entertained certain grotesqueries of fate with an unflinching, stoic enjoyment, he was at the moment afraid, on a level that surprised and then embarrassed him. He had the childish urge to wet the bed, and knew that if he did she would immediately slit his throat. Only with the most monumental effort did he keep from pissing. He counted his breaths to keep from thinking about the knife, but could not help imagining that with each one he might have breathed his last. The next, therefore, came as a gift. The air that filled his lungs was refreshingly sweet. A wave of euphoria gripped him at the beginning of each breath and one of terror at its end. His next breath might whistle through the slit in his throat, and that would be the last breath he’d hear. Yet as another and another breath came and went, he grew encouraged. Gradually, he felt the woman’s curiosity gain the upper hand.

“How?” she asked, unwillingly. “How is your spirit meant to serve me?”

Now the burden of responsibility for his own life lay with Mauser. If he answered well, he might survive, but if he gave a less than satisfactory destination for his spirit, it would pour fast from the extra smile underneath his chin. His brain raced, and then he spoke.

“My spirit is meant to be the slave of your spirit. I will make you my wife and give you everything I own. And more than that, I will love you no matter what you do to me, as a dog does. My spirit is meant to be g’dai, your animal, to do with as you wish, let live or kill.”

Once he’d said this, to his desperate surprise, he knew it was true. He couldn’t have known, however, exactly how true. Nor how painful would be the living out of his original apprehension. He only knew at that moment the fabulous relief as her hand lifted away from his throat. And then the shift of her body told him she was considering something else. He hadn’t a notion in the world that it would have been easier for him if she’d used her knife.

OF COURSE, as she was Four Souls, she probably knew all that would happen in some way unavailable to us. Pillagers don’t do anything without a reason, though it is sometimes hidden even to them. I don’t hold with everything people say about Fleur’s people, but I have seen what I’ve seen. When Fleur took the name Four Souls she thought she was taking a name that would build her up, protect her, and it was true, the original Four Souls was a powerful woman. What Fleur didn’t know was the name would take over and have more of an effect upon her than she could have conceived. For the name was something else — it was forceful, it was old, and it had its own intentions. In the end, it was even stronger than Fleur.

There are names that go on through the generations with calm persistence. Names that heal a person just for taking them, and names that destroy. Names that travel, names that bring you home, names you only mutter in the deep water of your sleep. Names that bring memory of painful attachments and names lost to time and the reckonings of chance. Names are throwaway treasures. Names hold the sweetness of youth, bring back faces and unsettling resemblances. Names acquire their own life and drag the person on their own path for their own reasons, which we can’t know. There are names that gutter out and die and then spring back, distinguished. Names that go on through time and trouble, names to hold on your tongue for luck. Names to fear. Such a name was Four Souls.

So the name was going to do what it wanted with Fleur Pillager. From the beginning, she did not own it. Once she took it, the name owned her. It would slam her to the earth and raise her up, it would divide her, it would make her an idiot and nearly kill her, and it would heal her once it had finished humbling her. Four Souls— the original Four Souls, I mean — had exactly what her name tells us, four souls that she could use. Four times she knew in her life that within the year she was meant to die, and so, those four times, she threw out a soul. That soul went about as a bird or animal, the shape of which only she knew. That soul roamed here and there, gaining knowledge of things, then came back and reported to its owner. So Four Souls grew wiser. But she knew too much already, perhaps, as those Pillagers do. For she was the daughter of a woman who became a healer when she was only a girl.

I’m going to lay down the roots here. I’m going to explain things. This is where the story fills in deeper, where you see through the past so you understand what made Fleur and the name she took too powerful to contain. This, I suspect, is the shadow Fleur dragged out behind her when she was born. This is the face she wore on her face. For she was born with a spirit face on her face and that face was laid away in the woods for the Gizhe Manito to love and to name. That face had a name but we don’t know it. We would never understand it. That face was named in the spirit language. Fleur got her name, her pretty French name, from a trapper’s wife, but of course she had the name that no one could speak. And when she took the Four Souls name, she brought down on herself not only the great strength, but the sorrow and the complexity of the woman who came before.

IN THE TIME before the time the last treaty came about, there was a great healing that took place in the camp of Under the Ground. It made us weep, it made us sorry, it made us wonder who we are. It made confusion between the dead and the living, this world and the other alongside our ordinary life. And yet, in spite of those conflicts, what happened that night gave slender hope on the reservation land that the old ones called ishkonigan, leftover, scraps so poor even the greediest would cast these bits aside.

The mother of the girl who became the one we know as Four Souls was born upon the great red island, fourth daughter of a fourth daughter in a line of dawn woman healers going back across the miigis water and farther yet, back before the oldest remember. Everybody who met her face-to-face thought her a simple woman — small, short, and round with a capturing smile. Her eyes, they might be penetrating when they wanted to know your case, but otherwise they had no other symptom in them but kindness. Nevertheless, she had accomplished something few understood.

As it happened, disease struck. Some left old sacred ground, struck out for the new, hearing some fresh powerful tale of the men in black robes who did not copulate. Besides cures, people needed supplies. Blankets. Knives. Who can blame them? Supposing the world went dead around you and all the animals were used up. The sky, too, of pigeons, doves, herons, and rain. Supposing one new sickness after another came and racked deep, so that young men and women threw themselves on stones to break their limbs in the crush of their fever. Suppose this happened in your own life, what then, would you not think of surrendering to the cross, of leading yourself into the hands of new medicines?

Some did, many did, for a time I was even one. But I came back from the Jesuits with a pair of eyeglasses, six books, a watch, and the old gods still strong in my heart. I am Nanapush. I am the one they call fire, the one who makes my own snare, who shot off a tree branch, ate snakes to survive, had wife upon wife, and remembers the making of Under the Ground.

She took her name when she was still a young girl registered as Fanny. At the loss of her own mother from the welted sickness, she decided, in anger, to go after death itself, and so had herself buried alive in a birch-bark covering. Connected only to the upper world by a breathing straw, she went down into the earth. Four days. Four nights. She decided to search through the layers of the earth. She would search for special help as she descended deeper, deeper. The old men drummed and the women sang to give her courage, but all that they could see from the soft earth of her grave was the tube of rawhide. Passing their hands above the opening not a one of them could tell whether or not she still drew breath.

It was on the fifth dawn they uncovered her, gently, scooping out dirt with their old paws. Singing, they brushed the earth away from her face, blue black and stone hard. They continued. Took the rawhide straw from her lips still frozen in a frowning o. Finally lifted her out in her stiff death shape and shook the dirt and beetles and worms from her clothes and hair. She was wearing a red dress and smelled of the beginnings of a powerful decay, a smell of bear, a smell of the dead lashed high in trees, an odor that came and went the rest of her life when she knew she would lose out to her enemy, death.

Niiban, crooned the old ones, mino ayaa sana, laying her upon a laced platform of blankets. Sleep and be well, though whether she was dead or living they did not know, not yet, not until during the quiet, slow, washing of her face and arms her eyelids throbbed, her mouth unpinched, and she drew a rough breath.

SO THAT was how she got her power and her name changed from Fanny Migwans into Anamaiiakiikwe, Under the Ground. That was how she got her chance to doctor. She was told the names of plants down there. She cured me once, I remember, of an eyesore sickness that came from rubbing my face after cleaning some fish. She mixed up a pulp of roots by chewing. Spitting, she made a paste of that and tenderly soothed it onto my shut eyelids. I remember her square woman’s hands — padded, priestly, warm — her slow calm, her bear’s eyes, her grip.

She had no children until she was well into the fourth decade of her life, and then she had a daughter by an Odawa man she loved and who loved her and who came to her house to visit every night. The daughter, you could tell, was the blood of her heart. Warm-eyed, laughing. Under the Ground named her Anaquot, Cloud, raised her close, and took her everywhere, first in a pack trimmed in black velvet that she decorated with beaded flowers and red straps, then alongside her on a small pony, walking slow, then everywhere as though she was her helper in the doctoring. They picked plants, offering tobacco to each one, and they tended their traplines and fished together on the lake. All winter, every day, Under the Ground broke a trail for Anaquot to walk to school. Every night, she brought her daughter home safe through the woods and put her in her own blankets, rolled her tight. They had a garden of squash and beans, and some wild brown chickens, a dog, a stand of chokecherries, and a slough where occasionally Under the Ground took her shotgun and blasted down a duck for her daughter’s supper.

This was how they lived until the girl’s eleventh full year, when she sickened suddenly, of a disease that had no name and had never been seen before on this reservation ground so that no one knew what to do.

It started as a weakness in the eyes and a tired sorrow, then a low cough that did not get better but deepened until the lungs made pink foam, but then, in the case of Anaquot, six nights of drumming and suck doctoring frightened away the disease so she seemed better all that winter, even cured.

During that time, another child, LaFortier’s son, fell in hot coals of the sugaring fire and caught his little shirt in flames, ran in circles until his uncle put it out. This child was laid more dead than living on a blanket at the sugaring camp, and Under the Ground was fetched. She came quickly, and used a paste on the boy’s burnt skin. She then caused the fire to be built up exactly as it was when the child fell in. She talked to that fire and prayed with it. Then she gathered its coals and tamed them in her hands, spoke to them softly, until they did not cause pain to her or to the child they had burned.

The boy healed with only the faintest ripple of scars, but from that time on, Under the Ground’s hands were striped by wrinkled gray tissue, bent like a frog’s. Yet she never hid her hands away in her apron. She was proud.

During the next winter, though, Anaquot stumbled on the path from school and fell asleep in snow. Her mother found her when the light was almost blue, and carried her home slung across her back, still dreaming in sleep that grew deeper and yet more restless as the night went on. By morning, Under the Ground’s eyes burnt and her own limbs loosened and she slept curled around her daughter in terror.

You heal by taking on the pain of others, by going down to argue with death itself, by swallowing the sharp bone and vomiting the sickness out in your own blood. That old woman’s daughter lay next to her, close, curled the way she used to lie within her mother’s body. The healer ached for her child’s return. There was nothing — no act, no murder, no betrayal, no agony — that she was not prepared to accomplish in order to save her girl.

Under the Ground woke to hear unusual noises.

The shadow of a person wanders as though sorry to leave. Touching old possessions — a kettle, a favorite knife. Sometimes a shadow takes a water pail, a dipper, a handful of flour or rice, but it cannot use these things, must drop them, demands attention in that way.

So that is how Under the Ground knew she had some assistance in her work — things dropped, murmurs, low steps all through the night that she lay with her daughter in the blankets.

By morning, worse. Both woke spotted with the girl’s blood from coughing. Deep in her chest she heard the slow whine of air escaping. Under the Ground built up the fire and cleaned her daughter. Brought out an old robe, ancient and still smelling of the greenwood smoke. Put Anaquot on it and covered her with blankets.

“Mother, Mother,” she said, “N’gah, why have you left me?”

“I’m here,” Under the Ground assured, and set about preparing her things.

“Mother, Mother, are you gone yet? Why don’t you stay with me?”

“I’m here,” wept Under the Ground.

“I’m cold,” said her girl.

Under the Ground built the fire higher and hotter. Down the path came an old man who had been thinking about her, who had pots fall in the night too and wondered who might need him. He took along a young nephew, a helper, yawning and annoyed to be awake.

“Sit over there, sit by the western wall,” insisted the healer, my uncle. “Death is curious and determined. Death comes from that direction. My boy, be strong and do not let anything get by you.”

The door of Under the Ground’s house opened to the east, as all our houses did then. Under the Ground brought the water into it and gave some to the old man but not to the helper. To that boy she said, “Go fetch us some more. Make yourself useful.” She didn’t say it in a rough way, just in a direct way, but still the boy’s heart went resentful. He wanted to run off and set snares in the woods, and he would have done that had he not pitied the girl in the blankets. So small, so bleak, so still, like and unlike his own slim sister. He went out, fetched the water, and in the old way his uncle had taught him, chopping away the ice and sinking the bucket in the stream just a little bit against the flow.

I ignored sticks to carve, rabbit paths perfect for snares, tracks of a deer on the path to the house. I tried to concentrate, even to think the way my uncle might, for the daughter of Under the Ground was laboring to breathe.

The old man drummed.

He picked up and drummed. He used a stick carved of sumac, the beater filled with cattail down. His drum was painted with a long yellow stripe.

Into my mind came the smell of fish and new rice, and then the ash smell of new leaves burning and the touch of my mother’s hands on my face. I could not stay awake. Sometimes I dozed off but my uncle did not — he drummed all day, but the girl continued to go down.

Under the Ground made a paste of leaves, a paste of nettles, a paste of roots she chewed up and spat, a paste of dead bees. She turned her daughter over with gentle care and she bone-doctored, spat out three fat white ants. They crawled into the fire and burst, lighting thick shadows on our faces. Around halfway through the night, my uncle’s voice broke. I took over and sang when Under the Ground bent her head to feel Anaquot’s breath on her cheek, its low, strained rasp.

We went on through the next day in a confused haze, and on through the night. By now there was no time and no meaning. Everything had stopped but my uncle’s drumming. A terrible odor of burning hair, then a strange fugitive sweetness. Food a relative brought, a pot of meat soup, and still the work. Under the Ground’s hair was wild with grease, sweat, and stuck off her shoulders in rigid tails. Her face was harrowed and her eyes sunk and red, tiny with smoke and tears. She’d shrunk and withered on her bones. Her face was bearlike, her snout wide, her eyes deep and dull as nails.

By the third day and night my uncle took me aside, drew me close to him, and whispered, “When you see the old woman go out, open that girl’s eyelids and see if she’s living yet.”

So when Under the Ground went out, drawn by my uncle’s call, I went to her daughter. Her cheek was rock cold and her hand stiff as a bundle of sticks. I thumbed her eyelid up. It stayed up and the iris stared into darkness, chilled and fixed. I pressed down the eyelid and crept back into the corner, put my head down when Under the Ground returned. I poked up the fire and the old woman kept praying, now telling her medicine mean things. Threatening her medicine.

“I’ll throw you away,” she warned. “You’re no good to me if you can’t help my girl.”

She rattled the bag. “Get out of here.” She screamed. “I don’t want you.” She scolded, she grew hard, “I don’t want you unless you help me now.” She threw down her medicine. Dried plants and small objects went rolling across the dirt and hide piled on the packed earth. I was fully awake now, paralyzed with fright. My uncle’s drumming stopped. Even the fire did not dare crackle or shift. In its waiting glow Under the Ground bent to her child and called her in a fearful, soft voice:

“Daughter, daughter…”

Under the Ground stropped her knife on her belt. Singing a wild song I never want to hear again, singing hard and low, then high as a crazy loon, she slashed her arms deeply, four cuts on each arm. The cuts were deep, I saw them. To the bone. The girl moved.

Anaquot sat straight up in the blankets, her hooded eyes still shut. I watched as a smile slowly came across her face, sweet at first, as though she was dreaming, then broader and deeper until it was terrible, a skull’s grin. Her eyes flew open and a staring blackness as of the cold place gripped the room.

That is when I saw Under the Ground throw out one of her daughter’s souls. Throw it out of her. I saw her grab an animal struggling in the girl’s blankets and then she threw it hard at the western wall — through the wall — it was gone — when I looked, and then looked back, the girl had crumpled backward and was peacefully resting.

THAT SOUL stumbled around and got into the body of a white raccoon and for a time it was seen about the edge of the town and on the farms curious and hungry, its eyes full of cunning light. Seemed to us it went around just watching and figuring. Night, the trill it made was a stranger’s laugh. Days, we tried to let it go, tried to forget.

And then an old man trapped the white raccoon, found it in his leg-hold trap, dead. He came to my uncle, shaking. He sat at our table. After a time he spoke, told us he had opened it up and the animal was hollow inside. Nothing there. No heart. No lungs. No guts. Just empty.

Some souls keep stumbling the rough paths. Some try to get into their old beds and rooms. Some you see traveling bad, balls of white light, some you pass in the woods with no notice but the prickle on the back of your neck. Some souls return. Some come back to people. After a time they return with more knowledge than they went out with.

Hers came back with all our secrets. Hers came back with a taste for charred bones. Hers came back with the sensitive paws and bright eyes of a healer. Hers came back masked, laughing, with a mouth full of delicate white teeth. Her soul came back knowing too much, saying no word. Hers came back and that daughter’s name, although nobody dared to use it, was Four Souls from then on.

She was the making of Red Cradle, the making of her son, she was the bad wife of Shaawano, the woman who ran off with a Pillager. She was the mother of Fleur.

EACH OF US has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life. That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy. She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes. You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded. See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else. Your hand moves and the hand moves below you. Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life.

Just so, the other Four Souls lived beneath the life of Fleur Pillager. Her name influenced Fleur’s actions and told her what to do. How can I tell you this? How can I make you see? Sometimes it is too difficult for even an old man, one who loves to sling words. Sometimes I have trouble with this thought — how this surface of life that tosses and shatters is not the real surface. How we are dreams, blasts, shadows, insubstantial gusts of motion. That this stub of a grain dealer’s pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words.