Four Souls

SEVEN. Whiskey, Love, Linoleum Nanapush

THE COUGHBALL of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest — bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the undissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story — what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story— all that time does not digest.

Fleur left the reservation. Of all that happened day to day, all the ins and outs of her existence, we have what came of the accumulation. We have the story.

The coughball itself is also a valuable find. Bad omen, but good medicine. It cures headaches, too much monthly blood, fevers, flux, sore feet, love. Fleur never used it, she never needed any medicine to snag her men. They fell her way like notched trees. She treated them that way, too, and burned them with her heat or used them for her purpose. Which is how, the second time Fleur Pillager went off the reservation, she toppled Minneapolis society and made a son. But her power got to be too much for her. She got careless. Too bold. She should have known that it is wrong to bear a child for any reason but to surrender your body to life.

Fleur was what you might call stingy with her spirit gifts, and so she didn’t get much back from other humans. Revenge, she wanted that. And also restoration. Don’t forget. She wanted her land back and if she couldn’t have the trees she wanted some equivalent justice for their loss. She was so concentrated on her plan that she could not receive. Not much love, is what I’m saying. She wasn’t loved. Eyah! Of course there was Eli, but there I rest my case. Yes, she was passioned. Men made brainless fools out of themselves in pursuit. They adored her and feared her in equal measure, as Eli did, and as Mauser did now.

We are all imperfect in our love for one another. That is why we turn to that kind spirit who created us. Gizhe Manito tries to protect us but sometimes fails, like any parent. Yet this spirit does not stop loving us. That is the one to whom Fleur turned, I am sure of it, to argue against like a parent when everything was taken. Everything, of course, except her young daughter, Lulu.

No, she did not give her first child away. It was not as they insist. Fleur merely took the girl off to hide her the way a wolf hides a pup when she must do battle to protect her standing or confront a danger. That’s how it was. Lulu was to be hidden in the government school, safe. Not left, not forgotten. This is what she did.

SHE HAD COME to kill and humiliate and take back her land, which he had stolen so carelessly that he wasn’t aware of it, but then Mauser made himself her dog anyway and wanted her in such an absence of self that she put aside her knife. Whatever tenderness Fleur owned at the time was attached to her child. What love she felt was buried underneath a tree marked by a red flag. Her love was bones, or bound up in loss. No man had truly felt it. So when Mauser bared his heart and throat he knew, perhaps, the wolf in her couldn’t kill him on instinct and the woman in her could not destroy him out of sheer intrigue.

He would have broken into a drenching, clear sweat, but ever since Fleur had returned his body to him, he had exercised increasing control over all of its jerks and spasms and eccentric twitches. She had healed him in order to wreck him in good condition, which to her was the only honorable way a Pillager could take satisfaction in vengeance. But healing a man is dangerous. I was going to say a man like Mauser. But perhaps it is dangerous for a woman to heal any man at all.

He desired her and she grew accustomed to her power. Maybe she desired him, though she would never admit it to me. Some women like a smart man, and others prefer a fool. Speaking as both, I can tell you it doesn’t matter if you can convince a woman you have something to hide.

So perhaps that was how John James Mauser did it. He threw out a net of questions, uncertainties, riddles, and Fleur dove into it, curious as an otter. She was snagged. She would be dragged along the bottom. She would be weakened and changed. His desire would exhaust her, and the high life temporarily fascinate her with its rich swirl of hilarious chimookomaanag doings and foods. She would be dazzled more than anything by the mounds of smoked white sturgeon at the party given in her honor at their wedding. For many years afterward, she talked of it. Platters of that most exquisite fish, dishes large as wagon wheels, piled high.

Uncle, she’d say, I wish I could eat it all again!

She withheld herself physically from Mauser until he came up with the papers and then went through with the wedding. By zhaaginaash law, she understood that his legal wife would inherit all he owned. Once she figured out how to kill him, she’d have her land back. But she could not kill him with a knife, this time— she would have to use much more subtle means, undetectable means, if that were possible. The problem was, the closer she got to the man she’d come to destroy, the muddier grew her intentions. She kept putting off his death. He took her traveling, brought her to theaters and great halls where she heard a new and violently beautiful music. They went to places where a thousand pictures were stored on the walls. He fed her the flesh of animals she’d never tasted. The meat of fruits she’d never seen. He seemed to get a hold over her in bed, too — perhaps some chimookomaan form of manaa that wrecked her resolve, at least for a short time after their marriage. That was probably when she was not careful enough with her counting of the days between moons. Anishinaabeg women had known, well before the Catholics preached it, a method of strict accounting by moon to regulate the even and timely appearance of their children. She never said it, but I believe that Mauser overwhelmed Fleur’s feminine defenses, perhaps with liquor. I don’t know when she first touched it, but it stands to reason that the taste of whiskey could have messed up her system of counting. For I don’t believe Fleur ever meant to have a child with Mauser.

Once she carried the child, Fleur was caught and she knew it, for although she was enduring, strong, bold, and remarkable, she had a weakness. She had survived the sicknesses that destroyed the rest of the Pillagers, but she was affected by the ravage of those fevers. I only know what I’ve heard from listening in on the women, from things Margaret has revealed to me of women’s private business. But from eavesdropping on them I understand that bearing children was dangerous for Fleur. In order not to let the child out too soon, Fleur had to stay still, keep to her bed. And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts.

IN THE YEARS after Fleur left, I had fallen into a state of keen and busy sorrow. I diverted myself with politics, stood for the tribal chairman, and immersed myself in a snow of white paper. I had argued about existence and the intentions of the whiteman’s God on earth with the Jesuits and then with Father Damien, but I had never come to grips with the worst scourge ever loaded on us. Smallpox ravaged us quick, tuberculosis killed us slow, liquor made us stupid, religion meddled with our souls, but the bureaucrats did the worst and finally bored us to death. I soon found that the stacks of rules and regulations that I had to understand in order to run the tribe pinched my brain and made me even touchier than Margaret.

Along with rules, there came another affliction. Acquisition, the priest called it. Greed. There was no word in our language to describe this urge to own things we didn’t need. Where before we always had a reason for each object we kept, now the sole reason was wanting it. People traded away their land for pianos they couldn’t play and bought clothing too fancy for their own everyday use. They bought spoons made of silver when there wasn’t food, and gilded picture frames when they had neither pictures nor walls. A strange frenzy for zhaaginaash stuff came over the best of us. Where before we gave our things away and were admired for our generosity, now we grew stingy and admired ourselves for what we grabbed and held. Even Margaret, whose eyes were sharp for foolishness, was overcome.

It was the nuns who changed Margaret, those women with the poor mouth souls. Ever since Margaret had visited the nuns’ residence, she had wanted a floor covering like theirs. The substance they walked on was both soft and hard, she told me, and could be mopped shiny clean. It was far more beautiful than stone, earth, or wood; it was more green than leaves, with drops of cream and ink curled through it. “As though a child were playing in paint with a matchstick,” she said. I nodded. I knew all about paint, for Margaret had bought paint one day and done something very beautiful and strange.

We had cleared a path to the cabin and then widened it enough to accommodate a wagon. I thought it was fine as it was, but Margaret wanted to improve this path. Somewhere, she got an idea to use the asiniig, our grandfathers, stones I had gathered in a heap near my sweat lodge just out back of the cabin. One by one, she lugged them out and placed them on either side of the road, leaving a tiny pinch of tobacco next to each one as an apology — or a request, for she had further plans. Early the next day she left for town and came back with the paint. Pink paint. With careful strokes of a brush that she made herself, from a squirrel’s tail, she painted every one of those rocks leading up to our place. Pink was the color. A bright candy pink.

“Onizhishin,” I said. For sure, they looked marvelous, so bright in the green scruff and dead leaves. “You’ve dressed up our ancestors.”

“It was nothing.” Margaret was modest, but I suppose my admiration for her work had some effect, for she began to improve the rest of our dwelling.

“If we have to stay in one place,” she reasoned, “if we can’t move around anymore and follow the rice and maple sugar and meat, then I plan to live in a good way. First, we have to make a better outhouse, just like Father Damien has drawn for us, and then… well, I’ve got an idea.”

No more sitting in the sun, dreaming and smoking my pipe. Now, if I wanted Margaret to cook for me or even to give me a kind word now and then, I was forced to work. I dug a hole for trash, burned it, and scattered the ashes. I chopped and even stacked fire-wood. I swept clean the ground leading up to our door. Inside our cabin, we had already packed the earth down hard and laid skins over it. I took out the skins each morning and shook them clean. Instead of walking right inside we took our makizinan off at our door. We sat on the skins and blankets, or the spindly wooden chair Margaret had traded for an old buffalo hide. She had me tack up a shelf on one side of the room. There was enough pink paint to brighten the boards. The centerpiece of our cabin was a stove with a pipe running into the wall. The stove was black iron, fancy, with a small nickel grill and a cooking box. We even nailed together a small table. It now looked to me like we had a comfortable and even fancy place, and I said so, but Margaret couldn’t get the nuns’ floor out of her mind. She kept pining over it, stabbing her finger at the skins on our dirt floor and frowning. She kept thinking of ways to get that substance — linoleum.

I hoped that, as with many of her enthusiasms, she’d get over it. She’d once had a frenzy for making maple sugar candy in carved wooden molds. She’d gotten past that. And then there was the time she planted a garden, not with the old varieties of squash and corn, but new and outlandish seeds that produced round globes of bitter melons that blackened at the first frost, hard yellow roots to cook and mash, and tart, ripe, red love apples that stung the mouth. I thought linoleum would fade just as these other fancies had, but then I noticed that Margaret had grown distant. Her gaze had a faraway quality, as if she were peering into the future. She figured and she plotted. She found a salesman and purchased small linoleum pieces that she laid on the ground and looked at for hours, as though she could grow them across the floor by the intensity of her stare. But the bits glowed against the earth or clean skins and did nothing.

“They are dead. They never had any life,” I told her. “Forget them and nestle in my arms.”

Margaret waved a hand to shut me up and took out her little pipe and tobacco pouch. She loaded it, puffed away as if her brain were on fire and her thoughts were the smoke, rising in thick circles. Her eyes narrowed and she glared in a fixed black way at nothing. From time to time she gestured and nodded and smiled to some invisible person. I should have worried about her right then, but instead I grew annoyed.

“The earth is much better than the linoleum you crave, and so are the skins beneath our feet. Leave off thinking of the nuns’ floor or you will sicken yourself, and me!”

But she did not, the smooth stuff gripped her. It drove her to distraction and the urge to finally acquire it ended up fracturing her will.

WE WERE snared in laws by then. Pitfalls and loopholes. Attempting to keep what was left of our land was like walking through a landscape of webs. With a flare of ink down in the capital city, rights were taken and given. Finding an answer from a local official was more difficult than tracking a single buffalo through the mazed tracks of creatures around a drinking hole. We acquired an Allotment Agent to make it easier for us to sell our land to white people. Then we got a Farmer in Charge to help us chop our trees down, our shelter, and cut the earth up, our mother. Land dwindled until there wasn’t enough to call a hunting territory. That was because we were supposed to learn to farm in the chimookomaan way, using toothed machines and clumsy, big horses to pull them. We were all going to have to plant seeds the way Margaret did, for the rest of our lives, and yet we’d only just grown used to the idea that we owned land — something that could not possibly belong to any human.

Just as the first of us had failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, but that no one would take the land until we paid the money back. Mortgage, this was called. This piece of banker’s cleverness sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to old Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money. Some farmed. Others came home night after night for months full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notice was handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else. Now it appeared that our people would turn into a wandering bunch, begging at the back doors of white houses and town buildings. Then laws were passed to outlaw begging and even that was solved. No laws were passed to forbid starvation, though, and so the Anishinaabeg were free to do just that.

Yes, we were becoming a solved problem. That’s what I’m saying. Who worries about the dead? They are safe in the ground.

NECTOR OWNED land that was allotted to him as a child, though he wasn’t old enough to take care of it yet. Nector’s land was half slough, but that’s not bad, that’s where the ducks land. Part field if you wanted field, or clearing, and part dense birch woods with burnt-over patches where raspberries and blueberries and tart high-bush cranberries sprouted. This land was waiting for Nector, but then one day as I was making my way back to our cabin from town, where I had traded for a jar of maple syrup, I saw that a motorized wagon as well as an ox-drawn wagon and three chimookomaanag were making a road on Nector’s land. I stopped. They were chopping birch down and loading them. Clearing another field just past that.

I walked up to one of them, a brown-haired chimookomaan who gave the orders, and I said to him, “What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like, old savage? Get the hell outta here or I’ll fix your ugly face.”

He turned away and his young muscled back covered with a moss brown shirt was like a mute wall. How this one set of humans came to be so often afflicted with a common blindness strains my powers. It’s a sad thing. I quietly turned away and as I meekly disappeared around the side of their truck I added, to the gas in their tank, the maple syrup that I was bringing home for Margaret. I hated to waste good syrup, but the young pup had given me no choice.

I went home intending to speak immediately to Margaret about the matter. Her round ojiid greeted me, for she was crouched on her hands and knees when I came in. She was laying a stick marked with red lines around the bottom logs of the cabin, muttering to herself. After a while I figured out that she was measuring the floor.

“What are you doing?” I said for the second time that afternoon. And just like the thick, muscled young man clearing Nector’s land, she turned her back on me. She wouldn’t talk to me. After a time I understood it wasn’t that she was angry, just that she was absorbed in some female dealing of her own. I watched her place the stick just so and mutter to herself until I got bored, and then I gave up and left her. Later, I regretted it, for I had to find out what Margaret had done from Bernadette Morrissey.

“SOLD IT,” said Bernadette with the agent’s desk between us. “Or at least part. The eighty acres that adjoins hers, she kept.”

I had to make Bernadette repeat what she’d told me in Ojibwemowin in order to make certain I had the sense of it. And then, once I was satisfied that the horse-face spoke the truth, once I had looked upon the papers for myself, I was afflicted by a sorrowful anger. My sweetheart, my porcupine woman, my prickly dove, had exchanged the real ground for the false ground. My Margaret had betrayed us. She had bought her linoleum and given away Nector’s earth.

NOW MARGARET had stood up with the Pillagers, and she had fought for the land. She had ignored the threats of Agent Tatro. She had fought against Agent Tatro, against the Lazarres and Morrisseys, and she had enjoyed every battle. Through the worst of things, she came out urging defiance. When her head was shaved, she’d got more vigorous instead of hiding away in shame. Her rage increased in the cold wind around her ears. The coalhod bonnet I bought for her inspired her fierce tirades and gave her confidence to rail against the agent with gall and fire. True, she had diverted the money meant to pay off the Pillager fees and applied it on Kashpaw land — but it was done in defense at least of keeping some share of the earth. Margaret was always for the land, if nothing else. Nothing stopped her in this quest, until that linoleum. Because of it, she betrayed herself, and worse, she betrayed her son.

SO WHEN I came home days after I’d found out about the sale, and when I saw that she had fit this new covering onto the floor, I did not speak. I didn’t trust myself. So much given for so little. A false and foolish thing. Margaret’s eye challenged me to take issue and have my say. But I did not. She knew that I knew the truth, but I said nothing, which mystified her at first. I merely shook out the newspaper that I’d picked up in town and sat down on my little bench beside the door. All that afternoon, I sat there refusing to work, an old man in the sun, while Margaret put the finishing touches on her floor. After it was glued to boards placed on the earth, smoothed, and waxed, she spent a very long time enraptured by it, moving the chair to one side, then the other, then back and forth, making a racket I knew was calculated to upset me and stir my annoyance until I boiled over and relieved her. I did not let that happen. For in truth I was afflicted with something I can’t describe — perhaps a human embarrassment. Finally, she came outside and sat down beside me, eager for me to let fly at her in rage. Still, I didn’t. She tried to goad me.

“How do you like the new floor?” She gave a sweet, punishing emphasis to each of the words.

I would not be trapped so easily. I nodded and said nothing. Even when she asked me so many times that it grew insulting, I could not respond. As the day dwindled, the sun from the west intensified beneath low clouds and picked out the undersides of all the leaves in gold. Margaret asked me again and again. I remained silent. Finally she quit talking and sat next to me as the light darkened in the trees.

The blue came out of the bushes. The black came out of the earth. The night was windless, moonless. I wanted to forgive her. Several times I tried to speak. But I never found the words.