Four Souls by Louise Erdrich Read Free Book Online

relationships based upon honest regard. As I sipped the last drops of beef tea I tried to enumerate moments stripped of pretense and all I could come up with was those efforts of mine, with brother-in-law, when he grasped my hand in desperate gratitude, unknowing, and allowed me to really see him. As I relived those moments of extremity, a strange thought met me unawares. Were I not to know him, or someone, some person, at this radical depth, I fear my time on earth would be hideous. I was surprised to think this. But it crossed my mind that to know others on a superficial level only is a desperate hell and life is worth living only if the veneer is stripped away, the polish, the wax, and we see the true grain of the other no matter how far less than perfect, even ugly, even savage at the heart.

FIVE
Under the Ground
    Nanapush
    O N 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