Free Four Souls by Louise Erdrich

strong as Fleur, as bold, as conscious, even though at first glance I had despised her. To be begged in a voice that God heard as well as I. To suddenly realize that if I could lay aside my small contempt, I might cherish her. I might be able to help her grow the child, the babe whom I wanted to live with a longing quite beyond my own selfish habits. By the time the whiskey had taken hold and her body quit attempting to expel the child, she had changed in my mind, but I didn’t yet know how.
     
    “C RUDE , but effective,” said the doctor when he saw the whiskey. “Continue the treatment as required. Don’t let her out of the bed.” He called me near again as he washed his hands.
    “I do not treat servants,” he said, flicking water from his hands, “or Indians.”
    I suppose that before this moment I might have agreed with him. I might have washed his hands for him with an obsequious little smile, and handed him a clean towel to pat them dry. But at the tone of his voice, some nerve in me was strangely yanked.
    “Oh? Oh? I will be certain to make her husband, John James Mauser , aware of your sentiments,” I told the doctor, in an unmistakable rage. My voice rose. “In turn, I am sure that he will make his known to all who serve with him on the hospital board—”
    But the man cut me off quite rudely by walking straight from the room without the pretense of a leave-taking. I went back into Fleur’s room right away and helped her to another sip of the spirits, then sat with her, reading aloud from a book of the poems of Lord Byron, until she slept.
     
    S O IT IS I who know as much of the truth of things as one can know. I who was privileged, who was driven to the side of a woman I’d once ordered to wash my clothes. I suppose it could be said that I was humbled, or enlarged. Some truer form of human regard had triumphed in me. The prospect of the child brought me to that. As her pregnancy continued precarious, I visited as often as I could. I worried about my distraction from Placide, but my sister barely noticed my absence and never asked my whereabouts, even when my visits grew so frequent that I spent more time in Fleur’s presence than I did in my own house.
    Now, to my surprise, I found it easy to be with Fleur. The room she had shared with Mauser, but now slept in alone, was very calm with its wallpaper of an eggshell brocade. The bed coverlet was made of old lace, folded down around her feet, and from that bed she watched the fire wink on the ebony mantelpiece in which were emblazoned cockleshells, the carved faces of sea nymphs, and dancing goddesses. I found it brought me peace to sit with Fleur hour upon hour. She spoke little at first and never smiled, though I think she enjoyed the music of verse. Most often, she passed her hours in a blank weariness that had in it no hint of either hostility or resentment. When my voice grew hoarse from reading aloud, I crocheted blankets for the baby or sewed pieces of a tiny layette. When my eyes failed or my fingers cramped, I simply sat and watched the afternoon light pass across the walls.
    The shadows of the ash leaves as the sun moved behind them were very graceful, their movements hypnotic and sad. The radiance of late afternoon struck the fireplace and picked out the figures of the captive Graces. In that quiet, I reflected often on the house in which I’d passed my days. I had seen it raised from the beginning. I knew its natural provenance, as well as its present existence. I had watched John James Mauser build it for my sister, after all, and had been moved and impressed by the making of it.
    At the time, though I had sympathized in and even acted in protest at the treatment of the horses that dragged its great blocks of stone uphill, it had not occurred to me that humans were ill treated in the matter too. All of the materials, the fabric, all the raw stuff of our opulent shelter were taken from Fleur’s people. She described her natal lands and