Free Four Souls by Louise Erdrich Page A

informed me of their rapine treatment at the hands of white men, at the hands of Mauser himself. As I sat in the room with the woman talking or dreaming in the bed, many thoughts came. It occurred to me to imagine her as a person—as a woman with family and feelings for them such as my own. I began to wonder who they were, and where she was from in actual truth and not the land of my misperceptions. And then, one day when she was half caught in sleep or in the whiskey the doctor prescribed and I spooned out by the hour, Fleur spoke. In a raving melancholy, she poured out language by the tub, all the time gazing straight into my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t understand a single word of her vagabond tongue, but I did know she was asking for my help. That was unmistakable. She began to weep. I put my hand on her forehead and stroked her brow until she grew calmer. Piece by piece, over the weeks and months, there then grew from such moments between us a connection. And from that connection, I am not ashamed to say it, there grew love.
     
    T HE CHILD was born screaming and would not be soothed until I thought to dip my finger into the whiskey cup and lay it on his kitten’s tongue. Afterward, we painted Fleur’s nipples with it so that the child would suck, although, by then, as she continued her medicinal drinking, I suppose he imbibed plenty at the breast. For the first week, I slept in the cellar, in Fleur’s old bed, and raced up the stairs when hearing the faintest cries. The next week, I slept on a pallet on the floor of the nursery. Soon I had the closet. Then my old room back. Nursemaid, doctor, fictional aunt, slave to the tiny one, servant to the mother too, I was in my correct element. I did all I could for Fleur, supplied the antidote for any worry, the remedy for any need, subdued any craving. I was so thoroughly immersed in my role, and in the charming new life, that only later, a good three months along, did I begin to have an inkling of what was starting to happen.
    Fleur’s dullness and depletion, her sunk eye, yellowed skin, had begun to give me concern. I was slightly reassured when she rallied. She took charge of herself, rose from bed, began to walk and take air. But although I could see how her strength quickly improved, I also noticed that she had acquired a taste for the stuff that had arrested her labor. She would not be without a decanter of whiskey in any room, and she sipped it throughout the day. Though I never saw her visibly intoxicated, though she never slurred her talk or stumbled, it was clear that she had began to rely on the liquor and was lost without its golden fire.
     
    T HESE WERE the happiest and the most requited times of my existence. The baby soft as butter, the blue-eyed little prince, was astonishingly like his father in coloration, and he was placid, either sweet or indifferent of temper. He started out thin and puling, but soon grew rolls and puckers, anklets and bracelets of silken fat. My continual presence at the house was accepted as long as I did not outstay my welcome, into the evening, but retired by the time John James Mauser returned for dinner. Still, I think that Mauser was amused at my enthusiasm for the boy, and perhaps sympathetic to my fervor, as it resembled his own. I found that I could sit in one place and simply stare at the baby without suffering one second of boredom or impatience. I’d never had the experience of this awed foolishness, this trance. I seemed quite brainless. I heard myself give out coos, hoots, burbles— noises I had never before uttered, animallike and almost desperate. Sometimes I gazed so long into the baby’s face that I forgot my own face. Or I touched the shining hands and forgot my own borders, melted skin through skin. As I made my way home each night, I had to remind myself that he was birthed of Fleur, belonged to Mauser, that I was nothing and no relation. Yet I had given away my own heart, and once that’s done there is no