Free Four Souls by Louise Erdrich Page B

easy way to take it back.

SEVEN
Whiskey, Love, Linoleum
    Nanapush
    T HE 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.
     
    S HE 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 .