Some did, many did, for a time I was even one. But I came back from the Jesuits with a pair of eyeglasses, six books, a watch, and the old gods still strong in my heart. I am Nanapush. I am the one they call fire, the one who makes my own snare, who shot off a tree branch, ate snakes to survive, had wife upon wife, and remembers the making of Under the Ground.
She took her name when she was still a young girl registered as Fanny. At the loss of her own mother from the welted sickness, she decided, in anger, to go after death itself, and so had herself buried alive in a birch-bark covering. Connected only to the upper world by a breathing straw, she went down into the earth. Four days. Four nights. She decided to search through the layers of the earth. She would search for special help as she descended deeper, deeper. The old men drummed and the women sang to give her courage, but all that they could see from the soft earth of her grave was the tube of rawhide. Passing their hands above the opening not a one of them could tell whether or not she still drew breath.
It was on the fifth dawn they uncovered her, gently, scooping out dirt with their old paws. Singing, they brushed the earth away from her face, blue black and stone hard. They continued. Took the rawhide straw from her lips still frozen in a frowning o. Finally lifted her out in her stiff death shape and shook the dirt and beetles and worms from her clothes and hair. She was wearing a red dress and smelled of the beginnings of a powerful decay, a smell of bear, a smell of the dead lashed high in trees, an odor that came and went the rest of her life when she knew she would lose out to her enemy, death.
Niiban, crooned the old ones, mino ayaa sana, laying her upon a laced platform of blankets. Sleep and be well, though whether she was dead or living they did not know, not yet, not until during the quiet, slow, washing of her face and arms her eyelids throbbed, her mouth unpinched, and she drew a rough breath.
SO THAT was how she got her power and her name changed from Fanny Migwans into Anamaiiakiikwe, Under the Ground. That was how she got her chance to doctor. She was told the names of plants down there. She cured me once, I remember, of an eyesore sickness that came from rubbing my face after cleaning some fish. She mixed up a pulp of roots by chewing. Spitting, she made a paste of that and tenderly soothed it onto my shut eyelids. I remember her square woman’s hands—padded, priestly, warm—her slow calm, her bear’s eyes, her grip.
She had no children until she was well into the fourth decade of her life, and then she had a daughter by an Odawa man she loved and who loved her and who came to her house to visit every night. The daughter, you could tell, was the blood of her heart. Warm-eyed, laughing. Under the Ground named her Anaquot, Cloud, raised her close, and took her everywhere, first in a pack trimmed in black velvet that she decorated with beaded flowers and red straps, then alongside her on a small pony, walking slow, then everywhere as though she was her helper in the doctoring. They picked plants, offering tobacco to each one, and they tended their traplines and fished together on the lake. All winter, every day, Under the Ground broke a trail for Anaquot to walk to school. Every night, she brought her daughter home safe through the woods and put her in her own blankets, rolled her tight. They had a garden of squash and beans, and some wild brown chickens, a dog, a stand of chokecherries, and a slough where occasionally Under the Ground took her shotgun and blasted down a duck for her daughter’s supper.
This was how they lived until the girl’s eleventh full year, when she sickened suddenly, of a disease that had no name and had never been seen before on this reservation ground so that no one knew what to do.
It started as a weakness in the eyes and a tired sorrow, then a low cough that did not get better but deepened until the lungs made pink foam, but then, in the case of Anaquot, six nights of drumming and suck doctoring frightened away the disease so she seemed better all that winter, even cured.
During that time, another child, LaFortier’s son, fell in hot coals of the sugaring fire and caught his little shirt in flames, ran in circles until his uncle put it out. This child was laid more dead than living on a blanket at the sugaring camp, and Under the Ground was fetched. She came quickly, and used a paste on the boy’s burnt skin. She then caused the fire to be built up exactly as it was when the child fell in. She talked to that fire and prayed with it. Then she gathered its coals and tamed them in her hands, spoke to them softly, until they did not cause pain to her or to the child they had burned.
The boy healed with only the faintest ripple of scars, but from that time on, Under the Ground’s hands were striped by wrinkled gray tissue, bent like a frog’s. Yet she never hid her hands away in her apron. She was proud.
During the next winter, though, Anaquot stumbled on the path from school and fell asleep in snow. Her mother found her when the light was almost blue, and carried her home slung across her back, still dreaming in sleep that grew deeper and yet more restless as the night went on. By morning, Under the Ground’s eyes burnt and her own limbs loosened and she slept curled around her daughter in terror.
You heal by taking on the pain of others, by going down to argue with death itself, by swallowing the sharp bone and vomiting the sickness out in your own blood. That old woman’s daughter lay next to her, close, curled the way she used to lie within her mother’s body. The healer ached for her child’s return. There was nothing—no act, no murder, no betrayal, no agony—that she was not prepared to accomplish in order to save her girl.
Under the Ground woke to hear unusual noises.
The shadow of a person wanders as though sorry to leave. Touching old possessions—a kettle, a favorite knife. Sometimes a shadow takes a water pail, a dipper, a handful of flour or rice, but it cannot use these things, must drop them, demands attention in that way.
So that is how Under the Ground knew she had some assistance in her work—things dropped, murmurs, low steps all through the night that she lay with her daughter in the blankets.
By morning, worse. Both woke spotted with the girl’s blood from coughing. Deep in her chest she heard the slow whine of air escaping. Under the Ground built up the fire and cleaned her daughter. Brought out an old robe, ancient and still smelling of the greenwood smoke. Put Anaquot on it and covered her with blankets.
“Mother, Mother,” she said, “N’gah, why have you left me?”
“I’m here,” Under the Ground assured, and set about preparing her things.
“Mother, Mother, are you gone yet? Why don’t you stay with me?”
“I’m here,” wept Under the Ground.
“I’m cold,” said her girl.
Under the Ground built the fire higher and hotter. Down the path came an old man who had been thinking about her, who had pots fall in the night too and wondered who might need him. He took along a young nephew, a helper, yawning and annoyed to be awake.
“Sit over there, sit by the western wall,” insisted the healer, my uncle. “Death is curious and determined. Death comes from that direction. My boy, be strong and do not let anything get by you.”
The door of Under the Ground’s house opened to the east, as all our houses did then. Under the Ground brought the water into it and gave some to the old man but not to the helper. To that boy she said, “Go fetch us some more. Make yourself useful.” She didn’t say it in a rough way, just in a direct way, but still the boy’s heart went resentful. He wanted to run off and set snares in the woods, and he would have done that had he not pitied the girl in the blankets. So small, so bleak, so still, like and unlike his own slim sister. He went out, fetched the water, and in the old way his uncle had taught him, chopping away the ice and sinking the bucket in the stream just a little bit against the flow.
I ignored sticks to carve, rabbit paths perfect for snares, tracks of a deer on the path to the house. I tried to concentrate, even to think the way my uncle might, for the daughter of Under the Ground was laboring to breathe.
The old man drummed.
He picked up and drummed. He used a stick carved of sumac, the beater filled with cattail down.
His drum was painted with a long yellow stripe.
Into my mind came the smell of fish and new rice, and then the ash smell of new leaves burning and the touch of my mother’s hands on my face. I could not stay awake. Sometimes I dozed off but my uncle did not—he drummed all day, but the girl continued to go down.
Under the Ground made a paste of leaves, a paste of nettles, a paste of roots she chewed up and spat, a paste of dead bees. She turned her daughter over with gentle care and she bone-doctored, spat out three fat white ants. They crawled into the fire and burst, lighting thick shadows on our faces. Around halfway through the night, my uncle’s voice broke. I took over and sang when Under the Ground bent her head to feel Anaquot’s breath on her cheek, its low, strained rasp.
We went on through the next day in a confused haze, and on through the night. By now there was no time and no meaning. Everything had stopped but my uncle’s drumming. A terrible odor of burning hair, then a strange fugitive sweetness. Food a relative brought, a pot of meat soup, and still the work. Under the Ground’s hair was wild with grease, sweat, and stuck off her shoulders in rigid tails. Her face was harrowed and her eyes sunk and red, tiny with smoke and tears. She’d shrunk and withered on her bones. Her face was bearlike, her snout wide, her eyes deep and dull as nails.
By the third day and night my uncle took me aside, drew me close to him, and whispered, “When you see the old woman go out, open that girl’s eyelids and see if she’s living yet.”
So when Under the Ground went out, drawn by my uncle’s call, I went to her daughter. Her cheek was rock cold and her hand stiff as a bundle of sticks. I thumbed her eyelid up. It stayed up and the iris stared into darkness, chilled and fixed. I pressed down the eyelid and crept back into the corner, put my head down when Under the Ground returned. I poked up the fire and the old woman kept praying, now telling her medicine mean things. Threatening her medicine.
“I’ll throw you away,” she warned. “You’re no good to me if you can’t help my girl.”
She rattled the bag. “Get out of here.” She screamed. “I don’t want you.” She scolded, she grew hard, “I don’t want you unless you help me now.” She threw down her medicine. Dried plants and small objects went rolling across the dirt and hide piled on the packed earth. I was fully awake now, paralyzed with fright. My uncle’s drumming stopped. Even the fire did not dare crackle or shift. In its waiting glow Under the Ground bent to her child and called her in a fearful, soft voice:
“Daughter, daughter…”
Under the Ground stropped her knife on her belt. Singing a wild song I never want to hear again, singing hard and low, then high as a crazy loon, she slashed her arms deeply, four cuts on each arm. The cuts were deep, I saw them. To the bone. The girl moved.
Anaquot sat straight up in the blankets, her hooded eyes still shut. I watched as a smile slowly came across her face, sweet at first, as though she was dreaming, then broader and deeper until it was terrible, a skull’s grin. Her eyes flew open and a staring blackness as of the cold place gripped the room.
That is when I saw Under the Ground throw out one of her daughter’s souls. Throw it out of her. I saw her grab an animal struggling in the girl’s blankets and then she threw it hard at the western wall—through the wall—it was gone—when I looked, and then looked back, the girl had crumpled backward and was peacefully resting.
THAT SOUL stumbled around and got into the body of a white raccoon and for a time it was seen about the edge of the town and on the farms curious and hungry, its eyes full of cunning light. Seemed to us it went around just watching and figuring. Night, the trill it made was a stranger’s laugh. Days, we tried to let it go, tried to forget.
And then an old man trapped the white raccoon, found it in his leg-hold trap, dead. He came to my uncle, shaking. He sat at our table. After a time he spoke, told us he had opened it up and the animal was hollow inside. Nothing there. No heart. No lungs. No guts. Just empty.
Some souls keep stumbling the rough paths. Some try to get into their old beds and rooms. Some you see traveling bad, balls of white light, some you pass in the woods with no notice but the prickle on the back of your neck. Some souls return. Some come back to people. After a time they return with more knowledge than they went out with.
Hers came back with all our secrets. Hers came back with a taste for charred bones. Hers came back with the sensitive paws and bright eyes of a healer. Hers came back masked, laughing, with a mouth full of delicate white teeth. Her soul came back knowing too much, saying no word. Hers came back and that daughter’s name, although nobody dared to use it, was Four Souls from then on.
She was the making of Red Cradle, the making of her son, she was the bad wife of Shaawano, the woman who ran off with a Pillager. She was the mother of Fleur.
EACH OF US has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life. That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy. She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes. You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded. See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else. Your hand moves and the hand moves below you. Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life.
Just so, the other Four Souls lived beneath the life of Fleur Pillager. Her name influenced Fleur’s actions and told her what to do. How can I tell you this? How can I make you see? Sometimes it is too difficult for even an old man, one who loves to sling words. Sometimes I have trouble with this thought—how this surface of life that tosses and shatters is not the real surface. How we are dreams, blasts, shadows, insubstantial gusts of motion. That this stub of a grain dealer’s pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words.
SIX
Figures of the Captive Graces
Polly Elizabeth
IT WAS HARD to believe that a man who had so wonderfully stripped and profited from his holdings here on earth could so easily become that woman’s dupe. False heaven, I thought when I understood the locked door to his room, the indiscreet sounds from within, the dazed look of foolish contentment on his face. False man, I cried aloud when not more than a year after she had come to do the laundry the woman was in possession of it and the entire house. In short order, sister and myself were served legally with papers. To my surprise, we were offered a settlement so handsome that we thought it wise to accept, particularly since Placide admitted to me that she had practiced Karezza with her painting instructor for the whole past year and cared little what Mauser did. Within weeks, to the astonishment of all who lived up and down the avenue, we had secured a proper house in Saint Paul and were preparing to move. And may I now say, here, that the word “Karezza” shall nevermore pass my lips? For upon the description of that discipline, innocently outlined to the doctor by my sister, Mauser was able not only to divorce Placide but to annul their marriage in the Holy Roman Church.
To the grand sobs of Mrs. Testor (who chose nonetheless to stay) and the ill-disguised happiness of Fantan, we left. Once sister and I took up life in Saint Paul, our view of the situation gained a measure of perspective and we were able to enjoy (perhaps spitefully, I admit) as well as report on the spectacle that John James soon made with his squaw.
Certainly, she had to know that people called her squaw behind her back, but never face-to-face beyond the one time Mr. Virgil Hill described. It was his sense, he thoughtfully remarked, that having addressed her as a squaw he stood in sudden danger of evisceration. It happened (he said he was quite innocent of ill intentions) as they stood by the buffet table where a huge rare roast stood pink and lucious with the carving knife temporarily abandoned by the server. He was suddenly aware how close the handle of that knife lay to the hand of the wife of John James Mauser. It was nothing he could quantify. She did not pick up the knife or even make one gesture toward it with her fingers. Yet the air between them itched.
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sp; So I shan’t call Fleur “squaw” again at the safety of this remove, for I would not dare say it to her face. I do not believe in saying such things at a distance that one hasn’t the boldness of nerve to say in person. I am not interested in risking evisceration, you can be sure. After all, my sister so completely depends upon me that I think were I to die and leave her to her own devices, she wouldn’t survive the rigors of her art.
Enough to say that with me to run Placide’s life she did survive. The two of us did well enough. Our portion from Mauser was such a generous maintenance that we had no complaints as far as that went. And, too, the figure that John Mauser soon presented was so pathetic, so ludicrous, that we did not feel the sting of his abandonment. People sympathized quite openly with us, though there were some men cut of a questionable fabric who professed that they understood his attraction to the Indian woman. Once she began to appear at certain functions in dramatic, daring, and yet somehow decently reserved exquisite gowns, she attracted a low sort of admiration. And then she vanished, for shame we hoped. But it turned out the reason was quite different.
Mrs. Testor became my confidante. After Fleur had ceased to appear in public, I went to visit Testor once a week, bearing a small and appropriate gift—a set of candles, a sack of licorice, a bag of scented salts—at the hour when John James Mauser and his wife were accustomed to motor out to Minnetonka to take the air or to lunch in grand style at one of the most exclusive downtown clubs. Testor fixed me a cup of tea on most days and we had a cozy little chat. On the day I learned the reason for Mrs. Mauser’s concealment, I also understood that she was not at lunch but upstairs, in bed.
Four Souls: A Novel Page 5
