Published nearly twenty years ago but just discovered in my eighty-three-year-old mom's stash of books, I was assured by her that I would like Four Souls by Louise Erdrich. She was right. A haunting and beautiful tribute to the human spirit and indigenous people, this novel is at once entertaining and memorable.
Fleur Pillager sets out on foot from her Ojibwe reservation to Minneapolis to seek revenge and take back what is hers. Following the "iron road" (railroad tracks) she finds the mansion belonging to lumber baron John Mauser. This is the man responsible for stripping her land bare and taking it. Fleur secures a job as a launderess in the household, hired by Polly Elizabeth who at the time is John Mauser's sister-in-law. Fleur sets about her plan to ease John Mauser from his neuralgia using her natural remedies; she wants him healthy so that she can destroy him fresh.
Securing her place as John's wife does not get her the restitution she desires as he eventually loses his wealth and land by not paying taxes. Fleur takes their son back to her reservation and sets about the next stage of her plan to reclaim their land. This ends in a genius move by Fleur: a cleverly played game of poker against the white man who now owns the stripped bare land that Fleur seeks.
The story is narrated by Nanapush and Margaret, an elderly tribal member couple who take Fleur under their wing upon her return to Ojibwe. In a moving culmination of this tale, Margaret instructs Fleur to embark on an eight-day period on a rock by a lake with no food and little water to purge herself from all of her ill feelings of revenge, resentment, and loneliness. Margaret prepares Fleur for this sequestering by bathing her and dressing her in a medicine dress that Margaret says will heal her, listen to her, and save her.
My mother, who has suffered many losses in her lifetime, underlined a passage where Nanapush says that sorrow is a useless thing. We often hear that our trials and tribulations make us stronger; I wonder if this is true or something humans need to tell themselves for amelioration. Either way, eventually every individual needs to find a way towards their own type of healing from whatever they suffer from. Nanapush explains at the end of the story that old age is when your heart is full, and you can finally see the shape of all that has happened and all that is to come. I think that Nanapush's philosophies deserve to be embraced.
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