Four Souls

Set in early 20th-century Minnesota and narrated in alternating voices, the novel follows Fleur Pillager, an Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) woman, as she seeks revenge against the white lumber baron who stole her ancestral land. The book is part of Louise Erdrich's interconnected cycle of novels about Ojibwe families on a North Dakota reservation.

Fleur travels east on foot, pulling a cart containing her ancestors' bones, following the railroad tracks toward Minneapolis. She survives by stealing boots, snaring muskrats, and roasting cattail root. The night before reaching the city, she buries the bones beneath a tree, ties a red prayer flag to its branches, and takes her mother's secret spirit name: Four Souls. She enters Minneapolis overwhelmed by its noise and absence of plant life and gazes uphill at a shimmering mansion with a wolf's grin.

Nanapush, a tribal elder and one of the novel's primary narrators, explains that Fleur told him this part of her story years later. He pieces together the rest through conversations with Father Damien, a reservation priest. Nanapush recounts the history of the mansion: built for John James Mauser, a lumber baron, on a ridge that was once an Ojibwe campground. The oak for the interior came from Fleur's own allotment, seized as tax-forfeit through the scheming of an Indian agent named Tatro. Mauser married Placide Armstrong Gheen for her money; their marriage is loveless.

Polly Elizabeth Gheen, Placide's unmarried older sister and the novel's second narrator, describes Fleur's arrival as a dark, bundled figure against pristine white snow. Desperate for help after her previous servant quit, Polly Elizabeth hires Fleur as a laundress. Mauser suffers nightly drenching sweats and convulsive fits, tended by his manservant Fantan, who lost his tongue to a war injury. Polly Elizabeth dismisses Fleur as harmless, but days later finds her bent over Mauser during a violent episode, calming his thrashing limbs with powerful physical manipulation. Polly Elizabeth senses that something unsettling has entered the household.

Nanapush clarifies Fleur's motives: she did not help Mauser out of mercy but to exploit his suffering. She heals him in secret, burning sweet grass, brewing Ojibwe medicine, and using her strong hands to unknot his muscles. She wants him healthy so she can destroy him properly. At night she silently roams the house, memorizing every sound and sleeping habit. One night she falls asleep outside Mauser's door. He opens it, sees her moonlit face, and is captivated. She has caught him without knowing it.

Meanwhile, Polly Elizabeth eavesdrops as a Chicago specialist, Dr. Fulmer, diagnoses Mauser. The doctor determines that the couple's practice of Karezza, a method of sexual intercourse without climax that Placide adopted from a book Polly Elizabeth gave her, has caused Mauser's neurological collapse through prolonged suppression of emission.

When Fleur finally decides to kill Mauser, entering his bedroom with a knife at his throat, he surprises her: "What took you so long" (44). Unable to remember which woman's land he stole, since he defrauded so many, he offers total submission. He will make her his wife, give her everything, and serve her unconditionally. Fleur lifts the knife. Nanapush explains that the name Four Souls carries its own intentions. Fleur's maternal ancestor, a healer called Under the Ground, once saved her dying daughter Anaquot by slashing her own arms and throwing one of the girl's souls out of her body. That soul wandered as a white raccoon, returned with knowledge, and the daughter became the original Four Souls, Fleur's mother. The name now directs Fleur rather than the reverse.

Within a year, Fleur takes possession of the household. Mauser divorces Placide, who has been carrying on her own affair and cares little. Polly Elizabeth and Placide relocate to Saint Paul. When Polly Elizabeth learns that Fleur is pregnant and in danger of losing the child, her desperate longing for a baby draws her back. She administers whiskey to stop Fleur's early labor, forces a reluctant doctor to treat Fleur, and over months of bedside vigil, genuine love develops between the two women. The boy is born, and Polly Elizabeth becomes his devoted caretaker.

Fleur acquires a dependence on whiskey during her confinement. The boy, John James Mauser II, grows rapidly but shows signs of developmental difficulty: He cannot speak coherently yet performs lightning mathematical calculations and masters the card games Fleur teaches him. Mauser, believing his son's condition is divine punishment, becomes a fervent Catholic. His investments fail. In a late-night confession to Polly Elizabeth, he reveals that his fortune is gone and he plans to flee the country. Fleur, he says, knows the full extent of his plundering and expects him to restore her land. He admits she originally came to kill him but developed something like pity. Polly Elizabeth declares she will cast her lot with Fleur.

On the reservation, Nanapush faces his own troubles as tribal chairman. His beloved Margaret, a fierce and sharp-tongued woman, sells the allotted land belonging to her son Nector to buy linoleum flooring, a betrayal that leaves Nanapush speechless with shame. Their relationship fractures further when Nanapush's old enemy Shesheeb, whom Nanapush believes went windigo (became possessed by a cannibalistic spirit) and killed Nanapush's young wife years ago, returns and begins flattering Margaret. In a jealous frenzy, Nanapush sets a lethal wire snare for Shesheeb but accidentally catches Margaret. He saves her life, and in her near-death experience she receives a vision instructing her to sew a medicine dress from materials untouched by white people.

A series of comic misadventures follows. Nanapush steals communion wine from the convent, ends up wearing Margaret's newly finished medicine dress, and nearly dies when Shesheeb forces him to dance through dark medicine. Nanapush is saved only when Shesheeb's dog, still under the influence of love powder it accidentally consumed, attacks Shesheeb and breaks his drumming rhythm. Nanapush wakes in the reservation drunk tank wearing the dress on the day of a crucial tribal council vote. Unable to find his own clothes, he delivers an impassioned speech invoking the sacred nature of women's labor. The assembly votes to reject a settlement that would have required the people to leave their land.

Mauser flees the country. Polly Elizabeth, left to liquidate the household, finds love with Fantan. They marry and plan to move north near the reservation to run a trading store. Fleur takes the automobile and the boy and returns home.

On the reservation, Fleur visits the land office daily in her white suit until Bernadette Morrissey, the land agent, reveals that Tatro, the former Indian agent, holds the deed to her land. Fleur enters Tatro's perpetual poker game at his bar, playing modestly for days while her seemingly vacant son sits beside her, secretly tracking every card and reading Tatro's tells. When Fleur feigns drunkenness and bets her car, Tatro wagers the deed. Fleur hands her cards to the boy, whose hands transform with stunning grace. He wins every hand, and Fleur reclaims her land.

Margaret, the novel's third narrator, takes charge of Fleur's healing. Recognizing that Fleur is still drinking and that the boy has never received a spirit name, Margaret bathes Fleur ceremonially in cedar water, smudges her with sweet grass, and lowers the medicine dress onto her body. She tells Fleur she must fast for eight days on a rock by the lake, mourning her dead and confronting her empty spirit. All of Fleur's power and revenge, Margaret says, amount to nothing before one truth: Her first child, Lulu, does not love her, and her second child does not know how. Fleur must let the dress break her down so it can rebuild her.

In a brief closing passage, Nanapush reports the aftermath. Fleur, now understood by the spirits, lives quietly in the woods under a name nobody speaks aloud. The reservation endures as what the Ojibwe call ishkonigan, the leftover. As long as the people hold this scrap of earth, they will remain a people. Nanapush acknowledges that his own words are footsteps in snow, soon covered, but that even a people who lived close to the bone can sometimes change and become.