Four Souls by Louise Erdrich Page A

instance, I fell through the ice of a deep pond and was known to have been submerged for nearly half an hour before I was dragged out. I came to. I survived that and I was only four years old. When I was a young hooligan I jumped a train but judged wrong and fell beneath it, managed to roll out between the wheels. Don’t know how I did it. Unscathed. And then in my lumbering days a Swede dropped a pine on me. Sure, it should have killed me. But two jagged branches that might have run me through pinned me beneath the trunk, supporting it so that I was merely tapped down a little into the soft duff. I fell off a scaffold once and was caught by the belt and hung there, sixty feet off the ground. I married Placide and on our wedding day the horses spooked and ran straight over me, you remember. Not one hoof mark. Stood and brushed myself off. There was the bullet Fantan took for me in the can of sardines.”
    “What?” I said.
    “A long story for another time.” He waved that off. “And then there was my long illness after I’d so ridiculously gone to war. I did some terrible things in my younger days and was always surprised and suspicious that luck seemed to reward rather than punish me. But now I think perhaps luck was just saving for my comeuppance. Or that the just desserts that skipped over me were visited upon my son.”
    There she is, I thought the next day, watching from a nursery window as Fleur emerged from the car below. His comeuppance. It startled me to think like that, but the fact is, Mauser’s history had made me shiver. It rang true. I have stopped believing in a divine lookout, but Mauser’s luck was striking, or had been, until the grotesque collapse of his illness. And when Fleur cured him, I wondered now, was that a piece of good fortune or was it the beginning of a subterranean justice that now started, one catastrophe and then the next, to bring him down?
    His investments began to fail. A lead mine collapsed. Securities he’d thought invulnerable to the world’s flux proved otherwise. A fertilizer plant he’d owned closed and he had to sell off those lands he’d acquired by means underhanded, anyway. He was unnerved, I could see it, uncertain. Even after he came home at night, he closeted himself for hours with his accountant. When he emerged he wore a desperate, foraging look. Still, an edifice of money built as large as Mauser’s, one that withstood all the world’s undoing, doesn’t go all at once. The daily features of life seemed changeless. The household still functioned with its usual extravagance and Mrs. Testor continued her profitable ways with the meats. Fleur’s account at the dress shop was paid and the couple still appeared at social events. With her hair piled high, she still displayed the bold profile and predatory grace of a swooping bird. Mauser, although he cut as fine a figure, wore an increasingly haunted look, though maybe hunted is the better word.
     
    M Y LOVE for the boy, and the fact that I’d succeeded in drawing Mauser out on the subject of his religious habits, broke some ice between the two of us. Still, the old animosity I’d felt for his lurking manservant persisted until one day I asked about a detail of conversation that remained odd to me—Mauser’s mention of the can of sardines and the bullet. I then was told the story of the way the two men forged their bond.
    We sat together in the breakfast room, in pale light, our coffee on delicate gold-rimmed saucers. I wondered if he might sell them to me when the house went, then quashed my greedy thought. Mauser lighted a small cheroot and began to speak.
    “My war starts with a can of sardines, a small can, unworthy of mayhem. I see it sitting in the dim illumination, there on the low table, its wrapper a bright yellow, cheerful, centering the group of men.”
    He tapped the cigar. I let him go on, didn’t stop as he waxed thoughtful.
     
    M OLES , human gophers, that’s what we were. Burrowing