Four Souls by Louise Erdrich Page B

creatures. I loved the dirt, craved the solid gray promise of it, nosed into the cold black safety, set my shoulders into the swing of the pick, the shovel, or dug with my face when the shelling commenced. Fantan too, here, he can tell you we loved dirt. I don’t care if it was wet or dry or stank of human rot. Life in the trenches fostered adoration of the muck and the shit of survival. Don’t make a face! Queen Polly Elizabeth! I swear you’re a Brit, a throwback, you and your conflagrate them flower beds laid out in rows.
    I first got over there. I thought to myself, why, these British, they’re short ! They were lean as weasels, too, my God, sunk in the chest and small. I thought they picked out the little ones to live in these dugouts, or maybe they were stunted by island living somehow. Come to find out, it wasn’t any of my theories that held the reason I stood a head at least over even the tallest Englishman. Quite simply, the tallest had been slaughtered first. The British Recruiting Office had been forced to lower their requirements from five foot eight, I believe it was when the war began, to five foot three by the time Lloyd George started the conscription. So there I was, and Fantan, easy targets and easy picking.
    “If this goes on,” I said to him one foul afternoon, “think about the future of the English as a breed. The French too, I suspect. Darwin would say it is survival of the measliest. Maybe all of Europe, if it isn’t one big crater, will be composed of miniature, clever, tunneling folk. Of course, there are the women, the fair and stalwart mothers and widows, as the newspapers call them back home. They’ll tower. They’ll lambaste and dominate. They’ll thrive. They’ve not been culled for height or for intelligence yet. They are the ones who will run things.”
    Fantan concurred, agreeable then as he is now, although of course very different, my dear. I say you’re British with your flowers because once I got there, moved into the trenches you see, and began to understand what a drunk fool I’d been to recruit myself, the other item that astonished me about the British was their stubborn passion for the civilized bloom. Our first shelter, which we tried absurdly to make comfortable, was actually decorated all around the door with the trained vine of a climbing sweet pea. The girlfriend of some poor poetic cluck had sent the seeds on his request. He was blown to literal pieces before the show of the first bud, so it was left for the rest of us to enjoy the bower. The damn blossoms were enormous, hot pink, lavender, and white, fertilized by human guts.
    Oh, you’ve gone pale green, Polly Elizabeth. Your mother wouldn’t have sat still this long. But you feel sorry for me, don’t you, or is it something else? I know you’re sick to the gills of Fantan, of putting up with him. You want to know why I brought him back, of course, and why I won’t let you, any more than I permitted your mother, toss him to the church or the veterans’ ward. You want to know how I won him, or he won me, or we became possessed of each other. Since you can’t ask him, you’re asking me. I’ll answer, too, it’s easy. A can of sardines.
    All right, then, another coffee, that will do.
    The sardines had got to be a kind of joke in the lulls. There were these times when not much went on beyond the pounding of guns, the sniping, and the occasional man hit north or south of you. There were evenings we sat in the dugout, which we’d banked well and scratched deeper and deeper into the earth and improved, even with a scrap of rug, a crate, a table of sorts, so that we thought our burrow was pretty grand—spacious and well concealed and snug. There were these two men, a couple, mates they called themselves, like Fantan and me. Bert Chiswick and Mr. Dragon were their names. The two thought themselves mighty clever when it came to bridge, which I despise. But we played it with them, had to before they would put