Eli, a young man, seeks advice from Nanapush on how to seduce Fleur, and his mother Margaret is scandalized when a spy she’s hired reports back their conspicuous coupling in the woods.
Nanapush tells how Fleur returns to the reservation and people speculate about how she earned the money to pay off her land fees. Fleur has a baby and the town speculates about who the father might be. It is discovered that Dutch James is still alive. Fleur is believed to have caused the storm, but Pauline reveals it was she who locked the door to the freezer. Pauline witnesses this attack, but does not try to stop it.įleur leaves town and, soon after, a storm destroys the shop, though the only men hurt are the men who harmed Fleur, found frozen dead in the meat locker. The men, skeptical that she could so consistently win the same amount, grow frustrated and attack her, raping her in a barn behind the shop. Over a series of nights, she watches Fleur winning exactly one dollar each night in card games with the men who work at the butcher shop. Pauline is interested in Fleur, watching her closely, but generally invisible to everyone around her.
Fleur has come to town to take work in the butcher shop, too, when Pauline begins doing odd jobs there as well. She lives with her Aunt Regina and young cousin Russell, and Pauline’s companion Dutch James, who works at the butcher shop. Pauline Puyat explains that she left her father on the reservation to live in the town of Argus so that she could embrace modern ways more fully, despite her father’s protests. After this, Nanapush asks Fleur to stay with him in her cabin, but Fleur believes she must return to her cabin to protect her land. Fleur and Nanapush welcome the priest and feed him, talking nonstop. One day, Father Damien, a young priest from town, appears and tells them that another Pillager has been found on an island alone in the woods- Moses Pillager, who seems to have gone “half-windigo” (become a kind of monster) in his attempt to survive the disease. Nanapush brings Fleur back to his cabin where the two mourn their lost families together, growing weak with grief. In the story, Nanapush’s relatives have all passed away, and all of the Pillager family is thought to have died in their remote cabin on Lake Matchimanito, but when Nanapush goes there to seal the cabin with a policeman, they find young Fleur still barely alive inside. He provides context by saying that, at the time he met her mother, Fleur Pillager, the Indians were dying of consumption and the government was intruding, trying to take the Anishinabe land. Nanapush, an older member of the Anishinabe tribe, speaks to his granddaughter, Lulu, telling her the history of her mother’s life and explaining why her mother sent her away to boarding school.
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