Erdrich Fleur Quotes

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed.

I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this.

What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could.