Summary

Chapter Three is titled “Medicine,” and is narrated in the first-person voice of Nanapush. The narration picks up the story at the moment at which the previous chapter left off. Polly Elizabeth, Fleur, and Fantan took Mauser to his bedroom and tied him to his bed, Nanapush commenting in narration that as Fleur described the scene to him, Polly Elizabeth took a kind of pleasure in tying down her brother-in-law. Fleur, Nanapush then says, managed to clear the room and get Mauser calm, a process that the narrator says she repeated frequently and regularly the longer she stayed in the house. Throughout this sequence, Nanapush comments on why Fleur did what she did, beginning with a reference to how both he and Fleur both hated being survivors, hating “who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those...