She kills Napoleon for impregnating her, but this death is also blamed on Fleur. Pauline reveals that she is responsible for the men who died in the storm, having locked them in their freezer. She attempts to convert Fleur’s family, but they mock Pauline for these efforts. At the convent, Pauline denies her Native heritage, believing herself to be fully white and committing herself to suffering in Christ’s name. Pauline keeps the pregnancy a secret and gives the baby, Marie, to Bernadette, so that she can join a nearby convent. Pauline then discovers she is pregnant with Napoleon’s baby and attempts to abort the child, but Bernadette convinces her to keep it. Instead, she envies the companionship between Fleur and Eli, and visits the medicine doctor to procure a love medicine to coax Eli into having an affair with Sophie, Bernadette’s young daughter. She begins attending Catholic mass and allows Napoleon Morrissey to seduce her, but feels no romance toward him. After leaving the butcher shop, Pauline moves in with Bernadette Morrissey, learning how to prepare the dead for the afterlife. Pauline watches Fleur from afar, curious about how she is able to win so consistently at the poker game, and then bearing witness to the men who attack Fleur for this success. She rejects her father’s commitment to Native ways, and so she moves to Argus to live with her Aunt Regina and cousin Russell and work in the butcher shop with Fleur. She has also lost all of her family except her father. Pauline Puyat is a mixed-blood woman who is the other narrator of the book.
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