The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

She slept hot just the way her words sometimes blew hot. She could warm him right up.

Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’s father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.

In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.

“The average man is proof the average woman can take a joke,”

Goddamn everything about this man was probably drooping, thought Juggie. Glad my fellow doesn’t have this problem. Then she felt bad for thinking such a thing. And she wished how he wished her to feel: she felt sorry for him.

It was as if a marvelous design had flashed before her, and disintegrated, before she could grasp the figures it conveyed.

deciding one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness,