The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could easily blow away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.

know you got a point,” said Eddy. “I just don’t want to take your point right now.”

Thomas had friends on the other side. More and more friends. Too many. Sometimes he talked to them. Archille. Talked to them. Why shouldn’t he? It helped to think they had moved to another country. That they lived on the far side of a river you could only cross once.

“And they are still using the land,” said Biboon. “Still using the hell out of it,” said Thomas. “But trying to pretend they didn’t sign a contract to pay the rent.”

Wood Mountain, the boxer, son of Archille, grandson of a man who fought with Sitting Bull, wanted to stay home. Which, after all, was the same thing Sitting Bull had wanted to do.

what he would say, how difficult they’d make it, whether he’d choke up on his words.

“Study hard because we need to know the enemy.”

The Names Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance. But it seemed to Zhaanat that this behavior had caused a rift in the life of places. The animals didn’t come around to these locations stained by the names of humans. Plants, also, had begun to grow fitfully. The most delicate of her plant medicines were even dying out altogether, or perhaps they had torn themselves up by the roots to drag their fruits and leaves to secret spots where even Zhaanat couldn’t find them. And now even these half-ruined places that bore the names of saints and homestead people and priests, these places were going to be taken. In her experience, once these people talked of taking land it was as good as gone.

Later, when Patrice heard about Bucky’s twisted mouth and how it was spreading down his side, she looked at her mother’s face, serene and severe, for a clue. But Patrice knew that she herself had done it. Her hatred was so malignant it had lifted out of her like a night bird. It had flown straight to Bucky and sank its beak into the side of his face.

The precision of the world took her breath away. The crisp lines of brick. The legibility of signs on doors. The needles of pines standing out sharp against more needles

A place simple, savage, ineffable, and exquisite. It was the place she went to every night.

Together they drank the icy birch water, which entered them the way life entered the trees, causing buds to swell along the branches. Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.

Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.