The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

He had a profile that would look Indian on a movie poster, Roman on a coin. There was a classic stoicism in his heavy beak and jaw.

Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.

I’m gonna pray for your family. That’s cool, I said, though it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being prayed for. As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine.

I put my back against a tree and leaned there—not slumping. I was filled with that odd energy. I was allowing the tree to help me think.

They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth.

And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history,

Some people in these hungry times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat.

Even if they are so poor they have nothing, they give the last of their nothing to another human.

I was building lie upon lie and it all came naturally to me as honesty once had.

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring. I hadn’t been touched yet.

Look at me. He threw his hair back, tapped the tips of his fingers on his chest. Would I wreck her life? The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will. Our bodies, too. So fucking what? Every bit of what we did was made in heaven. The Creator is goodness, brother. In his mysterious mercy he gave me Zelia. The gift of our love—I can’t throw it back in the face of the Creator, can I?

The sentence was to endure. Nobody shed tears and there was no anger.

I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old.

We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.