The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

As my father

prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year’s seedlings.

but the two of us stared at each other in a way that struck me somehow as adult, as though he knew that by reading his law book I had inserted myself into his world.

Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

I was glad that he was so definite—find her, not just look for her, not search. We would go out and find her.

I saw myself as different, though I didn’t know how yet.

In a vague way, I hoped something was going to happen.

She was shaking so bad I was scared she would fly apart.

Don’t you Indians have your own hospital over there? Aren’t you building a new one?

I was never like so many Indian boys, who’d look down quiet in their anger and say nothing. My mother had taught me different.

I threw my arms around my father’s soft torso, held him under his jacket, and I fiercely clung to him, saying nothing, only breathing with him, taking great deep sobs of air.

The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud.

A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk.

Very little is needed to make a happy life,

His emotion grabbed at her.

As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine.

We were not churchgoers. This was our ritual. Our breaking bread, our communion. And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

and I think as we watched her we both had the sense that she was ascending to a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.

Maybe Lark moved on, or maybe he absorbed her poison.

The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled me and flooded me.

Now I felt what had happened to her in my gut.

We switched back. But I still believe that if it would have helped me, Cappy would have kept on walking in my tight old shoes.

They never sought protection from each other’s illnesses.

Then again, sometimes a ghost is a person out of your future. A person dropping back through time, I guess, by mistake. I’ve heard that from my own mother.

When the warm rain falls in June, said my father, and the lilacs burst open. Then she will come downstairs. She loves the scent of the lilacs.

The ground drained my rage.

You gave me life, I said. That’s how it’s supposed to work. So let me do what I want with it!

I leaned my bike against the tree and lay down in spite of the ticks.

The old cemetery was filled with its complications.

Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back.

Before we were born, my twin had the compassion to crush against me, to perfect me by deforming me, so that I would be the one who was spared.

It was placed so that when he woke up he could gaze at the hot eternal sky.

You have read this far and you know that I’m writing this story at a removal of time, from that summer in 1988, when my mother refused to come down the stairs and refused to talk to Soren Bjerke.

The money was still pushing at me to talk, to reveal.

The turtle’s message had been about mortality. How my father should act with swiftness in the face of death.

I thought about my father sitting in the welling gloom downstairs, and my mother in the black bedroom with the shades drawn against tomorrow’s sunrise.

I watched this shadow. Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.

a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream.

The turtle watched her silently, its eyes uncanny yellow stars, before it sank away.

There are many stories of children who were forced to live alone, my father went on, including those stories from antiquity in which infants were nursed by wolves. But there are also stories told from the earliest histories of western civilization of humans rescued by animals.

I didn’t know how bad I’d needed noise.

He went, as they said in those times, back to the blanket. Not that he wore a blanket.

Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.

The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way.

I lay awake thinking of the place on the hill, the holy wind in the grass, and how the structure had cried out to me. I could see a part of something larger, an idea, a truth, but just a fragment.

I could not see the whole, but just a shadow of that way of life.

He’s in a dream now, Sonja said tenderly. Her words burst through a sob. He’s going away. Let’s not disturb him. She leaned over Mooshum, smoothing his hair back and murmuring. He opened his eyes once, smiled at her, closed his eyes again.

Lots of men cry after they do something nasty to a woman.

Still, after I thought about it for a long time—in fact, all my life—I wanted to be something better.