The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

He had a profile that would look Indian on a movie poster, Roman on a coin.

In TNG we weren’t skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about.

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

Sonja was her name, and I liked her the way a boy likes his aunt, but I felt differently about her breasts—on them I had a hopeless crush.

Humans were meant to live with the horse.

In other words, being an Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape.

he had built their house from scratch. He and his sons had messed it up from scratch, too.

He’d claimed we’d taken the sacredness out of the fire with our hot dogs.

They’d forgotten to be mad at Randall now and everything was funny.

My father was punishing hot dog thieves and examining washers—not even washing machines—just washers worth 15 cents apiece.

There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.

they talked so dirty the air around them turned blue.

For a handsome guy that girls loved, Cappy was not cool.

Her eyes were never soft or affectionate, but always alert and cold. This seemed odd for someone who cooked for boys. But then, she had survived many deaths and other losses and had no sentiment left.

I had entered that furrow of remorse—planted with the seeds of resentment—peculiar to young men.

My father, so strictly rational that he’d first refused the sacrament and then refused to attend Holy Mass at all, believed in ghosts.

Mom was always trying to keep us clean, and Dad was getting us dirty.

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.

During the time when everything melted but the ground could not yet be prepared for the garden, he again ate constantly, putting back the flesh he’d lost to his winter war.

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

I’ve read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.

Through the generations, we have become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons.

It was a giant and a very old mishiikenh, one of those snapping turtles science tells us are unchanged for over 150 million years—a form of life frightful but perfect.

She wore a shirt of softly fringed suede that clung to her breasts like an unforgiven sin.

His love for Zelia was not like my love for Sonja, which had become a thing contaminated by humiliation, treachery, and even bigger waves of feeling that tore me up and threw me down.

Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time. Even to this day, his words are used to continue the dispossession of our lands. But what particularly galls the intelligent person now is that the language he used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim ascendancy and on and on.

We stayed away from the fact of Lark’s existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.

They tried to tell me I couldn’t ride with him to the hospital but I fought. I stayed with him. They couldn’t make me leave him. I knew what happened if you let a parent get too far away.

The end of thinking occurred.

Even the most traditional Indians, the people who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school, or had made friends with some of the more interesting priests, as Mooshum had for a time, or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.

The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see.

Anyone can miss a deer and hit a golfer.

I allowed my consciousness to sink to an even younger hiding place where nothing could touch me.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent.

His jokes were friendly and awful.

We had no idea what was going to be built. There was always the same amount of dirt. A federal project, said Zack.