The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

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. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening. And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.

stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

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.

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

I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle the way she’d left me in mine.

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.

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.

Your people were brought together by us buffalo once. You knew how to hunt and use us. Your clans gave you laws. You had many rules by which you operated. Rules that respected us and forced you to work together. Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart.

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

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.

Moral evil is different. It is caused by human beings. A person does something deliberately to another person to cause pain and torment.

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.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

The scent of burning sweetgrass wafted from the little pull-down screen windows.

They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.