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.

Hm i think its more they resent it

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

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

This is a sopranos line

He had never stopped being grateful that she had married him and right afterward given him a son, when he’d come to believe he was the end of the line.

how we valued the sanctity of small routine.

How we valued … her? Oh ok that too?

I went around to the other side and got in with her. I lifted her head and slid my leg underneath. I sat with her, holding my arm over her shoulder.

No, I’m coming too. I’ve got to hold on to her. We’ll call from the hospital. I had almost never challenged my father in word or deed. But it didn’t even register between us. There had already been that look, odd, as if between two grown men, and I had not been ready.

But Cher did not look tough. She looked like a surprised plastic doll.

One way to look tough

Looked like that poor woman had a miscarriage or maybe—her voice went sly—a rape.

Until this point i thought vshe had been vomiting blood too

Then suddenly I felt bad about Cher. What had she done to me?

My father has the head, neck, and shoulders of a tall and powerful man, but the rest of him is perfectly average. Even a little clumsy and soft. If you think about it, this is a good physique to have as a judge. He looms imposingly seated at the bench, but when conferring in his chambers (a glorified broom closet) he is nonthreatening and people trust him.

picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella.

What time period is this

When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.

But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight.

Naturally, we all wanted to be Worf. We all wanted to be Klingons. Worf’s solution to any problem was to attack.

We also liked Geordi because it turned out he was always in pain because he wore the eye visor, and that made him noble too. The

Whitey had used the rest of the land that Shamengwa had owned to put up his gas station on the other side of town.

I was lucky: I was a boy doted on by women. This was not my doing, and in fact it worried my father.

As I said, I was born late, into the aging tier of the family, and to parents who would often be mistaken for my grandparents. There was that added weight of being a surprise to my mother and father, and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me—the bad and the good.

the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse.

Dad had announced that he was cooking dinner from a recipe. But he could not manage dessert. Thus, the pie.

The pie began to scent the air with a sweet amber fragrance. I hoped my aunt hadn’t got so angry she’d forget the pie.

He doesnt know how to tell if a pie is baked

didn’t really want to see my mother. It was terrible, but it was true. Even though I understood perfectly why she had struck me, I resented that I had to pretend it hadn’t happened or didn’t matter.

I looked at her and was immediately ashamed of my resentment—her

There were potatoes, nearly cooled, way overcooked, disintegrating in an undrained pot.

Incomplete Without the momthers work

We didn’t pray. For the first time, I felt the lack of some ritual. I couldn’t just start eating.

I guessed she’d heard his Marcus Aurelius quote before, but looking back on it, I also know she was trying to build up her shield. To not feel things. Not refer to what had happened. His emotion grabbed at her.

and her eyelid drooped slightly, as it would from then on, for the nerve had been tampered with and the damage was irreversible.

My mother and I probably realized at the same time that my father, who had taken care of my grandmother for many years and certainly knew how to cook, had faked his ineptitude.

And the meat, roadkill? Oh god, no. It died in the backyard.

Cappy looked at him and said, How sacred can your fire be if we sucked out its holiness with just our puny wieners? I couldn’t stop laughing.

I didn’t like being prayed for. As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine.

always ready to make you feel a little uncomfortable with the earnest superiority of all that he was learning from the elders, even your own elders, for your benefit.

he gets a lot of girls with his medicine. So he’s gotta keep in practice.

Lol

Randall had a stony profile, smooth skin, and a long braided ponytail. Girls, especially white ones, were fascinated with him.

Randall, said Cappy, the word medicine has quote marks around it.

I saw a man bending over you, like a police maybe, looking down at you, and his face was white and his eyes deep down in his face. He was surrounded by a silver glow.

Opichi gathered tidbits, call it gossip, but what she knew often informed my father’s decisions.

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.

It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we’d sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on.

She was wearing a plain blue dress that night.

she was ascending to a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.

We brushed our crumbs to the floor.

He’s there, he said, nodding at the heavy stacks.

lip-pointed

it was then that I began to understand who my father was, what he did every day, and what had been his life.

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.

wanted to be alone at the round house when I first got there.

I was looking for anything that other eyes might have missed, as in one of Whitey’s crime novels.

a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself.