The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

No, probably not, he said at last. When somebody throws their spirit at you they don’t even know it, but they mean to help.

thought about my luck—there was a feeling of guilt attached. I assumed that the person who’d hidden the money in the doll was a girl, maybe even somebody that I knew.

She carefully ironed each one flat and dry, testing the bottom of the iron often with her finger. They

She knos how to deal with cash i guess that checks out

We’re going to open a bunch of college savings accounts for you, said Sonja.

If ypure not taking the money to the police i guess vthats thye next best thing

Wherever that money came from? They are gonna want it back. They will kill to get it back, you know what I’m saying?

But can you do that? I’ve never known a guy who could keep a secret.

Lol

We have to bury the passbooks.

Hes just gotta remember all fthe bankds?

we came to the tree that people call the hanging tree, a huge oak.

somewhere I could see and talk to other people, just random people coming through, people who weren’t dying right before your eyes.

Like those Larks who owned Vinland. He’s been here, but he’s nice to me. Like, he’s not so bad. Linden? Yeah, that one. You should watch out for him, I said. She laughed. Whitey hates his guts. When I’m nice to him, he gets so jealous.

that rotten year for Indians, 1953, when Congress not only decided to try Termination out on us but passed Public Law 280, which gave certain states criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian lands within their borders. If there was one law that could be repealed or amended for Indians to this day, that would be Public Law 280.

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.

Then I saw my father realize there was something he did not know in what I was about to say.

when I spoke I whispered in a childish way that I immediately found shameful but which riveted them. Please don’t tell Mom I said this. Please?

there was a phone call. When she put the phone down, I could tell she was upset. Then about an hour afterward she said she was going after a file.

Maybe to destroy it

That file is why this happened.

anyway to speak about it now would also implicate Sonja, and I would never betray her.

She was an adult and so theoretically she was responsible for what had happened that day. I could always take refuge in that, I thought, and that I had this idea surprised and then humiliated me

Did he smell like beer? I heard my father ask. No, said Bjerke.

They already questioned linden

Bugger Pourier came home from Minneapolis to see his dying mother. She kicked him out, as usual, and he moved in down there.

He might be a witness

I only learned later that they’d caught the very snapper whose shell my mother’s first boyfriend had carved with their initials. That boy had perished, Clemence had told me. The turtle’s message had been about mortality. How my father should act with swiftness in the face of death.

Could be hiding a pregnancy. The dad was also surprised to get a son

I thought about Sonja’s left breast and right breast, which after continual surreptitious observation I had concluded were slightly different, and I wondered if I’d ever know exactly how.

She had cancer?

Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.

My mother’s job was to know everybody’s secrets.

It was my mother’s task to parse the ever more complicated branching and interbranching tangle of each bloodline.

She knows somebody's affair

with a named parent on the blank whose identity if known might shake the branches of the other trees.

We’ll have to break through her denial, is how he put it, and I felt a miserable dread.

No shit shelock

The traditional player, like your uncle Shamengwa, believed that he owed his music to the wind, and that like the wind his music partook of infinite changeability.

There was a call. It was Mayla. I only knew her by her family. She’s hardly ever been here. Just a girl, so young! She’d begun the enrollment process for her child.

Mayla asked to meet me at the round house. She had no car. She said her life depended on it, so I went there.

Three classes of land meet there, my father said. His voice pulled tight with fear. Tribal trust, state, and fee. That’s why I’m asking.

He screamed at Mayla and said he loved her, yet she had another man’s baby, she did this to him. But he still wanted her.

again and again and turned her over. You want to tell me where the money is? The money he gave you?

Thetre te money

While he had his back turned and was pouring the gas on Mayla, I grabbed his pants and put them between my legs and I urinated on them, that’s what I did. I did! Because I’d seen him light his cigarette and put the matches back into his pocket.

Wow shes smart

He poured more gasoline over her and splashed gas on me, too, but not the baby.

I guess he thinks he may get more money for adopting out the babay

You are going to die but if you say one word even one word up in heaven after you are dead I will kill them both.

What about Mayla Wolfskin, Dad? Is she alive? That’s the question. What do you think? I think not, he said softly, looking down at the floor.

I had to take your mother down to Minot this morning. To the hospital. They’ll keep her a couple of days.

She attempted suicide?

Is he from around here, Dad? It would fit . . . but he won’t show up here. He knows he’ll get caught.

I’d seen this person, he was familiar, but I didn’t know him.

Meeting the ghost / attacker?

Sometimes grown-ups recognize a kid and talk as if they know you, but they really know your parents or uncle or were somebody’s teacher.

Ew

A good kid? Second white man to say that this summer. My thought was, This could wreck me.

Even an Indian boy like you can have a good family and get that sort of start, I guess. And maybe it will let you draw even with a white kid of your own age, you know? Who doesn’t have a loving family.

My twin sister had a loving Indian family and they stuck by her when times were hard.

I was mad at Whitey. I’d pumped gas for the enemy.

Mayla went to boarding school in South Dakota, then was going on to Haskell. There was this program where they took the smartest ones to have a special job in the government, something like that.

He could be dead out there, I said. No, he ain’t. That was an empty. ’Sides, I know just how hard to hit him. Bet he says that about you, too. She didn’t answer.

At first she was just an ordinary woman, said Mooshum, good at a number of things—weaving nets, snaring rabbits, skinning out and tanning hides.

extra meat would come their way, for she especially, Akii, could make out in dreams where to find the animals.

He kept the children behind him as they slept and the axe with him in his blanket. He was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. 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. That’s what was happening, her husband decided.

Oooo an old school gaslight