The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

she had survived many deaths and other losses and had no sentiment left.

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.

Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

wakes. Even if they are so poor they have nothing, they give the last of their nothing to another human.

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.

No, I needed her in ways that now were lost to me.

I’d learned from my mistake with Father Travis that unusual politeness from a boy my age is an instant suspicion-raiser.

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.