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.

I am the second Antone Bazil Coutts, but I’d fight anyone who put a junior in back of my name.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

We could be jolted into a fresh awareness of how we valued the sanctity of small routine. Wild though I saw myself in the mirror, in my thoughts, I valued such ordinary pleasures.

Those two words stabbed my thoughts, as she had meant them to do.

After I’d sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going into surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture’s fault.

Clemence stared at me, the Kleenex frozen beside her nose, and her skin went the color of old snow. She bent over suddenly and put her head down on her knees.

I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it.

Star had a fancy television bought with the one lavish bingo win she’d managed in her lifetime.

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.

sour. I dumped the milk, rinsed the glass, filled it, and gulped down the iron water of our reservation until the sour taste was gone. Then I stood there with the empty glass in my hands.

Her eyebrows had always been so expressive of irony and love, but now were held tight by anguish.

She and Whitey also had three dogs, all female, ferocious, and named in some way after Janis Joplin.

All right, Joe, you’re asking a lot of questions. You are developing an order to things in your mind. You’re thinking this out. So am I. Joe, the perpetrator couldn’t light the match. He went to look for another book of matches. Some way of lighting a fire. While he was gone, your mother managed to escape. How?

On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge—like love, sex, or having or not having a baby—has nothing to do with government.

Clemence came back in, breaking my thoughts, and I heard the creak of the oven door. Then the slide of the rack as she removed two pies from the oven. I heard her set the pies out to cool. The oven door clanged and the screen door whined open and clapped shut. In a moment, the faint crispness of a burning cigarette wafted through the screen. I’d never known my aunt to smoke before, but she had started since the hospital. The scent of Clemence’s newly taken up smoking sobered both of the men.

My father let me in. The hot kitchen smelled of some violent experiment.

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.

I’ve learned since that there are two things about judges. They all have dogs, and they all have some special quirk to make them memorable. Thus, I think, the fountain pen, even though at home my father used a ballpoint. I opened the last file on the desk and began reading it.

What happened to Mom, did it happen there? Again, no answer. He shuffled away the papers, stood up. The light caught the lines in his face and they deepened to cracks. He looked a thousand years old.

Cappy was a skinny guy with big hands and scarred-up, knobby feet, but he had bold cheekbones, a straight nose, big white teeth, and lank, shiny hair hanging down over one brown eye. Melting brown eye.

didn’t see a thing out of place, though, or rather, since it was the woods and everything was out of place and wild, I didn’t see a thing in place. A neatened area. Something that did not look or feel right. An empty jar, a bottle cap, a blackened match. This place had been minutely combed clean of what didn’t belong already and I reached the clearing where the round house was set without finding anything of interest or use.

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

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. Zack had one of those last sort. Grandma Ignatia Thunder.

I took off Cappy’s shoes. Thanks, I said. 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 began to like what I was doing. The ground drained my rage.

he turned and stared at me with the unblinking all-seeing gaze I used to think he turned on murderers before I found out he only dealt with hot dog thieves.

And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.

So that’s how we finally saw Alien—standing at the window behind the young priest we suspected of an unspeakable crime.

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I’d even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife.

She nodded at Cappy and sat down behind us. Cappy shrugged, and as we hadn’t played our game for a while and were not going to quit for any small reason, we continued: For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving.

Our destination: enemy headquarters. The heart of our hated foe’s impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.

The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother’s spirit isn’t dying right upstairs.

But finally, I agreed to do it and Dad had fortunately bought some ice cream. It was Linda’s favorite food. Even on a rainy day? He smiled. She’s cold-blooded.

When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing. I remember that I opened my mouth, that is all, and that I did not shut it until I was back with Mom.

You’re gonna see things sometimes, Mom told me once. Your soft spot stayed open longer than most babies. That’s how spirits get in.

My brother Cedric had given me the name Tuffy because he knew once I went to school I would get a nickname anyway. He didn’t want it to refer to my arm or head.

knew I was loved because it was complicated for Mom and Dad to get me from the welfare system, though I’d helped out their efforts with my endless scream. All of which is not to say they were perfect.

This is your mother, Grace Lark. The voice was tight and nervous. I set the phone back down in the cradle. Later, that moment struck me as very funny. I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle the way she’d left me in mine.

As you know, I am a government employee. At any time, I could have found out the address of my birth parents. I could have called them up, or hey, I could have gotten drunk and stood in their yard raving! But I didn’t want to know anything about them. Why would I? Everything I did know hurt and I have always avoided pain—which is maybe why I’ve never married or had children.

I had always identified the visitations of my presence as one of those spirits Betty’s doctoring let into my head.

Perhaps I’d sit in the kitchen and watch a movie at the table. Or maybe I’d stay by the fire and read my novel from the library. The dog would snore and twitch in his dreams. Those had been my choices. Now I was gripped by something else—a dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first? I could not decide. The dog came and put his head in my lap and we sat there until I realized that one of the reactions I could have was numbness. Relieved, feeling nothing, I put the dog out, let him in, and went to bed.

But this was not a do-unto-others sort of thing with me. I already said that I do not seek pain and I would not have contemplated going through with it unless I couldn’t bear the alternative.

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 contracted an infection of the spirit, said Linda precisely, in a correcting tone. I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My real family came to my rescue, got me on my feet again, she went on.

He went out every single day in his flamboyant gear and labored with incremental ferocity.

By means of this ceaseless and seemingly quixotic activity, Mooshum stayed alive.

He heard so well that he was bothered by the periodic judder of Clemence’s sewing machine down the hall and by my uncle Edward’s habit of humming dirges while he corrected school papers.

He drank the tea, made a face. Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young. I helped him stand up and with his eyes shut he was willing to be led to the cot in the living room where he dozed in the daytime, right beside the picture window. It was placed so that when he woke up he could gaze at the hot eternal sky.

But at last when we had deposited it all and were driving toward home I went through each of the passbooks and added the numbers up in my head. I told Sonja there was over forty thousand dollars. It was a full-size baby doll, she said.