The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

Hell, yes! I said. You don’t swear on the job, said Sonja. You’re representing something. Okay. We drove for a few miles. I asked what I was representing. Reservation-based free market enterprise. People are watching us.

Soren Bjerke, special agent for the FBI, was an impassive lanky Swede with wheat-colored skin and hair, a raw skinny nose, and big ears.

You have read this far and you know that I’m writing this story at a removal of time, from that summer in 1988, when my mother refused to come down the stairs and refused to talk to Soren Bjerke.

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. And yet, quite honestly, at that moment in 1988, as I looked at my father and Bjerke at our kitchen table, my brain was still stuffed with money like the head of that trashed doll with manufactured mischief in her eyes.

I stopped talking and my mouth hung open. We stared at one another like three dummies with crumbs on our chins.

That’s it, I said. Nothing else. But he just loomed. So I gave up a lesser secret, which is often the way we satisfy someone who knows, and knows that he knows, as my father did then.

Now the crane my mother used to watch, or its offspring, flapped slowly past my window. That evening it cast the image not of itself but of an angel on my wall. I watched this shadow. Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.

My father tried to keep a conversation going every night, and when I had exhausted my meager store of the day’s doings, he forged on, a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream. I am sure I saw him laboring on the muddy little river painted on the vase.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance. He said the feeling has grown stronger and more persistent, too, since the embassy bombing where he’d been injured. Interesting, my father said. That priest. A flagpole sitter.

some way replicate his music, but it has become their own, too, which is the only way for music to remain alive.

I nodded. All day my mother’s words had seeped up through the surface of all I did, like a dark oil.

An old cow as crazy and decrepit as Nanapush himself would become, and me, and all survivors of those years, the last of so many.

This buffalo knew what had happened to Nanapush’s mother. She said wiindigoo justice must be pursued with great care. A place should be built so that people could do things in a good way. She said many things, taught Nanapush, so that, as he lived on, Nanapush was to become wise in his idiocy.

Cappy kicked the God Squadder’s legs out from under him, reached around with a wrestler’s move, and started dunking him.

Yeah, said Zack. Seek out new life-forms. The YEC, a rosary-based primitive people . .

Neal, calling out whatever Zack did. Holy Spirit is right on! Right on upon us. Hallelujah. Praise the Christ Form. Praise His Rez Erection. Holy Mother’s Milk. Lamb of Goodness Sakes. Holy Fruity Womb! Zack was a rotten Catholic.

knew better than to meet Father Travis’s eyes after that one look. I turned away and bumped up against Dream Girl, who was standing at the edge of things, with the truth and Cappy walking from the water in her thoughts. I saw those things on her face. And I saw there was no conflict. Which is as much as to say that she was in love.

Some warm part of her was gone and might not return. This new formidable woman would take getting to know, and I was thirteen. I didn’t have the time.

The other kids from the reservation, real devout ones whose parents were deacons and pie makers for the funerals, had told Neal that the four of us were the worst bunch in school, which wasn’t even true. They were just trying to help Neal feel impressed with himself as from the beginning he had confessed low self-esteem. Unfortunately for us and for our chances of long-term salvation, Youth Encounter Christ was only a two-week camp. We had been converted with only a day left. So we were in wrap-up sessions. And since they were wrapping up the insights gained over the two weeks, we didn’t have much to contribute.

Then Father Travis spoke: Sometimes things happen very quickly, like that, which is why in this encounter group we work to prepare you for those lightning-fast moments. Those moments aren’t temptation, really. You react on instinct. Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep. You’re tempted then. That’s why we learn strategies to keep ourselves occupied, to pray.

The day went on pretty much like that—confessions, pep talks, tears, drama-praying. Creepy moments when we had to stare into each other’s eyes.

Many an agent gained wealth on stolen rations in those years, and many a family turned their faces to the wall and died for lack of what they were promised.

But even though she was a linguistics major, she didn’t have a word for what kind of cousin Angus was to me. I thought Mooshum defined it best with his statement that I was bound to defend Angus, but only so far. I didn’t have to die for him, which was a relief.

He was lying on the couch, pillowed, covered with an afghan, just a pile of sticks and a big grin.

If things could stay that way, safe and good, if the attacker would die in jail. If he would kill himself. I couldn’t live with the if.

But he was staring at his desk as if he saw through the oak top into the file beneath it and through the manila cover to the photograph and from the photograph perhaps to some other photograph or record of old brutality that hadn’t yet bled itself out.

That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him. You can go that way, said the old buffalo woman, but even though you become a fool, people will in time consider you a wise man. They will come to you.

You’ve been into my dad’s old Cohen Handbook. You’ll be a lawyer if you don’t go to jail first.

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.

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.

During this ride of peace, so like my earliest memories of going places with my parents, it came to me what I must do. A thought descended into me as I lay beneath my own soft old quilt. I pushed it out. The thought fell back. Three times I pushed it out, each time harder. I hummed to myself. I tried to talk, but my mother put her finger to her lips and pointed at my father, who was asleep. The thought came again, more insistent, and this time I let it in and reviewed it. I thought this idea through to its conclusion. I stood back from my thought. I watched myself think. The end of thinking occurred.

Bugger Pourier, reforming again after years of a stumblebum life in the Cities, was the only other student in the dim room.

He cocked his head to the side as though he was listening to a sound I couldn’t hear. Then he flipped through his catechism book and pointed out the definition. The sins that cried out for vengeance were murder, sodomy, defrauding a laborer, oppressing the poor.

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.

For no reason. The skin of evil shows up in the fucking grocery and his dad has a fucking heart attack trying to kill him. Wouldn’t you think that a kid who witnessed all this would need spiritual help?

Thinking of Sonja was like punching a bruise.

I will be the one. No you won’t, I thought. But she was keen as a blade, as if during that time she lay dull in her closed room she had actually been sharpening herself.

Now that I have lived some, I understand what happened to me in the kitchen that night, and why it happened when it happened. During my sleep I’d dropped my guard. The thoughts that protected my thoughts had fallen away. I was left with my real thoughts. My knowledge of what I planned. With those thoughts came fear. I had never really been afraid before, not for myself.

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.

Grand Entry always caught my breath and made me step along with the dancers. It was big, contagious, defiant, joyous.

Suzette and Josey took their regalia very seriously and made sure all of the bad looks from other women, the grudge thoughts or snapping eyes, were removed from their cloth and beads by the smoke. And their own thoughts, too, perhaps, for their husbands’ eyes were known to roam although they had no proof.

No, I thought, as I crept into my bed, I’ve got Cappy and the others. I’ve done what I had to do. There is no going back. And whatever happens, I can take.

She dropped down and crawled the row on all fours sometimes. Sat back on her heels. She gave the colander a little jounce, to settle the beans. That’s why I did it, I thought. And I was satisfied right then. So she could give her colander a shake. She didn’t have to look behind her, or fear he would sneak up on her. She could pick her bush beans all day and nobody was going to bother her.

Then she lifted her food in her chubby little hands, the sharp nails newly shellacked, and gave me such a look—it was a merry twinkle but at the same time it suggested insanity.

I was stuck. That mad sparkle came back and lighted up her tiny round eyes. She seemed about to explode with laughter. Instead, she leaned toward me and peered around as if the walls were bugged, then she whispered. I would do anything in the world for your family. I am devoted to you guys. Though you’ve been using me, Joe, and you want something from me now. What is it?

Lark’s killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma.