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 already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.

We loved Star Wars, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in TNG.

Humans were meant to live with the horse.

Very little is needed to make a happy 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.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.

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

I had entered that furrow of remorse—planted with the seeds of resentment—peculiar to young men.

Cigarettes will kill you.

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.

had a good route, he said, yawning, a regular route. I could do it in my sleep. Every Christmas my people left me cards, money, cookies, that sort of thing. I knew their lives so well. Their habits. Every detail. I could have committed

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.

They couldn’t make me leave him. I knew what happened if you let a parent get too far away.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Travis went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

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.

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.

I was always there, said Cappy. Every morning. I always had your back.

The best thing for me to do was forget. And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream.

I know there’s lots of world over and above Highway 5, but when you’re driving on it—four boys in one car and it’s so peaceful, so empty for mile after mile, when the radio stations cut out and there’s just static and the sound of your voices, and wind when you put your arm out to rest it on the hood—it seems you are balanced.