Round House, The: A Novel

by Louise Erdrich

  There’s something, I said.

  I put down my fork and looked at my empty plate. I wanted another piece, this time with ice cream. At the same time, I had a sick sense of what I was about to do and thought that I might never eat again.

  Something? said my father. Bjerke wiped his lips.

  There was a file, I said.

  Bjerke put down his napkin. My father peered at me over the rims of his eyeglasses.

  Joe and I went through the files, he said to Bjerke, by way of explaining my unexpected remark. We pulled the possible court cases where someone might have—

  Not that kind of file, I said.

  The two of them nodded at me patiently. Then I saw my father realize there was something he did not know in what I was about to say. He lowered his head and stared at me. That gilded octopus ticked on the wall. I took a deep breath, and 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?

  Joe, said my father. He took off his glasses and set them on the table.

  Please?

  Joe.

  All right. That afternoon when Mom went to the office 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. A week ago, I remembered about the file. So I asked her if they found the file. She said there was no file. She said that I should never mention a file. But there was a file. She went after it. That file is why this happened.

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

  That is not all, said my father suddenly. That is not all you know.

  He leaned over the table in that way he had. He loomed, he seemed to grow. I thought about the money first, of course, but I was not about to give that up and anyway to speak about it now would also implicate Sonja, and I would never betray her. I tried to shrug it off.

  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.

  All right.

  Bjerke leaned forward too. I pushed my chair back, a little wildly.

  Take it easy, said my dad. Just tell what you know.

  That day we went out to the round house and found the gas can, well, we found something else there too. Across the fence line, down by the lakeshore. There was a cooler and a pile of clothes. We didn’t touch the clothes.

  What about the cooler? asked Bjerke.

  Well, I believe we opened that.

  What was in it? asked my father.

  Beer cans.

  I was about to say they were empty and then I looked at my father and knew that a denial was beneath me and a lie would embarrass both of us in front of Bjerke.

  Two six-packs, I said.

  Bjerke and my father looked at each other, nodded, and sat back in their chairs.

  Just like that I ratted out my friends in order to hide the fact of the money. I sat stunned at how quickly it had happened. I was also shocked at how perfectly my admission covered up the forty thousand dollars I had just secured that very day with Sonja’s help. Or under Sonja’s direction. It was me helping Sonja, after all. She was the one who’d had the idea. She was the one who hadn’t gone to my father or to the police. 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 so that, sitting there before my father and Bjerke, I began to sweat and I felt my heart quicken and my throat seize tight.

  I jumped up.

  I gotta go!

  Did he smell like beer? I heard my father ask.

  No, said Bjerke.

  I locked myself in the bathroom and could hear them talking out there. If there’d been a window easy to open I might have jumped out and run. I put my hands under the water and muttered words and very deliberately did not look into the mirror.

  When I came back out and slunk to the table, I saw a slip of paper next to my empty cake plate and milk glass.

  Read it, said my father.

  I sat down. It was a citation, though just on scrap paper. Underage drinking. It mentioned juvenile detention.

  Should I cite your friends too?

  I drank both six-packs. I paused. Over time.

  Where would we find the cans? asked Bjerke.

  They’re gone. Crushed up. Thrown out. They were Hamm’s.

  Bjerke didn’t seem to think the brand was remarkable. He didn’t even jot this down.

  That area was under surveillance, he said. We knew about the cooler and the clothes, but they don’t belong to the attacker. Bugger Pourier came home from Minneapolis to see his dying mother. She kicked him out, as usual, and he moved in down there. We were hoping he’d come get his beer. But I guess you drank it first.

  He said this in a remote but somehow sympathetic tone and I felt my head begin to swim with the sudden drain of adrenaline. I stood up again and backed away with the paper warning in my hands.

  I’m sorry, sir. They were Hamm’s. We thought …

  I kept backing up until I reached the doorway and then I turned around. Leaden, I climbed the stairs. I went past my mother’s door without looking in on her. I went into my own room and shut the door. My parents’ bedroom took up the front of the upstairs and had three windows that normally let in the first sunlight of morning. The bathroom and sewing room took up small spaces on either side of the stairway. My room at the back of the house caught the long gold of sunset and in summer especially it was comforting to lie in my bed and watch the radiant shadows climb the walls. My walls were painted a soft yellow. My mother had painted the walls while she was pregnant and always said she’d chosen the color because it would be right for either a girl or boy, but that halfway through the painting she knew I was a boy. She knew because each time she worked in the room a crane flew by the window, my father’s doodem, as I have said. Her own clan was the turtle. My father insisted that she had arranged for the snapping turtles she’d hooked on their first date to scare him into asking her to marry him without delay. 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. As the light crept down the sides of the walls, turning the yellow paint to a deeper bronze, I thought about the awful doll and the money. 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. I thought about my father sitting in the welling gloom downstairs, and my mother in the black bedroom with the shades drawn against tomorrow’s sunrise. There was that hush on the reservation that falls between the summer dusk and dark, before the pickup trucks drag between the bars, the dance hall, and the drive-up liquor window. Sounds were muted—a horse neighed over the trees. There was a short, angry bawl way off as a child was dragged in from outdoors. There was the drone of a faraway motor chugging down from the church on the hill. My mother hadn’t ever realized that cranes are very predictable and cease their hunting at a certain hour and return to their roosts. 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.

  Chapter Eight

  Hide and Q

  My mother’s job was to know everybody’s secrets. The original census rolls taken in the area that became our reservation go back past 1879 and include a description of each family by tribe, often by clan, by occupation, by relationship, age, and or
iginal name in our language. Many people had adopted French or English names by that time, too, or had been baptized and received thereby the name of a Catholic saint. It was my mother’s task to parse the ever more complicated branching and interbranching tangle of each bloodline. Through the generations, we have become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons. At the tip of each branch of course the children are found, those newly enrolled by their parents, or often a single mother or father, with a named parent on the blank whose identity if known might shake the branches of the other trees. Children of incest, molestation, rape, adultery, fornication beyond reservation boundaries or within, children of white farmers, bankers, nuns, BIA superintendents, police, and priests. My mother kept her files locked in a safe. No one else knew the combination of the safe and there was now a backlog of tribal enrollment applications piled up at her office.

  Special Agent Bjerke was in our kitchen the next morning to approach the problem of questioning my mother about the particular file.

  Would it help if we had a woman? To talk? We can get a female agent to drive over from our Minneapolis office.

  I don’t think so.

  My father fiddled with the tray he’d fixed for my mother’s breakfast. There was an egg fried the way she’d liked, toast buttered just so, a dab of Clemence’s raspberry jam. He had already brought her coffee with cream and was encouraged that she’d sat up for him and had a sip.

  I went upstairs with the tray and set it down on one of the chairs next to the bed. She had put down the coffee and was pretending to sleep—I could tell by the infinitesimal tension in her body and her fake deep breaths. Perhaps she knew that Soren Bjerke had returned, or perhaps my father had said something about the file already. She would feel betrayed by me. I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me, and I left her room wishing that I could go straight to Sonja and Whitey’s and pump gas in the hot sun or wash windshields or clean the scummy restroom. Anything but go back upstairs, into the bedroom. My father said it was important I be there so that she couldn’t deny it.

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

  The three of us went upstairs. My father first, then Bjerke, me last. My father knocked before entering her room, and Bjerke, looking at his feet, waited outside with me. My father said something.

  No!

  She cried out and there was the crash of what I knew was the breakfast tray, a clatter of silverware skidding across the floor. My father opened the door. His face was glossy with sweat.

  We’d best get this over with.

  And so we entered and sat down in two folding chairs he’d pulled up next to her bed. He lowered himself, like a dog that knows it isn’t welcome, onto the end of the bed. My mother moved to the far edge of the mattress and lay hunched, her back to us, the pillow childishly held over her ears.

  Geraldine, said my father in a low voice, Joe’s here with Bjerke. Please. Don’t let him see you this way.

  What way? Her voice was a crow’s jeer. Crazy? He can take it. He’s seen it. But he’d rather be with his friends. Let him go, Bazil. Then I’ll talk to you.

  Geraldine, he knows something. He’s told us something.

  My mother crunched herself into a smaller ball.

  Mrs. Coutts, said Bjerke, I apologize for bothering you again. I’d much rather solve this and let you alone, leave you in peace. But the fact is I need some additional information from you. Last night we learned from Joe that on the day you were attacked you received a telephone call. Joe thinks he remembers that this telephone call was upsetting to you. He says that after a short time you told him that you were going after a file and then you drove to your office. Is this true?

  There was no movement or sound from my mother. Bjerke tried again. But she waited us out. She didn’t turn to us. She didn’t move. It seemed an hour that we sat in a suspense that quickly turned to disappointment and then to shame. My father finally lifted his hand and whispered, Enough. We backed out of the room and walked down the steps.

  Late that afternoon, my father moved a card table into the bedroom. My mother did not react. Then he set up folding chairs at the table and I heard her furiously berating him and begging him to take it away. He came downstairs sweating again, and told me that every night at six o’clock I was to be home for dinner, which we’d bring upstairs and eat together. Like a family again, he said. We were starting this regimen now. I took a deep breath and carried up the tablecloth. Again, though my mother was angry, my father opened the shades and even a window, to let in a breeze. We brought a salad and a baked chicken up the stairs, plus the plates, glasses, silverware, and a pitcher of lemonade. Perhaps a drop of wine tomorrow night, to make something festive of it, Dad said without hope. He brought a bouquet of flowers he’d picked from the garden that she hadn’t seen yet. He put them in a small painted vase. I looked at the green sky on that vase, the willow, the muddy water and awkwardly painted rocks. I was to become overly familiar with this glazed scene during those dinners because I didn’t want to look at my mother, propped up staring wearily at us as if she’d just been shot, or rolled into a mummy pretending to be in the afterlife. 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. After he’d spoken of the day’s small events one night, he said he’d had a very interesting talk with Father Travis Wozniak and that the priest had been there in Dealey Plaza on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Travis’s father had taken him into the city to see the Catholic president and his elegant first lady, who was wearing a suit the exact mute pink as the inside of a cat’s mouth. Travis and his father walked down Houston Street, crossed Elm, and decided that the best place to view the President would be there on the grassy slope just east of the Triple Underpass. They had a good view and watched the street expectantly. Just before the first motorcycle escorts appeared, someone’s black-and-white gundog ran out into the middle of the street and was quickly recalled by its owner. It often bothered Travis afterward to think that if only the dog had got loose at another time, perhaps just as the motorcade passed, messing up the precision and timing of things, or if it had thrown itself under the wheels of the presidential convertible in an act of sacrifice, or leapt into the President’s lap, what followed might not have happened. 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.

  Father Travis had gone on describing how the motorcycles preceded the presidential convertible, and there was John F. Kennedy, looking straight ahead. Some women sitting on the grass had brought their lunch to eat and now stood up beside their sandwich boxes and wildly clapped and cheered. They drew the President’s attention, and he looked directly at them, and then smiled at Travis, who was dazzled and disoriented to see the portrait in the living room of every Catholic family come to life. The shots sounded like a car had backfired. The first lady stood up and Travis saw her scan the crowd. The car halted. Then more shots. She threw herself down and that was the last he saw, for his father threw him down, too, and covered him with his body. He was slammed into the ground so suddenly, and his father was so heavy, that he bit into the sod. Ever after, thinking of that day, he remembers the grit in his teeth. Soon his father felt the shift of the crowd and the two of them rose. Waves of confusion swirled, turned chaotic when the presidential car streaked forward. People ran back and forth, not certain w
hich direction was safest, and subject to racing rumors. He saw a family of black people cast themselves onto the earth in grief. The speckled gundog was loose again; it trotted right and left, nose high, as if it were actually directing the crowd instead of being buffeted this way and that by surges of people in the grip of conflicting terrors and fascinations. Some tried to run back to the place they had last seen the President and others grappled with people they thought somehow responsible. People sank to their knees and were lost in prayer or shock. The gundog sniffed a fallen woman and then stood beside her, pointing gravely and motionlessly at the stuffed bird on her hat.

  On another night, after I tried but at last grew stumped for conversation, my father remembered that of course an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan, thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings. The crane, the bear, the loon, the catfish, lynx, kingfisher, caribou, muskrat—all of these animals and others in various tribal divisions, including the eagle, the marten, the deer, the wolf—people were part of these clans and were thus governed by special relationships with one another and with the animals. This was in fact, said my father, the first system of Ojibwe law. The clan system punished and rewarded; it dictated marriages and regulated commerce; it told which animals a person could hunt and which to appease, which would have pity on the doodem or a fellow being of that clan, which would carry messages up to the Creator over to the spirit world, down through the layers of the earth or across the lodge to a sleeping relative. There were many instances right in our own family, in fact, as you well know, he said to the crease in the blankets that was my mother, your own great-aunt was saved by a turtle. As you remember, she was of the turtle, or the mikinaak, clan. At the age of ten she was put out to fast on a small island. There she stayed one early spring, four days and four nights with her face blackened, utterly defenseless, waiting for the spirits to become her friends and adopt her. On the fifth day when her parents did not return, she knew something was wrong. She broke the paste of saliva that sealed her thirsty mouth, drank lake water, and ate a patch of strawberries that had tormented her. She made a fire, for although she was not allowed to use it on her fast, she carried with her a flint and steel. Then she began to live on that island. She made a fish trap and lived off fish. The place was remote, but still she was surprised at how the time passed, one moon, two, and no one came to get her. She knew by then that something very bad had happened. She also knew that the fish would soon retreat to another part of the lake for the summer and she would starve. So she determined to swim to the mainland, twenty miles away. She set off on a fair morning with the wind at her back. For a long time the waves helped her along, and she swam well enough, even though she had been weakened by her meager diet. Then the wind changed and blew directly against her. Clouds lowered and she was lashed by a cold driving rain. Her arms and legs were heavy as swollen logs, she thought that she would die, and in her struggle called out for help. At that moment she felt something rise beneath her. It was a giant and a very old mishiikenh, one of those snapping turtles science tells us are unchanged for over 150 million years—a form of life frightful but perfect. This creature swam below her, breaking her way through the water, nudging her to the surface when her strength gave out, allowing her to cling to its shell when she was exhausted, until they came to shore. She waded out and turned to thank it. The turtle watched her silently, its eyes uncanny yellow stars, before it sank away. Then she found her brothers and sisters. It was true about the disaster. They had been laid low by the devastations of the great influenza—as with all pandemics this struck reservations hardest. Their parents were dead and there was no way to know where their sister had been left off, in addition to which people were afraid to catch the deadly illness and had moved away from them in haste so that they, too, the children, were living alone.