The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  Zack asked why she didn’t stay in Montana and convert those Indians over there.

  What Indians? she asked.

  Oh them, said Cappy quickly. They’re all Mormons and Witnesses and so on already, those Montana Indians. Nobody goes near them. You should keep on converting over here. Lots of pagans here.

  Oh, said Zelia. Well, we don’t trespass on other missions so much, anyway.

  She was Mexican, from a very close family. They’d been against her mission work to a danger zone, she said, but she got her way eventually.

  Actually, you’re an Indian too, I told her. She looked offended, so I said, Maybe you’re a noble Mayan.

  You’re probably an Aztec, said Cappy. This was later in the afternoon. We had signed on for the last two days of Father Travis’s summer program so that we could see Dream Girl. She and Cappy were starting to flirt.

  Yes, I think you are Aztec. Cappy eyed her half mockingly. You’d reach right into a man’s chest and rip out his heart.

  She looked away, but she smiled.

  Zack put his fist out and pumped it with a squishing noise. Padump. Padump. But neither of them looked at him. The three of us knew we had no hope. Cappy was the only one. But we still wanted to be near her and hoped that she would try converting us for real.

  At home, my mother’s energy had faded only slightly. She had two streaks of color on her face. I realized she’d smeared on rouge. She was taking iron pills and other pills. There were six bottles of stuff right inside the kitchen cabinet. She had made Juneberry pancakes for dinner. Mom and Dad sat skeptically and listened as I told all about how I had joined Youth Encounter Christ, or YEC, and was due up at the church tomorrow.

  Youth Encounter? My father narrowed his eyes. You quit Whitey’s to join a youth encounter group?

  I quit Whitey’s because he pasted Sonja.

  My mother went rigid.

  All right, said my father quickly. What do you encounter?

  We dramatize life situations. Like if we are offered drugs. We imagine that Jesus is there to step between, say, Angus and the drug dealer. Or me and the dealer, say, not that it happens.

  That’s right, said my father, you’re beer drinkers, as I remember. Does Jesus snatch the cans from your paws? Empty them on the ground?

  That’s what we’re supposed to visualize.

  Interesting, said my mother. Her voice was neutral, formal, neither caustic nor falsely enthusiastic. I’d thought she was the same mother only with a hollow face, jutting elbows, spiky legs. But I was beginning to notice that she was someone different from the before-mother. The one I thought of as my real mother. I had believed that my real mother would emerge at some point. I would get my before mom back. But now it entered my head that this might not happen. The damned carcass had stolen from her. 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 second day at Youth Encounter Christ was better than the first—we got our T-shirts that morning and put them right on over our clothes, patting the thorn-encircled sacred hearts printed over our own hearts. We went down to the lake and started lip-synching the songs everyone else in the group knew. Neal was our best friend now. 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.

  One girl whose sister we knew, Ruby Smoke, stated that she had been delivered of a serpent. I felt Zack shaking beside me, and I elbowed him hard. Angus knew the score and murmured praise, but Cappy said, What kind of snake was it, in a deadpan voice, and Father Travis bent forward, giving him a sideways stare.

  Ruby was a big girl with short, sprayed hair, streaked with dry red, and hoop earrings. Lots of makeup. Her boyfriend, Toast, I don’t recall his real name, nobody did, was there too—very skinny with basketball shorts and a sad slump. He looked over at Cappy not with malice, and said, None of your business. A serpent is a serpent.

  Cappy put his hands up, Just asking, man! He fixed his eyes on the ground.

  But since you’re interested, said Ruby, it was a humungous serpent, brownish, with crisscross lines. And its eyes were golden and it had a wedge head like a rattlesnake.

  A pit viper, I said. You were delivered of a pit viper.

  Father Travis looked ominous, but Ruby looked pleased.

  It’s okay, Father, she said. Joe’s uncle is a science teacher.

  In fact, I went on, encouraged, it sounds to me like you were delivered of the fer-de-lance, which is hands down the deadliest snake in the world. If it bites your hand they chop off your arm. That’s the treatment. Or you could have been delivered of the bushmaster, which can get to ten feet and waits to ambush its prey and can take down a cow. You can’t see it when the fer-de-lance strikes, it moves at lightning speed.

  Everyone nodded in excitement at Ruby and someone said, Way to go, Ruby. She looked proud of herself. 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. But a quick-acting poison, that’s different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you’ve ever imagined.

  I sat rooted, struck into an odd panic by his words.

  We caught hands all around and put our heads down and prayed the Hail Mary, which you don’t have to be a Catholic to know on this reservation as people mutter it at all hours in the grocery store or bars or school hallways. We did ten, mentioning the fruit of thy womb every time, a phrase that Zack found unbearable and couldn’t even say for fear he’d laugh. 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. I say creepy because I had to stare into Toast’s eyes, which were burnt holes, unreadable and belonging to a guy, so what was the point anyway. Cappy got to lock eyes with Zelia. This was supposed to be a soul-to-soul encounter. A spiritual thing. But Cappy said he got the worst hard-on of his life.

  The flittering energy that had possessed my mother was burnt out and she was resting—but on the couch, not locked in her room. After I got home, my father invited me to sit alongside him on an old rusted kitchen chair next to the garden. The evening was cool and the air stirred the scrub box elder bordering the yard. The big cottonwood clattered by the garage. My father tipped his head back to catch the slow-setting sun on his face.

  I had asked him about the damned carcass, and he was trying to think of what to say.

  Who is it?

  My father shook his head.

  The thing is, my father said, the thing is. He was choosing his words very carefully. There will be an arraignment where the judge will decide whether he can be charged. But even now we may be pushing the envelope. The defense attorney is filing a motion for his release. Gabir is hanging in there, but he doesn’t have a case. Most rape cases don’t get this far but we have Gabir. There’s talk by the defense of suing the BIA. Even though we know he did it. Even though everything matches up.

  Who is it? Why can’t they just hang him?

  My father put his head in
his hands, and I said I was sorry.

  No, he said, broodingly. I wish I could hang him. Believe me. I imagine myself the hanging judge in an old western; I’d happily deliver the sentence. But beyond playing cowboy in my thoughts, there is traditional Anishinaabe justice. We would have sat down to decide his fate. Our present system though. . . .

  She doesn’t know where it happened, I said.

  My father tipped his chin down. There is nowhere to stand. No clear jurisdiction, no accurate description of where the crime occurred. He turned over a scrap of paper and drew a circle on it, tapped his pencil on the circle. He made a map.

  Here’s the round house. Just behind it, you have the Smoker allotment, which is now so fractionated nobody can get much use out of it. Then a strip that was sold—fee land. The round house is on the far edge of tribal trust, where our court has jurisdiction, though of course not over a white man. So federal law applies. Down to the lake, that is also tribal trust. But just to one side, a corner of that is state park, where state law applies. On the other side of that pasture, more woods, we have an extension of round house land.

  Okay, I said, looking at the drawing. Fine. Why can’t she make up a place?

  My father turned his head and gazed at me. The skin beneath his eyes was purple-gray. His cheeks were loose folds.

  I can’t ask her to do that. So the problem remains. Lark committed the crime. On what land? Was it tribal land? fee land? white property? state? We can’t prosecute if we don’t know which laws apply.

  If it happened anyplace else . . .

  Sure, but it happened here.

  You knew this ever since Mom talked about it.

  So did you, my father said.

  Since my mother had broken her silence in my presence and set in motion all that followed, I had insisted to my father that he tell me what was happening. And to some extent he did, although not all of it by any means. For instance, he said nothing about dogs. The day after we spoke, a search-and-rescue outfit came to our reservation. From Montana, is what Zack heard.

  We were riding aimlessly around, doing wheelies in the dust, circling the big gravelly yard near the hospital, jumping over stray clumps of alfalfa and jewelweed. It was Saturday and Zelia, along with the other leaders of the camp, was on a final bus trip to the Peace Garden. After their leadership workshop they would all leave. The workshop lasted three days and Cappy was being Worf.

  He made his Klingon challenge to me, Heghlu meh qaq jajvam, tried to skid into a 360, and bit the dust.

  This is a good day to die! he yelled.

  Fuck yes! I yelled.

  Angus was best at imitating Data. Please continue this petty bickering, he said. It is most intriguing. He raised his finger.

  At that moment, Zack rode up and told us what was happening down by the lake with the search-and-rescue teams and the police and the vans towing commandeered fishing boats. By the time we got to the lake, we could see them, the dogs and their handlers in four aluminum boats with outboard motors that couldn’t have been more than fifteen hp. The dogs were different breeds; there was a golden one, a runty one that looked like a cross between Pearl and Angus’s scabby rez mutt, a sleek black Lab, and a German shepherd.

  They’re looking for a car that went down, said Zack. At least I know that much.

  I knew it was Mayla’s car. From what Mom had said, I knew that her attacker had sent it to the bottom of the lake. I also knew they were looking for Mayla. I couldn’t help imagining ways that he could have weighted her body and somehow got her back into that car. I didn’t want to think of these things, but my mind kept these awful thoughts going. We watched the searchers all day, the dogs choosing the air above the water, and their people watching every move they made. It was a slow business. They moved across the water, calm, methodical, laying an invisible grid down on the lake bottom. They worked until dark, then quit and set up their own tents and mess camp right near the shore.

  The next day, we were there early and got closer, in fact spectacularly close. We didn’t mean to. We left our bikes and crept toward the camp unnoticed—there was a new bustle of energy there. Some purpose had been established and we saw it when two wet-suited divers went out in one of the boats and lowered themselves into the drop-off we all knew about. There was a steep bank and where it met the shore it was well-known that the water went to an immediate depth of what we grew up thinking was a hundred feet, but turned out to be twenty. There was a cliff above it, where we lodged ourselves and watched through the day. We were hungry, thirsty, and talking about sneaking away, when a tow truck rumbled down the rutted road. It backed down as close to the water as the searchers could safely wave it. We stayed hidden in the brush and were there when the car, a maroon Chevy Nova, was winched up the bank streaming weeds and water. We expected of course to see a body, and Angus whispered to be ready—we’d get nightmares. He’d seen his drowned uncle. But there was no body in the car. We were peering through weeds, but perched directly where we had a perfect view of the car’s interior. We saw the sludgy water wash through and away. The windows were all cranked down. The doors were soon opened. Nobody, nothing, I thought at first, except there was one thing.

  One thing that sent through me a shock that registered as a surface prickle and then went deeper, all that day, all evening, then that night, until I saw it again the moment I was falling asleep and started awake.

  In the back window of the car there was a jumble of toys—some plastic, a mashed-up stuffed bear maybe, all were washed together so you couldn’t quite distinguish what each of them was except for a scrap of cloth, a piece of blue-and-white checked fabric that matched the outfit on the doll stuffed with money.

  Chapter Nine

  The Big Good-bye

  Mooshum was born nine months after berry-picking camp, a happy time when families got together all through the bush. I went out to pick berries with my father, Mooshum always said, and I came back with my mother. He thought it was a great joke and always celebrated his conception, not his birth, as in fact he had become convinced that he was born at Batoche during the siege in 1885, which my father privately doubted. It was true, however, that Mooshum had still been a child when his family left behind their neat cabin, their lands, their barn and sweet water well, and fled Batoche after Louis Riel was caught and sentenced to be hanged. They came down over the border, where they were not exactly welcomed with open arms. Still, they were taken in by an unusually kindhearted chief who told the U.S. government that maybe it threw away its half-breed children and gave them no land, but that the Indians would take these children into their hearts. The generous full-bloods would have a hard time of it in the years to come, while the mixed-bloods who already knew how to farm and husband animals fared better and eventually began to take over and even looked down on those who had rescued them. Yet as Mooshum went on in life he cast off his Michif ways. First to go was Catholicism, then he started speaking pure Chippewa not mixed with French, and even made himself a fancy powwow outfit to dance in although he still jigged and drank. He went, as they said in those times, back to the blanket. Not that he wore a blanket. But sometimes he threw one over his shoulder and walked out to the round house and participated in the bush ceremonies. He was great friends with all the troublemakers who caroused about as well as those who fought desperately to keep their reservation, ground that kept shifting under their feet according to government whim and Indian agent head counts and something called allotment. 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.

  And now, said Mooshum, on the day we gathered to celebrate his birthday, there is food aplenty. Food everywhere. Fat Indians! You would never see a fat Indian back in my time.

  Grandma Ignatia sat with him under the old-timey arbor that Uncle Edward and Whitey had built for Mooshum’s birthday party. They had laid fresh popple saplings onto posts to make a shady roof, and the leaves were still
sweet and bright. The old ones sat in woven plastic lawn chairs and drank hot tea though the day was warm. Clemence had instructed me to sit with Mooshum, to watch him and make sure that the heat did not prostrate him. Grandma Ignatia was shaking her head at the fat Indians.

  I had a fat Indian for a husband at one time, she told Mooshum. His pecker was long and big but only the head reached past his gut. And of course I didn’t like to get underneath him anyway for fear of getting smashed.

  Miigwayak! Of course. What did you do? Mooshum asked.

  I bounced around on top naturally. But that belly, yai! It grew big as a hill and I couldn’t see over it. I’d call out, Are you still back there? Holler to me! Like most fat Indians he did have a skinny butt. Man, those muscles in his back cheeks were powerful, too. He swung me around like a circus act. So I enjoyed him real well, those times were good.

  Awee, said Mooshum. His voice was wistful.

  But sadly they were not to last, said Grandma Ignatia. One time we were going hell for leather when he quit. Sometimes he did get tired out of course, being so heavy like he was, so I just keep cranking away on top. His flagpole was still up and hard as steel. But I thought he might have gone to sleep, he was so quiet. Holler to me! I said. But he never did. My, it is strange he sleeps through all of this! He must be having a grand dream, I think. So I don’t quit until it’s all over—many times over with me, eyyyy. At last I get off him. My, he’s lasting! I think. I crawl around to the other end of him. Not long, and I realize that he is not breathing. I pat his face, but no good. He is dead and gone, my sweet fat husband. I mourned for that man a solid year.

  Awee, said Mooshum. A happy death. And a noble lover for you, Ignatia, as he satisfied you even from the other side. I wish to die that way, but who will give me the chance?

  Does it still stand up? asked Ignatia.

  Not by itself, said Mooshum.

  Eyyyy, said Ignatia. After a hundred years of hard use it would be a miracle. If you only prayed more, she cackled.