The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  What does she mean wrapped whole? My father stopped beside me, frowning at the paper. He held a carton of cream in one hand. Why sweet? Why salted?

  I was pushing the cart in front of my dad, and so I saw Linden Lark first. He was leaning into the cold light of the open meat case. My father must have looked up just after I did. There was a moment where all we did was stare. Then motion. My father threw the cream, surged forward, and grabbed Lark by the shoulders. He spun Lark, jamming him backward, then gripped Lark around the throat with both hands. As I’ve said before, my dad was somewhat clumsy. But he attacked with such an instinct of sudden rage it looked slick as a movie stunt. Lark banged his head against the metal racks of the cooler. A carton of lard smashed down and Lark slipped in the burst cream, scraping the back of his head down the lower edge of the case, ringing the shelves. The glass doors flapped against my father’s arms as he fell with Lark, still pressing. Dad kept his chin down. His hair had fallen in strings about his ears and his face was dark with blood. Lark flailed, unable to put a similar grip on my father. I was on him too, now, with the cans of Rotel tomatoes.

  The thing was, Lark seemed to be smiling. If you can smile while being choked and can-beaten, he was doing it. Like he was excited by our attack. I smashed the can on his forehead and opened a cut just over Lark’s eye. A pure black joy in seeing his blood filled me. Blood and cream. I smashed as hard as I could and something—maybe the shock of my happiness or Lark’s happiness—caused my father to let go of Lark’s throat. Lark kicked upward and pushed with all his might. My father went skidding backward. With a hard jolt my father landed in the aisle, and Lark fled in a scrambled crouch.

  That was when my father had his first heart attack—it turned out to be a small one. Not even a medium one. Just a small one. But it was a heart attack. In the grocery store aisle in the spilt cream and rolling cans, next to the Prell shampoo, my father’s face went a dull yellow color. He strained for breath. He looked up at me, perplexed. And because he had his hand on his chest, I said, Do you want the ambulance?

  When he nodded yes, everything went out of me. I went down on my knees, and Puffy made the call.

  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.

  We stayed down in Fargo for almost a week and spent the days at St. Luke’s Hospital. On the first day, my father had an operation that is now routine, but which at the time was new. It involved inserting stents into three arteries. He looked weak and diminished in the hospital bed. Although the doctors said that he was doing well, of course I was afraid. I could only look in at him, at first, from the hall. When he was moved into his own room, things were better. We all sat together and talked about nothing, everything. This seems odd, but it soon became a kind of a vacation to be there, safe, together, our conversation vague. We’d walk the halls, pretend shock at the mushy food, talk some more about nothing.

  At night, my mother and I went back to the room we shared at the hotel. We had twin beds. On other trips, the three of us had always bunked together, Mom and Dad in a double. I would sleep on a rollaway in some corner. This was the first time I could remember staying alone anywhere with just my mother. There was an awkwardness; her physical presence bothered me. I was glad she’d brought Dad’s old blue bathrobe made of towel cloth, the one she’d kept pestering him to get rid of. The nap was worn down in places, the sleeve unraveling, the hem frayed. I’d thought that she brought it for him, but then she put it on the first night. I imagined she had forgotten her own robe, which was printed with golden flowers and green leaves. But the second morning I woke early and looked over at her, still sleeping. She was wearing my father’s robe. I checked that night to see if she was wearing his robe on purpose, and sure enough she got into bed wearing it. The room wasn’t cold. It occurred to me the next day, as I was wandering around the park outside the hospital, that it would feel good if I had something of Dad’s to wear, too. It would tie us together somehow.

  I needed him so much. I couldn’t really go into it very far, this need, nor could my mother and I talk about it. But her wearing his robe was a sign to me of how she had to have the comfort of his presence in a basic way that I now understood. That night, I asked her if she’d packed Dad an extra shirt, and she nodded when I asked if I could wear it. She gave it to me.

  I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman’s in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men’s clothing, and he didn’t buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father’s ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don’t sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always had a dog named Pearl.

  I was wearing my father’s shirt on the day he stopped being vague, the second-to-last day we were there. He saw his shirt on me and looked quizzical. My mother left to get some coffee and I sat with him. This was the first time I was really alone with him. It did not surprise me that even while his incisions were healing he chose to revisit the situation, to ask if I knew anything of Lark’s whereabouts. I had been thinking the same way, but of course I didn’t. If Clemence had told my mother in their phone conversations from the hotel room, I didn’t know about it. But then that night I did get a call; it was while my mother was out buying a newspaper. It was Cappy.

  Some members of our family paid a visit, he said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Here?

  No, there.

  Where?

  They brought him around.

  What?

  The Holodeck, dummy. It was a situation like when Picard was the detective. Remember? The persuasion?

  Right. I was flooded, tingling with relief. Right. Is he dead?

  No, just persuaded. They messed him up good, man. He won’t come around you. Tell your mom and dad.

  After the call, I was thinking how to tell them. How to make it sound like I didn’t know it was Doe and Randall and Whitey, even Uncle Edward, who went to Lark’s, when another call came in. My mother had come back. I could tell the call was from Opichi when my mother asked if there was something wrong at the office. The cadence of the voice, tiny in the receiver, was shrill and intense. My mother sat down on the bed. Whatever she heard wasn’t good. Eventually, she put the receiver in its cradle, and then she curled up on the bed, her back to me.

  Mom?

  She didn’t answer. I remember the buzz of lights on in the bathroom. I walked around to the other side of the bed and knelt down beside it. She opened her eyes and looked at me. At first she seemed confused and her eyes searched my face almost as if she were looking at me for the first time, or at least after a long absence. Then she focused and her mouth creased in a frown. She whispered.

  I guess people beat him up.

  That’s good, I said. Yeah.

  And then, Opichi says, he drove back all crazy and blasted up to the gas station. He said something to Whitey about his rich girlfriend. How Whitey’s rich girlfriend had herself a nice setup and he was thinking of joining her. He drove through, yelling, making fun of Whitey. He got away. Whitey chased him with a wrench. What was he talking about? Sonja isn’t rich.

  I sat there with my mouth open.

  Joe?

  I put my head down in my hands, my elbows on my knees. After a while, I lay down and put a pillow over my head.

  This room’s hot, said my mother. Let’s get the blower going.

  We cooled off and went to a little restaurant called the 50s Cafe for hamburgers, french fries, chocolate shakes. We ate silently. Then all of a sudden, my mother put down the hamburger. She l
aid it on her plate and said, No.

  Still chewing, I stared at her. The slight droop of her eyelid gave her a critical air.

  Is there something wrong with that burger, Mom?

  She gazed past me, transfixed by a thought. The knife crease shot up between her eyebrows.

  It’s something Daddy told me. A story about a wiindigoo. Lark’s trying to eat us, Joe. I won’t let him, she said. I will be the one to stop him.

  Her determination terrified me. She picked up her food and deliberately, slowly, began to eat. She didn’t stop until she’d finished all of it, which also frightened me. This was the first time since the attack she ate all the food on her plate. Then we went back to the room, got ready for bed. My mother took a pill and fell asleep at once. I stared at the feeble soundproofing insulation tiles on the ceiling. If I watched them closely enough, I could feel my own heart wind down. My chest opened and my stomach stopped grinding. I counted out, slowly and evenly, 78 random holes in the tile just over my head, and 81 in the next. If my mother went after Lark, he’d kill her. I knew this. I counted the holes again and again.

  On the day we left Fargo, I woke early. My mother was up, in the bathroom making brushing and washing sounds. I listened to the shower water rattle down. The hotel curtains were so heavy I didn’t know that it was pouring outside too. One of those rare August rains that tamp down the dust flares on the roads had just begun. A rain that washes the whitened dust-coated leaves. A rain that fills the cracks in the earth and revives the brown grasses. That grows the corn by a foot and makes a second cutting of hay possible. A gentle rain that lasts for days. There was a chill in the air that persisted all the way home. My mother drove with the windshield wipers going. The coziest of sounds to a boy drowsing in the backseat. My father stayed alert beside my mother, covered with a quilt. From time to time I’d open my eyes, just to see them. He had his hand across the seat, resting on her leg above the knee. Occasionally she took one hand off the wheel, reached down, and rested her hand on top of his.

  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.

  When we got home, Clemence had fixed the chili. Puffy had delivered all of the groceries that we had picked out. Everything we needed was stowed in the cupboards and the refrigerator. I saw my box of potato chips right away, sitting on the counter. I thought of the cans of tomatoes I had used as weapons. Clemence had probably opened them and added them to the chili. Every day since the grocer, I wished I had brained Lark. I imagined myself killing him over and over. But since I hadn’t, I was going to visit Father Travis first thing in the morning. I decided I would join his Saturday morning catechism class. I thought he would let me do that. I also hoped that if I made myself useful afterward up at the church, he might notice how the gophers had been driven from the tunnels by the rain and now were fattening on the new grass. They needed to be dealt with. I hoped that Father Travis might teach me how to shoot gophers, so that I could get some practice.

  I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch when it came to being a Catholic. Priests and nuns have been here since the beginning of the reservation. Even the most traditional Indians, the people who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school, or had made friends with some of the more interesting priests, as Mooshum had for a time, or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe. Everybody had extremely devout or at least observant family members; I had been lobbied over and over, for instance, by Clemence. She had persuaded my mother (she hadn’t bothered with my father) to have me baptized and had campaigned for my first communion and confirmation. I knew what I was in for. The God Squad had not been doctrinal, but my classes would be filled with lists. Confession: i. Sacramental. ii. Annual. iii. Sacrilegious. iv. Legal. Grace: i. Actual. ii. Baptismal. iii. Efficacious. iv. Elevating. v. Habitual. vi. Illuminating. vii. Imputed. viii. Interior. ix. Irresistible. x. Natural. xi. Prevenient. xii. Sacramental. xiii. Sanctifying. xiv. Sufficient. xv. Substantial. xvi. At meals. xvii. There were also Actual, Formal, Habitual, Material, Moral, Original, and Venial Sin. There were special types of sins: those against the Holy Ghost, Sins of Omission, Sins of Others, Sin by Silence, and the Sin of Sodom. There were Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance.

  There were, of course, definitions of each of these categories on the lists. Father Travis taught like Vatican II had never happened. Nobody looked over his shoulder way up here. He said Latin mass if he felt like it and for several months the previous winter had turned the altar away from the congregation and conducted the Mysteries with a sort of wizardy flourish, Angus said. When it came to teaching catechism, he added subject matter or dismissed it. Saturday morning, he let me into the church basement and told me to take a seat in the cafeteria. I did, trying not to look down at the rug and think of Cappy. Bugger Pourier, reforming again after years of a stumblebum life in the Cities, was the only other student in the dim room. He was a skinny sorrowful man, with the fat purple clown nose of a longtime drinker. His sisters had dressed him in clean clothes, but he still smelled musty, like he’d been sleeping in a moldy corner. I looked over the handouts and listened to Father Travis talk about each member of the Holy Trinity. After class was done and Bugger wandered off, I asked Father Travis if I could take personal instruction all next week.

  Do you have some goal in mind?

  I want to be confirmed by the end of summer.

  We get one visit from the bishop in the spring and everybody gets confirmed at that time. Father Travis looked me over. What’s your rush?

  It would help things.

  What things?

  Things at home, maybe, if I could pray.

  You can pray without being confirmed. He handed me a pamphlet.

  Plus, he said, you can pray by just talking to God. You can use your own words, Joe. You don’t have to be confirmed in order to pray.

  Father, I have a question.

  He waited.

  I had heard a phrase mentioned long ago and had stored it in my mind. I asked, What are Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance?

  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.

  I thought I knew what sodomy was and believed it included rape. So my thoughts were covered by church doctrine, a fact I had found out the very first day.

  Thanks, I said to Father Travis. I’ll see you Monday.

  He nodded, his eyes thoughtful.

  Yes, I’m sure you will.

  On Sunday, I sat through mass with Angus and on Monday morning I was at church right after breakfast. It was raining again, and I had eaten a huge bowl of my mother’s oatmeal. It had weighed me down on my bike and sat warm and heavy in my stomach now. I wanted to go back to sleep, and so, probably, did Father Travis. He looked pallid and maybe hadn’t slept so well. He hadn’t shaved yet. The skin beneath his eyes was blue and the coffee was harsh on his breath. The cafeteria counter was stacked with neatly boxed-up food and the trash cans were stuffed.

  Was there a wake down here? I asked.

  Mr. Pourier’s mother died. Which means we have probably seen the last of him. He was hoping to reconcile with the church while she was still conscious. By the way, I have a book for you. He handed me a soft old splayed paperback of Dune. So. Shall we star
t with the Eucharist? I saw you at mass with Angus. Did you understand what was happening?

  I had memorized the pamphlet, so I said yes.

  Can you tell me?

  There was a sharing of the grace-producing food of our souls.

  Very good. Anything else?

  The body and blood of Christ were present in the wine and crackers?

  Communion wafers, yes. Anything else?

  As I wracked my mind the rain quit. A sudden flare of sunshine hit the dusty glass of the basement windows and spun motes of dust in the air. The basement was aslant with shimmering veils of light.

  Uh, spiritual nutrition?

  Right. Father Travis smiled at the dancing slashes of air around us and up at the windows. Since it’s just us two, whaddya say we take our class outside?

  I followed Father Travis up the steps, out the side door, and along the path that led through dripping pines. The grass path made a loop behind the gym and school, down through the rows of trees and over again to the road where Cappy and Father Travis had made the most dramatic part of their run. As we walked he told me that in order to prepare for the Eucharist when I would become part of the Mystical Body of Christ, I would have to purify myself via the sacrament of confession.

  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.

  All right, I said faintly. Look, Father! There’s a gopher.

  Yes. He stopped and looked at me. How’s your soul doing?

  I glanced around as if my soul would appear so I could check on it. But there was only Father Travis’s carefully planed, too handsome face, his grave, pale eyes shining uncannily, his sculpted lips.