Round House, The: A Novel

by Louise Erdrich

  And I will pray to Saint Anthony, the one in charge of lost objects. You’re so old you probably can’t even find your own pecker in those pants Clemence put on you today.

  Yes, these pants. They are good material.

  One of my other husbands, said Ignatia, the one with the tiny cock, had a pair of pants like yours once. Extremely high quality. He had sex like a rabbit. Quick in-out-in-out but for hours at a time. I would just lay there making things up in my head, thinking my own thoughts. It was restful. I felt nothing. Then one day, something. Howah! I cried. What happened to you? Did it grow?

  Yes, I watered it, he said between in-out-in-out. And fertilized it.

  Yai! I cried out, even louder. What did you use?

  I’m joking, woman. I made it bigger with clay from the river. Oh, no!

  All of a sudden I felt nothing again.

  It fell off, he said.

  The whole wiinag?

  No, just the clay part. He was very downhearted. Oh my love, he said, I wanted to make you scream like a bobcat. I’d give my life to make you happy. I said to him, That’s all right, I’ll show you another way.

  So I showed him a thing or two and he learned so good that I made sounds his ears had never heard. One time, anyway, we had this lantern swinging from a hook over the foot of the bed. He was going at me like the rabbit and that lantern fell off the hook and hit him in the ass. I heard him tell his friends about it. They were laughing pretty good, then he says, I was lucky though. If I had been doing the deed my old lady taught me, the one that makes her so happy, that lantern would have hit me in the head.

  Yai! Mooshum’s tea spluttered from his lips. I gave him a napkin because Clemence had also charged me with keeping food out of his hair, which against her wishes he’d worn the way he liked it, hanging down around his face in greasy strands.

  Too bad we never tried each other out when we were young, said Ignatia. You are much too shriveled up to suit me now but as I remember it, you were damn good-looking.

  So I was, said Mooshum.

  I blotted away the tea that was rolling down his neck, before it reached the starched white collar of his shirt. I drove a few girls out of their minds, Mooshum continued, but when my pretty wife was living, I did my Catholic duty.

  No difficulty there, Ignatia snorted. Were you faithful or not? (They both pronounced the word fateful; in fact, every th in this whole conversation was a t.)

  I was fateful, said Mooshum. To a point.

  What point? said Ignatia sharply. She always supported women’s extramarital excitements, but was completely intolerant of men’s. Oh, wait, my old friend, how could I be forgetting? To a point! Eyyyyy, very funny.

  Anishaaindinaa. Yes, of course, she lived out on the point, that Lulu. And you had your son with her.

  I started in surprise, but neither one of them noticed. Was it known all over that I had an uncle I never knew about? Who was this son of Mooshum’s? I tried to shut my mouth but as I looked around I saw of course a large number of the guests were Lamartines and Morrisseys and then Ignatia said his name.

  That Alvin did good for himself.

  Alvin, a friend of Whitey’s! Alvin had always seemed like part of the family. Well. When I tell this story to white people they are surprised, and when I tell it to Indians they always have a story like it. And they usually found out about their relatives by dating the wrong ones, or at any rate, they usually began to figure out family somewhere in their teens. Maybe it was because no one thought to explain the obvious which was always there or maybe as a child I just had not listened before. Anyway, I now realized that Angus was some kind of cousin to me, as Star was a Morrissey and her sister, mother to Angus, was once married to Alvin’s younger brother, Vance, and yet as Vance had a different father from Alvin the connection was weakened. Had I heard the name for this type of cousin, I wondered, sitting there, or should I ask Mooshum and Ignatia?

  Excuse me, I said.

  Oh yes, my boy, how polite you are! Grandma Ignatia suddenly noticed me sitting there and stuck me with her crow-sharp eyes.

  If Alvin is my half uncle and Star’s sister was married to Vance and they had Angus what does that make Angus to me?

  Marriageable, croaked Grandma Ignatia. Anishaaindinaa. Kidding, my boy. You could marry Angus’s sister. But you ask a good question.

  He is your quarter cousin, Mooshum said firmly. You don’t treat him like a whole cousin but he’s closer to you than a friend. You would defend him, but not to da dett.

  That’s how he said it, da dett. Nowadays most of us will say our ths unless we grew up speaking Chippewa, but we still drop a lot of them from habit. My father felt that as a judge it was important to pronounce his every last th. My mother didn’t, however. As for me, I left my ds behind when I went to college and I took up the th. So did lots of other Indians. I wrote an awful poem once about all of the ds that got left behind and floated around on reservations and a friend read it. She thought there was something to that idea and as she was a linguistics major she wrote a paper on the subject. Several years after she wrote that paper, I married her, back on the reservation, and I noticed that as soon as we passed the line we dropped our ths and picked up our ds again. 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.

  At this point, more people came and sat with us, a crowd in fact, all around Mooshum, and the whole party directed its attention to where he sat underneath the arbor. People with cameras carefully positioned themselves and my mother and Clemence posed for pictures with their heads on either side of Mooshum’s head. Then Clemence ran back into the house and there was a hush broken by the exclamations of small children pushed to the edge of the crowd, The cake! The cake!

  As Clemence and Edward were now fiddling with their cameras, my cousins Joseph and Evey got to carry in the extraordinary cake. Clemence had constructed a great sheet cake frosted with whiskey-laced sugar, Mooshum’s favorite, and she had iced it onto a piece of masonite covered with tinfoil. The cake was the size of a desktop, elaborately lettered with Mooshum’s name and studded with at least a hundred candles, already lighted, brightly burning as my cousins walked gingerly forward. People parted around them. I slipped aside once they held the cake right in front of Mooshum’s face. The cake was dazzling. Ignatia looked jealous. The little flames reflected up into Mooshum’s dim old eyes as people sang the happy birthday song in Ojibwe and English and then started on a Michif tune. The candles flared more intensely as they burned down, dripping wax onto the frosting until they were mere stubs.

  Blow them out! Make a wish! people cried, but Mooshum seemed mesmerized by their light. Grandma Ignatia leaned over and spoke right into his ear. He nodded, finally, and stooped over the cake and at that moment a stray breeze came through the arbor, a little gust. You think it would have extinguished the candles, but on the contrary. It gave them enough oxygen for one last flare and when this happened the little flames fused into a single fire that ignited the mixture of wax and whiskey icing. The cake caught fire with a gentle whoosh and the flames leapt high enough to ravel into Mooshum’s locks of greasy hair as he bent over with his lips pursed. I still have the picture in my mind of Mooshum’s head surrounded by the blaze. Only his delighted eyes and happy grin showed, as, it seemed, he was consumed. My grandfather and the cake might have been destroyed right there, if Uncle Edward hadn’t had the presence of mind to empty a pitcher of lemonade over Mooshum’s head. Just as providentially, Joseph and Evelina were still holding on to the masonite and ran the burning cake out onto the driveway, where the flames went out once they had consumed the liquorous frosting. Uncle Edward was again the hero of the day as he simply slicked off the scorched frosting with a long bread knife. He declared the rest of the cake edible, indeed, improved by the scorching. Someone brought gallons of i
ce cream and the party recommenced. I was told to take Mooshum inside to rest from the thrill. Once there, Clemence tried to cut away his singed locks.

  The fire itself hadn’t touched his skin or his scalp, but to be on fire had excited him enormously. He was concerned that Clemence cut away only what parts of his hair were hopelessly black and shriveled.

  Okay, I’m trying, Daddy. But the pieces stink, you know.

  She gave up.

  Oh here, Joe. You sit with him!

  He was lying on the couch, pillowed, covered with an afghan, just a pile of sticks and a big grin. His white choppers had come loose in the excitement, so I fetched a cup of water and he plunged them in. Unfortunately, I chose an opaque plastic cup of the kind that children were using to drink Kool-Aid. While my back was turned, some four-year-old snatched the cup and ran outside happily drinking the denture water, imitating his older cousins, until apparently this child asked his mother for more Kool-Aid and she saw what was in the bottom. I sat by Mooshum, though, oblivious of these dramas. My cousins were home but much older than me and absorbed in carrying out constant orders from their mother. My friends, who had promised to come, weren’t here yet. This party would go on and on. There would be dancing later, fiddles, an electric guitar and keyboard, more food. My friends were probably waiting for Alvin’s pit-barbecued venison or the food coming from their own households. Once a party like this started on the reservation it always gained its own life. There was a tradition of the uninvited showing up and every party had provisions for that—as well as for those who would show up drunk and get too rowdy. But from all of this, lying in state on the living room couch, Mooshum was protected. Part of things but able to snooze. I sat with him as he dropped off and slept. But when Sonja entered he snapped to like a soldier. Her outfit must have penetrated his unconscious. She wore a shirt of softly fringed suede that clung to her breasts like an unforgiven sin. And those jeans, making her legs so long and lean. My eyes popped. New lizard-skin-trimmed cowboy boots! And she wore those studs in her ears. They trembled in the soft light.

  I ducked when she tried to kiss the top of my head, moved off so she could sit in my chair, but stayed in the room with my arms folded, glaring at her. I knew that shirt was bought with my doll money and it looked expensive. She’d used a lot of my money again. And those boots! Everybody had to notice.

  Sonja bent close to Mooshum. They were speaking in annoying low voices, and she was shaking her head, laughing. He was giving her a toothless pleading look that dripped with besotted admiration. She leaned over and kissed his cheek, then she held his hand and talked some more and both of them laughed and laughed themselves silly until I got disgusted and went away.

  My parents were sitting in the grown-up seating area beneath the arbor and my mother, though talking little, was at least nodding as my father spoke to her. The band was setting up out by the storage shed. Behind the shed, Whitey and the other drinkers were sitting on the ground passing a bottle. Whitey was on a morose jag now. He sat in the corner of the yard staring at the party, trying to track things with his double vision, muttering dark thoughts that fortunately were completely incoherent. I saw Doe Lafournais and Cappy’s aunt Josey. There was Star and Zack’s mom, too, and Zack’s baby brother and sister. But no Zack, Angus, or Cappy. I didn’t want to ask where they were in case they were up to something, so I got my bike from beside the garage and left. I was pretty sure that Zelia had something to do with Cappy’s absence and sure enough, as I went toward the church I met Zack and Angus zigzagging down the hill, slow as they could, no Cappy.

  He stayed behind. They’re gonna meet in the graveyard at dark, said Zack.

  All three of us were crushed by the thought, even though we’d given up on Zelia day one. We rode back to the party, which was ramping up with jiggers stepping out onto the grass and Grandma Ignatia in the middle showing off her fancy steps. We ate as much as we could, then sneaked beers and poured the beer into empty soda cans. We drank and hung out listening to the band, watching Whitey hang on Sonja as they two-stepped until it grew late. My father said I should ride my bike home, and I did, wobbling into the yard. I took Pearl up to my room and was just falling asleep when I heard my parents coming home. I heard them walk up the stairs talking together in low voices and then I heard them enter their bedroom the way they always had before. I heard them shut their door with that final small click that meant everything was safe and good.

  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.

  I need to know, I said to my father the next morning. You’ve got to tell me what the carcass looks like.

  I’ll tell you when I can, Joe.

  Does Mom know he could get out?

  My father waved his finger across his lips. Not exactly, no. Well, yes. But we haven’t spoken. It would set her back, he said quickly. His face contorted. He put his hand over his features as if to erase them.

  I have to look out for her, watch for him.

  He nodded, and after a while he rose and with a heavy tread walked to his desk. As he fumbled in his pocket for his keys, I saw the vulnerable brown eggshell of his head, the wisps of white. He had begun to lock this particular drawer, but now he opened it and withdrew a file. He opened the file, walked over to me, and drew out a photograph. A mug shot. He put the photograph in my hands.

  You mother hasn’t decided whether to tell anybody else, he said. It’s her call. So don’t talk about this.

  A handsome but not good-looking powerful man with a pallid complexion and black shining eyes that showed no white, just the speck of livid life. His half-open mouth was filled with perfect white teeth and his lips were thin and red. It was the customer. The man who’d bought gas the day before I quit.

  I’ve seen him before, I said. Linden Lark. He bought gas at Whitey’s.

  My father didn’t look at me, but his jaw flattened, his lips went hard.

  When?

  Must have been just before he was picked up.

  My father pinched the picture back and slid it into the file. I could see that it hurt his fingers to touch the photograph, that the mute image emitted a jagged force. He slammed the file back in the drawer, then stood staring at the papers scattered over his desk. He unclenched the hand over his heart, opened it, fingered a shirt button.

  Bought gas at Whitey’s.

  We heard my mother outside. She was pounding slim poles she’d cut down into the ground, setting them alongside her tomato plants. Next she would rip old sheets into strips to bind their acrid, musky stems, so that they could safely climb. Already the plants bore star-shaped flowers colored a soft, bitter yellow.

  He’s studied us, said my father softly. Knows we can’t hold him. Thinks he can get away. Like his uncle.

  What do you mean?

  The lynching. You know that.

  Old history, Dad.

  Lark’s great-uncle was in the lynching party. Thus, I think, the contempt.

  I wonder if he even knows how people here keep track of that, I said.

  We know the families of the men who were hanged. We know the families of the men who hanged them. We even know our people were innocent of the crime they were hung for. A local historian had dredged that up and proved it.

  Outside, my mother was putting away the tools. They jangled in her bucket. She cranked on the hose and began to spray her garden, the water splattering softly back and forth.

  We’ll get him anyway, I said. Won’t we, Dad.

  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.

  After his mother died, Linden Lark had kept her farmhouse at the edge of Hoopdance. He had been staying in the house, a rickety, peeling two-story that once had flower beds and big vegetable gardens. Now, of course, the
whole place had gone to weeds and was cut off by crime tape. Dogs had searched and double-searched the premises, the fields and woods surrounding the house and found nothing.

  No Mayla, I said.

  Dad was talking with me later on that day—the house was quiet. I’d been playing my game. He’d walked in. This time he told me things. The governor of South Dakota had stated that the child he wished to adopt came from a Rapid City social service agency and that claim was confirmed. The people there said that about a month ago someone, a man it was believed, had left the baby asleep in her car seat, in the furniture section at Goodwill. There had been a note pinned on the baby’s jacket informing the finder that her parents were dead.

  Is it Mayla’s baby?

  My father nodded.

  Your mother was shown a picture. She identified the baby.

  Where is Mom now? I asked.

  My father raised his brows, still surprised.

  I just dropped her off at work.

  A few days after my mother identified the baby, she began regular hours at her office. There was a backlog, blood quantum to parse, genealogy hopefuls curious about their possible romantic Indian Princess grandmothers. There were children returning as adults, adopted-out people cut off from their tribe, basically stolen by the state welfare agencies, and there were also those who had given up on being an Indian but whose children longed for the connection and designed a meaningful family vacation to the reservation to explore their heritage. She had a lot to do, and this was even before casino money roped wannabes in droves. She could apparently work as long as Lark was in custody. As long as the baby was safe. There were a few days when things were normal—but it was holding-your-breath normal. We heard the baby was with her grandparents, George and Aurora Wolfskin. She was placed there permanently or at least until Mayla returned. If she did return. Then on about the fourth day, my mother told my father that she had to talk to Gabir Olson and Special Agent Bjerke because, now that the baby’s safety was no longer an issue, she’d suddenly remembered the whereabouts of that missing file.