The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  She’s hurt? Was there an accident?

  I got it out that I didn’t know and Clemence hung up. A poker-faced nurse came out and told me to go back to my mother. The nurse disapproved that my mother had asked for me. Insisted, she said. I wanted to run ahead, but I followed the nurse down a bright-lit hall, into a windowless room lined with green glass-fronted metal cabinets. The room had been dimmed and my mother was wearing a flimsy hospital gown. A sheet was tucked around her legs. There was no blood, anywhere. My father was standing at the head of her bed, his hand on the metal rail of the headboard. At first I didn’t look at him, just at her. My mother was a beautiful woman—that’s something I always knew. A given among family, among strangers. She and Clemence had coffee-cream skin and hot black glossy curls. Slim even after their children. Calm and direct, with take-charge eyes and movie-star lips. When overcome with laughter, they lost all dignity, however, and choked, snorted, burped, wheezed, even farted, which made them ever more hysterical. They usually sent each other into fits, but sometimes my father, too, could make them lose control. Even then, they were beautiful.

  Now I saw my mother’s face puffed with welts and distorted to an ugly shape. She peered through slits in the swollen flesh of her lids.

  What happened? I asked stupidly.

  She didn’t answer. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She blotted them away with a gauze-wrapped fist. I’m all right, Joe. Look at me. See?

  And I looked at her. But she was not all right. There were scrapes of blows and the awful lopsidedness. Her skin had lost its normal warm color. It was gray as ash. Her lips were seamed with dried blood. The nurse came in, raised the end of the bed with a crank. Laid another blanket over her. I hung my head and leaned toward her. I tried to stroke her wrapped wrist and cold, dry fingertips. With a cry, she snatched her hand away as though I’d hurt her. She went rigid and closed her eyes. This action devastated me. I looked up at my father and he gestured for me to come to him. He put his arm around me, walked me out of the room.

  She’s not all right, I said.

  He looked down at his watch and then back at me. His face registered the humming rage of a man who couldn’t think fast enough.

  She’s not all right. I spoke as if to tell him an urgent truth. And for a moment I thought he’d break. I could see something rising in him, but he conquered it, breathed out, and gathered himself.

  Joe. He was looking strangely at his watch again. Joe, he said. Your mother was attacked.

  We stood in the hallway together under patchy, buzzing, fluorescent lights. I said the first thing I thought of.

  By who? Attacked by who?

  Absurdly, we both realized that my father’s usual response would have been to correct my grammar. We looked at each other and he said nothing.

  My father has the head, neck, and shoulders of a tall and powerful man, but the rest of him is perfectly average. Even a little clumsy and soft. If you think about it, this is a good physique to have as a judge. He looms imposingly seated at the bench, but when conferring in his chambers (a glorified broom closet) he is nonthreatening and people trust him. As well as thunderous, his voice is capable of every nuance, and sometimes very gentle. It was the gentleness in his voice now that scared me, and the softness. Almost a whisper.

  She doesn’t know who the man was, Joe.

  But will we find him? I asked in that same hushed voice.

  We will find him, my father said.

  And then what?

  My father never shaved on Sundays, and a few tiny stubbles of gray beard showed. That thing in him was gathering again, ready to burst out. But instead he put his hands on my shoulders and spoke with that reedy softness that spooked me.

  I can’t think that far ahead right now.

  I put my hands on his hands and looked into his eyes. His leveling brown eyes. I wanted to know that whoever had attacked my mother would be found, punished, and killed. My father saw this. His fingers bit into my shoulders.

  We’ll get him, I said quickly. I was fearful as I said this, dizzy.

  Yes.

  He took his hands away. Yes, he said again. He tapped his watch, bit down on his lip. Now if the police would come. They need to get a statement. They should have been here.

  We turned to go back to the room.

  Which police? I asked.

  Exactly, he said.

  The nurse didn’t want us back in the room yet, and as we stood waiting the police arrived. Three men came through the emergency ward doors and stood quietly in the hall. There was a state trooper, an officer local to the town of Hoopdance, and Vince Madwesin, from the tribal police. My father had insisted that they each take a statement from my mother because it wasn’t clear where the crime had been committed—on state or tribal land—or who had committed it—an Indian or a non-Indian. I already knew, in a rudimentary way, that these questions would swirl around the facts. I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice. My father touched my shoulder before he left me and approached them. I stood against the wall. They were all slightly taller than my father, but they knew him and leaned down close to hear his words. They listened to him intently, their eyes not leaving his face. As he spoke, he looked down at the floor occasionally and folded his hands behind his back. He looked at each of them in turn from under his brows, then cast his eyes down at the floor again.

  Each police officer went into the room with a notebook and a pen, and came out again in about fifteen minutes, expressionless. Each shook my father’s hand and swiftly exited.

  A young doctor named Egge was on duty that day. He was the one who had examined my mother. As my father and I were going back to Mom’s room, we saw that Dr. Egge had returned.

  I don’t suggest that the boy . . . , he began.

  I thought it was funny that his domed, balding, shiny head was eggish, like his name. His oval face with the little round black eyeglasses looked familiar, and I realized it was the sort of face my mother used to draw on boiled eggs so that I would eat them.

  My wife insisted on seeing Joe again, my father told Dr. Egge. She needs him to see that she is all right.

  Dr. Egge was silent. He gave my father a prim little piercing look. My father stepped back from Egge and asked me to go out into the waiting room to see if Clemence had arrived yet.

  I’d like to see Mom again.

  I’ll come get you, said my father urgently. Go.

  Dr. Egge was staring even harder at my father. I turned away from them with sick reluctance. As my father and Dr. Egge walked away from me, they spoke in low voices. I didn’t want to leave, so I turned and watched them before I went out into the waiting room. They stopped outside my mother’s room. Dr. Egge finished speaking and jabbed his eyeglasses up his nose with one finger. My father walked to the wall as if he were going through it. He pressed his forehead and hands against the wall and stood there with his eyes shut.

  Dr. Egge turned and saw me frozen at the doors. He pointed toward the waiting room. My father’s emotion was something, his gesture implied, that I was too young to witness. But during the last few hours I had become increasingly resistant to authority. Instead of politely vanishing, I ran to my father, flailing Dr. Egge aside. I threw my arms around my father’s soft torso, held him under his jacket, and I fiercely clung to him, saying nothing, only breathing with him, taking great deep sobs of air.

  Much later, after I had gone into law and gone back and examined every document I could find, every statement, relived every moment of that day and the days that followed, I understood that this was when my father had learned from Dr. Egge the details and extent of my mother’s injuries. But that day, all I knew, after Clemence separated me from my father and led me away, was that the hallway was a steep incline. I went back through the doors and let Clemence talk to my father. After I’d sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going int
o surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture’s fault.

  I should take you home, let you sleep in Joseph’s room, said Clemence. You can go to school tomorrow from our house. I’ll come back here and wait.

  I was tired, my brain hurt, but I looked at her like she was crazy. Because she was crazy to think that I would go to school. Nothing would go on as normal. That steeply inclined hallway led to this place—the waiting room—where I would wait.

  You could at least sleep, said Aunt Clemence. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep. The time would pass and you wouldn’t have to stare at that damn picture.

  Was it rape? I asked her.

  Yes, she said.

  There was something else, I said.

  My family doesn’t hedge about things. Though Catholic, my aunt was not one to let butter melt in her mouth. When she spoke, answering me, her voice was quick and cool.

  Rape is forced sex. A man can force a woman to have sex. That’s what happened.

  I nodded. But I wanted to know something else.

  Will she die from it?

  No, said Clemence immediately. She won’t die. But sometimes—

  She bit down on her lips from the inside so they made a frowning line and she squinted at the picture.

  —it’s more complicated, she said finally. You saw that she was hurt, real bad? Clemence touched her own cheek, sweetly rouged and powdered from going to church.

  Yes, I saw.

  Our eyes filled with tears and we looked away from each other, down at Clemence’s purse as she dug in it for Kleenex. We both let ourselves cry a bit as she got the Kleenex. It was a relief. Then we put the tissues to our faces and Clemence went on.

  It can be more violent than other times.

  Violently raped, I thought.

  I knew those words fit together. Probably from some court case I’d read in my father’s books or from a newspaper article or the cherished paperback thrillers my uncle, Whitey, kept on his handmade bookshelf.

  Gasoline, I said. I smelled it. Why did she smell like gas? Did she go to Whitey’s?

  Clemence stared at me, the Kleenex frozen beside her nose, and her skin went the color of old snow. She bent over suddenly and put her head down on her knees.

  I’m okay, she said through the Kleenex. Her voice sounded normal, even detached. Don’t worry, Joe. I thought I was going to faint, but I’m not.

  Gathering herself, she sat up. She patted my hand. I didn’t ask her about the gasoline again.

  I fell asleep on a plastic couch and someone put a hospital blanket over me. I sweated in my sleep and when I woke, my cheek and arm were stuck to the plastic. I peeled myself unpleasantly up on one elbow.

  Dr. Egge was across the room talking to Clemence. I could tell right away that things were better, that my mother was better, that whatever had happened with the surgery was better, and in spite of how bad things were, at least for now the picture wasn’t getting any worse. So I put my face down on the sticky green plastic, which now felt good, and I fell back asleep.

  Chapter Two

  Lonely Among Us

  I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me.

  It was five days since we had found my mother sitting in the driveway. I’d refused to go to school before she came back from the hospital. She was anxious to get out, relieved to be home. She said good-bye to me that morning from my parents’ bed in their upstairs bedroom.

  Cappy and your other friends will miss you, she said.

  I should go back to school, even though there were just over two weeks left until summer. When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.

  My other two friends were Zack Peace and Angus Kashpaw. Back in those days, the four of us were more or less together whenever it was possible, though it was understood that Cappy and I were closest. Cappy’s mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father, Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos. For although Doe became involved with women from time to time, he never did remarry. He was both a janitor of the tribal offices and, on and off, the chairman of the tribe. When he was first elected in the 1960s, he was paid just enough money to take his janitor job down to half-time. When too exhausted to run for a term, he picked up extra hours as the night watchman. It wasn’t until the seventies that the feds put money into tribal government, and we started figuring out how to run things. Doe was still chairman, on again, off again. The way it worked was, people voted Doe into office whenever they got mad at the current chairman. But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight. When it got bad enough, Doe would decline to run. He’d pack up his office, including the tribal chairman stationery that he always had printed on his own dime: Doe Lafournais, Tribal Chairman. For a few years, we’d have lots of drawing paper at Cappy’s house. Inevitably, his successor went through the same treatment. Eventually Doe’s contrite and pleading constituents would work on him until he threw his hat back in the ring. 1988 was an out-of-office year for Doe, which meant he did a lot of fishing with us. We’d spent half the winter in Doe’s icehouse, pulling in northerns and sneaking beers.

  Zack Peace’s family was split up now for the second time. His father, Corwin Peace, was a musician on perpetual tour. His mother, Carleen Thunder, ran the tribal newspaper. His stepdad, Vince Madwesin, was the tribal police officer who had interviewed my mother. Zack was almost a decade older than his baby brother and sister, because his parents had married young, divorced, then given it a second try and found out they were right the first time they divorced. Zack was musical, like his father, and always brought his guitar to the icehouse. He said he knew one thousand songs.

  As for Angus, he was from a part of the reservation that was hard-core poor. The tribe had acquired the money to put in subsidized project housing—large, tan city-style apartment buildings just outside of town. They were surrounded by hummocks of weedy earth, no trees or bushes. The money had run out before steps were built, so people used ramps of plywood or just hoisted themselves in and jumped out of their houses. His aunt Star had moved Angus, his two brothers, her boyfriend’s two children, and a changing array of pregnant sisters and bingeing or detoxing cousins into a three-bedroom unit. Aunt Star managed an epic amount of craziness. It didn’t help that besides no steps the building itself was a low-bid nightmare. The contractor had skimped on insulation, so in winter Star had to keep the oven on all night with the door open and the water in the kitchen trickling, or the pipes would freeze. There were rags stuffed between the walls and windows, because the Sheetrock had shrunk away from the cheap-john aluminum combination storm frames. The windows soon fell apart, lost their screens. Nothing worked. The plumbing kept backing up. I even became an expert in sealing the toilet with wax and duct tape. Star was always bribing us with frybread to do house repairs or rig up satellite reception off a dented hubcap or some such thing.

  Actually, once she had taken up with her big love, Elwin, we did manage the satellite. Star had a fancy television bought with
the one lavish bingo win she’d managed in her lifetime. Together with Elwin we MacGyvered some old equipment together and got signals from Fargo, Minneapolis, even Chicago or Denver. The satellite was hooked up in September of 1987, just in time for the season premieres of all the network shows. We improved reception to the point where we sometimes even got the shows syndicated out of certain cities, ever-changing according to the weather and the magnetism of the planets. We had to hunt them down, but I don’t think we ever missed one episode of Star Trek. Not the old one, but The Next Generation. We loved Star Wars, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in TNG.

  Naturally, we all wanted to be Worf. We all wanted to be Klingons. Worf’s solution to any problem was to attack. In the episode Justice we found out Worf didn’t enjoy sex with human females because they were too fragile and he had to show restraint. Our big joke around pretty girls was Hey, show some restraint. In Hide and Q the ideal Klingon girl jumped Worf and she was grotesquely hot. Worf was combustible, noble, and handsome even with a turtle shell on his forehead. Next to Worf, we liked Data because he mocked white people by being curious about stupid things that the crew would do or say, and because when gorgeous Yar got drunk he declared himself fully functional and had sex with her. Wesley, the one you’d think we’d identify with, our age and a genius, and with a careless mom who let him get into trouble, did not interest us because he was a bumbling white town-baby and wore ludicrous sweaters. We were in love of course with the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troy, especially when the show let her hair go long and curly. Her jumpsuits were low-cut, her red V belt pointed you-know-where, and her big head and short curvy body drove us wild. Commander Riker was supposedly hot for her, but he was wooden, implausible. Better once a beard hid his baby cheeks, but we still wanted to be Worf. As for Captain Picard, he was an old man, though a French old man, so we liked him. We also liked Geordi because it turned out he was always in pain because he wore the eye visor, and that made him noble too.