The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge—like love, sex, or having or not having a baby—has nothing to do with government.

  It took me another day to find out that it was already going around that there were suspects—basically anyone who acted strange or had not been seen or had been seen walking out of his back door with loaded black garbage bags.

  I found out by going over to my aunt and uncle’s house to pick up a pie on Saturday afternoon. My mother had told my father that she thought she had better get up, bathe, get dressed. She was still on pain pills, but Dr. Egge had told her that bed rest wouldn’t help. She needed mild activity. Dad had announced that he was cooking dinner from a recipe. But he could not manage dessert. Thus, the pie. Uncle Whitey was sitting at the table with a glass of iced tea. Mooshum sat across from him, hunched and frail, wearing ivory-colored long underwear, and a plaid robe over the long johns. He refused to dress in street clothes on Saturday because he needed a day of comfort, he claimed, to get ready for Sunday, when Clemence made him wear suit pants, a pressed white shirt, and sometimes a tie. He too had a glass of iced tea, but he was glaring at it.

  Bunny piss, he griped.

  That’s right, Daddy, said Clemence. It’s an old man’s drink. It’s good for you.

  Ah, swamp tea, said Uncle Whitey, swirling the glass appreciatively. Good for everything that ails you, Daddy.

  Cures old age? said Mooshum. Takes the years off?

  All but, said Whitey, who knew he could have a beer as soon as he got home and quit pretend-drinking with Mooshum, who was lonely for the old days when Clemence poured smooth whiskey. She’d become convinced that it was harming him and was always trying to cut him off.

  This goes down hard, my daughter, he said to Clemence.

  Cleans out your liver good, though, said Whitey.

  Here, Clemence, pour a little swamp tea for Joe.

  Clemence poured me a glass of iced tea and went to answer the phone. People were calling her constantly for news, gossip really, about her sister.

  Maybe the pervert really is an Indian, said Uncle Whitey. He was carrying an Indian suitcase.

  What Indian suitcase? I said.

  The plastic garbage bags.

  I leaned forward. So he left? But from where? Who is he? What’s his name?

  Clemence came back in and flared her eyes at him.

  Awee, said Uncle Whitey. Guess I’m not supposed to talk.

  Or have even a little glass of whiskey. Or piss in the sink, as I will do until she no longer pours swamp tea. A man’s kidneys overflow, said Mooshum.

  You piss in the sink? I asked.

  When given tea, always.

  Clemence went into the kitchen, came out with a bottle of whiskey and three stacked shot glasses. She arranged them on the table and poured two a quarter full. She poured the third half full and tossed it back. I was astounded. I’d never seen my aunt toss back a whiskey like a man. She held her drained glass delicately for a moment, regarding us, then put the glass down with a short smack and walked outside.

  What was that? Uncle Whitey asked.

  That was my daughter pushed too far, said Mooshum. I pity Edward when he returns. The whiskey will have set by then.

  Sometimes whiskey sets Sonja too, Uncle Whitey said, but I have tricks.

  What kind of tricks, said Mooshum.

  Old Indian tricks.

  Teach them to Edward, eh? He is losing ground.

  The pie began to scent the air with a sweet amber fragrance. I hoped my aunt hadn’t got so angry she’d forget the pie.

  The golf course. Is that where it happened? I looked straight at Whitey, but he dropped his eyes and drank.

  No, it didn’t happen there.

  Where did it?

  Whitey raised his sad and permanently bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t going to tell me. I couldn’t hold his gaze.

  Mooshum’s grip, so unsteady on the tea glass that he’d slopped it on the table, tightened now. He lifted the shot and took a neat sip. His eyes shone. He had not taken in our exchange. His brain was still fixed on women.

  Ah, my son, tell Oops and me of your beautiful wife. Red Sonja. Paint the picture. What does she do at present?

  Whitey shifted his eyes off me. When he grinned, the devil’s gap between his front teeth showed. Red Sonja was my aunt’s exotic dance persona not so long ago. She’d worn revealing barbarian armor, which was bits of studded plastic. Tattered scarves flowed from her hips. The transparent material looked to have been chewed and clawed by desperate men or pet wolves. Zack had found the picture in a Minneapolis publication and made me a gift of it. I kept it deep in my closet, in a special folder I had made that said HOMEWORK.

  These days Sonja works behind the cash register, my uncle said now, the whiskey adding its soft glow. She is always adding numbers. Today she is figuring out exactly what we must reorder for the next week.

  Mooshum closed his eyes, held the whiskey at the back of his tongue, and nodded, conjuring her up, bent over the accounts. I could see her suddenly, too, breasts riding like clouds over the long columns of neat little figures.

  And what will she do, asked Mooshum dreamily, when she has the sums and figures for the day, when she is finished?

  She will leave the desk and go outside with a bucket of water and the long-handled squeegee. She cleans the glass every week.

  Mooshum wasn’t wearing his flashy dentures and his collapsed smile spread. I closed my eyes and saw the pink sponge side of the squeegee drip its window-solution suds down the plate glass. Sonja stretched up on her tiptoes. Cappy’s big brother, Randall, said girls looked so good stretching up on their tiptoes that he liked to sit watching down the rows in the school library. Randall used to put all the good books on the top shelves. Mooshum sighed. I saw Sonja pressing the rubber blade hard against the glass, drawing the dust and the smudges down with the liquid and leaving a sparkling clarity.

  Clemence came back in, breaking my thoughts, and I heard the creak of the oven door. Then the slide of the rack as she removed two pies from the oven. I heard her set the pies out to cool. The oven door clanged and the screen door whined open and clapped shut. In a moment, the faint crispness of a burning cigarette wafted through the screen. I’d never known my aunt to smoke before, but she had started since the hospital.

  The scent of Clemence’s newly taken up smoking sobered both of the men.

  They turned to me and Uncle Whitey’s face was grave as he asked how my mother was.

  She’s coming out of her room tonight, I told Whitey. I’m supposed to take a pie home. My dad is cooking.

  Mooshum stared at me, an edge of harsh brilliance in his gaze, and I knew he had been told something, at least, of what had occurred.

  That’s good, he said. Hear me now, Oops. She gotta come out. Don’t leave her to sit. Don’t let her alone too much.

  Clear spring shadows spread like water across the road. Down past the quiet slough, engines rumbled up to and away from the liquor store’s drive-up window. From yards invisible behind stands of willow and chokecherry, the short, vibrant cries of women rang, calling their children home. A car slowed next to me and Doe Lafournais nodded at the empty passenger seat. Doe had a quiet face, a crooked nose, kind eyes. He had powerful arms and stayed strong through constant hard labor—besides being the chairman and janitoring, he had built their house from scratch. He and his sons had messed it up from scratch, too. The place was layers of junk on interesting junk now. He drove on when I shook my head and called out that I’d see him later—I was helping out that evening at Randall’s sweat lodge. Clemence had put the pie in the bottom of a shallow cardboard box. The steam from the warm apples threaded from the slit crust. The evening wasn’t cooling off, but I didn’t care. I’d sweat to eat that pie. I turned down the driveway and Pearl popped out of the lilacs. She gave one deep-chested bark of recognition and, after sniffing the air about me, she accompanied me, at a sp
ace of about three feet, up to the back door of the house. There she left me and went back to lie underneath her bush.

  My father let me in. The hot kitchen smelled of some violent experiment.

  Perfect timing, he said, and put the pie on the counter. Let’s keep this as a surprise. The pièce de résistance. She’ll be down in a minute, Joe. Wash up.

  While I was in the little toilet off the study, I heard the stairs creak. I stayed in there, washing and drying my hands slowly. I didn’t really want to see my mother. It was terrible, but it was true. Even though I understood perfectly why she had struck me, I resented that I had to pretend it hadn’t happened or didn’t matter. The blow had not left a visible bruise and my cheekbone was only slightly tender, but I kept touching the place and reviving my sense of injury. When I finished washing, I refolded the towel for perhaps the first time in my life and hung it carefully upon its rail.

  In our dining cove, my mother was standing behind her chair with her hands nervous on the wooden back. The fan was on, stirring her dress. She was admiring the meal laid out on the plain green cloth. I looked at her and was immediately ashamed of my resentment—her face was still garishly marked. I busied myself. My father had made a stew. The collision of smells that hit me when I’d entered the kitchen were the ingredients—sour turnips and canned tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad. The concoction gave off a penetrating reek.

  My father beckoned the two of us to sit down. There were potatoes, nearly cooled, way overcooked, disintegrating in an undrained pot. He ceremoniously heaped our shallow bowls. Then we sat looking at the food. We didn’t pray. For the first time, I felt the lack of some ritual. I couldn’t just start eating. My father sensed this and spoke with great emotion, looking at us both.

  Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.

  My mother took a sharp breath, and frowned. She shrugged away what he’d said, as if it irritated her. I guessed she’d heard his Marcus Aurelius quote before, but looking back on it, I also know she was trying to build up her shield. To not feel things. Not refer to what had happened. His emotion grabbed at her.

  With no ceremony, she picked up her spoon and plunged it into the stew. She choked her first gulp down. I sat poised. We both looked at my father.

  I added caraway seeds, he said gently. What do you think?

  My mother took a paper napkin from the pile my father had laid in the middle of the table, and she held it to her lips. Deep violet streaks and the yellow of healing contusions still marred her face. The white of her left eye was scarlet and her eyelid drooped slightly, as it would from then on, for the nerve had been tampered with and the damage was irreversible.

  What do you think? my father asked once more.

  My mother and I were silent, staring in shock at what we had tasted.

  I think, she said at last, that I should start cooking again.

  My father cast his eyes down, put out his hands, the picture of a man who had tried his best. He pouted a little and dug into his bowl, with a pretend heartiness that grew labored. He swallowed once, twice. I was aghast at his strength of mind. I filled up on bread. His spoon slowed. My mother and I probably realized at the same time that my father, who had taken care of my grandmother for many years and certainly knew how to cook, had faked his ineptitude. But the stew with its gagging undertone of rotted onion was so successfully infernal that it cheered us up, as my mother’s decision to cook had done. When I cleared away the awful dinner and the pie was produced, my mother smiled slightly, just an upward movement of her lips. My father divided the pie into three equal pieces and laid a slab of Blue Bunny vanilla on top of each piece. I got to finish my mother’s. She started teasing my father about the stew.

  Exactly how old were those turnips?

  Older than Joe.

  And where did you get that onion?

  That’s my little secret.

  And the meat, roadkill?

  Oh god, no. It died in the backyard.

  I wasn’t particularly worried about missing dinner that night because I knew after Randall’s sweat lodge that Cappy and his sidekick, me, would eat top-shelf. We were the fire keepers. Cappy’s aunts, Suzette and Josey, who had made Doe’s boys their pets, always fixed the food. On ceremony nights they’d leave a feast put up neatly in two big plastic coolers alongside the garage. Farther back, nearly in the woods, the sweat-lodge dome of bent and lashed-together saplings, covered by army-surplus tarps, humidly waited, gathering mosquitoes. Cappy had already made the fire. The rocks, the grandfathers, were superheating in the middle. Our job was to keep that fire going, hand in the sacred pipes and the medicines, bring the rocks to the door on long-handled shovels, close and open the flaps. We’d also throw tobacco into our fire when someone in the lodge yelled for it, to mark some special prayer or request. On crisp nights it was a good job—we’d sit talking around that fire, staying warm. Sometimes we’d secretly roast a hot dog or marshmallow on a stick even though the fire was sacred and one time Randall had caught us. He’d claimed we’d taken the sacredness out of the fire with our hot dogs.

  Cappy looked at him and said, How sacred can your fire be if we sucked out its holiness with just our puny wieners? I couldn’t stop laughing. Randall threw up his hands and walked off. It was too hot to roast anything now, besides we knew we’d eat hugely at the end. Food was our pay, besides sometimes driving Randall’s beat-up Olds. It was usually a pleasant enough job. That night, however, instead of cooling off, it grew muggy. There was no breeze. Even before sunset, whining clouds of mosquitoes swarmed us. Their attacks made us sit closer to the fire, in order to take advantage of the smoke, which only made us sweat enticingly. They just kept sucking on us through the salty, smoky layers of Off.

  Randall’s friends, who all belonged to a powwow drum or danced like Randall, showed up laughing. Two of them were baked, but Randall didn’t notice. He was obsessive about setting everything up perfectly—the rack for the pipes, the star quilt blanket smoothed out beside the entrance, the abalone shell for burning sage, the glass jars of powdered medicine, the bucket and dipper. He seemed to have a little measuring stick in his head for lining up these sacred items. It drove Cappy nuts. But other people liked Randall’s style and he had friends from all over Indian Country—just that day he’d opened a package from a Pueblo friend which contained a jar of medicine that was now sitting with the others. He was humming a pipe-loading song and putting his pipe together, concentrating so hard he didn’t notice that the back of his neck was covered with gorging mosquitoes. I swiped them off.

  Thanks, he said distractedly. I’m gonna pray for your family.

  That’s cool, I said, though it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being prayed for. As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine. But that was Randall, too, always ready to make you feel a little uncomfortable with the earnest superiority of all that he was learning from the elders, even your own elders, for your benefit. Mooshum had instructed Doe on how to set up this lodge and Doe had passed it down to Randall. Cappy saw my look.

  Don’t worry about it, Joe. He prays for me too. And he gets a lot of girls with his medicine. So he’s gotta keep in practice.

  Randall had a stony profile, smooth skin, and a long braided ponytail. Girls, especially white ones, were fascinated with him. A German girl had camped in their yard for a whole month one summer. She was pretty, and wore the first earth sandals ever seen on our reservation, so Randall got teased about them. Somebody got a good look at the label and it was Birkenstock, which became Randall’s nickname.

  The heat grew worse and we guzzled dippers of the sacred sweat-lodge water. I envied the guys going into the lodge because they would get so hot that this outside heat would seem like a cool breeze when they came out. Plus the fiercer heat from those grandfathers would wilt the mosquitoes. They all went in. Cappy and I brought the rocks to the door with the long-handled shovels. Randall took them off the shovels with
a pair of deer antlers and placed them in the center pit. We handed in all of their stuff and closed the flap. They started singing and we sprayed ourselves again with Off.

  We had finished three rounds and passed in the last of the grandfathers. We’d gone up to the house to refill the water cooler and were coming out, standing on the back deck, when there was an explosion. We didn’t even hear anyone yell, Door, signaling us to open it. The top of the sweat lodge just billowed up and heaved with guys fighting to get out. They raged and flailed in the tarps. There was muffled howling. Then they popped out any way they could—gasping, yelling, and rolling naked in the grass. The mosquitoes dive-bombed. We ran down with the water cooler. Randall and his buddies made gestures at their squeezed-up faces and we doused their heads. As soon as they could jump up, each one of them staggered or ran toward the house. Cappy’s aunts were driving up just then with extra frybread for the feast, so they saw eight naked Indians trying to grope their way across the yard. Suzette and Josey just stayed in the car.

  It took a long while, everyone sitting in the house amid the piles of bachelor junk, for the men to emerge from shock and figure out what happened.

  I think it was, said Skippy at last, that Pueblo medicine. Remember just before you threw a big handful on the rocks you thanked your buddy down there, then you said a longish prayer?

  A long, long prayer, Birkenstock. Then you ladled on that water . . .

  Oooh, said Randall. My friend said it was Pueblo medicine. I was praying for his situation with a Navajo woman. Cappy, go and get that jar.

  Don’t order me.

  Okay, please, younger brother, seeing as we’re all butt naked and traumatized, would you go out and get that jar?

  Cappy went out. He came back. There was a label on the jar.

  Randall, said Cappy, the word medicine has quote marks around it.

  The jar was filled with a brownish powder that didn’t smell very strong to us—not like bear root or wiikenh or kinnikinnick. Randall held the jar and frowned. He sniffed it like a fancy wine taster. At last, he licked his finger, stuck it in the jar, and put his finger in his mouth. Tears spurted instantly.