The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  Wiisinig, she said, without turning around.

  I took some apple slices and put them on my tongue. I looked at Cappy. We ate another jam sandwich each and just stood there watching in mesmerized hunger until she started lifting out the frybreads. Then we each took a plate and stood beside her. She took the hot frybreads out of the bubbling lard with tongs and put the lumpy golden rounds on our plates. We said thank you. She salted and peppered the meat. She dumped in a can of tomatoes, a can of beans. We kept standing there, our plates out. She heaped spoons of the crumbled meat mix on top of the frybreads. On the table, there was a block of commodity cheese. The cheese was frozen so it was easy to grate on top of the meat. We were so hungry we sat down right at the table. Zack and Angus were outside, through her sliding doors, in the courtyard. She made their Indian tacos now like ours, called them in, and they sat on the couch and ate.

  For a long time, nobody said anything. We just ate and ate. Grandma hummed as she cooked at the stove. She was short and skinny and she always wore a flowery pastel dress, flesh-colored stockings rolled down as if it were a fashion accent to do that, and moccasins that she made herself out of deerhide. Cappy’s two aunts tanned hides in their backyards. Their backyards stank, but the hides came out perfectly. Every summer they gave a soft buckskin to Grandma. Her moccasins were beaded with small pink flowers. She clipped her long, thin, white hair up in a barrette, and wore white shell earrings. Her face was gnarled and sly and her eyes were sharp little shining black marbles. Her eyes were never soft or affectionate, but always alert and cold. This seemed odd for someone who cooked for boys. But then, she had survived many deaths and other losses and had no sentiment left. As we filled up, we ate more slowly. We all wanted to finish at exactly the same time, to eat and run. But Grandma Thunder made us seconds, and we started all over again, eating even more slowly now, still not talking. When I finished, I thanked her and brought my plate to the sink. I was just about to tell her that I had to get home when Mrs. Bijiu came in without knocking. The worst of them all! A hefty, jiggling, loud woman, she took my chair at the table immediately and said, Oooohph!

  Eyah, they ate good, said Grandma Thunder.

  Top shelf, said Angus.

  We must go now, Kookum, said Zack.

  Apijigo miigwech, said Cappy. Minopogoziwag ingiw zaasakok waanag. He knew that to really make the old ladies happy, he should talk Indian, even if he wasn’t sure the words were right.

  Just listen to that Anishinaabe! They were indeed pleased with him.

  Just go . . . , Grandma waved her hand toward the door, satisfied that we had come to her.

  This one, this one here, said Mrs. Bijiu, lip pointing at me suddenly, fiercely. He is bony!

  Our hearts sank at the word.

  Bony! Grandma Thunder’s voice cracked. She reared up in her chair. I’ll tell you who’s got a bone in his pants these days!

  Holy Jesus! said Mrs. Bijiu. I know who you’re talking about. Napoleon. That akiwenzii goes scratching around at night and it’s not me who lets the old man in. He’s in good shape, though, never drank. Worked hard all his life. Now gets himself laid by a different woman every night!

  You boys listen up, said Grandma Ignatia. You want to learn something? Want to learn how to keep your little peckers hard all your life? Go and go? Live clean like old Napoleon. Liquor makes you quicker and that’s no good. Bread and lard keep you hard! He is eighty-seven and he not only gets it up easy, he can go five hours at a stretch.

  We wanted to sneak away but were pulled back by that last piece of information. Maybe we were each thinking of our three minutes in the woods.

  Five hours? said Angus.

  For he never tomcatted around and wasted his juice, cried Mrs. Bijiu. He was faithful to his wife!

  That’s what she thought, said Grandma Ignatia, taking a hankie from her sleeve.

  The two started laughing so hard they almost choked and we nearly made it out the door.

  In addition, he swears by his secret formula.

  Our heads turned back.

  Look at them swivel necks, the two old ladies laughed. Should we give them Napoleon’s secret formula?

  If the bread and lard don’t work, he takes red-hot pepper, rubs it on his . . . down there. Mrs. Bijiu made a certain hand motion over her lap, so vigorous it made us leap right out the door. The two old women’s cackling excitement followed us down the hall. I thought of what the red pepper had done to Randall and his buddies. No sign whatsoever of Napoleon’s formula at work as they bolted buck-naked across the quack grass.

  I think I’d like a medical opinion before I tried the pepper, I said to myself. But Angus heard it. A medical opinion became one of those ridiculous fake-smart lines I got teased for. Joe needs a medical opinion. Joe, have you asked your doctor if you should do that? I knew as we walked down the hallway I’d never hear the end of it, like Oops. Just before we went out the retirement home doors, I said to wait. I took off Cappy’s shoes.

  Thanks, I said.

  We switched back. But I still believe that if it would have helped me, Cappy would have kept on walking in my tight old shoes.

  Endless June summer light and silence in the dirt yards—everyone fallen back into their beds or kitchens as I wandered my bike up the road. Pearl met me as I came around the corner of the house. She stood alert, gazing at me, and never barked. You knew it was me, I said. You did good. She came up to me and wagged her tail just four times. She had a beautiful creamy plume of a tail that didn’t go with the short-haired middle of her—even though it matched her long, furry, wolfish ears. She sniffed at my hand. I scratched her ears until she shook my hand away. She was hungry. I’d taken one of Grandma’s jam sandwiches as I left and now I gave it to Pearl. Inside, I heard voices. I put away my bike and slipped inside. Uncle Edward was still there, in the study with my father. The kitchen was a shambles, so they’d probably fixed themselves a snack. I sneaked in and stopped outside the study. They were talking just loud enough for me to hear them from the couch. I could listen in, then pretend to be asleep if they came out. I could tell right away from the clink of ice, the glasses, that they were drinking together. It would be the Seagrams V.O. from the bottle behind the dishes on the highest shelf. I craned to hear what they would say.

  In all the years we’ve been married we have never once slept apart until now, said my father.

  This of course both repelled and fascinated me. I held my breath.

  She is isolating herself even from Joe. Doesn’t talk to anyone from work, of course. Won’t see visitors, even her old friend from boarding school days, LaRose.

  Clemence says she is cutting her off, too.

  Geraldine. Oh, Geraldine! She dropped a casserole, then this. Well, I know that wasn’t it. I frightened her, triggered her terror of the event.

  The event. Bazil.

  I know. But I cannot refer to it.

  There was silence. At last my father said, the attack. The rape. I must be going crazy, too, Edward. I keep losing track of Joe.

  He’ll be all right. She’ll come out of it, said Edward.

  I don’t know. She’s drifting out of grasp.

  What about church? said Edward. Would it help if Clemence took her to church? You know what I think about it, of course, but there’s a new priest she seems to like.

  I don’t think Geraldine would find comfort there, after all these years.

  We all knew that my mother had stopped going to church after she returned from boarding school. She never said why. Clemence never tried to get her to go, either, that I knew of.

  What about this new priest, though, my father asked.

  Interesting. Good-looking, I suppose. If you like the type. Central casting.

  For what?

  War movie. B western. Man on a doomed mission. Of all things, he’s an ex-Marine.

  Oh god, a trained killer turned Catholic.

  A dead silence opened between the two men and went on for so long it suddenly seem
ed loud.

  My father rose. I heard him shuffle about. I heard the silken pour of liquor.

  Edward, what do we know of this priest?

  Not much.

  Think.

  Pour me another. He’s from Texas. Dallas. The Catholic martyr on our kitchen wall. Dallas. That’s where this priest is from.

  I don’t know Dallas.

  More correctly, he’s from a little dried-up town outside of Dallas. He’s got a gun and I saw him out popping prairie dogs.

  What? That’s odd for a Benedictine. They strike me as a more genteel and thoughtful bunch.

  True, generally, but he’s new, recently ordained. He’s different from—but oh, who remembers Father Damien? And, ah, he’s searching. He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he’s entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply . . . intelligent.

  I hope he’s not like the one before him who wrote that scorching letter to the paper about the deadly charms of Metis women. Remember how we laughed about it? God!

  If only it were about God. Sometimes when I’m at the Adoration with Clemence, I see double, just like now.

  What do you see then?

  I see two priests, one dispensing holy water from a silver aspergillum, the other with a rifle.

  Just an air rifle, surely.

  Just an air rifle, yes. But he was fast with it, deadly, and accurate.

  Gopher count?

  Dozen or so. All laid out on the playground.

  The men paused, thinking, then Edward continued, Still, that does not make him . . .

  I know. But the round house. Symbol of the old pagan ways. The Metis women. Setting it all on fire together—the temptation and the crime all burned up as in a fire offering . . . oh god.

  My father’s voice caught.

  Now Bazil, now Bazil, said Edward. This is just talk.

  But I thought the priest’s guilt sounded plausible. That night, from the couch, where I listened and they never knew, I thought I had perhaps heard the truth. All we needed was proof.

  I must have fallen asleep for a good hour. Uncle Edward and my father woke me as they passed into the kitchen, rattling their glasses and flipping on and off the lights. I heard my father open the door and say good-bye to Uncle Edward, and I heard Pearl come in. He spoke to her in a calming way. He didn’t sound drunk at all. I heard him pour food into Pearl’s dish. Then her businesslike crunching and gnashing. It sounded like Dad put a dish or two in the sink, but then quit cleaning. He turned off the light. I squeezed back into the couch pillows as he passed, but he wouldn’t have noticed me anyway.

  My father was looking so intently at the head of the stairs as he climbed, step by deliberate step, that I crept around the couch to see what he was peering at—a light beneath the bedroom door, perhaps. From the foot of the stairs, I watched him shuffle to the bedroom door, which was outlined in black. He paused there, and then went past. To the bathroom, I expected. But no. He opened the door to the cold little room my mother used for sewing. There was a narrow daybed in that room, but it was only for guests. None of us had ever slept in it. Even when one of my parents had the flu or a cold, they slept in the same bed. They never sought protection from each other’s illnesses.

  The sewing room door shut. I heard my father rustling about in there and hoped that he’d emerge again. Hoped he had been looking for something. But then the bed creaked. There was silence. He was lying in there with the sewing machine and the cardboard boxes of neatly folded fabric, with the Peg-Boards he’d screwed to the wall that held a hundred colors of silken thread, with the scissors in graduated sizes, with the neatly coiled tape measure and the heart-shaped pincushion.

  I went upstairs and undressed sleepily, but once my head hit the pillow I realized my father hadn’t even made sure I was home. He’d forgotten all about me. I lay in my bed, sleepless, outraged. Over and over, I replayed the day’s events. The day had been packed with treacherous findings and information. I went through it all over again. Then I went farther back, to the night of the dropped casserole. To the mournful tension of repressed feeling as my mother had floated up the stairs, to my father’s hushed anxiety as we read together in the lamplight. With all my being, I wanted to go back to before all this had happened. I wanted to enter our good-smelling kitchen again, sit down at my mother’s table before she’d struck me and before my father had forgotten my existence. I wanted to hear my mother laugh until she snorted. I wanted to move back through time and stop her from returning to her office that Sunday for those files. I kept thinking how easily I could have gotten in the car with her that afternoon. How I could have offered to do that errand. I had entered that furrow of remorse—planted with the seeds of resentment—peculiar to young men.

  When I got to the resentment, I resented everything I could think of, including that file my mother had returned for. That file. Something nagged at me. The file itself. No one had mentioned it. Why had she gone back for a file? What was in it? I was back to weak regret. But I would ask her. I would find out more about what had drawn her back on a Sunday. There was, now I remembered it, a phone call. There’d been a call and the sound of her voice answering the call. And then she’d walked around, cleaning things, clattering dishes, agitated, though I hadn’t connected it with the call until now.

  Then she’d left, mentioning the file.

  Eventually my brain slowed, sifting thoughts into images. I was half asleep when I heard Pearl walk to my bedroom window. Her claws clicked on the bare wooden floor. I turned toward the window and opened my eyes. Pearl was standing fixed, ears pointing forward, her senses focused on something outside. I pictured a raccoon or a skunk. But the patient recognition with which she watched, not barking, wakened me entirely. I crept out of bed to that tall window, the sill just a foot or so from the floor. The moonlight illuminated the edges of things, made suggestions out of shadows. Kneeling next to Pearl, I could make out the figure.

  It was standing at the edge of the yard, in the tangle of branches. As we watched, its hands parted the branches, and it looked up at my bedroom window. I could make out its features clearly—the lined, somewhat sour countenance, the deep-set eyes under a flat brow, some dense silver hair—but I could not tell whether this being was male or female, or for that matter, whether it was alive or dead or somewhere in between. Although I was not exactly alarmed, I had the clear notion that what I was seeing was unreal. Yet it was neither human nor entirely inhuman. The being saw me and my heart jumped. I could see that face close up. There was a glow behind its head. The lips moved but I couldn’t make out words except it seemed to be repeating the same words. The hands drew back and the branches closed over it. The thing was gone. Pearl turned in a circle three times and settled herself on the rug again. I fell asleep as soon as I lay my head on the pillow, perhaps exhausted by the mental exertion required to admit that visitor into my consciousness.

  My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen. I was up before him. I made myself two pieces of toast and ate them standing, then made two more and put them on a plate. I hadn’t progressed yet to eggs, nor had I learned to mix pancakes. That would come later, after I became accustomed to the fact that I had begun to lead a life apart from my parents. After I began to work at the gas station. My father came in while I was sitting with my toast. He mumbled, and didn’t notice that I gave him no answer. He hadn’t started on his coffee yet. Soon he would be brought to life. He made his brew the old way, measuring the ground coffee into a speckled black enamel camp pot and throwing in an egg to set the grounds. He laid a hand briefly on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. He was wearing his old blue wool robe with the funny gilded crest. He sat down to wait for his coffee and asked if I’d slept well.

  Where? I said. Where do you think I slept last night?

  On the couch, he said, surprised. You were snoring your fool head off. I covered you up with a blanket.

  Oh, I said.

  The
coffeepot hissed and he got up, turned down the burner, and poured himself a cup.

  I think I saw a ghost last night, I told my father.

  He sat down again across from me and I looked into his eyes. I was sure he would explain the incident and tell me just how and why I’d been mistaken. I was sure he’d say, as grown-ups were supposed to, that ghosts did not exist. But he only looked at me, the circles under his eyes swollen, the dark creases becoming permanent. I realized that he had not slept well, or at all.

  The ghost was standing at the edge of the yard, I said. It looked almost like a real person.

  Yes, they’re out there, my father answered.

  He rose and poured another cup of coffee to take up to my mother. As he left the room, I experienced an alarm that quickly turned to fury. I glared at his back. Either he had purposely not cared to quiet my fear by challenging me, or he had not listened to me at all. And had he really covered me with a blanket? I had not noticed the blanket. When he came back into the room, I spoke belligerently.

  Ghost. I said ghost. What do you mean they’re out there?

  He poured more coffee. Sat down across from me. As usual, he refused to be perturbed by my anger.

  Joe, he said. I worked in a graveyard.

  So what?

  There was an occasional ghost, that’s what. Ghosts were there. Sometimes they walked in, looking just like people. I could recognize one occasionally as a person I had buried, but on the whole they didn’t much resemble their old selves. My old boss taught me how to pick them out. They would look more faded out than living people, and listless, too, yet irritable. They’d walk around, nodding at the graves, staring at trees and stones until they found their own grave. Then they’d stand there, confused maybe. I never approached them.