Louise Erdrich - The Round House

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.

Aah! Aah! He stuck his tongue out.

Hot pepper, said the others. Special Pueblo hot pepper. They watched Randall dance around the room.

Man, look at his feet fly.

We should give him Pueblo medicine next powwow.

For sure, man. They took long drinks of water. Randall was at the sink with his tongue sticking out under the water tap.

Randall placed that medicine down on the rocks, said Skippy, but when he threw down four big ladles of water, then, man, it vaporized into our eyes and we were breathing that shit in! It burnt like hell. How could Randall have done that to us, man?

They all looked at Randall with his tongue under the faucet.

I hope he puts more clothes on finally, said Chiboy Snow.

We remembered the aunts when we heard them pull out of the driveway. We looked out. They’d left behind two bags of fresh frybread. The grease was darkening the paper sacks in delicate patches.

If you bring our clothes in, Skippy said to us, and hand in that feast, I’d pay youse.

How much? said Cappy.

Two each.

Cappy looked at me. I shrugged.

We hauled their stuff in and as we were all eating Randall came and sat next to me. His face was rugged and raw like all the other guys. His eyes were swollen red. Randall had most of his college education, and sometimes he talked like he was addressing me as a social service case, and other times he treated me like his little brother. This was one of those close familial Randall times. His friends were already laughing and eating. They’d forgotten to be mad at Randall now and everything was funny.

Joe, he said, I saw something in there.

I filled my mouth with taco meat.

I saw something, he went on, and he sounded genuinely troubled. It was before the hot pepper blew things up that I saw it. I was praying for your family and my family and all of a sudden, I saw a man bending over you, like a police maybe, looking down at you, and his face was white and his eyes deep down in his face. He was surrounded by a silver glow. His lips moved and he was talking, but I could not hear what he said.

We sat there quietly. I stopped eating.

What should I do about it, Randall? I asked in a low voice.

We’ll both put down tobacco, he said. And maybe you should talk to Mooshum. It had a bad feeling, Joe.

My mother cooked all the next week, and even made it outside, where she sat on a frayed lawn chair scratching Pearl’s neck, staring into the chokecherry bushes that marked the boundaries of the backyard. My father spent as much time home as possible, but he was still called to finish out some of his responsibilities. He was also meeting daily with the tribal police, and talking to the federal agent who was assigned to the case. One day he traveled to Bismarck and back to talk with the U.S. attorney, Gabir Olson, an old friend. The problem with most Indian rape cases was that even after there was an indictment the U.S. attorney often declined to take the case to trial for one reason or another. Usually a raft of bigger cases. My father wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.

So the days went by in that false interlude. On Friday morning, my father reminded me that he would need my help. I often earned a few dollars by biking to my father’s office after school and “putting the court to bed for the weekend.” I swept out his small office, spray-wiped the glass top of his wooden desk. I straightened and dusted the diplomas on his wall— University of North Dakota, University of Minnesota Law School—and the plaques recognizing his service in law organizations. He had a list of places he was admitted to practice that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I was proud of that. Next door, in his closet-turned-chambers, I did a sweep-out. President Reagan, ruddy cheeks and muddled eyes, B-movie teeth, grinned off the wall in his government-issue portrait. Reagan was so dense about Indians he though we lived on “preserves.” There was a print of our tribal seal and one of the great seal of North Dakota. My father had framed an antiquified copy of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, plus the Bill of Rights.

Back in his office, I shook out his brown wool rug. I put away and straightened up his books, which included all the later editions of the old Cohen Handbook at home. There was the 1958 edition, issued during the era when Congress was intent on terminating Indian tribes—it was always left on the shelf, its disuse a mute rebuke to the editors. There were the 1971 facsimile edition and the 1982 edition—big, heavy, well worn. Next to those books there was a compact copy of our own Tribal Code. I also helped my father file whatever his secretary, Opichi Wold, hadn’t put away. Opichi, whose name meant Robin, was a dour little skinny woman with pin-sharp eyes. She functioned as my father’s set of reservation eyes and ears. Every judge needs a scout out there. Opichi gathered tidbits, call it gossip, but what she knew often informed my father’s decisions. She knew who could be released on recognizance, who’d run. She knew who was dealing, who was only using, who was driving without a license, who was abusive, reformed, drinking, dangerous, or safe with their own children. She was invaluable, though her filing system was opaque.