Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Guard Mom, I said.

Cappy, Zack, and Angus were supposed to meet me in a couple of hours at a stump we used—just off the highway, across the ditch. There, I left the other note, telling them I’d gone ahead. I had planned this because I wanted to be alone at the round house when I first got there.

It was a lofty June morning. The dew was still cold on the wild rose and sage in last fall’s mowed stubble, but I could tell that by afternoon it would be hot. Hot and clear. There would be ticks. Hardly anyone was out this early. Only two cars passed me on the highway. I turned off onto Mashkeeg Road, which was gravel, enclosed by trees, running partway around the lake. There were houses by the lake, screened by bush. An occasional dog popped up but I was pedaling fast and I came and went so quickly through their territories that few barked and none followed me. Even a tick, spinning through the air off a tree, hit my arm and could barely cling. I flicked him off and pedaled even faster until I reached the narrow road that led to the round house. It was still blocked by construction cones and painted oil drums. I guessed that was the work of the police. I walked my bike, looking carefully at the ground and beneath the leaves of the bushes along the way. The area had leafed in thickly during the past weeks. I was looking for anything that other eyes might have missed, as in one of Whitey’s crime novels. I didn’t see a thing out of place, though, or rather, since it was the woods and everything was out of place and wild, I didn’t see a thing in place. A neatened area. Something that did not look or feel right. An empty jar, a bottle cap, a blackened match. This place had been minutely combed clean of what didn’t belong already and I reached the clearing where the round house was set without finding anything of interest or use.

The grass had not been mowed yet, but the area where cars parked was covered with scrubby little plants. Horses had pulled all the good plants up by the roots and now tense little weeds rasped beneath the tires of my bike. The log hexagon was set up on top of a slight rise, and surrounded by rich grass, vivid green, long and thick. I dropped my bike. There was a moment of intense quiet. Then a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled me and flooded me. Finally, it ceased. I decided to go forward. As I climbed the hill, a breeze raised hairs on the back of my neck. But when I reached the round house, the sun fell like a warm hand on my shoulders. The place seemed peaceful. There was no door. There had been one, but the big plank rectangle was now wrenched off and thrown to the side. The grass was already growing through the cracks between the boards. I stood in the doorway. Inside, it was dim although four small busted-out windows opened in each direction. The floor was tidy—no empties or papers or blankets. All had been picked up by the police. I caught the faint odor of gasoline.

During the old days when Indians could not practice their religion—well, actually not such old days: pre-1978—the round house had been used for ceremonies. People pretended it was a social dance hall or brought their Bibles for gatherings. In those days the headlights of the priest’s car coming down the long road glared in the southern window. By the time the priest or the BIA superintendent arrived, the water drums and eagle feathers and the medicine bags and birchbark scrolls and sacred pipes were in a couple of motorboats halfway across the lake. The Bible was out and people were reading aloud from Ecclesiastes. Why that part of the Bible? I’d once asked Mooshum. Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. We think that way too. Sometimes we square-danced, said Mooshum, our highest Mide’ priest was a damn fine caller.

There was one old Catholic priest who used to sit down with the medicine people. Father Damien had sent home the superintendent. Then the water drums and feathers and pipes had returned. The old priest had learned the songs. No priest knew those songs now.

From Zack’s report of his stepdad’s radio conversation, and my father’s silence after he mentioned the round house, I knew the general location of the crime. But I didn’t know the exact whereness of it. At that moment, a certainty entered. I knew. He had attacked her here. The old ceremonial place had told me—cried out to me in my mother’s anguished voice, I now thought, and tears started into my eyes. I let them flood down my cheeks. Nobody was there to see me so I did not even wipe them away. I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

I concentrated on the escape itself, just as my father had described. Our car was parked at the base of the rise, just past a scraggle of bushes. Nobody would come up the road that way, anyway. There was a beach farther down that you could get to easier by a road along the lakeshore, around the other side. Of course the rapist—except I didn’t use that word: I used attacker—the attacker had bet on this lonely place remaining deserted. Which meant he had to have known something about the reservation, and meant more planning. People drank down on that beach at night, but to get there from the round house you had to cross a barbed-wire fence and then bushwhack. The attack had happened approximately where I was standing. He’d left her here, to get a new book of matches. I blocked out the thought of my mother’s terror and her scramble for the car. I imagined how far away the attacker had to have gone to fetch the matches, in order not to run back in time to catch her.

My mother had gotten up and bolted through the doorway, down the hill to her car. Her attacker would have walked down the opposite side of the hill, to the north, not to have seen her. I walked the way he must have gone, through the grass to that barbed-wire fence. I lifted the top line and side-legged through. Another fence line led down through the heavy tangle of birch and popple to the lake. I followed that fence all the way down to the edge of the lake and then kept walking to the water.

He must have had a stash somewhere or maybe another car—one parked near the beach. He’d gone back for more matches when his got wet. Probably, he was a smoker. He’d left behind extra matches or a lighter. He followed that fence down to the lake. He’d reached his stash. Heard the car door slam. Ran back up to the round house and after my mother. But too late. She’d managed to start the engine, stomp on the accelerator. She was gone.

I continued walking, across the narrow sand beach, into the lake. My heart was beating so hard as I followed the action in my understanding that I did not feel the water. I felt his overpowering frustration as he watched the car disappear. I saw him pick up the gas can and nearly throw it after the vanishing taillights. He ran forward, then back. Suddenly, he stopped, remembering his stuff, the car, whatever he did have, his smokes. And the can. He could not be caught with the can. However cold it was that May, the ice out but the water still freezing, he’d have to wade partway in and let water fill the can. And after that, as far out as possible, he had surely slung the water-filled tin and now, if I dived down and passed my hands along the muddy, weedy, silty, snail-rich bottom of the lake, there it would be.

My friends found me sitting outside the door of the round house in full sun, still drying off, the gas can placed in the grass before me. I was glad when they came. I had now come to the understanding that my mother’s attacker had also tried to set her on fire. Although this fact had been made plain, or was at least implicit in Clemence’s reaction at the hospital and my father’s account of my mother’s escape, my understanding had resisted. With the gas can there before me, I began shaking so hard my teeth clacked. When I got upset like that, sometimes I puked. This hadn’t happened in the car, in the hospital, even reading to my mother. Maybe I was numbed. Now I felt what had happened to her in my gut. I dug a hole for the mess and covered it with a heap of dirt. I sat there, weak. When I heard the voices and bikes, the drag of Cappy’s braking feet, the shouts, I jumped up and started slapping at my arms. I couldn’t let them see me shaking like a girl. When they got to me I pretended it was the cold water. Angus said my lips were blue and offered me an unfiltered Camel.