Louise Erdrich - The Round House

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 seemed 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.

Iwent 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.