Louise Erdrich - The Round House

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.

But how did you know they were ghosts?

Oh, you just know. Couldn’t you tell the thing you saw was a ghost?

I said yes. I was still mad. That’s just great, I said. Now we have ghosts.

My father, so strictly rational that he’d first refused the sacrament and then refused to attend Holy Mass at all, believed in ghosts. In fact he had information of ghosts, things he’d never told me. If Uncle Whitey had said these things about ghosts walking around looking like real people, I’d have known he was pulling my leg. But my father had very different ways of teasing and I knew in this case he wasn’t teasing. Because he took my ghost seriously, I asked him what I really wanted to know.

Okay. So why was it there?

My father hesitated.

Because of your mother, possibly. They are attracted to disturbances of all kinds. Then again, sometimes a ghost is a person out of your future. A person dropping back through time, I guess, by mistake. I’ve heard that from my own mother.

His mother, my grandmother, was from a medicine family. She’d said a lot of things that would seem strange at first but come true later in life.

She would have said to watch for that ghost. It could be trying to tell you something.

He put down his cup of coffee and now I remembered that last night he’d slept next to the sewing machine instead of my mother, and that he and Uncle Edward had figured out the priest was a suspect, and that they’d probably figured out even more than I realized because I’d fallen asleep. The priest and the gas can and the pile of stinking clothes and the court cases all collected in a tangled skein. My throat went dry and I couldn’t swallow. I sat there. He sat there. The ghost had come for my mother, or to tell me something.

The last thing I want to know is something that a ghost wants to tell me, I said.

At that moment it struck me that Randall also had seen something similiar, which relieved me. If this ghost, or whatever, was looking for Randall, he could fix it with his medicine. He’d put out tobacco. I would put out tobacco. The ghost would leave, or it might even help my mother. Who knew? She was upstairs with the coffee on her side table, cooling off. I knew she wouldn’t touch the cup and it would be there later on. An oily sheen would have formed on the cold, repugnant stuff. It would leave a black ring in the cup. Everything we gave her came back and left a ring or a crust or went cold or congealed or went hard. I was sick of bringing down her wasted food.