Louise Erdrich - The Round House

There’s no smoking on the playground, he said. One of the nuns saw you.

I opened my lips and a hoarse little sound emerged. Father Travis continued.

But you are welcome at Holy Mass. And if catechism interests you, I teach Saturdays at ten a.m.

He waited.

Again, I made some sound.

You’re Clemence Milk’s nephew... .

The drawing flow of gravity suddenly reversed and I sat straight up, filled with an electric energy of purpose.

Yes, I said. Clemence Milk is my auntie.

Now, remarkably, I found my legs under me. I stood. I actually stepped toward the priest, a small step, but toward him. My father’s phrasing left my mouth.

May I ask you a question?

Shoot.

Where were you, I asked, between three and six o’clock on the afternoon of May fifteenth?

What day was that?

The grave mouth tucked at the corners.

It was a Sunday.

I suppose I was officiating. I don’t really remember. And then after mass there was the Adoration. Why?

Just asking. No reason.

There is always a reason, said Father Travis.

Can I ask you another question?

No, said the priest. One question per day. His scar jumped to life on the side of his throat. It glowed red. You’re a good kid, I hear from your aunt, get good grades. You don’t give your parents trouble. We would love to have you in our youth group. He smiled. I saw his teeth for the first time. They were too white and even to be real. Young as he was, but with false teeth! And that scar like a thick rope of paint up his neck. He put his hand out. The callow artist’s rendering of features resolved. Too handsome to be handsome, Clemence had said. We stood there. The sheen off his cassock reflecting up into his eyes spooked me. He held his hand out steady. I tried to hold back but my hand reached out of its own accord. His palm was cool. The callus smooth and tough, like Cappy’s dad.

So we’ll see you then. He turned away. Then looked back with the hint of a grin.

Cigarettes will kill you.

I stood rooted until he’d entered the church basement door far up the hill. I put my back against a tree and leaned there—not slumping. I was filled with that odd energy. I was allowing the tree to help me think. I decided first of all not to hate myself for what had just passed between the priest and me, that moment. I could hardly have refused. To refuse to shake a person’s hand on the reservation was like wishing them dead. Although I did wish Father Travis Wozniak dead and wanted to burn him alive, even, my wish was contingent on secure proof that he was my mother’s attacker. Guilty. My father would not have condoned a conclusion bereft of factual support. I scratched my back with the ridged tree bark and stared at the place where the priest had disappeared. The door to the church basement. I intended to get those facts, and when my friends came, I would have help.

Cappy appeared with Angus. He had a bread bag half full of potato salad and a plastic spoon. I made a bowl out of the bag by folding down the top, then I ate the salad. It was the kind with mustard in the mayonnaise and pickles and eggs. Cappy’s aunts must have made the salad. My mother made it that way. I scraped my spoon against the inside of the bag. Then I told Cappy and Angus about the conversation I had overheard and how my father’s suspicion had landed on the priest.

My dad said he was in Lebanon.

Whatever, said Cappy.

He was a Marine.

So was my dad, said Cappy.

I’m thinking we should find out if he drinks Hamm’s beer, I said. I was going to ask him but figured I’d give away the game. I did get his alibi. I have to check it.

Angus said, His what?

His excuse. He says he officiated at mass that Sunday afternoon. All I have to do is ask Clemence.

Should we set some Hamm’s on his doorstep and see if he drinks it? said Angus.

Anybody would drink free beer, especially you, Starboy, said Cappy. We got to catch him drinking Hamm’s in private. Spy on him.

Look in a priest’s window?

Yes, said Cappy. We’ll bike around back of the church and convent up to the old cemetery. Then we can slip around through the fence, take our bikes down through the graves. The back of the priest’s house faces the cemetery, and the fence is padlocked, but you can slip through. When it’s dark, we’ll sneak up to the house.

Do the priests have a dog? I asked.

No dog, said Angus.

Good, I said. But at the moment I wasn’t actually afraid of getting caught by the priest. It was the cemetery that unnerved me. I had recently seen a ghost. One was enough, and my father had told me how they visited the cemetery when he worked. This cemetery was the place where Mooshum’s father, who had fought at Batoche with Louis Riel, was buried after he was killed years later racing a fast horse. It was where Mooshum’s brother Severine, who had briefly served at the church as a priest, was buried in a plot specially marked off by white-painted brick. One of the three who were lynched by a mob in Hoopdance were also buried there—they’d taken the boy’s body there because he was only thirteen. My age. And hanged. Mooshum remembered it. Mooshum’s brother Shamengwa, whose name meant the Monarch Butterfly, was buried there. Mooshum’s first wife, alongside whom he would be buried, was marked by a gravestone covered with fine gray lichen. His mother was buried in that place, the one who’d stopped talking entirely for ten years after Mooshum’s baby brother died. And there was my father’s family too, my grandmother’s family and her mother’s family, some of whom had converted. The men were buried to the west with the traditionals. They vanished into the earth. Small houses had been built over them to house and feed their spirits, but those had collapsed in advance of everything else, into nothingness. I knew the names of our ancestors from Mooshum and from my mother and father.

Shawanobinesiik, Elizabeth, Southern Thunderbird. Adik, Michael, Caribou. Kwiingwa’aage, Joseph, Wolverine. Mashkiki, Mary, The Medicine. Ombaashi, Albert, Lifted By Wind. Makoons, The Bearling, and Bird Shaking Ice Off Its Wings. They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth , which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth. And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.

To approach the cemetery from the back we had to go past an old lady who had dogs. You never knew how many dogs or what kind of dogs. She fed the rez dogs. Therefore her house was unpredictable and we always made a detour around it. As we got near, we prepared. Cappy had his pepper can. I grabbed up a heavy stick, thinking of how Pearl hated it, and why. Angus stripped some willow wands for a whip. We got our battle plan together and decided that I would go first with the stick and Cappy would bring up the rear with the pepper. The woman’s name was Bineshi and she was tiny and hunched as was her rickety little frame house. There were two wrecked cars in the yard where the dogs lounged. We thought we might make it if we had enough speed and zoomed past. But as soon as we turned onto the dirt road that ran along the edge of her yard, the dogs came bounding out of the wrecked cars. Two were gray with short legs, three were big, one was huge. They flashed up to us, barking with a vicious intensity. A small gray dog darted in and seized Angus by the pants cuff. Angus expertly kicked it, lashed its face with his whip, and kept riding.