Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I only use cinnamon, said Linda, and her pop eyes swelled with pleasure. Real cinnamon I buy in jars, not cans. From a foreign food section down in Hornbacher’s, Fargo. Not the stuff you get here. Sometimes I use a little lemon zest or orange peel.

She was so happy we liked the banana bread that I thought maybe Dad wouldn’t need me to get her to talk, but he said, Wasn’t it good, Joe? And then I said how I’d eaten it for breakfast and how I’d even stolen a piece because Mom and Dad were hogging it all.

I’ll bring two loaves next time, Linda said lovingly.

I spooned ice cream into my mouth and tried to let my father draw her out, but he raised his eyebrows at me.

Linda, I said, I heard. You know I wonder. I guess I’m asking a personal question.

Go right ahead, she said, and her pale features went rosy. Maybe nobody asked her personal questions. I thought quickly and let my tongue fly.

I have friends, you know, whose parents or cousins were adopted out. Adopted out of the tribe, and that is hard, well I’ve heard that. But I guess nobody ever talks about getting ...

Adopted in?

Linda showed her little rat teeth in such a simple, encouraging smile that I was reassured now, and suddenly found I really wanted to know. I wanted to know her story. I ate more ice cream. I said I really did like the banana bread, and that I was surprised I had, because the truth was usually I hated banana bread. What I mean is suddenly I forgot my father and really started talking to Linda. I went past pop eyes and sinister porcupine hands and wispy hair and just saw Linda, and wanted to know about her, which is probably why she told me.

I was born in the winter, she started, but then stopped to finish her ice cream. Once she’d pushed away the bowl, she started for real. My brother was born two minutes before me. The nurse had just wrapped him in a blue flannel warming blanket when the mother said, Oh god, there’s another one , and out I slid, half dead. I then proceeded to die in earnest. I went from slightly pink to dull gray-blue, at which point the nurse tried to scoop me into a bed warmed by lights. The nurse was stopped by the doctor, who pointed out my crumpled head, arm, and leg. Stepping in front of the nurse and me, the doctor addressed the mother, telling her that the second baby had a congenital deformity, and asking if he should use extraordinary means to salvage it.

The answer was no.

No, let it die. But while the doctor’s back was turned, the nurse cleared my mouth with her finger, shook me upside down, and swaddled me tight in another blanket, pink. I took a blazing breath.

Nurse, said the doctor.

Too late, she answered.

Iwas left in the nursery with a bottle strapped onto my face while the county decided how I would be transported to some sort of transitional situation. I was still too young to be admitted to any state-run institution, and Mr. and Mrs. George Lark refused to have me in their house. The night janitor at the hospital, a reservation woman named Betty Wishkob, asked for permission to hold me on her break. While cradling me, with her back turned to the observation window, Betty—Mom—nursed me. As she fed me, Mom molded and rounded my head in her powerful hand. Nobody in the hospital knew that she was nursing me at night, or that she was doctoring me and had decided to keep me.

This was five decades ago. I’m fifty now. When Mom asked if she could take me home, there was relief and not a lot of paperwork involved, at least in the beginning. So I was saved and grew up with the Wishkobs. I lived on the reservation and went to school as an Indian person would—first at the mission and later at the government school. But before then, around the age of three, I was taken away for the first time. I still remember the smell of disinfectant, and what I call white despair , into which there came a presence, someone or something who grieved with me and held my hand. That presence stayed with me. The next time a welfare officer decided to find a more suitable home for me, I was four. I stood beside Mom holding her skirt—green cotton. I hid my face in the scent of heated cloth. Then I was in the backseat of a car that sped soundlessly in some infinite direction. I woke alone in another white room. My bed was narrow and the sheets were tucked tightly down, so I had to struggle to get out. I sat on the edge of the bed for what seemed like a long time, waiting.

When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing. I remember that I opened my mouth, that is all, and that I did not shut it until I was back with Mom.

Every morning, until I was about eleven years old, Mom and my dad, Albert, tried to round my head and work my arms and legs. They made me lift a little bag filled with sand that Mom sewed into a weight. They woke me first and brought me into the kitchen. The woodstove was going and I drank a glass of thin, blue milk. Then Mom sat in one kitchen chair and put me in her lap. She rubbed my head, then cupped her powerful fingers and pulled my skull into shape.

You’re gonna see things sometimes, Mom told me once. Your soft spot stayed open longer than most babies. That’s how spirits get in.

Dad sat across from us in another chair, ready to stretch me from head to toe.

Put your feet out, Tuffy, he said. That was my nickname. I put my feet in Dad’s hands and he pulled me one way while Mom held tight around my ears and pulled the other.

My brother Cedric had given me the name Tuffy because he knew once I went to school I would get a nickname anyway. He didn’t want it to refer to my arm or head. But my head—so misshapen when I was born that the doctor had diagnosed me for an idiot—was changed by Mom’s squeezing and kneading. By the time I was old enough to look in a mirror, I thought I looked beautiful.

Neither Mom nor Dad ever told me I was wrong. It was Sheryl who gave me the news, saying, You are so ugly you’re cute .

I looked in the mirror the next chance I got and noticed that Sheryl was telling the truth.

The house we lived in still has a faint smell of rotted wood, onions, fried coot, the salty smell of unwashed children. Mom was always trying to keep us clean, and Dad was getting us dirty. He took us into the woods and showed us how to spot a rabbit run and set a snare. We yanked gophers from their holes with loops of string and picked pail after pail of berries. We rode a mean little bucking pony, fished perch from a nearby lake, dug potatoes every year for school money. Mom’s job had not lasted. Dad sold firewood, corn, squash. But we never went hungry, and there was affection in our house. I knew I was loved because it was complicated for Mom and Dad to get me from the welfare system, though I’d helped out their efforts with my endless scream. All of which is not to say they were perfect. Dad drank from time to time and passed out on the floor. Mom’s temper was explosive. She never hit, but she yelled and raved. Worse, she could say awful things. Once, Sheryl was twirling around in the house. There was a shelf set snugly in the corner. It held a cut-glass vase that was very precious to Mom. When we brought her wildflower bouquets, she would put them in that vase. I had seen her washing the vase with soap and polishing it with an old pillowcase. Then Sheryl’s arm knocked the vase off the shelf and it struck the floor with a bright sound and shattered into splinters.

Mom had been working at the stove. She whirled around, threw her hands out.

Damn you, Sheryl, she said. That was the only beautiful thing I ever had.

Tuffy broke it! said Sheryl, bolting out the door.