Louise Erdrich - The Round House

My mother’s job was to know everybody’s secrets. The original census rolls taken in the area that became our reservation go back past 1879 and include a description of each family by tribe, often by clan, by occupation, by relationship, age, and original name in our language. Many people had adopted French or English names by that time, too, or had been baptized and received thereby the name of a Catholic saint. It was my mother’s task to parse the ever more complicated branching and interbranching tangle of each bloodline. Through the generations, we have become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons. At the tip of each branch of course the children are found, those newly enrolled by their parents, or often a single mother or father, with a named parent on the blank whose identity if known might shake the branches of the other trees. Children of incest, molestation, rape, adultery, fornication beyond reservation boundaries or within, children of white farmers, bankers, nuns, BIA superintendents, police, and priests. My mother kept her files locked in a safe. No one else knew the combination of the safe and there was now a backlog of tribal enrollment applications piled up at her office.

Special Agent Bjerke was in our kitchen the next morning to approach the problem of questioning my mother about the particular file.

Would it help if we had a woman? To talk? We can get a female agent to drive over from our Minneapolis office.

I don’t think so.

My father fiddled with the tray he’d fixed for my mother’s breakfast. There was an egg fried the way she’d liked, toast buttered just so, a dab of Clemence’s raspberry jam. He had already brought her coffee with cream and was encouraged that she’d sat up for him and had a sip.

I went upstairs with the tray and set it down on one of the chairs next to the bed. She had put down the coffee and was pretending to sleep—I could tell by the infinitesimal tension in her body and her fake deep breaths. Perhaps she knew that Soren Bjerke had returned, or perhaps my father had said something about the file already. She would feel betrayed by me. I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me, and I left her room wishing that I could go straight to Sonja and Whitey’s and pump gas in the hot sun or wash windshields or clean the scummy restroom. Anything but go back upstairs, into the bedroom. My father said it was important I be there so that she couldn’t deny it.

We’ll have to break through her denial, is how he put it, and I felt a miserable dread.

The three of us went upstairs. My father first, then Bjerke, me last. My father knocked before entering her room, and Bjerke, looking at his feet, waited outside with me. My father said something.

No!

She cried out and there was the crash of what I knew was the breakfast tray, a clatter of silverware skidding across the floor. My father opened the door. His face was glossy with sweat.

We’d best get this over with.

And so we entered and sat down in two folding chairs he’d pulled up next to her bed. He lowered himself, like a dog that knows it isn’t welcome, onto the end of the bed. My mother moved to the far edge of the mattress and lay hunched, her back to us, the pillow childishly held over her ears.

Geraldine, said my father in a low voice, Joe’s here with Bjerke. Please. Don’t let him see you this way.

What way? Her voice was a crow’s jeer. Crazy? He can take it. He’s seen it. But he’d rather be with his friends. Let him go, Bazil. Then I’ll talk to you.

Geraldine, he knows something. He’s told us something.

My mother crunched herself into a smaller ball.

Mrs. Coutts, said Bjerke, I apologize for bothering you again. I’d much rather solve this and let you alone, leave you in peace. But the fact is I need some additional information from you. Last night we learned from Joe that on the day you were attacked you received a telephone call. Joe thinks he remembers that this telephone call was upsetting to you. He says that after a short time you told him that you were going after a file and then you drove to your office. Is this true?

There was no movement or sound from my mother. Bjerke tried again. But she waited us out. She didn’t turn to us. She didn’t move. It seemed an hour that we sat in a suspense that quickly turned to disappointment and then to shame. My father finally lifted his hand and whispered, Enough. We backed out of the room and walked down the steps.

Late that afternoon, my father moved a card table into the bedroom. My mother did not react. Then he set up folding chairs at the table and I heard her furiously berating him and begging him to take it away. He came downstairs sweating again, and told me that every night at six o’clock I was to be home for dinner, which we’d bring upstairs and eat together. Like a family again, he said. We were starting this regimen now. I took a deep breath and carried up the tablecloth. Again, though my mother was angry, my father opened the shades and even a window, to let in a breeze. We brought a salad and a baked chicken up the stairs, plus the plates, glasses, silverware, and a pitcher of lemonade. Perhaps a drop of wine tomorrow night, to make something festive of it, Dad said without hope. He brought a bouquet of flowers he’d picked from the garden that she hadn’t seen yet. He put them in a small painted vase. I looked at the green sky on that vase, the willow, the muddy water and awkwardly painted rocks. I was to become overly familiar with this glazed scene during those dinners because I didn’t want to look at my mother, propped up staring wearily at us as if she’d just been shot, or rolled into a mummy pretending to be in the afterlife. My father tried to keep a conversation going every night, and when I had exhausted my meager store of the day’s doings, he forged on, a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream. I am sure I saw him laboring on the muddy little river painted on the vase. After he’d spoken of the day’s small events one night, he said he’d had a very interesting talk with Father Travis Wozniak and that the priest had been there in Dealey Plaza on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Travis’s father had taken him into the city to see the Catholic president and his elegant first lady, who was wearing a suit the exact mute pink as the inside of a cat’s mouth. Travis and his father walked down Houston Street, crossed Elm, and decided that the best place to view the President would be there on the grassy slope just east of the Triple Underpass. They had a good view and watched the street expectantly. Just before the first motorcycle escorts appeared, someone’s black-and-white gundog ran out into the middle of the street and was quickly recalled by its owner. It often bothered Travis afterward to think that if only the dog had got loose at another time, perhaps just as the motorcade passed, messing up the precision and timing of things, or if it had thrown itself under the wheels of the presidential convertible in an act of sacrifice, or leapt into the President’s lap, what followed might not have happened. This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance. He said the feeling has grown stronger and more persistent, too, since the embassy bombing where he’d been injured.