Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I’ll come get you, said my father urgently. Go.

Dr. Egge was staring even harder at my father. I turned away from them with sick reluctance. As my father and Dr. Egge walked away from me, they spoke in low voices. I didn’t want to leave, so I turned and watched them before I went out into the waiting room. They stopped outside my mother’s room. Dr. Egge finished speaking and jabbed his eyeglasses up his nose with one finger. My father walked to the wall as if he were going through it. He pressed his forehead and hands against the wall and stood there with his eyes shut.

Dr. Egge turned and saw me frozen at the doors. He pointed toward the waiting room. My father’s emotion was something, his gesture implied, that I was too young to witness. But during the last few hours I had become increasingly resistant to authority. Instead of politely vanishing, I ran to my father, flailing Dr. Egge aside. I threw my arms around my father’s soft torso, held him under his jacket, and I fiercely clung to him, saying nothing, only breathing with him, taking great deep sobs of air.

Much later, after I had gone into law and gone back and examined every document I could find, every statement, relived every moment of that day and the days that followed, I understood that this was when my father had learned from Dr. Egge the details and extent of my mother’s injuries. But that day, all I knew, after Clemence separated me from my father and led me away, was that the hallway was a steep incline. I went back through the doors and let Clemence talk to my father. After I’d sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going into surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture’s fault.

I should take you home, let you sleep in Joseph’s room, said Clemence. You can go to school tomorrow from our house. I’ll come back here and wait.

I was tired, my brain hurt, but I looked at her like she was crazy. Because she was crazy to think that I would go to school. Nothing would go on as normal. That steeply inclined hallway led to this place—the waiting room—where I would wait.

You could at least sleep, said Aunt Clemence. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep. The time would pass and you wouldn’t have to stare at that damn picture.

Was it rape? I asked her.

Yes, she said.

There was something else, I said.

My family doesn’t hedge about things. Though Catholic, my aunt was not one to let butter melt in her mouth. When she spoke, answering me, her voice was quick and cool.

Rape is forced sex. A man can force a woman to have sex. That’s what happened.

I nodded. But I wanted to know something else.

Will she die from it?

No, said Clemence immediately. She won’t die. But sometimes—

She bit down on her lips from the inside so they made a frowning line and she squinted at the picture.

—it’s more complicated, she said finally. You saw that she was hurt, real bad? Clemence touched her own cheek, sweetly rouged and powdered from going to church.

Yes, I saw.

Our eyes filled with tears and we looked away from each other, down at Clemence’s purse as she dug in it for Kleenex. We both let ourselves cry a bit as she got the Kleenex. It was a relief. Then we put the tissues to our faces and Clemence went on.

It can be more violent than other times.

Violently raped, I thought.

I knew those words fit together. Probably from some court case I’d read in my father’s books or from a newspaper article or the cherished paperback thrillers my uncle, Whitey, kept on his handmade bookshelf.

Gasoline, I said. I smelled it. Why did she smell like gas? Did she go to Whitey’s?

Clemence stared at me, the Kleenex frozen beside her nose, and her skin went the color of old snow. She bent over suddenly and put her head down on her knees.

I’m okay, she said through the Kleenex. Her voice sounded normal, even detached. Don’t worry, Joe. I thought I was going to faint, but I’m not.

Gathering herself, she sat up. She patted my hand. I didn’t ask her about the gasoline again.

Ifell asleep on a plastic couch and someone put a hospital blanket over me. I sweated in my sleep and when I woke, my cheek and arm were stuck to the plastic. I peeled myself unpleasantly up on one elbow.

Dr. Egge was across the room talking to Clemence. I could tell right away that things were better, that my mother was better, that whatever had happened with the surgery was better, and in spite of how bad things were, at least for now the picture wasn’t getting any worse. So I put my face down on the sticky green plastic, which now felt good, and I fell back asleep.

Ihad three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me.

It was five days since we had found my mother sitting in the driveway. I’d refused to go to school before she came back from the hospital. She was anxious to get out, relieved to be home. She said good-bye to me that morning from my parents’ bed in their upstairs bedroom.

Cappy and your other friends will miss you, she said.

I should go back to school, even though there were just over two weeks left until summer. When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.

My other two friends were Zack Peace and Angus Kashpaw. Back in those days, the four of us were more or less together whenever it was possible, though it was understood that Cappy and I were closest. Cappy’s mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father, Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos. For although Doe became involved with women from time to time, he never did remarry. He was both a janitor of the tribal offices and, on and off, the chairman of the tribe. When he was first elected in the 1960s, he was paid just enough money to take his janitor job down to half-time. When too exhausted to run for a term, he picked up extra hours as the night watchman. It wasn’t until the seventies that the feds put money into tribal government, and we started figuring out how to run things. Doe was still chairman, on again, off again. The way it worked was, people voted Doe into office whenever they got mad at the current chairman. But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight. When it got bad enough, Doe would decline to run. He’d pack up his office, including the tribal chairman stationery that he always had printed on his own dime : Doe Lafournais, Tribal Chairman . For a few years, we’d have lots of drawing paper at Cappy’s house. Inevitably, his successor went through the same treatment. Eventually Doe’s contrite and pleading constituents would work on him until he threw his hat back in the ring. 1988 was an out-of-office year for Doe, which meant he did a lot of fishing with us. We’d spent half the winter in Doe’s icehouse, pulling in northerns and sneaking beers.