Louise Erdrich - The Round House

One girl whose sister we knew, Ruby Smoke, stated that she had been delivered of a serpent. I felt Zack shaking beside me, and I elbowed him hard. Angus knew the score and murmured praise, but Cappy said, What kind of snake was it, in a deadpan voice, and Father Travis bent forward, giving him a sideways stare.

Ruby was a big girl with short, sprayed hair, streaked with dry red, and hoop earrings. Lots of makeup. Her boyfriend, Toast, I don’t recall his real name, nobody did, was there too—very skinny with basketball shorts and a sad slump. He looked over at Cappy not with malice, and said, None of your business. A serpent is a serpent.

Cappy put his hands up, Just asking, man! He fixed his eyes on the ground.

But since you’re interested, said Ruby, it was a humungous serpent, brownish, with crisscross lines. And its eyes were golden and it had a wedge head like a rattlesnake.

A pit viper, I said. You were delivered of a pit viper.

Father Travis looked ominous, but Ruby looked pleased.

It’s okay, Father, she said. Joe’s uncle is a science teacher.

In fact, I went on, encouraged, it sounds to me like you were delivered of the fer-de-lance, which is hands down the deadliest snake in the world. If it bites your hand they chop off your arm. That’s the treatment. Or you could have been delivered of the bushmaster, which can get to ten feet and waits to ambush its prey and can take down a cow. You can’t see it when the fer-de-lance strikes, it moves at lightning speed.

Everyone nodded in excitement at Ruby and someone said, Way to go, Ruby. She looked proud of herself. Then Father Travis spoke: Sometimes things happen very quickly, like that, which is why in this encounter group we work to prepare you for those lightning-fast moments. Those moments aren’t temptation, really. You react on instinct. Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep. You’re tempted then. That’s why we learn strategies to keep ourselves occupied, to pray. But a quick-acting poison, that’s different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you’ve ever imagined.

I sat rooted, struck into an odd panic by his words.

We caught hands all around and put our heads down and prayed the Hail Mary, which you don’t have to be a Catholic to know on this reservation as people mutter it at all hours in the grocery store or bars or school hallways. We did ten, mentioning the fruit of thy womb every time, a phrase that Zack found unbearable and couldn’t even say for fear he’d laugh. The day went on pretty much like that—confessions, pep talks, tears, drama-praying. Creepy moments when we had to stare into each other’s eyes. I say creepy because I had to stare into Toast’s eyes, which were burnt holes, unreadable and belonging to a guy, so what was the point anyway. Cappy got to lock eyes with Zelia. This was supposed to be a soul-to-soul encounter. A spiritual thing. But Cappy said he got the worst hard-on of his life.

The flittering energy that had possessed my mother was burnt out and she was resting—but on the couch, not locked in her room. After I got home, my father invited me to sit alongside him on an old rusted kitchen chair next to the garden. The evening was cool and the air stirred the scrub box elder bordering the yard. The big cottonwood clattered by the garage. My father tipped his head back to catch the slow-setting sun on his face.

I had asked him about the damned carcass, and he was trying to think of what to say.

Who is it?

My father shook his head.

The thing is, my father said, the thing is. He was choosing his words very carefully. There will be an arraignment where the judge will decide whether he can be charged. But even now we may be pushing the envelope. The defense attorney is filing a motion for his release. Gabir is hanging in there, but he doesn’t have a case. Most rape cases don’t get this far but we have Gabir. There’s talk by the defense of suing the BIA. Even though we know he did it. Even though everything matches up.

Who is it? Why can’t they just hang him?

My father put his head in his hands, and I said I was sorry.

No, he said, broodingly. I wish I could hang him. Believe me. I imagine myself the hanging judge in an old western; I’d happily deliver the sentence. But beyond playing cowboy in my thoughts, there is traditional Anishinaabe justice. We would have sat down to decide his fate. Our present system though... .

She doesn’t know where it happened, I said.

My father tipped his chin down. There is nowhere to stand. No clear jurisdiction, no accurate description of where the crime occurred. He turned over a scrap of paper and drew a circle on it, tapped his pencil on the circle. He made a map.

Here’s the round house. Just behind it, you have the Smoker allotment, which is now so fractionated nobody can get much use out of it. Then a strip that was sold—fee land. The round house is on the far edge of tribal trust, where our court has jurisdiction, though of course not over a white man. So federal law applies. Down to the lake, that is also tribal trust. But just to one side, a corner of that is state park, where state law applies. On the other side of that pasture, more woods, we have an extension of round house land.

Okay, I said, looking at the drawing. Fine. Why can’t she make up a place?

My father turned his head and gazed at me. The skin beneath his eyes was purple-gray. His cheeks were loose folds.

I can’t ask her to do that. So the problem remains. Lark committed the crime. On what land? Was it tribal land? fee land? white property? state? We can’t prosecute if we don’t know which laws apply.

If it happened anyplace else ...

Sure, but it happened here.

You knew this ever since Mom talked about it.

So did you, my father said.

Since my mother had broken her silence in my presence and set in motion all that followed, I had insisted to my father that he tell me what was happening. And to some extent he did, although not all of it by any means. For instance, he said nothing about dogs. The day after we spoke, a search-and-rescue outfit came to our reservation. From Montana, is what Zack heard.

We were riding aimlessly around, doing wheelies in the dust, circling the big gravelly yard near the hospital, jumping over stray clumps of alfalfa and jewelweed. It was Saturday and Zelia, along with the other leaders of the camp, was on a final bus trip to the Peace Garden. After their leadership workshop they would all leave. The workshop lasted three days and Cappy was being Worf.

He made his Klingon challenge to me, Heghlu meh qaq jajvam , tried to skid into a 360, and bit the dust.

This is a good day to die! he yelled.

Fuck yes! I yelled.

Angus was best at imitating Data. Please continue this petty bickering, he said. It is most intriguing. He raised his finger.

At that moment, Zack rode up and told us what was happening down by the lake with the search-and-rescue teams and the police and the vans towing commandeered fishing boats. By the time we got to the lake, we could see them, the dogs and their handlers in four aluminum boats with outboard motors that couldn’t have been more than fifteen hp. The dogs were different breeds; there was a golden one, a runty one that looked like a cross between Pearl and Angus’s scabby rez mutt, a sleek black Lab, and a German shepherd.