Louise Erdrich - The Round House

One of my other husbands, said Ignatia, the one with the tiny cock, had a pair of pants like yours once. Extremely high quality. He had sex like a rabbit. Quick in-out-in-out but for hours at a time. I would just lay there making things up in my head, thinking my own thoughts. It was restful. I felt nothing. Then one day, something. Howah! I cried. What happened to you? Did it grow?

Yes, I watered it, he said between in-out-in-out. And fertilized it.

Yai! I cried out, even louder. What did you use?

I’m joking, woman. I made it bigger with clay from the river. Oh, no!

All of a sudden I felt nothing again.

It fell off, he said.

The whole wiinag?

No, just the clay part. He was very downhearted. Oh my love, he said, I wanted to make you scream like a bobcat. I’d give my life to make you happy. I said to him, That’s all right, I’ll show you another way.

So I showed him a thing or two and he learned so good that I made sounds his ears had never heard. One time, anyway, we had this lantern swinging from a hook over the foot of the bed. He was going at me like the rabbit and that lantern fell off the hook and hit him in the ass. I heard him tell his friends about it. They were laughing pretty good, then he says, I was lucky though. If I had been doing the deed my old lady taught me, the one that makes her so happy, that lantern would have hit me in the head.

Yai! Mooshum’s tea spluttered from his lips. I gave him a napkin because Clemence had also charged me with keeping food out of his hair, which against her wishes he’d worn the way he liked it, hanging down around his face in greasy strands.

Too bad we never tried each other out when we were young, said Ignatia. You are much too shriveled up to suit me now but as I remember it, you were damn good-looking.

So I was, said Mooshum.

I blotted away the tea that was rolling down his neck, before it reached the starched white collar of his shirt. I drove a few girls out of their minds, Mooshum continued, but when my pretty wife was living, I did my Catholic duty.

No difficulty there, Ignatia snorted. Were you faithful or not? (They both pronounced the word fateful; in fact, every th in this whole conversation was a t .)

I was fateful, said Mooshum. To a point.

What point? said Ignatia sharply. She always supported women’s extramarital excitements, but was completely intolerant of men’s. Oh, wait, my old friend, how could I be forgetting? To a point! Eyyyyy, very funny.

Anishaaindinaa. Yes, of course, she lived out on the point, that Lulu. And you had your son with her.

I started in surprise, but neither one of them noticed. Was it known all over that I had an uncle I never knew about? Who was this son of Mooshum’s? I tried to shut my mouth but as I looked around I saw of course a large number of the guests were Lamartines and Morrisseys and then Ignatia said his name.

That Alvin did good for himself.

Alvin, a friend of Whitey’s! Alvin had always seemed like part of the family. Well. When I tell this story to white people they are surprised, and when I tell it to Indians they always have a story like it. And they usually found out about their relatives by dating the wrong ones, or at any rate, they usually began to figure out family somewhere in their teens. Maybe it was because no one thought to explain the obvious which was always there or maybe as a child I just had not listened before. Anyway, I now realized that Angus was some kind of cousin to me, as Star was a Morrissey and her sister, mother to Angus, was once married to Alvin’s younger brother, Vance, and yet as Vance had a different father from Alvin the connection was weakened. Had I heard the name for this type of cousin, I wondered, sitting there, or should I ask Mooshum and Ignatia?

Excuse me, I said.

Oh yes, my boy, how polite you are! Grandma Ignatia suddenly noticed me sitting there and stuck me with her crow-sharp eyes.

If Alvin is my half uncle and Star’s sister was married to Vance and they had Angus what does that make Angus to me?

Marriageable, croaked Grandma Ignatia. Anishaaindinaa. Kidding, my boy. You could marry Angus’s sister. But you ask a good question.

He is your quarter cousin, Mooshum said firmly. You don’t treat him like a whole cousin but he’s closer to you than a friend. You would defend him, but not to da dett.

That’s how he said it, da dett. Nowadays most of us will say our th s unless we grew up speaking Chippewa, but we still drop a lot of them from habit. My father felt that as a judge it was important to pronounce his every last th . My mother didn’t, however. As for me, I left my d s behind when I went to college and I took up the th . So did lots of other Indians. I wrote an awful poem once about all of the d s that got left behind and floated around on reservations and a friend read it. She thought there was something to that idea and as she was a linguistics major she wrote a paper on the subject. Several years after she wrote that paper, I married her, back on the reservation, and I noticed that as soon as we passed the line we dropped our th s and picked up our d s again. But even though she was a linguistics major, she didn’t have a word for what kind of cousin Angus was to me. I thought Mooshum defined it best with his statement that I was bound to defend Angus, but only so far. I didn’t have to die for him, which was a relief.

At this point, more people came and sat with us, a crowd in fact, all around Mooshum, and the whole party directed its attention to where he sat underneath the arbor. People with cameras carefully positioned themselves and my mother and Clemence posed for pictures with their heads on either side of Mooshum’s head. Then Clemence ran back into the house and there was a hush broken by the exclamations of small children pushed to the edge of the crowd, The cake! The cake!

As Clemence and Edward were now fiddling with their cameras, my cousins Joseph and Evey got to carry in the extraordinary cake. Clemence had constructed a great sheet cake frosted with whiskey-laced sugar, Mooshum’s favorite, and she had iced it onto a piece of masonite covered with tinfoil. The cake was the size of a desktop, elaborately lettered with Mooshum’s name and studded with at least a hundred candles, already lighted, brightly burning as my cousins walked gingerly forward. People parted around them. I slipped aside once they held the cake right in front of Mooshum’s face. The cake was dazzling. Ignatia looked jealous. The little flames reflected up into Mooshum’s dim old eyes as people sang the happy birthday song in Ojibwe and English and then started on a Michif tune. The candles flared more intensely as they burned down, dripping wax onto the frosting until they were mere stubs.

Blow them out! Make a wish! people cried, but Mooshum seemed mesmerized by their light. Grandma Ignatia leaned over and spoke right into his ear. He nodded, finally, and stooped over the cake and at that moment a stray breeze came through the arbor, a little gust. You think it would have extinguished the candles, but on the contrary. It gave them enough oxygen for one last flare and when this happened the little flames fused into a single fire that ignited the mixture of wax and whiskey icing. The cake caught fire with a gentle whoosh and the flames leapt high enough to ravel into Mooshum’s locks of greasy hair as he bent over with his lips pursed. I still have the picture in my mind of Mooshum’s head surrounded by the blaze. Only his delighted eyes and happy grin showed, as, it seemed, he was consumed. My grandfather and the cake might have been destroyed right there, if Uncle Edward hadn’t had the presence of mind to empty a pitcher of lemonade over Mooshum’s head. Just as providentially, Joseph and Evelina were still holding on to the masonite and ran the burning cake out onto the driveway, where the flames went out once they had consumed the liquorous frosting. Uncle Edward was again the hero of the day as he simply slicked off the scorched frosting with a long bread knife. He declared the rest of the cake edible, indeed, improved by the scorching. Someone brought gallons of ice cream and the party recommenced. I was told to take Mooshum inside to rest from the thrill. Once there, Clemence tried to cut away his singed locks.