Louise Erdrich - The Round House

But he was staring at his desk as if he saw through the oak top into the file beneath it and through the manila cover to the photograph and from the photograph perhaps to some other photograph or record of old brutality that hadn’t yet bled itself out.

After his mother died, Linden Lark had kept her farmhouse at the edge of Hoopdance. He had been staying in the house, a rickety, peeling two-story that once had flower beds and big vegetable gardens. Now, of course, the whole place had gone to weeds and was cut off by crime tape. Dogs had searched and double-searched the premises, the fields and woods surrounding the house and found nothing.

No Mayla, I said.

Dad was talking with me later on that day—the house was quiet. I’d been playing my game. He’d walked in. This time he told me things. The governor of South Dakota had stated that the child he wished to adopt came from a Rapid City social service agency and that claim was confirmed. The people there said that about a month ago someone, a man it was believed, had left the baby asleep in her car seat, in the furniture section at Goodwill. There had been a note pinned on the baby’s jacket informing the finder that her parents were dead.

Is it Mayla’s baby?

My father nodded.

Your mother was shown a picture. She identified the baby.

Where is Mom now? I asked.

My father raised his brows, still surprised.

I just dropped her off at work.

Afew days after my mother identified the baby, she began regular hours at her office. There was a backlog, blood quantum to parse, genealogy hopefuls curious about their possible romantic Indian Princess grandmothers. There were children returning as adults, adopted-out people cut off from their tribe, basically stolen by the state welfare agencies, and there were also those who had given up on being an Indian but whose children longed for the connection and designed a meaningful family vacation to the reservation to explore their heritage. She had a lot to do, and this was even before casino money roped wannabes in droves. She could apparently work as long as Lark was in custody. As long as the baby was safe. There were a few days when things were normal—but it was holding-your-breath normal. We heard the baby was with her grandparents, George and Aurora Wolfskin. She was placed there permanently or at least until Mayla returned. If she did return. Then on about the fourth day, my mother told my father that she had to talk to Gabir Olson and Special Agent Bjerke because, now that the baby’s safety was no longer an issue, she’d suddenly remembered the whereabouts of that missing file.

All right, my father said. Where?

Where I left it, underneath the front seat of the car.

My father went outside and came back with the manila folder in his hands.

They went to Bismarck again, and I stayed with Clemence and Edward. The birthday banners were all down. The beer cans crushed. The leaves were dried out in the arbor. Things again were quiet at Clemence and Edward’s house, but a sort of cheerful quiet as there were always people coming around to visit. Not only relations and friends, but people who came just for Mooshum, students or professors. They would set up a tape recorder and tape him talking about the old days or speaking Michif, or Ojibwe or Cree, or all three languages together. But he really didn’t tell them much. All his real stories came at night. I slept in Evey’s room with him. About an hour or two into the night I woke to hear him talking.

When he was told to kill his mother, said Nanapush, a great rift opened in his heart. There was a crack so deep it went down forever. On the before side his love for his father, and belief in all that his father did, lay crumpled and discarded. And not only that one belief, but others as well. It was true that there could be wiindigoog—people who lost all human compunctions in hungry times and craved the flesh of others. But people could also be falsely accused. The cure for a wiindigoo was often simple: large quantities of hot soup. No one had tried the soup on Akii. No one had consulted the old and wise. The people he’d loved, including his uncles, had simply turned against his mother, so Nanapush could not believe in them or in what they said or did anymore. On the side of the crack where Nanapush was, however, his younger brothers and sisters, who had cried for their mother, existed. And his mother, too. Also the spirit of the old female buffalo who had been his shelter.

That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.

You can go that way, said the old buffalo woman, but even though you become a fool, people will in time consider you a wise man. They will come to you.

Nanapush did not want anyone to come to him.

That will not be possible, said the buffalo woman. But I can give you something that will help you—look into your mind and see what I am thinking about.

Nanapush looked into his mind and saw a building. He even saw how to make the building. It was the round house. The old female buffalo kept talking.

Your people were brought together by us buffalo once. You knew how to hunt and use us. Your clans gave you laws. You had many rules by which you operated. Rules that respected us and forced you to work together. Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way. As the mother is intent on her baby’s life, so your people should think of their children.

That is how it came about, said Mooshum. I was a young man when the people built it—they followed Nanapush’s instructions.

Isat up to look at Mooshum, but he had turned over and begun his snore. I lay awake thinking of the place on the hill, the holy wind in the grass, and how the structure had cried out to me. I could see a part of something larger, an idea, a truth, but just a fragment. I could not see the whole, but just a shadow of that way of life.

Ihad been there three or four days when Clemence and Uncle Edward went over to Minot to purchase a new freezer. They started out early in the morning, before I was up. Mooshum had risen at six as usual. He’d drunk the coffee, eaten all the eggs, toast, and buttered hash brown potatoes that Clemence made, even my share. When I went down to the kitchen, I took a slice of cold meat loaf she’d left for lunch, slapped it between two pieces of soft white bread, with ketchup. I asked my Mooshum what he wanted to do that day and he looked vague.

You go off with your own. He waved his hand. I’m all set here.

Clemence said I have to stay with you.

Saaah, she treats me like a puking baby. You go! You go off and have a good time!

Then Mooshum tottered over to Evey’s old dresser and rummaged among the things in his top drawer until he came up with an old gray sock. Dangling the sock at me with a significant look, he plunged his hand in. He was wearing his dentures, which usually meant company. With a sly air of triumph he drew a soft ten-dollar bill from the toe of the sock and waved it at me.