Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Women, I said.

He looked at me.

They’ll kill you.

How do you know?

I didn’t answer. His love for Zelia was not like my love for Sonja, which had become a thing contaminated by humiliation, treachery, and even bigger waves of feeling that tore me up and threw me down. By contrast, Cappy’s love was pure. His love was just starting to manifest. Elwin had a tattoo gun and traded for his work. Cappy said he wanted to go to his place and get Elwin to etch Zelia’s name in bold letters across his chest.

No, I said. C’mon. Don’t do that.

He stood. I’m gonna!

I only convinced him to wait by telling him that when his pecs swelled from his workouts, the letters could be bigger. We sat a long time, me trying to distract Cappy, that not working. I finally left when Doe came home and told Cappy to get to work on the woodpile. Cappy walked over to the axe, grabbed it and began splitting wood with such crazed thwacks that I feared he would take off his leg. I told him to take it easy, but he just gave me a dead look and hit a piece of wood so hard it shot up ten feet.

Meandering back toward our house, where my mother and father were supposed to have returned that afternoon, I had that feeling again of not wanting to go home. But I didn’t want to go back to anywhere Sonja was, either. Thinking of her made me think of everything. Into my mind there came the picture of that scrap of blue-and-white checked cloth, and the knowledge I kept pushing away about the doll being in that car. By throwing out the doll I’d obviously destroyed evidence, maybe even something that would tell Mayla’s whereabouts. Where she lay, in a place so obscure that even the dogs could not find her. I put the thought of Mayla from my mind. And Sonja. I tried also not to think of my mother. Of what had maybe happened in Bismarck. All of these thoughts were reasons I did not want to go home, or to be alone. They came up over me, shrouding my mind, covering my heart. Even as I rode, I tried to get rid of the thoughts by taking my bicycle over the dirt hills behind the hospital. I began to course violently up and down, jumping so high that when I landed my bones jarred. Whirling. Skidding. Raising clouds of grit that filled my mouth until I was sick and thirsty and dripping with sweat so I could finally go home.

Pearl heard my bike approach, and she stood at the end of the drive, waiting. I got off the bike and put my forehead on her forehead. I wished I could change places with her. I was holding Pearl when I heard my mother scream. And scream again. And then I heard my father’s low voice grinding between her shrieks. Her voice veered and fell, just the way I’d just been riding, crashing hard, until finally it dropped to an astonished mutter.

I stood outside, holding my bike up, leaning on it. Pearl was next to me. Eventually, my father walked out the back screen door and lit a cigarette, which I had never seen him do. His face was yellow with exhaustion. His eyes were so red they seemed rimmed with blood. He turned and saw me.

They let him go, didn’t they, I said.

He didn’t answer.

Didn’t they, Dad.

After a moment he dragged on the cigarette, looked down.

All of the electric poison that had drained out of me on my bike flooded back and I began to harangue my father, with words. Stupid words.

All you catch are drunks and hot dog thieves.

He looked at me in surprise, then shrugged and tapped the ash off his cigarette.

Don’t forget the scofflaws and custody cases.

Scofflaws? Oh sure. Is there anywhere you can’t park on the rez?

Try the tribal chairman’s spot.

And custody. Nothing but pain. You said yourself. You’ve got zero authority, Dad, one big zero, nothing you can do. Why do it anyway?

You know why.

No, I don’t. I yelled it at him and went in to be with my mother, but there was nothing to be with when I got there. She was staring blankly at the blank of the refrigerator and when I stepped in front of her she spoke in a weird, calm voice.

Hi, Joe.

After my father entered, she went upstairs in a slow devotional walk with him holding on to her arm.

Don’t leave her, Dad, please. I said this in dread as he came back down alone. But he did not even glance at me to answer. I stood awkwardly across from him, dangling my hands.

Why do you do it? I said to him, bursting out. Why bother?

You want to know?

He got up and went to the refrigerator and rummaged around and pulled something from deep on the back shelf. He brought it over to the table. It was one of Clemence’s uneaten casseroles, there so long the noodles had turned black, but stashed near enough to the cold refrigeration coils that it had frozen and so didn’t stink, yet.

Why I keep on. You want to know?

With a savage thump he turned the casserole over onto the table. He lifted off the pan. The thing was shot through with white fuzz but held its oblong shape. My father rose again and pulled the box of cutlery from the cabinet counter. I thought he’d gone crazy at last and watching him I could hardly speak.

Dad?

I’m going to illustrate this for you, son.

He sat down and waved a couple of forks at me. Then with cool absorption he laid a large carving knife carefully on top of the frozen casserole and all around it proceeded to stack one fork, another fork, one on the next, adding a spoon here, a butter knife, a ladle, a spatula, until he had a jumble somehow organized into a weird sculpture. He carried over the other four butcher knives my mother always kept keen. They were good knives, steel all the way through the wooden shank. These he balanced precariously on top of the other silverware. Then sat back, stroking his chin.

That’s it, he said.

I must have looked scared. I was scared. His behavior was that of a madman.

That’s what, Dad? I carefully said. The way you’d address a person in delirium.

He rubbed his sparse gray whiskers.

That’s Indian Law.

I nodded and looked at the edifice of knives and silverware on top of the sagging casserole.

Okay, Dad.

He pointed to the bottom of the composition and lifted his eyebrows at me.

Uh, rotten decisions?

You’ve been into my dad’s old Cohen Handbook . You’ll be a lawyer if you don’t go to jail first. He poked at the fuzzy black noodles. Take Johnson v. McIntosh . It’s 1823. The United States is forty-seven years old and the entire country is based on grabbing Indian land as quickly as possible in as many ways as can be humanly devised. Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody’s in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family’s fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government. Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox. Considering how much outright grease is used to bring this unsavory case to court, a case pled by no less than Daniel Webster, the decision was startling. It wasn’t the decision itself that still stinks, though, it was the obiter dicta, the extra incidental wording of the opinion. Justice Marshall went out of his way to strip away all Indian title to all lands viewed—i.e., “discovered”—by Europeans. He basically upheld the medieval doctrine of discovery for a government that was supposedly based on the rights and freedoms of the individual. Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time. Even to this day, his words are used to continue the dispossession of our lands. But what particularly galls the intelligent person now is that the language he used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim ascendancy and on and on.