Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I wish we didn’t have to give him to the Crows, said the young man.

They need their fun, I said. But just in case he gets loose we should make sure he cannot pull the trigger on a gun. We could chop off his fingers, but then the Crow would say we’d stolen some of him.

There is a centipede if it bites a man his hands will swell up like mittens for the rest of his life, the Blackfeet told me. So we made little torches for ourselves and went around hunting for this bug, but while we were away Liver Eater did manage to escape. When we returned all we saw was the chewed straps on the ground surrounded by broken brown teeth. He got away. Then he made up the story about eating the Indian’s leg because unless he had a good story who’d believe a toothless cross-eyed old bugger?

Exactly, said Clemence.

Awee, I’m going to miss that Sonja, said Mooshum, winking at me.

What?

Oh, said Clemence. Whitey says she cleared out. She played sick yesterday and he came home to find her closet empty and one of the dogs gone with her. She took off in her old rattletrap car he’d just fixed to run smooth.

Is she coming back? I said.

Whitey told me her note said never. He said he slept with the other dog, he was so broke up. She said he’d best clean up his act. Amen to that.

The news made me dizzy and I told Cappy we needed to go somewhere. He said his usual polite and traditional thank-you to Clemence and then we biked away together, slow. Finally we got to the road that led, though it was a long ride off, to the hanging tree where Sonja and I had buried the passbook savings books. We stopped our bikes and I told Cappy the entire story—finding the doll, showing it to Sonja, her helping me stash the money in those bank accounts, and then where we put the passbooks in the tin box. I told him about how Sonja insisted I keep quiet so as to not put him in danger. Then I told him about Sonja’s diamond stud earrings and the lizard-skin boots and about the night Whitey beat on her and how it looked like she was planning to get away from him and I told him how much money I had found.

She could get real far on that, he said. He looked away, offended.

Yeah, I should have told you.

We didn’t talk for a while.

We should go dig up the little box anyway, he said. Just to make sure. Maybe she left you some money, said Cappy. His voice was neutral.

Enough for shoes like yours, I said as we rode along.

I offered to trade, said Cappy.

It’s okay. I like mine now. I bet she left me a goddamned note. That’s what I bet.

We both turned out to be right.

There was two hundred dollars, one passbook, and a piece of paper.

Dear Joe,

Cash is for your shoes. Also I am leaving you saving acct. to spend on an IV education out east.

I looked inside the passbook. It was ten thousand.

Treat your mom good. Some day you might deserve how good you grew up. I can have a new life with the $. No more of what you saw.

Love anyways,

Sonja

What the hell, I said to Cappy.

What’s she mean, what you saw?

I struggled. I wanted to tell the whole dance, every howl, every gliding move, and show him the tassel. But my tongue was stopped by obscure shame.

Nothing, I said.

I split the cash with Cappy and put the passbook and letter in my pocket. At first, he wouldn’t take the money and then I said it was so he could get a bus ticket to visit Zelia in Helena. Travel money, then. He folded the bills in his hand.

We started back home and halfway there we scared up a pair of ducks from a watery ditch.

After a couple miles, Cappy laughed. I got a good one. How come ducks don’t fly upside down? He didn’t wait for me to answer. They’re afraid of quacking up! Still happy with his wit, he left me at the door to have dinner with my mother and father. I went in and although we were quiet and distracted and still in a form of shock, we were together. We had candied yams, which I never liked but I ate them anyway. There was farmer ham and a bowl of fresh peas from the garden. My mother said a little prayer to bless the food and we all talked about Cappy’s run. I even told them Cappy’s joke. We stayed away from the fact of Lark’s existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.

Linda Wishkob rolled out from her car and trudged to our door. I let my dad answer her knock and slipped out the back way. I’d finally worked out my thoughts in regard to Linda and her banana bread; although these thoughts did not make sense, I couldn’t argue myself out of them. Linda was responsible for the existence of Linden. She’d saved her brother, even though she knew by then he was a skin of evil. She now repelled me like she’d repelled him and her birth mother, though my parents didn’t feel the same way. As it turned out, while I was in the backyard running this way and that with Pearl, playing tag, though we never touched but whirled around each other in an unceasing trot, Linda Wishkob was giving my father information. What she told him would cause him to accompany my mother to her office and back home for the next two days. On the third day my father asked her to write him out a list for the grocery.

He insisted that we go instead of her and that she lock the door behind us and keep Pearl in the house. From all of this I gathered that Linden Lark was back in the area. My mind wouldn’t go any farther. I wasn’t thinking about it—I couldn’t stand thinking about it. It was out of my mind entirely when my father asked me to go to the grocery store with him. I had been on my way to meet up with Cappy and carve out a newer and faster series of jumps in the dirt. I resented going with my father to the grocery, but he said it would take two of us to decipher and find all of the exact things my mother wanted—which, when I saw her slanted script with even the brand names listed and tiny bits of advice in choosing properly, looked like the truth.

That we have a real grocery store on our reservation is no small thing. It used to be that, besides the commodity warehouse, food came from the tiny precursor store—Puffy’s Place. The old store sold mainly nonperishable items—tea, flour, salt, peanut butter—plus surplus garden vegetables or game meat. It sold beadwork, moccasins, tobacco, and gum. For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt. But with our own grocery now, run by our own tribal members and hiring our own people to bag and stock, we had something special. Even though the pop machine out front was banged in, the magic doors swished shut on slow grandmas, and children smudged the gumball machine until you couldn’t see the colors of the candy, it was our very own grocery. Trucks came to it, like a regular store, stocked it, and then drove away.

My father and I walked in past the wall of tattered powwow posters and ads for cars to sell. We got a grocery cart. Dad unfolded the list.

Dried pinto beans.

I pointed out that Mom had instructed us to shake and examine the plastic bag of beans and make sure it contained no small rocks. We located the beans in the pasta aisle.

A spotted pebble is going to look just like a bean, I said to my father, turning the rectangular package this way and that.

We should stock up, said my father, throwing six or seven bags into the cart. These are cheap. We can spread the beans in a pan and check for rocks when we get home.

Tomato paste, canned tomatoes—Rotel, the kind with chilies—4 cans each. Five pounds of hamburger meat. Lean if you can get it, the list said.