Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Lean? Why would she want lean?

Less grease, said my father.

I like grease.

Me too.

He threw some packages into the cart.

Cumin, I read. In the spice aisle we found cumin.

She was making extra food to bring to Clemence, to pay her back for all the dinners.

I read. Lettuce, carrots, then onions and we’re supposed to smell the onions first to make sure they aren’t rotten inside.

Fruit. Whatever fruit is good, said my father, peering over my shoulder at the list. I guess we are able to make that decision, anyway, regarding the fruit. What do you think?

We looked at a pile of muskmelons. Some had spots. There were grapes. All had spots. There was a bucket of local berries and some plums. Dad chose a melon and filled paper bags with plums and a plastic mesh bucket with the berries.

We bought chicken, an anemic-looking fryer, cut up, and we counted all the packaged pieces like she said. We bought another package that contained only thighs. We bought barbecue sauce and Old Dutch potato chips, for me. A couple of cans of mushroom soup went into the cart. At the bottom of the list was milk and butter, a 1-pound box of wrapped sticks, salted, and 1 pound wrapped whole, sweet. Cream.

What does she mean wrapped whole? My father stopped beside me, frowning at the paper. He held a carton of cream in one hand. Why sweet? Why salted?

I was pushing the cart in front of my dad, and so I saw Linden Lark first. He was leaning into the cold light of the open meat case. My father must have looked up just after I did. There was a moment where all we did was stare. Then motion. My father threw the cream, surged forward, and grabbed Lark by the shoulders. He spun Lark, jamming him backward, then gripped Lark around the throat with both hands. As I’ve said before, my dad was somewhat clumsy. But he attacked with such an instinct of sudden rage it looked slick as a movie stunt. Lark banged his head against the metal racks of the cooler. A carton of lard smashed down and Lark slipped in the burst cream, scraping the back of his head down the lower edge of the case, ringing the shelves. The glass doors flapped against my father’s arms as he fell with Lark, still pressing. Dad kept his chin down. His hair had fallen in strings about his ears and his face was dark with blood. Lark flailed, unable to put a similar grip on my father. I was on him too, now, with the cans of Rotel tomatoes.

The thing was, Lark seemed to be smiling. If you can smile while being choked and can-beaten, he was doing it. Like he was excited by our attack. I smashed the can on his forehead and opened a cut just over Lark’s eye. A pure black joy in seeing his blood filled me. Blood and cream. I smashed as hard as I could and something—maybe the shock of my happiness or Lark’s happiness—caused my father to let go of Lark’s throat. Lark kicked upward and pushed with all his might. My father went skidding backward. With a hard jolt my father landed in the aisle, and Lark fled in a scrambled crouch.

That was when my father had his first heart attack—it turned out to be a small one. Not even a medium one. Just a small one. But it was a heart attack. In the grocery store aisle in the spilt cream and rolling cans, next to the Prell shampoo, my father’s face went a dull yellow color. He strained for breath. He looked up at me, perplexed. And because he had his hand on his chest, I said, Do you want the ambulance?

When he nodded yes , everything went out of me. I went down on my knees, and Puffy made the call.

They tried to tell me I couldn’t ride with him to the hospital but I fought. I stayed with him. They couldn’t make me leave him. I knew what happened if you let a parent get too far away.

We stayed down in Fargo for almost a week and spent the days at St. Luke’s Hospital. On the first day, my father had an operation that is now routine, but which at the time was new. It involved inserting stents into three arteries. He looked weak and diminished in the hospital bed. Although the doctors said that he was doing well, of course I was afraid. I could only look in at him, at first, from the hall. When he was moved into his own room, things were better. We all sat together and talked about nothing, everything. This seems odd, but it soon became a kind of a vacation to be there, safe, together, our conversation vague. We’d walk the halls, pretend shock at the mushy food, talk some more about nothing.

At night, my mother and I went back to the room we shared at the hotel. We had twin beds. On other trips, the three of us had always bunked together, Mom and Dad in a double. I would sleep on a rollaway in some corner. This was the first time I could remember staying alone anywhere with just my mother. There was an awkwardness; her physical presence bothered me. I was glad she’d brought Dad’s old blue bathrobe made of towel cloth, the one she’d kept pestering him to get rid of. The nap was worn down in places, the sleeve unraveling, the hem frayed. I’d thought that she brought it for him, but then she put it on the first night. I imagined she had forgotten her own robe, which was printed with golden flowers and green leaves. But the second morning I woke early and looked over at her, still sleeping. She was wearing my father’s robe. I checked that night to see if she was wearing his robe on purpose, and sure enough she got into bed wearing it. The room wasn’t cold. It occurred to me the next day, as I was wandering around the park outside the hospital, that it would feel good if I had something of Dad’s to wear, too. It would tie us together somehow.

I needed him so much. I couldn’t really go into it very far, this need, nor could my mother and I talk about it. But her wearing his robe was a sign to me of how she had to have the comfort of his presence in a basic way that I now understood. That night, I asked her if she’d packed Dad an extra shirt, and she nodded when I asked if I could wear it. She gave it to me.

I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman’s in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men’s clothing, and he didn’t buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father’s ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don’t sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always had a dog named Pearl.

I was wearing my father’s shirt on the day he stopped being vague, the second-to-last day we were there. He saw his shirt on me and looked quizzical. My mother left to get some coffee and I sat with him. This was the first time I was really alone with him. It did not surprise me that even while his incisions were healing he chose to revisit the situation, to ask if I knew anything of Lark’s whereabouts. I had been thinking the same way, but of course I didn’t. If Clemence had told my mother in their phone conversations from the hotel room, I didn’t know about it. But then that night I did get a call; it was while my mother was out buying a newspaper. It was Cappy.

Some members of our family paid a visit, he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Here?

No, there .

Where?

They brought him around.

What?

The Holodeck, dummy. It was a situation like when Picard was the detective. Remember? The persuasion?

Right. I was flooded, tingling with relief. Right. Is he dead?