Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Do you have some goal in mind?

I want to be confirmed by the end of summer.

We get one visit from the bishop in the spring and everybody gets confirmed at that time. Father Travis looked me over. What’s your rush?

It would help things.

What things?

Things at home, maybe, if I could pray.

You can pray without being confirmed. He handed me a pamphlet.

Plus, he said, you can pray by just talking to God. You can use your own words, Joe. You don’t have to be confirmed in order to pray.

Father, I have a question.

He waited.

I had heard a phrase mentioned long ago and had stored it in my mind. I asked, What are Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance?

He cocked his head to the side as though he was listening to a sound I couldn’t hear. Then he flipped through his catechism book and pointed out the definition. The sins that cried out for vengeance were murder, sodomy, defrauding a laborer, oppressing the poor.

I thought I knew what sodomy was and believed it included rape. So my thoughts were covered by church doctrine, a fact I had found out the very first day.

Thanks, I said to Father Travis. I’ll see you Monday.

He nodded, his eyes thoughtful.

Yes, I’m sure you will.

On Sunday, I sat through mass with Angus and on Monday morning I was at church right after breakfast. It was raining again, and I had eaten a huge bowl of my mother’s oatmeal. It had weighed me down on my bike and sat warm and heavy in my stomach now. I wanted to go back to sleep, and so, probably, did Father Travis. He looked pallid and maybe hadn’t slept so well. He hadn’t shaved yet. The skin beneath his eyes was blue and the coffee was harsh on his breath. The cafeteria counter was stacked with neatly boxed-up food and the trash cans were stuffed.

Was there a wake down here? I asked.

Mr. Pourier’s mother died. Which means we have probably seen the last of him. He was hoping to reconcile with the church while she was still conscious. By the way, I have a book for you. He handed me a soft old splayed paperback of Dune. So. Shall we start with the Eucharist? I saw you at mass with Angus. Did you understand what was happening?

I had memorized the pamphlet, so I said yes.

Can you tell me?

There was a sharing of the grace-producing food of our souls.

Very good. Anything else?

The body and blood of Christ were present in the wine and crackers?

Communion wafers, yes. Anything else?

As I wracked my mind the rain quit. A sudden flare of sunshine hit the dusty glass of the basement windows and spun motes of dust in the air. The basement was aslant with shimmering veils of light.

Uh, spiritual nutrition?

Right. Father Travis smiled at the dancing slashes of air around us and up at the windows. Since it’s just us two, whaddya say we take our class outside?

I followed Father Travis up the steps, out the side door, and along the path that led through dripping pines. The grass path made a loop behind the gym and school, down through the rows of trees and over again to the road where Cappy and Father Travis had made the most dramatic part of their run. As we walked he told me that in order to prepare for the Eucharist when I would become part of the Mystical Body of Christ, I would have to purify myself via the sacrament of confession.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Travis went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

All right, I said faintly. Look, Father! There’s a gopher.

Yes. He stopped and looked at me. How’s your soul doing?

I glanced around as if my soul would appear so I could check on it. But there was only Father Travis’s carefully planed, too handsome face, his grave, pale eyes shining uncannily, his sculpted lips.

I don’t know, I said. I’d like to shoot some gophers.

He started walking again and from time to time I glanced at him, but he didn’t speak. Finally, when we turned into the trees, he said, Evil.

What?

We’ve got to address the problem of evil in order to understand your soul or any other human soul.

Okay.

There are types of evil, did you know that? There is material evil, that which causes suffering without reference to humans but gravely affecting humans. Disease and poverty, calamities of any natural sort. Material evils. These we can’t do anything about. We have to accept that their existence is a mystery to us. Moral evil is different. It is caused by human beings. A person does something deliberately to another person to cause pain and torment. That is a moral evil. Now you came up here, Joe, to investigate your soul hoping to get closer to God because God is all good, all powerful, all healing, all merciful, and so on. He paused.

Right, I said.

So you have to wonder why a being of this immensity and power would allow this outrage—that one human being should be allowed by God to directly harm another human being.

Something hurt in me, shot straight through me. I kept walking, my head down.

The only answer to this, and it isn’t an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn’t often, very often at least, intervene. God can’t do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?

No. But yeah.

The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

I went cold.

He does, said Father Travis, his voice rising a little. In every instance, Joe. In every heart-soaking instance. As the priest here you know well I have buried infants and whole families killed in car accidents and young people who made terrible choices, and even people who got lucky enough to die old. Yes, I’ve seen it. Every time there is an evil, much good comes of it—people in these circumstances choose to do an extra amount of good, show unusual love, become stronger in their devotion to Jesus, or to their own favorite saint, or attain an unusual communion of some sort in their families. I have seen it in people who go their own ways, your traditionals, and never come to mass except for funerals. I admire them. They come to the wakes. Even if they are so poor they have nothing, they give the last of their nothing to another human. We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see.

I stopped walking. I looked at the field, not at Father Travis. I shifted the book he’d given me from hand to hand. I felt like throwing it. Gophers were popping up and down, uttering their cheerful tweets.

I’d sure like to shoot some gophers, I said through my teeth.

We won’t be doing that, Joe, said Father Travis.

Our dusty old midsummer reservation town sparkled all washed clean as I rode down the hill, past the BIA houses, up the road past the water tower place toward the Lafournais spread. There were three Lafournais allotments bordering on one another and although they were divided many times they never did go out of the family. The houses were connected by threads of roads and trails, but Doe’s was the main house, the ranch style closest to the road, and Cappy was there leaning on the deck rail with his shirt open and a set of free weights on the decking by his feet.

I stopped, sat back on my bike seat.

Any girls come by to watch you pump iron?

Nobody came by, said Cappy. Nobody worth this vision.

He pretended to rip his shirt open and pounded his smooth chest. He was better since last week—he had got two letters from Zelia.