Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Those shrimp or something else I’d eaten stayed with me all that week. I felt sick when I looked at food and dizzy when I looked at my mother or my father, so I didn’t look at anyone and hardly ate. Mostly, I slept. I fell asleep like I was knocked out and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Once, on waking, I picked up the book Father Travis had given me. Dune was a fat paperback with three black figures walking a desert beneath a massive rock. I opened it at random and read something about a boy filled with a terrible sense of purpose. I flung the book across the room and left it there. Many months after that morning I would read that book, once, then again, and again. It was the only book I read for a solid year. My mother said I must be getting my growth. I overheard her. Or listened in on her. Eavesdropping was a habit now. My sneaking came of needing to know that there was no other way, that I had to do this. If Lark moved or skipped out or was poisoned like a dog or caught for some reason, I would be free. But I didn’t trust my parents to tell me any of these things, so I had to slip behind doors and sit underneath open windows and listen, never hearing what I wanted. Of course, powwow weekend came.

Mom and Dad had agreed to let me camp out with Doe’s boys, as they said, and I hitched a ride out with them in back of Randall’s pickup, sitting on my sleeping bag. Five dollars in my pocket for food. Randall drove us so fast on the gravel road that our teeth clacked and we nearly bounced out of the back, but we got there in time to set up in our usual place. Cappy’s family always parked their RV to the south at the edge of the powwow camp circle, right up against the unmowed fields. At that time of the year the hay was usually ready to cut again. Standing at the edge of the grass, I watched it ripple gently up a soft rise, parting and reparting like a woman’s hair. The family liked camping at the edge so they could get away from what Suzette and Josey called “the goings-on.” Doe’s sisters were stout and jolly. They danced women’s traditional, and when they were getting ready in their small RV camper it shook with their heavy movements and bursts of laughter. Their husbands did not dance but helped out with organization and security.

The first thing we did on arriving was lift the webbed lawn chairs out of the back of the pickup. We decided where to dig a fire pit and put the lawn chairs up around the hole. It was important to have a little place where visitors could come and get brewed tea, or drink Kool-Aid from one of the giant plastic thermos jugs Suzette and Josey filled before they came. They also had coolers—one stuffed with sandwiches, pickles, tubs of baked beans and potato salad, bannock, jelly, crab apples, blocks of commodity cheese. The other cooler was full of hot dogs and cold fried rabbit. Soon, around the camp, Suzette and Josey’s married children started pulling up in their low-slung old cars. When the car doors opened, the grandchildren bounced out like Super Balls. They gathered other children from the neighboring camps and moved through the powwow grounds in a tornado of whirling hair and chasing legs and pumping arms. Occasionally an announcement came over the loudspeaker—these were just test announcements. Doe did not come on for real until noon. He did the welcome several times and reminded dancers that Grand Entry was at one.

Put on your dancin’ shoes! His announcer voice was smooth as warm maple syrup. He loved to say Oh mercy, as well as Gee willikers, I’ll be doggone, and Howah! He loved to joke. His jokes were friendly and awful.

Just yesterday a white guy asked me if I was a real Indian. No, I said, Columbus goofed up. The real Indians are in India. I’m a genuine Chippewa.

Chip a what? How come you got no braids?

They got chipped off, I told him. The old word for us is Anishinaabe, you know. Eyyyy. Sometimes you can’t tell a real Anishinaabe woman something. She gives you that look and you got to tell her everything . Eyyyy.

Doe announced lost children. Papoose on the loose! Here’s a little boy looking for his family. Don’t be scared when you come claim him, Mama, he’s not covered with war paint. It’s just ketchup and mustard. He’s been fixing himself to face the Fifth Cavalry over at the hot dog stand.

When he introduced the drums, he rolled one to the next with a good word for each: Beartail, Enemy Wind, Green River. The bleachers started filling with people and Suzette and Josey sent their husbands to set up lawn chairs at the edge of the arena on the south side to avoid the long and blinding brilliance of the sun as it would set, it seemed, forever into the night. Cappy and I set up our tent with its square canopy where Randall could dress and preen. Suzette and Josey loved having a male dancer to fuss over and kept asking Cappy and me when we were going to start. Cappy had danced until he was ten years old.

I’m making you a new grass dance outfit. Josey shook her finger at him.

Cappy just smiled at her. He never said no to anyone. He and Randall had cut young popple saplings on their land and we set up a cooling arbor where the aunties could take the breeze. The day was heating up and their beaded yokes and the tanned hides, the bone breastplates and the woolen shawls, the heavy silver concho belts and figured ornaments and all that long leather fringe must have weighed sixty pounds or more. Suzette and Josey were round but phenomenally strong, so they could move with dignity under the weight of all this tradition, and not collapse. Randall was hardly weighed down at all by contrast, but he was covered with so many feathers Cappy said it looked like he’d rolled in a flock of eagles. He had a pair of red long johns with aprons or breechcloths that hung fore and aft.

Be sure you get your modesty panel set just right, said Cappy. You don’t want anyone to know what you ain’t got.

Shut up, bobtail, he said to Cappy. And don’t you even start, shrimpy, he said to me.

He held up a mirror and painted two black stripes down his forehead to his eyebrows, then continued underneath his eyes and down his cheeks. Randall’s eyes suddenly became impenetrable warrior eyes. He glowered at us from under his guard hair roach and swaying feathers.

Give us your smolder, said Cappy.

That was it, said Randall. Observe its effect.

He went out into the sunlight and stretched beside the cotton candy vendor’s trailer. Randall said his red long johns were traditional, but Cappy and I thought they ruined his look.

A girl in a leather halter top leaned away from her friends. Sipping soda through a straw, she watched all kissy face as Randall practiced his moves. He put his foot up on the trailer hitch, and strained to touch his toes like he was stretching his hamstrings. He did this twice and on the third time cracked a boogid. He tried to saunter off as though it hadn’t happened. The girl laughed so hard she choked and spurted her pop.

Learn from the master, said Cappy. Whatever Randall does, do the opposite.

Angus’s family was there, spilling out of and around a car, so we went to get him and find Zack. When we were all four together, we needed frybread, went and got some, and were eating in the shade of the stands when some girls from school came up to us. They always talked to Angus first, then Zack, then me, then focused on their real target, Cappy. The girls from our year were mainly named some version of Shawn. There was Shawna, Dawna, Shawnee, Dawnali, Shalana, and just plain Dawn and Shawn. There was also a girl named Margaret, named after her grandmother, who worked at the post office. I ended up talking to Margaret. Dawn, Shawn, and the others had their hair curled back from their faces and sprayed stiff, eye shadow, lip gloss, two pairs of earrings in each ear, tight jeans, little striped T-shirts, and shiny silver necklaces. I tease Margaret to this day about what she wore to that powwow—that’s because I remember every detail, down to the silver locket that contained not a photo of her boyfriend, but a picture of her baby brother.