Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I told Cappy about the file I found in my father’s desk drawer. I told him everything on the enrollment form. I told him about the governor of South Dakota.

So that’s where the money came from, he said.

For sure. She was one of those smart high-school girls who get picked to bring coffee and file papers. Get their pictures in the news, especially a pretty Indian with the governor’s arm around her shoulder. LaRose told me. Linda knew it too. That’s where Yeltow got to her. And Lark, he kept the secret, but he was jealous. Thought he owned her.

The governor gave her money to keep her mouth shut. Start a new life?

She put the cash in her little girl’s doll to keep it safe.

Safe from Lark.

I told Cappy that I’d seen that doll’s outfit in the car as it came out of the lake, that the doll must have floated out of that opened window and washed onto the opposite shore.

After this, I think, said Cappy, it will all come out. There’s still that file with his name on it. So why not? She was jailbait, Mayla.

He’ll go down for sure, I said then.

But Yeltow never did.

The silence of wind around us, the car cutting through the night along the Milk River, where Mooshum had once hunted, driven out farther and farther into the west, where Nanapush had seen buffalo straight back to the horizon, and then the next year not a single one. And after that Mooshum’s family had turned back and taken land on the reservation. He’d met Nanapush there and together they had built the round house, the sleeping woman, the unkillable mother, the old lady buffalo. They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.

Hinsdale went by. Sleeping Buffalo, too. Malta. We’d turn south far ahead at Havre. We’d traced our route on the gas station map.

Let’s keep going, said Cappy. I feel good. Let’s drive all night.

Make it so.

We laughed and Cappy slowed the car down and idled it while I ran around the front end, jumped in, started driving. The air was cool and green with sage. The lights hit coyote eyes slipping along the ditches, in and out of fence lines. Cappy balled up my jacket under his head, leaned on the window, and slept. I kept driving on until at last I got tired and switched off again with Cappy. This time Zack and Angus climbed in front to keep Cappy awake. I crawled in back. There was an old horse blanket that smelled of dust. I laid my head down and put the belt on because the buckle was cutting into my hip. As I dozed back there, listening to the three up in front talk and laugh, I had that same drifting sense of peace I got in my parents’ car. The guys passed the bottle back and I drank deep, to put myself out. I slipped away easily. I slept without dreaming even as the car hurtled off the road, flipped, rolled, threw its doors wide, and came to rest in an unplowed field.

I had the sense of a vast and violent motion. Before I could grasp its significance, all was still. I nearly fell back asleep thinking we had stopped. But I opened my eyes just to see where we were and the air was black. I called for Cappy, but there was no answer. There was the distant sound of distress, not weeping, but a laborious panting. I unbuckled myself and crept out the open door. The sounds came from Zack and Angus, tangled together, moving on the ground, then staggering up and falling. My brain clicked on. I searched the car—empty. One headlight flickered. I climbed out and made a widening circle around the car, but Cappy seemed to have vanished. He left for help, I thought in relief as I stepped along slowly. There was only the light of stars, and the car’s one beam; parts of the ground were so black they were like pits reaching down into the earth. For one disoriented moment, I thought I stood at the entrance to a mine shaft, and I feared that Cappy had been flung in. But it was only shadow. The deepest shadow I have ever known. I went down on my hands and knees and crawled into the shadow. I felt my way through invisible grass. The wind came up and blew my friends’ cries away from me. The sounds I made, too, when I found Cappy, were taken into the boom of air.

Isat in the police station, attached to the chair. Zack and Angus were in the Havre hospital. They’d taken Cappy someplace else to fix him up for Doe and Randall. The ghost had brought me here. I had seen him in the field as I held Cappy—my ghost had bent over me, backlit by the flashlight he held cocked over his shoulder, silver haloed, looking at me with a sour contempt. He shook me lightly. His lips had moved but the only words I could make out were Let go and I would not. I slept and woke in the chair. I must have eaten, drunk water, too. None of it do I remember. Except that again and again I looked at the round black stone that Cappy had given me, the thunderbird egg. And there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose from the chair, I’d gotten old along with them. I was broken and fragile. My shoes were lost in the accident. I walked between them, stumbled. My mother took my hand. When we got to the car, she opened the back door and crawled in. There was a pillow and the same old quilt. I sat in the front with my father. He started the engine. We pulled out just like that and started driving home.

In all those miles, in all those hours, in all that air rushing by and sky coming at us, blending into the next horizon, then the one after that, in all that time there was nothing to be said. I cannot remember speaking and I cannot remember my mother or my father speaking. I knew that they knew everything. The sentence was to endure. Nobody shed tears and there was no anger. My mother or my father drove, gripping the wheel with neutral concentration. I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old. I do remember, though, the familiar sight of the roadside café just before we would cross the reservation line. On every one of my childhood trips that place was always a stop for ice cream, coffee and a newspaper, pie. It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Injustice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International, included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted. In 2010, then North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan sponsored the Tribal Law and Order Act. In signing the act into law, President Barack Obama called the situation “an assault on our national conscience.” The organizations highlighted in boldfacebelow are working to restore sovereign justice and ensure safety for Native women.

Thank you to the many people who advised me as I wrote this book: Betty Laverdure, former tribal judge, Turtle Mountain Reservation; Paul Day, Gitchi Makwa, former tribal judge, Mille Lacs, and executive director of Anishinabe Legal Services; Betty Day, wisdom keeper and doulah; Peter Meyers, Psy.D., forensic psychologist; Terri Yellowhammer, former child welfare consultant for the state of Minnesota, and technical assistance specialist and associate judge for White Earth Ojibwe; N. Bruce Duthu, Dartmouth College, author of American Indians and the Law ; the members of Professor Duthu’s Native American Law and Literature class; the Montgomery Fellow Program at Dartmouth College, and Richard Stammelman; Philomena Kebec, staff attorney for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians; Tore Mowatt Larssen, attorney; Lucy Rain Simpson, Indian Law Resource Center; Ralph David Erdrich, R.N., Indian Health Service, Sisseton, South Dakota; Angela Erdrich, M.D., Indian Health Board, Minneapolis; Sandeep Patel, M.D., Indian Health Service, Belcourt, North Dakota; Walter R. Echo-hawk, author of In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided ; Suzanne Koepplinger, executive director of Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, who gave me the report she coauthored with Alexandra “Sandi” Pierce, “Shattered Hearts: The Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota”; Darrell Emmel, TNG consultant; my copy editor, Trent Duffy; Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins; Brenda J. Child, historian and chair of the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota; Lisa Brunner, executive director of Sacred Spirits First Nation Coalition; and Carly Bad Heart Bull, attorney. Additional thanks are due to Memegwesi; chi-miigwech to Professor John Borrows, whose most recent book, Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide , helped greatly in my understanding the process of wiindigoo law, as did Hadley Louise Friedland’s 2010 thesis “The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Responding to Harmful People in Cree, Anishinabek and Saulteaux Societies.”