The Round House (31 page)

It's something Daddy told me. A story about a wiindigoo. Lark's trying to eat us, Joe. I won't let him, she said. I will be the one to stop him.

Her determination terrified me. She picked up her food and deliberately, slowly, began to eat. She didn't stop until she'd finished all of it, which also frightened me. This was the first time since the attack she ate all the food on her plate. Then we went back to the room, got ready for bed. My mother took a pill and fell asleep at once. I stared at the feeble soundproofing insulation tiles on the ceiling. If I watched them closely enough, I could feel my own heart wind down. My chest opened and my stomach stopped grinding. I counted out, slowly and evenly, 78 random holes in the tile just over my head, and 81 in the next. If my mother went after Lark, he'd kill her. I knew this. I counted the holes again and again.

O
n the day we left Fargo, I woke early. My mother was up, in the bathroom making brushing and washing sounds. I listened to the shower water rattle down. The hotel curtains were so heavy I didn't know that it was pouring outside too. One of those rare August rains that tamp down the dust flares on the roads had just begun. A rain that washes the whitened dust-coated leaves. A rain that fills the cracks in the earth and revives the brown grasses. That grows the corn by a foot and makes a second cutting of hay possible. A gentle rain that lasts for days. There was a chill in the air that persisted all the way home. My mother drove with the windshield wipers going. The coziest of sounds to a boy drowsing in the backseat. My father stayed alert beside my mother, covered with a quilt. From time to time I'd open my eyes, just to see them. He had his hand across the seat, resting on her leg above the knee. Occasionally she took one hand off the wheel, reached down, and rested her hand on top of his.

During this ride of peace, so like my earliest memories of going places with my parents, it came to me what I must do. A thought descended into me as I lay beneath my own soft old quilt. I pushed it out. The thought fell back. Three times I pushed it out, each time harder. I hummed to myself. I tried to talk, but my mother put her finger to her lips and pointed at my father, who was asleep. The thought came again, more insistent, and this time I let it in and reviewed it. I thought this idea through to its conclusion. I stood back from my thought. I watched myself think.

The end of thinking occurred.

When we got home, Clemence had fixed the chili. Puffy had delivered all of the groceries that we had picked out. Everything we needed was stowed in the cupboards and the refrigerator. I saw my box of potato chips right away, sitting on the counter. I thought of the cans of tomatoes I had used as weapons. Clemence had probably opened them and added them to the chili. Every day since the grocer, I wished I had brained Lark. I imagined myself killing him over and over. But since I hadn't, I was going to visit Father Travis first thing in the morning. I decided I would join his Saturday morning catechism class. I thought he would let me do that. I also hoped that if I made myself useful afterward up at the church, he might notice how the gophers had been driven from the tunnels by the rain and now were fattening on the new grass. They needed to be dealt with. I hoped that Father Travis might teach me how to shoot gophers, so that I could get some practice.

I
wasn't exactly starting from scratch when it came to being a Catholic. Priests and nuns have been here since the beginning of the reservation. Even the most traditional Indians, the people who'd kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school, or had made friends with some of the more interesting priests, as Mooshum had for a time, or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe. Everybody had extremely devout or at least observant family members; I had been lobbied over and over, for instance, by Clemence. She had persuaded my mother (she hadn't bothered with my father) to have me baptized and had campaigned for my first communion and confirmation. I knew what I was in for. The God Squad had not been doctrinal, but my classes would be filled with lists. Confession: i. Sacramental. ii. Annual. iii. Sacrilegious. iv. Legal. Grace: i. Actual. ii. Baptismal. iii. Efficacious. iv. Elevating. v. Habitual. vi. Illuminating. vii. Imputed. viii. Interior. ix. Irresistible. x. Natural. xi. Prevenient. xii. Sacramental. xiii. Sanctifying. xiv. Sufficient. xv. Substantial. xvi. At meals. xvii. There were also Actual, Formal, Habitual, Material, Moral, Original, and Venial Sin. There were special types of sins: those against the Holy Ghost, Sins of Omission, Sins of Others, Sin by Silence, and the Sin of Sodom. There were Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance.

There were, of course, definitions of each of these categories on the lists. Father Travis taught like Vatican II had never happened. Nobody looked over his shoulder way up here. He said Latin mass if he felt like it and for several months the previous winter had turned the altar away from the congregation and conducted the Mysteries with a sort of wizardy flourish, Angus said. When it came to teaching catechism, he added subject matter or dismissed it. Saturday morning, he let me into the church basement and told me to take a seat in the cafeteria. I did, trying not to look down at the rug and think of Cappy. Bugger Pourier, reforming again after years of a stumblebum life in the Cities, was the only other student in the dim room. He was a skinny sorrowful man, with the fat purple clown nose of a longtime drinker. His sisters had dressed him in clean clothes, but he still smelled musty, like he'd been sleeping in a moldy corner. I looked over the handouts and listened to Father Travis talk about each member of the Holy Trinity. After class was done and Bugger wandered off, I asked Father Travis if I could take personal instruction all next week.

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.