The Round House (6 page)

We had finished three rounds and passed in the last of the grandfathers. We'd gone up to the house to refill the water cooler and were coming out, standing on the back deck, when there was an explosion. We didn't even hear anyone yell,
Door
, signaling us to open it. The top of the sweat lodge just billowed up and heaved with guys fighting to get out. They raged and flailed in the tarps. There was muffled howling. Then they popped out any way they could—gasping, yelling, and rolling naked in the grass. The mosquitoes dive-bombed. We ran down with the water cooler. Randall and his buddies made gestures at their squeezed-up faces and we doused their heads. As soon as they could jump up, each one of them staggered or ran toward the house. Cappy's aunts were driving up just then with extra frybread for the feast, so they saw eight naked Indians trying to grope their way across the yard. Suzette and Josey just stayed in the car.

It took a long while, everyone sitting in the house amid the piles of bachelor junk, for the men to emerge from shock and figure out what happened.

I think it was, said Skippy at last, that Pueblo medicine. Remember just before you threw a big handful on the rocks you thanked your buddy down there, then you said a longish prayer?

A long, long prayer, Birkenstock. Then you ladled on that water . . .

Oooh, said Randall. My friend said it was Pueblo medicine. I was praying for his situation with a Navajo woman. Cappy, go and get that jar.

Don't order me.

Okay, please, younger brother, seeing as we're all butt naked and traumatized, would you go out and get that jar?

Cappy went out. He came back. There was a label on the jar.

Randall, said Cappy, the word medicine has quote marks around it.

The jar was filled with a brownish powder that didn't smell very strong to us—not like bear root or wiikenh or kinnikinnick. Randall held the jar and frowned. He sniffed it like a fancy wine taster. At last, he licked his finger, stuck it in the jar, and put his finger in his mouth. Tears spurted instantly.

Aah! Aah! He stuck his tongue out.

Hot pepper, said the others. Special Pueblo hot pepper. They watched Randall dance around the room.

Man, look at his feet fly.

We should give him Pueblo medicine next powwow.

For sure, man. They took long drinks of water. Randall was at the sink with his tongue sticking out under the water tap.

Randall placed that medicine down on the rocks, said Skippy, but when he threw down four big ladles of water, then, man, it vaporized into our eyes and we were breathing that shit in! It burnt like hell. How could Randall have done that to us, man?

They all looked at Randall with his tongue under the faucet.

I hope he puts more clothes on finally, said Chiboy Snow.

We remembered the aunts when we heard them pull out of the driveway. We looked out. They'd left behind two bags of fresh frybread. The grease was darkening the paper sacks in delicate patches.

If you bring our clothes in, Skippy said to us, and hand in that feast, I'd pay youse.

How much? said Cappy.

Two each.

Cappy looked at me. I shrugged.

We hauled their stuff in and as we were all eating Randall came and sat next to me. His face was rugged and raw like all the other guys. His eyes were swollen red. Randall had most of his college education, and sometimes he talked like he was addressing me as a social service case, and other times he treated me like his little brother. This was one of those close familial Randall times. His friends were already laughing and eating. They'd forgotten to be mad at Randall now and everything was funny.

Joe, he said, I saw something in there.

I filled my mouth with taco meat.

I saw something, he went on, and he sounded genuinely troubled. It was before the hot pepper blew things up that I saw it. I was praying for your family and my family and all of a sudden, I saw a man bending over you, like a police maybe, looking down at you, and his face was white and his eyes deep down in his face. He was surrounded by a silver glow. His lips moved and he was talking, but I could not hear what he said.

We sat there quietly. I stopped eating.

What should I do about it, Randall? I asked in a low voice.

We'll both put down tobacco, he said. And maybe you should talk to Mooshum. It had a bad feeling, Joe.

M
y mother cooked all the next week, and even made it outside, where she sat on a frayed lawn chair scratching Pearl's neck, staring into the chokecherry bushes that marked the boundaries of the backyard. My father spent as much time home as possible, but he was still called to finish out some of his responsibilities. He was also meeting daily with the tribal police, and talking to the federal agent who was assigned to the case. One day he traveled to Bismarck and back to talk with the U.S. attorney, Gabir Olson, an old friend. The problem with most Indian rape cases was that even after there was an indictment the U.S. attorney often declined to take the case to trial for one reason or another. Usually a raft of bigger cases. My father wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

So the days went by in that false interlude. On Friday morning, my father reminded me that he would need my help. I often earned a few dollars by biking to my father's office after school and “putting the court to bed for the weekend.” I swept out his small office, spray-wiped the glass top of his wooden desk. I straightened and dusted the diplomas on his wall— University of North Dakota, University of Minnesota Law School—and the plaques recognizing his service in law organizations. He had a list of places he was admitted to practice that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I was proud of that. Next door, in his closet-turned-chambers, I did a sweep-out. President Reagan, ruddy cheeks and muddled eyes, B-movie teeth, grinned off the wall in his government-issue portrait. Reagan was so dense about Indians he though we lived on “preserves.” There was a print of our tribal seal and one of the great seal of North Dakota. My father had framed an antiquified copy of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, plus the Bill of Rights.

Back in his office, I shook out his brown wool rug. I put away and straightened up his books, which included all the later editions of the old Cohen
Handbook
at home. There was the 1958 edition, issued during the era when Congress was intent on terminating Indian tribes—it was always left on the shelf, its disuse a mute rebuke to the editors. There were the 1971 facsimile edition and the 1982 edition—big, heavy, well worn. Next to those books there was a compact copy of our own Tribal Code. I also helped my father file whatever his secretary, Opichi Wold, hadn't put away. Opichi, whose name meant Robin, was a dour little skinny woman with pin-sharp eyes. She functioned as my father's set of reservation eyes and ears. Every judge needs a scout out there. Opichi gathered tidbits, call it gossip, but what she knew often informed my father's decisions. She knew who could be released on recognizance, who'd run. She knew who was dealing, who was only using, who was driving without a license, who was abusive, reformed, drinking, dangerous, or safe with their own children. She was invaluable, though her filing system was opaque.

We kept all papers next door in a larger room walled with tan metal filing cabinets. A few files were always left on top of the cabinets because my father had expressed an interest in reading them over, or was adding notes. That day I noticed large stacks were left out—chestnut brown cardboard files with the labels neatly typed and fixed on by Opichi. Most were notes on cases, summaries and thoughts, drafts that preceded a final published judgment. I asked if we were going to file them, thinking there were too many to finish before suppertime.

We're taking them home, said my father.

This was a thing he did not do. His study at home was his retreat from all that went on in tribal court. He was proud of leaving the week's turmoil where it belonged. But today, we loaded the files into the backseat. We put my bike in the trunk and drove home.

I'll take those files in myself after dinner, he said on the way. So I knew he did not want my mother to see him bring those files into the house. After the car was parked we took my bike out and I wheeled it around back. My father entered before me. Walking through the kitchen door, I heard a splintering crash. And then a keen, low, anguished cry. My mother was backed up to the sink, trembling, breathing heavily. My father was standing a few feet before her with his hands out, vainly groping in air the shape of her, as if to hold her without holding her. Between them on the floor lay a smashed and oozing casserole.

I looked at my parents and understood exactly what had happened. My father had come in—surely Mom had heard the car, and hadn't Pearl barked? His footsteps, too, were heavy. He always made noise and was as I have mentioned a somewhat clumsy man. I'd noticed that in the last week he'd also shouted something silly when returning, like, I'm home! But maybe he'd forgotten. Maybe he'd been too quiet this time. Maybe he'd gone into the kitchen, just as he always used to, and then he'd put his arms around my mother as she stood with her back turned. In our old life, she would have kept working at the stove or sink while he peered over her shoulder and talked to her. They'd stand there together in a little tableau of homecoming. Eventually, he'd call me in to help him set the table. He'd change his clothes quickly while she and I put the finishing touches on the meal, and then we would sit down together. We were not churchgoers. This was our ritual. Our breaking bread, our communion. And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we'd sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on. But now my mother flushed darkly and an almost imperceptible shudder coursed over her. She took a gasping breath, and put her hand to her wounded face. Then she stepped over the mess on the floor and walked carefully away. I wanted her to shout, cry out, throw something. Anything would have been better than the frozen suspension of feeling in which she mounted the stairs. She was wearing a plain blue dress that night. No stockings. A pair of black Minnetonka moccasins. As she walked up each riser she looked straight ahead and her hand was firm on the banister. Her steps were soundless. She seemed to float. My father and I had followed her to the doorway, and I think as we watched her we both had the sense that she was ascending to a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.

W
e stood together even after the bedroom door clicked shut. At last we turned and without a word we went back into the kitchen and scraped up the casserole and broken dish. Together we brought the mess outside to the garbage. My father paused after he closed the bin. He bowed his head and at that moment I was first aware that he exuded a desolation that would grip him with increasing force. When he remained there motionless, I truly became frightened. I put my hand urgently on his arm. I couldn't say what I was feeling, but that time, at least, my father looked up.

Help me get those files in. His voice was hard and urgent. We'll start tonight.

And so I did. We unloaded the car. Then we slapped together a few rough sandwiches. (He prepared one of the sandwiches with more care and put it on a plate. I cut up an apple, arranged the slices around the bread, meat, and lettuce. When my mother didn't answer my tap on the bedroom door, I left it just outside.) Holding our food in our hands, we went into my father's study and crammed our mouths as we frowned at the files. We brushed our crumbs to the floor. My father turned on the lamps. He settled himself at his desk and then nodded at me to do the same in the reading chair.

He's there, he said, nodding at the heavy stacks.

I understood that I was going to help. My father was treating me as his assistant. He knew, of course, about my surreptitious reading. I glanced instinctively at the Cohen shelf. He nodded again, raised his eyebrows a fraction, and lip-pointed at the stack near my elbow. We began to read. And it was then that I began to understand who my father was, what he did every day, and what had been his life.

Over the course of the next week, we culled several cases from the corpus of his work. During this time, which was the last week of school, my mother was unable to leave her room. My father brought her food. I sat with her in the evenings and read to her from
The Family Album of Favorite Poems
until she slept. It was an old maroon book with a ripped cover picturing happy white people reading poems in church, to their children at bedtime, whispering into a sweetheart's ear. She would not let me read anything inspirational. I had to read the endless story poems with their ornate words and clunking rhythms. “Ben Bolt,” “The Highwayman,” “The Leak in the Dike,” and so on. As soon as her breathing evened out, I slunk away, relieved. She slept and slept, like she was sleeping for a sleeping marathon. She ate little. Wept often, a grinding and monotonous weeping that she tried to muffle with pillows but which vibrated through the bedroom door. I'd go downstairs, into the study, with my father, and continue reading through the files.