The Round House

Chapter Four

Loud as a Whisper

Cappy was a skinny guy with big hands and scarred-up, knobby feet, but he had bold cheekbones, a straight nose, big white teeth, and lank, shiny hair hanging down over one brown eye. Melting brown eye. The girls loved Cappy, even though his cheeks and chin were always scraped and he had a gap in one eyebrow where his forehead had been opened by a rock. His bike was a rusted blue ten-speed Doe had picked up at the mission. Because their house rattled with tools on every surface, Cappy kept it halfway fixed. Still, only first gear worked. And the hand brakes gave out unexpectedly. So when Cappy rode you’d see a spidery kid pedaling so fast his legs blurred and from time to time dragging his feet to stop or, if that didn’t work, throwing himself suicidally over the crossbar. Angus had a beat-up pink BMX that he meant to paint before he realized the color kept it from getting stolen. Zack’s bike was new, and a cool black, because his dad brought it after he had not shown up for two years. Since we couldn’t drive legally (although of course we drove whenever we could), the bikes gave us freedom. We didn’t have to rely on Elwin or on Whitey’s horses, though we did ride the horses, too, when we could. We didn’t have to ask Doe or Zack’s mom for a ride, which was good on the morning after school let out because they wouldn’t have taken us where we wanted to go.

Zack had confirmed, from listening in on his stepfather’s burping police radio (he did this constantly), where the crime against my mother had taken place. It was the round house. A two-track bush road led to the old log round house on the far side of Reservation Lake. Early that morning, I got up and stepped quietly into my clothes. I slipped downstairs and let Pearl out. Together, we peed outside, in the back bushes. I didn’t want to flush the noisy inside toilet. I sneaked back in, barely opening the screen door so it wouldn’t whine, easing it slow so it wouldn’t whap shut. Pearl entered with me and watched silently as I filled a bag with peanut butter sandwiches. I put them in my pack together with a jar of my mother’s canned dill pickles and a water jug. I had agreed to write a note to tell my dad where I was—all summer, he made me swear. I wrote the word LAKE on the legal pad he’d left for me on the counter. I tore off half a sheet and wrote another note that I stuck in my pocket. I put my hand on Pearl’s head and looked into her pale eyes.

Guard Mom, I said.

Cappy, Zack, and Angus were supposed to meet me in a couple of hours at a stump we used—just off the highway, across the ditch. There, I left the other note, telling them I’d gone ahead. I had planned this because I wanted to be alone at the round house when I first got there.

It was a lofty June morning. The dew was still cold on the wild rose and sage in last fall’s mowed stubble, but I could tell that by afternoon it would be hot. Hot and clear. There would be ticks. Hardly anyone was out this early. Only two cars passed me on the highway. I turned off onto Mashkeeg Road, which was gravel, enclosed by trees, running partway around the lake. There were houses by the lake, screened by bush. An occasional dog popped up but I was pedaling fast and I came and went so quickly through their territories that few barked and none followed me. Even a tick, spinning through the air off a tree, hit my arm and could barely cling. I flicked him off and pedaled even faster until I reached the narrow road that led to the round house. It was still blocked by construction cones and painted oil drums. I guessed that was the work of the police. I walked my bike, looking carefully at the ground and beneath the leaves of the bushes along the way. The area had leafed in thickly during the past weeks. I was looking for anything that other eyes might have missed, as in one of Whitey’s crime novels. I didn’t see a thing out of place, though, or rather, since it was the woods and everything was out of place and wild, I didn’t see a thing in place. A neatened area. Something that did not look or feel right. An empty jar, a bottle cap, a blackened match. This place had been minutely combed clean of what didn’t belong already and I reached the clearing where the round house was set without finding anything of interest or use.

The grass had not been mowed yet, but the area where cars parked was covered with scrubby little plants. Horses had pulled all the good plants up by the roots and now tense little weeds rasped beneath the tires of my bike. The log hexagon was set up on top of a slight rise, and surrounded by rich grass, vivid green, long and thick. I dropped my bike. There was a moment of intense quiet. Then a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled me and flooded me. Finally, it ceased. I decided to go forward. As I climbed the hill, a breeze raised hairs on the back of my neck. But when I reached the round house, the sun fell like a warm hand on my shoulders. The place seemed peaceful. There was no door. There had been one, but the big plank rectangle was now wrenched off and thrown to the side. The grass was already growing through the cracks between the boards. I stood in the doorway. Inside, it was dim although four small busted-out windows opened in each direction. The floor was tidy—no empties or papers or blankets. All had been picked up by the police. I caught the faint odor of gasoline.

During the old days when Indians could not practice their religion—well, actually not such old days: pre-1978—the round house had been used for ceremonies. People pretended it was a social dance hall or brought their Bibles for gatherings. In those days the headlights of the priest’s car coming down the long road glared in the southern window. By the time the priest or the BIA superintendent arrived, the water drums and eagle feathers and the medicine bags and birchbark scrolls and sacred pipes were in a couple of motorboats halfway across the lake. The Bible was out and people were reading aloud from Ecclesiastes. Why that part of the Bible? I’d once asked Mooshum. Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. We think that way too. Sometimes we square-danced, said Mooshum, our highest Mide’ priest was a damn fine caller.

There was one old Catholic priest who used to sit down with the medicine people. Father Damien had sent home the superintendent. Then the water drums and feathers and pipes had returned. The old priest had learned the songs. No priest knew those songs now.

From Zack’s report of his stepdad’s radio conversation, and my father’s silence after he mentioned the round house, I knew the general location of the crime. But I didn’t know the exact whereness of it. At that moment, a certainty entered. I knew. He had attacked her here. The old ceremonial place had told me—cried out to me in my mother’s anguished voice, I now thought, and tears started into my eyes. I let them flood down my cheeks. Nobody was there to see me so I did not even wipe them away. I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

I concentrated on the escape itself, just as my father had described. Our car was parked at the base of the rise, just past a scraggle of bushes. Nobody would come up the road that way, anyway. There was a beach farther down that you could get to easier by a road along the lakeshore, around the other side. Of course the rapist—except I didn’t use that word: I used attacker—the attacker had bet on this lonely place remaining deserted. Which meant he had to have known something about the reservation, and meant more planning. People drank down on that beach at night, but to get there from the round house you had to cross a barbed-wire fence and then bushwhack. The attack had happened approximately where I was standing. He’d left her here, to get a new book of matches. I blocked out the thought of my mother’s terror and her scramble for the car. I imagined how far away the attacker had to have gone to fetch the matches, in order not to run back in time to catch her.

My mother had gotten up and bolted through the doorway, down the hill to her car. Her attacker would have walked down the opposite side of the hill, to the north, not to have seen her. I walked the way he must have gone, through the grass to that barbed-wire fence. I lifted the top line and side-legged through. Another fence line led down through the heavy tangle of birch and popple to the lake. I followed that fence all the way down to the edge of the lake and then kept walking to the water.

He must have had a stash somewhere or maybe another car—one parked near the beach. He’d gone back for more matches when his got wet. Probably, he was a smoker. He’d left behind extra matches or a lighter. He followed that fence down to the lake. He’d reached his stash. Heard the car door slam. Ran back up to the round house and after my mother. But too late. She’d managed to start the engine, stomp on the accelerator. She was gone.

I continued walking, across the narrow sand beach, into the lake. My heart was beating so hard as I followed the action in my understanding that I did not feel the water. I felt his overpowering frustration as he watched the car disappear. I saw him pick up the gas can and nearly throw it after the vanishing taillights. He ran forward, then back. Suddenly, he stopped, remembering his stuff, the car, whatever he did have, his smokes. And the can. He could not be caught with the can. However cold it was that May, the ice out but the water still freezing, he’d have to wade partway in and let water fill the can. And after that, as far out as possible, he had surely slung the water-filled tin and now, if I dived down and passed my hands along the muddy, weedy, silty, snail-rich bottom of the lake, there it would be.



My friends found me sitting outside the door of the round house in full sun, still drying off, the gas can placed in the grass before me. I was glad when they came. I had now come to the understanding that my mother’s attacker had also tried to set her on fire. Although this fact had been made plain, or was at least implicit in Clemence’s reaction at the hospital and my father’s account of my mother’s escape, my understanding had resisted. With the gas can there before me, I began shaking so hard my teeth clacked. When I got upset like that, sometimes I puked. This hadn’t happened in the car, in the hospital, even reading to my mother. Maybe I was numbed. Now I felt what had happened to her in my gut. I dug a hole for the mess and covered it with a heap of dirt. I sat there, weak. When I heard the voices and bikes, the drag of Cappy’s braking feet, the shouts, I jumped up and started slapping at my arms. I couldn’t let them see me shaking like a girl. When they got to me I pretended it was the cold water. Angus said my lips were blue and offered me an unfiltered Camel.

They were the best cigarettes you could steal. Star’s man usually smoked generics, but he must have come into some cash. Angus slipped them from Elwin’s pack, one at a time, so he would not get suspicious. For this occasion, he’d taken two. I broke my cigarette carefully in half and shared with Cappy. Zack and Angus shared the other. I dragged on the end until it scorched my fingers. We didn’t speak while we were smoking and when we were done we flicked the shreds of tobacco off our tongues, the way Elwin did. The gas can was a battered dull red with a gold band around the top and the bottom. There was a long, crooked spout. Written in thick black script across a flame shape, bright yellow with a blue center and a white dot in the center of the blue, there was a scratched logo: CAUTION.

I wanna get him, I said to my friends. Watch him burn. They were also staring at the can. They knew what it was about.

Cappy picked a splinter off the broken door and stabbed the ground with it. Zack chewed a piece of grass. I looked at Angus. He was always hungry. I told him I’d brought sandwiches and fished the bag out of my pack to divide them up.

First, we unstuck the bread slices carefully from the peanut butter. Next we tucked in my mother’s famous little crunchy pickles. Last, we closed the sandwiches back up. The pickle juice salted the peanut butter, cut the stickiness so you could swallow each bite, and added just the right hot, sour bite to the nuts. After the sandwiches were gone, Angus drank most of the pickle brine and put the hot red pepper in his mouth. Cappy took the dill and chewed the end of the stalk. Zack looked away—sometimes he was fastidious, and then he would surprise you.

We passed around the water jar and then I told them I had thought of how the attack had happened. Here’s how it went, I said without blinking. He did it here. I tipped my head back to the round house. He did it, then he wanted to burn her inside the place. But his matches got wet. He went over the hill and down toward the lake for dry matches. I told them exactly how my mother had escaped. I said I’d thought that the attacker must have kept some of his stuff in the woods, and that I’d followed the fence posts to the lake and then out into the lake to where he’d sunk the can. I said that he was probably a smoker because he’d gone after the extra matches, or maybe he’d had a lighter. He had to have left something in the woods. If he’d left a pack of stuff out there, he’d maybe even slept out there. He could have smoked, dropped a butt. Or field-stripped the cigarette the way Whitey did, rolling away the threads of the filter, forming the end of the paper into a tiny ball. What we’d look for would be threads, tracks, any foreign material, anything at all.

We all nodded. Looked at the ground. Cappy raised his head, stared at me evenly.

Make it so, he said. Starboy?

Okay, said Angus, whose nickname that was, let’s see what we get.

What we got was wood ticks. Our reservation is notorious for them. We made a grid of the woods, crisscrossed the area from the fence going south along the lake about thirty feet. In the spring, when you hit a tick hole, which is where a huge bunch have hatched, they swarm you. But they swarm slow. You can shake some off but you can’t really crawl them off. We were crawling through tick hole after tick hole.

Zack yelled once, panic in his voice. He jumped up and I could see a few flung off him onto Angus and into Cappy’s shiny hair.

Shut up, you baby! said Angus. Fleas are a hell of a lot worse.

Yeah, fleas, said Zack. Remember when your mom flea-bombed your place and forgot you were inside?

Oh man, they shut the whole place up and flea-bombed the hell out of it, said Angus, squinting at what looked like a bit of plastic wrap, then tossing it. Forgot I was asleep in the corner and left me there overnight. All the fleas jumped onto me for safety and I was only four. They had one last drink of blood and died in my clothes. It was lucky they didn’t suck me dry.

They sucked your brain dry, said Zack. Look what you threw at me. He pinched a matted condom by the edge and swung it back and forth. It had obviously been there through the winter. Older kids made fires on the beach.

I held out the bread bag and Zack dropped in the petrified condom. And then we found dozens more and so many beer cans that Angus brought them to a rock and started crushing them to take back and redeem. What looked from a distance like leafy new undergrowth actually hid a dump. There were countless cigarette butts. The bread bag quickly filled with condoms and butts. There were also candy wrappers and old balls of toilet paper. Either the police did not consider this area relevant, or they had just given up.

People are disgusting, said Zack. This is way too much evidence.

I knelt on the ground with the bread bag. Ticks were crawling all over me. I said we should quit and drown the ticks in the lake. So we left the woods and stripped down on the beach. The ticks were mainly still in our clothes and not many were attached yet, except that Angus had one stuck on his balls.

Hey, Zack, I need some help!

Oh, f*ck you, said Zack.

Cappy laughed. Why don’t you let him stay on till he gets really big? They’ll call you Three Balls.

Like Old Man Niswi, I said.

He really had three. It’s true. My grandma knows, said Zack.

Shut up, said Cappy. I can’t take hearing about your grandma doing it with a three-balled man.

We were in the water now, splashing around diving and mock-fighting. We’d been so hot and sweaty and itchy it felt wonderful. I reached down to make sure no tick had gotten me where that one had got Angus. I went underwater and stayed as long as I could. When I came up, Zack was talking.

She said they tapped against her ass like three big ripe plums.

Your grandma says all kinds of things, said Cappy.

She told me all about it, Zack said.

There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort. Grandma Ignatia Thunder. She had been to Catholic boarding school but it just hardened her, she said, the way it hardened the priests. She spoke Indian and talked about men’s secrets. When she and Mooshum got together to reminisce about the old days, my father said they talked so dirty the air around them turned blue.

When the water numbed us, we got out and made fun of one another’s shriveled dicks.

Zack laughed at me, Aren’t you a little short for a Storm Trooper?

Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?

Zack had a Darth Vader, circumcised, and I did too. Cappy’s and Angus’s still had their hoods, so they were Emperors. We argued over whether it was better to be an Emperor or a Darth Vader—which one girls liked better. We made a fire. We sat around it, naked, on logs already carved with the names of other boys, picking ticks off our clothing and flicking them into the fire.

Worf’s an Emperor, said Angus.

For sure, said Cappy.

Nah, I said. Anyhow, the important one would be Data’s, because they’d give an android the kind girls like best, right? And he would definitely be a Darth Vader. I don’t see him as anything but a Darth.

I think everyone on that ship’s a Darth, said Cappy, except for Worf.

But hey, said Zack, a Klingon? You’d think hung, man, but there’s no bump in his uniform.

Do you question Klingon power? said Cappy, standing up. He looked down. Rise, my friend.

No response. We started laughing at him. Cappy laughed too. After a while, we wished we had another cigarette and we were hungry again. Angus went off to take a piss. He walked into the lake and went around the fence, into the woods.

Holeee, he yelled.

Then he marched out of the woods with two full six-packs of Hamm’s beer. One in each hand. Cappy and Zack whooped with joy. I ran toward him. Every other can we’d crushed or bottle we’d found had been Old Mill or Blatz, the reservation beer of the time. In spite of the dancing, drumming, feather-wearing Indian bear in the Hamm’s commercial, we were a Blatz people.

Drop that, I yelled. Angus froze. He laid the six-packs carefully on the ground.

I think he left those, I said. I think it’s evidence. There will be fingerprints.

Uh . . . I could see that Angus was thinking as fast as he could. He talked fast, too. Does water erase fingerprints? I found these in an open cooler. The beer was covered with water.

You found his stash, I said.

Can I pick up the beer? asked Angus.

I guess, I said.

Can I crack one open?

I looked at my friends. Yeah, I said.

Their hands shot out and pulled cans from the plastic ring.

If there’s no fingerprints then the main evidence is that he is a Hamm’s drinker, I said. Make of that what you will. I took a beer. The can was wet and icy. I held it as I followed Angus back to where he’d found the stash. I said we shouldn’t get too close yet and destroy the evidence, that we should probably crawl up to this thing and collect what we could find all around it.

Crawl? Again? said Angus.

The cooler, cheap Styrofoam, sat against a tree. There was a heap of clothes to one side.

Cappy said that he’d prefer to drink the beer first and get a buzz, then crawl over to gather evidence before he jumped back in the lake and drowned his ticks off again. We drank our beers.

Went down good, said Angus. He attempted to crush his can against his thigh. Ow, he said.

We fanned out and crawled in a circle, closing in on the cooler. It was on the edge of that cow pasture and there were dried cow pies here and there. We’d drunk the beers fast, to get buzzed, knowing that we each had two more waiting, cold, and we’d drink our next beers slower by the fire. The crawling around was definitely easier on us this time, though Angus lifted his leg and flared a boogid at me.

No boogid wars, said Zack.

Aw, said Angus, cracking another fart.

All of a sudden, Cappy tossed a cow pie into the open pasture like a Frisbee and started laughing.

Why did the Indian ignore the cow pie?

Nobody said anything.

He didn’t know shit!

Ha-ha, said Zack. You’re gonna turn into a powwow MC like your dad.

How much is four bucks and four bucks?

An Indian bar fight, groan, said Angus. He lifted his leg but he had no gas left.

It was true that at home Doe, Randall, and Cappy sometimes just sat around inventing bad Indian jokes.

As we crawled along, I noticed us. My skin was very light brown. Cappy’s was more brown. Zack’s a deeper brown. Angus’s was white but already tanned. Cappy was getting his growth, I was next, Zack and Angus were both shorter than me. Between us, we had so many scars that it was hard to count.

How come the four naked Indians in the woods were laughing, said Cappy.

Don’t encourage him, I said.

They got tick-led.

Sore. I laughed. For a handsome guy that girls loved, Cappy was not cool.

Angus was crawling away from me. I kept my distance. His butt was packed with purple marks where his brother had shot him with a BB gun. We were bumbling around at random now, not following any grid. There was hardly any trash on this side of the fence. I’d guessed that the attacker had gone in the lake, too, around the end of the fence, and put his stash away from the beach area. We got close to the cooler and I used a stick to prod at the pile of blankets and clothes.

The blankets were made of crummy polyester. There was a rotted-looking shirt, a pair of jeans. It all stank like behind the Dead Custer Bar.

Maybe we should leave this to the police, I said.

If we tell them, then we have to say we were here, said Zack. They will figure out that I listen to Vince’s radio and phone calls. I’ll be in deep shit.

Also, said Angus, there’s the beer.

Drinking half the evidence doesn’t look good, said Cappy.

Let’s get rid of it all, said Zack.

Okay, I said.

We went back, around the fence, and built up the fire. Then we ran down to the lake and jumped back in and got rid of the new ticks. Zack showed the place where he’d got speared in the armpit. He could have died, they said. The stitches had healed like a tiny white railroad track running mysteriously up his rib, under and along his arm. We put our clothes on and felt normal again. We sat by the fire and popped open the rest of the evidence.

Was his third ball the same size as the other two? Angus asked Zack.

Don’t start that again, said Cappy.

I wonder, I said, if we should even talk to the cops. I mean, they missed the gas can. They missed the cooler. They missed the pile of clothes.

That pile stinks. It smells like piss.

He pissed himself, said Angus.

We should torch that stuff, I said.

My throat burned and I was invaded by a stab of feeling so acute that I wanted to cry—again. Suddenly, we froze. We heard what sounded like a high-pitched eagle-bone whistle up the hill through the riffle of woods. The wind had changed direction, and a series of notes sounded as the air poured through the gaps in the mud chinking of the round house.

Cappy stood up and stared at the round house.

Angus made the sign of the cross.

Let’s bug out, said Zack.

We crushed the Hamm’s cans along with the others, piled them in a piece of plastic, and tied them together to bring back for Angus to sell. Then we put the fire out and buried the rest of the trash. I tied the gas can to my bike with a shoestring and we took off. The shadows were long, the air was cooling off, and we were hungry the way boys get hungry. Irrationally hungry so that everything we saw looked tasty and all we could talk of on the way home was food. Where we could get food, and eat food, a lot of food, and quick. That was our concern. Zack’s mom would be at bingo. Aunt Star was either flush or broke, never in between, and it was a Saturday. By now, she’d have spent what she had and probably not on food. Things were lean that week at Cappy’s house, though his dad possibly had stew. Doe’s bachelor stews were a crapshoot, though. Once he added commodity prunes to his chili. Another time he left some bread dough overnight and a mouse burrowed into it. Randall got a slice with the head and Cappy got the tail. Nobody could find the middle. My friends didn’t mention my house, though before what happened we would definitely have showed up there on a raid mission. Whitey and Sonja’s place was on the way, but I hated it when my friends talked about her. Sonja was mine. So I said they would be working at the gas station. Our other prospect was Grandma Thunder. She lived at the retirement home in a one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. She liked to cook for us; her closet was bursting with commodities that others traded to her.

She’ll make frybread and meat, said Zack.

She always has canned peaches, said Angus. His voice was reverent.

She has her price, said Cappy.

Just don’t anybody bring up balls or say the word twat.

Who would say that word around their grandma?

It could come out by mistake.

Come? Don’t say come.

Don’t even mention cats. She’ll say p-ssy.

Okay, I said. The list of topics not to mention while we stuff ourselves at Grandma’s is balls, cats, pussies, dicks.

Don’t say head, ever.

Don’t say wiinag, don’t say anything that rhymes with the f-word or the word cock.

Don’t say crotch, prick, snatch, you know, like snatch at something. She will take it wrong, believe me.

Don’t say horny, don’t say hard.

Don’t say hot or tit or virgin.

I have to get off my bike, said Angus.

We all did. We put our bikes down. Avoiding one another’s eyes, we mumbled something about going off to take a piss and each went off alone and in three minutes relieved ourselves of all those words and then came back and got on our bikes and continued riding onward, taking the back road past the mission. When we got into town we rode over to the retirement home. I was feeling guilty about having written just LAKE to my dad, so I called home from the lobby. Dad answered on the first ring, but when I told him that I was at Grandma Thunder’s, he sounded glad and told me that Uncle Edward was showing him my cousin Joseph’s latest science article and they were eating some leftovers. I asked, even though I knew, where Mom was.

Upstairs.

She’s asleep?

Yes.

I love you, Dad.

But he had hung up. The words I love you echoed. Why had I said those words and why into the phone just as I knew he was replacing it on the cradle? That I had said those words now made me furious and that my father had not responded singed my soul. A red cloud of anger floated up over my eyes. My head was light with hunger, too.

Come on, said Cappy, coming up behind me, startling me so my eyes filled yet again that day, which was too much.

Shut the f*ck up, I said.

He put his hands up and walked away. I followed him down the hall. Just before we got to Grandma’s apartment I spoke to his back, Cappy, I’m . . .

He turned around. I put my hands in my pocket and scuffed my shoes on the floor. My dad had refused on principle to buy me the type of basketball shoes I had wanted in Fargo. He said I didn’t need new shoes, which was true. Cappy had the shoes I wanted. He had his hands in his pockets too, and he was looking at the floor, ducking his head back and forth. Strangely, he said what I had been thinking, though he lied.

You got the shoes I wanted.

No, I said, you got the shoes I wanted.

Okay, he said, let’s trade.

We traded shoes. As soon as I put his on, I realized that his feet were a size bigger. He walked away from me on pinched feet. He had heard what I’d said on the phone.

We went into Grandma’s and sure enough the meat was already frying, and with an onion. The smell had a wonderful power and my stomach jumped. I wanted to grab anything that I could put in my mouth. There was a stack of jam sandwiches on the table, to tide us over. I ate one. Her back was to the stove and on her table there was a bowl of sweet little dried apples. There was an apple tree behind the senior citizens and Grandma always harvested the apples. She picked every apple out of the tree and she pared the apples into thin slices and dried them out in her oven and sprinkled them with sugar and cinnamon. I ate another jam and white bread sandwich. She had set plates on the table and more paper towels on the plates to soak up the frybread grease.

Wiisinig, she said, without turning around.

I took some apple slices and put them on my tongue. I looked at Cappy. We ate another jam sandwich each and just stood there watching in mesmerized hunger until she started lifting out the frybreads. Then we each took a plate and stood beside her. She took the hot frybreads out of the bubbling lard with tongs and put the lumpy golden rounds on our plates. We said thank you. She salted and peppered the meat. She dumped in a can of tomatoes, a can of beans. We kept standing there, our plates out. She heaped spoons of the crumbled meat mix on top of the frybreads. On the table, there was a block of commodity cheese. The cheese was frozen so it was easy to grate on top of the meat. We were so hungry we sat down right at the table. Zack and Angus were outside, through her sliding doors, in the courtyard. She made their Indian tacos now like ours, called them in, and they sat on the couch and ate.

For a long time, nobody said anything. We just ate and ate. Grandma hummed as she cooked at the stove. She was short and skinny and she always wore a flowery pastel dress, flesh-colored stockings rolled down as if it were a fashion accent to do that, and moccasins that she made herself out of deerhide. Cappy’s two aunts tanned hides in their backyards. Their backyards stank, but the hides came out perfectly. Every summer they gave a soft buckskin to Grandma. Her moccasins were beaded with small pink flowers. She clipped her long, thin, white hair up in a barrette, and wore white shell earrings. Her face was gnarled and sly and her eyes were sharp little shining black marbles. Her eyes were never soft or affectionate, but always alert and cold. This seemed odd for someone who cooked for boys. But then, she had survived many deaths and other losses and had no sentiment left. As we filled up, we ate more slowly. We all wanted to finish at exactly the same time, to eat and run. But Grandma Thunder made us seconds, and we started all over again, eating even more slowly now, still not talking. When I finished, I thanked her and brought my plate to the sink. I was just about to tell her that I had to get home when Mrs. Bijiu came in without knocking. The worst of them all! A hefty, jiggling, loud woman, she took my chair at the table immediately and said, Oooohph!

Eyah, they ate good, said Grandma Thunder.

Top shelf, said Angus.

We must go now, Kookum, said Zack.

Apijigo miigwech, said Cappy. Minopogoziwag ingiw zaasakok waanag. He knew that to really make the old ladies happy, he should talk Indian, even if he wasn’t sure the words were right.

Just listen to that Anishinaabe! They were indeed pleased with him.

Just go . . . , Grandma waved her hand toward the door, satisfied that we had come to her.

This one, this one here, said Mrs. Bijiu, lip pointing at me suddenly, fiercely. He is bony!

Our hearts sank at the word.

Bony! Grandma Thunder’s voice cracked. She reared up in her chair. I’ll tell you who’s got a bone in his pants these days!

Holy Jesus! said Mrs. Bijiu. I know who you’re talking about. Napoleon. That akiwenzii goes scratching around at night and it’s not me who lets the old man in. He’s in good shape, though, never drank. Worked hard all his life. Now gets himself laid by a different woman every night!

You boys listen up, said Grandma Ignatia. You want to learn something? Want to learn how to keep your little peckers hard all your life? Go and go? Live clean like old Napoleon. Liquor makes you quicker and that’s no good. Bread and lard keep you hard! He is eighty-seven and he not only gets it up easy, he can go five hours at a stretch.

We wanted to sneak away but were pulled back by that last piece of information. Maybe we were each thinking of our three minutes in the woods.

Five hours? said Angus.

For he never tomcatted around and wasted his juice, cried Mrs. Bijiu. He was faithful to his wife!

That’s what she thought, said Grandma Ignatia, taking a hankie from her sleeve.

The two started laughing so hard they almost choked and we nearly made it out the door.

In addition, he swears by his secret formula.

Our heads turned back.

Look at them swivel necks, the two old ladies laughed. Should we give them Napoleon’s secret formula?

If the bread and lard don’t work, he takes red-hot pepper, rubs it on his . . . down there. Mrs. Bijiu made a certain hand motion over her lap, so vigorous it made us leap right out the door. The two old women’s cackling excitement followed us down the hall. I thought of what the red pepper had done to Randall and his buddies. No sign whatsoever of Napoleon’s formula at work as they bolted buck-naked across the quack grass.

I think I’d like a medical opinion before I tried the pepper, I said to myself. But Angus heard it. A medical opinion became one of those ridiculous fake-smart lines I got teased for. Joe needs a medical opinion. Joe, have you asked your doctor if you should do that? I knew as we walked down the hallway I’d never hear the end of it, like Oops. Just before we went out the retirement home doors, I said to wait. I took off Cappy’s shoes.

Thanks, I said.

We switched back. But I still believe that if it would have helped me, Cappy would have kept on walking in my tight old shoes.

Endless June summer light and silence in the dirt yards—everyone fallen back into their beds or kitchens as I wandered my bike up the road. Pearl met me as I came around the corner of the house. She stood alert, gazing at me, and never barked. You knew it was me, I said. You did good. She came up to me and wagged her tail just four times. She had a beautiful creamy plume of a tail that didn’t go with the short-haired middle of her—even though it matched her long, furry, wolfish ears. She sniffed at my hand. I scratched her ears until she shook my hand away. She was hungry. I’d taken one of Grandma’s jam sandwiches as I left and now I gave it to Pearl. Inside, I heard voices. I put away my bike and slipped inside. Uncle Edward was still there, in the study with my father. The kitchen was a shambles, so they’d probably fixed themselves a snack. I sneaked in and stopped outside the study. They were talking just loud enough for me to hear them from the couch. I could listen in, then pretend to be asleep if they came out. I could tell right away from the clink of ice, the glasses, that they were drinking together. It would be the Seagrams V.O. from the bottle behind the dishes on the highest shelf. I craned to hear what they would say.

In all the years we’ve been married we have never once slept apart until now, said my father.

This of course both repelled and fascinated me. I held my breath.

She is isolating herself even from Joe. Doesn’t talk to anyone from work, of course. Won’t see visitors, even her old friend from boarding school days, LaRose.

Clemence says she is cutting her off, too.

Geraldine. Oh, Geraldine! She dropped a casserole, then this. Well, I know that wasn’t it. I frightened her, triggered her terror of the event.

The event. Bazil.

I know. But I cannot refer to it.

There was silence. At last my father said, the attack. The rape. I must be going crazy, too, Edward. I keep losing track of Joe.

He’ll be all right. She’ll come out of it, said Edward.

I don’t know. She’s drifting out of grasp.

What about church? said Edward. Would it help if Clemence took her to church? You know what I think about it, of course, but there’s a new priest she seems to like.

I don’t think Geraldine would find comfort there, after all these years.

We all knew that my mother had stopped going to church after she returned from boarding school. She never said why. Clemence never tried to get her to go, either, that I knew of.

What about this new priest, though, my father asked.

Interesting. Good-looking, I suppose. If you like the type. Central casting.

For what?

War movie. B western. Man on a doomed mission. Of all things, he’s an ex-Marine.

Oh god, a trained killer turned Catholic.

A dead silence opened between the two men and went on for so long it suddenly seemed loud.

My father rose. I heard him shuffle about. I heard the silken pour of liquor.

Edward, what do we know of this priest?

Not much.

Think.

Pour me another. He’s from Texas. Dallas. The Catholic martyr on our kitchen wall. Dallas. That’s where this priest is from.

I don’t know Dallas.

More correctly, he’s from a little dried-up town outside of Dallas. He’s got a gun and I saw him out popping prairie dogs.

What? That’s odd for a Benedictine. They strike me as a more genteel and thoughtful bunch.

True, generally, but he’s new, recently ordained. He’s different from—but oh, who remembers Father Damien? And, ah, he’s searching. He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he’s entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply . . . intelligent.

I hope he’s not like the one before him who wrote that scorching letter to the paper about the deadly charms of Metis women. Remember how we laughed about it? God!

If only it were about God. Sometimes when I’m at the Adoration with Clemence, I see double, just like now.

What do you see then?

I see two priests, one dispensing holy water from a silver aspergillum, the other with a rifle.

Just an air rifle, surely.

Just an air rifle, yes. But he was fast with it, deadly, and accurate.

Gopher count?

Dozen or so. All laid out on the playground.

The men paused, thinking, then Edward continued, Still, that does not make him . . .

I know. But the round house. Symbol of the old pagan ways. The Metis women. Setting it all on fire together—the temptation and the crime all burned up as in a fire offering . . . oh god.

My father’s voice caught.

Now Bazil, now Bazil, said Edward. This is just talk.

But I thought the priest’s guilt sounded plausible. That night, from the couch, where I listened and they never knew, I thought I had perhaps heard the truth. All we needed was proof.

I must have fallen asleep for a good hour. Uncle Edward and my father woke me as they passed into the kitchen, rattling their glasses and flipping on and off the lights. I heard my father open the door and say good-bye to Uncle Edward, and I heard Pearl come in. He spoke to her in a calming way. He didn’t sound drunk at all. I heard him pour food into Pearl’s dish. Then her businesslike crunching and gnashing. It sounded like Dad put a dish or two in the sink, but then quit cleaning. He turned off the light. I squeezed back into the couch pillows as he passed, but he wouldn’t have noticed me anyway.

My father was looking so intently at the head of the stairs as he climbed, step by deliberate step, that I crept around the couch to see what he was peering at—a light beneath the bedroom door, perhaps. From the foot of the stairs, I watched him shuffle to the bedroom door, which was outlined in black. He paused there, and then went past. To the bathroom, I expected. But no. He opened the door to the cold little room my mother used for sewing. There was a narrow daybed in that room, but it was only for guests. None of us had ever slept in it. Even when one of my parents had the flu or a cold, they slept in the same bed. They never sought protection from each other’s illnesses.

The sewing room door shut. I heard my father rustling about in there and hoped that he’d emerge again. Hoped he had been looking for something. But then the bed creaked. There was silence. He was lying in there with the sewing machine and the cardboard boxes of neatly folded fabric, with the Peg-Boards he’d screwed to the wall that held a hundred colors of silken thread, with the scissors in graduated sizes, with the neatly coiled tape measure and the heart-shaped pincushion.

I went upstairs and undressed sleepily, but once my head hit the pillow I realized my father hadn’t even made sure I was home. He’d forgotten all about me. I lay in my bed, sleepless, outraged. Over and over, I replayed the day’s events. The day had been packed with treacherous findings and information. I went through it all over again. Then I went farther back, to the night of the dropped casserole. To the mournful tension of repressed feeling as my mother had floated up the stairs, to my father’s hushed anxiety as we read together in the lamplight. With all my being, I wanted to go back to before all this had happened. I wanted to enter our good-smelling kitchen again, sit down at my mother’s table before she’d struck me and before my father had forgotten my existence. I wanted to hear my mother laugh until she snorted. I wanted to move back through time and stop her from returning to her office that Sunday for those files. I kept thinking how easily I could have gotten in the car with her that afternoon. How I could have offered to do that errand. I had entered that furrow of remorse—planted with the seeds of resentment—peculiar to young men.

When I got to the resentment, I resented everything I could think of, including that file my mother had returned for. That file. Something nagged at me. The file itself. No one had mentioned it. Why had she gone back for a file? What was in it? I was back to weak regret. But I would ask her. I would find out more about what had drawn her back on a Sunday. There was, now I remembered it, a phone call. There’d been a call and the sound of her voice answering the call. And then she’d walked around, cleaning things, clattering dishes, agitated, though I hadn’t connected it with the call until now.

Then she’d left, mentioning the file.

Eventually my brain slowed, sifting thoughts into images. I was half asleep when I heard Pearl walk to my bedroom window. Her claws clicked on the bare wooden floor. I turned toward the window and opened my eyes. Pearl was standing fixed, ears pointing forward, her senses focused on something outside. I pictured a raccoon or a skunk. But the patient recognition with which she watched, not barking, wakened me entirely. I crept out of bed to that tall window, the sill just a foot or so from the floor. The moonlight illuminated the edges of things, made suggestions out of shadows. Kneeling next to Pearl, I could make out the figure.

It was standing at the edge of the yard, in the tangle of branches. As we watched, its hands parted the branches, and it looked up at my bedroom window. I could make out its features clearly—the lined, somewhat sour countenance, the deep-set eyes under a flat brow, some dense silver hair—but I could not tell whether this being was male or female, or for that matter, whether it was alive or dead or somewhere in between. Although I was not exactly alarmed, I had the clear notion that what I was seeing was unreal. Yet it was neither human nor entirely inhuman. The being saw me and my heart jumped. I could see that face close up. There was a glow behind its head. The lips moved but I couldn’t make out words except it seemed to be repeating the same words. The hands drew back and the branches closed over it. The thing was gone. Pearl turned in a circle three times and settled herself on the rug again. I fell asleep as soon as I lay my head on the pillow, perhaps exhausted by the mental exertion required to admit that visitor into my consciousness.

My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen. I was up before him. I made myself two pieces of toast and ate them standing, then made two more and put them on a plate. I hadn’t progressed yet to eggs, nor had I learned to mix pancakes. That would come later, after I became accustomed to the fact that I had begun to lead a life apart from my parents. After I began to work at the gas station. My father came in while I was sitting with my toast. He mumbled, and didn’t notice that I gave him no answer. He hadn’t started on his coffee yet. Soon he would be brought to life. He made his brew the old way, measuring the ground coffee into a speckled black enamel camp pot and throwing in an egg to set the grounds. He laid a hand briefly on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. He was wearing his old blue wool robe with the funny gilded crest. He sat down to wait for his coffee and asked if I’d slept well.

Where? I said. Where do you think I slept last night?

On the couch, he said, surprised. You were snoring your fool head off. I covered you up with a blanket.

Oh, I said.

The coffeepot hissed and he got up, turned down the burner, and poured himself a cup.

I think I saw a ghost last night, I told my father.

He sat down again across from me and I looked into his eyes. I was sure he would explain the incident and tell me just how and why I’d been mistaken. I was sure he’d say, as grown-ups were supposed to, that ghosts did not exist. But he only looked at me, the circles under his eyes swollen, the dark creases becoming permanent. I realized that he had not slept well, or at all.

The ghost was standing at the edge of the yard, I said. It looked almost like a real person.

Yes, they’re out there, my father answered.

He rose and poured another cup of coffee to take up to my mother. As he left the room, I experienced an alarm that quickly turned to fury. I glared at his back. Either he had purposely not cared to quiet my fear by challenging me, or he had not listened to me at all. And had he really covered me with a blanket? I had not noticed the blanket. When he came back into the room, I spoke belligerently.

Ghost. I said ghost. What do you mean they’re out there?

He poured more coffee. Sat down across from me. As usual, he refused to be perturbed by my anger.

Joe, he said. I worked in a graveyard.

So what?

There was an occasional ghost, that’s what. Ghosts were there. Sometimes they walked in, looking just like people. I could recognize one occasionally as a person I had buried, but on the whole they didn’t much resemble their old selves. My old boss taught me how to pick them out. They would look more faded out than living people, and listless, too, yet irritable. They’d walk around, nodding at the graves, staring at trees and stones until they found their own grave. Then they’d stand there, confused maybe. I never approached them.

But how did you know they were ghosts?

Oh, you just know. Couldn’t you tell the thing you saw was a ghost?

I said yes. I was still mad. That’s just great, I said. Now we have ghosts.

My father, so strictly rational that he’d first refused the sacrament and then refused to attend Holy Mass at all, believed in ghosts. In fact he had information of ghosts, things he’d never told me. If Uncle Whitey had said these things about ghosts walking around looking like real people, I’d have known he was pulling my leg. But my father had very different ways of teasing and I knew in this case he wasn’t teasing. Because he took my ghost seriously, I asked him what I really wanted to know.

Okay. So why was it there?

My father hesitated.

Because of your mother, possibly. They are attracted to disturbances of all kinds. Then again, sometimes a ghost is a person out of your future. A person dropping back through time, I guess, by mistake. I’ve heard that from my own mother.

His mother, my grandmother, was from a medicine family. She’d said a lot of things that would seem strange at first but come true later in life.

She would have said to watch for that ghost. It could be trying to tell you something.

He put down his cup of coffee and now I remembered that last night he’d slept next to the sewing machine instead of my mother, and that he and Uncle Edward had figured out the priest was a suspect, and that they’d probably figured out even more than I realized because I’d fallen asleep. The priest and the gas can and the pile of stinking clothes and the court cases all collected in a tangled skein. My throat went dry and I couldn’t swallow. I sat there. He sat there. The ghost had come for my mother, or to tell me something.

The last thing I want to know is something that a ghost wants to tell me, I said.

At that moment it struck me that Randall also had seen something similiar, which relieved me. If this ghost, or whatever, was looking for Randall, he could fix it with his medicine. He’d put out tobacco. I would put out tobacco. The ghost would leave, or it might even help my mother. Who knew? She was upstairs with the coffee on her side table, cooling off. I knew she wouldn’t touch the cup and it would be there later on. An oily sheen would have formed on the cold, repugnant stuff. It would leave a black ring in the cup. Everything we gave her came back and left a ring or a crust or went cold or congealed or went hard. I was sick of bringing down her wasted food.

My father bent his head down and rested his forehead on his fist. He closed his eyes. There was the ticking of the clock in that sunny kitchen. Around the face of the clock there was a kind of sunburst. But the rays were plastic squiggles and the thing looked more like a gilded octopus. Still, I kept looking at the clock because if I looked down I would have to see the top of my father’s head. To see the egg-brown scalp and thin patch of gray hairs would put me over the edge. I’d snap, I thought, if I looked down.

So I said, Hey, Dad, it’s just a ghost. We can get rid of it.

My dad reared up and wiped his face with both hands. I know, he said. It has no damn message and it hasn’t really come for her. She’s going to get better, to get over this. She’ll start working again next week. She said something about it. And she’s reading books, I mean she’s reading a magazine anyway. Clemence brought some light reading into the house. Reader’s Digests. But that’s good, isn’t it? The ghost. How do you mean we’ll get rid of it?

Father Travis, I said. He can bless the yard or something.

My father took a sip of coffee and his eyes gauged me over the rim of the cup. I could see an energy fill him now. He was something like his old self. He knew when he was hearing bullshit.

So you were awake, he said. You heard us.

Yes, and I know more, I said. I went to the round house.