The Round House (11 page)

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.

M
y 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 Digest
s. 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.

Chapter Five

The Naked Now

W
hen the warm rain falls in June, said my father, and the lilacs burst open. Then she will come downstairs. She loves the scent of the lilacs. An old stand of bushes planted by the reservation farm agent bloomed against the south end of the yard. My mother missed its glory. The flimsy faces of her pansies blazed and then the wild prairie roses in the ditches bloomed an innocent pink. She missed those too. Mom had grown her bedding plants from seeds every year I could remember. She'd had her paper milk carton planters arranged on the kitchen counter and on the sills of all south-facing windows in April—but the pansy seedlings were the only ones that lived to get planted outside. After that week, we'd forgotten to take care of all the others. We found the spindly stalks dried to crisps. Dad had dumped the seedlings and dirt in the back and burned the bottoms of the milk cartons with the trash, destroying signs of our neglect. Not that she noticed.

The morning I told my father about the round house, he pushed his chair back, stood, and turned from me. When he turned around, his face was calm and he told me that we'd talk later. We were going to put in my mother's garden. Now. He'd bought expensive bedding plants from a tumbledown hothouse twenty miles off the reservation. Cardboard flats and plastic trays were set out in the shade. There were red, purple, pink, and striped petunias. Yellow and orange marigolds. There were blue forget-me-nots, Shasta daisies, lavender calendula, and red-hot poker flowers. Dad gave me directions. I set the plants one by one into the flower beds. She had a tractor tire painted white and filled with dirt, and matching rectangles of dirt beside the front steps. I added lobelia and candytuft to the pansies in the narrow beds that lined the driveway. I kept all of the flimsy plastic plant markers for her to see. From time to time, as I worked, I thought of the files. The ghost. The bits and pieces of confusion. The round house. I was beginning to dread the talk with my father. The files again. And the nagging thought of the priest, then the Larks, then the priest again. Behind the house her vegetable garden lay—still heaped with straw. After I'd planted the flowers, I went around back of the house to stack the plastic pots and put away the tools.

Keep those out. We're going to turn over the dirt in your mother's vegetable garden, said my dad.

For what?

He just gave me back the shovel I had dropped, and pointed to the edge of the yard, where onion sets and tomato sprouts and packets of bush bean and morning glory seeds waited. We worked together for another hour. When we'd finished with half the soil, it was time for lunch. He left to buy the rest of the plants. I went inside. I was supposed to watch over my mother. I looked around the kitchen. There was a tin of minced ham on the counter, a key fixed to the top to roll the cover back. I made myself a sandwich, ate it, and drank two glasses of water. There was a package of cookies with red jam in the center. I ate a handful. Then I made another sandwich and put it on a plate with two cookies to decorate it. I walked upstairs with the plate of food and a glass of water. Pearl had learned to watch for and wolf down food left outside the bedroom door, so we always brought it into the room now. I balanced the plate on top of the glass of water, and knocked. There was no answer. I knocked harder.

Come in, said my mother. I went in. It had now been over a week since she had walked up those stairs, and the bedroom had taken on a fusty odor. The air was heavy with her breath, as if she'd sucked out the oxygen. She kept the shades pulled. I wanted to set the sandwich down and run. But she asked me to sit.

I put the sandwich and water on the square bedside table from which I had removed so many stale sandwiches and half-drained glasses and bowls of cold soup. If she'd eaten anything I'd not seen it. I dragged a light chair with a cushioned seat close to the bed. I assumed that she wanted me to read to her. Clemence or my father chose the books—nothing sad or upsetting. Which meant the books were either boring romances (Harlequin) or old
Reader's Digest Condensed Books
(better). Or those
Favorite Poems
. Dad had checked “Invictus,” and “High Flight,” which I'd read. They made my mother emit a dry laugh.

Now I reached forward to switch on her bedside lamp—she wouldn't want the shade drawn up, light to pour through the window. Before I could touch the switch, she gripped my arm. Her face was a pale smudge in the dim air, and her features were smeared with weariness. She'd become weightless, all jutting bones. Her fingers bit hard into my arms. Her voice was fuzzy, as if she'd just woken.

I heard you two. What were you doing out there?

Digging.

Digging what, a grave? Your father used to dig graves.

I shook her arm off and drew back from her. The spidery look of her was repellent, and her words so strange. I sat down in the chair.

No, Mom, not graves. I spoke carefully. We were digging up the dirt in your vegetable garden. Before that, I was planting flowers. Flowers for you to look at, Mom.

Look at? Look at?

She turned over, away from me. Her hair on the pillow was greasy strings, still black, just a few streaks of gray. I could see her spine clearly through the thin gown, each vertebra jutted, and her shoulders were knobs. Her arms had wasted to sticks.

I made you a sandwich, I said.

Thank you, dear, she whispered.

Do you want me to read to you?

No, that's all right.

Mom, I need to talk to you.

Nothing.

I need to talk to you, I said again.

I'm tired.

You're always tired, but you sleep all the time.

She didn't answer.

It was just a comment, I said.

Her silence got to me.

Can't you eat? You'd feel better. Can't you get up? Can't you . . . come back to life?

No, she said immediately, as if she'd thought about this too. I can't do it. I don't know why. I just cannot do it.

Her back was still turned and a slight tremor began in her shoulders.

Are you cold? I stood and drew the blanket up over her shoulders. Then I sat back down in the chair.

I planted those stripey petunias you like. Here! I emptied my pockets of the little plastic identifying sticks, scattered them on the bed. Mom, I planted all different kinds of flowers. I planted sweet peas.

Sweet peas?

I hadn't really planted sweet peas. I don't know why I said it. Sweet peas, I said again. Sunflowers! I hadn't planted sunflowers either.

Sunflowers will get huge!

She turned over in bed and stared at me. Her eyes were sunk in gray circles of skin.

Mom, I've got to talk to you.

About the sunflowers? Joe, they'll shade out the other flowers.

Maybe I should plant them in another place, I said. I've got to talk to you.

Her face dulled. I'm tired.

Mom, did they ask you about that file?

What?

She stared at me in sudden dread, her eyes riveted to my face.

There was no file, Joe.

Yes, there was. The file you went to get on the day you were attacked. You told me you went to get a file. Where is it?

The dread in her face became an active fear.

I didn't tell you. You imagined that, Joe.

Her lips trembled. She coiled in a ball, put her shrunken fists to her mouth, and squeezed her eyes shut.

Mom, listen. Don't you want us to catch him?

She opened her eyes. Her eyes were black pits. She did not answer.

Mom, listen. I'm going to find him and I'm going to burn him. I'm going to kill him for you.

She sat up suddenly, activated, like rising from the dead. No! Not you. Don't you. Listen, Joe, you've got to promise me. Don't go after him. Don't do anything.

Yes, I'm going to, Mom.

This jolt of strong reaction from her triggered something in me. I kept goading her.

I'll do it. There is nothing to stop me. I know who he is and I'm going after him. You can't stop me because you're here in bed. You can't get out. You're trapped in here. And it stinks. Do you know it stinks in here?

I went over to the window and was about to pull the shade up when my mother spoke to me. What I mean is, my before-mother, the one who could tell me what to do, she spoke to me.

Stop that, Joe.

I turned away from the window. She was sitting up. There was no blood in her face at all. Her skin had a pasty, sunless quality. But she stared at me and spoke in an even and commanding tone.

Now you listen to me, Joe. You will not badger me or harass me. You will leave me to think the way I want to think, here. I have to heal any way I can. You will stop asking questions and you will not give me any worry. You will not go after him. You will not terrify me, Joe. I've had enough fear for my whole life. You will not add to my fear. You will not add to my sorrows. You will not be part of this.

I stood before her, small again.

This what?

All of this. She swept her arm toward the door. It is all a violation. Find him, don't find him. Who is he? You have no idea. None. You don't know. And you never will. Just let me sleep.

All right, I said, and left the room.

As I descended the stairs my heart grew cold. I had a sense that she knew who had done the thing. For sure, she was hiding something. That she knew who did it was a kick in the stomach. My ribs hurt. I couldn't get my breath. I kept walking straight into the kitchen and then out the back door, into the sunshine. I took great gulps of sunshine. It was as though I had been locked up with a raging corpse. I thought of ripping out every single flower I had planted and of stomping those blossoms into the earth. But Pearl came up to me. I felt my anger blazing out.

I'm going to teach you to play fetch, I said.

I went over to the edge of the yard to pick up a stick. Pearl trotted across the yard with me. I reached down and got the stick and straightened up to throw it, but a blur swept by and the stick was wrenched violently out of my hand. I whirled around. Pearl was standing a few paces away with the stick in her mouth.

Drop it, I said. Her wolf ears went back. I was mad. I walked over and grabbed the stick to take it from her mouth but she gave a meaningful growl and I let go.

All right, I said. So that's your game.

I walked a few feet away and picked up another stick. Brandished it to throw. Pearl dropped her stick and streaked toward me with the clear intention of tearing off my arm. I dropped the stick. Once the stick was on the ground, she sniffed at it, satisfied. I tried once more. I bent down to pick the stick back up and just as I closed my fingers on it Pearl stepped up to me and caught my wrist in her teeth. I slowly released the stick. Her jaws were so powerful she could have snapped the bone. I stood warily, my hand empty, and she released my arm. There were pressure marks, but not a tooth had broken flesh or scratched me.

So you don't play fetch, I see that now, I said.

My father pulled up then and took another cardboard flat of expensive nursery plants out of the car's trunk. We took them out back and set them alongside the vegetable garden plot. For the rest of the afternoon, we took off the old straw, then spaded and raked black earth. We sifted out the old roots and dead stalks and broke up the clods so the earth was fluffy and fine. The dirt was moist deep down below the surface. Rich. I began to like what I was doing. The ground drained my rage. We lifted out the pot-bound plants and gently loosened the roots before we set them in holes and packed the dirt around their stems. Afterward, we hauled buckets and watered the seedlings and then we stood there.

My father took a cigar from his front pocket, then looked at me and replaced it.

The gesture made me mad all over again.

You can smoke that if you want to, I said. I'm not gonna start. I'm not gonna be like you.

I waited for his anger to snuff mine out but was disappointed.

I'll wait until later, he said. We have not finished talking, have we.

No.

Let's put the lawn chairs out.

I set up two lawn chairs where we could overlook our work. While he was gone, I got the empty gas can out from under the steps and I put it underneath my chair. Dad brought out a carton of lemonade and two glasses. I knew from the length of time it took that he'd taken a glass upstairs, too. We sat down with our lemonade.

You don't miss a damn thing, Joe, he said after a time. The round house.

I took the gas can from under my chair, and set it between us on the ground.

My father stared down at it.

Where . . . ? he said.

This was straight down through the woods from the round house. About fifteen feet out, in the lake.

In the lake . . .

He'd sunk it in the lake.

Almighty God.

He reached down to touch the can, but drew his hand back. He put his hand on his chair's aluminum armrest. He squinted out at the neatly planted little seedlings in the garden, then slowly, very slowly, he turned and stared at me with the unblinking all-seeing gaze I used to think he turned on murderers before I found out he only dealt with hot dog thieves.

If I could just tan your hide, he said, I would do that. But it just . . . I could never do you harm. Also, I am pretty certain that if I did tan your hide the hiding wouldn't work. In fact, it might set your mind against me. It might cause you to do things secretly. So I am going to have to appeal to you, Joe. I am going to have to ask you to stop. No more hunting down the attacker. No more clue gathering. I realize it is my fault because I sat you down to read through the cases I pulled. But I was wrong to draw you in. You're too damn inquisitive, Joe. You've surprised the hell out of me. I'm afraid. You could get yourself . . . if anything happened to you . . .

Nothing's going to happen to me!

I had expected my father to be proud. To give me one of his low whistles of surprise. I'd expected that he would help me plan what to do next. How to set the trap. How to catch the priest. Instead, I was getting a lecture. I sat back in my chair and kicked at the gas can.