The Round House (23 page)

A
h, those first reservation years, when they squeezed us! Down to only a few square miles. We starved while the cows of settlers lived fat off the fenced grass of our old hunting grounds. In those first years our white father with the big belly ate ten ducks for dinner and didn't even send us the feet. Those were bad years. Nanapush saw his people starve and die out, then his mother was attacked as wiindigoo but the men could not kill her. They were nowhere. Dying. But now in his starved condition the rabbit gave him some strength, so he resolved to go after that buffalo. He took up his mother's hatchet and his father's gun.

As he dragged himself along, mile after mile, Nanapush sang the buffalo song although it made him cry. It broke his heart. He remembered how when he was a small boy the buffalo had filled the world. Once, when he was little, the hunters came down to the river. Nanapush climbed a tree to look back where the buffalo came from. They covered the earth at that time. They were endless. He had seen that glory. Where had they gone?

Some old men said the buffalo disappeared into a hole in the earth. Other people had seen white men shoot thousands off a train car, and leave them to rot. At any rate, they existed no longer. Still, as Nanapush stumbled along, mile by mile, he sang the buffalo song. He thought there must be a reason. And at last, he looked down. He saw buffalo tracks! He found it hard to believe. Hunger makes you see things. But after following these tracks for some time, he saw this was indeed a buffalo. An old cow as crazy and decrepit as Nanapush himself would become, and me, and all survivors of those years, the last of so many.

The cold deepened steadily. Nanapush trudged on, following the buffalo's tracks as it staggered into and out of a rough wooded area of brush and heavy cover in which, thought Nanapush, it would surely take shelter. But it did not. It moved out onto a violently flat plain where the wind blew against them both with killing force. Nanapush knew he would have to shoot the cow at once. He gathered every bit of will from his starving body and pushed on, but the buffalo stayed ahead, moving easier than he could against the snow.

Nanapush sang the buffalo song at the top of his lungs, driving onward. And at last, in that white bitterness, the buffalo heard his song. It stopped to listen. Turned toward him. Now the two were perhaps twenty feet apart. Nanapush could see that the creature was mainly a hide draped loosely over rickety bones. Yet she'd been immense and in her brown eyes there was a depth of sorrow that shook Nanapush even in his desperation.

Old Buffalo Woman, I hate to kill you, said Nanapush, for you have managed to live by wit and courage, even though your people are destroyed. You must have made yourself invisible. But then again, as you are the only hope for my family, perhaps you were waiting for me.

Nanapush sang the song again because he knew the buffalo was waiting to hear it. When he finished, she allowed him to aim point-blank at her heart. The old woman toppled over still watching Nanapush in that emotional way, and Nanapush fell beside her, spent. After a few minutes passed, he roused himself and plunged his knife into the underbelly. A gust of blood-fragrant steam stirred him to life and he worked quickly, wrenching away the guts, cleaning out the rib cavity. As he worked, he chewed on raw slices of heart and liver. Still, his hands shook and his legs kept giving out. He knew he wasn't thinking clearly. Then the snow came down. He was caught in the blind howl.

Hunters on the plains can survive a deadly storm by making a shelter of buffalo hide skinned straight off, but it is dangerous to go inside the animal. Everybody knows that. Yet in his delirium, blinded and drawn by its warmth, Nanapush crawled into the carcass. Once there, he swooned at the sudden comfort. With his belly full and the warmth pressing around him, he passed out. And while unconscious, he became a buffalo. This buffalo adopted Nanapush and told him all she knew.

Of course, once the storm had passed, Nanapush found that he was frozen against the buffalo's ribs. He was held fast by solid blood. Nanapush had dragged in his rifle and kept it where he could shoot, so he managed to blast himself an air hole, though he was deafened for days by the explosion. He could not get his gun to work again. He poked the barrel out the air hole to keep it from freezing over, and waited. To keep up his spirits, he began to sing.

After the storm passed, his mother came out to find him. She had saved herself by knocking a porcupine out of a tree. She'd killed it with great tenderness, and singed the quills into its flesh so she got the benefit of every part. She'd started looking for her son when the snow stopped. She even made a toboggan and dragged it along in case he'd been hurt or, in the best case, shot an animal. Soon she spotted the dark, shaggy shape swept half bare of snow. She ran, the toboggan bumping along behind, but when she reached the buffalo, her knees gave in fright, she was so surprised to hear it singing the song she'd learned from the fish. Then her mind cleared and she laughed. She knew immediately how her foolish son had trapped himself. So it was, Akii hacked Nanapush out of the buffalo, laced him onto the toboggan, and hauled him to the woods. There she built a brush shelter and a fire to thaw him out. Then with the toboggan they went back many times and transported every bit of the buffalo back to their family and relatives.

When the men were given meat by the woman they had tried to kill, and the son who had protected her, they were ashamed. She was generous, but took her children and did not go back to her husband.

Many people were saved by that old woman buffalo, who gave herself to Nanapush and his unkillable mother. Nanapush himself said that whenever he was sad over the losses that came over and over through his life, his old grandmother buffalo would speak to him and comfort him. This buffalo knew what had happened to Nanapush's mother. She said wiindigoo justice must be pursued with great care. A place should be built so that people could do things in a good way. She said many things, taught Nanapush, so that, as he lived on, Nanapush was to become wise in his idiocy.

M
ooshum fell straight back, gave a great sigh, and began his soft rattling snore. I dropped off too, as suddenly as Nanapush inside the buffalo, and when I woke I had forgotten Mooshum's story—although I remembered it later on in the day, when my father came to get me, because he said the word carcass. He was very pale and elated, and he was speaking to Uncle Edward, saying,
They've got his damned carcass in custody
. At that moment, I remembered Mooshum's story entirely, vivid as a dream, and simultaneously knew they'd caught my mother's rapist.

Who is he? Who? I asked my father as we walked up our road.

Soon enough, he said.

At home, my mother was up and about, cleaning, darting around the house with a spidery quickness. Then gasping in a chair, collapsed, leaving jobs started or half done. She got up again, no more than a stick figure. She rushed back and forth, refrigerator to stove to freezer. After her long retreat, this flashing energy was upsetting. She'd gone from zero to a hundred miles an hour and that seemed wrong, although my father seemed pleased and busied himself finishing her projects. They didn't notice me at all, so I left.

Now that they had the carcass in custody, now that something was being done, I felt a lightness. I felt like I could go back just to being thirteen and live my summer. I was glad I'd quit the station. I skimmed along the road.

Cappy's house, surrounded too by unfinished projects, stood about three miles east of the Hoopdance golf course. The golf course cut into the reservation, which was an issue between the town and the tribal council yet to be resolved. Did the tribal council have the right to lease tribal land to a golf course that extended off the reservation and gave most of its profits to non-Indians? And who was responsible if a golfer was struck by lightning? If this issue had come before my father, I was not aware of it, but everybody thought that Indians should get to golf there for free—which of course they couldn't. Sometimes Cappy and I biked over there to look for lost golf balls, which we planned to sell back to the golfers. When I got to Cappy's and suggested this, though, he said he wanted to do something else but he didn't know what. I didn't know what either. So we biked to Zack's and Angus was there and the four of us were together.

T
he lake beach closest to town had a church on it—or to be more accurate, the church blocked access. The church owned the road to the beach and kept up a cattle gate that could be locked. After the gates, there were signs—no alcohol, no trespassing, no anything. At the Catholic beach there was a faded-out statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by rocks. She was draped with rosaries, one of which belonged to Angus's aunt. Because of that rosary, I believe we felt we had the right to be there. Of course, as the Catholic church was given the land in a time of our desperation, the very time when Nanapush shot the buffalo, it was true that we not only had a right but owned the land, the church, the statue, the lake, even Father Travis Wozniak's little house. We owned the graveyard that stretched up the hill behind it and the lovely old oak woods pressing in on those graves. But own or not own the whole outfit, once we got there by brazenly riding up the hill, jumping the cattle guard, and racing for the beach, we encountered Youth Encounter Christ—YEC.

As we rode past, they were sitting cross-legged in a circle on the far side of the mowed grass. I could see at a glance they were a mixture of reservation kids, many I knew, and strangers who were probably summer volunteers from Catholic high schools or colleges. I'd seen these volunteers traveling in packs, in their bright orange T-shirts with black sacred heart images printed on the chest. Most people who would talk to them were converted already, which must have been a disappointment. Anyway, we slid past and left our bikes down by the dock. We bushwhacked around a corner to another slice of beach that was more private.

Let's hide our pants, said Angus, in case one of them shows up to steal our clothes. Clothes stealers did not exactly show up, but after we'd been in the water skinny-dipping, horsing around for half an hour, we did get two visitors. One was a tall, stoop-chested dirty blond guy, older, probably in college, with the worst zits you ever saw. The other, well, she was the opposite of him. She was I guess you'd say a dream. Which was what we called her afterward. Dream Girl. Caramel skin. Soft wide eyes of velvet brown. Straight brown fall of hair held back by cute headband. Shorts. Shapey. Breasts that delicately pushed at her ugly orange sacred heart T-shirt. I was relaxing on my back looking at the sky when all of this happened. I turned over and saw my friends were gone. They'd moved closer in to shore and were standing in waist-high water, chopping at the wavelets with their hands. Cappy was slicking back his hair as he talked and suddenly I noticed that he looked much older and stronger than Zack or Angus or me. I swam in, stood up beside my friends.

So I'm gonna ask you again to leave, said pimple guy.

And I'm gonna ask you again how come, said Cappy.

Once again, just to be clear—the YEC guy paused and lifted his first finger and pointed at heaven, a gesture which Angus copied ever after that day. This beach is reserved for church-authorized activities, said YEC. I'm asking you politely to leave.

Naw, said Cappy. We don't wanna go. He squirted water up through his closed fist in a jet. He was squinting lazily at Dream Girl. She hadn't said anything. But her eyes were on Cappy.

What do you think? He nodded at her. Do you think we should go?

Dream Girl said in a clear voice, I think you should go.

Okay, said Cappy, if you say so. And he walked out of the water.

I looked sideways at Cappy as he strode past. His dick hung heavy between his legs. There was a scream. It was from the guy.

Go back!

Then pimple boy rushed forward to grapple Cappy back into the water. Cappy pushed him off and Dream Girl walked away, but she took a good look back. Cappy kicked the God Squadder's legs out from under him, reached around with a wrestler's move, and started dunking him. He didn't dunk him hard, no worse than we did fooling around, but the guy screamed again and Cappy quit.

Hey, man, Cappy held onto his shoulder. The pimple guy puked in the lake and we moved away from him. I'm sorry, man, said Cappy. He reached out to pat the orange back, but the guy's face went a terrible dead purple and we could hear his back teeth grind.

He's shittin' mad or something, Cappy said. And just like that the guy flipped over and began thrashing wildly and jerking his head and he would have drowned right there if we hadn't grabbed him and carried him up onshore. We laid him out. I was the only one with socks. I rolled one up and stuck it in his mouth. We took turns holding the guy, talking to him, and at the same time getting dressed, quick. He quit seizuring and I removed the sock. We sent Angus up to get Father Travis.