The Round House

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.