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.
Chapter Five
The Naked Now
When 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