Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  When Ollie Young Bear was with us, however, I felt like a child. Ollie could not keep from giving me instruction or correcting my game. Make sure you bring the ball straight back, he would say. Follow through. Use a five-step approach, keep your eye on the spot and not the pins. He was relentless in his criticism, and my father would simply say, “Now listen to what Ollie’s telling you. Do you know what kind of average he’s carrying in league play? Two-ten. You listen to what he’s telling you.” I know my father was trying to show his esteem for Ollie and his lack of prejudice, but the only thing that was accomplished was that going bowling began to seem an awful lot like going to school.

  When I saw my father and Ollie Young Bear sitting together at a table away from the others in the cafe, I knew my father was asking Ollie if he had heard anything about Uncle Frank molesting Indian girls. Was he asking the right man? I wondered. Although Ollie Young Bear was much admired by the white population, he had no special status among the Indians. In fact, I once heard Marie say of Ollie, “He won’t be happy until he’s white.” Both Ollie and my father leaned over the table, their coffee cups between them, their voices low.

  I left my friends at the counter and crossed the room to say hello to my father.

  As I walked toward them, Ollie Young Bear was the first to notice me. He stopped talking and sat up straight, and then both of them stared at me. Neither smiled nor gave any sign of recognition, and I felt as if I were moving down a long chute, as if I were livestock, a horse, a sheep, a calf, being inspected as I walked. At that moment I knew that as long as this business was going on with his brother, my father had no use for a son. I could come and go as I wished; he wasn’t about to notice me.

  When I got to the table, my father said, “What can I do for you, David?”

  By way of explanation I pointed to my friends at the counter. “We were fishing....”

  My father reached for his billfold. “You need some money.”

  “No, that’s okay.” I backed away. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  He managed a smile. “Are you going home? Look in on Marie, will you? Make sure she’s taken her medicine.”

  When I got home Marie’s door was open slightly but she was sleeping, as she almost always seemed to be since she’d gotten sick. Her bottle of pills and a glass of water were beside the bed, so I assumed she had taken what she was supposed to. I didn’t want to wake her.

  I was in the house for a few minutes when I felt something was wrong, yet I wasn’t sure what it was. Then it struck me. It was the silence.

  On our kitchen counter was a small Philco radio, its once-shining wood case now dull and riven with tiny hairline cracks in the varnish (on the top there was a darker brown ring where something—either a tube inside or a hot object outside—had burned a perfect circle). The radio wasn’t on and probably hadn’t been for a couple days, and when Marie was there she always had the radio on, usually tuned to a Canadian station that played Big Band music. To this day when I hear one of those television commercials urging us to send in $19.95 to get all the hits of the Big Band era—The Glen Miller Band, Artie Shaw and His Orchestra, Paul Whiteman, Kay Kaiser, Duke Ellington—or when I hear even a few bars of that music—“String of Pearls,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “Satin Doll”—I think of Marie. But I do not send my money in. My memories are strong enough—and painful enough—without prodding them further.

  I turned the radio on and raised the volume, hoping that Marie would be able to hear her music when she woke.

  That night, after we had eaten dinner and my mother had fixed soup for Marie, my father stood at the kitchen table and said, “Gail, maybe you and David would like to go for a walk. I want to speak to Marie again.”

  My mother began to stack dishes but my father stopped her. “Those can wait. I want to talk to Marie right now. While she’s awake.”

  “She might want me here. She might feel more comfortable.”

  “Yes, she might, but I’m afraid Marie’s comfort isn’t what’s important now. This is something that has to be done. You and David go outside.”

  Since he had questioned Marie before when I was in the house I figured that this time it was my mother he didn’t want around. But she didn’t seem to understand, and she persisted. She said, “There might be some ways I can help.”

  By this time my father had retrieved a small notebook from the pocket of his suit coat. He stopped flipping its pages to say to my mother, “Did you hear me, Gail? Some of this I’d just as soon you didn’t hear.”

  Was he being gallant—sparing his wife from hearing the particulars of his brother’s alleged crimes? Or was he protecting his brother and keeping the number of witnesses to the accounts of his crimes to a minimum?

  My mother and I didn’t go far. That was all right. She wasn’t much for taking walks and I was child enough to think I was too old to go for walks with my mother. We stayed in the backyard, though it was big enough that if we did nothing but walk up and down its length we could have gotten our exercise.

  We stood in the middle of the yard while a gusty wind that lowered the temperature twenty degrees in less than an hour whipped my mother’s hair in front of her face and wrapped her skirt tight against her legs. A cool front was moving through—sure to ruin the fishing, the local fishermen would say. My mother shivered and folded her arms. “I should have brought a sweater,” she said.

  “Do you want me to get you one?”

  “No,” my mother said sharply. “No. You stay out of there. Your father’s doing . . . official business.”

  I swallowed hard. I had already decided that I was going to ask my mother, once we were alone out there, why my father was talking to Marie. I knew the reason, of course, yet I wanted my knowledge out in the open. I wanted to be included, to know more than what my eavesdropping brought me. I supposed I wanted adult status, to have my parents discuss this case in front of me, not to have to leave rooms or to have people shut up when I came near, or worst of all, have them speak in code as if I were a baby who could be kept in ignorance by grown-ups spelling words in his presence.

  Yet now that I had the opportunity, alone with my mother, my courage was running out. I wasn’t sure which prospect was more unsettling: that she wouldn’t tell me anything and would scold me for prying, or that she would reveal everything and I would have to hear that story coming from my mother’s lips.

  Finally I emboldened myself enough to ask a quick, awkward, suitably vague question: “What’s going on, anyway?”

  My mother kept her face turned to the wind but had closed her eyes against the blowing dust.

  “Oh, there’s some trouble going on with the Indians. Possible trouble, I should say.” Now she was as cautious as my father.

  “Why does he have to talk to Marie? When she’s sick.”

  She took a long time in answering. Obviously her mind was elsewhere, somewhere off with the wind. “He thinks Marie might have some information.”

  “I thought the BIA handled Indian problems.”

  “He’s just helping, dear. It’s not so much.”

  “It’s not so much” was a phrase my mother inherited from her mother. I had heard Grandma Anglund use it for occasions ranging from a scraped knee (mine) to a family burned out of its farm. It was her Norwegian way of keeping all our earthly affairs from achieving too much importance.

  My mother wandered a few steps away and stopped next to the one tree we had in our backyard, a towering, spreading oak exactly in the center of the lawn—precisely in the spot that kept the yard from being a boy’s perfect football field.

  “I love the wind,” she said, tilting her head up to catch as much of it on her face as she could. “It reminds me of North Dakota. My goodness, how Dad used to curse the wind. ‘Carrying away the topsoil,’ he’d say. ‘Giving it to South Dakota.’ But I always loved it, that feel of rushing air. Bringing something new, was the way I felt.”

  “Makes good fishing,” I said. “Riffles the water so t
he fish can’t see you.”

  She turned a slow circle. “But the wind has a different smell here. In North Dakota it always smelled like dirt. Even in the middle of winter with all that snow there could still be the smell of dirt in the air. As if the wind came from some open place that never froze. But here the wind smells like the mountains. Like snow. Like stone. No matter how far away the mountains are, I still feel them out there. I can’t get used to it. I never will. I guess I’m a flatlander at heart.”

  Had I any sensitivity at all I might have recognized that all this talk about wind and dirt and mountains and childhood was my mother’s way of saying she wanted a few moments of purity, a temporary escape from the sordid drama that was playing itself out in her own house. But I was on the trail of something that would lead me out of childhood.

  “Is Marie in trouble?” I asked. “Is Ronnie?”

  “What? Oh, no. No, nothing like that. Your dad just wants to see if she can give him some information. Answer some questions.”

  I looked back at the house. I could see, in the kitchen window, my father’s form. I wondered how long he had been watching us. “He’s out,” I said. “We can go back in.”

  My mother turned and waved in my father’s direction. If he saw he gave no sign, yet he remained in the window.

  “The sun must be in his eyes,” she said.

  “Let’s go in.”

  “You go ahead. I’m going to stay out here for awhile.”

  “And sniff the wind?”

  She laughed. “Something like that.”

  The following Sunday the wind that my mother loved was still blowing as we drove out to my grandparents’ ranch. We were traveling in our new Hudson that my father bought that year, and even that big, heavy boat rocked slightly in the wind once we were out in open country. It was a hot day, yet we had to keep the windows rolled up to keep the dust and grit from blowing into the car.

  Marie felt a little better, so we thought it might be all right to leave her for the day. Besides, Daisy was right next door, and she would look in on Marie. Later in the afternoon Doris Looks Away, a friend of Marie’s, was going to stop by the house.

  Neither of my parents spoke as we rode, and the silence in the car was as oppressive as the heat. I knew why they weren’t talking. My mother wanted to refuse the dinner invitation because Uncle Frank and his wife would be there. My parents tried to keep their quarrels from me, but that morning I had heard my father say, “For Christ’s sake, Gail. They’re my parents. What am I supposed to do—break off with them too?” “You don’t have to curse,” was my mother’s only response. The next thing I knew, we were getting into the car. The excursion was all right with me. I hadn’t been out to the ranch in a while, and I was eager to see my horse and to spend as much of the day riding as I could.

  As soon as we turned off the highway and onto the rutted, washboard road that led to my grandparents’, loose gravel and scoria began to clatter under the car. A thick cloud of red-tan dust rose behind us. Almost shouting, my father said, “I’ve been thinking. What would you two think of taking a few days later this month and going down to Yellowstone? Camp out. See the geysers.”

  “A real vacation,” my mother said. “The mountains.”

  “Why not,” my father said, as he held the jiggling steering wheel with both hands. “Why not us?”

  It wasn’t much of an exchange, but I knew what it meant: my parents were no longer fighting. I also knew we wouldn’t go to Yellowstone. My father disliked conflict so much that he would frequently make a promise or a suggestion—like a family vacation—intended to make everyone feel better. Unfortunately, often he did not keep the promises.

  When we pulled up in front of the ranch house, Uncle Frank’s truck was already there. Covered with the day’s dust, the Ford looked even older and more battered than usual. “They’re here,” my mother said softly.

  My grandparents’ house was built of logs, but it was no cabin; in fact, there was nothing simple or unassuming about it. The house was huge—two stories, five bedrooms, a dining room bigger than some restaurants, a stone fireplace that two children could stand in. The ceilings were high and open-beamed. The interior walls were log as well. And the furnishings were equally rough-hewn and massive. Leather couches and armchairs. Trestle tables. Brass lamps. Sheepskin rugs on the floors and Indian blankets on the walls. Hanging in my grandfather’s den were two gun cases, racks of antlers from deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and antelope, and a six-foot rattlesnake skin. One of the few times I heard my father say anything disparaging about his parents was in reference to their home. He once said, as we drove up to the house, “This place looks like every Easterner’s idea of a dude ranch.” (For a Montanan there was no greater insult than to have your name associated with the term “dude.”) My mother, who disliked ostentation of any sort, was especially offended by the house’s log construction—usually symbolic of simplicity and humility. (Her parents’ house was a very modest two-story white farmhouse—neat, trim, pleasant, but revealing nothing of the occupants’ prosperity.)

  And I?—I loved that house! It was large enough that I could find complete privacy somewhere no matter how many others were in there. The adults might be downstairs playing whist while I crept around upstairs, toy gun in hand, searching from room to room for the men who robbed the Bentrock First National Bank.

  When I slept over I was given a second-floor bedroom with wide, tall windows that faced north, and I sat at those windows and picked out the Big and Little Dippers, the only constellations I could identify. Or I imagined that the wide porch was the deck of a ship and the surrounding prairie the limitless sea.

  Grandpa stood on the porch to greet us. He was dressed in his Sunday rich ranch owner best—white Western shirt and string tie, whipcord trousers, and the boots that were handmade in Texas. He was alone, and while we got out of the car he watched us as impassively as he would strangers. He had his hands thrust in his back pockets, and his big belly stuck out like a stuffed sack of grain. His legs were spread wide, as if he were bracing himself. He wore his white hair longer than most men—over the tops of his ears, curling over his shirt collar, and with bushy sideburns almost to his jowls. As he stood there the wind lifted his hair and made his large head seem even larger.

  It was the first time I had seen Grandpa Hayden since I heard about Uncle Frank, and when I saw him towering there like a thundercloud I thought, he won’t let anything happen to his beloved son. He won’t. But what if it’s his other son who’s trying to do something....

  “Can I go down to the stable?” I asked.

  “You certainly may not,” my mother said. “You come in first and greet your grandparents and find out how long until dinner.”

  My mother lifted a cake pan from the front seat. When he saw it, Grandpa Hayden said in his booming voice, “What have you got in there? Damn it, Enid said you didn’t have to bring a thing.”

  “Hello, Julian,” my mother said as she stepped onto the porch. “I thought you liked chocolate cake.”

  Grandfather took the pan from her. “Don’t even take it in there. Hell, they don’t have to know about it. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “What are you doing out here, Pop?” asked my father. “Acting as the official welcoming committee?”

  “Came out here to fart. I had sausage for breakfast, and I’m not going to stay in the house any longer and squeeze ‘em in. Can’t do it.”

  My mother took the cake pan back and went into the house. She hated talk about bodily functions even more than she hated swearing. Both were specialties of my grandfather.

  My father took up a position at the porch rail next to Grandfather. “That wind’s something,” my father said.

  “If you don’t like wind,” Grandfather replied, “you don’t like Montana. Because it blows here 360 days a year. Better get used to it.”

  That was another of my grandfather’s specialties—turning casual remarks so they became opportunities for hi
m to pass on his judgments or browbeating opinions. I was about to go when my father turned around, stared at the house, and asked softly, “Pop, where’s Frank?”

  “He’s in there poking and twisting your mother’s shoulders. Trying to figure out if she’s got bursitis. Hell, I know she’s got bursitis.”

  “Can I ask you something, Pop?”

  I had my hand on the handle of the screen door while my father watched me, waiting for me to go in before he continued. I went in the house but stayed right by the door so I could hear what my father said.

  “It’s about Frank....”

  Yes, tell him, I thought. Tell Grandfather. Tell him, and he’ll take care of everything. He’ll grab Uncle Frank by the shoulders and shake him so hard his bones will clatter like castanets. He’ll shake him up and shout in Frank’s face that he’d better straighten up and fly right or there’ll be hell to pay. And because it’s Grandfather, that will be the end of it. Frank would never touch a woman like that again. Tell him.

  My father cleared his throat. “About him and Gloria not having kids.... You’ve got to go easy on that, Pop. They want kids. They’re trying.”

  “You know that, do you? Frank tell you that?”

  “Not right out, but—”

  “They sure as hell look healthy. Glo might be tiny but she’s got enough tit for twins. What’s the problem? He’s a goddamn doctor. He ought to be able to figure it out.”

  “Pop. Listen to yourself.”

  My grandfather’s boot heels thunked on the porch planks. “Your mother and I thought we’d have more to show than the one grandchild. Nothing against Davy. But Christ—just the one? From both of you?”

  “You know what she went through with David. After that we decided—”

  “—and white,” Grandfather interrupted. “We want them white.”

  The silence was so sudden and complete I thought at first that they saw me and that was why they quit talking. But I didn’t move; if I did they’d see me for sure.