Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  While these thoughts were gusting through my brain, my father and his brother had come closer to each other. The next thing I knew they were shaking hands. I put the gun back inside my waistband. My father and Uncle Frank walked off together, their broad shoulders almost touching.

  We left for Bentrock after dark, and I took my customary place in the backseat, where I could lean back and watch the stars out the back window. The wind had died and the night was clear. My parents were silent in the front seat until we were halfway to town. Then my father said without prelude, “I talked to Frank.”

  “Wes!” My mother whispered sharply and looked in my direction. I didn’t move.

  “It’s okay,” my father replied. Whether he thought I was asleep or that he wasn’t going to reveal anything, I wasn’t sure.

  My father went on. “I think the problem’s been taken care of. Frank said he’s going to cut it out.”

  “Oh, Wes-ley!” Her words came out in a moan, and I almost gave myself away by leaning forward to see if my mother was in pain.

  “What?” my father replied, his confusion apparent and sincere. “What is it?”

  “What about what’s already been done? What about that, that ... damage?”

  “It can’t be undone. That’s passed. That’s over and done.”

  My mother’s voice became so low and tender it seemed better suited for an expression of love than what she actually said. “That’s not the way it works. You know that. Sins—crimes—are not supposed to go unpunished.”

  Even then I knew what the irony of the conversation was: the secretary lecturing the lawyer, the law-enforcement officer, on justice.

  My father was silent for such a long time I thought the conversation was over. At last he said, “He’ll have to meet his punishment in the hereafter. I won’t do anything to arrange it in this life.”

  When we arrived home Doris Looks Away was still there, and she and Marie were sitting in the living room drinking coffee. Marie was wrapped in a blanket, but she said she felt stronger. She still had a cough, but it was not as tight and wracking as it had been. My mother felt Marie’s forehead and pronounced the fever still present, but obviously it had gone down. Her eyes had lost that unfocused, feverish gleam, and her cheeks no longer looked inflamed but merely ruddy.

  Uncomfortable in our presence, Doris left almost immediately. Marie announced that she was going back to bed. Before she left the room she turned to me and asked, “Did you ride today, Davy?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you ride far?”

  I nodded again.

  “And did you see a coyote?”

  How did she know I was given a pistol for hunting coyotes? “No,” I said, “but I was looking.”

  “He’s hard to see when you look for him.”

  Those were the last words Marie spoke to me. The next day, Monday, August 13, 1948, Marie Little Soldier was dead. My mother came home from work at 5:15 and found Marie lying dead in her bed. By the time I came home at 6:00 (I had spent the day fishing with Georgie Cahill), the hearse—a Buick station wagon from Undset’s Funeral Parlor—was backing out of our driveway and carrying Marie’s body away. Uncle Frank’s pickup was parked in front of the house. On the courthouse lawn across the street stood a few onlookers, and Mr. and Mrs. Grindahl next door were on their porch, staring at our house as if it might burst into flames at any second. From somewhere on the block came the steady ratcheta-ratcheta of a lawn mower—someone who didn’t know that for the moment all usual activity had ceased.

  When I saw the car from Undset’s, I did not run to our house in fear or curiosity. I didn’t have to. I knew, I knew immediately what had happened. What’s more, I could have walked right past our house, down the length of Green Avenue and right out of Bentrock. I could have kept going and never returned, out of my town, away from my family, away from my childhood. I could have kept going and taken with me the truth of what had happened in that house. No one else knew, and I could keep going until I found a place where I could bury that secret forever.

  But I didn’t. I walked slowly up the driveway and into the garage. I hung up my fishing pole and tackle box and the stringer of freshly caught perch and bluegills and went into the house.

  Everyone was still in the kitchen. My father was on the telephone. “Yes, that’s right,” he was saying. “Could you please tell her that. That’s right. She’s at Undset’s now.” My mother sat at the table. She was slumped and staring at the floor, but she had one hand on the tabletop and her fingers were tapping rapidly. Those two actions—the body slumped and the fingers tapping—seemed so mismatched it was as if they belonged to separate bodies. Uncle Frank leaned over the table, filling out a form of some kind. His medical bag was on the table too, and seeing it there where we ate our meals I realized how large it was, how if its black mouth opened, it could swallow all the light in the room.

  The door to Marie’s room was partially open, and I saw her bed. The blankets and sheets had been stripped, and the mattress was tilted up off the box springs and rested on its edge on the floor.

  My mother saw me and reached out to me with one arm; the hand with the drumming fingers remained on the table as if her arm was paralyzed.

  I stepped into my mother’s embrace, and as I did she leaned her head against my torso in a way that made it clear I was the one offering comfort.

  “It’s Marie,” she said. “She didn’t make it, David.”

  My father hung up the phone, and I looked at him. “She’s dead, David. That’s what your mother means. Marie died this afternoon.”

  I smelled like fish. That’s what I kept thinking. I smelled like fish, and that was the reason I didn’t belong in this room. It was that and not the secret I held, the fearful knowledge. . . .

  The back screen door slammed and Daisy McAuley burst into the kitchen. “My God! My God! What is going on here?”

  My father repeated the words he spoke to me. “Marie’s dead, Daisy. She died this afternoon.”

  “Oh, my Lord! Oh no! Why, I looked in on her yesterday afternoon. She was doing much better.”

  Uncle Frank finished his form and stood up so straight he seemed to be at attention. “This happens,” he said to Daisy. “Pneumonia patients can have a sudden relapse, their lungs fill quickly. . . . Or the heart can fail from the strain of dealing with the disease. And there may have been a preexisting condition. We don’t know. I see this much more often, however, in older patients.”

  I saw the document that Uncle Frank had been filling out. Across the top it said in bold letters “Mercer County Certificate of Death.”

  “I also have the feeling,” Uncle Frank continued, “that she may not have been doing as well as she wanted us to believe. I think the Indian way is to deny illness, to try to push through in the face of it.”

  “Her fever was down, I know that,” said my mother.

  Uncle Frank shrugged. “A fever can fluctuate dramatically.”

  Daisy sunk down so hard onto a kitchen chair that it scraped a few inches across the linoleum. “That poor thing. That poor young thing.”

  “Pneumonia is still a serious disease,” Uncle Frank said sternly. “Very serious. We mustn’t lose sight of that.”

  My father stood by the refrigerator with his back to us. He ran his index finger up and down the woven basket that covered the motor on top of the refrigerator. “I couldn’t reach any of Marie’s family. No answer at home or at the stepfather’s bar.” He turned around and I saw he had been crying. “I’m going to drive out there. They have to be notified as soon as possible. . . .”

  “What about Ronnie?” my mother asked.

  My father nodded. “I’ll get in touch with him too. And Doris. But Marie’s mother first. She has to be the first.”

  He moved toward the door, car keys in hand. “Do you need anything?” he asked my mother.

  She shook her head. “Just hurry back.”

  “I won’t take any longer than I have to.”
>
  This was my chance. I could ride along with my father and, when we were alone, tell him what I knew. But my mother still had her arm around me, and until she let go it didn’t seem right to leave. Besides, he was going to face more grief, and this room held all I could handle. (I hadn’t realized until that moment how large a part of my father’s job this was. When someone’s son rolled his pickup on a county highway, or someone’s father shot himself climbing over a fence when he was deer hunting, or when some woman’s husband dropped dead of a heart attack in a hotel down in Miles City, it was my father’s duty to notify the family. Or when a drunk lay down on the tracks right in the path of a Great Northern freight train, it was my father’s job to find out if he had any family. To this day I cannot hear that phrase—“pending notification of next of kin”—without thinking that someone out there, someone like my father, is toting around a basket of grief, looking for a doorstep to deposit it on. To think I once believed the hardest part of his job would be the dangerous criminals he might face.)

  Right after my father left, Uncle Frank excused himself, saying he had to look in on Janie Cassidy, who had an unusually severe case of chicken pox. My mother did not get up to see him out.

  Daisy reached out toward my mother and patted the back of my mother’s hand. “You took good care of her,” said Daisy. “That girl got the best care she could get right here in this house.”

  My mother released me and put her hand on top of Daisy’s. “I could have stayed home from work. I could have looked in on her earlier....”

  Daisy urgently placed her other hand on top of my mother’s so it looked as though they were playing that baby’s game of mounding hands, pulling the bottom one out and placing it on top. “You don’t talk like that,” Daisy told my mother. “You took good care of that girl. Good care.”

  Then Daisy must have seen something in my mother’s eyes, because she turned to me and said, “David, are you hungry? You must be hungry. . . . Why don’t you go over to our house and help yourself to pie. I’ve got a fresh blueberry pie on the kitchen table. You go get yourself some before Len eats it all.”

  I didn’t move. The next time Daisy spoke it was not a suggestion but a command. “Go. And help yourself to ice cream. Have all you like.”

  Because Daisy kept the curtains drawn and windows closed to keep the heat of the day out, the McAuley house was dark and stuffy. The house always had a strange smell, as though Daisy had found some vegetable to boil that no one else knew about.

  I stood over the pie, wondering how I could make myself eat a slice when I had no appetite.

  From another room a voice called out, “Who’s there?” It was Len.

  I went into the living room, where Len sat in an overstuffed chair, his long legs extended. In the room’s dimness Daisy’s white lace doilies on the sofa and chairs glowed white, as if they were hoarding all the available light.

  On the table beside Len was a glass of whiskey. I recognized its brown color and smelled its smoky-sweet odor in the room. This was a bad sign. At one time Len had been a heavy drinker, given especially to week-long benders when he would plunge so deeply into a drunken gloom that it seemed unlikely he would ever climb out. In Bentrock Len McAuley was so well liked and respected that everyone was relieved when he quit drinking. I felt as bad seeing that glass of whiskey as I had when I’d first heard Marie cough.

  He turned his gaze to me. It seemed, to my untrained eye, steady and clear. But it remained on me a little too long before he greeted me.

  “David. Quite a commotion over at your place.”

  “Marie died.” The words—and the fact they conveyed—popped out so easily they startled me.

  Len nodded solemnly. “Yes. I believe I’m aware of that. Yes.”

  The room’s heavy, dusky air seemed to insist on silence, and speaking was a struggle. “My dad’s going out to talk to her family.”

  Len continued to nod. “Yes. Your father would do that. Yes.”

  I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that would serve as an exit line. And then it was hopeless. Len kicked their old horsehair hassock—the first sudden move he had made—and as it tumbled my way he said, “Sit down, David.” I couldn’t refuse.

  Len stared at me for a long time, and though his gaze was steady there was something unfocused about it, as if an unseen dust in the room was clouding his vision.

  He took a swallow of whiskey and that seemed to start his tongue. “You know, David, how I feel about your family.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have this job. Deputy sheriff.” He looked down at his shirt as though he expected to see his badge there. “Which I owe to your granddad and your dad. You know what your granddad said it means to be a peace officer in Montana? He said it means knowing when to look and when to look away. Took me a while to learn that.” Len leaned forward and pointed a long, gnarled finger at me. “Your dad hasn’t quite got the hang of it. Not just yet.”

  He slumped back in his chair and looked intently around the room at floor level as if he were watching for mice or insects. I had heard about drunks and their pink elephants and I wondered if he was hallucinating. I wanted more than ever to get away, but there was something tightly wound even in Len’s casual posture—slumped shoulders and long legs extended—that made me think he was feigning repose and inattention, and as soon as I made a move to leave, his booted foot would suddenly trip me up or a long-fingered hand would pull me down.

  He stopped looking around the room and fixed his eye on the carpet in front of his feet. “Long time ago I wanted to say something to your granddad. . . . I wanted to tell him, don’t let those boys run wild. Just because we’re out here, a thousand miles from nowhere, you think it doesn’t matter. Out here, nothing but rimrock and sagebrush. You think no one’s going to care. But those boys have to live in the world. Rein ‘em in a little. Don’t break them, but pull ‘em back. But I didn’t. Never said a word. Now look at them.” He jerked his head up as if he actually saw my father and uncle in the room. “A lawyer and a doctor. College and the whole kit. Sheriff and a doctor. . . . Your granddad could tell me a thing or two....”

  For an instant something parted, as if the wind blew a curtain open and allowed a flash of sunlight into the room. Did Len know what I knew?

  I leaned forward. “Did you see something, Len?”

  He sat up straight and peered at me as if he weren’t sure of my identity. “Did you?” he asked.

  There it was, my opening! Now I could unburden myself, find someone else to carry this freight. Certainly Len could be trusted. But there was that glass of whiskey and its odor of sweet decay on his breath.... What if we weren’t talking about the same thing?

  I jumped to my feet. “I forgot the pie! I was supposed to get the pie!”

  Len smiled wearily. “Look after your mother. This’ll be a hard time for her.”

  Was Len in love with my mother? The thought never occurred to me until I wrote those words. But now I remember all the small chores and favors he did for her around our house—planing a sticking door or fixing a leaky faucet, bringing her the pheasants he shot or the fish he caught. The way he removed his hat when he came into our house and fiddled with it, creasing and denting the crown, running his finger around the sweatband. Well, why not. Why not say he loved her? Why not say his was one more heart broken in this sequence of events?

  That night I thought I felt death in our house. Grandmother Hayden, a superstitious person, once told me about how, when she was a girl, her brother died and for days after, death lingered in the house. Her brother was trampled by a team of horses, and his blood-and-dirt-streaked body was laid on the kitchen table. From then until the day he was buried my grandmother said she could tell there was another presence in the house. It was nothing she could see, she said, but every time you entered a room it felt as though someone brushed by you as you went in. Every door seemed to require a bit more effort to open and close. There always seemed
to be a sound—a whisper—on the edge of your hearing, something you couldn’t quite make out.

  As I had so often been advised by my parents, I never believed any of my grandmother’s supernatural stories. Until the day Marie died. That night I lay in bed and couldn’t breathe. The room felt close, full, as though someone else was getting the oxygen I needed.

  I turned on the light and got slowly, cautiously, out of bed and opened my window wider. That brought no relief. The curtain stuck tight to the screen as if the wind was in the house blowing out.

  Close to panic, I went to my parents’ room. From the doorway I called softly, “Dad?”

  In a voice so prompt and calm I wondered if he had really been asleep, my father answered, “What is it, David?”

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “What is it you thought you heard?”

  I peered into the darkened room. My father was still lying down.

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

  The sheets rustled and my mother sat up. “Is something wrong?”

  “I thought I heard something. Nothing. It wasn’t anything.”

  “Come here, David,” said my father.

  As I approached the bed he sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He patted the bed beside him. “Sit down.”

  I sat down and my father rubbed my back, massaging the thin band of muscle on either side of my spine. “What’s the trouble? Can’t sleep?”

  Just that little gentleness, that little thumb-rub below my neck, was all it took, and the words spilled out of me. “I saw something....”

  “Really? ” His voice was steady and low. “I thought you said you heard something.”

  “I mean earlier. This afternoon.”