Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  But since my father was embarrassed because I saw him on the floor, I had to go to bed. My mother gave me a sympathetic look but said nothing. I turned to go up to my room but my father stopped me.

  “David.”

  “Yes.”

  “If Grandpa should come here when I’m not home, you’re not to let him in, understand?”

  “What should I say?”

  “You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t answer the door. It’ll be locked. Front and back both.”

  “What about Grandma?”

  My father blinked and tilted his head back the way you do when you’re trying to keep tears from spilling over. “Not Grandma either.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Not until I tell you different.”

  That night I cried for the first time since that whole sad, sordid, tragic set of events began. My tears, however, were not for Marie, whom I loved, or my uncle, whom I once idolized, or for my parents or grandparents or for my community or my life in it—all, all changed, I knew, by what had happened. But that night I cried myself to sleep because I believed that I would never see my horse, Nutty, again. I remembered the way he lowered and twisted his head when I approached, as if he were waiting for me to whisper something in his ear, that long ear whose touch reminded me of felt. I remembered how I used to rub my fingertips against the grain of the tight, short hair of his forehead and then smooth the hair back down again. I remembered how, when I first put my foot in the stirrup, he seemed to splay out his legs slightly, as if he were lowering himself and bracing for my mount. One of the great regrets of my childhood had always been that I couldn’t live on the same grounds as my horse. Now the distance between us seemed too great for either Nutty or me to travel ever again.

  The next day was hot and windy. My mother stayed home from work, and though she said it was because she had a headache, I knew that was not the reason. She was staying home so I wouldn’t have to be alone in the house with Uncle Frank. Early that morning my father took breakfast down to Frank and stayed down there about half an hour. When he came up he said to my mother, “I’m going to see what other arrangements we can make.”

  Around ten o’clock my mother sent me to the grocery store, and within a few minutes of walking out of the house that morning I noticed that a change had occurred.

  I was a Hayden. I knew, from the time I was very young and without having been told, that that meant something in Bentrock. Because my grandfather was wealthy and powerful, because my father—like his father before him—enforced the law, because my uncle treated the sick and injured (and—am I wrong in mentioning?—because their wives were beautiful), people had an opinion about the Haydens. In their homes, in the cafes and bars and stores, they talked about us. When one of us passed on the street, there were sometimes whispers in our wake. They may not have liked us—perhaps Grandfather bought someone’s foreclosed ranch cheap or let his cattle graze someone else’s range, or perhaps he or my father sent someone’s brother or cousin to the state penitentiary, or perhaps we were simply too prosperous for that luckless, hardscrabble region—but our name was no joke. We were as close as Mercer County came to aristocracy. I never consciously traded on the Hayden name, yet I knew it gave me a measure of respect that I didn’t have to earn.

  But as I walked down our tree-lined street that morning, I imagined, behind every curtain or pulled shade, someone peering out and seeing a Hayden and thinking not of power, wealth, and the rule of law, but of perversion, scandal, family division, and decay. If the citizens of Bentrock didn’t know yet that my father had arrested his own brother for sexually assaulting his patients and murdering Marie Little Soldier, they would know soon enough. Then being a Hayden would mean having an identity I didn’t want but could do nothing to disown or deny.

  By the time I got to Nash’s Grocery Store, my shame over my family name was so great I didn’t want to go in. I finally got my courage up by convincing myself that it was too early for all the details of our scandal to have made the rounds yet. Still, I picked up the items my mother wanted and left as quickly as I could.

  On my way out I almost ran into Miss Schott, riding down the street on one of her big palominos. Miss Schott had been my second-grade teacher (everyone’s second-grade teacher was probably more like it), and since she had retired from teaching she devoted herself full-time to what had been her hobby—breeding, raising, and showing blue-ribbon palominos that were as fine as any in Montana.

  She was a strong, stout, cheerful woman who, now that she was no longer teaching, always dressed in boots, dungarees, a bandana-print shirt, and a sweat-stained short-brimmed cowboy hat that looked too small for her big head. She lived just outside town, and she rode one of her horses in every day to check her post office box or to run errands. No one in Bentrock was ever surprised to hear the heavy, slow clop-clop of Miss Schott riding down one of the town’s streets, or to see one of her tall, golden palominos tied up along the side of Nash’s Grocery or in the alley behind the Hi-Line Hotel, or to smell the horse’s steaming turds in any of the town’s gutters.

  It is commonplace to refer to the narrowness and intolerance of small-town life, but it seems to me just the opposite is true, at least of Bentrock, Montana, in 1948. The citizens of that community tolerated all kinds of behavior, from the eccentric to the unusual to the aberrant. From Miss Schott and her palominos to Mrs. Russell, who was a kleptomaniac (storekeepers kept track of what she stole and then once a week Mr. Russell, the president of the bank, went around and reimbursed them), to Arne Olsen, a farmer, who never (never) bathed and was proud of the fact, to Mr. Prentice, the band director at the high school who liked his boy students better than he liked his girl students, to old Henry Sandstrom, who shot mourning doves in his backyard, cooked them, and ate them. To my uncle Frank who molested his patients. How many other secrets had our town agreed to keep?

  When Miss Schott saw me, she greeted me cheerily, “Good morning, David. Is the summer flying by for you too?”

  I couldn’t answer her.

  I remembered that she had once been Uncle Frank’s patient. I couldn’t recall the reason or how I had even acquired this knowledge—another overheard conversation, perhaps—yet it was the one fact at the moment that pushed aside all others. I looked up at her astride her horse, and all I could think of was—What did Uncle Frank do to you? Did he touch you there? There? What did he put inside you?

  And then Loretta Waterman, a pretty high-school girl whose father owned the drugstore, walked by, her moccasins scuffing the sidewalk, and she waved to me or Miss Schott or Miss Schott’s horse, and I forgot about what Uncle Frank might have done to my former teacher and instead I wondered about Loretta, Did you go to Uncle Frank? Did he make you take off all your clothes? Did he look at you there? And there?

  I began to feel at once dizzy and ashamed and sick because this time, with Loretta, the thought of how Uncle Frank may have abused her did not disgust and anger me as it had with Miss Schott, but stirred me sexually.

  I didn’t want to feel any of what I was feeling. I hugged my sack of groceries and ran home.

  Once I was in the house, my mother said, “Look at you. All red in the face.”

  I jerked my head in the direction of the basement door. “How long is he going to be here?”

  “Not long. You know your father’s working on that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then what what?”

  “What’s going to happen after he leaves?”

  My mother put her finger to her lips and whispered her reply. “I imagine there will be a trial.”

  “Grandpa will just get him off. He can get everybody to do what he wants.”

  She shrugged and went back to slicing cucumbers. “You might be right about that.” As an afterthought, she added, “But not everybody.”

  “So what’s it all for?”

  “We’re—your father is doing what’s right.”

  “But we’re the ones gettin
g the shitty end of the stick.”

  Usually language like that would get me sent to my room. My mother didn’t even look up from her knife’s work. “You might be right about that too.”

  I was the first to notice the truck circling the house. From my bedroom window I saw it drive through the alley in back, along the railroad tracks. Four men were in it, two in the cab and two standing in back.

  After it went by a second time, slowly, I ran downstairs to see it go by in front as well. I crouched below the living room window and peeked over the sill—I didn’t want them to see me—and when it went by this time I recognized one of the men. Dale Paris, the foreman at my grandfather’s ranch, was in the passenger seat, his bare arm crooked out the window, his cap pulled low. Dale Paris was the only cowboy I knew who never wore a hat but instead a red-and-black checked wool cap, earflaps tied up in summer and down in winter. I didn’t know much about the man. He was simply a lean, silent presence on the ranch. My only contact with him had occurred when I came back from riding Nutty long and hard one day, and because I was in a hurry or lazy or both I simply unsaddled him and put him back in the stall. I was on my way out when Dale Paris stepped out of the shadows, grabbed my arm hard, and said, “Your horse needs wipin’ down.”

  The other men in the truck were probably also employees of my grandfather. If that were so, it didn’t take much reasoning to figure out why they were in town. They had come for Uncle Frank. How did they plan to get him? I didn’t care to speculate that far.

  My mother caught me peeking out the window. “What are you so interested in out there?”

  I felt I should protect her, though from what I wasn’t yet sure. “Nothing,” I replied.

  My answer didn’t satisfy her, and she pushed the curtain aside in time to see the truck pass, close to the curb and driving so slowly you could hear the engine lug in low gear.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  She looked at me a long time as though she knew I had the answer. When I couldn’t resist the power of her gaze any longer, I said, “I think they’re from Grandpa’s ranch. I saw them drive down the alley.”

  Without a word, my mother spun and went toward the kitchen, where she could look out the back window. Each of us at our respective posts—I in front and she in back—we kept careful watch on the circling truck. It drove around the house two more times before stopping in the alley. That was when my mother called me to the kitchen.

  “Who are they?” she asked again. “You know. Tell me.”

  I looked out the window again even though I knew who she was talking about. The truck was parked along the railroad tracks, at the end of our yard, and straight out from the house. The men who had been riding on the truck’s bed had gotten down and were standing by the cab, talking to the man in the passenger seat.

  “I think that’s Dale Paris,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “He works for Grandpa.”

  One of the men standing by the truck pointed toward the house, and the other man nodded. I knew what they were noticing. The people who owned the house before us had once planned to finish the basement and rent it out as an apartment. Toward that end they had built a rear entrance, steps going down to a door into the basement. These men must have figured, with Grandpa’s help, that Frank was in the basement, and that rear door was the way they were going in after him.

  The two men in the pickup got out. My mother clapped me on the shoulder. “Call your father,” she said. She remained at the window, as if it was important that she not take her eyes off the four men.

  I gave the operator the number of my father’s office—two, two, three, two—and when Maxine, my father’s secretary, answered, I asked for him.

  “He’s not here, honey,” she said in her Louisiana drawl. Maxine Rogers and her husband came to Montana in the 1920s, in one of the first waves of oil-drilling exploration. After her husband’s death, Maxine went to work for my grandfather, and she had been in the sheriff’s office ever since. She was a short, wiry woman full of what I took to be Southern charm. She had a streak of snow-white hair running from her forehead to the top of her head that I always associated—totally without reason—with her husband’s death. He was struck by lightning on a butte west of town. Maxine wasn’t anywhere near him when it happened.

  “It’s important,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Couldn’t say for sure. Haven’t seen him for an hour or so. You might try Mr. Paddock’s office.”

  “How about Len? Is he there?”

  “Haven’t seen him all morning.”

  “If my dad comes in, please tell him to come over to the house.”

  I turned to ask my mother the number of the state attorney’s office, but she was gone. The wind gusted, the curtains reached into the room, and when I looked out the window I saw four men crossing our lawn.

  They walked abreast of each other but spaced out so that together they took up almost the entire width of the yard. Three of the men were dressed identically in straw cowboy hats, white T-shirts, blue jeans, and boots, so they looked like some strange uniformed team crossing the lawn in formation.

  They came on slowly, looking about, as if they expected to be stopped at any time. I looked for weapons—rifles or shotguns or pistols—but saw none. Dale Paris, however, had an axe, and he carried it loosely at his side, the axe head swinging close to his leg.

  Before I could turn or call out to my mother that the men were approaching, she came back into the room.

  She was carrying my father’s shotgun and a box of shells. She put the box on the kitchen table, opened it, and took out two shells.

  “Dad’s not in his office. Len either.”

  She turned the shotgun over, looking for something, holding it awkwardly across her forearms and wrists, trying to cradle it, to balance it. When she found what she was searching for, the loading chamber, she tried to push in a shell. When she couldn’t get it in, I said, “You have to pump it open.”

  She pulled back on the pump—the quick, smooth, oily clatter of steel on steel—and put in the shells. She pushed back up on the pump and the gun was ready to fire.

  “It’ll hold five,” I told her.

  She gestured to the box. “I’ve got more.”

  The sight of my mother lo ading that shotgun was frightening —yes—but also oddly touching. She was so clumsy, so obviously unsuited for what she was doing that it reminded me of what she looked like when she once put on a baseball glove and tried to play catch with me. I wanted to rush over to her, to help her, to relieve her of the awful duty she had taken up.

  “It’s got a tremendous kick,” I said. “If you fire it you really have to brace yourself.” I took a step forward. “Why don’t you let me—”

  “Get out of here!” she snapped. “Go! Go over to the courthouse. Find your father. Find someone!”

  Before I left I looked out the window once more. The four men were closer, but they had not reached the house. They had closed their rank and were now side by side. I could see Dale Paris’s face clearly, sharp, intent, wind-bitten. One of the other cowboys laughed about something, and Dale Paris shut him up with a word and a scowl as quick and definite as a coyote’s snarl.

  My mother still stood a few paces back from the window, but she hefted the shotgun up, holding it right below her breast, and pointed it toward the window.

  “The safety,” I said and reached up close—close enough to embrace her—and clicked the safety off. “You’re ready.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the backyard.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Just go! Out the front door.”

  I ran across the street, took the stone courthouse steps two at a time, pulled open the door—everything, the steepness of the stairs, the weight of the door, seemed to slow me down. I ran up another flight of stairs to the opaque glass door with the stenciled black letters “Mercer County State’s Attorney.
” I pulled the door open with such force the glass rattled in its frame.

  Flora Douglas, the secretary, was there, stacking reams of paper inside a cabinet. She was perhaps in her sixties, a round-faced, large-jawed woman whose severe look was made even harsher by her rimless spectacles and her steel-gray hair pulled tightly back in a bun. In truth, she was a kind, gentle woman—unmarried and childless—who had doted on me since she baby-sat me as an infant.

  “Hello, David.” Her gold-backed teeth glistened when she smiled.

  “Is my dad here?”

  “He was here earlier. About an hour ago.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Is Mr. Paddock here?”

  She shook her head and shrugged helplessly.

  “If my dad comes back, will you tell him to come home right away?”

  “I sure will.”

  I ran from the house, down the stairs, and toward the jail in the basement. As fast as I was moving it seemed agonizingly slow when I thought of Dale Paris and the other men in our yard.

  Maxine was at the counter out front where people paid their parking tickets. She was counting manila envelopes and whispering numbers to herself so she wouldn’t lose count.

  “My dad back?” I panted.

  She popped her Beeman’s gum before answering. “Not yet, honey.” She went back to her count.

  “Could you call him on the radio please?”

  “He’s not in his car. I thought he was someplace in the building.”

  “Is Len here?”

  “Still haven’t seen him.” She finished the stack, and when she looked up at me she must have seen something she hadn’t noticed before. “My God, David. What is it? Has something happened? Is it your mom?”

  I was already backing away. “Just tell him to come home. Please. Right away.”