Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  I didn’t want to be there when Uncle Frank came up. What were we supposed to say to him? Did you miss your wife? How do you like our basement? Are you glad to be out? Yet I couldn’t walk away. As long as my mother stayed, I felt I had to as well. I wasn’t protecting her—I no longer had any illusions that I could play that role—but I stayed out of loyalty. I wasn’t sure what our family had become in those troubled days, but I knew we had to stay close together. We had been under siege. We had to shore up the walls of the family as best we could.

  Then the waiting was over. Footsteps thudded up the stairs, dull booms that could be mistaken, if one hadn’t heard the real thing so recently, for a series of tiny shotgun blasts.

  But two men did not come through the door. It was my father alone, sputtering as if he had come up from underwater. Before my mother could say anything, my father waved his hand in disgust.

  “I’ll move him over to the jail first thing in the morning,” said my father.

  My mother let her head drop forward.

  “He’s guilty as sin, Gail. He told me as much.” My father struck himself on the thigh with his fist. “Goddamn it! What could I have been thinking of? Maybe a jury will cut him loose. I won’t. By God, I won’t.”

  My mother got up from the table and began to work. She set the sugar bowl, the butter, and a loaf of bread on the table. She was on her way to the refrigerator when my father stopped her. “Did you hear me? This is the way it’s got to be. I’m sorry.”

  She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “I’m not arguing with you, Wesley.”

  “You don’t think I wish it could be some other way?” my father asked belligerently. “He’s my brother—we grew up together, sucked the same tit!”

  She slammed the refrigerator. “Wesley—”

  “I don’t care. I tell you, if you could hear him talk. As if he had no more concern for what he did than if . . . if he had kicked a dog. No. He’d show more remorse over a dog.”

  “Marie?”

  My father nodded grimly. “Don’t ask how.”

  She pressed her hand over her mouth, to hold back a curse or because she was gagging on what my father told her. Or on what he wouldn’t tell her and what her imagination filled in.

  “Do you see?” asked my father. “I can’t let him loose. Not and live with myself.”

  My parents’ usual roles had neatly reversed themselves. My mother now represented practicality and expediency; my father stood for moral absolutism. Yet when I looked at my father his expression was so anguished that it didn’t seem possible that he was arguing on principle.

  “We understand, Wesley,” my mother said gently, but I knew her words would do nothing to diminish his suffering.

  “David,” my mother said clearly and calmly, a different voice for a different world. “We don’t have anything to eat. Why don’t you run down to Butler’s and get some of those frankfurters, and I’ll boil them. That’ll be quick.”

  She wanted me out of the house. That I knew. But she tried to soften that banishment with a little gift. The food I loved more than any other was the frankfurters from Butler’s Butcher Shop. She gave me five dollars. “And when you go by Cox’s, if you see one of those lemon cakes in the window, why don’t you get one. Or anything else that looks good to you.”

  Before I left the house I turned back to look at my parents. They had not collapsed into each other’s arms as I thought they might. They were simply standing in the kitchen. My father had his arms folded and stared blankly at the floor again. But my mother was looking at him, the expression in her eyes tender and loving and frightened, the same look she lowered on me when I was sick.

  I suddenly felt a great distance between us, as if, at that moment, each of us stood on our own little square of flooring with open space surrounding us. Too far apart to jump to anyone else’s island, we could only stare at each other the way my mother stared at my father.

  That night the jars began to break.

  I woke around 1:00 a.m., startled but unsure of what had roused me. Then I heard it, a distant pop and a faint clinking. I searched the dark, not because I thought the sound was in my room, but because I felt, in my sleepy groping, that activating any of my other senses might help my hearing.

  There it was again—that ringing-tinkling—plainly glass breaking. But where? What was happening?

  I got out of bed to look out my window but before I got there I knew the noise wasn’t coming from outside. No, this was in the house. It was coming from the basement! From Uncle Frank!

  I ran to my parents’ room. Their door was open and the light was on, so I had no reluctance about walking right in.

  They weren’t there. Their pillows still held the indentations of their heads, and the blanket and sheet formed an inverted V in the middle of the bed, suggesting that they had both thrown away the covers from their own side of the bed. I ran out of the room and to the head of the stairs.

  I stood there waiting, listening.

  Another faint shatter of glass.

  Was it a window? Was Uncle Frank breaking one of the windows, hoping he could crawl out the high, narrow opening and escape through one of the window wells? Had my parents gone to stop him?

  No, there was no possible way he could squeeze through one of those windows.

  Another crash.

  At the bottom of the stairs the darkness lost some of its thickness and strength—a light was on somewhere downstairs. Was it my parents? Uncle Frank? Someone come again to break him out, someone who broke our windows to get in?

  I ran downstairs, hitting each step as hard and loud as I could, hoping to embolden myself as much as to frighten off whoever might be there.

  My father and mother, in their pajamas, were sitting on the couch. They were not touching each other, and they looked frightened and tired, like children who have been awakened during the night for an emergency.

  “Dad,” I said, “I heard—”

  “I know,” he interrupted. “The canning jars.”

  “He’s smashing them,” my mother needlessly added.

  “He’s got into the root cellar,” said my father. “He must be breaking every jar in there.”

  “All my jars of tomatoes and rutabagas. The pickles. The plum jelly. The applesauce. That corn relish you like so much.”

  Another jar popped below us, and now that I knew what the noise was from I could make some distinctions among the sounds. The higher-pitched pops were the small jelly jars—tightly packed and sealed tight with wax. The bass-note crashes were the large pickle jars, full of liquid and screwed tight with canning lids.

  My mother pressed her fist to her face. “When I think of the work I did. And Marie did. And Daisy....”

  “I’m not going down there,” my father explained to me. “That’s just what he wants. No, let him get it out of his system. He’ll run out of jars eventually.”

  Another one crashed.

  “He’s throwing them,” said my mother. “I can tell. He’s not just dropping them on the floor, he’s throwing them as hard as he can.”

  My father patted her arm.

  “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” she asked.

  “You can go back to bed, David,” said my father. “I’m going to sit up until things calm down.”

  Another one. Was he spacing them at exact intervals?

  “Get some sleep,” my mother advised. “It’s been such a long day.”

  My father stood and approached me. He put his hand on my shoulder. That gesture, along with an occasional back rub, was the only sign of physical affection he bestowed on me. My mother, on the other hand, still kissed and hugged me frequently. I knew and had known since I was very young that this difference between them had absolutely nothing to do with unequal qualities of love but only with their abilities to demonstrate it. Nevertheless, I wished at that moment that I could stay there, stay and feel the reassuring pressure of my father’s hand upon my shoulder.

  “On
e more night, David,” my father said. “Just one more night and he’ll be out of here. Things will be back to normal.”

  He was walking me toward the stairs, his hand no longer simply resting on my shoulder but gently pushing, giving me direction. “Sleep late,” he said when we got to the stairs. “Sleep as late as you can, and when you wake up the worst of this will all be over.”

  But I didn’t sleep late. I couldn’t. I fell asleep listening for the crash of the jars and I woke the same way, straining to hear breaking glass.

  Was it silence that finally woke me? At around six o’clock I came awake. The morning was overcast, dim, so there was no sunlight flooding my room. Birds do not sing at a gray sky with the same vigor as at a blue one, so their songs were not shaking me awake. From the basement there was no sound of Uncle Frank shattering jars. What else could it have been but silence?

  I got up quickly and quietly, crept past my parents’ closed bedroom door, and went downstairs. I was so happy to have our house’s stillness restored that I wanted to enjoy it.

  But I was startled when I entered the kitchen. My father was already up (or hadn’t he gone back to bed?), sitting at the kitchen table. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and the trousers to his light gray suit. He was barefoot, but his heavy black brogans were under the table. There was a copy of Argosy next to him, but it was unopened. He jerked his head up when I came into the room.

  “David. You’re up early.”

  “I didn’t know anyone else was awake.”

  “I’m waiting until I hear him stirring down there. Then I’m going to hustle him out and across the street.”

  “And put him in jail.”

  “And put him in jail. That’s right.”

  Perhaps because he was tired and I could see it—his hair uncombed, his beard unshaven, his eyes ringed with dark circles, his shoulders slumped—I finally realized what this day meant to my father: This was the day he would put his only brother in jail. There would never be another day like it in his life.

  I wanted to say something to indicate that I understood and sympathized. And I did sympathize. But understand? I could not; no one could. The best consolation I could manage was, “Not a very happy day, I guess.”

  He shrugged, a gesture full of resignation and fatigue. “David, I believe that in this world people must pay for their crimes. It doesn’t matter who you are or who your relations are; if you do wrong, you pay. I believe that. I have to.” He pushed himself up stiffly from the table. “But that doesn’t mean the sun’s going to shine.”

  He began to make coffee, trying to be as quiet as possible while he filled the percolator with water and carefully spooned in the grounds. “It’s funny, the story I keep thinking about this morning. I don’t know if I ever told it to you. Can’t even remember how old I was at the time. Nine or ten maybe, and Frank twelve or thirteen. We’d already moved into town, and Dad was sheriff. Anyway. A friend of mine—could that have been Cordell Wettering? I believe so—and I were playing out by the golf course one fall day. Back then that course wasn’t much. Still isn’t. But then it was really sad. It had sand greens and barely a tree on it. Except on the seventh hole where the fairway runs right along that old slough.

  “Cordell and I were on our way somewhere, or back from somewhere, and we cut through the slough. I guess things were dried out just enough or matted down from a few freezes, but we started finding golf balls in the brush, dozens of them. I don’t know why that was such a big deal for us—neither of us had ever golfed in our lives—but you know how it is. We couldn’t have been more excited if it was gold nuggets we found in that slough. When we came up out of there we were just dripping golf balls. Our pockets were stuffed and we were trying to carry more than we could hold.

  “But when we climbed out, there were the Highdog boys, three Blackfoot brothers who were widely known as bad customers. The oldest brother must have been about fourteen; the youngest, he was a skinny little runt about our age but mean as a snake when he was with his big brothers. Over the years every one of them was in and out of trouble with the law, but the little one got life in the state pen for carving up a cowboy with a broken bottle over in Havre.

  “Anyway, the Highdog brothers said the golf balls we were carrying were theirs. Said that slough was part of the territory they watched over—those were the words they used—so anything we found was their property.

  “Now, Cordell and I were plenty scared—we’d heard our share of stories about those brothers—but neither one of us wanted to give up our golf balls.

  “We took off, running as fast as we could, dropping golf balls as we ran. Those golf balls helped us keep a lead on them. Every one we dropped, they stopped to pick up.

  “But they were gaining on us, and just when it looked as though they were going to catch us—over by the clubhouse, such as it was—we ran into your uncle Frank.

  “He and some of his friends were hanging out in the parking lot of the golf course. They were with an older boy, Charley McLaughlin, who was rolling cigarettes for Frank and the others.

  “Cordell and I weren’t dumb. We ran over to Frank and the others and told them the Highdog brothers were on our tails. That was all they needed to hear. This was an excuse to get those Indians who had bullied so many kids. Now it was the Highdogs turn to run—with my brother right after them.

  “Well, they didn’t catch them but that was all right. The important thing was, they saved our bacon.

  “When Frank heard we almost got ourselves scalped over golf balls, he couldn’t stop laughing. For years afterward, he’d tease me about that day. ‘Look out!’ he’d say. ‘Here come the Highdogs! Hide your golf balls!’ I didn’t care. I was so grateful to him just for being there that day—I mean, I felt it was a kind of miracle. My brother. Being in the one place in the world I needed him most. . . .”

  When he finished his story my father was staring out the same window through which my mother had fired the shotgun.

  “Would they really have scalped you?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. No. I don’t mean that literally. They were bad business but not. . . . They’d have worked us over, though. That’s sure. Funny. I found out years later that they had a reason for wanting those golf balls. They were selling them back to the golf course. Those Highdogs. . . . I mentioned the little one ended up in the pen? The oldest Highdog was killed when he lay down on the railroad tracks just outside town. Drunk, trying to walk home. I remember Dad coming home after investigating the accident. He said it was the worst he ever saw.”

  The coffee stopped percolating, and the silence that abruptly followed seemed to startle my father out of the past and back to the kitchen. “Well. Did I hear him stirring down there?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “No? Maybe not. I’ll take some coffee down. That should get him going. We’ll get an early start.”

  He poured two cups of coffee and then put both cups on saucers, an action of such delicacy and formality that I almost laughed.

  He had a cup and saucer in each hand, so he asked, “Could you please open the door for me, David?”

  The door or its frame was warped so I had to push hard to get it open. When it came unstuck I deliberately did not look down.

  “Do you want me to close it behind you?”

  “You can leave it open. We’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  How much time passed before I heard my father’s cry—thirty seconds? A minute?

  Certainly no more than that. Yet what I heard signalled such a breach in our lives, a chasm permanently dividing what we were from what we could never be again, that it seems some commensurate unit of time should be involved. Ten years after my father descended the basement steps....

  From out of the cellar’s musty darkness, up the creaking steps, through the cobwebbed joists and rough-planked flooring came my father’s wail—“Oh, no! Oh my God, no!”

  I ran down the stairs. It felt as it sometimes does in dreams, as
if I were falling yet still able to control myself, hitting each step for just the instant it took to keep me from tumbling headlong down toward the concrete floor.

  I slowed when I reached the bottom, as though suddenly the fear of what I was running toward overtook my concern for my father.

  The aroma of coffee was still in the air. In fact, it felt as if I were following that smell.

  Then I turned into the laundry room and another odor replaced it. All those broken jars—the sharp vinegary smell of the pickling juices, the dill weed, the sweet apples and plums, the rotting, damp-earth smell of rutabagas and tomatoes, and another odor, sweeter, heavier, fouler than the others.

  My father was on the floor of the root cellar, and when I first saw the blood swirled like oil through the other liquids, I thought he had cut his bare feet on the broken glass that was everywhere.

  But I thought that only for an instant, for the split second before I saw the blood’s real source.

  Uncle Frank lay on the floor, his head cradled against my father’s chest. The gash across Uncle Frank’s wrist had already started its useless healing: the edges of the wound had begun to dry and pucker; the blood, what was left in him, had begun to blacken and congeal. I could see only his right arm, but I knew the cut there was one of a matching set.

  I must have made a sound—a little gasp that cracked against my larynx—because my father turned toward me. His features were contorted for a sob, but his eyes were tearless.

  “Go wake your mother, David. Tell her to call Len. Get him down here right away.”

  I backed away quickly, glad to have a mission that would take me out of the basement. My father stopped me with one more command: “And David, don’t let your mother come down here. Don’t let her!”

  Then my father’s tears broke loose, one more briny fluid to mingle on the basement floor.

  I didn’t run up the stairs. I couldn’t. But the reason is not what you might think. My legs worked fine. Oh, I was shaken. What I saw in the basement set my heart racing and soured my stomach but was not what slowed me down.