Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  No, I took my time climbing the two flights to my mother because I needed time to compose myself, to make certain I could keep concealed my satisfaction over what had happened.

  You see, I knew—I knew! I knew!—that Uncle Frank’s suicide had solved all our problems.

  My father would not have to march his brother across the street to jail.

  There would be no trial, no pile of testimony for jurors to sift through, trying to separate the inevitable one-eighth, one-quarter, one-half truths from the whole truth. No pressure on anyone to come forward and bear witness, no reputations damaged, no one embarrassed, no one chastised.... The town would not have to choose sides over guilt or innocence.

  Indian women could visit a doctor without fear of being assaulted, violated by a man who had taken a vow to do them no harm.

  We would no longer have to worry that Grandfather would mount an attack of some kind on our home.

  Certainly there would be sadness—Aunt Gloria was a widow, my father was suddenly, like me, an only child, Grandma’s tears would fill a rain barrel—but this grief would pass. Once the mourning period passed, we would have our lives back, and if they would not be exactly what they had been earlier, they would be close enough for my satisfaction.

  What more can I say? I was a child. I believed all these things to be true.

  As I climbed the stairs, I felt something for my uncle in death that I hadn’t felt for him in life. It was gratitude, yes, but it was something more. It was very close to love.

  Epilogue

  We moved from Bentrock on a snowy day in early December 1948, a day, really, when we had no business traveling. It was bad enough in town, where snow covered the streets; out in the country nothing stopped the wind, so roads and highways could easily be drifted closed. But the car was packed, the moving van had left the day before with our furniture, we had said our good-byes to those who would hear them. Doors were locked; minds were made up.

  They had been made up, in fact, for months. Since shortly after Uncle Frank’s suicide, when my mother abruptly said to my father, “I cannot continue living here.”

  I knew she did not mean the house alone but Bentrock as well.

  And I knew it was not the macabre discomfort of living in the same rooms where two people had recently died. That was not what made living there impossible for her. She had her religious beliefs to see her through that.

  But she had no resources that enabled her to live with the lies concocted in the aftermath of Frank’s death.

  It was decided (my use of the passive voice is deliberate; I could never be exactly sure who was involved in the decision: my parents, certainly, but others were probably involved as well—my grandfather seems a good bet. Len? Gloria?) to explain Uncle Frank’s death as an accident, to say that he had been helping my father build shelves in our basement, that he fell from a ladder, struck his head on the concrete floor, and died instantly. The only outsider to see Frank’s body—and who could thus contradict this story—was Clarence Undset, owner of Undset’s Funeral Home. What bribes were offered, what deals were struck to secure Mr. Undset’s silence, I never knew, but everyone seemed confident that he would never reveal what he saw when he took Frank’s body away: the gashes in Frank’s wrists.

  Similarly, it was decided not to reveal any of Frank’s crimes. What purpose would it serve? He would never molest anyone again. The Indian women of Mercer County were safe from him. Besides, as my letter-of-the-law father said, Uncle Frank was never convicted of anything; there was no sense clouding the air with accusations.

  As a consequence of these postmortem cover-ups, it was possible for Frank Hayden to be buried without scandal and to be eulogized in the usual blandly reverent way—decorated soldier, public servant, dedicated to healing, dutiful son, loving husband, still a youthful man, strong, vital. . . . Finally even the minister had to confess some bafflement over a life so rudely, inexplicably cut off. Who among us can begin to understand God’s plans for any of us? Who indeed.

  None of these precautions on behalf of Frank’s reputation was enough however to restore harmony in the Hayden family. At the funeral, all of us—Grandpa and Grandma, Aunt Gloria, my father, mother, and I—sat together in the same pew (a surprisingly small group, considering the clan’s power in the county), but neither my aunt nor my grandparents would speak to us. At the cemetery they made a point of standing on the opposite side of the grave from us. Even I understood the symbolism: Frank’s death was an unbridgeable gulf between us. Although my parents seemed only hurt by this snubbing (they shuffled away from the cemetery and did not return with everyone else to the church for the meal in the church basement), it angered me. If there was any sense, any purpose at all in Uncle Frank’s suicide, if he killed himself for any reason, it was so these people—his wife, his parents, his brother, his sister-in-law—could be reunited after his death. But there was the open grave, and not one of us would dream of leaping across it.

  Therefore, when my mother made her pronouncement about living in Bentrock, my father understood exactly what she meant, and he simply nodded, as if he had known all along that was so but had been waiting for her to say the words. He didn’t argue; he didn’t say, “This is our home”; he didn’t accuse; he didn’t say, “You’ve never liked this town or this house, but it’s my home.” He agreed with my mother and began immediately to dismantle our lives in Bentrock.

  He arranged, first of all, to withdraw from the upcoming election, citing as his reason “another job offer—an opportunity to practice law and put all that schooling to use.” This was before he had lined up the possibility of a job with a law firm in Fargo, North Dakota. Len McAuley’s name was substituted for my father’s on the ticket. There was no doubt Len would be elected. He ran unopposed.

  Next, our house was put up for sale, and my mother called her parents to tell them we would be staying with them on the farm while we looked for our own place.

  My mother withdrew me from school and was given, in a manila envelope, my records to be conveyed to my next school.

  My parents said their good-byes—to Len and Daisy, to the Hutchinsons. To Ollie Young Bear. The number of people seemed so small that it diminished my parents’ years in Bentrock, as if their time there hadn’t really amounted to much at all. I kept my own farewells to a minimum, and to ease the emotionalism (and perhaps to trick myself and make leaving easier), I told many of my friends that we would probably be moving back the following summer.

  There we were, our car so loaded down it seemed ready to bottom out as my father backed out of the driveway. As we were about to pull away, I shouted, “Wait!”, opened the back door, and jumped out of the car.

  I ran to the house and clambered up a snowdrift to the living room window. I wanted one last look, to see what our house looked like without us in it. If my parents asked what I was looking for, I had already decided what I would answer. “Ghosts,” I would say.

  The frost on the window made it difficult to see in.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  The emptiness inside made it difficult to see in. The blank room had even less pattern than frosted glass. The bland gray carpeting, the once-white walls trying to turn yellow—snow should have been falling and drifting in there.

  My parents, bless them, did not honk the horn or yell for me to get back in the car. They waited, and when I turned back to them and saw them through the screen of falling snow, I wondered again how it could have happened—how it could be that those two people who only wanted to do right, whose only error lay in trying to be loyal to both family and justice, were now dispossessed, the ones forced to leave Bentrock and build new lives. For a moment I felt like waving good-bye to them, signalling them to go, to move without me. It had nothing to do with wanting to stay in Montana; it had everything to do with wanting to stay away from those two hapless, forlorn people. What kind of life would it be, traveling in their company?

  In fact, it was not a bad life at all. After spen
ding the winter with my mother’s parents on their farm, we moved the following spring to Fargo. There my father got a job with a small law office and within five years his name was listed as a partner with the firm: Line, Gustafson, and Hayden, Attorneys-at-Law. My mother got her wish: my father became a lawyer. He finally had a job to go with that briefcase she gave him.

  For a while she tendered hopes that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and pursue a career in law. “Wouldn’t it be something,” she once hopefully said to me when I was in my teens, “Hayden and Son, Law Partners?” “Wouldn’t it be more appropriate,” I answered, “for me to be elected sheriff of Mercer County, Montana, and carry on that Hayden tradition?” She never said another word about what I should do with my life. My remark was cruel, yet it was kinder than the truth: after what I observed as a child in Bentrock, I could never believe in the rule of law again. That my father could continue in his profession I attributed to his ability to segment parts of his life and keep one from intruding on another.

  For myself, I eventually became a history teacher in a Rochester, Minnesota, high school. I did not—do not—believe in the purity and certainty of the study of history over law. Not at all. Quite the opposite. I find history endlessly amusing, knowing, as I do, that the record of any human community might omit stories of sexual abuse, murder, suicide . . . . Who knows—perhaps any region’s most dramatic, most sensational stories were not played out in the public view but were confined to small, private places. A doctor’s office, say. A white frame house on a quiet street. So no matter what the historical documents might say, I feel free to augment them with whatever lurid or comical fantasy my imagination might concoct. And know that the truth might not be far off. These musings, of course, are for my private enjoyment. For my students I keep a straight face and pretend that the text tells the truth, whole and unembellished.

  Our only link with Montana was Grandma Hayden. She wrote to us regularly and even visited us a few times until she became too ill to travel.

  As far as I know, she never spoke of the events of 1948, but she kept us up to date on some of those who played roles in the tragedy.

  Aunt Gloria left Montana less than a year after we did. She moved to Spokane, where her sister lived, and Gloria eventually remarried.

  Len McAuley was unable to complete his term in office. He had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and he had to turn the badge over to his deputy, Johnny Packwood, who had been in the military police. Thus, the Hayden-McAuley control of the Mercer County sheriff’s office was broken.

  Len lived on a number of years after his stroke, but ironically, less than a year after Len’s cerebral hemorrhage my grandfather had one too. Which he did not survive. He was dead within three days.

  Two strokes. I used to think, my interest in symbol and metaphor far surpassing my medical knowledge, that they died from keeping the secret about my uncle Frank. They held it in, the pressure built, like holding your breath, and something had to blow. In their case, the vessels in their brains. In my father’s case, it was not only the secret he held in but also his bitterness. Which eventually turned into his cancer. Well, there I go, blaming an incident that happened over forty years ago for what was probably brought on by Len McAuley’s whiskey, my grandfather’s cigars, and my father’s diet.

  My happiest memory of Marie, the one that gradually separated itself from the general tangle of pleasant, warm moments, was from the autumn before she died.

  Unhappy with my general lack of success at team sports, I decided I would do something about it. By sheer disciplined practice, through diligence, I would overcome my lack of natural ability and become good at something. Football was the sport I chose, and I further narrowed my choice of skills by concentrating on just one aspect of football. I would become an expert dropkicker. Drop-kicking, of course, has long since ceased to be a part of football, but in 1947 players drop-kicked field goals; they dropped the ball, let it hit the ground for the briefest instant, then tried to boot it through the goal posts. That fall I spent hours in the backyard, trying to drop-kick a football over a branch of our oak, then shagging the ball and kicking it back the other way, back and forth, back and forth. . . .

  One afternoon when I was practicing after school, Ronnie Tall Bear burst out the back door of our house, Marie close behind him. Although Marie was obviously chasing him, they were both laughing.

  Ronnie ran across our yard. When he came to my football, he fell on it, rolled with it through the leaves, and came up running, exactly as he no doubt had done with recovered fumbles countless times in football practices or in actual games.

  When Ronnie picked up my football, Marie was able to gain some ground, but now he began to run like the football star he once was, tucking the ball under one arm, faking, spinning, stopping, starting, shifting direction. Ronnie turned when he came to the railroad tracks and doubled back toward me. Once he got close enough, he lateraled the ball to me. Now Marie, tiring and slowing but still pursuing, was after me.

  For the next half hour we chased up and down the yard, throwing the football back and forth, running after each other. It was a game, yet it had no object and no borders of space or time or regulation. It was totally free-form, but we still tried to use our skills—throwing accurate spirals, leaping to make catches, running as fast as we could in pursuit or escape. I felt that what we played, more accurately how we played, had its origin in Ronnie and Marie’s Indian heritage, but I had no way of knowing that with any certainty. All I could be sure of was that I never had more fun playing ball, any kind of ball, in my life.

  When we were too tired to play any longer, we went back to the house by way of the garage. There my mother kept a gallon of apple cider. Was it Marie’s idea to uncap it? No matter. We passed the cider around, each of us drinking from the heavy jug, the cool, sweet cider the perfect answer to the question, how do you follow an afternoon of running around in the warm autumn sun?

  I believe I remembered that incident so fondly not only because I was with Marie and Ronnie, both of whom I loved in my way, but also because I felt, for that brief span, as though I was part of a family, a family that accepted me for myself and not my blood or birthright.

  My wife, Betsy, lived in seven cities before she graduated from high school. All of the communities were in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois, and during one summer vacation we drove to each town so she could photograph her childhood homes. (My wife also teaches, and this trip was exactly the sort of thing that teachers, with all that time and so little money, are likely to come up with for their summers.)

  Since Betsy was immersed in all this nostalgia, it was natural for her to suggest that we drive to Montana to see my boyhood home. No, I told her, that was all right; I had no desire to go back. This she couldn’t understand, and I finally gave in and told her why I—why no one in my immediate family—wanted to return to Bentrock. I told her about what happened in the summer of 1948.

  The story stunned her, but it also fascinated her. She couldn’t wait for the next meeting with my parents, so she could ask them about their memories of that summer.

  I could have warned her off. I could have told her that in my family that is a subject never discussed. We all know what happened—we know it is there, in our shared past, we don’t deny it, but we don’t talk about it, as if keeping quiet is a matter of good manners. But I didn’t tell my wife any of this. I suppose I wanted to see what would happen when someone else brought out into the open a topic that had never been discussed in any detail in my presence.

  A few months later we were all together, gathered at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. We had been seated for only a few minutes when Betsy said, “David told me all about what happened when you lived in Montana. That sure was the Wild West, wasn’t it?”

  My father, at this time, had already had one cancer surgery, and he was not strong, but at Betsy’s question he slammed his hand down on the table so hard the plates and sil
verware jumped.

  “Don’t blame Montana!” he said. “Don’t ever blame Montana!”

  He pushed himself away from the table, left the room, and never returned to the meal.

  Later that night, after everyone was in bed, I came back down to the dining room. I sat in the chair where my father had sat and lightly put my hands on the table. For an instant I thought I felt the wood still vibrating from my father’s blow.

  About the Author

  Born and raised in North Dakota, Larry Watson is the author of many novels, including In a Dark Time, White Crosses, Orchard, Laura, and Montana 1948, which has been acclaimed widely around the world. Also the author of a collection of fiction, Justice, and a chapbook of poetry, Leaving Dakota, Watson has received numerous awards and prizes for his work. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  The Milkweed National Fiction Prize

  Milkweed Editions awards the Milkweed National Fiction Prize to works of high literary quality that embody humane values and contribute to cultural understanding. For more information about the Milkweed National Fiction Prize or to order past winners, visit our Web site (www.milkweed.org) or contact Milkweed Editions at (800) 520-6455.

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