Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Monty Burnham’s funeral was held the next day, and according to my uncle, it was an event as grand as any in Wembley’s history.

  The town’s florist could not handle all the orders that came in, and the hotel and two motels didn’t have enough rooms for all those who traveled to Wembley to pay their last respects. Schools and businesses were closed on the afternoon of the funeral, and Good Shepherd Methodist Church was literally filled to overflowing. Once there was no longer any place to sit in the pews or even to stand in the back or along the side, folding chairs were set up in the church basement, and the service was piped down there over loudspeakers.

  Among the congregants were three members of the United States House of Representatives, a U.S. senator, the under secretary of agriculture, and two former governors of North Dakota. Roger Maris, a Fargo native and the New York Yankee who would break Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record before the year was out, sent condolences, a brief message that the minister read during the service along with the announcement that a Wembley grade school would be renamed. Washington Elementary School would become Monty Burnham Elementary. A scholarship would be established in his name for a student majoring in political science at one of the state’s universities, and if the funding came through for a new gym for the high school, it was agreed it would bear Monty Burnham’s name.

  If the dead could be embarrassed by excessive displays of veneration and grief, Uncle Burt said, almost any corpse would have blushed over how Wembley turned itself inside out over Monty Burnham. Then again, Monty might have been the only man who, could he have witnessed his own funeral, would have thought the whole affair fell a little short of what he deserved. Uncle Burt also advanced the theory that if Raymond Stoddard had not disrupted the natural course of things, Monty Burnham might have eventually revealed his true self, got caught in some political scandal, and died in disgrace. And Wembley children could have kept walking through the doors of Washington Elementary School.

  All of this my father reported again to my mother and me after the nightly phone call with his brother, and I guess I had been brought in on enough of those conversations that I finally felt I could ask a question of my own.

  “Did you dislike Senator Burnham as much as Uncle Burt did?”

  My father seemed willing to repeat all his brother’s remarks, no matter how tasteless or mordant, but now that he had been asked to offer his own view, his characteristic caution returned. “I had very few dealings with the man. Not back in Wembley and not in the years since.”

  “But did you hate him?”

  “He wasn’t our kind of people, let me just say that.”

  Our? Did that pronoun refer to him and his brother? Were my mother and I included? Could it have meant my father’s and Raymond Stoddard’s?

  “Why not? What kind was he?” I have often thought that I would have gotten much further had I asked, whose kind was he?

  As I recall, my father once again subjected me to a long gaze of assessment. He was uncertain about my ability to understand, yes, but I believe he was also unsure about whether he could truly articulate his thoughts and feelings about Monty Burnham.

  “He was dishonest.”

  “You mean like a crook?” It didn’t take long for my imagination to fashion a fantasy—yes, yes, Monty Burnham was a crooked politician; he was stealing money that should have gone to schools or hospitals or to the poor. Raymond Stoddard somehow discovered what Burnham was doing, yet he couldn’t get the authorities to believe him, and the only way to stop the senator was to—

  “A crook?” My father shook his head. “I don’t believe Monty Burnham was a crook. The man had all the money he needed and then some. He had no reason to steal. Besides, money wasn’t what mattered to him. Fame—that’s what he was out for. No, that’s not the sort of dishonesty I’m talking about. I mean, he was the kind of man who had no regard for the world as it is. He had his way of seeing the world, and he had no doubt about the rightness of his view. Monty Burnham, like most politicians, wasn’t burdened with doubt. So he went right ahead and said, in so many words, ‘This is the way things are.’ ”

  “So he was a phony?” If there is anything teenagers understand, it’s hypocrisy, and no failing is greater.

  “A phony?” My father ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Not exactly. I mean, maybe that’s part of it. But only a small part of it. Men like Monty Burnham—if they have their way, we’ll never get at the truth of things in this world. And they won’t mind one damn bit.”

  By now I thought I understood what my father was talking about. “He was a liar?”

  But that remark only brought home to my father how wide the gulf was between what he said and what his son comprehended. He shook his head and winced. It was a characteristic expression for him—my father felt frustration as pain—and I’ve seen that same look—you have too—on Humphrey Bogart’s face in movies, and just as with my father, it was usually accompanied by a death-deep drag on a cigarette.

  “I’m not explaining this very well. He wasn’t necessarily lying. He just didn’t give a damn that what he said might not be true. He probably believed that as long as his heart was in the right place, it would be okay.”

  “And his heart—”

  By this time my mother took pity on both of us, but her interruption was also in the interest of keeping the record straight. “We might not have cared for Monty Burnham’s type, dear, but that doesn’t mean we wished him ill. Besides”—now she addressed my father—“if you still lived in Wembley, you probably would have voted for him, wouldn’t you?”

  My father might have disapproved of Monty Burnham’s character, but that didn’t mean he could bring himself to vote for a Democrat. “Probably,” he said, and walked from the room.

  Marie didn’t warn me not to ask my father about what he saw when he opened the door to the Stoddards’ garage, but she didn’t have to. I loved my father and he loved me, but nothing in our relationship furnished the kind of intimacy that would have to exist before I could ask, What did Raymond Stoddard look like when he was hanging from the crossbeam? I don’t doubt that there are sons in the world who could pose such a question and fathers who could answer, but we weren’t of that breed.

  Nevertheless, my father did eventually volunteer information about Raymond Stoddard’s appearance in death, though strictly speaking, my father told us—my mother and me—about something he didn’t see.

  People who hang themselves usually die slowly—they choke to death—and they have time to reconsider their action and attempt to undo it. Almost always their hands exhibit the signs of their self-doubt, the palms and fingers raw with friction burns from grasping at the rope, cord, string, line, or wire that is cutting off their oxygen supply. Raymond Stoddard’s hands were unmarked, evidence of a mind undeterred from its purpose and able to overpower the self-preserving impulses of the body.

  My father came into possession of this arcanum of the self-destructive through his friendship with the Bismarck police detective who had been at the funeral (my guess had been right) and at our house the night of the murder-suicide. Soon, in fact, this new friend, Lee Mauer, was a regular visitor in our home, and even without knowing that some men were our kind while others were not, I knew that Mr. Mauer was not. He was a big, beefy, barrel-chested man, vulgar, loud, and profane and about as unlike my father as another man could be. They had curiosity in common, however, and each believed the other might possess some information that could solve the mystery of Raymond Stoddard’s motive.

  Initially, Lee Mauer came to our house mostly by invitation. My parents felt sorry for him because he lived alone—he was divorced and his wife and two children lived in Casper, Wyoming—and my mother believed that what was most lacking in his life was home cooking. He came often for Sunday dinner, our most formal, elaborate meal of the week, and he ate so heartily my mother had to increase significantly the size of portions to accommodate Mr. Mauer’s appetite. Furthermore,
she had to counsel her children to overlook Mr. Mauer’s poor table manners and his inappropriate talk. Her warnings were futile; almost everything Lee Mauer said—and how he said it—I found fascinating.

  He had difficulty getting through a sentence without a profanity, something he was aware of, because he told my sister and me that we should be careful that we didn’t develop the “bad speech habits” that he couldn’t rid himself of. Worse, in my mother’s view, was his willingness to bring up topics unfit for the dinner table or for children. For that matter, some subjects were probably matters of police confidentiality and shouldn’t have been discussed in anyone’s presence.

  He said, for example, that he suspected a Bismarck politician of driving down to South Dakota in order to visit prostitutes, and although he didn’t give the man’s name, Lee Mauer implied that he was hoarding the man’s identity for possible future use. A name he was willing to mention was a local doctor’s, a man Lee Mauer said was nothing better than a drug pusher. Lee Mauer’s ex-wife and her friends had become virtual drug addicts, hooked on the sedatives and painkillers that the doctor prescribed. Lee Mauer told us that the police were keeping their eye on a well-known local athlete, a recent graduate of Bismarck High School, because they suspected him of stealing cars. Before any of my friends knew that the son of a sheriff’s deputy had been arrested for selling liquor to minors, I acquired that information courtesy of Lee Mauer.

  His gossip favored the lurid, the gruesome, the dangerous, and the scandalous, and all those qualities were enhanced by his side-of-the-mouth confidential style. One could easily imagine him passing on a bit of intelligence about the hands of a hanged man. In fact, if there were ever any doubt about his willingness to discuss any disaster in detail, it was dispelled completely when he told about the death of two young people in a motorcycle accident the previous summer. It happened in Bismarck’s Riverside Park, and Lee Mauer happened to be in the park that evening and so hurried to the crash scene to see if he could be of help. “Split in two that young fellow was,” Lee Mauer said, “from crotch to neck. Like he was a goddamn wishbone for a couple of giants. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Tales like that, coupled with Mr. Mauer’s general crudeness, finally alienated my mother completely, and she stopped inviting him for meals.

  But he kept coming, usually in the late evening. No doubt he came out of loneliness, but since he couldn’t admit that, he always had an excuse for stopping by. He was investigating the report of a break-in nearby or he had to check out a suspicious vehicle parked on a neighborhood street. Even when he said he had been driving past, saw a light, and decided to stop, he made it sound as though that too was official business. Because he had learned that we didn’t have much in the way of liquor in the house, he often brought with him a six-pack of Grain Belt Premium beer or a pint of schnapps or blackberry brandy. My father would occasionally drink a beer, but he seldom indulged in anything stronger, and certainly none of Lee Mauer’s sweet liquors.

  Through Lee Mauer I first learned the lesson—the one I had to learn and relearn over the years and which I still haven’t mastered—that even (or perhaps especially) the motives of others are often understood by reference back to the self.

  Lee Mauer grumbled constantly about politicians, “those greedy sonsabitches,” with their unconcern for everything but their own advancement. “They don’t give a good goddamn who they step on.” And Lee Mauer could voice those sentiments over and over and each time act as though the emotions were newly minted. His voice would rise to a brassy pitch that rang with anger. His features would bunch and his face would redden. He’d pound the table with his big square fist. There, one couldn’t keep from thinking, was the kind of rage that would drive a man to murder.

  Furthermore, Lee Mauer fixed his political anger on an issue, and there, he believed, his emotions and Raymond Stoddard’s coincided. The 1961 North Dakota legislature, as one of its first orders of business, voted itself both a raise and a cost of living increase, yet a 4 percent wage increase proposed for the state’s classified and unclassified employees was voted down. This inequity was worsened, in some people’s view, by public statements by legislators, such as Monty Burnham, who cheerfully professed not to have known that their salary hike had been attached to a particular bill. Lee Mauer had no trouble imagining that a disgruntled state worker—like Raymond Stoddard—could take out his anger and resentment on a legislator—like Monty Burnham—who had enriched himself while denying the clerks, secretaries, bureaucrats, and administrators their share of the state’s resources.

  My father didn’t argue with Lee Mauer, but he didn’t buy the policeman’s theory and instead saw it stemming from Lee Mauer’s own job dissatisfaction. Lee Mauer held the rank of lieutenant with the Bismarck police department, yet he felt continually slighted in the workplace and complained constantly of the “ass-kissers and brownnosers” who surpassed him in rank, salary, or privilege. My father knew all this, but merely shook his head and to my mother and me said, “Lee just doesn’t get it. It’s exactly his griping that makes trouble for him. The police department is like any organization. They want the good team players, not someone who’s poisoning the well.”

  This judgment my father expressed with more than a touch of disapproval. In his view men and women were supposed to work hard and keep their complaints to themselves. It’s worth noting, however, that he always practiced law alone, in spite of offers to work for various firms, companies, and institutions. He must have known his nature well enough to realize that he would be a saner, if poorer, man if he kept to a minimum the number of people with power and authority over him. My father’s son, I earn my living as a novelist, an occupation as solitary as any.

  But you must decide for yourself. Have you had experiences that would lead you to believe a man’s perceptions of injustice in the workplace could move him to murder? In 1961 the term “going postal” wasn’t part of our cultural vocabulary, but language often lags behind deeds.

  When I recall my father and Lee Mauer sitting in our darkened kitchen nightly, their white shirts the only brightness in the room, a brimming ashtray between them, each man’s hand curled lightly around a can of beer, it seems as if they turned the room into their private enclave, taking up almost all the space in the room and forcing anyone who wanted to enter to wedge themselves in and then slide along the walls. Perhaps I have that impression because my mother assiduously avoided the kitchen when the men were in there, or perhaps it comes from Lee Mauer sometimes obviously and deliberately falling silent when someone came in. But I hung around the edges as often as I could, and on one of those occasions I overheard a Lee Mauer remark that was so unsettling it haunted me for years. I finally exorcised its effect with a narrative of my own.

  In December 1942, when she was nineteen years old, Alma Stoddard had a series of experiences that made her feel as though she were living in a world turned upside down. She left Wembley, North Dakota, her little town near the top of the country, for a visit to a city on the bottom—Killeen, Texas—and when she left North Dakota in December the weather was uncharacteristically mild. Temperatures were in the fifties, and there was no snow. Texas, she expected, would be hot. After all, the letters she received from her husband were often filled with complaints about the heat, yet when she stepped off the bus in Killeen, a good three inches of wet snow covered the ground, and a cold northwest wind blew so hard that tears sprang to her eyes. As it turned out, the weather was the least puzzling feature of her visit.

  She had traveled to Texas to see her husband, Raymond, who was stationed at Camp Hood. He would soon be sent overseas, and since they were both realistic people who were not automatically given to optimistic assumptions about the future, they knew they might not have another chance to be together again for a long time, perhaps ever again. As it was, they had already scaled back on their plans. For a while they had discussed the possibility of Alma moving to Texas but had finally decided that would be impract
ical. By the time she found a place to live and work, Raymond might be relocated, and then Alma would have given up her job at Hudson’s Pharmacy back in Wembley and her rent-free home with her mother.

  There had been other compromises. For a time it seemed possible that Raymond would be able to come home to North Dakota for an extended leave. But then all furloughs in his unit were canceled, and the best the Stoddards could arrange was a three-day weekend in a Texas hotel whose lobby was decorated with a dried-out pine tree sparsely decorated with a few glass bulbs.

  Alma was sitting on an overstuffed chair near that tree when she saw something more surprising—and more unsettling—than Texas snow. She was waiting for Raymond to meet her, but the first man in uniform to walk through the glass door was not her husband but Monty Burnham, a young man she had dated in high school.

  Then, as if to demonstrate that human relationships had been turned as upside down as the country’s climate, Monty Burnham greeted her with the words “Alma! There’s my girl!” And he said this within earshot of the man who came through the revolving door right behind him—her husband.

  She had known, from Raymond’s letters, that Monty Burnham was also stationed at Camp Hood, but she didn’t think the men spent much time in each other’s company. Her husband hadn’t said anything more than that he “saw Monty and Dusty Boyd, and a few other guys from back home, around the camp.”

  The men took turns hugging her, and because she had spent more time in Monty Burnham’s arms over the years than in Raymond’s, both embraces felt familiar. Alma had been Monty’s steady girlfriend from the age of fifteen to the age of seventeen. She and Raymond had been together—dating, engagement, and marriage combined—for only a little more than a year. Both men smelled of tobacco, damp wool, and hair tonic, but she gasped when she felt how thin and bony Raymond seemed. She hoped that he would think her response came only from emotion. And perhaps her shock was merely a consequence, now as in the past, of having first had her arms around Monty’s more substantial girth.