Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  (Incidentally, my informant on matters Marie has usually been the wife of my college roommate, Rob Varley. After earning a master’s degree from the University of North Dakota, Rob returned to Bismarck to work for a utility company, and he married Karen Holmes, a former friend of Marie’s. Karen was the secretary of their high school class, and she’s been in charge over the years of keeping track of classmates and issuing invitations for reunions.)

  For many years that wife I mentioned earlier accompanied me on trips to my hometown. A native of Billings, Montana, she was a nursing student when we met in Missoula. A soft-spoken, sincere, pretty woman, it would never have occurred to her trusting nature that on any occasion when we were in Bismarck, I was constantly scanning the streets in the hope that Marie Ryan might also be back in town and I could catch a glimpse of her. A glimpse. I told myself that I wanted nothing more. Just something to satisfy my curiosity, to see if she was as lovely as ever (and as lovely as Karen, who visited Marie in Minneapolis, said she was). She was my first love, an adolescent obsession. Many such youthful infatuations stay with men and women. Sometimes for years. They’re normal. Harmless. That was what I told myself. Then, just when I thought I had convinced myself that all those things were true, the refrain would begin again, its vowels wailing through my brain—eye ee ah ee eye ee ah ee eye ee ah ee. I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie. . . .

  During the years of our marriage my wife never suspected that I was in love with another woman. Why would she? I never lied to her about where I was or who I was with. How could I love someone I hadn’t seen for five years . . . for ten . . . for twenty? When our marriage inevitably ended, it wasn’t because I had been caught in an affair. But my emotional remoteness, my inaccessibility, finally exhausted my wife.

  I remember the occasion when the end came. We were in the car together, running errands or going out for lunch. The circumstances don’t matter. I might have said something, but it’s more likely that I didn’t. My silences were more common, and more wearing, than any speech, even of the wounding sort. She suddenly let her head fall back against the headrest, and said, without a trace of anger or vitality in her voice, “I’ve had it with you.”

  Indeed she had. Caring for the sick or injured was more than her profession; it was her natural disposition. For months, for years, she had tried to revive our marriage, willing to do almost anything to bring it back to health. “What do you want from me?” she used to ask. I didn’t take advantage of her invitation. What was I supposed to say—be someone else? And since I was unwilling to be anyone other than who I was—joyless and remote—our marriage expired.

  Even when I was no longer making those annual pilgrimages to Bismarck in the company of a wife, I was usually not traveling alone. We had twin daughters, and the divorce didn’t diminish their willingness—their eagerness—to make the trip to Grandmother’s house and to the city that had been their father’s boyhood home.

  When the girls were nine or ten, I decided to take them on a tour of the state capitol and its grounds. One of our first stops was the building’s legislative wing, the art deco Great Hall where Raymond Stoddard murdered Monty Burnham. I planned to show them the banquette where the senator had been sitting when the assassin approached, the floor that had once been stained with blood, its red swirling into the marble’s pattern. I intended to give them a lesson in history. . . .

  I couldn’t do it.

  While the scene and the story probably would have been to them nothing more than a bit of gruesome Bismarck trivia, I couldn’t take the chance. What if a detail—as slight as the bullet-pocked stone floor or as large as the connection to Keogh Street and their ancestry—lodged in my daughters the way the details had made a home in me? Of some matters ignorance is preferable to knowledge.

  I’ve brought the matter of Raymond Stoddard and his motivation about as far as I can. If I haven’t made the choices clear, let me present them one more time. You might choose to believe, as my mother did, that Raymond Stoddard killed to avoid a scandal involving his job with the state. You might side with my father and think that resentment and anger over the Stoddard family’s being cheated of a dwelling and acreage was enough to make Raymond buy a gun and use it. It may be your conviction that murder always proceeds from a deranged mind whose purposes are never available to us. Your character, your experiences, your values, your worldview—all these will cause you to favor one theory over another. Have you ever succumbed to an irrational impulse? Could jealousy corrupt your soul? Have you ever acted with nothing but bitterness behind the behavior? My own hypothesis doesn’t require much beyond what’s known of the principals’ lives—that and the knowledge that nothing has a power quite like love to tilt us toward murder and self-destruction.

  I imagine—and it hardly seems appropriate to term this theory the product of imagination, so plausible does it seem to me—that Raymond Stoddard had always known that his wife loved another man before she loved him. For years, this was a source of satisfaction for him. He regarded himself as blessed that Alma Shumate chose him; he had a special pride that he possessed what others wanted. In economic terms, her value increased according to how strongly she was desired by others. However, just as the rich man worries that he will lose his treasure, so Raymond Stoddard’s anxiety eventually outpaced his happiness.

  Maybe Raymond’s doubts needed nothing to grow but his own insecurities, and maybe they began with a casual remark, a comparison his wife made between him and other men. It might have been a perfectly harmless observation. Why, Alma asked her husband when he reached for his money to pay the restaurant bill, do you always carry your wallet in your jacket pocket? Every other man I’ve known—my father, my brother, Monty, Pastor Lundgren, Bill McCutcheon—carries his in the back pocket of his trousers. Monty. Only a first name was necessary. They both knew of whom she was speaking. Or maybe it started with Monty Burnham’s rise to prominence. One evening he was featured on the news, a brief segment showing him at the dedication of the Lewis and Clark monument overlooking the Missouri, and Alma leaned farther forward than she ever did for an act she liked on The Ed Sullivan Show or with more interest than she showed in any episode of The Loretta Young Show, her favorite program.

  And that was all it took.

  She still thought of Monty Burnham. She knew Monty Burnham, knew him and his habits well enough to recollect without effort how he carried his wallet. He wasn’t only part of her past; he was in her present. She might be looking out a window, but she wasn’t seeing the snow falling or the wind sweeping away the fallen leaves, she was thinking about Monty Burnham. He was more real to her than the sunset pinks and lavenders of the horizon.

  Who is to say where worry crosses over to fear and then hardens into agonized belief? We either have the ability to talk ourselves out of our fears or we don’t. And Raymond Stoddard reached the point where he suspected that anytime Alma left the house it might be for the final time. Her suitcase was packed, and around the corner her lover was waiting. Of course he forgot that Wednesdays were her days for working at the church or that she had told him that she was walking over to Mrs. Morton’s house for coffee or that she said she’d stop at Super Valu; he believed that anytime she left the house it was for another assignation.

  Over the years Raymond Stoddard had tried various measures of self-treatment to salve his perpetually wounded pride or to alleviate his misery. He had always drunk, but at some point the act become purposeful, determined. The benumbed man, after all, feels no pain. Anger too can be a narcotic, and though he was never able to use it as successfully as bourbon, the few times his rage burst forth, Raymond found himself oddly released from pain. For that matter, his own reveries could sometimes offer him relief, even when the object of contemplation was his wife in the arms of another man. He pictured so vividly the scenes of Alma in bed with Monty Burnham that Raymond was briefly taken outside himself; he was no longer a man in agony, he was an impersonal creator, a v
isionary, a vehicle for his own lurid imagination.

  None of his strategies for relieving his pain lasted for long, however. It always returned, and frequently redoubled. Finally in January of 1961—and how many residents of the northern plains have come to a life-altering conclusion in deepest winter, as though something in their brains could crystallize and take form just as their breath does in the frigid air—Raymond Stoddard concluded it all had to stop, even if his own life was subsumed within that “all.”

  Marcia Stoddard’s semester grades arrived, and they were not good. A C in Introduction to Drama. A C- in biology, and they went down from there. A D in Spanish, and an F in Educational Psychology.

  Her father was furious. “She had to attend the university,” he said, slapping the printed grade form down on the kitchen counter. “She had to graduate early from high school, and then junior college wasn’t good enough for her. Oh, no. It had to be the university. And I’m shelling out good money for grades like these?”

  Alma tried to calm her husband and to keep his ranting from being overheard by her son and his friend watching television in the living room. “Shhh. You know she was struggling. She said so at Thanksgiving.”

  “This isn’t just struggling. See this. F. That’s failing. Not struggling. Failing.”

  “She promised she’d do better. It was a bad semester.”

  “She promised. And does she know how she’ll do better? I’m going to have a talk with her.”

  “What do you think that will accomplish? She’s let us down. She knows that. She’s let herself down.”

  “If she doesn’t have a plan for how she’s going to improve, I might have a few suggestions for her.”

  “I really don’t think that’s what she needs to hear right now.”

  “What she needs . . . Maybe what she needs isn’t the important thing right now. Maybe—just a minute. Are you telling me that I shouldn’t speak to my own daughter? Is that what you’re saying? Because—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Will you stop? You’re not going to solve this with a talk. You’ve never bothered talking to her before, about her grades or anything else. You . . . you’re barely a father to her.”

  Because Raymond couldn’t quite comprehend what his wife had said to him—he wasn’t Marcia’s father?—he looked elsewhere for assistance. The boys in the living room—if they’d heard Alma’s statement, surely they would register its shock, wouldn’t they? What the hell? Dad isn’t—? Mr. Stoddard isn’t Marcia’s father? And Raymond’s son was rising to his feet—was he coming out to the kitchen to demand the truth of his paternity? But Gene merely walked to the television set and with a half turn of the horizontal hold stopped the picture from rolling. His friend never took his eyes off that week’s episode of Gunsmoke. Was it Raymond who had misunderstood? Had his wife merely offered a comment on him as an insufficiently attentive, barely engaged father, and in that regard not very different from every other father? That interpretation was certainly available.

  Yet Raymond rejected it and chose instead to take Alma’s blurted remark as revelation, the confession he had dreaded and longed to hear.

  His wife had not just loved another before she loved him—that he could handle and indeed in some moments could even gloat about—but she had had sex with that man. That was harder to bear. Of course she had never stopped thinking about, caring about Monty Burnham—the reminder of him, of them and their love for each other, was constantly present in Marcia. Their child. And that was, quite literally, a fact he could not digest. He bolted from the kitchen on his way to the bathroom, but when he saw his son and his son’s friend, Raymond turned around. He ran to the garage and there he lurched to the trash can just in time: He vomited onto the sack of garbage that he had put there only an hour earlier.

  What was he to do? He thought he had known what his darkest worry was—that Alma constantly, secretly compared him to another man and found her husband wanting—but Raymond realized now that even in his bleakest, most pessimistic self-pitying moods he had not imagined circumstances as black as these.

  With the new year, the legislators invaded the city for their biennial session, and soon their plans to create or thwart new laws became the news that dominated local and state media. Newspapers and television news programs could be counted on to carry articles and interviews in which senators and representatives lobbied, through the press, for or against the projects and issues closest to or furthest from their hearts. Monty Burnham was a rising star in the Republican party, and whether he sought the attention of the cameras or the cameras looked for him is irrelevant; he was a reliable media presence, as close to famous as any North Dakotan was likely to come during the first cold, snowy days of 1961.

  On its six o’clock nightly news broadcast, Bismarck station KFYR televised a brief interview with Senator Burnham on the contentious subject of the state’s property tax, and as it happened, Raymond Stoddard, who usually favored the news on KXMB, the CBS affiliate, was watching KFYR during the Burnham segment. Had Raymond’s wife been in the room at the time, Raymond might well have turned to her, pointed at the screen, and issued his ultimatum: Him or me—which is it? Right now, make your decision. No deliberation, no discussion, no denials, no explanations, no lists of pros and cons. Right now—him or me.

  But the only other person in the room was the teenage boy who lived up the block, waiting for Raymond’s son so the two of them could attend that evening’s basketball contest—Bismarck High School versus its in-town rival, St. Mary’s. They wanted to leave early enough to be in time for the junior varsity game as well.

  But what if Alma had been there? It wouldn’t have mattered. Raymond knew what she’d say. He was foolish, imagining things. The past was past. She might profess her love for Raymond, depending on whether he’d angered or touched her with his accusation. But Raymond Stoddard now lived in a realm where neither protest nor proof, nor protestations of love or innocence, could reach him. Nothing of the usual life of humans could affect his faith. Alma loved another man, and Raymond knew it. The only thing left was to leave this life with nothing behind but this message to his wife: I know.

  Raymond tried composing a suicide note to Alma, a letter that would make it clear that he was aware that she loved someone else and always had. But every attempt to write this communication failed. Sheet after sheet he tore up or crumpled and tossed aside. He couldn’t get the tone right. He wanted to sound noble, self-sacrificing, yet he also felt that he was entitled to be angry and aggrieved—her contempt for him finally became too much to bear. He wanted to outline the relevant background to his suicide, yet any attempt to go into the past enlarged the scope of his note and soon he was writing page after page of personal history. He didn’t want to write an autobiography. Indeed, any account of his life only served to emphasize how undistinguished it was. Yet he had to find a way to leave a message for Alma, something that would tell her that he knew about her feelings for another man, and that he could no longer go on living with this knowledge.

  He purchased a .45 automatic, the make and model of sidearm that he and Monty Burnham trained with during the second World War. In the privacy of the basement laundry room Raymond filled the clip to capacity with cartridges, slammed the clip into place, and pulled back on the automatic’s slide to chamber a bullet. Then he clicked on the pistol’s safety. Although he hadn’t picked up a gun since his years in the service, the feel of the weapon in his hand was so familiar that he thought its loading and operation might well belong in the same category as riding a bicycle—once learned, never forgotten. He put the .45 into the pocket of his overcoat—first wrapping it in a dish towel so its shape wouldn’t give itself away—and each day he carried it to work with him. That was the extent of his plan; the rest would be improvised as chance presented itself. He couldn’t be sure when he’d see Monty Burnham, but Raymond knew when the senate was in session and where the legislators were likely to be when they were not in chambers. Raymond made it a po
int to visit the legislative wing frequently.

  The day soon came when he saw Monty Burnham sitting on a red leather banquette outside the senate, which was in recess. Raymond wished the man had been alone, but he could hardly afford to let the opportunity pass. Who knew when he’d have another? He returned to his office and put on his overcoat with its familiar weight on the right side. Into his left pocket he placed the envelope containing the folded, signed confession that he had typed days before. That communication he had had no trouble composing; it came out exactly right the first time, and he was quietly proud of its straightforward—yet still slightly enigmatic—uncomplaining acknowledgment of guilt.

  His decision to say nothing about his motive before shooting Monty Burnham was governed by the same logic, if it can be called that, that decided Raymond against leaving a note for Alma. He didn’t know what to say because he didn’t know what not to say. But if the act itself was going to tell her everything that needed to be said, then the sight of the .45 pointed at Monty Burnham would have to be sufficient explanation for the senator.

  Only the actual sound of the gun going off was Raymond unprepared for. That long hall, those high ceilings, the walls and floors of stone—the .45 boomed and echoed like none ever had during his years of training and combat. He knew the gun would jump in his hand and send a jolt all the way up his arm—he was heedful to aim his second shot as carefully as the first—but the noise, the noise! For a moment his hearing was affected, and shouting and screaming reached Raymond’s ears as if they came from a much greater distance than from the men and women scattering around him. Then, as his hearing gradually improved, the noise from those same people grew louder, as if they were now coming closer, when in fact everyone wanted to move away from the man with the gun.