by Larry Watson
Calvin Sidey was inconsolable, and his grief, its intensity and its dimension, was frightening to behold. His drinking was soon out of control and his moods turned darker and his temper hotter. Beverly remembered being in Soward’s Butcher Shop when Calvin stormed in and began to berate and threaten Mr. Soward for selling an inferior cut of meat. Beverly had her son, Adam, with her, and since she couldn’t cover Adam’s ears in time to keep him from hearing Calvin Sidey’s curses, she turned to leave the store.
Even in his drunken rage, Calvin Sidey must have realized how inappropriate his actions were, and he fell suddenly silent and stumbled backward as if he had been blocking Beverly and Adam’s path to the door. But oddly, Mr. Soward suddenly stopped defending his product and told Calvin Sidey that perhaps he was right; perhaps that meat had been unusually gristly. He offered to replace the roast free of charge, a bit of charity as remarkable as Calvin Sidey’s outburst.
Beverly had often wondered about that day and the alteration of both men’s behavior. What had caused it? The presence of a woman? A child? Those were plausible explanations, yet she couldn’t shake the thought that the change that transpired in that room with its raw reek of butchered flesh and fresh blood had more to do with Calvin Sidey than her, that he had somehow been able to inspire — simultaneously?—courtesy and terror in others and himself. And then she mocked herself for such thoughts, telling herself that she was letting her image of a grief-stricken drunk be affected by her recollection of Aunt Doris’s moony talk about the man.
Within a year or two of the incident in the butcher shop, Beverly had moved into the house next to Calvin Sidey’s. Her husband, Burt, through a willingness to work eighty-hour weeks and to accept the case of any client who walked through his door, was finally able to afford a home on Fourth Street, though by then those residences no longer had the prestige of Burt’s boyhood. They were simply nice houses, which suited Beverly just fine; she never expected to live in a home finer than her mother and father’s. And poor Burt. He got so little enjoyment out of the house that meant so much to him. His hard-charging years caught up to him, and he was dead of a heart attack before he turned fifty.
And that meant neither of the houses at the top of Fourth Street had a man as the head of the household. Around the time of Burt’s death, Calvin Sidey left Gladstone. Beverly still remembered the day Calvin’s mother and sister came to the house, two black-clad women looking like bobbing magpies as they came up the front walk. They had been living together in a small apartment above the Gladstone Memorial Clinic, but when they entered the Sidey house, it was to stay. And their arrival coincided with Calvin’s departure—for good. Jeanette must have been fifteen or sixteen, and her brother Bill two or three years younger. If their father ever returned for his children’s birthdays, for their high school graduations, or for holidays, Beverly never knew about it. She wondered if he even knew, at the time, that his son enlisted in the army and that his daughter ran off with a Louisiana oilman.
When Calvin left Gladstone, the word around town was that he had returned to the cowboy life, hiring himself out to any rancher who’d have him. Then Beverly heard that he was living like a hermit on land that a family member had homesteaded in the previous century.
By then, Beverly knew a thing or two about grief herself. She knew its agony didn’t grow worse over time. Day by day, week by week, its pain lessened, although sometimes so imperceptibly that it seemed a wound that couldn’t heal. And grief didn’t drive you away from your family and civilization. Beverly had clung so tightly to her son after Burt’s death that she sometimes wondered if Adam’s problems had their origin in that period when he lost his father, when his mother asked of him something he could not give.
As if she were among the last to catch a flu that had been making the rounds, Beverly heard a rumor that offered up another reason for Calvin Sidey’s departure. The story had obviously been in circulation for a while because when it was brought up in Beverly’s presence, it was with the assumption that she would know it as well as anyone in town.
Del Murdock, a rancher, was found dead in his own driveway. The cause of death was clear—his skull was fractured—but the cause behind the cause was not. He was lying by his truck’s open door, so it was possible that he got out, slipped, fell backward, and split his head open on the running board. That was certainly a plausible explanation; on many nights he staggered out of one or another of Gladstone’s bars, climbed into his truck, and negotiated the long drive back to the house where he lived alone most of the year. His wife spent more and more of her time down in Casper, Wyoming, where, or so Mrs. Murdock said, she had a sick mother who needed looking after. Most of Gladstone figured she grabbed onto any excuse she could find to put distance between herself and the foul-mouthed drunk she was married to.
But many people claimed that Del’s skull had fractured from something other than a fall and a truck’s running board. A pipe or a gun barrel or a two-by-four could also have done the damage, and that version had someone waiting for Del when he drove up that night, someone who clubbed Del in the back of the head. That someone was rumored to be Calvin Sidey, and in that narrative he left Gladstone to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The story had never made sense to Beverly. What did Calvin Sidey have against Del Murdock? And why would Sidey believe that living far from town put him out of the reach of the law?
She finally asked her husband, though reluctantly. Burt, whether through the fault of his lawyer’s training or his own contrary nature, did not like to respond to any question put directly to him, and on that occasion he behaved as he so often did. He worked his tongue inside his cheek and lip, tsked softly, and then said, cryptically, “The French, they are a funny race . . .”
“What on earth does that mean?” Beverly had demanded, thereby guaranteeing that she would get no more from Burt than a nod of the head and a raised eyebrow.
Beverly sat on her curiosity for a long time before she had the nerve to inquire again into the death of Del Murdock and Calvin Sidey’s alleged role. Finally, she asked May Swearingen, who not only knew most of the town’s gossip but much of Gladstone’s official history as well.
“ ‘The French are a funny race’—what’s that supposed to mean?” Beverly asked. “And what could it possibly have to do with Calvin Sidey and Del Murdock’s death?”
“You never heard that saying?” May Swearingen was hugely overweight, and she paused to pinch two more of the gingersnaps Beverly set out. “I guess your hubby wants to spare you the vulgarities. ‘The French, they are a funny race—they fight with their feet and fuck with their face.’ The story going round had Del Murdock in the Pioneer Bar reciting this little ditty one night shortly after Mrs. Sidey died overseas. Del speculated out loud that maybe Mrs. Sidey had gone back over there to get some of that French fucking. Folks think news of this little incident found its way back to Calvin Sidey, and that’s why he was waiting for Del when he pulled up to his house that night.”
“That’s a ghastly explanation! Do you believe it?”
“I don’t believe it,” said May. “But I don’t not believe it.”
“According to that story, Calvin Sidey left Gladstone so he couldn’t be arrested . . .”
May took two more cookies and put them both in her mouth. “Yep. Though it seems to me if they had any kind of case at all they could arrest him out on the prairie as easy as on Fourth Street. Of course, they’d have to catch him first and out there that might not be so easy. But gone he is, that’s sure, and I don’t think he plans to come back.”
But now Calvin Sidey has returned to Fourth Street and with suitcase in hand. Beverly supposes she should wave and call out, Remember your old neighbor? Then she might ask him if he’s coming back for good. Or for ill . . . But the July sun supplies all the heat Beverly Lodge can handle. She doesn’t need the blue flame of that old man’s gaze turned on her as well.
SEVEN
Bill Sidey slaps on th
e light that illuminates the basement stairs and calls out over his shoulder, “Dad? I’ll show you what I’ve set up for you down here.”
Toting his father’s suitcase, Bill starts down the stairs, the hollow thump of his father’s boots following him. With each step the men take, the temperature drops a few degrees until, at bottom, they’ve escaped the day’s heat entirely.
Nightfall is hours away, but the unfinished basement, with its gray concrete walls and floor, its untreated studs and joists, its encroaching clutter, is so dark Bill has to turn on another light, this one an old floor lamp he has placed next to the bed. The lamp shade has yellowed with age and gives the bulb a dim, autumnal cast. There’s enough illumination, however, for Bill to see again how dismal are the surroundings in which he’s housing his father.
Bill sets the suitcase on the bed, and as he does, he notices how many tufts are missing from the old chenille bedspread. He points to a dresser he has positioned in the middle of the room in an attempt to partition off a sleeping area from the rest of the basement. “The top two drawers are empty, and if those aren’t enough, I’ll clear out others. And I know that’s not much of a closet,” he says, indicating the wire hangers hung on nails pounded into two-by-four studs, “but you can hang a few things over there.”
Calvin looks around the basement. “Where did the bed come from? You bring it down from upstairs? I told you, I didn’t want to turn anyone out of their bed.”
Bill shakes his head. “It came from a rental. A house we’re trying to rent furnished, but since no one has looked at the place since January, I don’t believe it’ll matter that the bed isn’t in there.”
“So you didn’t just lug it down the stairs,” Calvin says. “You hauled it across town and then down the stairs.”
Bill sits down heavily on the bed. He’d like to stretch out and close his eyes. His father has been in the house less than an hour, and Bill already feels a kind of exhaustion coming on, the kind that comes from being in the company of this man who is so difficult to satisfy. And why should it be Bill who tries to please? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
“You said you wanted to stay down here, Dad,” Bill says, spreading his hands in a gesture that takes in the entire basement. “And here we are.”
“This place you can’t rent—have you come down on the price?”
“Have I . . . Of course. Twice.”
“Maybe try it unfurnished? Someone looking for a whole house has probably got some furniture.”
Bill sighs. “Maybe.”
Calvin nods, then walks toward the basement alcove where a bathroom has been roughed in—a toilet, a sink, and a galvanized steel shower stall. He peers in, then moves on to the laundry room where he makes a quick circuit that seems to have as its purpose nothing more than the confirmation of something hoped for or suspected. He returns to where his son is sitting on the bed. “How much are you asking?”
For a moment Bill thinks his father has lost his mind and is wondering how much it will cost him to rent this basement space. Then Bill realizes that his father is still referring to the unrented house.
“One twenty. That’s what we’re asking now.”
“Seems steep to me,” Calvin says. “But hell. What do I know. Get what you can get.”
Then Calvin reaches past his son to spring the latches on his suitcase. Bill stands and steps aside so his father can proceed with his unpacking.
“This will do,” Calvin says.
Bill supposes that his father is referring to the basement and the way it’s been arranged for him. And that expression of approval should be enough for Bill. It should be. He knows that. To expect, hope, or push for more from this man is almost certainly an exercise in futility. Yet Bill can’t help himself.
“Jesus, Dad. You don’t have to stay down here. Let us put you in our room.”
“Not necessary,” says Calvin.
“You said you wanted it cool. We’ve got a window air conditioner up there.” As Bill says this, however, he recalls his father’s trailer and its suffocating heat.
Calvin reaches up and with the tip of his index finger touches one of the rough wood joists as if he’s confirming the solidity of what’s overhead. “This is fine,” he says.
“In Will’s room then. Or Ann’s. This makes no sense. You down here and an empty bedroom upstairs.”
“This will do fine,” he says again.
“You know, Dad, this is your house. No matter how long it’s been since you lived here, it’s still in your name.”
“Should we take care of that while I’m in town? Sign the papers and make it official? You know I’ve got a will drawn up, and this will all be yours when I’m gone. But if you want to get that out of the way now, it’s fine by me.”
“No, no, that’s not . . . I don’t care about the paperwork. I want you to feel comfortable. To feel at home here. For Christ’s sake, you haven’t even taken off your hat.”
Calvin swiftly, angrily, removes his hat. For a second, it looks as though he’s going to sail it onto the bed, but then, as if recalling ancient superstition, he stops himself. He pinches the hat’s crown and runs his fingers around the brim as if reshaping it were the reason he took it off in the first place. He drops the hat on top of the dresser. He tugs on the pulls for the top drawer, and the drawer sticks, the wood probably warped by the basement’s damp. When the drawer pops open, Calvin feels around the drawer’s interior, touching the bottom and sides as if he’s searching for a secret compartment.
“This was your mother’s,” Calvin says without looking at his son. “Hers and her idea. I remember the day we bought it. At a furniture store in Bozeman. Had a little quarrel over it. We’ve got a dresser, I told her. But hell, we both knew she’d have her way . . .” He takes his hand out of the drawer and rubs the top. “Bird’s-eye maple. We had a hell of a time hauling it back here. What were we driving then? That big DeSoto maybe . . . And what the hell were we doing in Bozeman?”
Bill could pretend as though the conversation really is about furniture, but he’s disinclined to do so. “I missed her too, you know. We all did.”
“I’m sure you did.” Calvin slowly pushes the drawer shut, and once it’s closed, he flips the drawer pull up and down, making a clacking sound like a door knocker. “But the hell of it is, I never stopped.” Then he turns away from the dresser and back to his son. “Marjorie doesn’t look sick to me. She looks damn good.”
Bill can’t say to his father, I’ve noticed the same thing. But the truth is, as the time for their trip draws closer, Marjorie has become more energetic and animated.
“She’s not sick, Dad. She has a condition.”
“If this operation’s a success, how’s she going to be different?”
Bill knows what he wants the answer to be, though it’s not an answer he could ever give to his father. He secretly hopes that once his wife’s uterus is removed, she’ll regress and he’ll no longer find himself married to the cautious, modest, anxious Marjorie but to the wild, uninhibited Marjorie of her teenaged years, her Tully Heckaman years, as he has come to think of them. In marriage, Bill has provided her with stability and respectability, and she’s thanked him by being a faithful, proper wife. How could he ever convey to her, much less to his father, his desire that Marjorie be for her husband what she once was for a young cowboy?
“She won’t have such bad periods for one thing,” Bill says, hoping that his candor will push his father away from the subject.
“They won’t go on forever, you know. How old is Marjorie?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“She can’t put up with this problem a few more years?”
“You know what, Dad? She’s not one of your goddamn ranch wives who has a kid during the night and is up fixing breakfast for all the hands the next morning and then castrating calves in the afternoon. Those women don’t exist anymore. I doubt they ever did.”
“Don’t be too sure—”
�
�This isn’t up to me, Dad. Or you. A doctor says Marjorie needs this operation. That’s good enough for me.”
“A Missoula doctor,” Calvin says scornfully. “What about insurance? Have you talked to Jess Stabler? Will they pay for an operation on the other side of the state?”
“Jess isn’t with Blue Cross any longer. He retired more than ten years ago. But to answer your question: Yes, insurance will cover the operation and the hospital stay. Most of it, anyway. And we can take care of the rest.”
“Good for you.” Calvin turns his back to his son and reopens the dresser’s top drawer. Then he crosses to the bed and from the suitcase takes out a small stack of T-shirts and briefs and a few pair of socks folded into a ball, the whiteness of all these startling amid the basement’s gray. Bill knows he’s being dismissed, but he doesn’t care.
“Could you hold off on that, Dad? I’ll help you unpack in a minute, but first I’ve got something I have to say.”
Calvin puts his underwear on top of the dresser and pushes the drawer closed.
“After Mom died,” Bill says, “Jeanette and I needed you. All right, since then I’ve learned enough about human nature to know that maybe you just couldn’t give us what we needed. But hell, you probably needed something from us too. It doesn’t matter. Not now. It’s all water under the bridge. No reason to go back to that time. But now it’s my kids who will be in your care, and I’m putting you on notice: You will not abandon them.”
His father smiles faintly. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”
“You know what I’m talking about. I didn’t ask you to stay here just to make sure the house doesn’t blow away while we’re gone. These kids are going to worry about their mom. They need to know they’re with someone who cares about them. And while we’re gone, you’ll be that someone.”
