Montana 1948 (10 page)

I still couldn't hear them, but I wasn't sure if it was the distance or the fact that they had lowered their voices. Now they were barely speaking. Uncle Frank was backing away and muttering something. My father picked up a rock, wound up as if he were going to throw it as far as he could, then simply tossed it into the creek. I watched the splash to see if a trout rose to check it out as they sometimes will. Nothing. I wasn't surprised. You weren't likely to get a trout out in the middle of a shallow creek on a hot day.

Then Frank took a sudden step toward my father. Frank's arms were spread wide, beseechingly, yet his movement was so quick it seemed threatening.

I still had my grandfather's pistol, tucked inside the waistband of my jeans. I took it out, thumbed off the safety, and rested the gun against the stub of a branch. My view of Uncle Frank was unobstructed, and I steadied the sights on his head, right in front of his ear.

The gun was unloaded, of course, but I wondered at that moment what might happen if it weren't. And my first question wasn't, could I pull the trigger; it was, could I, from that distance, with that weapon, under those conditions—the wind, the slope of the hill—hit my target. Only after I decided, probably not—an unfamiliar gun, its small caliber, my poor marksmanship—did I wonder what might happen if I killed my uncle. Would everyone's problems be solved? Would my father be relieved? Could I get away with it?

While these thoughts were gusting through my brain, my father and his brother had come closer to each other. The next thing I knew they were shaking hands. I put the gun back inside my waistband. My father and Uncle Frank walked off together, their broad shoulders almost touching.

We left for Bentrock after dark, and I took my customary place in the backseat, where I could lean back and watch the stars out the back window. The wind had died and the night was clear. My parents were silent in the front seat until we were halfway to town. Then my father said without prelude, “I talked to Frank.”

“Wes!” My mother whispered sharply and looked in my direction. I didn't move.

“It's okay,” my father replied. Whether he thought I was asleep or that he wasn't going to reveal anything, I wasn't sure.

My father went on. “I think the problem's been taken care of. Frank said he's going to cut it out.”

“Oh,
Wes
-ley!” Her words came out in a moan, and I almost gave myself away by leaning forward to see if my mother was in pain.

“What?” my father replied, his confusion apparent and sincere. “What is it?”

“What about what's already been done? What about that, that ...
damage?”

“It can't be undone. That's passed. That's over and done.”

My mother's voice became so low and tender it seemed better suited for an expression of love than what she actually said. “That's not the way it works. You know that. Sins—crimes—are not supposed to go unpunished.”

Even then I knew what the irony of the conversation was: the secretary lecturing the lawyer, the law-enforcement officer, on justice.

My father was silent for such a long time I thought the conversation was over. At last he said, “He'll have to meet his punishment in the hereafter. I won't do anything to arrange it in this life.”

When we arrived home Doris Looks Away was still there, and she and Marie were sitting in the living room drinking coffee. Marie was wrapped in a blanket, but she said she felt stronger. She still had a cough, but it was not as tight and wracking as it had been. My mother felt Marie's forehead and pronounced the fever still present, but obviously it had gone down. Her
eyes had lost that unfocused, feverish gleam, and her cheeks no longer looked inflamed but merely ruddy.

Uncomfortable in our presence, Doris left almost immediately. Marie announced that she was going back to bed. Before she left the room she turned to me and asked, “Did you ride today, Davy?”

I nodded.

“Did you ride far?”

I nodded again.

“And did you see a coyote?”

How did she know I was given a pistol for hunting coyotes? “No,” I said, “but I was looking.”

“He's hard to see when you look for him.”

Those were the last words Marie spoke to me. The next day, Monday, August 13, 1948, Marie Little Soldier was dead. My mother came home from work at 5:15 and found Marie lying dead in her bed. By the time I came home at 6:00 (I had spent the day fishing with Georgie Cahill), the hearse—a Buick station wagon from Undset's Funeral Parlor—was backing out of our driveway and carrying Marie's body away. Uncle Frank's pickup was parked in front of the house. On the courthouse lawn across the street stood a few onlookers, and Mr. and Mrs. Grindahl next door were on their porch, staring at our house as if it might burst into flames at any second. From somewhere on the block came the steady
ratcheta-ratcheta
of a lawn mower—someone who didn't know that for the moment all usual activity had ceased.

When I saw the car from Undset's, I did not run to our house in fear or curiosity. I didn't have to. I knew, I knew immediately what had happened. What's more, I could have walked right past our house, down the length of Green Avenue and right out of Bentrock. I could have kept going and never returned, out of my town, away from my family, away from my childhood. I could have kept going and taken with me the truth of what had happened in that house. No one else knew, and I could keep going until I found a place where I could bury that secret forever.

But I didn't. I walked slowly up the driveway and into the garage. I hung up my fishing pole and tackle box and the stringer of freshly caught perch and bluegills and went into the house.

Everyone was still in the kitchen. My father was on the telephone. “Yes, that's right,” he was saying. “Could you please tell her that. That's right. She's at Undset's now.” My mother sat at the table. She was slumped and staring at the floor, but she had one hand on the tabletop and her fingers were tapping rapidly. Those two actions—the body slumped and the fingers tapping—seemed so mismatched it was as if they belonged to separate bodies. Uncle Frank leaned over the table, filling out a form of some kind. His medical bag was on the table too, and seeing it there where we ate our meals I realized how large it was, how if its black mouth opened, it could swallow all the light in the room.

The door to Marie's room was partially open, and I saw her bed. The blankets and sheets had been stripped, and the mattress was tilted up off the box springs and rested on its edge on the floor.

My mother saw me and reached out to me with one arm; the hand with the drumming fingers remained on the table as if her arm was paralyzed.

I stepped into my mother's embrace, and as I did she leaned her head against my torso in a way that made it clear I was the one offering comfort.

“It's Marie,” she said. “She didn't make it, David.”

My father hung up the phone, and I looked at him. “She's dead, David. That's what your mother means. Marie died this afternoon.”

I smelled like fish. That's what I kept thinking. I smelled like fish, and that was the reason I didn't belong in this room. It was that and not the secret I held, the fearful knowledge. . . .

The back screen door slammed and Daisy McAuley burst into the kitchen. “My God! My God! What is going on here?”

My father repeated the words he spoke to me. “Marie's dead, Daisy. She died this afternoon.”

“Oh, my Lord! Oh no! Why, I looked in on her yesterday afternoon. She was doing much better.”

Uncle Frank finished his form and stood up so straight he seemed to be at attention. “This happens,” he said to Daisy. “Pneumonia patients can have a sudden relapse, their lungs fill quickly. . . . Or the heart can fail from the strain of dealing
with the disease. And there may have been a preexisting condition. We don't know. I see this much more often, however, in older patients.”

I saw the document that Uncle Frank had been filling out. Across the top it said in bold letters “Mercer County Certificate of Death.”

“I also have the feeling,” Uncle Frank continued, “that she may not have been doing as well as she wanted us to believe. I think the Indian way is to deny illness, to try to push through in the face of it.”

“Her fever was down, I know that,” said my mother.

Uncle Frank shrugged. “A fever can fluctuate dramatically.”

Daisy sunk down so hard onto a kitchen chair that it scraped a few inches across the linoleum. “That poor thing. That poor young thing.”

“Pneumonia is still a serious disease,” Uncle Frank said sternly. “Very serious. We mustn't lose sight of that.”

My father stood by the refrigerator with his back to us. He ran his index finger up and down the woven basket that covered the motor on top of the refrigerator. “I couldn't reach any of Marie's family. No answer at home or at the stepfather's bar.” He turned around and I saw he had been crying. “I'm going to drive out there. They have to be notified as soon as possible. . . .”

“What about Ronnie?” my mother asked.

My father nodded. “I'll get in touch with him too. And Doris. But Marie's mother first. She has to be the first.”

He moved toward the door, car keys in hand. “Do you need anything?” he asked my mother.

She shook her head. “Just hurry back.”

“I won't take any longer than I have to.”

This was my chance. I could ride along with my father and, when we were alone, tell him what I knew. But my mother still had her arm around me, and until she let go it didn't seem right to leave. Besides, he was going to face more grief, and this room held all I could handle. (I hadn't realized until that moment how large a part of my father's job this was. When someone's son rolled his pickup on a county highway, or someone's father shot himself climbing over a fence when he was deer hunting, or when some woman's husband dropped dead of a heart attack in a hotel down in Miles City, it was my father's duty to notify the family. Or when a drunk lay down on the tracks right in the path of a Great Northern freight train, it was my father's job to find out if he
had
any family. To this day I cannot hear that phrase—“pending notification of next of kin”—without thinking that someone out there, someone like my father, is toting around a basket of grief, looking for a doorstep to deposit it on. To think I once believed the hardest part of his job would be the dangerous criminals he might face.)

Right after my father left, Uncle Frank excused himself, saying he had to look in on Janie Cassidy, who had an unusually severe case of chicken pox. My mother did not get up to see him out.

Daisy reached out toward my mother and patted the back of my mother's hand. “You took good care of her,” said Daisy. “That girl got the best care she could get right here in this house.”