Montana 1948 (17 page)

“At least the word will be out on him,” said my father. “Maybe it will stop.”

Len said, “I don't think you have to worry. He's got the message.”

During this conversation two things struck me: first, that the man they were discussing (and whose crimes they kept alluding to but now did not specifically mention in deference to my supposed innocence) was not some outsider, some Kalispell cowboy or Billings tough who got in trouble up here in my father's jurisdiction, but was my uncle, a man who had only recently stopped lifting me and spinning me around in a dizzying whirl of affection and roughhouse play
when he came to the house. He was
Uncle Frank,
who tried to teach me how to throw a curve ball, who gave me expensive gifts for my birthday and Christmas, who made bad jokes all through my grandmother's Thanksgiving and Easter dinners, who every year went up to Canada to buy the best fireworks for our Fourth of July celebration. Who was married to Aunt Gloria, beautiful Aunt Gloria. Who murdered my beloved Marie. And I couldn't make all those facts match the last one. Just as I couldn't get my mind to wrap itself around the knowledge that he was in our basement, and when I tried to think of that the floor beneath my feet suddenly seemed less solid, like those sewer grates you daringly walked over that gave a momentary glimpse of the dark, flowing depths always waiting below.

Len said, “Your pop's going to keep coming. You have to know that. It's not going to be safe around here. She's right to worry.”

My father stared at the floor so intently it seemed as though he too was concentrating on his brother below.

“You've got an election coming up,” continued Len. “You've got to think about how something like this is going to play with the voters. This county is going to get split three ways by this. Some will stand by you. Not many. There's the reservation. The Indians in town. Your pa. And he'll call in every marker he can. This county is going to get torn up over this. This will make Mercer County look like the Indian wars and the range wars combined. We'll be a long time coming back from this.”

My father kept looking down. “Did my father talk to you, Len?”

“When?”

“Recently. The last day or so.”

Len paused for a long time. “He talked to me.”

“What did he want? What did he ask you to do?”

“You don't want to know that, Wes. Your pa's wild right now. He's not thinking right. He doesn't know what to do.”

“Did he ask you to come over here, Len? Did he ask you to get Frank out yourself? Did he tell you how to do it?”

Len shook his head. “Don't ask me any more. Your pa talked to me. Let's leave it at that.”

“And you turned him down. Or you wouldn't be standing here right now.”

Len patted his head awkwardly as if he were checking to see if he had his hat on. “You're the sheriff. I'm the deputy.”

I thought I saw a trace of a smile flicker across my father's lips. When he finally lifted his head he looked briefly at my mother, at Len, then settled his gaze on me.

I was still child enough to believe, as children do, that when adults were engaged in adult business children became invisible. That was why it was so unsettling to have my father staring at me. What did he want from me? Was he waiting for me to express an opinion—I was the only one in the room who hadn't. Didn't he know—I was a child and ineligible to vote? How dare he bring me in on this now—I wasn't even supposed to know the facts of the case!

Young people are supposed to be the impatient ones, but in
most circumstances they can outwait their elders. The young are more practiced; time passes slower for them and they are constantly filling their hours, days, months, and years with waiting—for birthdays, for Christmas, for Father to return, for summer to arrive, for graduation, for the rain to stop, for the minister to stop talking, for girls to stop saying, “Not now, not yet; wait.” No, when it comes to patience, even the enforced variety, the young are the real masters.

So it was easy to outwait my father. I simply put on my best blank face and kept its dim light beaming toward him. Soon he turned away and, without saying another word to any of us, crossed the room, opened the door to the basement, and descended the stairs.

When the thudding of his steps stopped, my mother calmly asked Len, “How do you think Frank did it?”

“Marie?”

She nodded.

“Wouldn't be hard, I suppose. A doctor. He's probably got the means right there in his bag. Pills. A shot of something or other. Maybe he put a pillow over her face. Weak as she was, it wouldn't have taken much.”

Talk as brutal as this I would have thought would upset my mother, but she didn't flinch. Neither did she shoo me from the room so I would be spared this talk. She was too tired to care anymore. This was the day she had fired a gun in the direction of four men. From her own kitchen. There was no point in worrying about what children heard. There was no point
in protecting them from words when evil and danger were so near at hand.

She said, “There should have been an autopsy.”

Len shrugged. “Someone's got to ask for one. And someone's got to have a reason for asking.”

“But at least we'd know.”

“And then what? If you know something for sure, then you've got to act on that knowing. It's better this way. You know what you want Wes to do. It'll be a lot easier for him if he doesn't know too much.”

“Yes,” my mother replied, chastened.

It bothered me that Len and my mother could talk so easily, freely, almost intimately. That ease seemed to depend on my father's absence. He left the room, and they relaxed and talked about what was really on their minds.

Len went to the sink for a glass of water.

“I'm sorry,” said my mother. “Would you like some coffee? Or—I think we have something ... stronger.”

Len waved his hand. “Got to go. Daisy must be wondering what's going on.”

“I'm surprised she didn't come over.”

“That shotgun blast. That's what's keeping her away.”

Len tapped the kitchen window right over the blown-out screen. “Might as well just put up the storm window. August. It's not that long until it's time anyway.” He finished his water, drinking it all as if it was really thirst and not nerves that brought it to his lips.

He turned to me. “How about it, David. There's a project for you. Take that screen down and put up the storm window for your mother.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“Not now, David,” answered my mother.

“I better get moving,” Len said again. On his way to the door he plucked his gun from the top of the refrigerator as casually as if he were picking up a garden tool. “Just holler if you need me.” He glanced at the basement door. “I don't think you're going to have any more trouble. Not now.”

He left, and my mother and I remained in the kitchen, waiting for my father and Uncle Frank to come up the stairs. Neither of us spoke, but the room's silence was not the usual kind. It felt stunned, still vibrating, the way the air feels in the silence immediately following a gunshot. And something else: I knew that all around us—in the houses up and down the block—human ears were tuned to our frequency, listening to our silence and wondering, was that a shotgun? Where did it come from? Did it come from the Haydens?

I didn't want to be there when Uncle Frank came up. What were we supposed to say to him? Did you miss your wife? How do you like our basement? Are you glad to be out? Yet I couldn't walk away. As long as my mother stayed, I felt I had to as well. I wasn't protecting her—I no longer had any illusions that I could play that role—but I stayed out of loyalty. I wasn't sure what our family had become in those troubled days, but I knew we had to stay close together. We
had been under siege. We had to shore up the walls of the family as best we could.

Then the waiting was over. Footsteps thudded up the stairs, dull booms that could be mistaken, if one hadn't heard the real thing so recently, for a series of tiny shotgun blasts.

But two men did not come through the door. It was my father alone, sputtering as if he had come up from underwater. Before my mother could say anything, my father waved his hand in disgust.

“I'll move him over to the jail first thing in the morning,” said my father.

My mother let her head drop forward.

“He's guilty as sin, Gail. He told me as much.” My father struck himself on the thigh with his fist. “Goddamn it! What could I have been thinking of? Maybe a jury will cut him loose. I won't.
By God, I won't.”

My mother got up from the table and began to work. She set the sugar bowl, the butter, and a loaf of bread on the table. She was on her way to the refrigerator when my father stopped her. “Did you hear me? This is the way it's got to be. I'm sorry.”

She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “I'm not arguing with you, Wesley.”

“You don't think I wish it could be some other way?” my father asked belligerently. “He's my brother—we grew up together, sucked the same tit!”

She slammed the refrigerator. “Wesley—”

“I don't care. I tell you, if you could hear him talk. As if he had no more concern for what he did than if . . . if he had kicked a dog. No. He'd show more remorse over a dog.”

“Marie?”

My father nodded grimly. “Don't ask how.”

She pressed her hand over her mouth, to hold back a curse or because she was gagging on what my father told her. Or on what he wouldn't tell her and what her imagination filled in.

“Do you see?” asked my father. “I can't let him loose. Not and live with myself.”

My parents' usual roles had neatly reversed themselves. My mother now represented practicality and expediency; my father stood for moral absolutism. Yet when I looked at my father his expression was so anguished that it didn't seem possible that he was arguing on principle.

“We understand, Wesley,” my mother said gently, but I knew her words would do nothing to diminish his suffering.

“David,” my mother said clearly and calmly, a different voice for a different world. “We don't have anything to eat. Why don't you run down to Butler's and get some of those frankfurters, and I'll boil them. That'll be quick.”

She wanted me out of the house. That I knew. But she tried to soften that banishment with a little gift. The food I loved more than any other was the frankfurters from Butler's Butcher Shop. She gave me five dollars. “And when you go by Cox's, if you see one of those lemon cakes in the window, why don't you get one. Or anything else that looks good to you.”

Before I left the house I turned back to look at my parents. They had not collapsed into each other's arms as I thought they might. They were simply standing in the kitchen. My father had his arms folded and stared blankly at the floor again. But my mother was looking at him, the expression in her eyes tender and loving and frightened, the same look she lowered on me when I was sick.

I suddenly felt a great distance between us, as if, at that moment, each of us stood on our own little square of flooring with open space surrounding us. Too far apart to jump to anyone else's island, we could only stare at each other the way my mother stared at my father.

That night the jars began to break.

I woke around 1:00 a.m., startled but unsure of what had roused me. Then I heard it, a distant
pop
and a faint clinking. I searched the dark, not because I thought the sound was in my room, but because I felt, in my sleepy groping, that activating any of my other senses might help my hearing.

There it was again—that ringing-tinkling—plainly glass breaking. But where? What was happening?

I got out of bed to look out my window but before I got there I knew the noise wasn't coming from outside. No, this was in the house. It was coming from the basement! From Uncle Frank!

I ran to my parents' room. Their door was open and the light was on, so I had no reluctance about walking right in.

They weren't there. Their pillows still held the indentations of their heads, and the blanket and sheet formed an inverted V in the middle of the bed, suggesting that they had both thrown away the covers from their own side of the bed. I ran out of the room and to the head of the stairs.

I stood there waiting, listening.

Another faint shatter of glass.

Was it a window? Was Uncle Frank breaking one of the windows, hoping he could crawl out the high, narrow opening and escape through one of the window wells? Had my parents gone to stop him?