Montana 1948 (19 page)

I didn't run up the stairs. I couldn't. But the reason is not what you might think. My legs worked fine. Oh, I was shaken. What I saw in the basement set my heart racing and soured my stomach but was not what slowed me down.

No, I took my time climbing the two flights to my mother because I needed time to compose myself, to make certain I could keep concealed my satisfaction over what had happened.

You see, I knew—I knew! I
knew!
—that Uncle Frank's suicide had solved all our problems.

My father would not have to march his brother across the street to jail.

There would be no trial, no pile of testimony for jurors to sift through, trying to separate the inevitable one-eighth, one-quarter, one-half truths from the whole truth. No pressure on anyone to come forward and bear witness, no reputations damaged, no one embarrassed, no one chastised.... The town would not have to choose sides over guilt or innocence.

Indian women could visit a doctor without fear of being assaulted, violated by a man who had taken a vow to do them no harm.

We would no longer have to worry that Grandfather would mount an attack of some kind on our home.

Certainly there would be sadness—Aunt Gloria was a widow, my father was suddenly, like me, an only child, Grandma's tears would fill a rain barrel—but this grief would pass. Once the mourning period passed, we would have our lives back, and if they would not be exactly what they had been earlier, they would be close enough for my satisfaction.

What more can I say? I was a child. I believed all these things to be true.

As I climbed the stairs, I felt something for my uncle in death that I hadn't felt for him in life. It was gratitude, yes, but it was something more. It was very close to love.

Epilogue

W
e moved from Bentrock on a snowy day in early December 1948, a day, really, when we had no business traveling. It was bad enough in town, where snow covered the streets; out in the country nothing stopped the wind, so roads and highways could easily be drifted closed. But the car was packed, the moving van had left the day before with our furniture, we had said our good-byes to those who would hear them. Doors were locked; minds were made up.

They had been made up, in fact, for months. Since shortly after Uncle Frank's suicide, when my mother abruptly said to my father, “I cannot continue living here.”

I knew she did not mean the house alone but Bentrock as well.

And I knew it was not the macabre discomfort of living in the same rooms where two people had recently died. That was not what made living there impossible for her. She had her religious beliefs to see her through that.

But she had no resources that enabled her to live with the lies concocted in the aftermath of Frank's death.

It was decided (my use of the passive voice is deliberate; I could never be exactly sure who was involved in the
decision: my parents, certainly, but others were probably involved as well—my grandfather seems a good bet. Len? Gloria?) to explain Uncle Frank's death as an accident, to say that he had been helping my father build shelves in our basement, that he fell from a ladder, struck his head on the concrete floor, and died instantly. The only outsider to see Frank's body—and who could thus contradict this story—was Clarence Undset, owner of Undset's Funeral Home. What bribes were offered, what deals were struck to secure Mr. Undset's silence, I never knew, but everyone seemed confident that he would never reveal what he saw when he took Frank's body away: the gashes in Frank's wrists.

Similarly, it was decided not to reveal any of Frank's crimes. What purpose would it serve? He would never molest anyone again. The Indian women of Mercer County were safe from him. Besides, as my letter-of-the-law father said, Uncle Frank was never convicted of anything; there was no sense clouding the air with accusations.

As a consequence of these postmortem cover-ups, it was possible for Frank Hayden to be buried without scandal and to be eulogized in the usual blandly reverent way—decorated soldier, public servant, dedicated to healing, dutiful son, loving husband, still a youthful man, strong, vital. . . . Finally even the minister had to confess some bafflement over a life so rudely, inexplicably cut off. Who among us can begin to understand God's plans for any of us? Who indeed.

None of these precautions on behalf of Frank's reputation was enough however to restore harmony in the Hayden
family. At the funeral, all of us—Grandpa and Grandma, Aunt Gloria, my father, mother, and I—sat together in the same pew (a surprisingly small group, considering the clan's power in the county), but neither my aunt nor my grandparents would speak to us. At the cemetery they made a point of standing on the opposite side of the grave from us. Even I understood the symbolism: Frank's death was an unbridgeable gulf between us. Although my parents seemed only hurt by this snubbing (they shuffled away from the cemetery and did not return with everyone else to the church for the meal in the church basement), it angered me. If there was any sense, any purpose at all in Uncle Frank's suicide, if he killed himself for any
reason,
it was so these people—his wife, his parents, his brother, his sister-in-law—could be reunited after his death. But there was the open grave, and not one of us would dream of leaping across it.

Therefore, when my mother made her pronouncement about living in Bentrock, my father understood exactly what she meant, and he simply nodded, as if he had known all along that was so but had been waiting for her to say the words. He didn't argue; he didn't say, “This is our home”; he didn't accuse; he didn't say, “You've never liked this town or this house, but it's my home.” He agreed with my mother and began immediately to dismantle our lives in Bentrock.

He arranged, first of all, to withdraw from the upcoming election, citing as his reason “another job offer—an opportunity to practice law and put all that schooling to use.” This was before he had lined up the possibility of a job with a law
firm in Fargo, North Dakota. Len McAuley's name was substituted for my father's on the ticket. There was no doubt Len would be elected. He ran unopposed.

Next, our house was put up for sale, and my mother called her parents to tell them we would be staying with them on the farm while we looked for our own place.

My mother withdrew me from school and was given, in a manila envelope, my records to be conveyed to my next school.

My parents said their good-byes—to Len and Daisy, to the Hutchinsons. To Ollie Young Bear. The number of people seemed so small that it diminished my parents' years in Bentrock, as if their time there hadn't really amounted to much at all. I kept my own farewells to a minimum, and to ease the emotionalism (and perhaps to trick myself and make leaving easier), I told many of my friends that we would probably be moving back the following summer.

There we were, our car so loaded down it seemed ready to bottom out as my father backed out of the driveway. As we were about to pull away, I shouted, “Wait!”, opened the back door, and jumped out of the car.

I ran to the house and clambered up a snowdrift to the living room window. I wanted one last look, to see what our house looked like without us in it. If my parents asked what I was looking for, I had already decided what I would answer. “Ghosts,” I would say.

The frost on the window made it difficult to see in.

No, that wasn't it.

The emptiness inside made it difficult to see in. The blank room had even less pattern than frosted glass. The bland gray carpeting, the once-white walls trying to turn yellow—snow should have been falling and drifting in
there.

My parents, bless them, did not honk the horn or yell for me to get back in the car. They waited, and when I turned back to them and saw them through the screen of falling snow, I wondered again how it could have happened—how it could be that those two people who only wanted to do right, whose only error lay in trying to be loyal to both family and justice, were now dispossessed, the ones forced to leave Bentrock and build new lives. For a moment I felt like waving good-bye to them, signalling them to go, to move without me. It had nothing to do with wanting to stay in Montana; it had everything to do with wanting to stay away from those two hapless, forlorn people. What kind of life would it be, traveling in their company?

In fact, it was not a bad life at all. After spending the winter with my mother's parents on their farm, we moved the following spring to Fargo. There my father got a job with a small law office and within five years his name was listed as a partner with the firm: Line, Gustafson, and Hayden, Attorneys-at-Law. My mother got her wish: my father became a lawyer. He finally had a job to go with that briefcase she gave him.

For a while she tendered hopes that I would follow in my father's footsteps and pursue a career in law. “Wouldn't it be something,” she once hopefully said to me when I was in my teens, “Hayden and Son, Law Partners?” “Wouldn't it be more appropriate,” I answered, “for me to be elected sheriff of Mercer County, Montana, and carry on that Hayden tradition?” She never said another word about what I should do with my life. My remark was cruel, yet it was kinder than the truth: after what I observed as a child in Bentrock, I could never believe in the rule of law again. That my father could continue in his profession I attributed to his ability to segment parts of his life and keep one from intruding on another.

For myself, I eventually became a history teacher in a Rochester, Minnesota, high school. I did not—do not—believe in the purity and certainty of the study of history over law. Not at all. Quite the opposite. I find history endlessly amusing, knowing, as I do, that the record of any human community might omit stories of sexual abuse, murder, suicide . . . . Who knows—perhaps any region's most dramatic, most sensational stories were not played out in the public view but were confined to small, private places. A doctor's office, say. A white frame house on a quiet street. So no matter what the historical documents might say, I feel free to augment them with whatever lurid or comical fantasy my imagination might concoct. And know that the truth might not be far off. These musings, of course, are for my private enjoyment. For my students I keep a straight face and pretend that the text tells the truth, whole and unembellished.