Justice (15 page)

Wesley was returning to his home in Bentrock, Montana, from Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was a freshman at the University of North Dakota. His brother Frank, who was already home, was a junior at the University of Minnesota. The brothers had planned on traveling together—meeting in Fargo, North Dakota, and riding the train together to Bentrock—but Frank had found an early ride that would take him all the way to Miles City, so Wesley was left to ride the train alone.

The train lurched, the sound of the wheels on the track
changed, dropping an octave, and their speed altered slightly, like a horse changing its gait from a trot to a canter. They were off the trestle, and Wesley returned to his mother's letter.

“I saw Iris the other day, and she asked about you and said how much she missed you. She wanted to know if you'd be coming home for Thanksgiving. She was so excited to hear that you would be that I went ahead and invited her to share our meal with us. I hope that's all right. I know you're a college man now, but I didn't think you'd mind seeing Iris again. She looked so pretty in her red wool coat....”

Wesley stopped reading and put the letter back in its envelope and stuck it inside his coat pocket. He had read far enough.

It was true, he had not written to Iris, and he had especially not told her he would be returning for Thanksgiving. He had hoped he would be able to avoid seeing her while he was home.

Wesley Hayden and Iris Heil had been a steady couple during Wesley's senior year in high school. She was the first girl Wesley kissed, the first girl to allow him to touch her bare breasts, and the first girl Wesley loved.

Nevertheless, when Wesley left for college he believed he was saying farewell to Iris for good. He did not relish the idea; when he said good-bye it was all he could do to hold back the tears, and the lump in his throat grew so large it seemed to tighten his chest until he could barely draw a breath.

But Wesley had ideas about leaving Bentrock, Montana, the town in which he was born and raised, for good. Going
away to college was only the first step. Unlike his brother Frank, who was offered an athletic scholarship to play baseball at the University of Minnesota, Wesley had no financial incentive to choose a college outside his home state; he could as easily have boarded a train to go to Montana State in Bozeman or the university in Missoula, but he figured that if he was serious about making his life elsewhere he had to begin sometime.

Love was not the issue. Wesley loved Montana. He loved his parents. He supposed he even loved Iris. In the last few months, away from his home state for the longest stretch in his eighteen years, he had come to realize how much of it he treasured——its endless horizon, its huge sky, the way the air smelled faintly of sage and washed rock.

But Wesley's father, Julian Hayden, was an important man in their part of northeastern Montana. He was a landowner of modest wealth; he had substantially expanded his land holdings from his original homestead and supplemented them with a few buildings and businesses in town.

Of more significance, however, was the fact that Wesley's father was the county sheriff, and his hands controlled the gears of the county's political machinery. In short, the Hayden name was known, it meant something to virtually all the region's residents, and even if Wesley himself was not always sure of what it meant to be a Hayden, that didn't lessen the fact that as long as he lived in Bentrock he would automatically have an identity that he had nothing to do with forming.

And once he was out of his hometown and living in Grand Forks, Wesley felt a strange thrill in his anonymity. It was something he hadn't expected and certainly had never experienced.
He could walk around campus, and he was nobody—just one more student in the throng that moved from building to building. Or he could leave the college grounds and walk down University Avenue until he came to the business district. There he would not even be recognized as a student—he could be a clerk in a shoe store, a vagrant, a soda jerk at Kemmelman's Pharmacy.

As he walked around the city, Wesley was careful to vary his route, never to frequent the same store on consecutive days, for fear he would become known as a regular. Many of the other freshman males were being rushed by fraternities, but Wesley had no interest in pledging. Then he'd be a Sigma Chi or a Phi Delt. That was not for him. He had friends on campus, his roommate and a few other fellows from his dormitory, but he told them almost nothing of his background. A classmate found out where Wesley was from and began to call him “Montana.” One night as a group of students walked back from the library together, Wesley separated this young man from the others and asked him if he wouldn't please use his proper name. There must have been some pleading quality in Wesley's voice or a beseeching look in his eyes, because the student apologized and said he'd stop.

But now the train's engine was steaming relentlessly westward, and sometime around midnight the train would pull into Bentrock's depot. Wesley would step onto the platform and then he'd be home again, a Hayden, and if his father or brother were not yet there to pick him up, he would carry his satchel into the brightly lit station. There he would doubtless see Ray Hoffman, the Northern Pacific ticket agent. Ray
would greet him, welcome him home for Thanksgiving and ask, because he knew exactly how long Wesley had been gone and where he had been, how college was going in North Dakota....

The meal was finished, but no one made a move to rise from the table. Wesley's father had carved the turkey, and its carcass still sat near his place. Occasionally Mr. Hayden reached out and pinched another small scrap of meat from the bones.

From her end of the table Wesley's mother said softly to her husband, “If you're still hungry, I have more turkey in the icebox. I put some away for the boys' sandwiches, but you're welcome to it.”

Mr. Hayden shoved the turkey platter. “No, go on. Get it out of here.”

Mrs. Hayden rose and began to stack plates and dishes.

Iris stood as well.

“You sit right back down,” Wesley's mother said.

“I can help,” Iris said.

“Absolutely not. You're a guest at our table, and we do not put our guests to work. You sit here and pretend you're hanging on every word these men speak.”

Obediently Iris sat back down, and as she did she smiled sweetly at Wesley. He had his elbows on the table and his hands clasped in front of him. Iris reached out a finger and ran it slowly across the knuckles of his left hand, a gesture that felt
so shockingly intimate that Wesley took his hand away. He picked up his water glass and turned his attention back to his father, who was telling a story about a man he had recently arrested.

But Wesley had difficulty concentrating on anything other than Iris. The only illumination in the dining room came from the candles on the table, and their wavering and flickering light softened and shadowed every smooth surface—the porcelain milk pitcher, the china bowls and platters, the faces of these people. Iris looked even lovelier than Wesley remembered. Something had changed in her since he had left, barely three months ago. She had lost something—a plumpness in her cheeks, a fullness around her mouth—and this absence made her look older. Her beauty now seemed permanent, no longer something that belonged only to her youth. Her dress was dark red with a white lace collar. Wesley remembered her wearing the dress to the school's Christmas dance the previous year. Tonight, however, in the room's dim light, the dress looked the color of wine. She was also wearing the necklace that Wesley had given her last Christmas, a thin gold chain holding a rhinestone framed by tiny pearls in the shape of a heart. Iris often fingered the pendant and then, as if she suddenly remembered she wasn't supposed to touch it, let it fall back against her throat and folded her hands on her lap. But it wasn't long before she was touching it again, running the rhinestone heart back and forth on its chain.

Wesley's father spoke louder, as if commanding his son's attention were merely a matter of his voice's volume. Perhaps it was. Wesley began to listen to his father's story.

“I was ready to haul him in,” his father said. “Bring him up on a federal offense and everything, when he told me he was going to quit opening envelopes as soon as he came up with enough money for the meal. And if he read any letter that had important news, he'd see to it they got their mail. He'd deliver it himself.

“But I kept on driving. And then I hear sniffling and I look over and Emil's got tears running down his cheeks. Making a clean little track through the dirt.

“That did it. I pull over to the side of the road and say to him, Goddamn it, Emil, this is no way to be putting food on the table. Not at Thanksgiving, not at any time. Hell, it's not even a sensible way to steal. This part of the country, you could open a thousand envelopes and never come across so much as a dollar. But then Emil's another one of those Roosians who's none too bright. He couldn't quite put it all together to stick up a filling station. No, hell no. He's got to snatch the mail bag.

“So I let the sorry bastard go. Told him he was going to have to help Lonnie deliver the mail. If Lonnie would have him. Then I kicked his sorry ass out of the car and shooed him on home. He's goddamn lucky to be spending the night in his own bed.”

Wesley's father turned to Iris and wagged his finger at her. “When you're around me, young lady,” he said, “you're going to have to cover your ears. I'm too old to start watching my tongue.”

Wesley's father got up and went to the sideboard. He opened the cupboard down below and brought out a bottle of
sour mash bourbon, a gift brought all the way from Louisiana by Merle Dennis, an oil speculator who used Bentrock as a base while he ranged from southern Montana up through western North Dakota and into Canada searching for likely locations to drill for oil. Sheriff Hayden had served as Merle Dennis's unofficial guide through the territory, introducing him to ranchers and farmers and even helping him negotiate a few sales of mineral rights. In return for these favors, every time Merle Dennis came back to Bentrock he brought a gift for the sheriff—a hand-tooled belt, a jackknife with an ivory scrimshaw handle, a humidor of cigars, a card of hand-tied flies, a bottle of bourbon. Mr. Hayden put the bottle on the dining room table, and the candlelight gave the whiskey an amber glow. Mr. Hayden also put three cut-glass whiskey tumblers on the table.

“Now then,” he said to his sons, “who would like to follow that delicious dinner with a swallow of fine whiskey?”

Wesley and Frank exchanged glances. They knew their father was referring to them. Iris was excluded from his offer by her age and gender. Wesley was sure their father knew his sons drank, but they had never been allowed to drink openly, much less at the family table. What had changed since Wesley left? Did attending college suddenly mean they were at an age to share their father's whiskey?

Frank did not hesitate. He picked up a glass and held it out for his father to fill. “And I bet you gave Emil a couple bucks, didn't you?” he said to his father.

Mrs. Hayden reentered the room. “It was more than a couple.”

Mr. Hayden waved his hand dismissively. “I gave him ten. Told him to get his family a decent meal for Thanksgiving. And if I heard he bought a bottle with it, I'd throw his ass in jail.”

While his father was pouring, Wesley offered his glass. His father poured in about two fingers of bourbon.

“Tell me,” Frank asked his father, “who's sheriff now—you or Len? I've lost track.”

Mercer County had a limit on the number of terms a sheriff could serve consecutively, and to get around this regulation, Len McAuley, Julian Hayden's deputy, served an occasional term as sheriff and designated Mr. Hayden as his deputy. Those were their official titles, but their actual duties did not change. No one had any doubts about who was in charge in Mercer County.

“Still me,” Mr. Hayden said. “Election's next year. I've got another year in office.”

Wesley brought the whiskey to his lips. As he did, its aroma, redolent of caramel and burnt wood, rushed up his nostrils. He hesitated before he drank, and then did so cautiously, hoping to avoid the effects the first swallow of whiskey could bring——an involuntary shudder, watering eyes, and, worst of all, a gasp or cough. The last thing Wesley wanted was for his father or brother or Iris to think he couldn't take a drink of whiskey without it stealing his breath away. He needn't have worried; the whiskey had the expected kick but it seemed cushioned—whiskey wrapped in soft cotton.

Mrs. Hayden stacked another armload of dirty dishes.
Wesley noticed her raise her eyebrows when she saw the tumblers of whiskey, but she said nothing.