Montana 1948 (6 page)

“Would she be willing to talk to me?”

“She might be. If you approach her the right way.”

“I only have the one way.”

“I know,” my mother said.

My father clapped his hands, his usual prelude to action—time to put up the storm windows, to rake the leaves, to shovel the walk, to shake the rugs. To this day, when I hear the first clap of applause in a theater, a lecture hall, a banquet,
I reflexively think of my father and his call to chores. “Let's see if she's awake,” he said, “and get on with it.”

As they left the porch, I ran around the house and went in the back door just as they were heading into Marie's room. Neither of them said a word to me. They went in and closed the door behind them. I lingered nearby but couldn't make out a word, only the steady low murmur of voices punctuated occasionally by Marie's coughs.

On the kitchen table was Uncle Frank's beer bottle. I examined it closely, searching for the lines and whorls of his fingerprints. (One of the ways my father kept the respect and admiration of the boys in our town during the war was by fingerprinting every child who stopped by his office. I must have been fingerprinted fifteen times myself.) I was beginning already to think of Uncle Frank as a criminal. I may not have been entirely convinced of his guilt, but the story my mother told was too lurid, too frightening, for me to continue thinking of my uncle in the way I always had. Charming, affable Uncle Frank was gone for good.

My parents were in Marie's room for a long time, and when they came out both of them were grim-faced and silent.

“How's Marie?” I asked my mother.

“She's going to sleep a while. That's what she needs now.”

Our supper was soup and sandwiches, a meal usually reserved for lunches or Sunday evenings when we got home
late from spending the day at the ranch. After eating, my father went back out on the porch and simply stood there, staring out at the evening's lengthening shadows. My mother was finishing the dishes when he came back in and announced, “I'm going over to talk to Len.”

Len McAuley was my father's deputy and our next-door neighbor, and before he was my father's deputy he had been my grandfather's deputy. I once heard a story about how Len, without a weapon, ran down on foot and disarmed a cowboy who shot up a bar on Main Street, but the story was hard to believe about the Len McAuley I knew. He was tall, gaunt, stoop-shouldered, shy, and soft-spoken. Len and his wife Daisy (who made up for Len's taciturnity with both the quantity and the volume of her talk) were in their sixties, and they were more like grandparents to me than my own. When I was younger, Len used to carve little animals for my play, and Daisy never stopped baking cookies for me.

As my father went out the door, my mother called after him, “If Daisy's home tell her I've got a fresh pot of coffee!”

Moments later they were off on their own, my father and Len standing in the McAuley front yard and my mother and Daisy sitting at our kitchen table. But there were similarities. All four were drinking coffee. In each pair one talked while the other listened. (My mother and Len were the listeners.) And both my father and mother were, I knew, conducting investigations.

I wandered in and out of the house, catching fragments
of both conversations, until my mother finally said, “David. Either go out or stay in.” Daisy laughed and said, “He's like Cuss”—her cat—“when he's out, he wants to go in. When he's in he wants to go out.”

Both my parents were discreet about their investigations. Neither came right out and repeated Marie's story about Uncle Frank, yet they used the same strategy: to mention Marie's perturbation and then to pretend mystification—“I don't know why she would act that way,” my mother said, while my father shook his head in puzzlement. They both left openings for Len or Daisy to contribute what they could.

And my mother struck pay dirt.

On one of my passes through the kitchen, Daisy was hunched over the table, her white hair bobbing in my mother's direction and her tanned plump arm reaching toward my mother. Daisy's usually loud, brassy voice was lowered, but I heard her say, “The word is he doesn't do everything on the up-and-up.” Then she noticed me. She straightened up and smiled at me but stopped talking. That meant I was supposed to leave the room, and I did. But slowly. As I crossed into the living room, Daisy whispered, “Just the squaws though.”

Later that night, right before we all went to bed, my mother checked on Marie once more. When she came out my father and I were in the kitchen, drinking milk and eating the rhubarb cake that Daisy had brought over.

My mother shut Marie's door quietly and then leaned her
back against it, almost as if she were using her weight to keep the door closed. She looked tired. She was still wearing her work clothes—she usually changed into dungarees or slacks and a gingham shirt as soon as she got home. Her glasses were off and her eyes were ringed with fatigue. Her lipstick had faded, and she hadn't brushed out her hair.

My father asked without looking up, “How's Marie?”

My mother's gaze was fixed upon my father. “You're eating,” she said.

“Daisy's cake. It's delicious.”

“You can eat....”

At some point my father must have become aware that she was staring at him. His cake unfinished, he set down his fork. “I don't hear her coughing.”

“She's sleeping again.” I couldn't tell if she was actually looking at him or if she was simply staring off and his form intersected her vision.

Then I knew. She saw him now as she hadn't before. He was not only her husband, he was a
brother,
and brother to a man who used his profession to take advantage of women, brother to a
pervert!
And how did I know these were my mother's thoughts? I knew because they were mine. I put down my glass of milk but I did not look at my father. I didn't want to notice the way he combed his hair straight back. I didn't want to see the little extra mound of flesh between his eyebrows. I didn't want to see the way the long line of his nose was interrupted by a slight inward curve. I didn't want to see any of the ways that he resembled his brother.

“What did Len say?” asked my mother.

“That we need rain.”

My mother hung her head.

“That's what we talked about, Gail.”

She brought her head up quickly. “That's not what Daisy and I talked about.”

“I don't want this all over town, Gail. We don't have proof of anything.”

Now they were falling into familiar roles. My father believed in
proof,
in evidence, and he held off on his own convictions until he had sufficient evidence to support them. My mother, on the other hand, was willing to go on a lot less, on her feelings, her faith.

My mother said, “It's around town more than you realize.”

“I don't want this getting back to my father.”

That
was what my father believed in. If he could not sufficiently fear, love, trust, obey, and honor God—as we were told in catechism class we must—it was because he had nothing left for his Heavenly Father after declaring absolute fealty to his earthly one.

“Is that what you're concerned about?”

“Gail....”

My mother pointed at me. “He won't be going to him again. I guarantee that.”

“For God's sake, Gail.”

“He won't.”

I was afraid I would give myself away—by blushing or
failing to react the way I should. I wasn't supposed to know what they were talking about.

“Let's not discuss this in front of him.”

My mother continued to stare at him.

“I'll handle this, Gail. In my fashion.”

After another long silence, my mother finally left her post at Marie's door. She was almost out of the kitchen when she turned and said to my father in the calmest voice she had used all evening: “Just one thing, Wes. You never said you didn't believe it. Why is that? Why?”

She waited for his answer. I waited too, breathlessly, looking down at our floor's speckled linoleum and holding my sight on one green speck until my father said, of course I don't believe it; of course it isn't true.

But he didn't say a word. He simply picked up his fork and continued to eat Daisy McAuley's rhubarb cake.

That was when it came to me. Uncle Frank was my father's brother, and my father knew him as well as any man or woman.

And my father knew he was guilty.

Two

T
HE next day my father began investigating the accusation Marie had made against his brother. How did I know this? I made my guess from three facts. Before he left for his office in the morning he asked my mother if she needed any honey. He was driving out to the reservation, and if she liked he could stop at Birdwells' and buy her some honey. My mother had a passion for honey. She spread it on toast and biscuits; she sweetened her tea with it; she used it in baking; she ate spoonfuls of it right from the jar. And the best honey, she said, came from the Birdwells' bee farm. Mr. Birdwell's place was on the highway that led to the reservation.

My father's inquiry about the honey was, first of all, an overture of peace to my mother. Let's not quarrel, my father was saying. (The phrase he often used with both my mother and me was, “Let's not have this unpleasantness between us,” as if the problem, whatever it might be, resided not
in
us but
outside
of us.)

And, second, the offer to buy honey was also an offhand way for my father to announce that he was going out to the reservation. He had no jurisdiction there, and the reservation police hadn't called him in on a case, so he could be going
there for only one reason: to look into the accusations Marie had made.

Later that day I saw my father at the Coffee Cup, a popular diner in downtown Bentrock. There was nothing uncommon about my father (or any other citizen) being in the Coffee Cup on a summer afternoon, but my father usually sat at the large table in the center of the cafe, drinking coffee with his regular group: Don Young, the pharmacist; Rand Hutchinson, the owner of Hutchinson's Greenhouse; Howard Bailey, who ran an oil abstracting company; and other members of the Bentrock business community. On that day, however, he sat at a table for two over against the far wall. With him sat Ollie Young Bear, the most respected—even beloved—Indian in northeastern Montana, perhaps even the whole state.

Ollie Young Bear was also a war hero (he was wounded in action in North Africa), a graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman, a deacon at First Lutheran Church, an executive with Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, the star pitcher on the Elks' fast-pitch softball team—runner-up in the Silver Division of the state tournament (though he probably could not have been admitted to the Elks as a member). He did not smoke, drink, or curse. He married Doris Strickland, a white woman whose family owned a prosperous ranch south of Bentrock, and Ollie and Doris had two shy, polite children, a boy and a girl. All of these accomplishments made Ollie the perfect choice for white people to point to as an example of what Indians
could
be. My father liked to say of Ollie Young Bear, “He's a testimony to what hard work will get you.”