Montana 1948 (14 page)

As I approached the kitchen where my parents were, I heard my father say, “Help me with this, Gail,” and a chair scraped across the linoleum. I thought he might be moving furniture or changing a light bulb and needed her help.

I was wrong.

I came into the kitchen and saw my mother sitting by the table. My father was on his knees before her, and his head was on her lap. She was rubbing the back of his neck in a way that was instantly recognizable to me: it was exactly the way she rubbed my neck when I had a headache. Overhead, insects flew frantic circles around the kitchen light.

Before I could speak my mother saw me and said so softly I wondered for an instant if my father was sleeping, “Hello, David.”

My father lifted his head and I could tell by his red-rimmed eyes that he had been crying. But that was not what concerned me.

At that moment my father looked so
old
(he was only thirty-eight at the time), and I knew for the first time how this experience with his brother was ruining him physically. Was that the moment I realized my father would die someday? Perhaps. At any rate I knew that the puffiness around his eyes, the deepening creases of worry across his forehead and around his mouth, his pallor, his slow, stiffening gait were all signs that he was growing weaker. I also knew that to continue to stand up to Grandfather, my father needed all the strength he possessed. And perhaps that would still not be enough.

As if she could read my mind, my mother said, “Your father’s just tired, David.”

Using his good leg to brace himself, my father pushed himself to his feet. “We’re all tired,” he said. “Let’s hit the hay.”

I wasn’t tired, and I didn’t want to go to bed. I wanted my parents to tell me what happened when Grandfather and Grandmother were there. Though I knew exactly what was said, I wanted my parents to interpret it all for me. I wanted them to explain it so it wasn’t as bad as the facts made it seem.

But since my father was embarrassed because I saw him on the floor, I had to go to bed. My mother gave me a sympathetic look but said nothing. I turned to go up to my room but my father stopped me.

“David.”

“Yes.”

“If Grandpa should come here when I’m not home, you’re not to let him in, understand?”

“What should I say?”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t answer the door. It’ll be locked. Front and back both.”

“What about Grandma?”

My father blinked and tilted his head back the way you do when you’re trying to keep tears from spilling over. “Not Grandma either.”

“Not ever?”

“Not until I tell you different.”

That night I cried for the first time since that whole sad, sordid, tragic set of events began. My tears, however, were not for Marie, whom I loved, or my uncle, whom I once idolized, or for my parents or grandparents or for my community or my life in it—all, all changed, I knew, by what had happened. But that night I cried myself to sleep because I believed that I would never see my horse, Nutty, again. I remembered the way he lowered and twisted his head when I approached, as if he were waiting for me to whisper something in his ear, that long ear whose touch reminded me of felt. I remembered how I used to rub my fingertips against the grain of the tight, short hair of his forehead and then smooth the hair back down again. I remembered how, when I first put my foot in the stirrup, he seemed to splay out his legs slightly, as if he were lowering himself and bracing for my mount. One of the great regrets of my childhood had always been that I couldn’t live on the same grounds as my horse. Now the distance between us seemed too great for either Nutty or me to travel ever again.

The next day was hot and windy. My mother stayed home from work, and though she said it was because she had a headache, I knew that was not the reason. She was staying home so I wouldn’t have to be alone in the house with Uncle Frank. Early that morning my father took breakfast down to Frank and stayed down there about half an hour. When he came up he said to my mother, “I’m going to see what other arrangements we can make.”

Around ten o’clock my mother sent me to the grocery store, and within a few minutes of walking out of the house that morning I noticed that a change had occurred.

I was a Hayden. I knew, from the time I was very young and without having been told, that that meant something in Bentrock. Because my grandfather was wealthy and powerful, because my father—like his father before him—enforced the law, because my uncle treated the sick and injured (and—am I wrong in mentioning?—because their wives were beautiful), people had an opinion about the Haydens. In their homes, in the cafes and bars and stores, they talked about us. When one of us passed on the street, there were sometimes whispers in our wake. They may not have liked us—perhaps Grandfather bought someone’s foreclosed ranch cheap or let his cattle graze someone else’s range, or perhaps he or my father sent someone’s brother or cousin to the state penitentiary, or perhaps we were simply too prosperous for that luckless, hardscrabble region—but our name was no joke. We were as close as Mercer County came to aristocracy. I never consciously traded on the Hayden name, yet I knew it gave me a measure of respect that I didn’t have to earn.

But as I walked down our tree-lined street that morning, I imagined, behind every curtain or pulled shade, someone peering out and seeing a Hayden and thinking not of power, wealth, and the rule of law, but of perversion, scandal, family division, and decay. If the citizens of Bentrock didn’t know yet that my father had arrested his own brother for sexually assaulting his patients and murdering Marie Little Soldier, they would know soon enough. Then being a Hayden would mean having an identity I didn’t want but could do nothing to disown or deny.

By the time I got to Nash’s Grocery Store, my shame over my family name was so great I didn’t want to go in. I finally got my courage up by convincing myself that it was too early for all the details of our scandal to have made the rounds yet. Still, I picked up the items my mother wanted and left as quickly as I could.

On my way out I almost ran into Miss Schott, riding down the street on one of her big palominos. Miss Schott had been my second-grade teacher (everyone’s second-grade teacher was probably more like it), and since she had retired from teaching she devoted herself full-time to what had been her hobby—breeding, raising, and showing blue-ribbon palominos that were as fine as any in Montana.

She was a strong, stout, cheerful woman who, now that she was no longer teaching, always dressed in boots, dungarees, a bandana-print shirt, and a sweat-stained short-brimmed cowboy hat that looked too small for her big head. She lived just outside town, and she rode one of her horses in every day to check her post office box or to run errands. No one in Bentrock was ever surprised to hear the heavy, slow
clop-clop
of Miss Schott riding down one of the town’s streets, or to see one of her tall, golden palominos tied up along the side of Nash’s Grocery or in the alley behind the Hi-Line Hotel, or to smell the horse’s steaming turds in any of the town’s gutters.

It is commonplace to refer to the narrowness and intolerance of small-town life, but it seems to me just the opposite is true, at least of Bentrock, Montana, in 1948. The citizens of that community tolerated all kinds of behavior, from the eccentric to the unusual to the aberrant. From Miss Schott and her palominos to Mrs. Russell, who was a kleptomaniac (storekeepers kept track of what she stole and then once a week Mr. Russell, the president of the bank, went around and reimbursed them), to Arne Olsen, a farmer, who never
(never)
bathed and was proud of the fact, to Mr. Prentice, the band director at the high school who liked his boy students better than he liked his girl students, to old Henry Sandstrom, who shot mourning doves in his backyard, cooked them, and ate them. To my uncle Frank who molested his patients. How many other secrets had our town agreed to keep?

When Miss Schott saw me, she greeted me cheerily, “Good morning, David. Is the summer flying by for you too?”

I couldn’t answer her.

I remembered that she had once been Uncle Frank’s patient. I couldn’t recall the reason or how I had even acquired this knowledge—another overheard conversation, perhaps—yet it was the one fact at the moment that pushed aside all others. I looked up at her astride her horse, and all I could think of was—
What did Uncle Frank do to you? Did he touch you there? There? What did he put inside you?

And then Loretta Waterman, a pretty high-school girl whose father owned the drugstore, walked by, her moccasins scuffing the sidewalk, and she waved to me or Miss Schott or Miss Schott’s horse, and I forgot about what Uncle Frank might have done to my former teacher and instead I wondered about Loretta,
Did you go to Uncle Frank? Did he make you take off all your clothes? Did he look at you there? And there?

I began to feel at once dizzy and ashamed and sick because this time, with Loretta, the thought of how Uncle Frank may have abused her did not disgust and anger me as it had with Miss Schott, but stirred me sexually.

I didn’t want to feel any of what I was feeling. I hugged my sack of groceries and ran home.

Once I was in the house, my mother said, “Look at you. All red in the face.”

I jerked my head in the direction of the basement door. “How long is he going to be here?”

“Not long. You know your father’s working on that.”

“Then what?”

“Then what
what?”

“What’s going to happen after he leaves?”

My mother put her finger to her lips and whispered her reply. “I imagine there will be a trial.”

“Grandpa will just get him off. He can get everybody to do what he wants.”

She shrugged and went back to slicing cucumbers. “You might be right about that.” As an afterthought, she added, “But not everybody.”

“So what’s it all for?”

“We’re—your father is doing what’s right.”

“But we’re the ones getting the shitty end of the stick.”

Usually language like that would get me sent to my room. My mother didn’t even look up from her knife’s work. “You might be right about that too.”

I was the first to notice the truck circling the house. From my bedroom window I saw it drive through the alley in back, along the railroad tracks. Four men were in it, two in the cab and two standing in back.

After it went by a second time, slowly, I ran downstairs to see it go by in front as well. I crouched below the living room window and peeked over the sill—I didn’t want them to see me—and when it went by this time I recognized one of the men. Dale Paris, the foreman at my grandfather’s ranch, was in the passenger seat, his bare arm crooked out the window, his cap pulled low. Dale Paris was the only cowboy I knew who never wore a hat but instead a red-and-black checked wool cap, earflaps tied up in summer and down in winter. I didn’t know much about the man. He was simply a lean, silent presence on the ranch. My only contact with him had occurred when I came back from riding Nutty long and hard one day, and because I was in a hurry or lazy or both I simply unsaddled him and put him back in the stall. I was on my way out when Dale Paris stepped out of the shadows, grabbed my arm hard, and said, “Your horse needs wipin’ down.”