Montana 1948 (8 page)

And I?—I loved that house! It was large enough that I could find complete privacy somewhere no matter how many others were in there. The adults might be downstairs playing whist while I crept around upstairs, toy gun in hand, searching from room to room for the men who robbed the Bentrock First National Bank.

When I slept over I was given a second-floor bedroom with wide, tall windows that faced north, and I sat at those windows and picked out the Big and Little Dippers, the only constellations I could identify. Or I imagined that the wide porch was the deck of a ship and the surrounding prairie the limitless sea.

Grandpa stood on the porch to greet us. He was dressed in his Sunday rich ranch owner best—white Western shirt and string tie, whipcord trousers, and the boots that were handmade in Texas. He was alone, and while we got out of the car he watched us as impassively as he would strangers. He had his hands thrust in his back pockets, and his big belly stuck out like a stuffed sack of grain. His legs were spread wide, as if he were bracing himself. He wore his white hair longer than most men—over the tops of his ears, curling over his shirt collar, and with bushy sideburns almost to his jowls. As he stood there the wind lifted his hair and made his large head seem even larger.

It was the first time I had seen Grandpa Hayden since I heard about Uncle Frank, and when I saw him towering there like a thundercloud I thought, he won’t let anything happen to his beloved son. He won’t. But what if it’s his
other
son who’s trying to do something....

“Can I go down to the stable?” I asked.

“You certainly may not,” my mother said. “You come in first and greet your grandparents and find out how long until dinner.”

My mother lifted a cake pan from the front seat. When he saw it, Grandpa Hayden said in his booming voice, “What have you got in there? Damn it, Enid said you didn’t have to bring a thing.”

“Hello, Julian,” my mother said as she stepped onto the porch. “I thought you liked chocolate cake.”

Grandfather took the pan from her. “Don’t even take it in there. Hell, they don’t have to know about it. I’ll take care of it myself.”

“What are you doing out here, Pop?” asked my father. “Acting as the official welcoming committee?”

“Came out here to fart. I had sausage for breakfast, and I’m not going to stay in the house any longer and squeeze ‘em in. Can’t do it.”

My mother took the cake pan back and went into the house. She hated talk about bodily functions even more than she hated swearing. Both were specialties of my grandfather.

My father took up a position at the porch rail next to Grandfather. “That wind’s something,” my father said.

“If you don’t like wind,” Grandfather replied, “you don’t like Montana. Because it blows here 360 days a year. Better get used to it.”

That was another of my grandfather’s specialties—turning casual remarks so they became opportunities for him to pass on his judgments or browbeating opinions. I was about to go when my father turned around, stared at the house, and asked softly, “Pop, where’s Frank?”

“He’s in there poking and twisting your mother’s shoulders. Trying to figure out if she’s got bursitis. Hell, I know she’s got bursitis.”

“Can I ask you something, Pop?”

I had my hand on the handle of the screen door while my father watched me, waiting for me to go in before he continued. I went in the house but stayed right by the door so I could hear what my father said.

“It’s about Frank....”

Yes, tell him, I thought. Tell Grandfather. Tell him, and he’ll take care of everything. He’ll grab Uncle Frank by the shoulders and shake him so hard his bones will clatter like castanets. He’ll shake him up and shout in Frank’s face that he’d better straighten up and fly right or there’ll be hell to pay. And because it’s Grandfather, that will be the end of it. Frank would never touch a woman like that again.
Tell him.

My father cleared his throat. “About him and Gloria not having kids.... You’ve got to go easy on that, Pop. They want kids. They’re trying.”

“You know that, do you? Frank tell you that?”

“Not right out, but—”

“They sure as hell look healthy. Glo might be tiny but she’s got enough tit for twins. What’s the problem? He’s a goddamn doctor. He ought to be able to figure it out.”

“Pop. Listen to yourself.”

My grandfather’s boot heels thunked on the porch planks. “Your mother and I thought we’d have more to show than the one grandchild. Nothing against Davy. But Christ—just the one? From both of you?”

“You know what she went through with David. After that we decided—”

“—and white,” Grandfather interrupted. “We want them white.”

The silence was so sudden and complete I thought at first that they saw me and that was why they quit talking. But I didn’t move; if I did they’d see me for sure.

My father said something I barely heard: “What do you mean by that?”

Grandfather laughed a deep, breathy
cuh-cuh-cuh
that sounded like half cough and half laugh. “Come on, Wesley. Come on, boy. You know Frank’s always been partial to red meat. He couldn’t have been any older than Davy when Bud caught him down in the stable with that little Indian girl. Bud said to me, ‘Mr. Hayden, you better have a talk with that boy. He had that little squaw down on her hands and knees. He’s been learnin’ from watching the dogs and the horses and the bulls.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some young ones out on the reservation who look a lot like your brother.”

One of them approached the screen door, and I quickly slipped away from my hiding post and into the living room. I picked up the first thing at hand—a cigarette lighter that looked like a derringer—and began to squeeze the trigger over and over, each time scraping the flint and throwing up a small, pungent flame. I tried to make my concentration on the lighter seem so total that no one would suspect me of eavesdropping.

It was my father coming through the door, and as he did he said over his shoulder to Grandfather, “I suspect you might be right on that.” To me he said, “Put that down, David. It’s not a toy.”

It was the second time I had heard my grandfather say something about my uncle and Indian girls. . . .

Neither my father nor my uncle married women from Bentrock, or from Montana, for that matter. (That was probably another reason for people to resent the Haydens. I could imagine someone from town saying, “Weren’t any of the local girls good enough for the Hayden boys?”) My mother, as I mentioned, was from North Dakota, and Gloria was from Minnesota. My father met my mother while he was in law school, and Frank met Gloria while he was in medical school at the University of Minnesota. My parents were married soon after they met; Frank and Gloria, however, had an on-again, off-again romance for years.

They were finally married in Minneapolis, Gloria’s home-town. This was during the war, and Frank was home on leave. The wedding took place right after Christmas, and it was a small, quiet affair, with only a few friends and family in attendance. Grandfather paid for all of us to travel by train to the wedding and to stay in a hotel in Minneapolis. It was the first time I was on a train and the first time I stayed in a hotel.

The night before the wedding my father, Grandfather, Uncle Frank, an old college friend of his, and two of Gloria’s brothers went out together for Frank’s bachelor party.

They didn’t return to the hotel until quite late. I was already asleep, but I woke up when my father came in. He was drunk—which made another first for me. I had never seen my father take more than one drink. I lay quietly in bed while my mother helped my father undress. She also tried to keep him quiet, but it was no use; he was too drunk and too excited to keep his voice low.

“You should have seen it, Gail,” he said. “By God, it was something. This Minneapolis big shot, this city boy, wouldn’t let up. Kept saying to Pop, ‘Mighty fine boots. Mighty fine. Just hope you’re not tracking in any cow shit with those boots.’ Wouldn’t stop.”

“Shhh. Watch your language. David can hear you.”

“Just reporting. That’s all. Just saying how it was. Finally Pop says, ‘You don’t let up, I’m going to stick one of these boots up your ass. Then I’m going to track
your
shit all over this bar.’”

“Oh, Wesley!”

He laughed. Giggled would be more accurate. “I’ve got to say what happened, don’t I? This city fellow thinks he’s heard enough. He plops his hat down on the bar, takes off his glasses and sets them down too. He starts for our table. But by the time he gets there Pop has pulled out that little .32 revolver of his. Chrome-plated so it’s the shiniest thing in the place. Hell, I didn’t know he had it with him. Anyway, he’s got that gun right in the fella’s face, and the guy goes white. He’s just white as a sheet. Pop holds it there for a minute, and then he says, ‘Out in Montana you wouldn’t be worth dirtying a man’s hands on. Or his boots. So we’d handle him this way. Nice and clean.’ And he keeps holding the gun on him. I thought maybe I should say something, but Frank reaches over and puts his hand on my arm. Frank’s laughing to beat the band, so he must know something. Finally Pop says, ‘Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I’m going to finish this whiskey and then I’m coming after you.’ By God, Gail, you should have seen that fella hightail it out of there! Left without his hat and glasses. And Pop just sits back down and finishes his whiskey. Doesn’t say a word. Meanwhile Frank’s laughing so hard he gets
me
going and then neither one of us can stop. People are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana—and Frank and I are howling our heads off. Then when we leave we notice that Minneapolis hasn’t even
got
any snow. And that sets Frank and me off all over again. Oh, Gail, I wish you could’ve been there. The Hayden boys all over again. The Hayden boys and their old man.”

By that time, my mother had gotten him into bed and was covering him. “I don’t think you’ll find this so funny tomorrow morning. You’re lucky you weren’t all arrested.”

“They couldn’t arrest us—we
are
the law!” My father found that idea hilarious. He started laughing so hard he could barely breathe. Soon he was coughing and choking, and then he had to rush to the bathroom. The next thing I heard was my father vomiting. He was in there so long I fell asleep before he came out.

After the wedding the next day on the train going back to Montana, my grandfather offered a box of chocolates to my mother, Grandmother, and me. My father couldn’t even look at them, a fact that my grandfather found amusing. My grandfather had a sweet tooth, and he insisted those were the best chocolates in the world, available only from a small confectionary in downtown Minneapolis.

Soon they were all talking about Frank and Gloria and the wedding, how nice the ceremony was, what a lovely woman Gloria was, how they hoped for a happy life for the two of them. Then Grandfather said, “Now he’s got himself a good-looking white woman for a wife. That better keep him off the reservation.”

No one said another word. Every one of us turned to the window as if there were actually something to look at besides wind-whipped, snow-covered prairies.

At dinner I sat between my grandmother and Aunt Gloria. My grandmother, a thin, nervous woman who seldom spoke when my grandfather was present, concentrated during the meal on cutting her ham into small perfect triangles before she ate them. Whenever she passed a dish to me she asked quietly, “Do you like this, David?” and her questions seemed so eager and pathetic that I said yes to everything. As a result, my plate was piled high with sweet potatoes and cooked carrots and sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese and kidney beans and corn bread and ham. And I had no appetite.

Aunt Gloria chattered throughout the meal. She talked about the weather and the price of milk. She talked about how, even though the war had been over for three years, she still felt funny about throwing out a tin can. She taught first grade, and she talked about how she was going to make little construction paper Indian headbands for all her students, with their names on the feathers. She talked about her little brother who was in college in Missoula and who told her how the ex-GI’s pushed the professors around.