Justice (17 page)

The thought suddenly occurred to Wesley—had Frank had his hand there before? Had Frank touched Iris's breasts before Wesley ever did? Was that why both Iris and Frank could
act so calmly now—Frank because there was nothing new about having his hand there and Iris because she had allowed Frank to touch her before? Perhaps that day down at the river Iris thought nothing of letting Wesley see her breasts because she had already revealed them to his brother?

Still holding the necklace, Frank said to his father, “Here, take a look. See what your son is spending his money on.” Frank looked up at Wesley. “Or is it Dad's money?”

Mr. Hayden rose from his chair and leaned forward. Now he too had his face directed toward Iris's breasts. He tilted his head to one side, then the other, no doubt appraising the pendant and its setting, but he could as easily have been eyeing the young woman's breasts.

“Lovely,” Mr. Hayden said.

Wesley felt ready to explode. In his rage he was ready to smash his fists into his father's and brother's faces, to knock them to the floor and kick them until they lost consciousness and couldn't even flinch from his blows, until kicking them would be like kicking a sack of grain. Then Wesley would step down on his brother's hand, the hand that tenderly held Iris's necklace, and with his boot heel he would grind away until Frank's finger bones gave way, cracking against the floorboards.

Of course Wesley did nothing. The candlelight stirred from an unseen movement of air, and the shadows in the corners shifted shape. His father had leaned his palm on the table, and Wesley noticed the cross-hatching of black hair on his father's muscular forearm. He heard Iris's breathing, short and quick—was she unnerved because she was pinned down by
these two men or did their attention excite her?

Wesley looked around for help—would his mother be coming back into the room soon? No, she didn't know what was happening in her house. At some time in the last few minutes she had closed the swinging door separating the kitchen and the dining room. Did she close it, Wesley wondered, because she somehow knew what was happening and chose not to be a witness and therefore not responsible?

In desperation, Wesley stood and wedged his way between Iris and his father and brother.

Mr. Hayden and Frank both leaned away from Iris, although Frank took the necklace with him for an instant, only reluctantly letting it fall back on her chest.

Wesley grabbed the whiskey bottle as if that was what he was after all along. He poured himself a drink more generous than the one his father had given him.

“Generally you ask,” his father said, “before you help yourself to another man's whiskey.”

Before he answered his father, Wesley took a drink of bourbon. But in his anger and haste he swallowed too much, and he had to struggle to keep from coughing. He squinted his eyes to prevent the sudden tears from spilling over.

“I guess I figured,” Wesley said as gravely as he could, “we shared everything in this house.”

Wesley's father pushed himself back from the table as if he needed to get a better look at this son of his who stood over him drinking his whiskey.

“You either forgot some of your manners at that university,” Mr. Hayden said, “or I fouled up and let you go when
you still had something left to learn.”

“Don't worry about it. You taught me. I learned by example.”

Mr. Hayden leaned back even further, as though his son had still not come into focus. “I believe worrying about it is exactly what I should be doing, young man.”

Wesley had the feeling that his father was only distracting him, that while they locked stares across the table, Frank and Iris were exchanging looks of a friendlier sort.

He broke eye contact with his father and turned his attention quickly back to Iris. “We have to go,” he said, his voice harsher than he intended it to sound.

But Iris was staring up at him as though she was not quite certain of his identity either. He couldn't blame her; at that moment he wasn't sure himself.

There was a wet ring on the white tablecloth where earlier his glass of ice water had rested. Now Wesley set his whiskey down, aiming the heavy glass for that same damp circle. Once the glass was out of his hand, he watched the whiskey for a moment, trying to judge the steadiness of his hand by how much the amber liquid shimmered in the candlelight.

“Let's go,” he said again. This time his voice was softer, and Iris rose immediately.

Mr. Hayden stood too. He pushed his chair in and stepped to the side. He thrust his chest out, and for a moment Wesley thought his father was blocking his way, trying to prevent his son from taking this young woman away. But Julian Hayden always rose when a woman, young or old, stood, and he liked to take up the slack in his suspenders by puffing out his chest.

Frank said, “Oh, come on, Wes. Jesus. Wait up.”

But Wesley did not wait. He guided Iris gently toward the door. His only hesitation as they left the dining room was to glance back toward the kitchen and his mother. The door was still closed.

It was snowing as they left the house, heavy wet flakes that were so large in the night sky that Wesley didn't have to look to the porch light to see them fall. He gazed straight up, and there they came, a riot of white scraps falling so swiftly it seemed there must be more to them than mere water, ice, and air.

Iris walked ahead of him on her way to the car, and Wesley could tell by the length and pace of her stride that she was angry. Or perhaps it was not anger at all but puzzlement. How many times over the months they had been dating had she looked at him and said, “I just don't understand you.” And the implication was always clear: the fault was in Wesley, not in her ability to understand.

The snow was already working hard to fill in Iris's tracks, and for a moment Wesley stopped and watched her walk on without him. Flakes of snow caught in her hair and on the dark wool of her coat. He turned and looked back toward the house and their dark footsteps trailing across the yard. If the snow continued to fall at this pace, in less than an hour you wouldn't be able to tell that anyone had ever left that house.

L
EN McAuley had his first drink of liquor when he was only twelve years old. The drink was given him by Dr. Wright, who hoped the liquor would help the boy make it through his second day in Montana. The doctor poured three fingers of bourbon, filled the glass with water, and then dropped in a sugar cube. “I've got no medicine for your kind of pain, son,” the doctor said, “but this helps some folks.”

Len drank the whiskey down in three swallows. He didn't know if it helped or not, but from that day on whiskey and water became his drink of choice. From time to time he even sweetened it with sugar—and brought back his childhood with the first sip. On most days, Len used whiskey exactly the way Dr. Wright originally prescribed it: to help him through the pain of each day in Montana.

Len McAuley came to Mercer County, Montana, in 1898 with his father, mother, and older brother. As soon as school was out for the summer, they left their home in St. Paul, Minnesota, planning to homestead in northeast Montana. By the time they got off the train, gathered their luggage and
belongings, and arranged to rent a wagon to haul everything out to their section of land, the hour was late, and Mr. McAuley was afraid he might have trouble finding their claim in the dark. They decided to spend the night at the Carson House Hotel.

During the night, a fire began. The cause was never determined—a kerosene lamp knocked over, a traveling salesman's cigar left smoldering—but the hotel, built of lumber from forests in the Judith Mountains, burned so quickly that the local fire brigade was reduced to watching the fire burn itself out and making certain the flames did not spread to adjacent stores or buildings.

Len never knew for sure whether it was his father, mother, or older brother who threw him out their secondstory hotel room window, breaking Len's arm but saving his life. In his memory of that night, it seemed to Len that he fell through the flames, and that as the building fell in on itself he had simply ridden the thick cloud of smoke away from the flames and into the night sky. Only two other rooms besides the McAuleys' were occupied, one by the salesman and one by an older man who taught music in the local schools and lived, during the school year, in the hotel. Both these hotel patrons, along with three members of the McAuley family, perished in the fire. Only Len McAuley and the desk clerk escaped.

The Presbyterian minister and his wife offered to take Len into their home, since he had no other family, but he declined. He and his family had come to Montana to make a living from the land, and that was what he was determined to do. The citizens of Bentrock took up a collection for him, and he used that
money along with what little he earned by selling off the family possessions that survived the fire, and bought a wagon, a horse, and supplies. As soon as he was able, he drove out to the land that his father had planned to farm. There young Len McAuley made his own home, as best he could. He lived at first under his wagon, filling in three sides with brush, rocks, and what wood he could find. At night he crawled in as though he were entering a cave. That suited him. If he lived like an animal, perhaps he would feel no more than an animal felt—heat, cold, hunger, fatigue—and the human emotions, sorrow and grief and loneliness, would leave him.

Of course he was too young to file a claim for eventual ownership of the land, but no one said anything because everyone was certain the boy would vacate the section before long. If the wind and the heat, then the cold and the snow did not drive him off the prairie, the isolation would.

But he stayed. He hunted, he fished, and he foraged for other food and firewood. The women of the county made sure that when they or their husbands passed anywhere near Len McAuley's claim, they dropped off food, especially the baked goods that they knew a boy would love but could never manage for himself. In fact, on his rudimentary cookstove Len had managed to make a kind of scone similar to the ones his mother made. He even used fresh-picked blueberries, an improvement, he felt, on his mother's recipe. He would accept these offerings but none of the invitations for a home-cooked meal at one of the nearby farms or ranches or in town.

Eventually he built himself a shack, little more than a leanto, but which offered greater protection from the elements
than his wagon allowed. The very first time he stood inside this home—stood upright and heard the wind turn away when it came to those walls of his making—something in him changed, and he felt the loss of human companionship like a physical pain, as though part of his being had been torn away. He rode that day to the nearest human habitation, a homestead less than a mile upstream from where he had been living.