Justice (22 page)

Right after the election, Julian resigned so Wesley could take over right away. Julian and his wife moved out of their house across from the courthouse and back to the family ranch. Wesley and Gail were to move into the vacant house, a two-story white frame house with a huge backyard. The house was lovely—spacious and clean and newly painted inside and out—and to go to work all she had to do was walk across the street. Nevertheless, she did not feel right about the house. Moving into it meant taking one more step away from their own lives.

She tried to talk herself out of her concerns. Wesley was
nothing like his father. Not at all. He was a gentle, thoughtful, soft-spoken and soft-hearted man whose main goal in life—and in this he was completely unlike his father—was not to be noticed. Campaigning for office, what little of it he had to do, had been difficult for him. Every time he had to make a speech before any group—the Farmers Union or the Ladies Auxiliary —she could see how tense he became, how the knots around his jaw tightened and the lines above his brow deepened. No, he was not his father.

Then one day in early December Gail had occasion to leave her desk and go down to the sheriff's office in the basement of the courthouse. She wanted to ask Wesley if he would be free that evening so they could go bowling with Beverly and her husband.

Wesley was at his desk. His desk? It was the same rolltop desk that Julian had sat at for so many years. The same leatherbound law books were lined on top of the desk. The same railroad calendar hung over the books. The odor of Julian's cigars lingered in the air. But that was her husband sitting there.

She said his name and he turned toward her, tilting back in his chair just as his father had always done.

He was wearing his hat. Wesley never wore his hat indoors. But his father did.

One detail unsettled Gail even more than the hat. When her husband faced her, she noticed his badge. How could she have missed this before?

He did not have his badge pinned to his coat. Instead, he had it hooked and hanging from the pocket of his vest, the pin
inside, the shield outside. Exactly the way his father wore his badge. The same badge.

For a moment she couldn't speak. Had she taken a wrong turn somewhere—gone left instead of right at the bottom of those narrow stairs?

“What is it, Gail?” Wesley asked. “Is there something wrong?”

She shook her head, as much to clear her mind as to answer him. She finally stammered out what she had come to ask him. “Do you want . . . will you be available to go bowling tonight with Bev and Mitch?”

“That sounds fine,” he said. “I should be done here around six.” Then, while she still stood in the doorway, he turned back to his desk.

Although the snow had stopped hours earlier, out here in the country the wind stirred it up in such thick swirls and gusts it might as well still be falling. Wesley had left the car running but the heater could not compete with the cold, and the windows were beginning to frost over. Gail squinted hard in Wesley's direction. What if she did not know that was him, she thought. Would she be able to tell? He was wearing his father's coat and doing his father's job. Was there anything to tell her with certainty that the man standing up to his knees in snow, peering into a parked car and trying its doors, was her husband?

He started back toward her, his head tilted to avoid the
wind's icy sting. The limp! Of course! That listing walk could belong only to Wesley. As he approached the car, she reached over and opened his door.

He shivered with cold as he situated himself behind the wheel. “By God, that wind is something,” he said. Gail watched the flakes of snow on his coat melt to droplets of water.

“Is anyone in there?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Must have tried walking. I can't see any sign of tracks, so maybe they got somewhere before the storm hit full force. If they didn't....” He didn't have to finish the sentence. Everyone knew what happened if you were caught out in the open in a blizzard. Every landmark would vanish, and without anything to give you your bearings you could walk in circles before freezing to death. Everyone in the state knew how easily it could happen, and if their memories were short, every winter they got a reminder: someone died in the snow.

“Maybe someone picked them up,” Gail suggested.

“Maybe.”

His hands gripped the steering wheel, but Wesley made no move to drive away. He's probably waiting to thaw out a little, Gail thought. No matter what the reason, she was going to take advantage of this moment when she had him alone.

“Wesley, can I ask you something?”

He had taken off his gloves and was breathing on his fingers to warm them up. Years ago he had been pheasant hunting in the fall when the weather turned suddenly cold, and he had to walk miles back to his car. He wasn't dressed for the weather,
and his hands had been so cold he thought he might have gotten a touch of frostbite. Since then his hands were always cold, no matter what the temperature.

“Uh-huh,” he answered absently. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I should have worn mittens. Gloves don't keep your hands warm worth a damn.”

“Why did you bring me out here?”

He looked at her as though he didn't understand her question. “Why?” he repeated.

“Yes, why. Was there something you wanted me to see? There's nothing out here but snow.”

He continued to stare at her with an expression that was half bewilderment and half consternation.

“Did your father ever take your mother out on a call like this?”

He was more confused than ever, but she could see that he was getting angry too. The mention of his father had done that.

“Never,” he answered.

“Are you sure? Perhaps many years ago, before your memory.” Gail had held the theory that Julian Hayden had somehow broken his wife, broken her the way a cowboy broke a horse, and maybe this was how he had done it, by bringing her along on a mission like this. And once she had seen what he saw regularly in his line of work—the exploded body of a man hit by a freight train, the blackened eyes of a woman beaten by her husband, the tears of a boy who knows that once the pickup is lifted off him, his legs will be gone—he thought that she'd be docile forever, forever fearful that he
would show her again what kinds of horrors the world routinely offers.

“I thought,” he said, his voice lowering and taking on the slow cadence that he affected when he was trying to hold his temper, “that you might like to get out. You've been cooped up for a couple days with this storm. That's all. Don't make so much of things.”

Was he telling the truth? She couldn't tell. He seemed sincere, innocent in his intentions, but she simply didn't know. The man she married had become unreadable.

He shook his head and reached for the gearshift. Whenever he couldn't understand her, he always made it seem as though there was something wrong with
her
. What's more, he often implied that it had to do somehow with the way she was raised, the region, the people she was from, as much to say, here we don't think such thoughts; in my family we don't act that way.

But she was not finished. She had been playing with an idea for weeks, since before Christmas. It was a reckless notion, she knew, but as she had watched the changes in Wesley, she had become desperate.

She put her gloved hand on his and stopped him from putting the car in gear. “Wait,” she said.

He didn't look at her or move his hand from under hers.

“I want to tell you something.” She took her hand away and pulled the collar of her coat tighter. “We're.... I'm, I'm expecting.”

Now he looked at her blankly, as if he was waiting for her to finish her sentence. Expecting? Expecting what? Whom?

It was a lie, but that was what she had come to. She couldn't think of any other way to pry her husband loose from his job, his father. Perhaps if another life were involved she could persuade Wesley that this wild country—where you could perish in your car on a winter's day—was no place for their son or daughter to grow up.

Yet now that her plan was out in the open it seemed as insubstantial as a snowflake. How would this revelation change anything? What could she have been thinking?

At first he said nothing, then he reached for her and held her in an awkward embrace. Their heavy coats, the close quarters of the car's front seat—it was all they could do to lean their weight into one another, and because of the cold they had to avoid touching any exposed flesh.

When he finally spoke his voice sounded thick, as though his throat was clotted with snow. “Another generation,” he said, “another generation born in Mercer County.”

Over Wesley's shoulder Gail looked out across the road. The wind carried a plume of snow off the top of the drift, and it looked as if the snow was smoking. The wind carved the edge of the drift as sharp as a knife's blade.

On September 13, 1937, almost nine months exactly after the January day when Gail made that false announcement to her husband, their son was born in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Dixon, Montana, a town forty miles from Bentrock, which had no hospital of its own.

They named their son after her father, Carl David Hayden, but decided they would call him David. Gail always thought that David, and her pregnancy with him, was responsible for saving her marriage.

Shortly after the long labor and difficult delivery, Wesley cautiously entered the hospital room where his wife lay. He wore the expression that all new fathers wear, half joy and half shame for what their wives endured.

He sat tentatively on the side of the bed, as if his full weight might spill his exhausted wife from the mattress.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

He nodded, and grinning inanely said, “He's the biggest baby in there.” Gail knew their son had barely weighed seven pounds.

A nurse came in and gave Gail a hypodermic to help her sleep. Before she lost consciousness entirely, she heard Wesley speak to the nurse. Gail couldn't be sure—had he said, “It looks like Mercer County is going to have another Hayden for sheriff”?

G
AIL Hayden closed her eyes and listened for her father downstairs. He was always up before dawn, lighting the stove, putting water on to boil, making coffee, dressing to go out to begin his chores. Gail's mother would shortly follow her husband downstairs. Her mother's one indulgence was to wait until the kitchen warmed up before she got out of bed.

But Gail couldn't hear her father yet. She opened her eyes and tried to guess how far off dawn was without looking at the clock. She looked through the gap left by the partially pulleddown window shade. The darkness seemed to be losing its strength, as if it were a softening shadow and not an unwavering blank of blackness, as moonless nights often were in the country. She shut her eyes once more.