Montana 1948 (18 page)

The coffee stopped percolating, and the silence that abruptly followed seemed to startle my father out of the past and back to the kitchen. “Well. Did I hear him stirring down there?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“No? Maybe not. I’ll take some coffee down. That should get him going. We’ll get an early start.”

He poured two cups of coffee and then put both cups on saucers, an action of such delicacy and formality that I almost laughed.

He had a cup and saucer in each hand, so he asked, “Could you please open the door for me, David?”

The door or its frame was warped so I had to push hard to get it open. When it came unstuck I deliberately did not look down.

“Do you want me to close it behind you?”

“You can leave it open. We’ll be up in a few minutes.”

How much time passed before I heard my father’s cry—thirty seconds? A minute?

Certainly no more than that. Yet what I heard signalled such a breach in our lives, a chasm permanently dividing what we were from what we could never be again, that it seems some commensurate unit of time should be involved. Ten years after my father descended the basement steps....

From out of the cellar’s musty darkness, up the creaking steps, through the cobwebbed joists and rough-planked flooring came my father’s wail—“Oh, no!
Oh my God, no!”

I ran down the stairs. It felt as it sometimes does in dreams, as if I were falling yet still able to control myself, hitting each step for just the instant it took to keep me from tumbling headlong down toward the concrete floor.

I slowed when I reached the bottom, as though suddenly the fear of what I was running toward overtook my concern for my father.

The aroma of coffee was still in the air. In fact, it felt as if I were following that smell.

Then I turned into the laundry room and another odor replaced it. All those broken jars—the sharp vinegary smell of the pickling juices, the dill weed, the sweet apples and plums, the rotting, damp-earth smell of rutabagas and tomatoes, and another odor, sweeter, heavier, fouler than the others.

My father was on the floor of the root cellar, and when I first saw the blood swirled like oil through the other liquids, I thought he had cut his bare feet on the broken glass that was everywhere.

But I thought that only for an instant, for the split second before I saw the blood’s real source.

Uncle Frank lay on the floor, his head cradled against my father’s chest. The gash across Uncle Frank’s wrist had already started its useless healing: the edges of the wound had begun to dry and pucker; the blood, what was left in him, had begun to blacken and congeal. I could see only his right arm, but I knew the cut there was one of a matching set.

I must have made a sound—a little gasp that cracked against my larynx—because my father turned toward me. His features were contorted for a sob, but his eyes were tearless.

“Go wake your mother, David.
Tell her to call Len.
Get him down here
right away.”

I backed away quickly, glad to have a mission that would take me out of the basement. My father stopped me with one more command: “And David, don’t let your mother come down here.
Don’t let her!”

Then my father’s tears broke loose, one more briny fluid to mingle on the basement floor.

I didn’t run up the stairs. I couldn’t. But the reason is not what you might think. My legs worked fine. Oh, I was shaken. What I saw in the basement set my heart racing and soured my stomach but was not what slowed me down.

No, I took my time climbing the two flights to my mother because I needed time to compose myself, to make certain I could keep concealed my satisfaction over what had happened.

You see, I knew—I knew! I
knew!
—that Uncle Frank’s suicide had solved all our problems.

My father would not have to march his brother across the street to jail.

There would be no trial, no pile of testimony for jurors to sift through, trying to separate the inevitable one-eighth, one-quarter, one-half truths from the whole truth. No pressure on anyone to come forward and bear witness, no reputations damaged, no one embarrassed, no one chastised.... The town would not have to choose sides over guilt or innocence.

Indian women could visit a doctor without fear of being assaulted, violated by a man who had taken a vow to do them no harm.

We would no longer have to worry that Grandfather would mount an attack of some kind on our home.

Certainly there would be sadness—Aunt Gloria was a widow, my father was suddenly, like me, an only child, Grandma’s tears would fill a rain barrel—but this grief would pass. Once the mourning period passed, we would have our lives back, and if they would not be exactly what they had been earlier, they would be close enough for my satisfaction.

What more can I say? I was a child. I believed all these things to be true.

As I climbed the stairs, I felt something for my uncle in death that I hadn’t felt for him in life. It was gratitude, yes, but it was something more. It was very close to love.

Epilogue

W
e moved from Bentrock on a snowy day in early December 1948, a day, really, when we had no business traveling. It was bad enough in town, where snow covered the streets; out in the country nothing stopped the wind, so roads and highways could easily be drifted closed. But the car was packed, the moving van had left the day before with our furniture, we had said our good-byes to those who would hear them. Doors were locked; minds were made up.

They had been made up, in fact, for months. Since shortly after Uncle Frank’s suicide, when my mother abruptly said to my father, “I cannot continue living here.”

I knew she did not mean the house alone but Bentrock as well.

And I knew it was not the macabre discomfort of living in the same rooms where two people had recently died. That was not what made living there impossible for her. She had her religious beliefs to see her through that.

But she had no resources that enabled her to live with the lies concocted in the aftermath of Frank’s death.

It was decided (my use of the passive voice is deliberate; I could never be exactly sure who was involved in the decision: my parents, certainly, but others were probably involved as well—my grandfather seems a good bet. Len? Gloria?) to explain Uncle Frank’s death as an accident, to say that he had been helping my father build shelves in our basement, that he fell from a ladder, struck his head on the concrete floor, and died instantly. The only outsider to see Frank’s body—and who could thus contradict this story—was Clarence Undset, owner of Undset’s Funeral Home. What bribes were offered, what deals were struck to secure Mr. Undset’s silence, I never knew, but everyone seemed confident that he would never reveal what he saw when he took Frank’s body away: the gashes in Frank’s wrists.

Similarly, it was decided not to reveal any of Frank’s crimes. What purpose would it serve? He would never molest anyone again. The Indian women of Mercer County were safe from him. Besides, as my letter-of-the-law father said, Uncle Frank was never convicted of anything; there was no sense clouding the air with accusations.

As a consequence of these postmortem cover-ups, it was possible for Frank Hayden to be buried without scandal and to be eulogized in the usual blandly reverent way—decorated soldier, public servant, dedicated to healing, dutiful son, loving husband, still a youthful man, strong, vital. . . . Finally even the minister had to confess some bafflement over a life so rudely, inexplicably cut off. Who among us can begin to understand God’s plans for any of us? Who indeed.

None of these precautions on behalf of Frank’s reputation was enough however to restore harmony in the Hayden family. At the funeral, all of us—Grandpa and Grandma, Aunt Gloria, my father, mother, and I—sat together in the same pew (a surprisingly small group, considering the clan’s power in the county), but neither my aunt nor my grandparents would speak to us. At the cemetery they made a point of standing on the opposite side of the grave from us. Even I understood the symbolism: Frank’s death was an unbridgeable gulf between us. Although my parents seemed only hurt by this snubbing (they shuffled away from the cemetery and did not return with everyone else to the church for the meal in the church basement), it angered me. If there was any sense, any purpose at all in Uncle Frank’s suicide, if he killed himself for any
reason,
it was so these people—his wife, his parents, his brother, his sister-in-law—could be reunited after his death. But there was the open grave, and not one of us would dream of leaping across it.

Therefore, when my mother made her pronouncement about living in Bentrock, my father understood exactly what she meant, and he simply nodded, as if he had known all along that was so but had been waiting for her to say the words. He didn’t argue; he didn’t say, “This is our home”; he didn’t accuse; he didn’t say, “You’ve never liked this town or this house, but it’s my home.” He agreed with my mother and began immediately to dismantle our lives in Bentrock.

He arranged, first of all, to withdraw from the upcoming election, citing as his reason “another job offer—an opportunity to practice law and put all that schooling to use.” This was before he had lined up the possibility of a job with a law firm in Fargo, North Dakota. Len McAuley’s name was substituted for my father’s on the ticket. There was no doubt Len would be elected. He ran unopposed.

Next, our house was put up for sale, and my mother called her parents to tell them we would be staying with them on the farm while we looked for our own place.

My mother withdrew me from school and was given, in a manila envelope, my records to be conveyed to my next school.

My parents said their good-byes—to Len and Daisy, to the Hutchinsons. To Ollie Young Bear. The number of people seemed so small that it diminished my parents’ years in Bentrock, as if their time there hadn’t really amounted to much at all. I kept my own farewells to a minimum, and to ease the emotionalism (and perhaps to trick myself and make leaving easier), I told many of my friends that we would probably be moving back the following summer.

There we were, our car so loaded down it seemed ready to bottom out as my father backed out of the driveway. As we were about to pull away, I shouted, “Wait!”, opened the back door, and jumped out of the car.

I ran to the house and clambered up a snowdrift to the living room window. I wanted one last look, to see what our house looked like without us in it. If my parents asked what I was looking for, I had already decided what I would answer. “Ghosts,” I would say.

The frost on the window made it difficult to see in.

No, that wasn’t it.

The emptiness inside made it difficult to see in. The blank room had even less pattern than frosted glass. The bland gray carpeting, the once-white walls trying to turn yellow—snow should have been falling and drifting in
there.

My parents, bless them, did not honk the horn or yell for me to get back in the car. They waited, and when I turned back to them and saw them through the screen of falling snow, I wondered again how it could have happened—how it could be that those two people who only wanted to do right, whose only error lay in trying to be loyal to both family and justice, were now dispossessed, the ones forced to leave Bentrock and build new lives. For a moment I felt like waving good-bye to them, signalling them to go, to move without me. It had nothing to do with wanting to stay in Montana; it had everything to do with wanting to stay away from those two hapless, forlorn people. What kind of life would it be, traveling in their company?