Montana 1948 (2 page)

The harshness of the land and the flattening effect of wind and endless sky probably accounted for the relative tranquility of Mercer County. Life was simply too hard, and so much of your attention and energy went into keeping not only yourself but also your family, your crops, and your cattle alive, that nothing was left over for raising hell or making trouble.

And 1948 still felt like a new, blessedly peaceful era. The exuberance of the war’s end had faded but the relief had not. The mundane, workaday world was a gift that had not outworn its shine. Many of the men in Mercer County had spent the preceding years in combat. (But not my father; he was 4-F. When he was sixteen a horse kicked him, breaking his leg so severely that he walked with a permanent limp, and eventually a cane, his right leg V-ed in, his right knee perpetually pointing to the left.) When these men came back from war they wanted nothing more than to work their farms and ranches and to live quietly with their families. The county even had fewer hunters after the war than before.

All of which made my father’s job a relatively easy one.

Oh, he arrested the usual weekly drunks, mediated an occasional dispute about fence lines or stray cattle, calmed a few domestic disturbances, and warned the town’s teenagers about getting rowdy in Wood’s Cafe, but by and large being sheriff of Mercer County did not require great strength or courage. The ability to drive the county’s rural roads, often drifted over in the winter or washed out in the summer, was a much more necessary skill than being good with your fists or a gun. One of my father’s regular duties was chaperoning Saturday night dances in the county, but the fact that he often took along my mother (and sometimes me) shows how quiet those affairs—and his job—usually were.

And that disappointed me at the time. As long as my father was going to be a sheriff, a position with so much potential for excitement, danger, and bravery, why couldn’t some of that promise be fulfilled? No matter how many wheat fields or cow pastures surrounded us, we were still Montanans, yet my father didn’t even look like a western sheriff. He wore a shirt and tie, as many of the men in town did, but at least they wore boots and Stetsons; my father wore brogans and a fedora. He had a gun but he never carried it, on duty or off. I knew because I checked, time and time again. When he left the house I ran to his dresser and the top drawer on the right side. And there it was, there it always was. Just as well. As far as I was concerned it was the wrong kind of gun for a sheriff. He should have had a nickel-plated Western Colt .45, something with some history and heft. Instead, my father had a small .32 automatic, Italian-made and no bigger than your palm. My father didn’t buy such a sorry gun; he confiscated it from a drunken transient in one of his first arrests. My father kept the gun but in fair exchange bought the man a bus ticket to Billings, where he had family.

The gun was scratched and nicked and had a faint blush of rust along the barrel. The original grips were gone and had been replaced by two cut-to-fit rectangles of Masonite. Every time I came across the gun it was unloaded, its clip full of the short, fat .32 cartridges lying nearby in the same drawer. The pistol slopped about in a thick, stiff leather strap-and-snap holster meant for a larger gun and a revolver at that. Since it looked more like a toy than the western-style cap guns that had been my toys, I wasn’t even tempted to take my father’s gun out for play, though I had the feeling I could have kept it for weeks and my father wouldn’t have missed it.

You’re wondering if perhaps my father kept his official side arm in his county jail office. If he did, I never saw it there, and I wandered in and out of that jail office as often as I did the rooms of our home. I saw the rack of rifles and shotguns in their locked case (and two sets of handcuffs looped and dangling from the barrel of a Winchester 94) but no pistols.

We lived, you see, in a white two-story frame house right across the street from the courthouse, and the jail and my father’s office were in the basement of the courthouse. On occasion I waited for my father to release a prisoner (usually a hung-over drunk jailed so he wouldn’t hurt himself) or finish tacking up a wanted poster before I showed him my report card or asked him for a dime for a movie. No, if there had been a six-shooter or a Stetson or a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots around for my father to put on with his badge, I would have known about it. (I must correct that previous statement: my father never
wore
his badge; he carried it in his suit-coat or shirt pocket. I always believed that this was part of his self-effacing way, and that may be so. But now that the badge is mine—my mother sent it to me after my father’s death and I have it pinned to my bulletin board—I realize there was another reason, connected not to character but to practicality. The badge, not star-shaped but a shield, is heavy and its pin as thick as a pencil’s lead. My father would have been poking fair-sized holes in his suits and shirts, and the badge’s weight could have torn fabric.)

If my father didn’t fit my ideal of what he should be in his occupation, he certainly didn’t fit my mother’s either. She wanted him to be an attorney. Which he was; he graduated from the University of North Dakota Law School, and he was a member of both the North Dakota and Montana State Bar Associations. My mother fervently believed that my father—indeed, all of us—would be happier if he practiced law and if we did not live in Montana, and her reasons had little to do with the potentially hazardous nature of a sheriff’s work compared to an attorney’s or the pay scale along which those professions positioned themselves. She wanted my father to find another job and for us to move because only doing those things would, she felt, allow my father to be fully himself. Her contention is one I must explain.

My father was born in 1910 in Mercer County and grew up on a large cattle ranch outside Bentrock. In the early twenties my father, with his parents and his brother, moved to Bentrock, where my grandfather began his first of many terms as county sheriff. My grandfather kept the ranch and had it worked by hands while he was in office, and since Mercer County had a statute that a sheriff could serve only three consecutive terms, he was able to return to the ranch every six years. When Grandfather’s terms expired, his deputy, Len McAuley, would serve a term; after Len’s term, Grandfather would run again, and this way they kept the office in the proper hands. During his terms as sheriff, Grandfather brought his family into town to live in a small apartment above a bar (he owned the bar and building the apartment was in). My father often spoke of how difficult it was for him to move from the ranch and its open expanses to the tiny apartment that always smelled of stale beer and cigar smoke. He spent every weekend and every summer at the ranch and when he had to return to the apartment where he and his brother slept on a fold-out couch, he felt like crying.

(And now that it is too late to ask anyone, I wonder: Why did my grandfather first run for sheriff? This one I can probably answer, from my memory and knowledge of him. He wanted, he needed, power. He was a dominating man who drew sustenance and strength from controlling others. To him, being the law’s agent probably seemed part of a natural progression—first you master the land and its beasts, then you regulate the behavior of men and women.)

When my grandfather finally decided to retire for good and return to the ranch, he found a way to do this yet retain his power in the county: he turned the post over to my father. Yes, the sheriff of Mercer County was elected, but such was my grandfather’s popularity and influence—and the weight of the Hayden name—that it was enough for my grandfather to say, as he had earlier said of his deputy, now I want my son to have this job.

So my father set aside his fledgling law practice and took the badge my grandfather offered. It would never have occurred to my father to refuse.

There you have it, then, a portrait of my father in those years, a man who tried to turn two ways at once—toward my grandfather, who wanted his son to continue the Hayden rule of Mercer County, and toward my mother, who wanted her husband to be merely himself and not a Hayden. That was not possible as long as we lived in my grandfather’s domain.

There was another reason my mother wanted us to leave Montana for a tamer region and that reason had to do with me. My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.

My mother was concerned about my values, but since often the most ordinary worldly matters assumed for her a spiritual significance, she saw the problem as centered on my mortal being. (My mother was a Lutheran of boundless devotion; my father was irreligious, a path I eventually found and followed after wandering through those early years of church, Sunday School, and catechism classes.)

The problem was that I wanted to grow up wild. Oh, not in the sense that wildness is used today. I wasn’t particularly interested, on the cusp of adolesence, in driving fast cars (pickup trucks, more accurately in Bentrock), smoking (Sir Walter Raleigh roll-your-owns the cigarette of choice), drinking (home-brewed beer was so prevalent in Mercer County that boys always had access to it), or chasing girls (for some reason, the girls from farms—not town or ranch or reservation—had the reputation of being easy). In fact, I came late to these temptations.

Wildness meant, to me, getting out of town and into the country. Even our small town—really, in 1948 still a frontier town in many respects—tasted to me like pabulum. It stood for social order, good manners, the chimed schedules of school and church. It was a world meant for storekeepers, teachers, ministers, for the rule-makers, the order-givers, the law-enforcers. And in my case, my parents were not only figurative agents of the law, my father
was
the law.

In addition to my discomfort with the strictures of town (a common and natural reaction for a boy), I had another problem that seemed like mine alone. I never felt as though I understood how town life
worked
. I thought there was some secret knowledge about living comfortably and unselfconsciously in a community, and I was sure I did not possess that knowledge. When the lessons were taught about how to feel confident and at ease in school, in stores, in cafes, with other children or adults, I must have been absent. It was not as though I behaved badly in these situations but rather that I was never sure how to behave. I was always looking sneakily at others for the key to correct conduct. And instead of attributing this social distress to my own shy and too-serious character I simply blamed life in town and sought to escape it as often as I could.

And that was an easy enough matter. Though we lived in the middle of town, I could be out in minutes, whether I walked, biked, ran, or followed the railroad tracks just on the other side of our backyard. With my friends or on my own, I spent as many of the day’s hours as I could outdoors, usually out at my grandfather’s ranch or along the banks of the Knife River. (How it got its name I’ve never known; it’s hard to imagine a duller body of water—in dry summers it could barely keep its green course flowing and sandbars poked up the length of it; it froze every year by Thanksgiving.)

I did what boys usually did and exulted in the doing: I rode horseback (I had my own horse at the ranch, an unnaturally shaggy little sorrel named Nutty); I swam; I fished; I hunted (I still have, deep in a closet somewhere, my first guns from those years—a single-shot bolt action Winchester .22 and a single-shot Montgomery Ward .410 shotgun); my friends and I killed more beer cans, soda bottles, road signs, and telephone pole insulators than the rabbits, squirrels, grouse, or pheasants we said we were hunting; I explored; I scavenged (at various times I brought home a snakeskin, part of a cow’s jawbone, an owl’s coughball, a porcupine quill, the broken shaft and fletch of a hunter’s arrow, an unbroken clay pigeon, a strip of tree bark with part of a squirrel’s tail embedded in it so tightly that it was a mystery how it got there, a perfectly shaped cottonwood leaf the size of a man’s hand, and a myriad of river rocks chosen for their beauty or odd shape).

But what I did was not important. Out of town I could simply
be,
I could feel my
self,
firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water’s monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.

Perhaps my mother sensed this, and following her duty to civilize me, wished for a larger community to raise me in, one that I couldn’t get out of quite so easily and that wouldn’t offer such alluring chaos once I was out. (The impression is probably forming of my mother as an urban woman disposed by background to be suspicious of wild and rough Montana. Not so. She grew up on a farm in eastern North Dakota, in the Red River valley, flat, fertile, prosperous farming country.)