Читать книгу Montana 1948 - Larry Watson - Страница 8

One

IN 1948 my father was serving his second term as sheriff of Mercer County, Montana. We lived in Bentrock, the county seat and the only town of any size in the region. In 1948 its population was less than two thousand people.

Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana, and Bentrock is barely inside the state’s borders. Canada is only twelve miles away (though the nearest border crossing is thirty miles to the west), and North Dakota ten miles. Then, as now, Mercer County was both farm and ranch country, but with only a few exceptions, neither farms nor ranches were large or prosperous. On the western edge of the county and extending into two other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948 its roads were unpaved, and many of its shacks looked as though they would barely hold back a breeze. But all of northeastern Montana is hard country—the land is dry and sparse and the wind never stops blowing. The heat and thunderstorms in summer can be brutal, and the winters are legendary for the fierceness of their blizzards and the depths to which temperatures drop. (In one year we reached 106 degrees in July and 40 below in January.) For those of you who automatically think of Montana and snow-capped mountains in the same synapse, let me disabuse you. Mercer County is plains, flat as a tabletop on its western edge and riven with gullies, ravines, and low rocky hills to the east because of the work the Knife River has done over the centuries. The only trees that grow in that part of the country, aside from a few cottonwoods along the riverbank, have been planted by farmers and town dwellers. And they haven’t planted many. If the land had its way, nothing would grow taller than sagebrush and buffalo grass.

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.)

That was our family in 1948 and those were the tensions that set the air humming in our household. I need to sketch in only one more character and the story can begin.

Because my mother worked (she was the secretary in the Register of Deeds office, also in the courthouse across the street), we had a housekeeper who lived with us during the week. Her name was Marie Little Soldier, and she was a Hunkpapa Sioux who originally came from the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. She was in her early twenties, and she came to our part of Montana when her mother married a Canadian who owned a bar in Bentrock. The bar, Frenchy’s, was a dirty, run-down cowboy hangout at the edge of town. Among my friends the rumor was that Frenchy kept locked in his storeroom a fat old toothless Indian woman whom anyone could have sex with for two dollars. (One of my friends hinted that this was Marie’s mother, but I knew that wasn’t true. Marie’s mother once came to our house, and she was a thin, shy woman barely five feet tall. She reminded me of a bird who wants to be brave in the presence of humans but finally fails. When Marie introduced her to my mother, Marie’s mother looked at the floor and couldn’t say a word.)

Marie was neither small nor shy. She loved to laugh and talk, and she was a great tease, specializing in outrageous lies about everything from strange animal behavior to bloody murders. Then, as soon as she saw she had you gulled, she would say, “Not so, not so!”

She was close to six feet tall and though she wasn’t exactly fat she had a fleshy amplitude about her that made her seem simultaneously soft and strong, as if all that body could be ready, at a moment’s notice, for sex or work. The cotton print dresses she wore must have been handed down or up to her because they never fit her quite right; they were either too short and tight and she looked about to pop out of them, or they were much too large and she threatened to fall free or be tangled in all that loose fabric. She had a wide, pretty face and cheekbones so high, full, and glossy I often wondered if they were naturally like that or if they were puffy and swollen. Her hair was black and long and straight, and she was always pulling strands of it from the corner of her mouth or parting it to clear her vision.

And I loved her.

Because she talked to me, cared for me. . . . Because she was older but not too old.... Because she was not as quiet and conventional as every other adult I knew.... Because she was sexy, though my love for her was, as a twelve-year-old’s love often is, chaste.

Besides, Marie had a boyfriend, Ronnie Tall Bear, who worked on a ranch north of town. I was not jealous of Ronnie, because I liked him almost as much as I liked Marie. Liked Ronnie? I worshipped him. He had graduated from Bentrock High School a few years earlier, and he was one of the finest athletes the region had ever produced. He was the Mustangs’ star fullback, the high-scoring forward in basketball; in track he set school records in the discus, javelin, and 400-yard dash. He pitched and played outfield on the American Legion baseball team. (I realize now how much I was a part of that era’s thinking: I never wondered then, as I do now, why a college didn’t snap up an athlete like Ronnie. Then, I knew without being told, as if it were knowledge that I drank in with the water, that college was not for Indians.) During the war Ronnie was in the infantry (good enough for the Army but not for college). Marie told me he was thinking of trying his hand on the rodeo circuit.

Marie’s room, when she stayed with us during the week, was a small room off the kitchen. My bedroom and my parents’ were on the second floor. (And as I go back in my memory I realize we had a third bedroom on the second floor. Who decided that room should not be Marie’s? I had long known that I was destined to be an only child.) I mention Marie’s room because it was there, and with her, that this story began.

It was mid-August 1948. Our corner of the state had been, as usual, hot and dry, though even in the midst of all the heat there were a few signs of autumn—a cottonwood leaf here and there turning yellow and sometimes letting go, and nights cool enough for a light blanket.

Marie stayed in her room all that morning, and when I passed the door I heard her coughing. I peered in once and saw her lying on the bed. She came out only long enough to set out lunch. At our house meals were never fancy, but the food was always abundant and varied. Marie probably brought out cottage cheese, perhaps some leftover ham or chicken or sausage, a wedge of cheddar cheese, a loaf of bread, butter, pickles, canned peaches, cold milk, and something from the garden—carrots or radishes or cucumbers or tomatoes.

The noon whistle blew and within five minutes my mother was walking through the door, and if my father was in town, he would soon follow.

I stopped my mother in the living room and whispered to her, “I think Marie’s sick.”

“What’s wrong?” My mother was instantly alarmed. She feared nothing more than disease, but she was not cowardly or meek in its presence. No disease, common or exotic, faced a fiercer foe than my mother. She spent a good deal of energy avoiding it or keeping it away from herself and her family. She would not accept or extend invitations if she knew it meant someone sick might get too close. If we were walking down the street and someone ahead of us coughed or sneezed, my mother slowed her pace until she thought those germs had dissipated in the air. It all sounds silly, but it must have worked. We were seldom sick, and I did not get the usual childhood diseases until I left home. (And then they hit me hard. I had to drop a French class my freshman year in college because measles laid me up and put me too far behind. Years later my fever ran so high when I had chicken pox that my wife took me to the emergency room, where they packed me in ice.)

“I’m not sure,” I told my mother. “She’s been in her room all morning.”

My mother walked quietly through the living room and kitchen to the door of Marie’s room. I followed close behind.

The door wasn’t shut tight, and my mother knocked hard enough so it swung open. “Marie? Are you all right?”

Just then Marie had another coughing fit, and she couldn’t answer. She rolled onto her side, brought her knees up, and barked out a series of dry coughs. When the spasm subsided, she nodded. “A cold. I have a little cold.”

My mother would have none of it. She went to the bedside and put her hand on Marie’s forehead. “Come here,” my mother commanded me. When I came close, she put her hand on my forehead. The comparison confirmed what she suspected.

“You have a temperature, all right.”

If my father had been there he would have been quick to correct my mother’s choice of words. “A fever, Gail. She has a fever. Everyone has a temperature.”

My mother gave my forehead a tiny little push as she took her hand away, a signal that I was supposed to get back—there was illness here.

I didn’t go far. I stood in the doorway and watched Marie while my mother went through her routine of questions.

“How long have you been feeling sick?”

Marie rolled onto her back and brushed her hair from her face. Her cheeks now glowed so brightly they looked painful, as if they had been rubbed raw. Her eyes seemed darker than ever, all pupil, black water that swallowed light and gave nothing back. Her lips were pale-dry and chapped. Her dress had ridden up over her knees and the sight of her sturdy brown legs and bare feet was strangely shocking, a glimpse of the sensual in the sickroom. (But nothing new. I had once seen Marie naked, or nearly so. In our basement laundry room we had a shower, nothing fancy—a shower head, a tin stall, and an old green rubber curtain with large white sea horses on it. I came galloping downstairs one day—obviously when Marie thought I would be out of the house a while longer—and caught her just as she was stepping out of the shower. She was quick with her towel but not quick enough. I saw just enough to embarrass us both. Dark nipples that shocked me in the way they stood out like fingertips. A black triangle of pubic hair below a thick waist and gently rounded belly. And above it all, shoulders that seemed as broad as my father’s. I stammered an apology and backed out as quickly as possible. Neither of us ever said anything about the incident.)

After another brief coughing fit, this time nothing more than some breathy, urgent chuffs, Marie answered, “I don’t know. A couple days maybe.”

“Have you been eating?”

Marie shook her head.

“Are you sick to your stomach?”

Another head shake.

“Have you been throwing up?”

Marie whispered no.

“Do you know anyone else who is sick? Someone you might have caught this from?”

I felt so bad for Marie having to put up with this interrogation that I finally said something. “Mom. She doesn’t feel good.”

My mother turned and said sharply, “You wait in the other room. I’m trying to find out something here.”

I took a few steps back into the kitchen, but I still saw and heard what went on in Marie’s room.

My mother brought two wool blankets down from the closet shelf and spread them over Marie. “The first thing,” my mother said, “is to bring your temperature down. We should be able to sweat that out of you in no time.”

To this day many Sioux practice a kind of purification ritual in which they enclose themselves in a small tent or lodge and with the help of heated stones and water steam themselves until sweat streams from them. My mother believed in a variation of that. A fever was to be driven away by more heat, blankets piled on until your own sweat cooled you.

Marie must have agreed with the course of treatment because she made no protest.

“David will be here this afternoon if you need anything,” my mother said. “You rest. I’ll come over again around three o’clock, and if you’re not feeling better we’ll give Dr. Hayden a call.”

This remark brought Marie straight up in bed. “No! I don’t need no doctor!” With that outburst she began coughing again, this time harder than ever.

“Listen to you,” my mother said. “Listen to that cough. And you say you don’t need a doctor.”

“I don’t go to him,” said Marie. “I go to Dr. Snow.”

“Dr. Hayden is Mr. Hayden’s brother. You know that, don’t you? He’ll come to the house. And he won’t charge anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Marie’s frugality was legendary. She hated waste, and on more than a few occasions she claimed what we were going to throw away—food, clothing, magazines—saying she would find a use for them. Finally we caught on. Before we planned to throw anything away, we checked with Marie first. Our old issues of Collier’s probably found their way out to the reservation.

Marie closed her eyes. “I don’t need no doctor.” Her voice was no louder than a whisper.

My mother left the room, closing the door halfway. “Keep an eye on her, David,” she told me. “If she gets worse, call me.”

“Is she very sick?”

“She has a temperature. And I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

I stayed out, as my mother ordered, but I walked past Marie’s room often. Marie slept, even when she coughed. I heard her voice on one of my passings and stopped, but it soon became obvious that she was not calling me but talking in her fevered sleep. “It’s the big dog,” she said. “Yellow dog. It won’t drink.” And then a word that sounded like ratchety. And repeated, “Ratchety, ratchety.” I didn’t know if it was a word from Sioux or from fever.

Later, as I was sitting at the kitchen table, Marie shouted for me. “Davy!” I ran to her door.

I stopped. Marie was lying on her back, gazing at the doorway. “I don’t need no doctor, Davy. Tell them.”

“My mom doesn’t want you to get worse.”

“No doctor.”

“It’s just my uncle Frank. He’s okay.”

Marie’s forehead and cheeks shone with sweat. “I’m feeling better,” she said. She pulled back the blankets and sat up, but as she did she began to cough again. Soon she was gasping for breath in between coughs. This frightened me. I went to the bed and held Marie’s shoulders until the coughing subsided, something I remembered my mother doing for me. I felt Marie trembling all over, as your muscles do after great exertion.

When she was done I helped her lie down again. “Maybe I should go get my mother.”

“No doctor.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll tell her you don’t want a doctor.”

Marie’s eyes closed and she seemed to be breathing evenly again.

“Marie?”

She nodded weakly. “I’m okay.”

I backed slowly away but hesitated in the doorway. Marie’s eyes remained closed and her breathing was deep and regular. My hands were damp from gripping Marie’s shoulders. Was the sweat mine or hers?

My mother and father came home together at five o’clock. If the evening followed its usual pattern, my father would read the Mercer County Gazette, have supper, and go out again for an hour or two if the evening was peaceful. He would be gone longer if it was not.

My father dropped his hat and briefcase (another lawyer’s touch—and a gift from my mother) on the kitchen table. “David,” he said, “I hear you’re baby-sitting the baby-sitter.”

How naive I was! Until that moment I believed that we had hired Marie to care for our house, to keep it clean and prepare the meals since my mother, unlike most mothers, worked all day outside our home. We called Marie our “housekeeper,” and I thought that was her job—to keep the house. It never occurred to me that she had been hired to look after me as well.

My mother headed for Marie’s room.

“I think she’s still sleeping,” I said.

Within minutes my mother came back out. She said, “She’s burning up, Wes. You’d better call Frank.”

My father did not question my mother’s judgment in these matters. He went for the phone.

“Wait!” I called.

Both my father and mother turned to me. I did not often demand my parents’ attention because I knew I could have it whenever I wanted it. That was part of my only-child legacy.

“Marie said she didn’t want a doctor.”

“That’s superstition, David,” said my father. “Indian superstition.”

This is as good a place as any to mention something that I would just as soon forget. My father did not like Indians. No, that’s not exactly accurate, because it implies that my father disliked Indians, which wasn’t so. He simply held them in low regard. He was not a hate-filled bigot—he probably thought he was free of prejudice!—and he could treat Indians with generosity, kindness, and respect (as he could treat every human being). Nevertheless, he believed Indians, with only a few exceptions, were ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and irresponsible. I first learned of his racism when I was seven or eight. An aunt gave me a pair of moccasins for my birthday, and my father forbade me to wear them. When I made a fuss and my mother sided with me, my father said, “He wears those and soon he’ll be as flat-footed and lazy as an Indian.” My mother gave in by supposing that he was right about flat feet. (Today I put on a pair of moccasins as soon as I come home from work, an obedient son’s belated, small act of defiance.)

“She said she doesn’t need one,” I said.

“What does she need, David? A medicine man?”

I shut up. Both my parents were capable of scorching sarcasm. I saw no reason to risk receiving any more of it.

My father was already on the phone, giving the operator my uncle’s home phone number. “Glo?” he said into the receiver. “This is Wes. Is the doctor home yet?” Gloria, my uncle’s wife, was the prettiest woman I had ever seen. (Prettier even than my mother—a significant admission for a boy to make.) Aunt Gloria was barely five feet tall, and she had silver-blond hair. She and Frank had been married five or six years but had no children. I once overheard my grandfather say to my uncle: “Is she too small to have kids? Is that it, Frank? Is the chute too tight?”

In the too-loud voice he always used on the telephone, my father said, “We’ve got a sick Indian girl over here, Frank. Gail wants to know if you can stop by.”

After a pause, my father said to my mother, “Frank wants to know what her symptoms are.”

“A high temperature. Chills. Coughing.”

My father repeated my mother’s words. Then he added, “I might as well tell you, Frank. She doesn’t want to see you. Says she doesn’t need a doctor.”

Another short pause and my father said, “She didn’t say why. My guess is she’s never been to anyone but the tribal medicine man.”

I couldn’t tell if my father was serious or making a joke.

He laughed and hung up the phone. “Frank said maybe he’d do a little dance around the bed. And if that doesn’t work he’ll try beating some drums.”

My mother didn’t laugh. “I’ll go back in with Marie.”

As soon as Uncle Frank arrived, his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up, I felt sorry for my father. It was the way I always felt when the two of them were together. Brothers naturally invite comparison, and when comparisons were made between those two, my father was bound to suffer. And my father was, in many respects, an impressive man. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and pleasant-looking. But Frank was all this and more. He was handsome—dark, wavy hair, a jaw chiseled on such precise angles it seemed to conform to some geometric law, and he was as tall and well built as my father, but with an athletic grace my father lacked. He had been a star athlete in high school and college, and he was a genuine war hero, complete with decorations and commendations. He had been stationed at an Army field hospital on a Pacific island, and during a battle in which Allied forces were incurring a great many losses, Uncle Frank left the hospital to assist in treating and evacuating casualties. Under heavy enemy fire he carried—carried, just like in the movies—three wounded soldiers from the battlefield to safety. The story made the wire services, and somehow my grandfather got ahold of clippings from close to twenty different newspapers. (After reading one of the clippings, my father muttered, “I wonder if he was supposed to stay at the hospital.”)

Frank was witty, charming, at smiling ease with his life and everything in it. Alongside his brother my father soon seemed somewhat prosaic. Oh, stolid, surely, and steady and dependable. But inevitably, inescapably dull. Nothing glittered in my father’s wake the way it did in Uncle Frank’s.

Soon after the end of the war the town held a picnic to celebrate his homecoming. (Ostensibly the occasion was to honor all returning veterans, but really it was for Uncle Frank.) The park was jammed that day (I’m sure no event has ever gathered as many of the county’s residents in one place), and the amount and variety of food, all donated, was amazing: a roast pig, a barbecued side of beef, pots of beans, brimming bowls of coleslaw and potato salad, an array of garden vegetables, freshly baked pies and cakes, and pitchers of lemonade, urns of coffee, and barrels of beer. Once people had eaten and drunk their fill, my grandfather climbed onto a picnic table.

He didn’t call for silence. That wasn’t his way. He simply stood there, his feet planted wide, his hands on his hips. He was wearing his long buckskin jacket, the one so tanned and aged that it was almost white. He assumed that once people saw him, they would give him their attention. And they did.

He said a few words honoring all the men who served (no one from Mercer County was killed in action—not such an improbability when you consider the county’s small population—though we had our share of wounded, the worst of whom, Harold Branch, came back without his legs). Then after a long, reverent pause, Grandfather announced, “Now I’d like to bring my son up here.”

My father was standing next to me when Grandfather said that. My father did not move. Grandfather did not say, “my son the veteran,” or “my son the war hero,” or “my son the soldier.” He simply said, “my son.” And why wouldn’t the county sheriff be called on to make a small speech?

But my father didn’t move. He just stood there, like every other man in the crowd, smiling and applauding, while his brother stepped up on the table. Uncle Frank had not hesitated either; he knew immediately that Grandfather was referring to him.

Uncle Frank made a suitably brief and modest speech, saying that the war could not have been won without the sacrifices of both soldiers and those who remained at home.

At one point I looked up to see how my father was reacting to his brother’s speech. My father was not there. He had drifted back through the crowd and was picking up scraps of paper from the grass. With his bad leg, bending was difficult. He had to keep the leg stiff and bend from the waist. Then he carried these bits of paper, a piece at a time, to the fire-blackened incinerator barrel.

Uncle Frank’s talk must not have been enough for my grandfather. He climbed back up on the table and, after urging the crowd on to another minute of applause, held up his hands for silence again. “This man could have gone anywhere,” he said. “With his war record he could be practicing in Billings. In Denver. In Los Angeles. There’s not a community in the country that wouldn’t be proud to have him. But he came back to us. My son. Came back to us.”

My father kept searching for paper to pick up.

Uncle Frank put his black bag on the kitchen table. “How about something to drink, Wes? I was digging postholes this morning and I’ve been dry all day.”

My father opened the refrigerator. “Postholes? Not exactly the kind of surgery I thought you’d be doing.”

“I’m going to fence off the backyard. We’ve got two more houses going up out there. Figured a fence might help us keep what little privacy we’ve got.”

I wondered what Grandpa Hayden would say about that. Though his land was fenced with barbed wire as most ranchers’ were, he still had the nineteenth-century cattleman’s open range mentality and hatred of fences. Our backyard bordered a railroad track (trains passed at least four times a day), but my father refused to put up a fence—as all our neighbors had—separating our property from the tracks.

“I’ve got cold beer in here,” said my father. “It’s old man Norgaard’s brew.” Ole Norgaard lived in a tar-paper shack on the edge of town. He had a huge garden and sold vegetables through the summer and early fall. His true specialty, however, and the business he conducted throughout the year, was brewing and selling beer. My father swore by everything Ole Norgaard produced.

Uncle Frank made a face. “I’ll pass.”

My father brought out a bottle with a rubber stopper and a wire holding it in place. “You can’t buy a better beer.” He held out the bottle.

Uncle Frank laughed and waved my father away. “Just give me a glass of water.”

My father persisted. “Ask Pop. He still drinks Ole Norgaard’s beer.”

“Okay, okay,” Frank said. “It’s great beer. It’s the world’s greatest goddamn beer. But I’ll drink Schlitz, if it’s okay with you.

My father nodded in my direction. “Not in front of the boy.” That was one of my father’s rules: no one was supposed to swear in front of my mother or me.

Uncle Frank picked up his bag. “Okay, Wes. I’ll tell you what. Let me see the patient first and then I’ll drink a bottle of Ole’s beer with you. Maybe I’ll drink two.”

Just then my mother came out of Marie’s room. “She’s in here, Frank.”

“Hello, Gail. How is the patient?”

“She’s awake. Her temperature might be down a bit.”

Frank went in and shut the door behind him. Within a minute we heard Marie shouting, “Mrs.! Mrs.!”

My mother looked quizzically at my father. He shrugged his shoulders. Marie screamed again. “No! Mrs.!”

This time my mother went to the door and knocked. “Frank? Is everything okay?”

My uncle opened the door. “She says she wants you in here, Gail.” He shook his head in disgust. “Come on in. I don’t give a damn.”

This time the door closed and the room remained silent.

“David,” my father said to me. “Why don’t we go out on the porch while the medical profession does its work.”

Our screened-in porch faced the courthouse across the street. When I was younger I used to go out there just before five o’clock on all but the coldest days to watch for my parents.

My father put his bottle of beer down on the table next to the rocking chair. I didn’t sit down; I wanted to be able to maneuver myself into the best position to hear anything coming from Marie’s room. I didn’t have to wait long. I soon heard—muffled but unmistakable—Marie shout another no.

I glanced at my father but he was staring at the courthouse.

Then two more no’s in quick-shouted succession.

My father pointed at one of the large elm trees in our front yard. “Look at that,” he said. “August, and we’ve got leaves coming down already.” He heard her. I knew he did.

Before long Uncle Frank came out to the porch. He put down his bag and stared around the room as if he had never been there before. “Nice and cool out here,” he said, tugging at his white shirt the way men do when their clothes are sticking to them from perspiration. “Maybe I should put up one of these.”

“Faces east,” my father said. “That’s the key.”

“I’ll drink that beer now.”

My father jumped up immediately.

Uncle Frank lowered his head and closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and worked his fingers back and forth as if he were trying to straighten his nose. I heard the smack of the refrigerator door and the clink of bottles. I wanted my father to hurry. After what had just happened with Marie I didn’t want to be alone with Uncle Frank.

Without opening his eyes Frank asked, “You playing any ball this summer, David?”

I was reluctant to answer. My uncle Frank had been a local baseball star, even playing some semipro ball during the summers when he was in college and medical school. I, on the other hand, had been such an inept ball player that I had all but given it up. But since Frank and Gloria had no children I always felt some pressure to please them, to be like the son they didn’t have. I finally said, “I’ve been doing a lot of fishing.”

“Catching anything?”

“Crappies and bluegill and perch out at the lake. Some trout at the river.”

“Any size to the trout?” He finally looked up at me.

“Not really. Nine inches. Maybe a couple twelve-inchers.”

“Well, that’s pan size. You’ll have to take me out some afternoon.”

Before I could answer, my father returned, carrying a bottle of beer. “Now drink it slow,” he said. “Give it a chance.”

Frank made a big show of holding the bottle aloft and examining it before drinking.

“What was the problem with Marie?” asked my father.

“Like you said on the phone. They’re used to being treated by the medicine man. Or some old squaw. But a doctor comes around and they think he’s the evil spirit or something.”

My father shook his head. “They’re not going to make it into the twentieth century until they give up their superstitions and old ways.”

“I’m not concerned about social progress. I’m worried they’re not going to survive measles. Mumps. Pneumonia. Which is what Marie might have. I’d like to get an X-ray, but I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that.”

“Pneumonia,” said my father. “That sounds serious.”

“I can’t be sure. I’ll prescribe something just in case.”

From where I stood on the porch I could see into the living room, where my mother stood. She was staring toward the porch and standing absolutely still. Her hands were pressed together as they would be in prayer, but she held her hands to her mouth. I looked quickly behind me since her attitude was exactly like someone who has seen something frightening. Nothing was there but my father and my uncle.

“Should she be in the hospital?” asked my father.

Frank rephrased the question as if my father had somehow said it wrong. “Should she be? That depends. Would she stay there? Or would she sneak out? Would she go home? If she’s going to be in some dirty shack out on the prairie, that’s no good. Now if she were staying right here. . . .”

Bentrock did not have its own hospital. The nearest one was almost forty miles away, in North Dakota. Bentrock residents usually traveled an extra twenty miles to the hospital in Dixon, Montana.

My mother came out onto the porch to answer Frank’s question. “Yes, she’s staying here. She’s staying until she gets better.” Her voice was firm and her arms were crossed, almost as if she expected an argument.

“Or until she gets worse. You don’t want an Indian girl with pneumonia in your house, Gail.”

“As long as she’s here we can keep an eye on her.”

Frank looked over at my father. If my mother said it, it was so, yet my father’s confirmation was still necessary. “She can stay here,” he said.

“She’s staying here,” my mother said one more time. “Someone will be here or nearby.”

I couldn’t figure out why my mother seemed so angry. I had always felt she didn’t particularly care for Frank, but I had put that down to two reasons. First, he was charming, and my mother was suspicious of charm. She believed its purpose was to conceal some personal deficit or lack of substance. If your character was sound, you didn’t need charm. And second, Uncle Frank was a Hayden, and where the Haydens were concerned my mother always held something back.

Yet her comportment toward Frank had always been cordial if a little reserved. My parents and Frank and Gloria went out together; they met at least once a month to play cards; they saw each other regularly at the ranch at holidays and family gatherings. When either my father or I were hurt or fell ill, we went to see Frank or he came to see us. (My mother, however, went to old Dr. Snow, the other doctor in Bentrock. She said she would feel funny seeing Frank professionally.)

Whatever the source of her irritation, Frank must have felt it too. He abruptly put down his half-finished beer and said, “I’d better be on my way. I have the feeling I might be called out to the Hollands tonight. This is her due date, and she’s usually pretty close. I’ll phone Young Drug with something for Marie. Give me a call if she gets worse.”

The three of us watched Frank bound down the walk, his long strides loose yet purposeful. After he got into his old Ford pickup (an affectation that my father made fun of by saying, “If a doctor is going to drive an old truck, maybe I should be patrolling the streets on horseback”) and drove away, my mother suggested I go outside. “I have to talk to your father,” she said. “In private.”

If I had gone back into the house—to the kitchen, to my room, out the back door, if I had left the porch and followed Frank’s steps down the front walk—I would never have heard the conversation between my father and mother, and perhaps I would have lived out my life with an illusion about my family and perhaps even the human community. Certainly I could not tell this story....

I left the porch and turned to the right and went around the corner of the house. From there I was able to crouch down and double back to the side of the porch, staying below the screen and out of my parents’ line of vision. I knew my mother was going to say something about Marie yelling when Uncle Frank was there, and I wanted to hear what she had to say.

I didn’t have to wait long.

My mother cleared her throat, and when she began to speak, her voice was steady and strong, but her pauses were off, as if she had started on the wrong breath. “The reason, Wesley, the reason Marie didn’t want to be examined by Frank is that he—he has . . . is that your brother has molested Indian girls.”

My father must have started to leave because I heard the clump of a heavy footstep and my mother said quickly, “No, wait. Listen to me, please. Marie said she didn’t want to be alone with him. You should have seen her. She was practically hysterical about having me stay in the room. And once Frank left she told me all of it. He’s been doing it for years, Wes. When he examines an Indian he . . . he does things he shouldn’t. He takes liberties. Indecent liberties.”

There was a long silence. My mother’s hollyhocks and snapdragons grew alongside the house where I was hiding, and the bees that flew in and out of the flowers filled the air with their drone.

Then my father spoke. “And you believe her.”

“Yes, I do.”

Footsteps again. Now I knew my father was pacing.

“Why would she lie, Wesley?”

My father didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking: She’s an Indian—why would she tell the truth?

“Why, Wes?”