Montana 1948 (5 page)

“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?”

“I didn’t say she was lying. Maybe she’s simply got it wrong. An examination by a doctor. . . . Maybe she doesn’t know what’s supposed to go on. My gosh, I remember when I had to go see Doc Snow for my school checkups. He would poke me and tickle me and check my testicles and have me cough, and I might have felt funny about the whole business, but I knew it was part of the exam. But if I
didn’t
know and. . . .”

“It’s not like that. Marie told me. That’s not the case.”

“And if you’d never seen a doctor in your life. . . . Why, you wouldn’t know what was going on.”

“No, Wes.”

“Think if you’d never had a shot, an injection. If you’d never seen a needle. You’d think he was trying to kill you. To stab you.”

“Wesley, would you
listen
to me?”

“And Marie. For God’s sake, you know how she likes to make up stories. She’s been filling David’s head with them for years. She’s got a great sense of drama, that one—”

“Wesley!”
My mother shouted my father’s name exactly the way she would shout a baby’s to stop him from doing something dangerous—toddling toward the stairs, extending his finger toward the electrical outlet—anything to stop him. I flinched and a part of me said leave, get away, run, now before it’s too late, before you hear something you can’t unhear. Before everything changes. But I pressed myself closer to the house and hung on.

“All right,” my father said. “All right. Let’s have it.”

There was a shuffling, and I wondered if my mother was moving closer to my father. Her voice became lower. “I told you. When he examines Indian girls he does things to them.”

“Things, Gail? He does
things
to them? I’m sure he does
things
to all his patients.”

His tone must have angered her, because her voice went right back to where it had been earlier, and though it seemed each word was the product of effort it also seemed born out of absolute determination. “What things? I’ll tell you what things. Your brother makes his patients—
some
of his patients—undress completely and get into indecent positions. He makes them jump up and down while he watches. He fondles their breasts. He—no, don’t you turn away.
Don’t!
You asked and I’m going to tell you. All of it. He puts things into these girls. Inside them,
there.
His instruments. His fingers. He has . . . your brother I believe has inserted his, his penis into some of these girls. Wesley, your brother is
raping
these women. These
girls.
These Indian girls. He offers his services to the reservation, to the BIA school. To the high school for athletic physicals. Then when he gets these girls where he wants them he. . . .
Oh!
I don’t even want to say it again.
He does what he wants to do.”

The shock of hearing this about Uncle Frank was doubled because my mother was saying these words.
Rape. Breasts. Penis.
These were words I never heard my mother use—never—and I’m sure her stammer was not only from emotion but also from the strain on her vocabulary.

I waited for my father to explode, to shout a defense of his brother, to scream a condemnation of Marie and her lies. Instead, he said as quietly as before: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Why?”

“That’s right. Why? Are you telling me this because I’m Frank’s brother? Because I’m your husband? Because I’m Marie’s employer?” He paused. “Or because I’m the sheriff?”

“I’m telling
you,
Wes. I’m just telling
you.
Why? What part of you doesn’t want to hear it?”

“I wish,” my father said, “I wish you wouldn’t have told the sheriff.”

Did he laugh softly, ironically, then? I thought I heard a chuckling noise, but it might have been the heavy heads of the snapdragons leaning and rustling against each other.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. I wanted to stand up, to look at them. Were they embracing? Glaring at each other? For some reason I imagined them staring off in different directions, my father toward the front lawn and the leaves that fell before they should and my mother the other way, back into the house and toward the bedroom where Marie lay sweating in her fever and her shame.

My father asked, “Did any of this happen to Marie?”

“Yes. Some. Not the worst. But her friends. People she knows.”

“Would she be willing to talk to me?”

“She might be. If you approach her the right way.”

“I only have the one way.”

“I know,” my mother said.

My father clapped his hands, his usual prelude to action—time to put up the storm windows, to rake the leaves, to shovel the walk, to shake the rugs. To this day, when I hear the first clap of applause in a theater, a lecture hall, a banquet, I reflexively think of my father and his call to chores. “Let’s see if she’s awake,” he said, “and get on with it.”

As they left the porch, I ran around the house and went in the back door just as they were heading into Marie’s room. Neither of them said a word to me. They went in and closed the door behind them. I lingered nearby but couldn’t make out a word, only the steady low murmur of voices punctuated occasionally by Marie’s coughs.

On the kitchen table was Uncle Frank’s beer bottle. I examined it closely, searching for the lines and whorls of his fingerprints. (One of the ways my father kept the respect and admiration of the boys in our town during the war was by fingerprinting every child who stopped by his office. I must have been fingerprinted fifteen times myself.) I was beginning already to think of Uncle Frank as a criminal. I may not have been entirely convinced of his guilt, but the story my mother told was too lurid, too frightening, for me to continue thinking of my uncle in the way I always had. Charming, affable Uncle Frank was gone for good.