Montana 1948 (6 page)

My parents were in Marie’s room for a long time, and when they came out both of them were grim-faced and silent.

“How’s Marie?” I asked my mother.

“She’s going to sleep a while. That’s what she needs now.”

Our supper was soup and sandwiches, a meal usually reserved for lunches or Sunday evenings when we got home late from spending the day at the ranch. After eating, my father went back out on the porch and simply stood there, staring out at the evening’s lengthening shadows. My mother was finishing the dishes when he came back in and announced, “I’m going over to talk to Len.”

Len McAuley was my father’s deputy and our next-door neighbor, and before he was my father’s deputy he had been my grandfather’s deputy. I once heard a story about how Len, without a weapon, ran down on foot and disarmed a cowboy who shot up a bar on Main Street, but the story was hard to believe about the Len McAuley I knew. He was tall, gaunt, stoop-shouldered, shy, and soft-spoken. Len and his wife Daisy (who made up for Len’s taciturnity with both the quantity and the volume of her talk) were in their sixties, and they were more like grandparents to me than my own. When I was younger, Len used to carve little animals for my play, and Daisy never stopped baking cookies for me.

As my father went out the door, my mother called after him, “If Daisy’s home tell her I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee!”

Moments later they were off on their own, my father and Len standing in the McAuley front yard and my mother and Daisy sitting at our kitchen table. But there were similarities. All four were drinking coffee. In each pair one talked while the other listened. (My mother and Len were the listeners.) And both my father and mother were, I knew, conducting investigations.

I wandered in and out of the house, catching fragments of both conversations, until my mother finally said, “David. Either go out or stay in.” Daisy laughed and said, “He’s like Cuss”—her cat—“when he’s out, he wants to go in. When he’s in he wants to go out.”

Both my parents were discreet about their investigations. Neither came right out and repeated Marie’s story about Uncle Frank, yet they used the same strategy: to mention Marie’s perturbation and then to pretend mystification—“I don’t know why she would act that way,” my mother said, while my father shook his head in puzzlement. They both left openings for Len or Daisy to contribute what they could.

And my mother struck pay dirt.

On one of my passes through the kitchen, Daisy was hunched over the table, her white hair bobbing in my mother’s direction and her tanned plump arm reaching toward my mother. Daisy’s usually loud, brassy voice was lowered, but I heard her say, “The word is he doesn’t do everything on the up-and-up.” Then she noticed me. She straightened up and smiled at me but stopped talking. That meant I was supposed to leave the room, and I did. But slowly. As I crossed into the living room, Daisy whispered, “Just the squaws though.”

Later that night, right before we all went to bed, my mother checked on Marie once more. When she came out my father and I were in the kitchen, drinking milk and eating the rhubarb cake that Daisy had brought over.

My mother shut Marie’s door quietly and then leaned her back against it, almost as if she were using her weight to keep the door closed. She looked tired. She was still wearing her work clothes—she usually changed into dungarees or slacks and a gingham shirt as soon as she got home. Her glasses were off and her eyes were ringed with fatigue. Her lipstick had faded, and she hadn’t brushed out her hair.

My father asked without looking up, “How’s Marie?”

My mother’s gaze was fixed upon my father. “You’re eating,” she said.

“Daisy’s cake. It’s delicious.”

“You can eat....”

At some point my father must have become aware that she was staring at him. His cake unfinished, he set down his fork. “I don’t hear her coughing.”

“She’s sleeping again.” I couldn’t tell if she was actually looking at him or if she was simply staring off and his form intersected her vision.

Then I knew. She saw him now as she hadn’t before. He was not only her husband, he was a
brother,
and brother to a man who used his profession to take advantage of women, brother to a
pervert!
And how did I know these were my mother’s thoughts? I knew because they were mine. I put down my glass of milk but I did not look at my father. I didn’t want to notice the way he combed his hair straight back. I didn’t want to see the little extra mound of flesh between his eyebrows. I didn’t want to see the way the long line of his nose was interrupted by a slight inward curve. I didn’t want to see any of the ways that he resembled his brother.

“What did Len say?” asked my mother.

“That we need rain.”

My mother hung her head.

“That’s what we talked about, Gail.”

She brought her head up quickly. “That’s not what Daisy and I talked about.”

“I don’t want this all over town, Gail. We don’t have proof of anything.”

Now they were falling into familiar roles. My father believed in
proof,
in evidence, and he held off on his own convictions until he had sufficient evidence to support them. My mother, on the other hand, was willing to go on a lot less, on her feelings, her faith.

My mother said, “It’s around town more than you realize.”

“I don’t want this getting back to my father.”

That
was what my father believed in. If he could not sufficiently fear, love, trust, obey, and honor God—as we were told in catechism class we must—it was because he had nothing left for his Heavenly Father after declaring absolute fealty to his earthly one.

“Is that what you’re concerned about?”

“Gail....”

My mother pointed at me. “He won’t be going to him again. I guarantee that.”

“For God’s sake, Gail.”

“He won’t.”

I was afraid I would give myself away—by blushing or failing to react the way I should. I wasn’t supposed to know what they were talking about.

“Let’s not discuss this in front of him.”

My mother continued to stare at him.

“I’ll handle this, Gail. In my fashion.”

After another long silence, my mother finally left her post at Marie’s door. She was almost out of the kitchen when she turned and said to my father in the calmest voice she had used all evening: “Just one thing, Wes. You never said you didn’t believe it. Why is that? Why?”

She waited for his answer. I waited too, breathlessly, looking down at our floor’s speckled linoleum and holding my sight on one green speck until my father said, of course I don’t believe it; of course it isn’t true.

But he didn’t say a word. He simply picked up his fork and continued to eat Daisy McAuley’s rhubarb cake.

That was when it came to me. Uncle Frank was my father’s brother, and my father knew him as well as any man or woman.

And my father knew he was guilty.

Two

T
HE next day my father began investigating the accusation Marie had made against his brother. How did I know this? I made my guess from three facts. Before he left for his office in the morning he asked my mother if she needed any honey. He was driving out to the reservation, and if she liked he could stop at Birdwells’ and buy her some honey. My mother had a passion for honey. She spread it on toast and biscuits; she sweetened her tea with it; she used it in baking; she ate spoonfuls of it right from the jar. And the best honey, she said, came from the Birdwells’ bee farm. Mr. Birdwell’s place was on the highway that led to the reservation.

My father’s inquiry about the honey was, first of all, an overture of peace to my mother. Let’s not quarrel, my father was saying. (The phrase he often used with both my mother and me was, “Let’s not have this unpleasantness between us,” as if the problem, whatever it might be, resided not
in
us but
outside
of us.)

And, second, the offer to buy honey was also an offhand way for my father to announce that he was going out to the reservation. He had no jurisdiction there, and the reservation police hadn’t called him in on a case, so he could be going there for only one reason: to look into the accusations Marie had made.

Later that day I saw my father at the Coffee Cup, a popular diner in downtown Bentrock. There was nothing uncommon about my father (or any other citizen) being in the Coffee Cup on a summer afternoon, but my father usually sat at the large table in the center of the cafe, drinking coffee with his regular group: Don Young, the pharmacist; Rand Hutchinson, the owner of Hutchinson’s Greenhouse; Howard Bailey, who ran an oil abstracting company; and other members of the Bentrock business community. On that day, however, he sat at a table for two over against the far wall. With him sat Ollie Young Bear, the most respected—even beloved—Indian in northeastern Montana, perhaps even the whole state.

Ollie Young Bear was also a war hero (he was wounded in action in North Africa), a graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman, a deacon at First Lutheran Church, an executive with Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, the star pitcher on the Elks’ fast-pitch softball team—runner-up in the Silver Division of the state tournament (though he probably could not have been admitted to the Elks as a member). He did not smoke, drink, or curse. He married Doris Strickland, a white woman whose family owned a prosperous ranch south of Bentrock, and Ollie and Doris had two shy, polite children, a boy and a girl. All of these accomplishments made Ollie the perfect choice for white people to point to as an example of what Indians
could
be. My father liked to say of Ollie Young Bear, “He’s a testimony to what hard work will get you.”

And it was not as though Ollie had forsaken his own people. Though he was not from the reservation, he drove out there every weekend with bats and balls, equipment he paid for out of his own pocket, and organized baseball games for the boys.

Because my father obviously liked and respected him—held him up, in fact, as a model—I tried to feel the same way about him. But it was difficult.

Mr. Young Bear, as my father insisted I call him, was a stern, censorious man. He was physically imposing—tall, barrel -chested, broad-shouldered, large-headed—and he never smiled. His lips were perpetually turned down in an expression both sad and disdainful. He seemed to find no humor in the world, and I have no memory of hearing him laugh.

He and my father went bowling together, and I was sometimes allowed to tag along. I didn’t particularly care for the sport, but I loved Castle’s Bowling Alley, a dark, narrow (only four lanes), low-ceilinged basement establishment that smelled of cigar smoke and floor wax. I loved to put my bottle of Nehi grape soda right next to my father’s beer bottle on the scorecard holder and to slide my shoes under the bench with my father’s when we changed into bowling shoes. I loved the sounds, the heavy clunk of the ball dropped on wood, its rumble down the alley, the clatter of pins, and above it all, men’s shouts—“Go, go, gogogo!” “Get
in
there!” “Drop,
drop!”
Then the muttered curses while they waited for the pin boy to reset the pins. When I was in Castle’s Alley I felt, no matter how many women or children might also be there, as though I had gained admittance to a men’s enclave, as though I had
arrived.

When Ollie Young Bear was with us, however, I felt like a child. Ollie could not keep from giving me instruction or correcting my game. Make sure you bring the ball straight back, he would say. Follow through. Use a five-step approach, keep your eye on the spot and not the pins. He was relentless in his criticism, and my father would simply say, “Now listen to what Ollie’s telling you. Do you know what kind of average he’s carrying in league play? Two-ten. You listen to what he’s telling you.” I know my father was trying to show his esteem for Ollie and his lack of prejudice, but the only thing that was accomplished was that going bowling began to seem an awful lot like going to school.

When I saw my father and Ollie Young Bear sitting together at a table away from the others in the cafe, I knew my father was asking Ollie if he had heard anything about Uncle Frank molesting Indian girls. Was he asking the right man? I wondered. Although Ollie Young Bear was much admired by the white population, he had no special status among the Indians. In fact, I once heard Marie say of Ollie, “He won’t be happy until he’s white.” Both Ollie and my father leaned over the table, their coffee cups between them, their voices low.