by Larry Watson
“If you were my sons,” Sheriff Cooke said to them, “I’d sit you down and give you some advice about choosing friends. Look at the trouble these two galoots got you into.”
They began walking out of the alley in single file again. Lester still had his head back and his hands cupped to his nose, but Tommy had turned to face Frank and Wesley. Tommy was rubbing his arms up and down, shivering, and his face, pale with cold and anger and shame, glowed in the dark. Through his chattering teeth he said to the brothers, “You lucky fuckers.”
They crested the last of a series of hills leading to Bentrock, still a good five miles from town but close enough to see the tiny scattering of lights in the valley that meant they were almost home. But this early morning, in the predawn dark, it was not the lights of town that caught their attention but the glow of a fire burning brightly just this side of the Knife River bridge, the last border separating Bentrock from all the wild country hemming in their town on every side.
“What the hell is that?” Wesley asked from the front seat.
Tommy leaned forward from the back. “What’s what?”
Wesley pointed. “Out there.”
“A fire?” Tommy asked. “Is that a fire?”
Lester had not spoken since they left McCoy, and in fact had slept for most of the trip, but he roused at this announcement. “What’s on fire?” His voice was thick and nasal because his nostrils were packed with gauze, medical treatment that Deputy Rawlins administered back in Sheriff Cooke’s office.
“Jesus,” Wesley said. “What’s burning?”
“Never mind,” Frank answered. “I know.”
“What? Can you see?” asked Tommy.
“It’s Dad.”
They waited then, keeping their eyes on the fire, letting its enlarging flames and brightening glow signal their progress through the night.
When they were close enough they could see, exactly as Frank had predicted, Sheriff Hayden and his deputy Len McAuley. They were parked by the bridge, their cars still partially on the road to avoid getting stuck in the deep snow drifted in the ditch. And they had built a fire, a blaze of brush and scrub wood.
Frank pulled in behind his father’s car as if there was nothing unusual about parking on this empty snow-packed stretch of highway where no car had passed for hours.
Before Frank turned off the motor, Wesley saw in the glare of their headlights the silver flask his father passed back to Len McAuley. Len dropped the flask into the pocket of his mackinaw.
Sheriff Hayden, in the great bulk of his buffalo coat, walked toward their car, twisting his head down to see into the car’s interior. His hands were in his pockets, and not just from the cold, Wesley guessed. His father often jammed his hands into his pockets when his temper was about to explode, when he couldn’t be sure what he might do with his hands.
Frank was out of the car before his father came around to the side. “What did you think,” Frank asked his father, “we wouldn’t see you without the fire?”
Sheriff Hayden shook his head vigorously. “That is not the tone you want to be taking. No. No sir. Not after Len and I stood out here half the night, worrying and freezing our asses. No. You best start over.”
“Hell, I half expected to see you coming our way. Every time I saw a pair of headlights I wondered if they were yours.”
“We thought about it. Believe me, we talked about it.” He looked in at Wesley. “How are you boys?”
“I think Lester’s nose might be broke,” Wesley answered. “It’s swelled up pretty bad.”
“Come on out of there, Lester. Let Len take a look.”
As Tommy slid out of the car with Lester behind him, Mr. Hayden said, “Thomas Salter. If I didn’t know you were a part of this, I would have guessed.”
“When did you talk to Sheriff Cooke?” Frank asked his father.
“The first time? Late afternoon. Around 5: 30, I reckon.”
“They got more snow over that way,” Wesley said, getting out of the car.
Both his father and brother looked at him but said nothing.
Len gently led Lester over toward the fire and hunched his tall frame down so he could look directly at Lester’s nose. “Tell me if I’m hurtin’ you.” After a moment of careful examination, Len said to Sheriff Hayden. “I don’t know. Could be broke.”
“Who had the pistol?” Sheriff Hayden asked the boys.
Neither Frank nor Wesley said anything but Lester spoke up. “It was Tommy’s.”
Sheriff Hayden nodded knowingly. “Where is it now?”
Frank answered, “Cooke confiscated all our guns. Rifles. Shotguns. Everyone.”
“He say anything about you getting them back?”
“We didn’t even know he had ’em at first. They packed us up and we were down the road a good piece before we thought to look.”
Len and Lester came back to the car. “That’s too much,” Len said. “Keeping the guns.”
Sheriff Hayden shrugged. “His jurisdiction.”
“I could see taking the pistol—” said Frank.
“—that was what got you in trouble. That more than anything. Boys waving a pistol around. That was stupid. Disrespectful and stupid.”
“It was that Indian girl,” Tommy said, his voice too loud for the still night. Then Tommy must have seen something in Sheriff Hayden’s eyes—something glinting in the firelight—and he fell silent.
“Len, you want to take Lester and Tommy home?”
“Should I wake their folks?”
“Might just as well. With you telling the story maybe there’ll be fewer versions floating around.”
“How about a doctor for Lester?”
The sheriff gazed for a moment at Lester’s swollen, discolored face. “No, let his folks decide about that.”
Wesley watched Len lead Tommy and Lester to Len’s car, and he felt again the separation from his two friends—his brother’s friends—that he had felt when they walked out of that alley in McCoy, and he knew that he was privileged, his father’s son, protected from some of the blows the world would inevitably offer.
His father stepped closer to the fire, took his hands from his pockets, and warmed them over the flames. “I suppose you two would like to get back home to your own beds.”
“It wasn’t us, Pop,” Frank said. “It wasn’t us that started any of it.”
His father spit into the fire. “Doesn’t matter. You’re the only ones was Haydens. If it’s just those two spreading trash around somebody else’s territory, that’s one thing. But you were there. And you had your name with you. You’ve got it everywhere you go. You can’t take it off and put it on like a pair of boots. You’re a Hayden. Like it or not. And you damn well better start thinking about what that means. Because you sure as hell don’t seem to know now.”
While his father was talking Wesley stepped away from the fire and looked back down the road in the direction from which they had come. It always surprised him, looking at snowy fields on a moonless night like this one, how briefly the snow’s whiteness lasted in the dark. It seemed as though its pale glow should shine for miles, lighting up the path they had driven that night.
By now Frank was arguing with their father. “What were we supposed to do, goddammit. Why don’t you tell us that?”
“If you don’t know,” his father said to Frank, “it’s not going to do a damn bit of good for me to tell you. Now get back in your car and head for home. I’ll be right behind you.”
It took a few tries to get the Model T started, and while the boys cranked the car, their father scattered the fire and kicked snow on its remains. Soon they were heading west again. Once out of the firelight, Wesley could see into the distance. An occasional light from a farm or ranch had come on. It was time for predawn chores to begin.
“I wonder how long he’s going to be on the rampage,” Frank said.
Wesley didn’t answer. He wondered if he was getting sick. He was so tired. His throat was dry and raspy, and
he didn’t think it was only from breathing in wood smoke. His jaw ached as if the cold had gotten deep into the joints. His head felt heavy and full and warm. He pulled off his glove and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. He didn’t know if he had a fever, but then his mother said your hand couldn’t tell—it was always cooler than your forehead. If he told her he didn’t feel well, she would hold him gently by the shoulders and put her lips, soft and warm, to his brow, the test she had used since he was a baby to determine if he had a fever. Wesley decided he wouldn’t say anything to her.
Julian Hayden
(1899)
JULIAN Hayden came to Montana in 1898 with two vows: he was determined, first of all, to prove out his claim to a quarter section of land. To do that, according to the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act, he had to settle on the land in a more or less permanent dwelling (a sod house or railroad shack would qualify) and make improvements on the land for five years. Although Julian was only sixteen and homesteaders were supposed to be at least twenty-one, land was so plentiful in the region and the government wanted settlers so badly that homestead officers didn’t check anyone’s age too closely.
Julian Hayden’s second vow was simpler in its terms but larger in its demand: he was determined to do a better job than his father of caring and providing for the family.
Julian brought his mother to Montana with him. She had a brother in Wolf Point who had promised to help them get started on their claim. As it turned out, his help consisted of giving them directions on how to build a tar-paper shack and advising them that if they paid more than twenty dollars for materials they were fools. Julian and his mother paid eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents.
Julian’s sister Lorna, older by a year, stayed behind in Schofield, Iowa. High-strung and fearful, she was ill suited for life on the frontier. Before Julian and his mother left Iowa, he made certain that Lorna was comfortably situated by talking the Methodist minister, Reverend Willard West, into giving his sister a job. Reverend West had three young daughters and a sickly wife. In exchange for room, board, and a small monthly wage, Lorna would help care for the children. That was to be her only duty, Julian emphasized; he did not want his sister working like a slave in the minister’s home. Reverend West agreed emphatically and reassured Julian; they had a hired girl to do housework—Lorna would simply watch the girls.
Once they were settled securely in Montana, Julian would send for his sister. But not before. There were depths of melancholy that Lorna constantly skirted, and Julian worried that the harshness of life on the plains might push her off the edge.
Julian also left his father behind, buried in the Schofield town cemetery. George Hayden had been killed outside his own barbershop and in full view of many of the local citizens. Including his own son.
A farmer was in town to buy supplies, and his horse, a big bay, was skittish from the moment they arrived. At every loud noise—a window slamming or a dog barking—the horse threatened to bolt. Finally, something happened—perhaps no more momentous than a white curtain suddenly blowing out through an open window—and the horse broke free and began to gallop down Main Street. Julian remembered thinking that the horse’s hooves clattered so loudly on the cobblestones that it sounded as though a wagonload of logs was being dumped on the street.
Julian had been standing in the doorway of the harness shop where he worked, and as he followed the horse’s progress he saw his father step into the street.
When Mr. Hayden finally saw the horse charging at him, he froze in indecision. Julian could tell his father didn’t know what to do because he leaned first in one direction and then the other, as though he were feinting, trying to trick the horse into altering its path.
And for an instant the horse did slow, prancing sideways as though it wanted to avoid the man as much as the man wanted to avoid the horse. At the last moment, however, the horse could not make itself stop, and Julian’s father—who finally decided which way to go—leaped in exactly the same direction as the horse veered.
The blow seemed no more than glancing, as though the horse were merely shouldering the man out of the way. But that was enough. Mr. Hayden, a small man, flew across the cobblestones as if propelled by an explosive.
Julian did not condemn his father for freezing in the horse’s path. He could not, because when he saw his father struck, Julian behaved in exactly the same way. He could not make himself move from the doorway of the harness shop. From every direction people were running toward his father’s body, but Julian simply stood there, the smell of the shop’s leather filling his nostrils. Afterward, he would associate this smell with the horse’s galloping escape, though he had no evidence that a piece of leather—a rein, a bridle, a tether—had failed.
When Julian finally reached his father’s side, his father was already dead, as no doubt he had been from the instant his body struck the paving stones. There was not a mark on his body, a fact that later served to comfort his mother. She knew that her husband was not a good provider and never would be, but his good looks even in death pleased her. The doctor who signed the death certificate conjectured that perhaps Mr. Hayden had died of fright—that his heart had seized with fear when the horse bore down upon him. Julian doubted that diagnosis; after all, his father had jumped just before he was struck. He had simply jumped the wrong way.
Mr. Hayden did not leave his family much. He had insurance, but since he had fallen behind on the premiums the company did not pay off on the policy. His barbershop was not paid for. They did not own their home but rented from the widow of a prominent Schofield banker and politician. Worst of all, to Julian’s way of thinking, his father had bequeathed him no trade or skill or even any tools with which a young man could make a living. He left behind a past——debts that had to be paid—but no future. Other than the few dollars Julian brought home from working after school in the harness shop, the family had no income. When Julian’s uncle wrote that Montana was a place where someone could become a landowner with no other resource but a willingness to work hard, Julian persuaded his mother that this was the only opportunity that offered them a chance not simply to get by but eventually to prosper. When they left Iowa the only material reminders Julian took of his father were his barbers’ scissors, a straight razor, and a strop. Everything else they sold or gave away, including a new wool suit. Julian had already outgrown his father’s clothes.
Their shack measured twelve feet by fourteen feet. The exterior walls were covered with tar paper and the interior ones with newspapers. From an old sheepherder they bought a cookstove for preparing food and providing heat. Haystuffed bags served as mattresses on beds made from boards, poles, and ropes. They nailed cracker boxes and apple crates to the walls for shelves and used syrup pails and baking powder cans for food storage. Julian hadn’t planned on having a wood floor their first year, but when someone made a remark about rattlesnakes coming up through holes in the dirt he changed his mind. They used their trunk for storage and as a table, and they bought two chairs at a farm auction. At the same auction they acquired a plow and a shaggy, scrawny pair of horses.
While he waited to pay for his purchases at the estate sale, Julian overheard a bandy-legged, leathery-skinned older man talking to a pair of young cowboys. “They brought this horse in with two brands,” the old man said, “so I knew what I was in for. I saddled him and got on, and he did nothing but stand there. Still as a statue. Then, just when I was going to spur him, he threw his head straight back. Caught me right in the face. Broke my nose for me and knocked me on my ass. ‘Somebody give me a quirt,’ I says, and by God I brought that horse to his knees.” If that was for breaking a man’s nose, Julian wondered, what punishment would they have in Montana for a horse that killed a man?
During their first year on the homestead, Julian intended to plant wheat and potatoes while his mother raised a few chickens for eggs. Julian had a few other ideas for turning a dollar, but all those plans were short-term. As soon as he could manage it,
he was going to start buying cattle. In Iowa, which had some of the richest soil in the country, plenty of farmers were still hard-pressed to get by, and Montana’s soil was not Iowa’s. Julian had paid attention as the train brought them across Minnesota and North Dakota and into Montana. Along the way the land’s suitability for farming gradually gave out—the topsoil became thinner, drier, less fertile—and by the time they arrived in Mercer County it was obvious to him that this country was not meant for growing most crops. It was rangeland plain and simple, no matter who touted the benefits of dry farming or boasted about his latest yield of spring wheat. Besides, Julian didn’t want to spend his life staring down at the dirt. The sky here was huge, and he wanted to be able to lift his sight and let it range as wide and far as he chose.
His mother wasn’t much help with the work. She had often berated her husband for his shiftlessness, but the truth was, she had never been much of a worker herself. She spent most of the day sitting outside the shack, erect in her straightback chair, her hands folded serenely on her lap. She moved her head as though she was looking about, but her gaze was as blank as a blind person’s. Julian was sure that if he asked her what she saw out there toward the horizon, she wouldn’t be able to answer him. At night with the lamp off and both of them in bed, he could hear her crying softly. He knew her tears had nothing to do with grief over her husband’s death. She hadn’t cried in Iowa, so the conclusion was inescapable: she wept over this wind-swept place she had come to.
The letters from Lorna didn’t help. Julian’s sister wrote almost every day, brief letters that did little but complain. Julian suggested once that she save on postage by writing longer letters less frequently, but she wrote back and said that it helped her “to converse with her brother and dear mother every day, even if for a moment or two.”
She mentioned her loneliness, though as Julian pointed out to his mother, Lorna remained in the same community she had lived in all her life; she had friends and relatives there, whereas they knew almost no one in Montana. She wrote that she missed them, but asserted in virtually every letter that life on the prairie would be too difficult for her.