Justice

by Larry Watson

  As her father spoke, Enid could feel his power increasing. It was as if he were casting a spell, enchanting them, and while it was happening they couldn’t stop him. And when he was finished, it would be too late. As it was for her already—she knew she should say something to refute what her father said, but if she opened her mouth no words would come out.

  Julian didn’t say anything either, though Enid knew that what her father said certainly enraged her husband. Julian reached down to the floor of the buggy and picked up the cigar box that he always kept there. Enid had seen once before what was in the box. Every time Julian killed a rattlesnake he cut off its rattles and saved them in that box. She hated the sight of them, and Julian often teased her with the box, threatening to open it in her presence.

  He rested the box carefully on his lap and with both hands lifted the lid. He was moving so slowly, so deliberately, that Enid thought for an instant that this time he had a live rattlesnake in the box.

  Then, in a motion almost quicker than Enid’s eye could follow, Julian brought the pistol out of the box and pointed it at her father.

  Everything was still again. Julian held his arm straight out, the small chrome-plated pistol aimed right at her father’s chest. Her father’s hand tightened around the harness leather. The horses, well trained and well behaved, stood right where they had been reined in. Only the cottonwood trees, their branches blushing a pale early green, moved in the wind.

  The silence was so unnatural that Enid wondered why Julian didn’t simply pull the trigger and release them from this moment’s bondage.

  Mr. Garling said, “A pistolero too, I see.”

  “By God,” Julian said, laughing softly, “you are a talker.”

  “Daughter,” her father spoke very slowly, “you could tell him to put that pistol up.”

  Julian kept the pistol trained on Mr. Garling, but he turned his head slightly to look at Enid.

  “I can’t tell him what to do,” she said to her father.

  She wondered if Julian would ever shave his mustache; if he did then she could be certain, in moments like this, whether that was a smile playing at the corners of his lips.

  Her father spoke again. “If you expect me to bless this union, sir, I will not do it. Not even at gunpoint.”

  Julian laughed louder this time. “Maybe it’s your soul you ought to be thinking about blessing.” He transferred the gun to his other hand and picked up the reins. “What I expect you to do is to let go of my team. Let go and stand aside. I don’t give a good goddamn what else you do.”

  Mr. Garling jerked his hand away as if the harness leather was a hot wire.

  Julian gestured with the gun. “The other.”

  Enid’s father backed up until he stumbled on the edge where the road’s hardpan began to erode into the soft dirt of the river bank.

  “Can you drive a team?” Julian asked.

  It took Enid a moment before she realized he was speaking to her. “I never have,” she answered.

  “Just grab hold of the reins. Not tight. Give them some slack. Bounce the reins up and down a couple times. They know what to do.” Then—was he speaking to Enid’s father? —he said, “I never whipped a horse in my life.”

  Enid did as he told her. She was startled when the horses responded immediately and stepped forward in unison. Enid wanted to look back at her father one more time—was that a new suit he was wearing?—but the horse’s hooves were already striking the boards of the bridge, and she thought she needed to watch the road.

  Julian called out to her father, “You let us know when you want to pay us a visit. Our home is always open to family!” The wheels rumbled across the bridge, and Julian shouted once more, “You know where to find me!”

  Enid doubted she would ever see her father again.

  Just after sundown the wind shifted and began to gust out of the northwest. The temperature fell, and a light rain slanted down. The rain soon turned to snow, and Enid had to wrap up in a blanket to shield herself from the sting of the icy pellets. When they finally rolled into Williston, Julian said to her, “Well, we made it, Wife. The prairie didn’t get us this time.” Enid was so cold the hinges of her jaw felt frozen, and she couldn’t even get out the two words she had in mind to say: This time?

  They checked into the Lewis and Clark Hotel, and after thawing out in front of one of the two big parlor stoves in the lobby, they went into the dining room, almost deserted on that Saturday night.

  Enid was ravenous, and she ate a steak as large as Julian’s. For dessert the waiter brought Julian a large slice of chocolate cake, which he ate but found unsatisfactory. “Should have brought one of them pies from the wedding,” he said. “Can’t beat the cooking of the Roosian girls.” Neither of them said a word about meeting her father at the bridge.

  With the meal Enid had her first taste of whiskey. She was reluctant to take a drink, but Julian insisted. She knew he wanted her to drink so he could do what he had in mind to do once they went upstairs. She was embarrassed to drink in public, but Julian assured her that anyone who saw her would know she was just trying to take the chill off the night.

  Enid had seen men toss whiskey back and then shudder as if they had stepped into icy water, but she swallowed the liquor with ease. Of course, Julian mixed hers with coffee and sugar, but still, the whiskey seemed to do nothing but warm her chest. After her first cup she asked for another, and by the time they went upstairs she felt as though she had finally found a way to take a step back from her own life.

  Their room was on the north side of the hotel, and the wind made the window vibrate and hum in its casement. Julian pulled the shade and drew the curtains. He turned to Enid and said, “You can prepare yourself right here. I’m going down the hall for a moment.” His voice sounded deeper, thicker, than it normally did, but Enid attributed this—as she was ready to do for every departure from the usual—to whiskey. When he left the room he locked the door behind him.

  Enid undressed slowly, and as she did, she folded each item—her blouse and skirt, her petticoat, her corset, her chemise—and put it in the armoire. It was important to her that Julian not see any of her undergarments. She had brought a union suit, and tomorrow if it was still cold, as she expected it would be, she would wear that. She congratulated herself for having packed it. Then she put on the nightgown that she and her mother had bought. Her flesh still felt sensitive from the cold, and the nightgown’s crocheted yoke chafed her chest and back.

  Enid lay down on the bed and adjusted the pillows behind her head. She looked down toward the foot of the bed, and it seemed unusually far away. Was this bed longer than most, or was this an illusion, the effect of lying alone in a bed large enough for two?

  She could face what was to come. How bad could it be? If what happened between a man and a woman in the marriage bed was so unpleasant, there wouldn’t be as many children in the world as there were. Besides, this was the day when she had looked at her father while he was in the sights of another man’s gun. She had been ready for what would follow. She hadn’t screamed or wept or pleaded for her father’s life or tried to wrest the pistol from the man’s—why couldn’t she say it?—from her husband’s hand. Instead, she had sat quietly on the buggy seat and thought the coldest thought of her life: if you are aiming at the V where my father’s tie enters his vest, you are aiming too high. If she could bear up under the weight of that moment, she could certainly bear the weight of a man’s body on hers.

  Enid closed her eyes. The darkness swam with motion, tilting and turning in one direction and then another, but she believed this sensation, too, was caused by the whiskey. She moved her head off the pillow so she could listen for her husband’s approach with both ears. Then she realized: she was listening for the thud of his boots, and he would not be wearing them.

  Thanksgiving

  (1927)

  WESLEY Hayden unfolded the letter from his mother in order to read it one more time. The train was crossing a trestle an
d swayed from side to side even more than usual. He steadied the page on his leg. He had received the letter a week earlier; it was dated November 17, 1927:

  “Dear Wesley, I’m so pleased that both my boys will be home for Thanksgiving. As you grow older and stray further from the nest, I worry about the day when neither you nor your brother will return for the holidays. I know the day will come when you and Frank will have your own homes and families but until then pardon me for selfishly wanting you here as often as possible.”

  Wesley was returning to his home in Bentrock, Montana, from Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was a freshman at the University of North Dakota. His brother Frank, who was already home, was a junior at the University of Minnesota. The brothers had planned on traveling together—meeting in Fargo, North Dakota, and riding the train together to Bentrock—but Frank had found an early ride that would take him all the way to Miles City, so Wesley was left to ride the train alone.

  The train lurched, the sound of the wheels on the track changed, dropping an octave, and their speed altered slightly, like a horse changing its gait from a trot to a canter. They were off the trestle, and Wesley returned to his mother’s letter.

  “I saw Iris the other day, and she asked about you and said how much she missed you. She wanted to know if you’d be coming home for Thanksgiving. She was so excited to hear that you would be that I went ahead and invited her to share our meal with us. I hope that’s all right. I know you’re a college man now, but I didn’t think you’d mind seeing Iris again. She looked so pretty in her red wool coat....”

  Wesley stopped reading and put the letter back in its envelope and stuck it inside his coat pocket. He had read far enough.

  It was true, he had not written to Iris, and he had especially not told her he would be returning for Thanksgiving. He had hoped he would be able to avoid seeing her while he was home.

  Wesley Hayden and Iris Heil had been a steady couple during Wesley’s senior year in high school. She was the first girl Wesley kissed, the first girl to allow him to touch her bare breasts, and the first girl Wesley loved.

  Nevertheless, when Wesley left for college he believed he was saying farewell to Iris for good. He did not relish the idea; when he said good-bye it was all he could do to hold back the tears, and the lump in his throat grew so large it seemed to tighten his chest until he could barely draw a breath.

  But Wesley had ideas about leaving Bentrock, Montana, the town in which he was born and raised, for good. Going away to college was only the first step. Unlike his brother Frank, who was offered an athletic scholarship to play baseball at the University of Minnesota, Wesley had no financial incentive to choose a college outside his home state; he could as easily have boarded a train to go to Montana State in Bozeman or the university in Missoula, but he figured that if he was serious about making his life elsewhere he had to begin sometime.

  Love was not the issue. Wesley loved Montana. He loved his parents. He supposed he even loved Iris. In the last few months, away from his home state for the longest stretch in his eighteen years, he had come to realize how much of it he treasured——its endless horizon, its huge sky, the way the air smelled faintly of sage and washed rock.

  But Wesley’s father, Julian Hayden, was an important man in their part of northeastern Montana. He was a landowner of modest wealth; he had substantially expanded his land holdings from his original homestead and supplemented them with a few buildings and businesses in town.

  Of more significance, however, was the fact that Wesley’s father was the county sheriff, and his hands controlled the gears of the county’s political machinery. In short, the Hayden name was known, it meant something to virtually all the region’s residents, and even if Wesley himself was not always sure of what it meant to be a Hayden, that didn’t lessen the fact that as long as he lived in Bentrock he would automatically have an identity that he had nothing to do with forming.

  And once he was out of his hometown and living in Grand Forks, Wesley felt a strange thrill in his anonymity. It was something he hadn’t expected and certainly had never experienced. He could walk around campus, and he was nobody—just one more student in the throng that moved from building to building. Or he could leave the college grounds and walk down University Avenue until he came to the business district. There he would not even be recognized as a student—he could be a clerk in a shoe store, a vagrant, a soda jerk at Kemmelman’s Pharmacy.

  As he walked around the city, Wesley was careful to vary his route, never to frequent the same store on consecutive days, for fear he would become known as a regular. Many of the other freshman males were being rushed by fraternities, but Wesley had no interest in pledging. Then he’d be a Sigma Chi or a Phi Delt. That was not for him. He had friends on campus, his roommate and a few other fellows from his dormitory, but he told them almost nothing of his background. A classmate found out where Wesley was from and began to call him “Montana.” One night as a group of students walked back from the library together, Wesley separated this young man from the others and asked him if he wouldn’t please use his proper name. There must have been some pleading quality in Wesley’s voice or a beseeching look in his eyes, because the student apologized and said he’d stop.

  But now the train’s engine was steaming relentlessly westward, and sometime around midnight the train would pull into Bentrock’s depot. Wesley would step onto the platform and then he’d be home again, a Hayden, and if his father or brother were not yet there to pick him up, he would carry his satchel into the brightly lit station. There he would doubtless see Ray Hoffman, the Northern Pacific ticket agent. Ray would greet him, welcome him home for Thanksgiving and ask, because he knew exactly how long Wesley had been gone and where he had been, how college was going in North Dakota....

  The meal was finished, but no one made a move to rise from the table. Wesley’s father had carved the turkey, and its carcass still sat near his place. Occasionally Mr. Hayden reached out and pinched another small scrap of meat from the bones.

  From her end of the table Wesley’s mother said softly to her husband, “If you’re still hungry, I have more turkey in the icebox. I put some away for the boys’ sandwiches, but you’re welcome to it.”

  Mr. Hayden shoved the turkey platter. “No, go on. Get it out of here.”

  Mrs. Hayden rose and began to stack plates and dishes.

  Iris stood as well.

  “You sit right back down,” Wesley’s mother said.

  “I can help,” Iris said.

  “Absolutely not. You’re a guest at our table, and we do not put our guests to work. You sit here and pretend you’re hanging on every word these men speak.”

  Obediently Iris sat back down, and as she did she smiled sweetly at Wesley. He had his elbows on the table and his hands clasped in front of him. Iris reached out a finger and ran it slowly across the knuckles of his left hand, a gesture that felt so shockingly intimate that Wesley took his hand away. He picked up his water glass and turned his attention back to his father, who was telling a story about a man he had recently arrested.

  But Wesley had difficulty concentrating on anything other than Iris. The only illumination in the dining room came from the candles on the table, and their wavering and flickering light softened and shadowed every smooth surface—the porcelain milk pitcher, the china bowls and platters, the faces of these people. Iris looked even lovelier than Wesley remembered. Something had changed in her since he had left, barely three months ago. She had lost something—a plumpness in her cheeks, a fullness around her mouth—and this absence made her look older. Her beauty now seemed permanent, no longer something that belonged only to her youth. Her dress was dark red with a white lace collar. Wesley remembered her wearing the dress to the school’s Christmas dance the previous year. Tonight, however, in the room’s dim light, the dress looked the color of wine. She was also wearing the necklace that Wesley had given her last Christmas, a thin gold chain holding a rhinestone framed by tiny pearls in
the shape of a heart. Iris often fingered the pendant and then, as if she suddenly remembered she wasn’t supposed to touch it, let it fall back against her throat and folded her hands on her lap. But it wasn’t long before she was touching it again, running the rhinestone heart back and forth on its chain.

  Wesley’s father spoke louder, as if commanding his son’s attention were merely a matter of his voice’s volume. Perhaps it was. Wesley began to listen to his father’s story.

  “I was ready to haul him in,” his father said. “Bring him up on a federal offense and everything, when he told me he was going to quit opening envelopes as soon as he came up with enough money for the meal. And if he read any letter that had important news, he’d see to it they got their mail. He’d deliver it himself.

  “But I kept on driving. And then I hear sniffling and I look over and Emil’s got tears running down his cheeks. Making a clean little track through the dirt.

  “That did it. I pull over to the side of the road and say to him, Goddamn it, Emil, this is no way to be putting food on the table. Not at Thanksgiving, not at any time. Hell, it’s not even a sensible way to steal. This part of the country, you could open a thousand envelopes and never come across so much as a dollar. But then Emil’s another one of those Roosians who’s none too bright. He couldn’t quite put it all together to stick up a filling station. No, hell no. He’s got to snatch the mail bag.

  “So I let the sorry bastard go. Told him he was going to have to help Lonnie deliver the mail. If Lonnie would have him. Then I kicked his sorry ass out of the car and shooed him on home. He’s goddamn lucky to be spending the night in his own bed.”

  Wesley’s father turned to Iris and wagged his finger at her. “When you’re around me, young lady,” he said, “you’re going to have to cover your ears. I’m too old to start watching my tongue.”