Justice

by Larry Watson

  “Don’t worry about it. You taught me. I learned by example.”

  Mr. Hayden leaned back even further, as though his son had still not come into focus. “I believe worrying about it is exactly what I should be doing, young man.”

  Wesley had the feeling that his father was only distracting him, that while they locked stares across the table, Frank and Iris were exchanging looks of a friendlier sort.

  He broke eye contact with his father and turned his attention quickly back to Iris. “We have to go,” he said, his voice harsher than he intended it to sound.

  But Iris was staring up at him as though she was not quite certain of his identity either. He couldn’t blame her; at that moment he wasn’t sure himself.

  There was a wet ring on the white tablecloth where earlier his glass of ice water had rested. Now Wesley set his whiskey down, aiming the heavy glass for that same damp circle. Once the glass was out of his hand, he watched the whiskey for a moment, trying to judge the steadiness of his hand by how much the amber liquid shimmered in the candlelight.

  “Let’s go,” he said again. This time his voice was softer, and Iris rose immediately.

  Mr. Hayden stood too. He pushed his chair in and stepped to the side. He thrust his chest out, and for a moment Wesley thought his father was blocking his way, trying to prevent his son from taking this young woman away. But Julian Hayden always rose when a woman, young or old, stood, and he liked to take up the slack in his suspenders by puffing out his chest.

  Frank said, “Oh, come on, Wes. Jesus. Wait up.”

  But Wesley did not wait. He guided Iris gently toward the door. His only hesitation as they left the dining room was to glance back toward the kitchen and his mother. The door was still closed.

  It was snowing as they left the house, heavy wet flakes that were so large in the night sky that Wesley didn’t have to look to the porch light to see them fall. He gazed straight up, and there they came, a riot of white scraps falling so swiftly it seemed there must be more to them than mere water, ice, and air.

  Iris walked ahead of him on her way to the car, and Wesley could tell by the length and pace of her stride that she was angry. Or perhaps it was not anger at all but puzzlement. How many times over the months they had been dating had she looked at him and said, “I just don’t understand you.” And the implication was always clear: the fault was in Wesley, not in her ability to understand.

  The snow was already working hard to fill in Iris’s tracks, and for a moment Wesley stopped and watched her walk on without him. Flakes of snow caught in her hair and on the dark wool of her coat. He turned and looked back toward the house and their dark footsteps trailing across the yard. If the snow continued to fall at this pace, in less than an hour you wouldn’t be able to tell that anyone had ever left that house.

  Len McAuley

  (1935)

  LEN McAuley had his first drink of liquor when he was only twelve years old. The drink was given him by Dr. Wright, who hoped the liquor would help the boy make it through his second day in Montana. The doctor poured three fingers of bourbon, filled the glass with water, and then dropped in a sugar cube. “I’ve got no medicine for your kind of pain, son,” the doctor said, “but this helps some folks.”

  Len drank the whiskey down in three swallows. He didn’t know if it helped or not, but from that day on whiskey and water became his drink of choice. From time to time he even sweetened it with sugar—and brought back his childhood with the first sip. On most days, Len used whiskey exactly the way Dr. Wright originally prescribed it: to help him through the pain of each day in Montana.

  Len McAuley came to Mercer County, Montana, in 1898 with his father, mother, and older brother. As soon as school was out for the summer, they left their home in St. Paul, Minnesota, planning to homestead in northeast Montana. By the time they got off the train, gathered their luggage and belongings, and arranged to rent a wagon to haul everything out to their section of land, the hour was late, and Mr. McAuley was afraid he might have trouble finding their claim in the dark. They decided to spend the night at the Carson House Hotel.

  During the night, a fire began. The cause was never determined—a kerosene lamp knocked over, a traveling salesman’s cigar left smoldering—but the hotel, built of lumber from forests in the Judith Mountains, burned so quickly that the local fire brigade was reduced to watching the fire burn itself out and making certain the flames did not spread to adjacent stores or buildings.

  Len never knew for sure whether it was his father, mother, or older brother who threw him out their secondstory hotel room window, breaking Len’s arm but saving his life. In his memory of that night, it seemed to Len that he fell through the flames, and that as the building fell in on itself he had simply ridden the thick cloud of smoke away from the flames and into the night sky. Only two other rooms besides the McAuleys’ were occupied, one by the salesman and one by an older man who taught music in the local schools and lived, during the school year, in the hotel. Both these hotel patrons, along with three members of the McAuley family, perished in the fire. Only Len McAuley and the desk clerk escaped.

  The Presbyterian minister and his wife offered to take Len into their home, since he had no other family, but he declined. He and his family had come to Montana to make a living from the land, and that was what he was determined to do. The citizens of Bentrock took up a collection for him, and he used that money along with what little he earned by selling off the family possessions that survived the fire, and bought a wagon, a horse, and supplies. As soon as he was able, he drove out to the land that his father had planned to farm. There young Len McAuley made his own home, as best he could. He lived at first under his wagon, filling in three sides with brush, rocks, and what wood he could find. At night he crawled in as though he were entering a cave. That suited him. If he lived like an animal, perhaps he would feel no more than an animal felt—heat, cold, hunger, fatigue—and the human emotions, sorrow and grief and loneliness, would leave him.

  Of course he was too young to file a claim for eventual ownership of the land, but no one said anything because everyone was certain the boy would vacate the section before long. If the wind and the heat, then the cold and the snow did not drive him off the prairie, the isolation would.

  But he stayed. He hunted, he fished, and he foraged for other food and firewood. The women of the county made sure that when they or their husbands passed anywhere near Len McAuley’s claim, they dropped off food, especially the baked goods that they knew a boy would love but could never manage for himself. In fact, on his rudimentary cookstove Len had managed to make a kind of scone similar to the ones his mother made. He even used fresh-picked blueberries, an improvement, he felt, on his mother’s recipe. He would accept these offerings but none of the invitations for a home-cooked meal at one of the nearby farms or ranches or in town.

  Eventually he built himself a shack, little more than a leanto, but which offered greater protection from the elements than his wagon allowed. The very first time he stood inside this home—stood upright and heard the wind turn away when it came to those walls of his making—something in him changed, and he felt the loss of human companionship like a physical pain, as though part of his being had been torn away. He rode that day to the nearest human habitation, a homestead less than a mile upstream from where he had been living.

  There he met Julian Hayden, another teenage boy, and his mother. The Haydens had come to Montana from Iowa and had been living on their claim longer than Len, yet they still had that uncertain, unsettled look in their eyes and on their property that said that the very next hardship—whether as large as a hailstorm or as small as a rattlesnake—might be the one to drive them off the prairie for good.

  Len had come there for company, but once there he found he had nothing to say. Finally, after an awkward silence during which Julian and his mother simply stared up at Len sitting bareback on his horse, Len blurted out, “Do you need any help?”

  He had meant
only to offer the kind of assistance that one neighbor offers another, but Julian misunderstood. He looked at his mother, the two of them conferred for a moment, and then Julian said, “We’ll hire you.”

  That afternoon Len McAuley helped Julian Hayden put up a section of fence. He worked for Julian Hayden first on the ranch, and then years later when Julian moved into town and ran for county sheriff, Len became part of that partnership as well. Julian hired Len McAuley as his deputy, and when Julian’s three allotted terms in office expired, Len served a term (with Julian as his deputy) until Julian was eligible to run again.

  When Julian Hayden decided to go back to ranching, he turned his sheriff’s badge over to his son, and Len gave his loyalty to another Hayden generation, serving this time as Wesley’s deputy. The son needed Len more than his father ever had, for although Wesley had been born and raised in Mercer County, he never seemed to understand the region or its people the way his father had. Len reasoned that this was because Julian had been there almost as long as the county—they grew up together—and the boy came along after both were established. To help Wesley along, Len counseled him, “Just do what your dad would do,” but the advice wasn’t much use. Although Len instinctively knew what Julian would do in almost any situation, Julian’s son seldom did.

  In Len’s mind the incident with the Eldridge boy illustrated this difference between father and son.

  Jimmy Eldridge was not a bright boy. He was big for his age to begin with, and then he flunked a grade or two, which only emphasized the difference between him and his classmates. Other boys would tease Jimmy just to see him spit and sputter in his rage. One day when Wesley had been in office for less than a year, Jimmy got into it on the playground with two other boys. Young Miss Hauser tried to break up the fight. Jimmy was on top of George Flynn, and Miss Hauser tried to pull Jimmy off. Jimmy didn’t turn around to look; he just threw his arm back to get this new attacker away. Miss Hauser went flying, and she hit her head on a rock. A scalp cut doesn’t have to be very bad to bleed a lot, and she did. Another teacher tried to stop the bleeding, but it was no use. Miss Hauser had to have a couple stitches in the back of her head. When Wesley Hayden heard about this incident he went off as though someone had been murdered. Len tried to calm him down, but Wesley kept saying, over and over, “A teacher. We can’t stand for this happening to one of our teachers.”

  Once Wesley got the details, or as many as he wanted to hear, he drove over to the Eldridge home. He took Jimmy out of the house, loaded him into the car—the car with the official insignia on the door, so everyone in the neighborhood knew who was taking Jimmy away—and drove him down to the jail. He didn’t actually put the boy in a cell, but he brought him to the open door, let him have a good look at that dark interior, and told Jimmy that he could be locked up for what he did in the school yard. Then he let the boy sit in the office for an hour before he took him home.

  Len knew Wesley was trying to handle the problem the way his father would have—by acting quickly and decisively, trying to teach the boy a lesson he wouldn’t forget, but still keeping the affair out of court. But Wesley didn’t get a damn thing right.

  If he had known the Eldridge family, he would have known something about their pride. Jimmy was the youngest child in a family of five, and the only one who was not as bright and handsome as a newly minted silver dollar, and his parents would prefer as little attention come to him as possible. Wesley’s father would have called Jimmy’s father, told him about the playground incident, and then forgotten about it, sure that Mr. Eldridge would speak to his boy and that nothing like it would happen again. Julian could also be sure that the Eldridges would cast their votes for Julian (or for Len) in the next election.

  But perhaps it was so much easier for Len to know what Julian Hayden would do because Len had devoted so many days and hours of his life studying Julian Hayden, letting that man’s surety answer for the doubt and uncertainty in Len’s own life. Len had attached himself and his fortunes to Julian Hayden, for better or for worse. He had let Julian serve as his polestar, giving him direction where he had none. When Julian decided to marry, to bring a wife to his ranch, Len looked around until he found a woman for himself—Daisy Pender, a sheep rancher’s daughter from nearby Franklin County.

  Daisy talked so much that Len didn’t propose to her the night he planned to. He simply couldn’t find enough space in all her talk, talk, talk to squeeze in his question. Two nights later he got the matter taken care of and then only by first directing her attention to the western horizon. “Look!” he shouted, as if something was out there that human eyes had never seen. When she looked in that direction he used the pause to ask her to marry him. She said yes. And more. On the heels of her assent, Daisy resumed her talking and out tumbled all her plans for their life together. Len couldn’t be sure if she was making up these plans as she spoke, or if she had anticipated his question and worked all this out long in advance. For a while he listened to her, then he leaned back and concentrated on his hands.

  When it was not possible for Len to take a drink to transport himself out of an uncomfortable moment—as most moments in human company were for him—he had developed a mannerism that sometimes worked almost as well as whiskey. He would loosely lace together three fingers from his left hand with three fingers from his right. He left his thumbs and index fingers free. Then he lightly touched the tips of those four fingers together, lining them up so each touched its mate in exactly the same place, so that each line and groove of skin had its precise match. This simple action gave him inordinate satisfaction, as if something were being restored, resolved, in the instant when the fingertips touched.

  He returned his attention to Daisy just as she was saying that she was “not one of those women who avoids her wifely duties.” She had been around men enough to know what they required of a wife, and she would not back off from any part of the contract. Len leaned further back into the porch’s shade so Daisy would not see him blush.

  Over the years, Len did not often ask Daisy to perform those duties. Shortly after they were married something happened to the way Len thought of her. She became like a relative to him, perhaps a cousin he had known since childhood. It even seemed sometimes as though she had been waiting for him in Montana, a member of the McAuley clan sent out ahead of the others to scout out the territory. Then he tried to wave away those notions as if they were haze, smoke, fumes escaping from an uncorked whiskey bottle. She was a Pender, daughter of Amos and Harriet, both from Montana sheepherding families.

  At times Len considered that the problem was in him, that he was simply not capable of feeling for a woman what he was supposed to feel. Daisy said she knew what men required——well, Len knew too. For much of his life he had been hearing their conversations—in saloons, in barbershops, around the cattle pens. He had heard them talk about women as though they were prey to be stalked, surprised, and then brought to their knees or thrown onto their backs. For many men it seemed as though they couldn’t take their pleasure unless it brought pain to a woman. Len wanted no part of the deed or the talk. It was another reason he preferred to do his drinking at home or in his office late at night.

  Then a young woman came to town, and Len knew he could feel what other men felt.

  She was from eastern North Dakota, a farm girl just a state away, yet it seemed as if she could have come from the other side of the earth. She was openhearted, soft-spoken, and well mannered. It was not that Montanans weren’t capable of being gentle or kind, but this young woman acted as if those were qualities to be proud of rather than embarrassed about.

  And yes, she was pretty, in a delicate, small-boned way. She also had an allure that reminded Len of a woman he had once seen when he was a boy.

  His mother was a seamstress, and her customers often came to their apartment for fittings. One day Len’s mother called him into the kitchen when she was working on a woman’s dress. The woman was in the room, standing behind the screen his mother had
set up in the corner. Len’s mother wanted him to go to the store for thread because she was about to run out, but Len could not tear his vision away from the screen where the woman was. All he could see was her arm, long and pale and bare and extended out from the screen as she waited for the garment that Len’s mother was stitching. The woman’s fingers were curved slightly, and from where Len stood it almost seemed as though she was gesturing to him. Even after his mother barked at him to carry out his errand, he could only back slowly from the room. Even after his mother was dead, and every spool of her thread gone up in flames with her, Len still carried with him the image of that naked arm.

  Len McAuley did not see this gesture again until that young woman, new to Montana but already well on her way to befriending the entire community, signaled to him across the crowded coffee shop of the Northern Pacific Hotel. He had just climbed the stairs (the coffee shop looked down on the lobby from an open mezzanine), and he was trying not to be obvious about the fact that he was searching for her in the crowd. She saw him just as he saw her.

  “Len! Len—over here!” And she stood and indicated with a graceful sweep that an empty place was available at her table. It was a morning in late June, the third consecutive day of the summer’s first heat, and her slender arm was bare and pale. She worked all day in the Register of Deeds office, and the summer sun and wind did not have a chance to tan and dry her skin the way it did so many Montana women’s.

  If there was any portion of his heart she had not already seized, then that gesture completed the job. Sunlight poured through two high windows, and everything in the room— cigarette smoke, dust motes, even the clatter of cups and saucers and ashtrays, the excited gabble that rose from the town’s store and office workers as they gathered for their first break of the day—seemed to thicken, slow, and swirl in those shafts of light. Through the haze and din she had picked Len out and motioned him to her side. The feeling that suffused him told him what he had to do.