Justice

by Larry Watson

  She tried to talk herself out of her concerns. Wesley was nothing like his father. Not at all. He was a gentle, thoughtful, soft-spoken and soft-hearted man whose main goal in life—and in this he was completely unlike his father—was not to be noticed. Campaigning for office, what little of it he had to do, had been difficult for him. Every time he had to make a speech before any group—the Farmers Union or the Ladies Auxiliary —she could see how tense he became, how the knots around his jaw tightened and the lines above his brow deepened. No, he was not his father.

  Then one day in early December Gail had occasion to leave her desk and go down to the sheriff’s office in the basement of the courthouse. She wanted to ask Wesley if he would be free that evening so they could go bowling with Beverly and her husband.

  Wesley was at his desk. His desk? It was the same rolltop desk that Julian had sat at for so many years. The same leatherbound law books were lined on top of the desk. The same railroad calendar hung over the books. The odor of Julian’s cigars lingered in the air. But that was her husband sitting there.

  She said his name and he turned toward her, tilting back in his chair just as his father had always done.

  He was wearing his hat. Wesley never wore his hat indoors. But his father did.

  One detail unsettled Gail even more than the hat. When her husband faced her, she noticed his badge. How could she have missed this before?

  He did not have his badge pinned to his coat. Instead, he had it hooked and hanging from the pocket of his vest, the pin inside, the shield outside. Exactly the way his father wore his badge. The same badge.

  For a moment she couldn’t speak. Had she taken a wrong turn somewhere—gone left instead of right at the bottom of those narrow stairs?

  “What is it, Gail?” Wesley asked. “Is there something wrong?”

  She shook her head, as much to clear her mind as to answer him. She finally stammered out what she had come to ask him. “Do you want . . . will you be available to go bowling tonight with Bev and Mitch?”

  “That sounds fine,” he said. “I should be done here around six.” Then, while she still stood in the doorway, he turned back to his desk.

  Although the snow had stopped hours earlier, out here in the country the wind stirred it up in such thick swirls and gusts it might as well still be falling. Wesley had left the car running but the heater could not compete with the cold, and the windows were beginning to frost over. Gail squinted hard in Wesley’s direction. What if she did not know that was him, she thought. Would she be able to tell? He was wearing his father’s coat and doing his father’s job. Was there anything to tell her with certainty that the man standing up to his knees in snow, peering into a parked car and trying its doors, was her husband?

  He started back toward her, his head tilted to avoid the wind’s icy sting. The limp! Of course! That listing walk could belong only to Wesley. As he approached the car, she reached over and opened his door.

  He shivered with cold as he situated himself behind the wheel. “By God, that wind is something,” he said. Gail watched the flakes of snow on his coat melt to droplets of water.

  “Is anyone in there?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Must have tried walking. I can’t see any sign of tracks, so maybe they got somewhere before the storm hit full force. If they didn’t....” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Everyone knew what happened if you were caught out in the open in a blizzard. Every landmark would vanish, and without anything to give you your bearings you could walk in circles before freezing to death. Everyone in the state knew how easily it could happen, and if their memories were short, every winter they got a reminder: someone died in the snow.

  “Maybe someone picked them up,” Gail suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  His hands gripped the steering wheel, but Wesley made no move to drive away. He’s probably waiting to thaw out a little, Gail thought. No matter what the reason, she was going to take advantage of this moment when she had him alone.

  “Wesley, can I ask you something?”

  He had taken off his gloves and was breathing on his fingers to warm them up. Years ago he had been pheasant hunting in the fall when the weather turned suddenly cold, and he had to walk miles back to his car. He wasn’t dressed for the weather, and his hands had been so cold he thought he might have gotten a touch of frostbite. Since then his hands were always cold, no matter what the temperature.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered absently. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I should have worn mittens. Gloves don’t keep your hands warm worth a damn.”

  “Why did you bring me out here?”

  He looked at her as though he didn’t understand her question. “Why?” he repeated.

  “Yes, why. Was there something you wanted me to see? There’s nothing out here but snow.”

  He continued to stare at her with an expression that was half bewilderment and half consternation.

  “Did your father ever take your mother out on a call like this?”

  He was more confused than ever, but she could see that he was getting angry too. The mention of his father had done that.

  “Never,” he answered.

  “Are you sure? Perhaps many years ago, before your memory.” Gail had held the theory that Julian Hayden had somehow broken his wife, broken her the way a cowboy broke a horse, and maybe this was how he had done it, by bringing her along on a mission like this. And once she had seen what he saw regularly in his line of work—the exploded body of a man hit by a freight train, the blackened eyes of a woman beaten by her husband, the tears of a boy who knows that once the pickup is lifted off him, his legs will be gone—he thought that she’d be docile forever, forever fearful that he would show her again what kinds of horrors the world routinely offers.

  “I thought,” he said, his voice lowering and taking on the slow cadence that he affected when he was trying to hold his temper, “that you might like to get out. You’ve been cooped up for a couple days with this storm. That’s all. Don’t make so much of things.”

  Was he telling the truth? She couldn’t tell. He seemed sincere, innocent in his intentions, but she simply didn’t know. The man she married had become unreadable.

  He shook his head and reached for the gearshift. Whenever he couldn’t understand her, he always made it seem as though there was something wrong with her. What’s more, he often implied that it had to do somehow with the way she was raised, the region, the people she was from, as much to say, here we don’t think such thoughts; in my family we don’t act that way.

  But she was not finished. She had been playing with an idea for weeks, since before Christmas. It was a reckless notion, she knew, but as she had watched the changes in Wesley, she had become desperate.

  She put her gloved hand on his and stopped him from putting the car in gear. “Wait,” she said.

  He didn’t look at her or move his hand from under hers.

  “I want to tell you something.” She took her hand away and pulled the collar of her coat tighter. “We’re.... I’m, I’m expecting.”

  Now he looked at her blankly, as if he was waiting for her to finish her sentence. Expecting? Expecting what? Whom?

  It was a lie, but that was what she had come to. She couldn’t think of any other way to pry her husband loose from his job, his father. Perhaps if another life were involved she could persuade Wesley that this wild country—where you could perish in your car on a winter’s day—was no place for their son or daughter to grow up.

  Yet now that her plan was out in the open it seemed as insubstantial as a snowflake. How would this revelation change anything? What could she have been thinking?

  At first he said nothing, then he reached for her and held her in an awkward embrace. Their heavy coats, the close quarters of the car’s front seat—it was all they could do to lean their weight into one another, and because of the cold they had to avoid touching any exposed flesh.

  When he finally spoke his vo
ice sounded thick, as though his throat was clotted with snow. “Another generation,” he said, “another generation born in Mercer County.”

  Over Wesley’s shoulder Gail looked out across the road. The wind carried a plume of snow off the top of the drift, and it looked as if the snow was smoking. The wind carved the edge of the drift as sharp as a knife’s blade.

  On September 13, 1937, almost nine months exactly after the January day when Gail made that false announcement to her husband, their son was born in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Dixon, Montana, a town forty miles from Bentrock, which had no hospital of its own.

  They named their son after her father, Carl David Hayden, but decided they would call him David. Gail always thought that David, and her pregnancy with him, was responsible for saving her marriage.

  Shortly after the long labor and difficult delivery, Wesley cautiously entered the hospital room where his wife lay. He wore the expression that all new fathers wear, half joy and half shame for what their wives endured.

  He sat tentatively on the side of the bed, as if his full weight might spill his exhausted wife from the mattress.

  “Did you see him?” she asked.

  He nodded, and grinning inanely said, “He’s the biggest baby in there.” Gail knew their son had barely weighed seven pounds.

  A nurse came in and gave Gail a hypodermic to help her sleep. Before she lost consciousness entirely, she heard Wesley speak to the nurse. Gail couldn’t be sure—had he said, “It looks like Mercer County is going to have another Hayden for sheriff”?

  The Visit

  (1937)

  GAIL Hayden closed her eyes and listened for her father downstairs. He was always up before dawn, lighting the stove, putting water on to boil, making coffee, dressing to go out to begin his chores. Gail’s mother would shortly follow her husband downstairs. Her mother’s one indulgence was to wait until the kitchen warmed up before she got out of bed.

  But Gail couldn’t hear her father yet. She opened her eyes and tried to guess how far off dawn was without looking at the clock. She looked through the gap left by the partially pulleddown window shade. The darkness seemed to be losing its strength, as if it were a softening shadow and not an unwavering blank of blackness, as moonless nights often were in the country. She shut her eyes once more.

  It was a November morning like so many other November mornings when Gail had awakened in this room. Outside the ground would be iron gray with frost or a mottled white from a scattering of snow. The cats would be leaving the barn and making for the kitchen’s warmth. Soon her mother would call up the stairs telling Gail it was time to get ready for school....

  But it was November, 1937. Gail had been out of school for close to ten years, and it had been almost that long since Gail lived in this house, on this farm in North Dakota’s Red River valley. Her home now was in northeastern Montana, in Bentrock, the county seat of Mercer County, where her husband was the sheriff. Where the barren rocky soil had a reddish cast that always made her think that the land had once been on fire.

  She had left her husband to come back home. No, no, that wasn’t the way to say it. It was the baby. Yes, she had left her husband, but he wanted her to go. No, he hadn’t sent her away. It was the baby, the baby.

  Gail opened her eyes to slow her whirling thoughts. She turned her gaze to the bassinet at the other side of the room where her sleeping baby lay. Even in the early morning darkness the bassinet, with its covering of white cloth and lace, glowed like no other object in the room. Where did it find light to reflect back to her eyes, she wondered?

  She listened for her son’s breathing. Could she hear it? She wasn’t sure, but something, some disturbance of air seemed to be in the room with her. She almost believed the bedroom was warmer—by a degree? half a degree?—from her baby’s presence, from the heat emanating from his tightly wrapped body, from the tiny chuffs of breath he sent into the air. She was often surprised, when she picked him up, by how warm he was, how he seemed at times to be nothing more than a miniature engine for producing heat.

  She listened too for the murmuring smacking sounds he would make just before he began to cry to be fed. She could feel it was almost time. Her baby’s hunger registered in her body just as it did in his. His emptiness. Her fullness. His need. Her ache. Soon they would relieve each other.

  She shifted onto her side, a position that increased the discomfort in her swollen breasts. Once when Gail was a young girl and visiting her cousins’ farm near McKenzie, North Dakota, she sprained her ankle. She and her cousins had been playing Red Rover, Gail had been running, and she stepped in a gopher hole, twisting her ankle so sharply she was surprised it didn’t break. “Just a bad sprain,” the doctor said as he probed and gently manipulated the foot. Her ankle swelled to twice its normal size, and despite the tightness and pain, Gail could not resist moving her foot. The way, since the baby, she could not resist pressing gently against her milk-heavy breasts. The ache was there—steady and dull—but she could tolerate it.

  Her son was the reason for this visit. She had brought her first-born child here for her parents to see, to show her son—to show David—off to all the uncles and aunts, the cousins, the old friends and acquaintances who still lived in North Dakota. The trip had been at least in part her husband Wesley’s idea. “If you go to them,” he said, “rather than wait for them to come to Montana, you’ll be able to make this a vacation. Your mother will do the cooking and cleaning, and you can relax and take care of the baby. Stay as long as you like. Get good and rested before you come home.”

  Gail left, then, of her own accord. She was not sent away. When Wesley put her and the baby on the train, he kissed her and told her he would miss her while she was away.

  So she did not leave her husband in the way that some of the town’s gossips—in both Montana and North Dakota—might whisper and speculate about. Gail would make her visit, she would let her parents coo and cluck over this beautiful baby, she would let them wait on her until this fatigue—which made her feel, after the baby was born, as if she were carrying extra weight, as if every bone in her body had somehow been transformed to heavy iron—finally lifted, and then she would go back to Montana, back to her home and back to her husband.

  Why then, from the moment she first entered this house of her childhood, did this thought wrap itself around her: I do not have to leave here, not ever again. She stepped into the parlor and saw her mother’s doilies pinned carefully to the backs and arms of every chair, she breathed in that familiar household aroma—a mixture, it seemed to her, of baking bread and furniture wax—she heard the furnace clunk and gasp before it began to blow out hot air, and she thought—God help her, she could not keep from thinking—she would never have to set foot in Montana again.

  She tried to shake loose the thought immediately, to toss it off like a heavy blanket on a warm night, but she could not get free of it. Its weight and comfort was too much for her.

  When her mother held a jar of applesauce under hot water to loosen the lid, when her father looked into his coffee cup, then swirled the dregs before swallowing, when Gail lay her baby on the bed in the very same depression in the mattress that Gail’s own weight had made, every time some little familiarity struck her, she thought—again and again and again

  —this was once my home. And it could be again.

  There was nothing extraordinary in any of these moments or in any of these sights, but their very ordinariness was their appeal. Because Gail could not eliminate from her memory the picture of something quite extraordinary. And Wesley was in the center of this picture, exactly where she wished he would not be....

  The previous spring, on the first weekend in May, on a Saturday evening when, long after the sun had set, the air was still soft and warm as it can be only on nights in May. The previous winter had been particularly long and hard, even for northeastern Montana. They got their first heavy snow in late October, and from then until the end of April the snow cover was continuou
s. Usually an excess of snow meant, as Wesley and the other natives of the region told her, milder temperatures, but last winter that had not been true. December, January, February—all saw record-breaking cold. And still the snows came.

  A part of Gail wanted to blame the weather, to say that people had been cooped up too long, that when they were finally released into the warm spring air, when they finally got to stand with their feet on dry earth—not in snow or mud—it was too much for them. In their giddy joy they dropped some of the restraints and inhibitions that they would usually hold tight to.

  That was what one part of her said. Another said, what could you expect—this was Montana, the West, and that it was once called Wild was a source of pride for many of its citizens. Why, if the people in the part of North Dakota where Gail grew up knew that their region was called wild, they would hang their heads in shame. Or try to do something about it.

  Oh, Gail told herself so many things—the weather was to blame. The state itself. Her father-in-law. The badge. The situation. The Indian. Anything to avoid saying: Wesley. His nature.

  They hadn’t been at the dance from its start. Wesley wanted to make his rounds in town first and then finish up the night at the small country tavern where all the tables had been taken outdoors to make room inside for dancing and the music makers—an accordionist, a fiddle player, and a drummer.

  By the time Gail and Wesley arrived, there were as many people outside as in. The tavern was small anyway, and all the bodies—warmed by the day’s heat and the night’s dancing—made it impossibly stuffy. Besides, the night was clear and pleasant, why not stand outside with a whiskey or a beer in hand, stare up at the stars, and sigh once more to anyone who would listen, “My God, wasn’t this winter a long one.”

  Wesley did not expect trouble at this dance; he was simply putting in an appearance, showing himself in order to say, “There is law in Mercer County, Montana.” This strategy he learned from his father, who held the office before Wesley. “Keep moving,” his father often advised. “Let ’em know you’re around. A minute here. A minute there. They’ll never know where you’re going to show up next.” But this dance was the last planned stop on the nightly tour; Wesley could allow himself a drink now, and he led Gail to the bar.