by April Smith
Bissonette stopped her. “I’m sorry. This is not a political meeting, madame.”
The crowd’s grudging welcome to Verna Bismark turned to hostile applause in support of the moderator.
“Mr. Haynes has certainly been talking politics and making reckless accusations—”
“Just a minute, Mrs. Bismark. We’re not going to discuss the candidates here, this is fact-finding only—”
Verna, who had counseled Cal to keep his cool, now lost hers, turning on the vice commander, spitting mad. “Oh, blow it out your barracks bag, Patrick! I’m not going to stand here while you turn this into a witch hunt! You don’t get to threaten someone and his wife because you disagree with him—”
There were shouts of “Throw her out!”
The K-HAY cameraman, who had been watching from the sidelines, got the signal from Haynes to start shooting. The sixteen-millimeter Eyemo camera held only three minutes’ worth of film, and he’d been hoarding it until the crowd came to a boil, which was now. Several men got out of their seats and approached the stage. The room was filled with boos and lewd remarks. The cameraman shoved past everyone and got to the stage.
In the back of the room Cal said, “We have to get her out of there.”
Fletch stopped him. “I’ll do it. You stay here.”
“No—”
Betsy said, “There’s going to be a fight.”
Cal told them all to get in the car.
“I’m afraid you’ve stepped over the bounds,” Vice Commander Bissonette was shouting over the melee. “We’ve done everything to remain reasonable and open-minded—”
Two ranchers took Verna Bismark by the arms and marched her off the stage and out a side door. The meeting wasn’t over; there was still a lot of milling around and arguing to take care of, but Cal’s intention was to save Verna Bismark. He fought his way around the building. When he found her alone, outside in the humid night, he apologized over and over.
“Why are you surprised?” Verna asked, breathlessly lighting a cigarette.
“I didn’t see it coming,” said Cal. “I made a fundamental mistake. I underestimated the enemy.”
“I’m with you. I thought I could get through with my girlish charms,” Verna said. “Boy, was I out to lunch.” She straightened her back and tossed her head to regain her composure. In the light thrown by a single bulb on a lamp outside the hall, her eyes were moist. “You realize nothing can stop them now.”
The cameraman was already on the road. In a matter of minutes he was back in town and had pulled into the station parking lot on Fifth Street beneath the yellow K-HAY letters on the brick wall. Not waiting for the elevator, taking two steps at a time, he arrived at the second-floor photo lab, unloaded the magazine inside a changing bag, rolled the news film onto a developing reel, and stuck it into the processor, where it went through seven different chemical baths while the clock ticked.
Cal and Betsy arrived at the Lucky Clover Ranch a little before the ten o’clock news. In the living room, the kids had dutifully put on their pajamas and were lying on the couch, watching the end of I Love Lucy on K-HAY.
“Hi, Dad. How was the meeting?” asked Jo.
Cal didn’t answer. He yanked the plug to the TV right out of the wall. Jo and Lance were flabbergasted. The picture on the screen shrank to a dot and disappeared. Betsy walked upstairs and Cal followed without a word.
25
On Election Day, voters awoke to find a plastic bag containing a rock on their lawns. Inside the bag was an alarming message warning them that “new facts” were discovered to prove that “a certain candidate” had “ties to Moscow.” The letter was unsigned, but the Ku Klux Klan was famous for tossing plastic bags with rocks and hate-filled tracts at their targets. People took it as a personal threat from sources unknown, which was enough to keep them away from the polls. As a result of this and other inflammatory mailings against him since the meeting at Legion Hall, Calvin Kusek lost the election, with only 28 percent of the vote. John F. Kennedy was elected president, and Thaddeus Haynes was swept into office as the U.S. senator from South Dakota.
Cal had lost in every way. His agenda was in pieces. He was forced to sit by and watch as Minuteman became a fact. Missile fields were quickly authorized across the west and built on a rush schedule. Caravans of armored trucks began to clog the rural roads. Engineers in hard hats and orange vests were everywhere. Backhoes rolled over wheat fields, and if farmers complained, the workers called them “unpatriotic.” Construction went fast because the California defense firms that masterminded the project had efficiently broken it down into crews who each performed a single task: excavate, pour concrete, lower the prefabricated silo into the hole, fill in the dirt, and move on to the next.
No matter how he tried to rethink it, Cal’s political career was over. “Twenty-eight percent!” people kept repeating, either delighted or despairing. No matter which, his reputation had been ruined. The shocking loss had cost the trust he’d built from arriving as a stranger to becoming a community leader. After six years in the state house, dutifully following the trodden path of patience and negotiation, bit by bit making small gains in responsible lawmaking, he’d been chased by a mob of fanatics over a cliff.
For months after the election Cal fell through space. The silence surrounding him was unearthly. He’d go into the law office and sit at his desk and nothing happened. The phone did not ring. No aides called from campaign headquarters, no reporters begged for minutes of his time. He’d open the mail. A letter expressing sympathy could make him cry. Fletch tried to interest him in new clients, but he couldn’t concentrate. On downtown streets, instead of reaching out for handshakes, Cal would drop his eyes, ashamed of the mistakes that let his family and supporters down.
He’d gravely misjudged the amount of fear that lay beneath the hardiness of these rural families, and how skillfully Haynes played upon it. Atomic war or endless drought, “You suffer God’s punishment because you have not cast out evil from our midst,” he’d intoned. Cal had been naive to think that goodness alone would triumph over such malicious nonsense. He should have never allowed himself and Betsy to be put in the role of scapegoats. He should have counterpunched much earlier, with everything he had.
Silence had crept inside the marriage, too. In the evenings, while concertos for piano played on the hi-fi, Cal and Betsy sat in opposite chairs and read, burrowing into the minds of Tolstoy, Machiavelli, Churchill, Lincoln, Brontë, and Ferber, looking for answers. Direct attacks on the Kuseks’ loyalty had ebbed, but now they were frozen out by ordinary complacency. People in town, embarrassed by their presence, looked the other way. Even Verna Bismark was saying privately that Calvin Kusek had become “bad meat.” Their great adventure had come to a halt.
Jo withdrew from the family and put her head down to get through the rest of high school. Later, when Robbie Fletcher was a freshman at the University of Colorado majoring in journalism, he’d write to her a few times before their correspondence dropped off, but not before driving her crazy with how “liberating” everything was “out here,” meaning anywhere but South Dakota. Jo spent long, solitary afternoons in the research section of the library, absorbed in the dense pages of the college guide, imagining dorm life in far-off regions, swooning over exciting courses “out there.” College seemed like a fairy tale. All I’ll have to do is read! she thought.
Lance, too, was planning his escape. With Uncle Scotty gone, he’d given up bull riding. It seemed childish to him now. He’d fallen in with a different crowd—students who were fired up about civil rights. They’d been ostracized as weirdo Kennedy supporters, but now they reveled in his presidency, and because Kennedy stood up for Martin Luther King Jr., they did, too. Lance read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, wore a CORE button, and schemed about sneaking off to join the Freedom Riders in Alabama. His grades improved and he started taking honors classes. One day he completely shocked his father by announcing he wanted to become a lawyer.
&nbs
p; It was clear that neither child had any interest in taking over the Lucky Clover Ranch. For the first time the Kuseks considered selling and moving back east. Betsy wrote to Marja about apartment rentals. Cal sent his résumé to New York congressman John V. Lindsay, who years ago had offered him a job, but received a staff-written rejection in return.
Now when he surveyed his livestock, Cal’s heart was cold. He wanted to send them all to the feedlot so he didn’t have to care anymore. Despite Haynes’s promises, Dutch Roy never did receive the air force contract because he couldn’t have; it was never a possibility, it had been an outright lie to get him to ride along on the hunt to bring down Calvin Kusek. In fact, Doris and Dutch Roy, former queen and king of the frontier, were now in the same position as the Kuseks. Their son, too, was gone, and they were looking to sell the Crazy Eights.
The only bright spot during those miserable winter months was a new five-year-old purebred quarter horse Cal had bought named Vanity that he was training as a ranch horse. Being a sorrel mare, she had attitude. She’d give off little bucks when he asked her to lope, and head-butt when he asked her to stand, but a bop on the nose would keep her in line, and she was learning to listen.
She loved to run and had good endurance, so he’d take her out to fix fences and look for wolves that had been picking off their weakest cattle. It was late afternoon on a bitter day in December when they reached the edge of spruce forest on the northern side of Bottlebrush Creek, and Cal spotted dog tracks in the snow. They halted and listened. Vanity’s ears pricked forward. Cal could hear nothing but the tapestry of bird sounds. He could make out high-pitched warblers and the whoo-ooh-ooh of an owl and, deep in the woods, the low pulse of a running creek. He could smell icy water.
Vanity’s ears went flat. Her body tensed and she sprang sideways. Fifty yards away a mule deer broke from the trees, running for its life ahead of a dozen gray wolves. Cal pulled the rifle, collected his horse and urged her into a gallop. She took off eagerly, and for an exhilarating sprint Cal was able to keep the wolves in sight, but then the deer darted back into the safety of the woods and the band split in two behind it. Cal wheeled Vanity around to follow the smaller bunch and they took off, nimbly jumping over a thicket of brush—neither of them realizing there was a dry gully on the other side. The horse stumbled into a ditch and flipped over. Cal’s heel went through the stirrup and the animal fell on top of him.
The disturbance they made settled and was lost in the endless snowy tracts. Horse and rider lay still, their breath clouds commingling in the freezing air. He was trapped beneath her massive body, just able to move the toes inside his boot. He knotted the reins around the saddle horn so that she couldn’t get up, because if she did, the first thing she would do was run, and he’d be dragged to death hanging by the stirrup. She fought the tethers, trying to get on her knees. He talked calmly to her. He stroked her coat, dark and sticky with sweat. After a while she let out a long snort and gave up struggling.
Dusk was coming fast. After dark the temperature would fall below zero. Cal was turned on his side with his right arm torqued beneath his shoulder, his face grazed with scratches. Before his eyes the miniature world grew large. He stared at three fallen juniper berries, big as planets. He could see every grain of forest dust on their skins. The wind swept the evergreens along with cold gray fog, but Cal was insensible, charmed by a single snowflake that had settled on his sleeve. He seemed to be inside the latticework, wondering why he’d never really looked before. Sleep was beckoning, and with it the thought of easy death, of one by one every cell in his body turning into a crystal of ice.
Then he heard the wolves. First the clear horn sound of the alpha male, followed by an answer, then all their voices echoing together with ethereal dissonance. Trapped, Vanity’s eyes rolled back in terror. She floundered and kicked, desperate to be free, and with every jolt Cal’s leg laced tight with pain. The knife. The knife was in his back pocket. He couldn’t reach the knife. He heard the heart-shattering cry of the wolves again, piercing inhuman harmonies followed by a frenzy of yips and barks calling for supremacy.
With his free left hand, he clawed the earth. He seized a rock, a stick, and kept on jabbing and scrabbling until he’d dug a shallow hole. Gritting his teeth, he twisted onto the injured shoulder, raising himself up high enough to get his left hand to his pocket and touch the handle of the knife and tease it from his pocket. He dropped it, found it again, flicked it open, and was able to slice through the stirrup leather, feeling the pressure on his leg release. He spun the reins off the saddle horn and clicked at Vanity, telling her to stand, and as she struggled to her feet, he rolled to safety. It seemed the horse hadn’t broken any bones, but her hind leg was curled and hurting.
Cal found the rifle in the bush and fired a booming round into the black woods. The howling stopped but picked up again, undaunted, and he kept the gun cocked and loaded as he led the injured mare across the open meadow. It would be a long, slow trek, and he had a lot of time to think about things as they hobbled along under an infinite blanket of stars. It was past ten o’clock when they made it to the ranch, torn up, weary, and sore, exhausted as prisoners of war. Betsy came running out of the house, frantic.
“What happened?” she cried. “The kids took the truck to look for you. I had the sheriff on the line.”
“Vanity’s hurt. Call the vet,” Cal mumbled, his voice slurred. “I hope it’s just a tendon. You’re a good old girl,” he told the horse, stroking her drooping neck. “And so are you,” he told his wife, almost collapsing in her arms.
Betsy ran expert fingers along his arms and torso, examining for breaks and bruises. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know how we made it. We flipped into a gully and she pinned me down. She could have broken her neck. I could have died of cold.”
“Cal!”
“God must have a plan,” he said.
“What’s the plan?” Betsy asked indulgently, as they limped toward the barn.
“I’m going after Haynes. If it kills me, I’m going after him.”
MERCY MEDICAL CENTER
DECEMBER 26, 1985
5:00 P.M.
Verna Bismark and Randy Sturgis were still in the waiting area when Jo came out of the ICU, accompanied by Dr. Pataki. They stood anxiously.
“Willie touched me!” Jo exclaimed. She was smiling broadly, almost delirious with joy. “He knew I was there!”
Verna clapped her hands together in prayer. “Is it true?”
“I squeezed his fingers and they moved. Right, Dr. Pataki?”
“There was a response,” the doctor agreed.
“So there’s hope!” Randy exclaimed.
“It’s impossible to say for sure, given the severity of the injuries,” Dr. Pataki said.
“Well, what are you going to do?” Verna demanded.
“We’re going to apply time, patience, and observation. Excuse me, I have surgery,” he said, and left.
“I’m going to have a cigarette,” Verna said, and followed him out.
Jo flopped in a chair. “Best news all day!”
26
The Pennington County courthouse was built in the 1920s in the Beaux-Arts style, a monument on a grand scale meant to stand for the merits of American government at its most thoughtful and temperate. When the Kusek trial opened in the South Dakota Supreme Court on a wet morning in February 1963, that pale limestone facade had resisted the corrosion of wind and human avarice for almost half a century. As Cal and Betsy, holding hands in the rain, passed the huge two-story arched windows and sober Ionic columns, it was not unreasonable to assume they were entering a temple of justice, where the wrongs against them would be reconciled and the offenders made to pay.
Fletch had repeatedly warned Cal and Betsy against suing Haynes. Getting nowhere, he called in the best trial lawyer in the state, fifty-five-year-old Kurt Lennox, for the thankless job of talking a potential client into dropping a case. The two met at a steak house in Pierre.
The trouble was Cal liked Kurt Lennox. He liked the thin white beard that hung inches off his chin and the unkempt gray hair that made him resemble Mark Twain. He liked his showman style—a seersucker suit with a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots—and the fire in his belly for justice, a compadre spoiling for the fight.
Right off Lennox told Cal that no libel case in the country had ever been won if it bore the “pink taint” of alleged Communist sympathies, and no state was more virulently anti-Red than South Dakota. He pointed out that the bias was written into the Republican Party platform, for heaven’s sake: “We pledge a continuous fight against Communism and its influence both at home and abroad.”
Add to that Haynes’s sneaky strategy of not directly accusing Cal of being a Communist. Haynes and friends had been shrewd in their use of fear and smear to question Cal’s loyalty…question the truth about his wife…a precedent set by the McCarthy hearings, in which suspicion of guilt was enough to create panic and cause mass firings of university professors and jail time for Hollywood writers. As Fletch had begged him to understand, even the law was stacked against them. Fair comment privilege, conceived to protect free speech, meant that a public official could not sue a person for having libeled against him. Disapproval, denigration, reproach, and blame were apparently considered a normal part of public service, Kurt Lennox reckoned over his after-dinner brandy.
But he was serious as a heart attack when he leaned across the table and told Cal straight up that the worst part of going to trial would be the anxiety and suffering it would cause his family all over again. Every day they would walk up the courthouse steps through a gauntlet of hostility. Cal replied that Jo would be away at Reed College in Oregon, and Lance had only a couple of years before he left for university. They, too, had been victims of prejudice and were ready to make things right. Kurt’s frank, pale blue eyes still reflected his concern.