by April Smith
“We, the jury in the above entitled case,” the foreman read, “do find for the plaintiff in the first claim against the ‘Meet Your Enemy’ flyer for relief in the amount of ten thousand dollars.”
Cal got goose bumps. Betsy got the chills. Jo started screaming.
The second claim was against the doctored tape. The verdict again was in the Kuseks’ favor—in the amount of $15,000.
The room was buzzing with quiet cheers and loud whispers. “We won! We won!”
The third claim was against the speeches in the Legion Hall meeting, and again the jury found for the Kuseks in the amount of $5,000.
Total damages were $30,000, an unprecedented amount for a libel verdict in South Dakota. The jury also found for the plaintiffs on the conspiracy issue, meaning Thaddeus Haynes and Dutch Roy would carry the mark of collaborators in slander. The smear campaign had backfired. Calvin Kusek’s good name was restored and theirs were stained forever. Cal and Betsy’s vindication was complete.
Judge Wheeler thanked the jurors for their long and faithful service and declared that court was adjourned.
The room erupted in a pandemonium of hugs, tears, whoops, and clenched fists in victory. The other side stalked out in silence.
Beaming and waving, the Kuseks descended the curving stairway from the courtroom to the marble lobby like the royal family, flashbulbs going off, a mob of reporters and frenzied supporters waiting to crush them with joy. Although he’d long ago given up bull riding, outside in the chilly night, surrounded by dancing classmates and friends, Lance got down on one knee, thanked God, stood up, and, in rodeo tradition, skimmed his cowboy hat through the air. It traveled straight and true, coming to rest with finality on the frozen ground.
27
Nine months later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Like everyone else, the Kuseks stayed glued to the television set for the next four days as the unbelievable events of the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson, the horse-drawn caisson and state funeral for the young president, the burial at Arlington, and the point-blank shooting of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, unfolded live. Cal and Betsy idolized John F. Kennedy and had worked unfailingly for his election. In their vainest moments, they imagined themselves bush league versions of John and Jackie, leading the way to an enlightened society in their own little Camelot on Lucky Clover Ranch.
With Kennedy’s death the lights went out on the New Frontier, his vision of prosperity and innovation, which could have been his legacy for America. Instead, the bullet that killed the president released a decade of senseless violence, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy to the Vietnam War. At that same moment, of no interest to the rest of the world but with grave consequence to the Kusek family, on November 22, 1963, a child was born named Derek LaSalle.
He came into this world a troubled soul, in a cabin deep in the Olympic National Forest of Washington State. He was the son of Chrissy and Armand LaSalle, with an older brother named Amos. All the males in the family were lumberjacks, and many had grown up in the same camp of simple wood-framed houses built in the 1940s by the timber company as a permanent community for its employees.
On November 22 there was a storm—a deluge of heavy, primordial rain that knocked the power out. Landslides blocked the roads, and because of the national days of mourning, the local clinic was closed. The LaSalles were delayed in getting to the regional hospital, forty-five miles away, where the baby arrived three weeks early and not breathing. When he was miraculously revived, they immediately saw there was something strange about him. As an infant he couldn’t settle. He wasn’t happy as a child. He bit other children and threw fits. His parents couldn’t keep him in school, so he grew up wild in the old-growth rain forest, rigging slings for the company when he was fifteen. According to the locals, the fact that Derek LaSalle, at the age of twenty-two, was fated to murder a prominent family a thousand miles away went all the way back to the odd green eyes that first saw the light of day when President Kennedy was killed: he’d been born under a bad sign.
LaSalle was one year old when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, unofficially declaring war on Vietnam. The Kuseks, caught up in the antiwar movement, nonetheless felt they had completed their personal mission, and relished the calm that had settled over their lives after the verdict. The missile fields still stood as sentries of the Cold War, and in a few years Vietnam veterans would bring the reality of ground fighting home to South Dakota. As the state’s children served and fell, the plow of history dragged on, overturning the battle of the Kusek trial and burying it in a consecrated field of valor.
In this new and shining day, Calvin Kusek emerged a hero. He’d stood up to the enemy and won. You might not buy his politics, but you couldn’t argue with the dollar amount of the prize! Thirty thousand was a big number, big enough to prove—as many now admitted—that he’d been right. The tactics of the other side had been dirty pool. He’d been ambushed, but he fired back, protecting his honor the way any true patriot would. The jury had been right. The judge had been right. On the street, people went out of their way to chat, and Cal and Betsy savored the paradoxical wonderment of having been vilified as traitors and now held up as champions of freedom.
They abandoned all thoughts of moving back to New York City. They were true westerners now, especially since while she was at Reed College, Jo had fallen in love with the wooded squares in the city of Portland and the gorgeous rivers that crisscrossed the state. Her next stop would be the University of Oregon for a degree in landscape design. She didn’t know where that would take her, except she was inspired by the innovative culture of the Northwest. If her parents wanted to see their daughter, they’d have to travel there, because she rarely came home.
The Fletchers and Kuseks continued to be close friends and law partners. Being convicted of slander had no effect on Thaddeus Haynes’s political career. He was reelected to a second term in the Senate, and by 1968 had bought two more local TV stations, creating the Haynes Broadcast Network.
When Lance left home for Northwestern University, Betsy started working full-time at Mercy Medical Center. Two years later she was promoted to floor supervisor, but after a while began to wonder if she’d taken on too much. Getting up at five a.m. to do ranch chores was becoming harder. She dreaded the drive, especially in bad weather. She felt tired in the mornings and found herself calling in sick more than she’d like. It couldn’t be age, she told herself, she was only forty-seven. Stell urged her to quit or at least take time off, but Betsy felt so responsible for everyone—patients, coworkers, animals, and family—that she kept on pushing.
A nasty cold was going around the hospital. Along with the usual sore throat and stuffy nose, Betsy had symptoms of lethargy and loss of appetite, which was par for the course for the virus, but over the next few weeks, food itself became less interesting. She began to avoid it, cooking for Cal but taking just a tablespoonful for herself. He joked that she certainly didn’t need to diet. But not eating was making her weak in the head. It was hard to concentrate, which worried her, because as charge nurse she had to check everyone else’s work. She kept bumping into things and getting bruises, then having no memory of how they got there. She drank more coffee and doubled down harder.
Mrs. Galveston was a patient on Betsy’s floor who had her gall bladder removed and was recovering normally. On her rounds, a nurse’s aide noted an alarming decrease in Mrs. Galveston’s heartbeat, and that respirations were down to four per minute. Her blood pressure had also dropped precipitously, to 80/40. The aide quickly summoned the doctor, who discovered the patient had been given twice the dose of morphine indicated. He immediately administered Narcan to reduce the effect of the opiate. Mrs. Galveston recovered, but Betsy Kusek was called on the carpet. It turned out she had administered the morphine, and in the correct amount, but failed to note it on the chart, causing the next nurse on shift to repeat the same dose within a half-hour period.
It was a serious mistake, which required official intervention. Betsy was well liked and respected, but the doctors had been concerned about her. She’d been forgetful, didn’t have her usual energy, and was losing weight. Before any kind of disciplinary action, they insisted that she undergo an examination and take a blood test. Betsy didn’t share this with Cal. She was certain it was a recurrence of the flu, or maybe late-life anemia.
The results were devastating. Betsy was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, the same bone cancer that had killed her mother. The oncologist offered a bone marrow transplant, but Betsy didn’t want heroic measures. She realized she’d been in denial all this time and didn’t want to prolong the inevitable.
“I just want to go home,” she’d said.
She was fine for the next few weeks, then turned feverish, and Jo and Lance came home. The children learned how to give morphine injections. A hospital bed and IVs were set up in the living room so Betsy could be where she belonged—in the middle of things. Stell was there to hold the bucket when she vomited. Cal would go outside to weep but soon gave it up, and they all cried together almost all the time. He could not imagine life without her. His mind was stopped at an impassable wall.
Beside the bed they made a little altar of Betsy’s best-loved things: her mother’s jewelry. Ceramic ashtrays Jo and Lance had made in grade school. Eagle feathers she’d picked up, the medicine wheel Doc Avery had given Cal, fresh sprays of lavender from the prairie. She told Marja not to come out. She didn’t want the burden of her sister’s grief. They called each other every day and made a point of saying not good-bye but “Talk to you tomorrow.”
The parade of ranch wives bearing casseroles began. There was no rancor left against the Kuseks; it had all been swept clean like the smudge sticks of sage they kept burning to purify the room. Stell brought magazines and they’d talk about silly things, hairstyles and manicures. Jo was in on these discussions. She’d become a grown-up woman now.
“I had a dream,” Betsy told her husband three weeks before she died.
He was sitting on their bed, feeding her chips of ice. She moved the bowl away.
“I saw my mother.”
“Yes?”
“She was floating on the ceiling,” Betsy said, indicating with an emaciated hand. “There. She was wearing a nightgown and that robe she had at home, in Scarsdale, when we were kids. She had long hair, just flowing. It was light outside, and the light was so beautiful. Do you know who was next to me?”
“Who?” asked Cal, eyes brimming.
“Ruby.”
“Ruby, the little calf?”
Betsy smiled. “Yes, the little red calf who died. But he was here, so calm and trusting, right next to the bed. He was waiting for me.”
Cal’s eyes overflowed. “I know.”
“He had a crown made of flowers.”
Cal touched her dry cheek. “I’m glad you had such a beautiful dream.”
After that Betsy began to sleep a lot and barely took a sip of water. She stopped speaking. When Jo, overwhelmed, threw her arms around her mother, Betsy turned her head away. She was detaching from this life. The most profound change of all was the look in her eyes. Even at their worst moments, Jo had always found protection in her mother’s eyes. Loving and open, they’d always said, You are precious to me. Jo needed that reassurance right now more than anything, but Betsy had been transformed into a separate being. Her eyes said, This is serious, take note, but they could have said that to a stranger. She had no more to give. The stare was uninhabited by the mother Jo had known.
—
The day they buried Betsy Kusek beneath the cottonwoods on the Lucky Clover Ranch, the skies broke open and it poured. The drought was truly over, but their mourning would be unending. Cal was lost. His soul just wandered. Comically, he’d immediately become the most desired widower in Pennington County. Shirley Hix appeared at Betsy’s funeral all gussied up, admitting to having a crush on Cal the moment he set foot inside the Bison Café almost twenty years before.
Cal was having none of that, but he needed to stop walking around in circles and crying in the barn. Kusek v. Haynes and Roy had set a new standard in libel law. Over the years he’d been invited to speak at conferences and to teach a course at Yale but always declined. Now he hired a ranch manager and some hands, and went back to New Haven for a semester, which turned into a year. And another year. And another.
When she was first diagnosed, Betsy had told him, “You go on and live another life.” As unthinkable as it had been, three hard years of grief passed, and another life was opening up for him in the long-ago pleasures of university life. He wasn’t on a tenure track, so he had nothing to prove. As long as Yale kept offering, Cal was happy to accept the role of guest lecturer. He loved being with students. He’d forgotten how young was young.
He made the rounds: sailboat races, cocktail parties, bookstore readings, weekends on Martha’s Vineyard, dinner parties in Manhattan with the most exciting minds in law. To the East Coast cognoscenti, Calvin Kusek’s sojourn on the western plains could not have been more exotic if he’d joined a colorful troupe of Mongolian horsemen, living in tents, drinking the blood of their ponies as they swept across the windy steppes, subsisting on boiled lizards. He’d gotten used to the skeptically raised professorial eyebrow: “North Dakota sounds god-awful.”
Cal would smile, no offense taken. “South Dakota,” he would say. “And only when it gets below minus ten.” He’d abandoned all efforts to explain the art of bull riding.
He was pursued and fell into a couple of short-lived affairs, which always seemed to end over sugary cocktails in a seafood joint with a disappointed thirty-five-year-old professor dressed in black. Jo and Lance and Betsy’s memory, it endured. And the white farmhouse from Sears that had been set too close to the road. All this he wanted back.
—
When Lance graduated from law school he, too, came back home. He joined the law firm of Fletcher and Kusek and married a sweet-natured, down-to-earth woman he’d known as a student at Northwestern named Wendy Justin, who taught elementary school. They bought a saltbox house on West Boulevard and painted it bright blue. Their son, Willie, was born in 1975.
Cal was living at the Lucky Clover Ranch and coming into town to work, but the child became his world. Willie’s first sentence was “I want Grandpa.” When Nelson Fletcher retired from the practice, Cal and Lance went on together. They built an addition to the saltbox house and moved their office there so that Grandpa could see his grandson every day—when they weren’t out on the ranch together, which was every weekend.
Cal was blessed with seven beautiful years with Willie. Too soon, he passed peacefully in his sleep at the age of sixty-nine and was laid to rest beside Betsy under the cottonwood trees at the Lucky Clover Ranch.
At a memorial service attended by more than three hundred people, Lance and Jo spoke of their father.
“Calvin Kusek was a hero in war, a hero in the fight for personal liberties, a hero as a husband, and always my personal hero as a dad,” said Jo.
Lance added that he’d never felt as proud as when he and his father became partners in law. He recalled the day they hammered in the sign on the front lawn so it faced West Boulevard: KUSEK & KUSEK—LAW OFFICES. It was colonial-style—white, with blue lettering that matched the color of the house.
MERCY MEDICAL CENTER
DECEMBER 26, 1985
6:30 P.M.
When she remembered that Verna Bismark owned a bank, Jo realized she had misjudged the lady. Verna had been a female pioneer, as she told it, putting up with ridicule and lewd remarks when ranchers sat down to discuss their loans, expecting a little flirtation to go a long way, which it did not.
“Your dad was the exception,” Verna said. “Never blinked an eye.”
“He was plenty happy at home,” Randy Sturgis added.
Verna rolled her eyes and Jo felt consoled to be sitting between these two kindly relics, al
most in place of her parents.
“Cal and I, we got right down to the business of politics,” Verna said, “and we had great success. Those other morons, they would’ve gotten a lot further in life if they hadn’t been driven to distraction by a double-D, and I’m not talking about a ranch, honey.”
Jo laughed through a fog of exhaustion that was suddenly scattered by the neon-orange flash of Robbie Fletcher’s parka as he strode from the elevator, clutching a reporter’s notebook. She could tell from the look of professional distraction that he had news. He greeted Verna and Randy and they exchanged sympathies.
“Take a walk with me,” he told Jo.
When they were alone at the end of the hall he said, “They’ve eliminated Honeybee Jones as a suspect.”
Jo became angry. “Why?!”
“He’s a witness. He’s cooperating with the police.”
“What’s he telling them? It has to be a pack of lies.”
“He says he knows who did it,” Robbie said.
“He does? How?”
“My source says he came down to command headquarters and named the killer off a police sketch. The guy they’re looking for is a drifter. Honeybee claims he stole his gun.”
“Claims he stole his gun,” Jo said derisively.
“I don’t blame you,” Robbie said. “Tyler Jones always was a wiseass.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
They headed back to the waiting area.
“Don’t spread it around,” Robbie said. “What I told you.”
“I don’t care.” Jo flashed him a tired smile. “Willie touched my hand.”
“Oh, hey, that’s wonderful!” Robbie Fletcher said.