by Larry Watson
My father must have started to leave because I heard the clump of a heavy footstep and my mother said quickly, “No, wait. Listen to me, please. Marie said she didn’t want to be alone with him. You should have seen her. She was practically hysterical about having me stay in the room. And once Frank left she told me all of it. He’s been doing it for years, Wes. When he examines an Indian he . . . he does things he shouldn’t. He takes liberties. Indecent liberties.”
There was a long silence. My mother’s hollyhocks and snapdragons grew alongside the house where I was hiding, and the bees that flew in and out of the flowers filled the air with their drone.
Then my father spoke. “And you believe her.”
“Yes, I do.”
Footsteps again. Now I knew my father was pacing.
“Why would she lie, Wesley?”
My father didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking: She’s an Indian—why would she tell the truth?
“Why, Wes?”
“I didn’t say she was lying. Maybe she’s simply got it wrong. An examination by a doctor. . . . Maybe she doesn’t know what’s supposed to go on. My gosh, I remember when I had to go see Doc Snow for my school checkups. He would poke me and tickle me and check my testicles and have me cough, and I might have felt funny about the whole business, but I knew it was part of the exam. But if I didn’t know and. . . .”
“It’s not like that. Marie told me. That’s not the case.”
“And if you’d never seen a doctor in your life. . . . Why, you wouldn’t know what was going on.”
“No, Wes.”
“Think if you’d never had a shot, an injection. If you’d never seen a needle. You’d think he was trying to kill you. To stab you.”
“Wesley, would you listen to me?”
“And Marie. For God’s sake, you know how she likes to make up stories. She’s been filling David’s head with them for years. She’s got a great sense of drama, that one—”
“Wesley!” My mother shouted my father’s name exactly the way she would shout a baby’s to stop him from doing something dangerous—toddling toward the stairs, extending his finger toward the electrical outlet—anything to stop him. I flinched and a part of me said leave, get away, run, now before it’s too late, before you hear something you can’t unhear. Before everything changes. But I pressed myself closer to the house and hung on.
“All right,” my father said. “All right. Let’s have it.”
There was a shuffling, and I wondered if my mother was moving closer to my father. Her voice became lower. “I told you. When he examines Indian girls he does things to them.”
“Things, Gail? He does things to them? I’m sure he does things to all his patients.”
His tone must have angered her, because her voice went right back to where it had been earlier, and though it seemed each word was the product of effort it also seemed born out of absolute determination. “What things? I’ll tell you what things. Your brother makes his patients—some of his patients—undress completely and get into indecent positions. He makes them jump up and down while he watches. He fondles their breasts. He—no, don’t you turn away. Don’t! You asked and I’m going to tell you. All of it. He puts things into these girls. Inside them, there. His instruments. His fingers. He has . . . your brother I believe has inserted his, his penis into some of these girls. Wesley, your brother is raping these women. These girls. These Indian girls. He offers his services to the reservation, to the BIA school. To the high school for athletic physicals. Then when he gets these girls where he wants them he. . . . Oh! I don’t even want to say it again. He does what he wants to do.”
The shock of hearing this about Uncle Frank was doubled because my mother was saying these words. Rape. Breasts. Penis. These were words I never heard my mother use—never—and I’m sure her stammer was not only from emotion but also from the strain on her vocabulary.
I waited for my father to explode, to shout a defense of his brother, to scream a condemnation of Marie and her lies. Instead, he said as quietly as before: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Why?”
“That’s right. Why? Are you telling me this because I’m Frank’s brother? Because I’m your husband? Because I’m Marie’s employer?” He paused. “Or because I’m the sheriff?”
“I’m telling you, Wes. I’m just telling you. Why? What part of you doesn’t want to hear it?”
“I wish,” my father said, “I wish you wouldn’t have told the sheriff.”
Did he laugh softly, ironically, then? I thought I heard a chuckling noise, but it might have been the heavy heads of the snapdragons leaning and rustling against each other.
Neither of them spoke for a long time. I wanted to stand up, to look at them. Were they embracing? Glaring at each other? For some reason I imagined them staring off in different directions, my father toward the front lawn and the leaves that fell before they should and my mother the other way, back into the house and toward the bedroom where Marie lay sweating in her fever and her shame.
My father asked, “Did any of this happen to Marie?”
“Yes. Some. Not the worst. But her friends. People she knows.”
“Would she be willing to talk to me?”
“She might be. If you approach her the right way.”
“I only have the one way.”
“I know,” my mother said.
My father clapped his hands, his usual prelude to action—time to put up the storm windows, to rake the leaves, to shovel the walk, to shake the rugs. To this day, when I hear the first clap of applause in a theater, a lecture hall, a banquet, I reflexively think of my father and his call to chores. “Let’s see if she’s awake,” he said, “and get on with it.”
As they left the porch, I ran around the house and went in the back door just as they were heading into Marie’s room. Neither of them said a word to me. They went in and closed the door behind them. I lingered nearby but couldn’t make out a word, only the steady low murmur of voices punctuated occasionally by Marie’s coughs.
On the kitchen table was Uncle Frank’s beer bottle. I examined it closely, searching for the lines and whorls of his fingerprints. (One of the ways my father kept the respect and admiration of the boys in our town during the war was by fingerprinting every child who stopped by his office. I must have been fingerprinted fifteen times myself.) I was beginning already to think of Uncle Frank as a criminal. I may not have been entirely convinced of his guilt, but the story my mother told was too lurid, too frightening, for me to continue thinking of my uncle in the way I always had. Charming, affable Uncle Frank was gone for good.
My parents were in Marie’s room for a long time, and when they came out both of them were grim-faced and silent.
“How’s Marie?” I asked my mother.
“She’s going to sleep a while. That’s what she needs now.”
Our supper was soup and sandwiches, a meal usually reserved for lunches or Sunday evenings when we got home late from spending the day at the ranch. After eating, my father went back out on the porch and simply stood there, staring out at the evening’s lengthening shadows. My mother was finishing the dishes when he came back in and announced, “I’m going over to talk to Len.”
Len McAuley was my father’s deputy and our next-door neighbor, and before he was my father’s deputy he had been my grandfather’s deputy. I once heard a story about how Len, without a weapon, ran down on foot and disarmed a cowboy who shot up a bar on Main Street, but the story was hard to believe about the Len McAuley I knew. He was tall, gaunt, stoop-shouldered, shy, and soft-spoken. Len and his wife Daisy (who made up for Len’s taciturnity with both the quantity and the volume of her talk) were in their sixties, and they were more like grandparents to me than my own. When I was younger, Len used to carve little animals for my play, and Daisy never stopped baking cookies for me.
As my father went out the door, my mother called after him, “If Daisy’s home tell her I’ve got a f
resh pot of coffee!”
Moments later they were off on their own, my father and Len standing in the McAuley front yard and my mother and Daisy sitting at our kitchen table. But there were similarities. All four were drinking coffee. In each pair one talked while the other listened. (My mother and Len were the listeners.) And both my father and mother were, I knew, conducting investigations.
I wandered in and out of the house, catching fragments of both conversations, until my mother finally said, “David. Either go out or stay in.” Daisy laughed and said, “He’s like Cuss”—her cat—“when he’s out, he wants to go in. When he’s in he wants to go out.”
Both my parents were discreet about their investigations. Neither came right out and repeated Marie’s story about Uncle Frank, yet they used the same strategy: to mention Marie’s perturbation and then to pretend mystification—“I don’t know why she would act that way,” my mother said, while my father shook his head in puzzlement. They both left openings for Len or Daisy to contribute what they could.
And my mother struck pay dirt.
On one of my passes through the kitchen, Daisy was hunched over the table, her white hair bobbing in my mother’s direction and her tanned plump arm reaching toward my mother. Daisy’s usually loud, brassy voice was lowered, but I heard her say, “The word is he doesn’t do everything on the up-and-up.” Then she noticed me. She straightened up and smiled at me but stopped talking. That meant I was supposed to leave the room, and I did. But slowly. As I crossed into the living room, Daisy whispered, “Just the squaws though.”
Later that night, right before we all went to bed, my mother checked on Marie once more. When she came out my father and I were in the kitchen, drinking milk and eating the rhubarb cake that Daisy had brought over.
My mother shut Marie’s door quietly and then leaned her back against it, almost as if she were using her weight to keep the door closed. She looked tired. She was still wearing her work clothes—she usually changed into dungarees or slacks and a gingham shirt as soon as she got home. Her glasses were off and her eyes were ringed with fatigue. Her lipstick had faded, and she hadn’t brushed out her hair.
My father asked without looking up, “How’s Marie?”
My mother’s gaze was fixed upon my father. “You’re eating,” she said.
“Daisy’s cake. It’s delicious.”
“You can eat....”
At some point my father must have become aware that she was staring at him. His cake unfinished, he set down his fork. “I don’t hear her coughing.”
“She’s sleeping again.” I couldn’t tell if she was actually looking at him or if she was simply staring off and his form intersected her vision.
Then I knew. She saw him now as she hadn’t before. He was not only her husband, he was a brother, and brother to a man who used his profession to take advantage of women, brother to a pervert! And how did I know these were my mother’s thoughts? I knew because they were mine. I put down my glass of milk but I did not look at my father. I didn’t want to notice the way he combed his hair straight back. I didn’t want to see the little extra mound of flesh between his eyebrows. I didn’t want to see the way the long line of his nose was interrupted by a slight inward curve. I didn’t want to see any of the ways that he resembled his brother.
“What did Len say?” asked my mother.
“That we need rain.”
My mother hung her head.
“That’s what we talked about, Gail.”
She brought her head up quickly. “That’s not what Daisy and I talked about.”
“I don’t want this all over town, Gail. We don’t have proof of anything.”
Now they were falling into familiar roles. My father believed in proof, in evidence, and he held off on his own convictions until he had sufficient evidence to support them. My mother, on the other hand, was willing to go on a lot less, on her feelings, her faith.
My mother said, “It’s around town more than you realize.”
“I don’t want this getting back to my father.”
That was what my father believed in. If he could not sufficiently fear, love, trust, obey, and honor God—as we were told in catechism class we must—it was because he had nothing left for his Heavenly Father after declaring absolute fealty to his earthly one.
“Is that what you’re concerned about?”
“Gail....”
My mother pointed at me. “He won’t be going to him again. I guarantee that.”
“For God’s sake, Gail.”
“He won’t.”
I was afraid I would give myself away—by blushing or failing to react the way I should. I wasn’t supposed to know what they were talking about.
“Let’s not discuss this in front of him.”
My mother continued to stare at him.
“I’ll handle this, Gail. In my fashion.”
After another long silence, my mother finally left her post at Marie’s door. She was almost out of the kitchen when she turned and said to my father in the calmest voice she had used all evening: “Just one thing, Wes. You never said you didn’t believe it. Why is that? Why?”
She waited for his answer. I waited too, breathlessly, looking down at our floor’s speckled linoleum and holding my sight on one green speck until my father said, of course I don’t believe it; of course it isn’t true.
But he didn’t say a word. He simply picked up his fork and continued to eat Daisy McAuley’s rhubarb cake.
That was when it came to me. Uncle Frank was my father’s brother, and my father knew him as well as any man or woman.
And my father knew he was guilty.
Two
THE next day my father began investigating the accusation Marie had made against his brother. How did I know this? I made my guess from three facts. Before he left for his office in the morning he asked my mother if she needed any honey. He was driving out to the reservation, and if she liked he could stop at Birdwells’ and buy her some honey. My mother had a passion for honey. She spread it on toast and biscuits; she sweetened her tea with it; she used it in baking; she ate spoonfuls of it right from the jar. And the best honey, she said, came from the Birdwells’ bee farm. Mr. Birdwell’s place was on the highway that led to the reservation.
My father’s inquiry about the honey was, first of all, an overture of peace to my mother. Let’s not quarrel, my father was saying. (The phrase he often used with both my mother and me was, “Let’s not have this unpleasantness between us,” as if the problem, whatever it might be, resided not in us but outside of us.)
And, second, the offer to buy honey was also an offhand way for my father to announce that he was going out to the reservation. He had no jurisdiction there, and the reservation police hadn’t called him in on a case, so he could be going there for only one reason: to look into the accusations Marie had made.
Later that day I saw my father at the Coffee Cup, a popular diner in downtown Bentrock. There was nothing uncommon about my father (or any other citizen) being in the Coffee Cup on a summer afternoon, but my father usually sat at the large table in the center of the cafe, drinking coffee with his regular group: Don Young, the pharmacist; Rand Hutchinson, the owner of Hutchinson’s Greenhouse; Howard Bailey, who ran an oil abstracting company; and other members of the Bentrock business community. On that day, however, he sat at a table for two over against the far wall. With him sat Ollie Young Bear, the most respected—even beloved—Indian in northeastern Montana, perhaps even the whole state.
Ollie Young Bear was also a war hero (he was wounded in action in North Africa), a graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman, a deacon at First Lutheran Church, an executive with Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, the star pitcher on the Elks’ fast-pitch softball team—runner-up in the Silver Division of the state tournament (though he probably could not have been admitted to the Elks as a member). He did not smoke, drink, or curse. He married Doris Strickland, a white woman whose family owned a prosperous ranch
south of Bentrock, and Ollie and Doris had two shy, polite children, a boy and a girl. All of these accomplishments made Ollie the perfect choice for white people to point to as an example of what Indians could be. My father liked to say of Ollie Young Bear, “He’s a testimony to what hard work will get you.”
And it was not as though Ollie had forsaken his own people. Though he was not from the reservation, he drove out there every weekend with bats and balls, equipment he paid for out of his own pocket, and organized baseball games for the boys.
Because my father obviously liked and respected him—held him up, in fact, as a model—I tried to feel the same way about him. But it was difficult.
Mr. Young Bear, as my father insisted I call him, was a stern, censorious man. He was physically imposing—tall, barrel -chested, broad-shouldered, large-headed—and he never smiled. His lips were perpetually turned down in an expression both sad and disdainful. He seemed to find no humor in the world, and I have no memory of hearing him laugh.
He and my father went bowling together, and I was sometimes allowed to tag along. I didn’t particularly care for the sport, but I loved Castle’s Bowling Alley, a dark, narrow (only four lanes), low-ceilinged basement establishment that smelled of cigar smoke and floor wax. I loved to put my bottle of Nehi grape soda right next to my father’s beer bottle on the scorecard holder and to slide my shoes under the bench with my father’s when we changed into bowling shoes. I loved the sounds, the heavy clunk of the ball dropped on wood, its rumble down the alley, the clatter of pins, and above it all, men’s shouts—“Go, go, gogogo!” “Get in there!” “Drop, drop!” Then the muttered curses while they waited for the pin boy to reset the pins. When I was in Castle’s Alley I felt, no matter how many women or children might also be there, as though I had gained admittance to a men’s enclave, as though I had arrived.