Wesley’s father got up and went to the sideboard. He opened the cupboard down below and brought out a bottle of sour mash bourbon, a gift brought all the way from Louisiana by Merle Dennis, an oil speculator who used Bentrock as a base while he ranged from southern Montana up through western North Dakota and into Canada searching for likely locations to drill for oil. Sheriff Hayden had served as Merle Dennis’s unofficial guide through the territory, introducing him to ranchers and farmers and even helping him negotiate a few sales of mineral rights. In return for these favors, every time Merle Dennis came back to Bentrock he brought a gift for the sheriff—a hand-tooled belt, a jackknife with an ivory scrimshaw handle, a humidor of cigars, a card of hand-tied flies, a bottle of bourbon. Mr. Hayden put the bottle on the dining room table, and the candlelight gave the whiskey an amber glow. Mr. Hayden also put three cut-glass whiskey tumblers on the table.
“Now then,” he said to his sons, “who would like to follow that delicious dinner with a swallow of fine whiskey?”
Wesley and Frank exchanged glances. They knew their father was referring to them. Iris was excluded from his offer by her age and gender. Wesley was sure their father knew his sons drank, but they had never been allowed to drink openly, much less at the family table. What had changed since Wesley left? Did attending college suddenly mean they were at an age to share their father’s whiskey?
Frank did not hesitate. He picked up a glass and held it out for his father to fill. “And I bet you gave Emil a couple bucks, didn’t you?” he said to his father.
Mrs. Hayden reentered the room. “It was more than a couple.”
Mr. Hayden waved his hand dismissively. “I gave him ten. Told him to get his family a decent meal for Thanksgiving. And if I heard he bought a bottle with it, I’d throw his ass in jail.”
While his father was pouring, Wesley offered his glass. His father poured in about two fingers of bourbon.
“Tell me,” Frank asked his father, “who’s sheriff now—you or Len? I’ve lost track.”
Mercer County had a limit on the number of terms a sheriff could serve consecutively, and to get around this regulation, Len McAuley, Julian Hayden’s deputy, served an occasional term as sheriff and designated Mr. Hayden as his deputy. Those were their official titles, but their actual duties did not change. No one had any doubts about who was in charge in Mercer County.
“Still me,” Mr. Hayden said. “Election’s next year. I’ve got another year in office.”
Wesley brought the whiskey to his lips. As he did, its aroma, redolent of caramel and burnt wood, rushed up his nostrils. He hesitated before he drank, and then did so cautiously, hoping to avoid the effects the first swallow of whiskey could bring——an involuntary shudder, watering eyes, and, worst of all, a gasp or cough. The last thing Wesley wanted was for his father or brother or Iris to think he couldn’t take a drink of whiskey without it stealing his breath away. He needn’t have worried; the whiskey had the expected kick but it seemed cushioned—whiskey wrapped in soft cotton.
Mrs. Hayden stacked another armload of dirty dishes. Wesley noticed her raise her eyebrows when she saw the tumblers of whiskey, but she said nothing.
“Where are your manners, son?” Mr. Hayden asked Wesley. “Aren’t you going to offer this young lady a taste?” He raised his own glass to indicate that Iris might like some bourbon.
Iris wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t want any.”
But now Wesley had to make the offer; his father was giving him a lesson that he had to learn.
He held his glass out to Iris. “Would you like to try a sip?”
Frank lightly slapped his brother on the arm. “Maybe she wants her own glass.”
“Would you?”
Iris shook her head. “I don’t even like the smell.”
“This is different,” Mr. Hayden said. “This is as good as whiskey gets.”
Iris continued to shake her head. “My dad let me take a sip of his whiskey once. It burned my throat.”
Frank said, “Your old man never had twelve-year-old bourbon like this in the house.” Frank looked over at his father so abruptly Wesley wondered if his father had kicked Frank under the table.
“You can’t swallow liquor like water,” Mr. Hayden scolded. “Especially not fine whiskey like this. If you just throw it back you’re not doing it justice.” He raised his glass and sipped slowly. When he took the glass away he kept his lips pursed; the whiskey was obviously still in his mouth. Then he inhaled deeply, as if swallowing whiskey was done with the nose. He licked his lips and sighed. “By God, whoever made this knows a hell of a secret.”
Mr. Hayden looked to his sons before offering his next advice. “Now, if you’re drinking the bootleg liquor you get around here, you might as well hold your nose and get it down as quick as you can. Then hope you don’t go blind. Or worse.”
His father reached past Wesley and held out his own glass to Iris. “Go ahead and try some, Miss. Like I told you. Just take a small sip and roll it around in your mouth a little before you swallow.”
Iris looked at Wesley but before he could speak or register any expression, she took the tumbler from his father.
“Sure, go ahead,” Frank said. “We’re not going to tell your folks.”
For Wesley’s family, like most others in their part of Montana, Prohibition was something to be got around rather than observed. There were plenty of nondrinkers, but their abstinence was more likely for religious rather than legal reasons. Certainly, Sheriff Hayden made no special effort to enforce the 18th amendment unless some bootlegger tried to take undue advantage of the county’s citizens. Wesley couldn’t remember seeing his own mother take a drink of whiskey. She would have an occasional glass of sweet wine, and on hot summer evenings she might share her husband’s beer, but hard liquor—Wesley didn’t think so. He was quite sure he had never seen his father offer his mother a drink of whiskey.
Iris lifted the glass to her lips. Before she drank she said to Frank, “You better not tell.”
Her eyelids fluttered and almost closed. According to Mr. Hayden’s instructions, she held the liquor in her mouth for a moment, but when she swallowed it was with such noticeable effort that it seemed to take muscular strength to get the whiskey down.
Iris shuddered as if a draft from an open window had reached her. She twisted her mouth down. “Ugh!” Wesley’s father and brother laughed at her reaction.
Why the act, Wesley wondered. He had seen Iris drink—wine, beer, and hard liquor—at parties. Just last summer, on a sweltering day, Wesley remembered, he and Iris had gone swimming in the Knife River, and Wesley had brought along two quarts of homemade beer. While they swam, the beer chilled in the river water. When they got out of the water, they opened both bottles, one for each of them, and Iris finished her bottle well before Wesley finished his. The ice-cold beer gave him a headache, so he gave Iris what was left in his bottle. She drank that down as quickly as she had her own. Admittedly, Wesley was not just being generous in offering her more beer.
They had been going further and further with their sexual experiments, and Wesley had a notion that perhaps that day he and Iris would actually have intercourse. The conditions seemed perfect: they were both in bathing suits, Iris was in an especially playful and affectionate mood, and perhaps with enough beer in her....
For shade and privacy they crawled up under the bridge where it was dark and cool, even on the summer’s hottest day. Years of the river rising and falling, rushing and slowing, had weathered the beams and timbers of the bridge until they felt soft to the touch. Even the boulders and concrete pilings were furred with moss. The Indians who fished the Knife River’s deep holes or the fast water in the spring had cleared away the brush and arranged logs under the bridge, so it was easy to find a place to sit. Or lie down.
Wesley pushed his kisses harder and harder into Iris until she fell back under their pressure. She was still wet from their swim, and his hands slid across her skin as if she had be
en lubricated for his touch. Her wet hair smelled of river water and permanent wave solution.
He tried to get his hand inside the top of her bathing suit, but the angle was awkward and the wet fabric clung to her. Iris twisted away from his fumbling hands. Done for, Wesley thought. But then Iris astonished him.
She sat up straight and, with what seemed nothing more than a simple shrug of her shoulders, slipped her bathing suit down to uncover her breasts. She wriggled around until she got the suit down around her waist. Then she lay back, her torso exposed now to his sight as well as his touch.
For a moment, Wesley couldn’t move. He had seen a woman’s breasts before, but only in Tommy Salter’s French postcards. Iris’s breasts were small, and the nipples weren’t much larger than pennies. Their dark skin was puckered and erect. He had felt those breasts only by reaching under layers of clothing and only in darkened rooms. For the moment he didn’t want to do anything more than look at her—it was enough, it was too much—but he dimly knew that just staring was a violation of some etiquette that ruled moments like these.
He reached out for her, and as he did someone stepped onto the bridge above them. Whoever was crossing walked slowly and stayed close to the rail. When the walker came to the center of the bridge he stopped, gazing at the river below. He began to whistle a tune Wesley almost recognized. Wesley looked at Iris. She had made no move to cover herself, not with her bathing suit or her arms. In fact, she was trying not to laugh out loud.
The walker began again, and soon his steps no longer echoed on the bridge planks.
Immediately Iris stood, balanced on a rock, and jumped up to grab one of the bridge’s iron cross braces. She pulled herself up until she could see above the bridge. “Who the hell was that?” she asked.
Wesley just sat there, staring at her once again, but this time with another brand of amazement. Who was this girl, hanging there, her breasts exposed to the summer air? He suddenly felt as though he didn’t know her at all—could never know her. How could he have dared to put his hands all over her?
She was Iris Heil, the only girl in a family of five children. Was that how she had gained the strength to chin herself like that, from trying to keep up with her older brothers? Another disquieting thought occurred to him. Surely her brothers had seen her breasts, and perhaps so frequently she had no hesitation or shame in revealing herself to Wesley.
Still holding onto the brace, Iris lowered herself, the hard, bunched muscles in her arms and shoulders stretching and thinning. She must have seen something in Wesley’s eyes because she did not come back to him under the bridge. She pulled her bathing suit back up and adjusted its straps on her shoulders. “Are we going back in the water?” she asked.
Without waiting for his answer, she picked her way among the rocks until she was above a pool deep enough for swimmers to dive into. She leaped awkwardly, all arms and legs, and as she vanished underwater, Wesley felt as though he had a new knowledge of loss: when opportunities that will never come again slip away untouched.
In the months that followed, Wesley was haunted by the memory of that day down by the river. But the image that kept recurring wasn’t of Iris in his arms but of her swinging from the bridge’s cross brace like a beautiful, half-naked trapeze artist. Even in his mind she was there for him to see but not to touch.
Now, Iris put the whiskey glass back on the table and lifted her fingers to her lips as if to wipe away the bourbon’s heat. “I don’t see how you can drink that,” she said.
Wesley looked away, disgusted with Iris’s hypocrisy. He glanced into the kitchen, where his mother was cleaning up after the meal. At that moment she was not working. She held a dish towel in her hands, bunched like a bouquet of coarse cloth. Wesley’s mother was staring into the room where her husband was teaching an underage woman how to drink sour mash whiskey. When Wesley’s eyes and his mother’s met, she turned away and went back to her work.
“It’ll put hair on your chest,” Wesley’s brother teased Iris. “Look out!”
“That old wives’ tale,” she said and turned back to Wesley.
What was the look in her eyes? Was she asking him for help? Did she want him to take her away? Or was she enjoying the attention and did she only want him not to give her away as she pretended, for his father and brother, to be someone she was not?
“Then you better pour yourself another glass,” Wesley said to his brother. “You need all the help you can get.”
“Hey, brother. You don’t want to get into a hair-counting contest. You’ll lose for sure.” Frank laughed the same easy laugh that Wesley had spent hours alone trying to emulate.
Wesley pointed to Frank’s glass. “You going to drink that?”
“You want to make a contest out of that, too?”
“I’m just asking.”
Mr. Hayden leaned toward Iris. “Your brothers get along like this?”
Iris wrinkled her nose the way she did after drinking the whiskey. “All the time.”
Frank waved his hand as if his brother was not worth his time or energy. Then he directed his attention back to Iris. “Pretty necklace you have there,” Frank said.
Iris smiled at Wesley. “Wesley gave it to me.”
“Is that right?” Frank moved his chair closer to Iris. “Where’d you get the good taste to pick out something that nice, little brother?”
“Maybe you got some help from your mother, eh?” Mr. Hayden suggested.
Wesley was about to deny that he had had his mother’s aid when Iris volunteered, “I might have given him a hint or two.”
A hint or two. Last year in the month before Christmas, Wesley and Iris walked downtown every day after school, ostensibly to meet their friends at Douglas’s Rexall for Cokes or phosphates. But the real reason for the daily excursions, Wesley came to know, was to provide Iris with more opportunities to stop in front of the window of Hesvig’s Jewelry and point out the necklace she loved and wanted so badly she was “ready to throw a rock through the window and just grab it for herself.” When he gave her the necklace for Christmas, Iris couldn’t even pretend to be surprised.
“Can I get a closer look?” Frank asked Iris.
She looked down and pushed her chest out slightly but made no move to lift the necklace for Frank’s inspection.
She didn’t have to. Frank picked it up for himself. He did not pick it up with his thumb and index finger, as he would if he were lifting a pebble from the floor. He slid four fingers under the pendant and held the necklace in his palm.
What bothered Wesley most was the fact that Frank didn’t lift the necklace from Iris’s chest. He simply held it there, the gold chain and rhinestones glittering in the candlelight, and the back of his hand resting on the swell of Iris’s bosom.
The thought suddenly occurred to Wesley—had Frank had his hand there before? Had Frank touched Iris’s breasts before Wesley ever did? Was that why both Iris and Frank could act so calmly now—Frank because there was nothing new about having his hand there and Iris because she had allowed Frank to touch her before? Perhaps that day down at the river Iris thought nothing of letting Wesley see her breasts because she had already revealed them to his brother?
Still holding the necklace, Frank said to his father, “Here, take a look. See what your son is spending his money on.” Frank looked up at Wesley. “Or is it Dad’s money?”
Mr. Hayden rose from his chair and leaned forward. Now he too had his face directed toward Iris’s breasts. He tilted his head to one side, then the other, no doubt appraising the pendant and its setting, but he could as easily have been eyeing the young woman’s breasts.
“Lovely,” Mr. Hayden said.
Wesley felt ready to explode. In his rage he was ready to smash his fists into his father’s and brother’s faces, to knock them to the floor and kick them until they lost consciousness and couldn’t even flinch from his blows, until kicking them would be like kicking a sack of grain. Then Wesley would step down on his brother’s ha
nd, the hand that tenderly held Iris’s necklace, and with his boot heel he would grind away until Frank’s finger bones gave way, cracking against the floorboards.
Of course Wesley did nothing. The candlelight stirred from an unseen movement of air, and the shadows in the corners shifted shape. His father had leaned his palm on the table, and Wesley noticed the cross-hatching of black hair on his father’s muscular forearm. He heard Iris’s breathing, short and quick—was she unnerved because she was pinned down by these two men or did their attention excite her?
Wesley looked around for help—would his mother be coming back into the room soon? No, she didn’t know what was happening in her house. At some time in the last few minutes she had closed the swinging door separating the kitchen and the dining room. Did she close it, Wesley wondered, because she somehow knew what was happening and chose not to be a witness and therefore not responsible?
In desperation, Wesley stood and wedged his way between Iris and his father and brother.
Mr. Hayden and Frank both leaned away from Iris, although Frank took the necklace with him for an instant, only reluctantly letting it fall back on her chest.
Wesley grabbed the whiskey bottle as if that was what he was after all along. He poured himself a drink more generous than the one his father had given him.
“Generally you ask,” his father said, “before you help yourself to another man’s whiskey.”
Before he answered his father, Wesley took a drink of bourbon. But in his anger and haste he swallowed too much, and he had to struggle to keep from coughing. He squinted his eyes to prevent the sudden tears from spilling over.
“I guess I figured,” Wesley said as gravely as he could, “we shared everything in this house.”
Wesley’s father pushed himself back from the table as if he needed to get a better look at this son of his who stood over him drinking his whiskey.
“You either forgot some of your manners at that university,” Mr. Hayden said, “or I fouled up and let you go when you still had something left to learn.”