I was running back across the street when the shotgun boomed, and its blast was so loud, so wrongly out of place along that quiet, tree-lined, middle-class American street that the air itself seemed instantly altered, turned foul, the stuff of rank, black chemical smoke and not the sweet, clean oxygen we daily breathed.
I was panting hard anyway, and when the shotgun fired, my heart jumped faster and I was suddenly breathless, the air blown so far out of me I couldn’t get it back for a second and I wondered—but didn’t really—have I been shot?
Yet I kept moving and when I burst through the front door I let the screen door slam behind me and to my distorted hearing—both sharpened and dulled by the shotgun blast—it sounded like another gunshot.
My mother had fired out the kitchen window but from a few paces back so that the buckshot had a chance to spread slightly and not only tear a ragged hole in the screen but to pull in the path of its explosion the kitchen curtain.
I knew from where she stood, from the angle of the shotgun’s barrel, and from where the buckshot flew that she hadn’t shot anybody. She had simply fired in warning or general panic or both.
She raised the shotgun, pumped another shell into the chamber—the ejected empty shell skittered across the linoleum—as if she were as practiced with that weapon as she was with her typewriter.
She stepped to the window and shouted, “You get away from there! Get away from the house—do you hear me!”
I came up behind her—did she even know I was there?—and I planned on wresting the shotgun from her. The thought of my mother shooting someone seemed the worst possibility the moment held. It was not that I preferred being overrun and beaten or killed by those men, but they were still out there. My mother was there in front of me, now trying clumsily to poke the shotgun barrel out through the hole in the screen, and I wanted to protect her not only from Dale Paris but from herself and the life she’d have to lead with someone’s blood on her hands.
But before I could stop her I saw something outside that made it unnecessary.
Len McCauley was stepping through the hedge that divided our property from his. He was hatless, barefoot, and his dungarees were riding low on his hips. His shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, flapping open in the wind. Even at a glance and from a distance, I could see how rib-skinny and pale his torso was, but there were ropey strands of sinew along his arms. Then I saw something that made the issue of muscle irrelevant.
In his right hand, held close to his side against his thigh, Len carried a gun, a long-barreled revolver, probably a .44 or .45.
Once he was in our yard Len broke into a long-legged lope. When he was about thirty feet from our house he dropped to one knee, brought his pistol up to eye level, rested the barrel in the crook of one arm, and aimed in the direction of the four men, who must have been by the back door leading to our basement. He said something quick and sharp. It sounded like “right there.”
Was Len drunk? I don’t know why I thought that. His shooting position may have been faintly comical—nothing like the cowboys in the movies—but his aim and his eye looked rock-steady. Maybe it was simply the sight of that skinny bird-chested old man suddenly appearing in our backyard with a gun in his hand, ready to save us from marauders. And since there was nothing in the realm of logic or rational thought to explain his being there, the illogic of drunkenness seemed as ready as anything.
Len gestured with his gun, indicating that the men were to move away from the house.
As they came into view, walking slowly and watching Len closely, Len stood up. He kept his pistol aimed—right at Dale Paris’s head, or so it looked. One of the men had his hands up. Len said something to them again, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, all four men began to walk quickly back toward the truck.
Len turned toward the house and the window with the blown-out screen. “Okay in there?” he called.
“We’re okay!” my mother shouted back. Then she was hurrying toward the door, still toting the shotgun. She banged open the screen door as if she couldn’t wait to get outside. I followed her, wondering why we were leaving the house now that it was safe.
The sun was shining, an unremarkable fact except that I felt, standing on our lawn, as if I had just returned from a strange, hostile country where there was neither sunlight nor soft grass. At the end of the yard the black truck and its four riders sped off, sending up a spray of gravel and raising dust we could taste even from our distance.
My mother laid the shotgun down gently and ran to Len McAuley’s side. Because you do not leave a shotgun lying in the grass, even hours after the dew has burned off, I picked up the gun. It smelled of gun oil and cordite.
“Oh, Len,” she said and put her arms around him. He did not return her embrace, but he raised one arm to keep his gun hand free.
My mother noticed me and, still clinging to Len, reached out to me. “David,” she said. I felt as though she were asking me to step over and become part of a new family consisting of Len our protector, my mother, and me. I remained in place, holding my father’s shotgun.
At that moment, with those thoughts of betrayal and loyalty running through my brain, my father came around the side of the house. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on? Maxine said. . . .”
My father was sweating, red-faced, and out of breath. With his bad leg, even walking fast exerted him. His hands were empty, and in our little armed enclave that made him seem out of place, almost naked.
Len took a step back, and my mother left his side to run to my father’s arms.
When he had held her long enough to reassure both of them that everything would be all right, my father asked again, this time to Len: “What happened here?”
Len gestured toward the yard’s end, where the truck had been parked. “Dale Paris. Mickey Krebs. Couple other men who work for your pa. They were here, looking to bust your brother loose, I suppose.” He nodded at my mother. “She gave ‘em a warning with a load of buckshot. Sent ‘em packing.”
My mother said, “If Len hadn’t come....”
“Any of them hurt?” asked my father.
Len shook his head.
“David,” said my father. “Are you all right? I hear you were running all over trying to find me. What do you think about all this foolishness?”
“Where were you?” I asked.
“I was up in the third-floor court room. Sitting in there with Ollie Young Bear. He’s been doing some work on this. Says he’s found some women from the reservation, two anyway, who are willing to come forward and testify against Frank.”
“Which charge?” asked Len.
“Assault. Sexual. That’s the best we can do. Nothing’s going to happen with Marie. No chance of an indictment there. That’s long gone.”
“You better move on it. Some sharp lawyer’s going to raise hell about you keeping him locked up like this.”
Since the moment this scandal had broken only a few days earlier, this was the most explicit anyone had been in my presence. My father actually said the word “sexual” in front of me!
My father nodded at Len. “It’s moving ahead right now. We’ll have him up for an arraignment later today or tomorrow.”
Without taking his attention from Len, my father walked over to me and gently, wordlessly, took his shotgun from me.
Len looked down at his bare toes in the grass. “How about your pop? He’s not going to stand for any of it. Today was just his first try. He’ll come at you again.”
“I’m going to see about heading that off.”
As those two men coolly discussed their plans for prosecuting Uncle Frank and protecting our home, my mother gestured to me. “Let’s go inside, David.” Len and my father stayed behind, as I knew they would.
Back in the kitchen my mother fussed with the window screen, pulling and twisting a few of the loose wire strands as if the hole could somehow be mended the way a small tear in a sweater could be rewoven. She finally gave up and closed the
inside window.
Moments later my father and Len came in. My father leaned his shotgun in the corner just as he did when he returned from hunting.
“From now on,” he said, “if I can’t be here, Len will be. He’s not going to the office; he’s going to stay right here. He’ll keep an eye on things. And I’m calling Dad today. Tell him no more stunts like this. This is my family. My house.”
As my father spoke, the words bouncing out of him like something falling from an overloaded truck, what struck me was that he seemed to be apologizing. For what? I wondered. For not being there when those men came? How could he have known? He was at work, where he was supposed to be. For being Frank Hayden’s brother? Julian Hayden’s son? Even then I knew we were not responsible for the circumstances of our birth or the sins of our fathers. For locking up Frank in our basement? For living in Montana? For not working as an attorney in Minneapolis?
Perhaps my mother also heard that apologetic tone in his voice, because she was looking at him queerly.
“No, Wes,” she said. Her voice was strangely mild. “You don’t have to do any of that.” She sat down slowly, carefully, as though she wasn’t quite sure she could trust the chair to hold her weight. “You can simply open that door.” She pointed to the basement door. “Go ahead. Let him go. That will take care of everything.”
My father stared at her, waiting for her to say something more—to say she was joking or exaggerating to make a point. But when no other word was forthcoming, he said, “You don’t mean that, Gail.”
“Oh, yes I do. Yes. I most certainly do mean that. Let him go. Get him out of here. Then I won’t have to walk around my own house thinking I hear him breathing down there. I won’t have to worry about him breaking out—bursting into the kitchen like, like ... like I don’t know what. A crazy man! And I won’t have to worry about strange men breaking in to break him out. I won’t worry about my son, whether I should keep him close to me or as far from the house as possible. I won’t wonder when men come threatening if David should pick up the gun to drive them away or if I should. But at least I know I can shoot the thing now. So, yes. I mean it. Let him go. Let him do whatever he wants to do to whomever he wants. I don’t care anymore. I just want my house back. I want my family safe.”
By the time my mother finished, tears were sliding down her face.
My father didn’t speak for a long time, and when he did, it was to Len. “What do you think?”
Len looked embarrassed, as if he had intruded on a husband and wife’s private quarrel. But since my father asked, there was no getting out. He sniffed and said, “She’s right. Might as well let him go. Even on the lesser charge you’re going to have a hell of a time getting a conviction. In this town. With your pop. With who’s going to be testifying against him.”
“At least the word will be out on him,” said my father. “Maybe it will stop.”
Len said, “I don’t think you have to worry. He’s got the message.”
During this conversation two things struck me: first, that the man they were discussing (and whose crimes they kept alluding to but now did not specifically mention in deference to my supposed innocence) was not some outsider, some Kalispell cowboy or Billings tough who got in trouble up here in my father’s jurisdiction, but was my uncle, a man who had only recently stopped lifting me and spinning me around in a dizzying whirl of affection and roughhouse play when he came to the house. He was Uncle Frank, who tried to teach me how to throw a curve ball, who gave me expensive gifts for my birthday and Christmas, who made bad jokes all through my grandmother’s Thanksgiving and Easter dinners, who every year went up to Canada to buy the best fireworks for our Fourth of July celebration. Who was married to Aunt Gloria, beautiful Aunt Gloria. Who murdered my beloved Marie. And I couldn’t make all those facts match the last one. Just as I couldn’t get my mind to wrap itself around the knowledge that he was in our basement, and when I tried to think of that the floor beneath my feet suddenly seemed less solid, like those sewer grates you daringly walked over that gave a momentary glimpse of the dark, flowing depths always waiting below.
Len said, “Your pop’s going to keep coming. You have to know that. It’s not going to be safe around here. She’s right to worry.”
My father stared at the floor so intently it seemed as though he too was concentrating on his brother below.
“You’ve got an election coming up,” continued Len. “You’ve got to think about how something like this is going to play with the voters. This county is going to get split three ways by this. Some will stand by you. Not many. There’s the reservation. The Indians in town. Your pa. And he’ll call in every marker he can. This county is going to get torn up over this. This will make Mercer County look like the Indian wars and the range wars combined. We’ll be a long time coming back from this.”
My father kept looking down. “Did my father talk to you, Len?”
“When?”
“Recently. The last day or so.”
Len paused for a long time. “He talked to me.”
“What did he want? What did he ask you to do?”
“You don’t want to know that, Wes. Your pa’s wild right now. He’s not thinking right. He doesn’t know what to do.”
“Did he ask you to come over here, Len? Did he ask you to get Frank out yourself? Did he tell you how to do it?”
Len shook his head. “Don’t ask me any more. Your pa talked to me. Let’s leave it at that.”
“And you turned him down. Or you wouldn’t be standing here right now.”
Len patted his head awkwardly as if he were checking to see if he had his hat on. “You’re the sheriff. I’m the deputy.”
I thought I saw a trace of a smile flicker across my father’s lips. When he finally lifted his head he looked briefly at my mother, at Len, then settled his gaze on me.
I was still child enough to believe, as children do, that when adults were engaged in adult business children became invisible. That was why it was so unsettling to have my father staring at me. What did he want from me? Was he waiting for me to express an opinion—I was the only one in the room who hadn’t. Didn’t he know—I was a child and ineligible to vote? How dare he bring me in on this now—I wasn’t even supposed to know the facts of the case!
Young people are supposed to be the impatient ones, but in most circumstances they can outwait their elders. The young are more practiced; time passes slower for them and they are constantly filling their hours, days, months, and years with waiting—for birthdays, for Christmas, for Father to return, for summer to arrive, for graduation, for the rain to stop, for the minister to stop talking, for girls to stop saying, “Not now, not yet; wait.” No, when it comes to patience, even the enforced variety, the young are the real masters.
So it was easy to outwait my father. I simply put on my best blank face and kept its dim light beaming toward him. Soon he turned away and, without saying another word to any of us, crossed the room, opened the door to the basement, and descended the stairs.
When the thudding of his steps stopped, my mother calmly asked Len, “How do you think Frank did it?”
“Marie?”
She nodded.
“Wouldn’t be hard, I suppose. A doctor. He’s probably got the means right there in his bag. Pills. A shot of something or other. Maybe he put a pillow over her face. Weak as she was, it wouldn’t have taken much.”
Talk as brutal as this I would have thought would upset my mother, but she didn’t flinch. Neither did she shoo me from the room so I would be spared this talk. She was too tired to care anymore. This was the day she had fired a gun in the direction of four men. From her own kitchen. There was no point in worrying about what children heard. There was no point in protecting them from words when evil and danger were so near at hand.
She said, “There should have been an autopsy.”
Len shrugged. “Someone’s got to ask for one. And someone’s got to have a reason for asking.”
&nb
sp; “But at least we’d know.”
“And then what? If you know something for sure, then you’ve got to act on that knowing. It’s better this way. You know what you want Wes to do. It’ll be a lot easier for him if he doesn’t know too much.”
“Yes,” my mother replied, chastened.
It bothered me that Len and my mother could talk so easily, freely, almost intimately. That ease seemed to depend on my father’s absence. He left the room, and they relaxed and talked about what was really on their minds.
Len went to the sink for a glass of water.
“I’m sorry,” said my mother. “Would you like some coffee? Or—I think we have something ... stronger.”
Len waved his hand. “Got to go. Daisy must be wondering what’s going on.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t come over.”
“That shotgun blast. That’s what’s keeping her away.”
Len tapped the kitchen window right over the blown-out screen. “Might as well just put up the storm window. August. It’s not that long until it’s time anyway.” He finished his water, drinking it all as if it was really thirst and not nerves that brought it to his lips.
He turned to me. “How about it, David. There’s a project for you. Take that screen down and put up the storm window for your mother.”
“Right now?” I asked.
“Not now, David,” answered my mother.
“I better get moving,” Len said again. On his way to the door he plucked his gun from the top of the refrigerator as casually as if he were picking up a garden tool. “Just holler if you need me.” He glanced at the basement door. “I don’t think you’re going to have any more trouble. Not now.”
He left, and my mother and I remained in the kitchen, waiting for my father and Uncle Frank to come up the stairs. Neither of us spoke, but the room’s silence was not the usual kind. It felt stunned, still vibrating, the way the air feels in the silence immediately following a gunshot. And something else: I knew that all around us—in the houses up and down the block—human ears were tuned to our frequency, listening to our silence and wondering, was that a shotgun? Where did it come from? Did it come from the Haydens?