Sundown, Yellow Moon

  But read on he did. He learned that the correspondence had flowed in more than one direction; Alma wrote as often to Monty Burnham as he wrote to her. Ray couldn’t see the texts of any of her letters or how she signed them, but he didn’t have to. It was obvious that she felt for Monty what he felt for her, and their rekindled relationship blazed hotter than before because now it was fed not only by the incendiary passions left over from youth but also by the slower-burning fuel of adult love. Ray deduced too that they had done more than adore each other from a distance. Plainly, they had been physically intimate, as Monty wrote that “I live for the time when once again I can hold your naked body in my arms, when I can. . . .”

  As you can see, I was already practicing the craft of the novelist I would someday be, though less with language than with imagination—speculating on what lives other than my own were like, and on what forces underlay people’s behavior. But in spite of what educators would have us believe about the creative powers of the young, reality hems in their minds more than it does adults’. At sixteen I couldn’t imagine what I could at twenty-six, thirty-six, forty-six, fifty-six . . . so I couldn’t really envision a world in which Alma Stoddard, clothed or otherwise, would lie in anyone’s arms or a world in which anyone would want her to. The problem was not just that she was the mother of my best friend. I could, after all, summon up a few lascivious thoughts about Mrs. Crisp, the flaxen-haired, tanned, curvaceous mother of my friend Jeff, whereas Alma Stoddard had the appearance of a woman who tried to de-emphasize not only her beauty but her entire physical being. She didn’t wear much makeup. She wore her hair in a tightly bobby-pinned, unflattering, unvarying style. Her clothes were dark, shapeless, and severe. A time would come when I would realize that ardor and austerity can coexist, but I couldn’t get there when I was sixteen, not with Alma Stoddard.

  Nevertheless, though I had nothing in the way of evidence to support it, I wasn’t about to relinquish the idea that the relationship that had existed in the past between Monty Burnham and Alma Stoddard must have had something to do with the present, and I couldn’t figure out why my mother brushed aside the possibility so quickly. Who knows—maybe if I had gone on to serve in the military someday I would have been similarly vexed by my father’s unwillingness to consider Raymond Stoddard and Monty Burnham’s war experiences as the early stimulus for Raymond’s murderous deed.

  Years later, however, it was my mother’s behavior that I mentioned to my sister. The occasion was Christmas, and in the past she had always traveled to Bismarck for the holiday. Our mother, however, had died months earlier, and since my unmarried sister had no other family, she spent the holiday with my wife, daughters, and me in Montana.

  It was late on Christmas Eve, and she and I were the only ones awake in the house. We were sitting in the living room, in front of a fire’s dying embers, and we each had a glass of calvados, her Christmas gift to me, purchased on a summer trip to Normandy. We were reminiscing, as brothers and sisters do, but unlike other siblings, we were working from a script. No one who lived in 1961 within the radius of that small circle that took in the capitol building on its eastern edge and Keogh Street on the western margin could talk about the past without eventually, inevitably, discussing the Stoddard-Burnham tragedy.

  I had just expressed my long-ago puzzlement about why our mother had found the onetime relationship between Alma Stoddard and Monty Burnham to be of so little interest, and before I finished the thought, my sister began to laugh softly.

  Didn’t I know? Our mother was engaged to be married when she was still a teenager, and not to the man who would be our father. All I could do was shake my head.

  Our mother grew up in a small town in western Minnesota, not far from Fargo, North Dakota, and her boyfriend, a year older, lived on a farm. They dated throughout high school, and on the day of his graduation he asked her to marry him the following year when she received her diploma. Our mother certainly had opportunities aplenty to observe the harsh realities of farm life, but the notion of an isolated, rural existence held a kind of romantic, bucolic appeal for her. And she loved the young man.

  “Well, what happened?” I asked. “What made us a lawyer’s kids and not a farmer’s?”

  “He was helping out on someone’s farm, and he was in an accident. A tractor flipped over on him. His legs were crushed, and he couldn’t stand the thought of being a cripple, so he broke off the engagement. Or tried to. Mom, being Mom, said that his condition didn’t matter to her, that they’d find some way to make a life together. She could keep her job at the drugstore where she’d been working since she was fourteen. She’d support them.”

  “Sounds like love, all right.”

  “On Mom’s part. But he ended up marrying another girl, a girl who lived on that farm where he’d been working when he had his accident. So I guess their relationship was a variant of the farmer’s daughter joke. And since she was pregnant, apparently he wasn’t completely disabled. But Mom really took it hard. She said she wasn’t sure how she’d be able to go on.”

  I’m sure my sister believes to this day that I set down my drink and walked from the room because I was upset by the news that our mother had once had a youthful romance that fractured her heart.

  But that was not it, not at all.

  Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert one’s gaze, advice I’ve tried to take to heart as a writer and as someone who wants to understand the human mysteries. Even without knowing any specifics, I had readily acknowledged that my parents had lives before they became spouses and parents, and I never held them to any standard that lay beyond the obligations of those roles. Besides, I once lived on Keogh Street—where was there a better school to learn the lesson that the life of every man and woman was so much more than it appeared to be?

  No, disclosures about my mother’s and father’s pasts weren’t likely to distress me. The real reason I couldn’t remain in my sister’s company wasn’t the story she told, but what in hearing it I learned about myself. How could I have been such a fool as to think that our mother dismissed the relationship between Alma Stoddard and Monty Burnham because it was a product of their teen years? She rushed past it because she knew how deep and durable a long-ago love could be.

  The next day—Christmas day—I told my sister I was sorry I’d walked out on her, and I let her think that the subject had simply been more than I could handle.

  She waved away my apology. “I knew you hadn’t heard the story.”

  “Did Dad know about it?”

  “He knew she once went with a boy she was serious about. He didn’t know they were engaged.”

  I wanted to defend my father, to say that knowledge of his wife’s past wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference in his life, but I couldn’t, not with complete confidence. The events of January 1961 kept me from that certainty as well. “So that was a secret best kept from the males in the family?”

  My sister shrugged. Every sibling wants to believe that he or she is favored in some way, and what could confer that status better than to be taken into a parent’s confidence? Maybe my sister held on to that story because our mother had asked her to tell it to no one. Or perhaps my sister hoarded it for a small measure of revenge because years before I had been included in some of our parents’ conversations while she was excluded. Whatever the reason, I was willing to let my sister have her satisfaction. Moreover, though what I learned about my mother forced a revision of who I had always believed she was, it did nothing to any theory I held about why Raymond Stoddard did what he did.

  I was worried about riding to school with Gene on that first day when he would be permitted to drive the family car, and my worry was quite specific. I feared that if people saw us getting out of the same car, it would only contribute to their confusion about us.

  Because we grew up together on Keogh Street and were so often in each other’s company and because we were similar in so many respects, Gene and I were frequently mist
aken for the other. We were both brown-haired, slender, and slightly taller than average. For the second consecutive winter we dressed in identical dark green overcoats. We were both serious about our studies, reasonably well behaved, and responsible. We were both shy and comfortable with silence. We were among the youngest of our class, our birthdays one month apart to the day—his October 2 and mine November 2. Indeed, if the world were intent on telling us apart, it had little to go on. Eye color—his brown, mine blue and peering out from behind glasses. He played the clarinet; I ran on the cross-country team. He had a girlfriend; I did not. I had tonsils; he did not. I had a father; he did not.

  As a teenager I was, like many adolescents, frustrated by my anonymity. I wanted, I thought, to be known, to have a reputation, an identity. I wasn’t a hood, a rebel, a varsity athlete, a class officer; I wasn’t popular with girls or watched by the police. I wasn’t tough or talented. But suddenly I saw that fame—or notoriety—could attach itself to you and yet have nothing to do with you. Gene Stoddard had been, like me, simply one of the indistinguishable mass of nice guys until, overnight, he became Bismarck’s most famous teenager. And he would have given anything to be obscure again. Or, put another way, to be mistaken for me. If I could have, I would have worn a sign around my neck: I AM NOT GENE STODDARD.

  As it turned out, Gene didn’t drive to school, not that morning. Overnight the temperature dropped to almost thirty below, cold even by North Dakota standards. The Stoddards, no doubt because they couldn’t bring themselves to enter their garage, had left their Ford parked outside, and in the morning it wouldn’t start. My father ended up taking Gene and me to school, and for some reason it seemed to me a sufficient differentiation of our identities that we climbed from a car belonging to our family.

  After delivering us to school, my father returned to Keogh Street and used his jumper cables to get the Stoddards’ car running again. Then he told Alma Stoddard that while he could understand why she might have difficulty going into the garage, if that was the case, then she should consider having a headbolt heater installed in the Ford and plugging it in on winter nights.

  I’m not sure if it was precisely during Raymond Stoddard’s funeral that I fell in love with Marie Ryan, but by the end of the day it was a fait accompli.

  The process began when she telephoned me the night before. No, no, it started before that. It started with her looks. Marie Ryan was a beautiful girl, and if her beauty occasionally passed unnoticed, it was because she herself paid so little attention to it. She had large, almond-shaped green eyes with a slight oriental tilt, high cheekbones, a strong jaw, creamy skin, deep dimples, and perfectly formed lips. Without the aid of orthodontia, her teeth were flawlessly straight. Although she was only fifteen, she had a woman’s lush body on her compact frame. To save her from classical beauty’s boring predictability, she had a chicken pox scar on her forehead, and her nose was a little wide, causing a series of diagonal wrinkles to break out along the bridge when she laughed. Consistent with her lack of vanity, she dressed plainly, almost carelessly, and wore her long lustrous reddish-brown hair in the simplest of styles.

  But no amount of physical description—at least none within my powers to offer—will do justice to what Marie Ryan was. Today the term is “hot.” Then, she was a babe, a honey, sexy, stacked. In 1961 we may not have known about pheromones, but we still trailed helplessly after someone who secreted them.

  As incomparable as Marie Ryan was in appearance, she was also unique in character. She was intelligent, outspoken, and unconventional. Indeed, it was this last quality that enabled her to pick up the telephone and dial my number. In 1961 teenage girls simply did not call boys. Furthermore, the reason for Marie Ryan’s call was another example of her ungovernable nature. Her parents had forbidden her to attend Raymond Stoddard’s funeral, and she wanted to know if she could go with me. Without hesitation I said yes, and as evidence of how pleased I was at the prospect of being in her company, I even allowed myself to think, fleetingly, pathetically, inappropriately, that it was almost as if she and I would be on a date.

  On the day of the funeral my parents needed to arrive early at First Lutheran Church. My mother, with a few of the women who belonged to the same Women’s League as Alma Stoddard, would be serving coffee, sandwiches, and cookies in the church basement after the funeral, so she had to begin preparations an hour before the service. My father wanted to get to the church early because Alma Stoddard had asked him to be a pallbearer, and he had agreed. I dropped my parents off at First Lutheran, so when it was time to go to the actual services, I had the car to myself, and, according to our arrangements, I picked Marie Ryan up on a street corner between the high school and the church.

  When she climbed into the car, I asked her if she had been excused from school.

  She shook her head. “I just left.”

  “So your afternoon classes—those will be unexcused absences?”

  Marie shrugged. “I’ll tell Mr. Fedder where I was. He’ll understand.” Vernon Fedder was the school’s vice principal and in charge of attendance and discipline.

  “What if they call your house?”

  “They almost never call if you miss in the afternoon,” she said, and then turned to look at me. “Don’t you want me to go with you? Is that what this is all about? Because if you don’t, you can let me out and I’ll walk. But I’m going to that funeral. I told Gene I’d be there, and I will be.” And she was loyal. How could I have forgotten to mention that? Loving and loyal.

  “I just don’t want you to get into trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t share my concerns about the possible consequences of her attending the funeral, especially since in doing so she was defying her parents and breaking school rules. (No one could be excused from school without a written note from a parent, and few parents, and certainly not Marie’s, wanted their children at a service for a murderer.) Once we arrived at the church, however, I understood.

  Together Marie and I walked up the steps and entered the church, but then she left my side and hurried up the aisle to where Gene sat with his mother and his sister. Marie slid into the pew right behind the Stoddards, leaned forward, and rested her hand on Gene’s shoulder.

  I trailed after Marie and seated myself next to her. My mother, coming up from the basement, soon appeared at the side door at the front of the church, and she also entered our pew. Before my mother sat down next to Marie, she bent over Alma Stoddard, whispered something to her and, through the net of Alma’s veil, kissed the new widow on the cheek. My father sat a few rows back with the other pallbearers.

  The service was sparsely attended. I could count the mourners—no more than twenty—and most of them I could identify as well from our neighborhood. Mrs. Holan and Mrs. Gustafson (but without their husbands); Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks from the newer brick house on Divide Avenue across from us; Judy Neville, Marcia Stoddard’s best friend in junior high and high school. There was also a tall balding man with a bulbous nose whom I took to be Raymond Stoddard’s coworker or perhaps even his boss; Earl Shumate, Alma’s brother, and her sister. Raymond Stoddard also had a brother and a sister but neither was present. Among the few faces I wasn’t sure of were two men I believed had been at our house on the evening of the day of the murder. One I thought was a newspaper reporter, the other a police officer or sheriff’s deputy, and unless they were both going to act as pallbearers, it looked as though Raymond Stoddard would come up short of the traditional six.

  The police or the press couldn’t have been present for any reason but to satisfy their own curiosity. There was no crime that required further investigation, and the media had quickly run out of things to write and say after the facts had been reported and Monty Burnham’s life had been celebrated.

  Indeed, the assassination seemed especially troublesome to journalists. They wanted to continue to write and report on the incident—interest remained high, people cou
ldn’t stop talking about it, and, best or worst of all, depending on your point of view, the murder had brought attention to Bismarck and North Dakota. But what were the media supposed to say? They had chronicled Burnham’s life, emphasizing the small-town-boy-rises-to-prominence story line; offered testimonials from friends, colleagues, and constituents; and played over and over the film clip (or displayed an accompanying still photograph) of Senator Burnham heartily welcoming presidential hopeful Richard Nixon to the state in the campaign summer of 1960. Burnham personally placed a Sioux headdress on Nixon’s head and handed the candidate a bag of dried buffalo chips “so he’d have something to fling at the Democrats when they started throwing their bull . . . manure his way.” Nixon was a good sport, but you could tell he wanted to shed the headdress at the earliest opportunity. Another media favorite was a photograph of Monty Burnham in midair. As a high school senior he took first place in the broad jump in the state track meet, and the picture caught him during one of his prize-winning leaps, arms and legs akimbo, and his mouth wide open as if he were shouting the commentary to accompany his own feat.

  What seemed to frustrate the media was that they could not close off Monty Burnham’s life with a theme. If only they could have written or said that Monty Burnham had died for a cause, but that plainly wasn’t so, and it wasn’t possible to make someone a martyr to senselessness or enigmatic violence. (In their efforts to make Monty Burnham one of North Dakota’s distinctive citizens, they might have pointed out how rare he truly was: In 1960 there had been only six murder victims out of the state’s population of 640,000. I looked up that statistic quite recently.) Journalists were no different from the people for whom they printed their newspapers and magazines, or broadcast their reports and features. What else was to be done about an event obviously momentous but to which the response ultimately seemed to be little more than a throwing up of hands?

  Raymond Stoddard’s life and behavior might have presented a potentially greater problem, but since he wasn’t famous, it was much easier to summarize him with relatively few words. In this regard, Pastor Lundgren had the advantage. He could follow the standard funeral service, take refuge in the platitudes of religion and scripture, and never refer to Raymond Stoddard in any but the most general outlines. And I don’t mean to mock what the minister said. Alma, Marcia, and Gene Stoddard and most of those in attendance probably took comfort in his words. I know I did. It would be a few years before I lost my religion, and I was relieved to hear that Raymond Stoddard, no matter that he had committed murder, was not disqualified from entry into heaven.