Montana 1948

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Larry Watson

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  The Milkweed National Fiction Prize

  Milkweed Editions

  Join Us

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Montana 1948

  National Bestseller • Milkweed National Fiction Prize • Mountains & Plains Bookseller Award • Friends of American Writers Award • Banta Award • Critics Choice Award • Shortlisted, IMPAC Dublin International Award • ALA/YALSA Best Books for Young Adults • New York Library Best Books for the Teen Age • ALA Booklist Editor’s Choice Award

  “A narrative that can be read purely for the pleasure of a good story. But Watson is after something smaller and larger—a quest for personal integrity within a community that doesn’t seem to want the truth; an understanding of the complexity of justice; a look at corruption behind the ideal of American white men as conquering heroes.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “The unspoken life of any small town, especially a small, hardscrabble western town, contains a motherlode of raw emotion, morally ambiguous and potentially devastating. Watson mines that vein with both unflinching honesty and complete respect, both for the dignity of the people and the implacability of the landscape.”

  Booklist (starred review)

  “Wonderful. . . . Be prepared to read this compact book in one sitting. Start at 10 P.M. By 11, you’re hooked. You finish in the wee hours, mesmerized by the fast-moving plot, the terse language, uncompromising characterization and insights into life. . . .”

  Baltimore Sun

  “Utterly mesmerizing. . . . There’s something eminently universal in Watson’s ponderings on the human condition, and it’s refracted through a nearly perfect eye for character, place and the rhythms of language. Fiction at its finest is sometimes hard to find; Montana 1948 amply fits the bill.”

  The Nation

  “Montana 1948 is a superbly rendered novel. The writing is clean, the characters finely drawn, the whole book deeply felt and honest. . . . It is a spare, unpretentious, but riveting book . . . with great sensitivity and subtlety.”

  Houston Chronicle

  “This short, swift novel . . . packs a wallop. . . . Watson sometimes evokes echoes of Ivan Doig and, of all authors, Harper Lee. . . . Quickly read (you’ll stay up till it’s done), this story will not be as quickly forgotten.”

  Milwaukee Journal

  “Taut, memorable. . . . In crisp, restrained prose, Watson indelibly portrays the moral dilemma of a family torn between justice and loyalty; by implication, he also illuminates some dark corners of our national history.”

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Watson’s story builds beautifully to its surprising yet inevitable conclusion. . . . Montana 1948 is a satisfying read.”

  Missoulian

  “Larry Watson handles each of his characters with considerable skill. . . . The memoir-like tone of Montana 1948 is one of its great merits and pleasures; and Larry Watson, who grew up in nearby North Dakota about the same time, knows his isolated Montana locale inside out, from the distinctive redolence of Bentrock’s bowling alley to exactly where the trout lie on the Knife River.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “Pithy, elegiac. . . . Montana 1948’s efficiently drawn characters, understated Main Street setting and disturbing situations are always convincing. And David Hayden’s narration seamlessly combines youthful and adult perspectives in an authentic and urgent voice.”

  Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A real page-turner. . . . Very thoughtful, very artistic, beautifully written. In short, it has everything. Watson’s portrayal of a small-town family at mid-century is zero to the bone. . . . And small-town life? Watson’s description recalls To Kill a Mockingbird. . . . So just go out and buy this book and read it.”

  Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “It is, first and foremost, a good story, told in a direct, seemingly artless prose. It’s a brilliant evocation of time and place. And it is the story of this country, of power and racism.”

  Detroit Free Press

  “A lean, gaunt narrative rich with implication. . . . A literary page-turner, morally complex and satisfying in its careful accumulation of detail and in its use of landscape to reveal character.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “A smooth, gripping story.”

  The Sacramento Bee

  “Straight-to-the-kill . . . [with] vivid, living characters who speak truly. The style of Montana 1948 is as thin, clear and crisp as a North Dakota wind.”

  Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. . . . The moral issues, and the consequences of following one’s conscience, are made painfully evident here. Watson is to be congratulated for the honesty of his writing and the purity of his prose. Highly recommended.”

  Library Journal

  “A novel whose power comes not just from fine writing, but from a fast-moving plot.”

  The Sunday Oregonian

  Also by Larry Watson

  In a Dark Time

  Leaving Dakota

  Orchard

  Laura

  White Crosses

  Justice

  For Susan

  Prologue

  FROM the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them. . . .

  A young Sioux woman lies on a bed in our house. She is feverish, delirious, and coughing so hard I am afraid she will die.

  My father kneels on the kitchen floor, begging my mother to help him. It’s a summer night and the room is brightly lit. Insects cluster around the light fixtures, and the pleading quality in my father’s voice reminds me of those insects—high-pitched, insistent, frantic. It is a sound I have never heard coming from him.

  My mother stands in our kitchen on a hot, windy day. The windows are open, and Mother’s lace curtains blow into the room. Mother holds my father’s Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and since she is a small, slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of its heavy length. Nevertheless, she has watched my father and other men often enough to know where the shells go, and she loads them until the gun will hold no more. Loading the gun is the difficult part. Once the shells are in, any fool can figure out how to fire it. Which she intends to do.

  There are others—the sound of breaking glass, the odor of rotting vegetables.... I offer these images in the order in which they occurred, yet the events that produced these sights and sounds are so rapid and tumbled together that any chronological sequence seems wrong. Imagine instead a movie screen divided into boxes and panels, each with its own scene, so that one moment can occur simultaneously with another, so no action has to fly off in time, so nothing happens before or after, only during. That’s the way these images coexist in my memory, like the Sioux picture calendars in which the whole year’s events are painted on the same buffalo hide, or like a tapestry with every scene woven into the same cloth, every moment on the same flat plane, the summer of 1948....

  Forty years ago. Two months ago my mother died. She made, as the expression goes, a good death. She came inside the house from working in her garden, and a heart attack, as sudden as a sneeze, felled her in the kitchen. My father’s death, ten years earlier, was less merciful. Cancer hollowed him out over the years until he could not stand up to a stiff wind. And Marie Little Soldier? Her fate contains too much of the story for me to give away.

  A stor
y that is now only mine to tell. I may not be the only witness left—there might still be someone in that small Montana town who remembers those events as well as I, but no one knew all three of these people better.

  And no one loved them more.

  One

  IN 1948 my father was serving his second term as sheriff of Mercer County, Montana. We lived in Bentrock, the county seat and the only town of any size in the region. In 1948 its population was less than two thousand people.

  Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana, and Bentrock is barely inside the state’s borders. Canada is only twelve miles away (though the nearest border crossing is thirty miles to the west), and North Dakota ten miles. Then, as now, Mercer County was both farm and ranch country, but with only a few exceptions, neither farms nor ranches were large or prosperous. On the western edge of the county and extending into two other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948 its roads were unpaved, and many of its shacks looked as though they would barely hold back a breeze. But all of northeastern Montana is hard country—the land is dry and sparse and the wind never stops blowing. The heat and thunderstorms in summer can be brutal, and the winters are legendary for the fierceness of their blizzards and the depths to which temperatures drop. (In one year we reached 106 degrees in July and 40 below in January.) For those of you who automatically think of Montana and snow-capped mountains in the same synapse, let me disabuse you. Mercer County is plains, flat as a tabletop on its western edge and riven with gullies, ravines, and low rocky hills to the east because of the work the Knife River has done over the centuries. The only trees that grow in that part of the country, aside from a few cottonwoods along the riverbank, have been planted by farmers and town dwellers. And they haven’t planted many. If the land had its way, nothing would grow taller than sagebrush and buffalo grass.

  The harshness of the land and the flattening effect of wind and endless sky probably accounted for the relative tranquility of Mercer County. Life was simply too hard, and so much of your attention and energy went into keeping not only yourself but also your family, your crops, and your cattle alive, that nothing was left over for raising hell or making trouble.

  And 1948 still felt like a new, blessedly peaceful era. The exuberance of the war’s end had faded but the relief had not. The mundane, workaday world was a gift that had not outworn its shine. Many of the men in Mercer County had spent the preceding years in combat. (But not my father; he was 4-F. When he was sixteen a horse kicked him, breaking his leg so severely that he walked with a permanent limp, and eventually a cane, his right leg V-ed in, his right knee perpetually pointing to the left.) When these men came back from war they wanted nothing more than to work their farms and ranches and to live quietly with their families. The county even had fewer hunters after the war than before.

  All of which made my father’s job a relatively easy one.

  Oh, he arrested the usual weekly drunks, mediated an occasional dispute about fence lines or stray cattle, calmed a few domestic disturbances, and warned the town’s teenagers about getting rowdy in Wood’s Cafe, but by and large being sheriff of Mercer County did not require great strength or courage. The ability to drive the county’s rural roads, often drifted over in the winter or washed out in the summer, was a much more necessary skill than being good with your fists or a gun. One of my father’s regular duties was chaperoning Saturday night dances in the county, but the fact that he often took along my mother (and sometimes me) shows how quiet those affairs—and his job—usually were.

  And that disappointed me at the time. As long as my father was going to be a sheriff, a position with so much potential for excitement, danger, and bravery, why couldn’t some of that promise be fulfilled? No matter how many wheat fields or cow pastures surrounded us, we were still Montanans, yet my father didn’t even look like a western sheriff. He wore a shirt and tie, as many of the men in town did, but at least they wore boots and Stetsons; my father wore brogans and a fedora. He had a gun but he never carried it, on duty or off. I knew because I checked, time and time again. When he left the house I ran to his dresser and the top drawer on the right side. And there it was, there it always was. Just as well. As far as I was concerned it was the wrong kind of gun for a sheriff. He should have had a nickel-plated Western Colt .45, something with some history and heft. Instead, my father had a small .32 automatic, Italian-made and no bigger than your palm. My father didn’t buy such a sorry gun; he confiscated it from a drunken transient in one of his first arrests. My father kept the gun but in fair exchange bought the man a bus ticket to Billings, where he had family.

  The gun was scratched and nicked and had a faint blush of rust along the barrel. The original grips were gone and had been replaced by two cut-to-fit rectangles of Masonite. Every time I came across the gun it was unloaded, its clip full of the short, fat .32 cartridges lying nearby in the same drawer. The pistol slopped about in a thick, stiff leather strap-and-snap holster meant for a larger gun and a revolver at that. Since it looked more like a toy than the western-style cap guns that had been my toys, I wasn’t even tempted to take my father’s gun out for play, though I had the feeling I could have kept it for weeks and my father wouldn’t have missed it.

  You’re wondering if perhaps my father kept his official side arm in his county jail office. If he did, I never saw it there, and I wandered in and out of that jail office as often as I did the rooms of our home. I saw the rack of rifles and shotguns in their locked case (and two sets of handcuffs looped and dangling from the barrel of a Winchester 94) but no pistols.

  We lived, you see, in a white two-story frame house right across the street from the courthouse, and the jail and my father’s office were in the basement of the courthouse. On occasion I waited for my father to release a prisoner (usually a hung-over drunk jailed so he wouldn’t hurt himself) or finish tacking up a wanted poster before I showed him my report card or asked him for a dime for a movie. No, if there had been a six-shooter or a Stetson or a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots around for my father to put on with his badge, I would have known about it. (I must correct that previous statement: my father never wore his badge; he carried it in his suit-coat or shirt pocket. I always believed that this was part of his self-effacing way, and that may be so. But now that the badge is mine—my mother sent it to me after my father’s death and I have it pinned to my bulletin board—I realize there was another reason, connected not to character but to practicality. The badge, not star-shaped but a shield, is heavy and its pin as thick as a pencil’s lead. My father would have been poking fair-sized holes in his suits and shirts, and the badge’s weight could have torn fabric.)

  If my father didn’t fit my ideal of what he should be in his occupation, he certainly didn’t fit my mother’s either. She wanted him to be an attorney. Which he was; he graduated from the University of North Dakota Law School, and he was a member of both the North Dakota and Montana State Bar Associations. My mother fervently believed that my father—indeed, all of us—would be happier if he practiced law and if we did not live in Montana, and her reasons had little to do with the potentially hazardous nature of a sheriff’s work compared to an attorney’s or the pay scale along which those professions positioned themselves. She wanted my father to find another job and for us to move because only doing those things would, she felt, allow my father to be fully himself. Her contention is one I must explain.

  My father was born in 1910 in Mercer County and grew up on a large cattle ranch outside Bentrock. In the early twenties my father, with his parents and his brother, moved to Bentrock, where my grandfather began his first of many terms as county sheriff. My grandfather kept the ranch and had it worked by hands while he was in office, and since Mercer County had a statute that a sheriff could serve only three consecutive terms, he was able to return to the ranch every six years. When Grandfather’s terms expired, his deputy, Len McAuley, would serve a term
; after Len’s term, Grandfather would run again, and this way they kept the office in the proper hands. During his terms as sheriff, Grandfather brought his family into town to live in a small apartment above a bar (he owned the bar and building the apartment was in). My father often spoke of how difficult it was for him to move from the ranch and its open expanses to the tiny apartment that always smelled of stale beer and cigar smoke. He spent every weekend and every summer at the ranch and when he had to return to the apartment where he and his brother slept on a fold-out couch, he felt like crying.

  (And now that it is too late to ask anyone, I wonder: Why did my grandfather first run for sheriff? This one I can probably answer, from my memory and knowledge of him. He wanted, he needed, power. He was a dominating man who drew sustenance and strength from controlling others. To him, being the law’s agent probably seemed part of a natural progression—first you master the land and its beasts, then you regulate the behavior of men and women.)

  When my grandfather finally decided to retire for good and return to the ranch, he found a way to do this yet retain his power in the county: he turned the post over to my father. Yes, the sheriff of Mercer County was elected, but such was my grandfather’s popularity and influence—and the weight of the Hayden name—that it was enough for my grandfather to say, as he had earlier said of his deputy, now I want my son to have this job.

  So my father set aside his fledgling law practice and took the badge my grandfather offered. It would never have occurred to my father to refuse.

  There you have it, then, a portrait of my father in those years, a man who tried to turn two ways at once—toward my grandfather, who wanted his son to continue the Hayden rule of Mercer County, and toward my mother, who wanted her husband to be merely himself and not a Hayden. That was not possible as long as we lived in my grandfather’s domain.