style="font-size:15px;"> 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 The original grips were gone and had been replaced by two cut-to-fit rectangles of Masonite.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.
There was another reason my mother wanted us to leave Montana for a tamer region and that reason had to do with me. My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.
My mother was concerned about my values, but since often the most ordinary worldly matters assumed for her a spiritual significance, she saw the problem as centered on my mortal being. (My mother was a Lutheran of boundless devotion; my father was irreligious, a path I eventually found and followed after wandering through those early years of church, Sunday School, and catechism classes.)
The problem was that I wanted to grow up wild. Oh, not in the sense that wildness is used today. I wasn’t particularly interested, on the cusp of adolesence, in driving fast cars (pickup trucks, more accurately in Bentrock), smoking (Sir Walter Raleigh roll-your-owns the cigarette of choice), drinking (home-brewed beer was so prevalent in Mercer County that boys always had access to it), or chasing girls (for some reason, the girls from farms—not town or ranch or reservation—had the reputation of being easy). In fact, I came late to these temptations.
Wildness meant, to me, getting out of town and into the country. Even our small town—really, in 1948 still a frontier town in many respects—tasted to me like pabulum. It stood for social order, good manners, the chimed schedules of school and church. It was a world meant for storekeepers, teachers, ministers, for the rule-makers, the order-givers, the law-enforcers. And in my case, my parents were not only figurative agents of the law, my father was the law.
In addition to my discomfort with the strictures of town (a common and natural reaction for a boy), I had another problem that seemed like mine alone. I never felt as though I understood how town life worked. I thought there was some secret knowledge about living comfortably and unselfconsciously in a community, and I was sure I did not possess that knowledge. When the lessons were taught about how to feel confident and at ease in school, in stores, in cafes, with other children or adults, I must have been absent. It was not as though I behaved badly in these situations but rather that I was never sure how to behave. I was always looking sneakily at others for the key to correct conduct. And instead of attributing this social distress to my own shy and too-serious character I simply blamed life in town and sought to escape it as often as I could.
And that was an easy enough matter. Though we lived in the middle of town, I could be out in minutes, whether I walked, biked, ran, or followed the railroad tracks just on the other side of our backyard. With my friends or on my own, I spent as many of the day’s hours as I could outdoors, usually out at my grandfather’s ranch or along the banks of the Knife River. (How it got its name I’ve never known; it’s hard to imagine a duller body of water—in dry summers it could barely keep its green course flowing and
