“I’m not concerned about social progress. I’m worried they’re not going to survive measles. Mumps. Pneumonia. Which is what Marie might have. I’d like to get an X-ray, but I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that.”
“Pneumonia,” said my father. “That sounds serious.”
“I can’t be sure. I’ll prescribe something just in case.”
From where I stood on the porch I could see into the living room, where my mother stood. She was staring toward the porch and standing absolutely still. Her hands were pressed together as they would be in prayer, but she held her hands to her mouth. I looked quickly behind me since her attitude was exactly like someone who has seen something frightening. Nothing was there but my father and my uncle.
“Should she be in the hospital?” asked my father.
Frank rephrased the question as if my father had somehow said it wrong. “Should she be? That depends. Would she stay there? Or would she sneak out? Would she go home? If she’s going to be in some dirty shack out on the prairie, that’s no good. Now if she were staying right here. . . .”
Bentrock did not have its own hospital. The nearest one was almost forty miles away, in North Dakota. Bentrock residents usually traveled an extra twenty miles to the hospital in Dixon, Montana.
My mother came out onto the porch to answer Frank’s question. “Yes, she’s staying here. She’s staying until she gets better.” Her voice was firm and her arms were crossed, almost as if she expected an argument.
“Or until she gets worse. You don’t want an Indian girl with pneumonia in your house, Gail.”
“As long as she’s here we can keep an eye on her.”
Frank looked over at my father. If my mother said it, it was so, yet my father’s confirmation was still necessary. “She can stay here,” he said.
“She’s staying here,” my mother said one more time. “Someone will be here or nearby.”
I couldn’t figure out why my mother seemed so angry. I had always felt she didn’t particularly care for Frank, but I had put that down to two reasons. First, he was charming, and my mother was suspicious of charm. She believed its purpose was to conceal some personal deficit or lack of substance. If your character was sound, you didn’t need charm. And second, Uncle Frank was a Hayden, and where the Haydens were concerned my mother always held something back.
Yet her comportment toward Frank had always been cordial if a little reserved. My parents and Frank and Gloria went out together; they met at least once a month to play cards; they saw each other regularly at the ranch at holidays and family gatherings. When either my father or I were hurt or fell ill, we went to see Frank or he came to see us. (My mother, however, went to old Dr. Snow, the other doctor in Bentrock. She said she would feel funny seeing Frank professionally.)
Whatever the source of her irritation, Frank must have felt it too. He abruptly put down his half-finished beer and said, “I’d better be on my way. I have the feeling I might be called out to the Hollands tonight. This is her due date, and she’s usually pretty close. I’ll phone Young Drug with something for Marie. Give me a call if she gets worse.”
The three of us watched Frank bound down the walk, his long strides loose yet purposeful. After he got into his old Ford pickup (an affectation that my father made fun of by saying, “If a doctor is going to drive an old truck, maybe I should be patrolling the streets on horseback”) and drove away, my mother suggested I go outside. “I have to talk to your father,” she said. “In private.”
If I had gone back into the house—to the kitchen, to my room, out the back door, if I had left the porch and followed Frank’s steps down the front walk—I would never have heard the conversation between my father and mother, and perhaps I would have lived out my life with an illusion about my family and perhaps even the human community. Certainly I could not tell this story....
I left the porch and turned to the right and went around the corner of the house. From there I was able to crouch down and double back to the side of the porch, staying below the screen and out of my parents’ line of vision. I knew my mother was going to say something about Marie yelling when Uncle Frank was there, and I wanted to hear what she had to say.
I didn’t have to wait long.
My mother cleared her throat, and when she began to speak, her voice was steady and strong, but her pauses were off, as if she had started on the wrong breath. “The reason, Wesley, the reason Marie didn’t want to be examined by Frank is that he—he has . . . is that your brother has molested Indian girls.”
My father must have started to leave because I heard the clump of a heavy footstep and my mother said quickly, “No, wait. Listen to me, please. Marie said she didn’t want to be alone with him. You should have seen her. She was practically hysterical about having me stay in the room. And once Frank left she told me all of it. He’s been doing it for years, Wes. When he examines an Indian he . . . he does things he shouldn’t. He takes liberties. Indecent liberties.”
There was a long silence. My mother’s hollyhocks and snapdragons grew alongside the house where I was hiding, and the bees that flew in and out of the flowers filled the air with their drone.
Then my father spoke. “And you believe her.”
“Yes, I do.”
Footsteps again. Now I knew my father was pacing.
“Why would she lie, Wesley?”
My father didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking: She’s an Indian—why would she tell the truth?
“Why, Wes?”
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