Justice (9 page)

Julian Hayden's second vow was simpler in its terms but larger in its demand: he was determined to do a better job than his father of caring and providing for the family.

Julian brought his mother to Montana with him. She had a brother in Wolf Point who had promised to help them get started on their claim. As it turned out, his help consisted of giving them directions on how to build a tar-paper shack and advising them that if they paid more than twenty dollars for materials they were fools. Julian and his mother paid eighteen
dollars and seventy-five cents.

Julian's sister Lorna, older by a year, stayed behind in Schofield, Iowa. High-strung and fearful, she was ill suited for life on the frontier. Before Julian and his mother left Iowa, he made certain that Lorna was comfortably situated by talking the Methodist minister, Reverend Willard West, into giving his sister a job. Reverend West had three young daughters and a sickly wife. In exchange for room, board, and a small monthly wage, Lorna would help care for the children. That was to be her only duty, Julian emphasized; he did not want his sister working like a slave in the minister's home. Reverend West agreed emphatically and reassured Julian; they had a hired girl to do housework—Lorna would simply watch the girls.

Once they were settled securely in Montana, Julian would send for his sister. But not before. There were depths of melancholy that Lorna constantly skirted, and Julian worried that the harshness of life on the plains might push her off the edge.

Julian also left his father behind, buried in the Schofield town cemetery. George Hayden had been killed outside his own barbershop and in full view of many of the local citizens. Including his own son.

A farmer was in town to buy supplies, and his horse, a big bay, was skittish from the moment they arrived. At every loud noise—a window slamming or a dog barking—the horse threatened to bolt. Finally, something happened—perhaps no more momentous than a white curtain suddenly blowing out through an open window—and the horse broke free and
began to gallop down Main Street. Julian remembered thinking that the horse's hooves clattered so loudly on the cobblestones that it sounded as though a wagonload of logs was being dumped on the street.

Julian had been standing in the doorway of the harness shop where he worked, and as he followed the horse's progress he saw his father step into the street.

When Mr. Hayden finally saw the horse charging at him, he froze in indecision. Julian could tell his father didn't know what to do because he leaned first in one direction and then the other, as though he were feinting, trying to trick the horse into altering its path.

And for an instant the horse did slow, prancing sideways as though it wanted to avoid the man as much as the man wanted to avoid the horse. At the last moment, however, the horse could not make itself stop, and Julian's father—who finally decided which way to go—leaped in exactly the same direction as the horse veered.

The blow seemed no more than glancing, as though the horse were merely shouldering the man out of the way. But that was enough. Mr. Hayden, a small man, flew across the cobblestones as if propelled by an explosive.

Julian did not condemn his father for freezing in the horse's path. He could not, because when he saw his father struck, Julian behaved in exactly the same way. He could not make himself move from the doorway of the harness shop. From every direction people were running toward his father's body, but Julian simply stood there, the smell of the shop's leather filling his nostrils. Afterward, he would associate this
smell with the horse's galloping escape, though he had no evidence that a piece of leather—a rein, a bridle, a tether—had failed.

When Julian finally reached his father's side, his father was already dead, as no doubt he had been from the instant his body struck the paving stones. There was not a mark on his body, a fact that later served to comfort his mother. She knew that her husband was not a good provider and never would be, but his good looks even in death pleased her. The doctor who signed the death certificate conjectured that perhaps Mr. Hayden had died of fright—that his heart had seized with fear when the horse bore down upon him. Julian doubted that diagnosis; after all, his father had jumped just before he was struck. He had simply jumped the wrong way.

Mr. Hayden did not leave his family much. He had insurance, but since he had fallen behind on the premiums the company did not pay off on the policy. His barbershop was not paid for. They did not own their home but rented from the widow of a prominent Schofield banker and politician. Worst of all, to Julian's way of thinking, his father had bequeathed him no trade or skill or even any tools with which a young man could make a living. He left behind a past——debts that had to be paid—but no future. Other than the few dollars Julian brought home from working after school in the harness shop, the family had no income. When Julian's uncle wrote that Montana was a place where someone could become a landowner with no other resource but a willingness to work hard, Julian persuaded his mother that this was the only opportunity that offered them a chance not simply to get by but
eventually to prosper. When they left Iowa the only material reminders Julian took of his father were his barbers' scissors, a straight razor, and a strop. Everything else they sold or gave away, including a new wool suit. Julian had already outgrown his father's clothes.

Their shack measured twelve feet by fourteen feet. The exterior walls were covered with tar paper and the interior ones with newspapers. From an old sheepherder they bought a cookstove for preparing food and providing heat. Haystuffed bags served as mattresses on beds made from boards, poles, and ropes. They nailed cracker boxes and apple crates to the walls for shelves and used syrup pails and baking powder cans for food storage. Julian hadn't planned on having a wood floor their first year, but when someone made a remark about rattlesnakes coming up through holes in the dirt he changed his mind. They used their trunk for storage and as a table, and they bought two chairs at a farm auction. At the same auction they acquired a plow and a shaggy, scrawny pair of horses.

While he waited to pay for his purchases at the estate sale, Julian overheard a bandy-legged, leathery-skinned older man talking to a pair of young cowboys. “They brought this horse in with two brands,” the old man said, “so I knew what I was in for. I saddled him and got on, and he did nothing but stand there. Still as a statue. Then, just when I was going to spur him, he threw his head straight back. Caught me right in the
face. Broke my nose for me and knocked me on my ass. ‘Somebody give me a quirt,' I says, and by God I brought that horse to his knees.” If that was for breaking a man's nose, Julian wondered, what punishment would they have in Montana for a horse that killed a man?

During their first year on the homestead, Julian intended to plant wheat and potatoes while his mother raised a few chickens for eggs. Julian had a few other ideas for turning a dollar, but all those plans were short-term. As soon as he could manage it, he was going to start buying cattle. In Iowa, which had some of the richest soil in the country, plenty of farmers were still hard-pressed to get by, and Montana's soil was not Iowa's. Julian had paid attention as the train brought them across Minnesota and North Dakota and into Montana. Along the way the land's suitability for farming gradually gave out—the topsoil became thinner, drier, less fertile—and by the time they arrived in Mercer County it was obvious to him that this country was not meant for growing most crops. It was rangeland plain and simple, no matter who touted the benefits of dry farming or boasted about his latest yield of spring wheat. Besides, Julian didn't want to spend his life staring down at the dirt. The sky here was huge, and he wanted to be able to lift his sight and let it range as wide and far as he chose.

His mother wasn't much help with the work. She had often berated her husband for his shiftlessness, but the truth was, she had never been much of a worker herself. She spent most of the day sitting outside the shack, erect in her straightback chair, her hands folded serenely on her lap. She moved
her head as though she was looking about, but her gaze was as blank as a blind person's. Julian was sure that if he asked her what she saw out there toward the horizon, she wouldn't be able to answer him. At night with the lamp off and both of them in bed, he could hear her crying softly. He knew her tears had nothing to do with grief over her husband's death. She hadn't cried in Iowa, so the conclusion was inescapable: she wept over this wind-swept place she had come to.

The letters from Lorna didn't help. Julian's sister wrote almost every day, brief letters that did little but complain. Julian suggested once that she save on postage by writing longer letters less frequently, but she wrote back and said that it helped her “to converse with her brother and dear mother every day, even if for a moment or two.”

She mentioned her loneliness, though as Julian pointed out to his mother, Lorna remained in the same community she had lived in all her life; she had friends and relatives there, whereas they knew almost no one in Montana. She wrote that she missed them, but asserted in virtually every letter that life on the prairie would be too difficult for her.

And she complained of the work she had to do.

These grievances were muted and subtle at first. She said only that she was tired, the children were so lively, the hours of her days were so full she scarcely had a moment to herself.... Gradually she became more specific. She had dusted the pews in the church, lined up all the hymnals, and swept the steps before and after the service. She had helped out with the cooking in the West household. After this letter Julian wrote to Reverend West, politely reminding him that the
agreement had been that his sister would care for the children; she was not to take the place of a hired girl. His sister's hardships did not lessen. Her hands hurt, she wrote, from polishing the family silver. She coughed all night because she had been beating rugs. Her knees ached from scrubbing floors.

This last charge appeared in a letter that arrived in the fall. The water barrel wore a thin membrane of frost that morning, and with each breath of wind a few snowflakes flew out of the north. When Julian finished his sister's letter, he said nothing to his mother. He did not care how hard he had to work on this miserable claim. No matter how brutal or dirty that work was, he was willing to do it because this was his land. But his sister was not going to wash another man's floors. Julian decided that he would have to return to Iowa to speak to the minister personally.

To get money for the trip back to Iowa, Julian sold his mother's chickens and hired himself out to every harvest crew that would have him. One day he finished working on one farm late in the afternoon and immediately walked to another field to begin work with another family. In spite of his own back-breaking labor, he never would have been able to earn his fare if not for his horses. He leased them out to two farmers who agreed to pay him in advance.

Before he left town Julian asked Len McAuley, a young man he had befriended, to look in on his mother while he was away. Len lived alone in a shack down by the Knife River, hunting, fishing, and trapping to get by. Julian had not only sought advice from Len, he had hired him a few times when
the work on Julian's place was more than he could handle alone.

Len was grateful but more than that. He looked up to Julian and felt that simply being near Julian Hayden—who was confident, ambitious, self-assured—helped correct some of the drift and despair of Len's own life. Julian was more father than friend to Len McAuley, and any favor Julian asked Len would surely grant.

Julian bought a round-trip train ticket, specifying that arrival and departure times should be as close together as possible. If he couldn't take care of this matter quickly, he couldn't take care of it at all. Into a canvas duffel he put a few pieces of chicken, two pancakes rolled tight and smeared with apple butter, and some wild cherries, all wrapped in newspaper and a cloth napkin; he also packed a clean shirt, a handkerchief, and his father's straight razor. He told his mother that he was going to Helena, that it was necessary to have certain papers on file at the state capitol if you wanted to claim additional sections of land in the future. Julian's mother had no reason not to believe him.