Necropolis
Various scenes from the city of the dead. By Bill Vaughn

Sand Coulee Creek issues from a box canyon at 6,000 feet between Tiger Butte and Black Butte in Montana's Little Belt Mountains. After this streamlet falls to the plains it wanders north for twenty miles through the gullies of the foothills, and edges around a plateau called the Dutch Bench till it reaches the steppes south of Great Falls, what civic boosters used to call The Electric City.

There it enters an ancient channel of the Missouri that the big river abandoned at the end of the last Ice Age. Then it flows west till it finds the river itself seven miles later. From the highest ground around, the Highland Cemetery, you can see the whole course of the Sand Coulee. The windy brown prairie it wanders across is largely undeveloped and still covered with short grass and prickly pear, just as it was when Jefferson’s murderous henchmen, Lewis and Clark, made their portage here around the great falls of the Missouri.

Although the official plats of Cascade County optimistically call the area straddling the lower Sand Coulee “Virginia Gardens” everyone else had a different name for the unzoned sprawl of shacks, hopeless farms, junk yards, stock car tracks and river bars where I grew up: Rat Flats.

My father, Ben Vaughn, and my mother, Nancy Moran, bought a house and three acres there for $6,000 in 1952 with a down payment he got from the Air Force for a sheet metal mishap in a bomber repair hangar resulting in the loss of the last joint on his left pinky. The house had once been the largest turkey coop in the county. However, the Turkey Coop was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and there were many convenient ways in and out of this shack during the middle of the night.

One of my first memories of Rat Flats is wading in our sparkling creek with Nancy, her Irish red hair glowing in the sun, her blue eyes flashing, laughing at me as I shrieked with joy whenever a fish darted by or a startled frog dove for safety. When I recalled that image I immediately saw another: My mother is getting Sunday dinner ready by wringing a chicken’s neck. As the headless bird skitters around the back yard she turns away from it to shuck an ear of corn.

Later, in the second half of my childhood, all I cared about the creek was that it supplied me with water sports in the summer and skating in the winter and a place to go to whenever I needed to escape. When I left home for college, turning my back on one life to embrace another, I stuffed my childhood in a box and pushed it away. The new era seemed so heady and liberating, and the one just finished so full of such dark and confused emotions I put up a firewall around it.

But one day at Dark Acres, a quarter century after I left home, I suddenly felt compelled to open that box to see if the jumbled memories inside matched anything in the real world. Stopping for lunch on the drive over the Continental Divide between Missoula to Great Falls I spread out on a picnic table the road map I kept in the glove compartment. I was stunned. Right there was Hound Creek and Belt Creek to the east, but between them in the place where the Sand Coulee should have been was nothing but empty white space. For one irrational moment I wondered if I had simply fabricated a whole young life with the creek at its center in an extreme case of the spin our minds put on all childhood recollections.

I was reassured when I went back to the Bronco and checked out my other reference, a wonderful contour map made by the Defense Mapping Agency. There was the Sand Coulee right where it was supposed to be. This superior map compressed into a rectangle of three square feet the 7000 square miles that would have been toasted if the Commies had chosen to visit Malmstrom Air Force Base, on the east edge of Great Falls, and its far-flung garrison of ICBMs, with a thermonuclear surprise.

The topography was raised in vinyl, so when I closed my eyes and ran my fingers over it as if it were Braille, I could feel the mountains and the benches and the grooves that are the beds of the streams. I could trace the Sand Coulee and even feel the oozes such as Walker Coulee and Number Five Coulee that feed it as it makes its way home. And there was the three-mile loop of the creek that was my playground, exactly where it should be. I drove on east, parked a couple miles upstream from the Turkey Coop, and began walking along the banks to the river.

Part Two: After negotiating a tangle of fallen barbed wire and piles of junk I entered an acre of box elder groves and wild pink roses surrounded by an oxbow cut by a meander from a high chalky bank. Although we didn’t know who owned this land we claimed it as our own, and named it Potsylvania, after the Balkan-style fiefdom in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. I appointed myself General, and then forced the gang of Rat Flats kids I had organized along paramilitary lines to draw straws for the other ranks.

Laura, my kid sister, ended up with the shortest straw. But she contemptuously threw away the private’s stripe I had fabricated from pink ribbon affixed to her shirt with a bottle cap on one side of the fabric and its cork lining on the other, an act for which she would pay. We hacked a “national highway” through the roses, traded with each another using stacks of Credits, the national currency I typed on my little portable Remington and wrinkled for authenticity, and fought dirt clod wars with the kids from neighboring Slobovia. One of our historic moments was a court marshal convened to investigate one of Laura’s insubordinations. It was decided that this slacker would be punished by forcing her out into the water on a raft, where we pelted her with clods until she confessed her sedition and agreed to be my slave for a day.

The trouble with the Sand Coulee started in the late fifties. Ribbons of some sort of mysterious rust began appearing in the creek's languid flow. Although the well water along the lower creek contained so many minerals it smelled like rotten eggs, and when used for irrigation stained buildings and trees, this rust in the creek was noxious and unnatural. At first no one knew what it was, and no one seemed much to care. This was still years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which launched the environmental movement, or Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America. It was a time when Montanans tearing across their state on highways with no speed limits in unsound vehicles without seatbelts routinely heaved their empties out the window, piped industrial waste and raw sewage straight into their rivers, and piled the rusted bodies of these same death traps on the banks to keep the water from stealing their overgrazed land.

Along the poisoned Sand Coulee the frogs and the turtles disappeared first, then the crawdads and finally the fish. When the central Montana climate reverted to the dry side of its cycle, which means less than fifteen inches of rain a year, the creek emptied. The rust piled in layers and dried to a bloody grit that sun devils sucked into the air. Like England after Gwenivére’s infidelity and Lancelot’s betrayal, Potsylvania was stifled.

Ben brought in a man with a backhoe to dig a hole in the creek bed twelve feet deep that would fill with spring water so he could breakfast summer mornings on the fried green tomatoes he loved. Over time as he disposed of any junk he couldn’t burn, junk that would have cost good money to haul away, the hole filled in—a bonanza for some future anthropologist reconstructing the daily affairs of the northern redneck. At the bottom of this midden was a Sears lawn tractor. Ben had been riding it along the high, brushy bank above the hole one day when he somehow miscalculated a turn and plunged backwards down the slope and into the pond, saving himself but not the tractor.

Then the drain field from his homemade septic system clogged with shit and the family’s offal began seeping into the sad, useless puddles that were all that remained of the old Sand Coulee.

But when you look closely at the Pentagon’s map it’s clear that it wasn’t sewage that murdered the Sand Coulee. There are several killers, actually, each one marked by a crossed pick and ax. These were mining adits, shafts dug into hillsides in the creek’s drainage beginning in 1876 to get at the seams of bituminous coal in something called the Morrison Formation, which had once been a Jurassic swamp. One of these adits was up Walker Coulee, five miles from the Turkey Coop. There wasn’t much to see, but I drove there and stood in the sagebrush and grass, buffeted by a hot wind. In the mutually self-serving and self-destructive manner of all things wrought by man, these coal mines kept us from freezing to death—a fact I was reminded of every day when I hauled buckets of ash from the furnace to Ben’s clinker dump in a field behind the house. The mines had been so poorly engineered that groundwater fed by rain and snow began leaching iron, potassium, lead, and arsenic out of the abandoned adits and into the creek.

Of course, even if the owners of these mines had known how to avoid ruining the creek there was no compulsion to make them take the effort. In the 1950s Montana’s politicians, and most everyone else, did what the mining industry told them to do (as late as 1959 the Anaconda Copper Company still owned and operated most of Montana’s daily newspapers, including the Missoulian). After all, the Treasure State’s motto is oro y plata—gold and silver.

I don’t remember mourning the Sand Coulee—maybe because its death was a process, not an event, or maybe because children are hard-wired to tune out what for adults becomes the omnipresent psychic noise of regret. In any event, when I moved my theater of operations from the creek to the Missouri I didn’t give the Sand Coulee another thought until I got a call in May of 1980 from Ben, now retired from a career as a civil servants, followed by a couple of years working for a private contractor. He sounded exhausted. There’d been an accident. How soon could I come home?

That afternoon I found myself putting out in a small outboard, Ben at the wheel, into the lagoon at the mouth of the Sand Coulee. We each had a pole. In the bottom of the boat was a gaff on a rope. Upstream at the Turkey Coop, etched in the muddy bank, the evidence of our family’s tragedy was as obvious as a museum diorama.

Part Three: In 1965, when I was in high school Ben married an attractive, petite blonde named Irene. She’d been managing the Yogo Inn in Lewistown, a big motel in a little burg at the geographical center of Montana. The area was bristling with the antiballistic missiles Ben spent his long working days helping to plant under the wheat. Like Ben, Irene had been married and divorced twice before. And she had two kids, one from each marriage. Debbie, her older daughter, was in high school, and Darlene was a bright and shiny little girl. My sister and I liked our new family immediately, and played chase games with our new stepsisters for hours.

But despite the initial good vibes of Ben’s third marriage the union finally became entangled in old patterns, bad habits, and booze. He had come to dislike her kids, and she had run out of patience with his. They fought about everything, from money to politics to food. The Cascade County sheriff’s department visited the Turkey Coop more than once to settle domeatic squabbles that had turned physical.

In 1984 my wife, Kitty, and I were witness to one of these brawls. On Labor Day we had trailered our horses to Great Falls to compete in the state championships of O-Mok-See, a Blackfeet word meaning “riding tall.” This was a western form of the English sport of gymkhana featuring races on horseback inside an arena. Kitty and her sisters had grown up with the sport; I was just learning it.

Ben had kindly offered to put us up at Rat Flats, and our horses as well. Although I was oblivious as always to most social undercurrents, the tensions at the Turkey Coop had escalated. Irene nodded when she saw me in the next morning, and went out of her way to chat amiably with Kitty, whom she liked, before retreating into her bedroom in the evening. These days, I learned, she slept alone, that can of Diet Pepsi her only companion.
But despite Irene’s customary chill, I was pleased that the four of us could get along, at least on the even-keeled, emotionally inert level I had striven to maintain with my father for years. We didn’t mind sitting on Ben’s patio, listening to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline on the radio, or to Mantovani’s Living Strings on the stereo in the living room. I had learned long ago that around my father displays of strong feeling might be dangerous.

Following the O-Mok-See Saturday night we headed home to Rat Flats under a hot, ominous sky jumpy with heat lightning. When we turned into long driveway at the Turkey Coop we saw shadows running across the lawn. For an instant I was taken back to those summer evenings when we played capture the flag and hide and seek on this very lawn, throwing just these sorts of shadows, which always got mixed up just like now with those of the June bugs that banged against the porch lights. But these figures weren’t children. Irene showed surprising speed and agility as she sprinted from the house to the big Buick she was driving at the time.

“Help me!” she shouted, her voice so hoarse the words were a growl. Ben was out the door right behind her. But she was quick, and he didn’t catch up to her till she managed to slip behind the wheel and start the engine. She floored it and began backing away in a furious cloud of dust. Ben somehow found the handle and jerked open her door. In the confusion and the darkness it wasn’t easy to follow this dance, but apparently the door collided with one of the old cottonwoods I used to hang from in my jungle hammock. There was a crunch and a snap as hinges broke and the safety glass shattered. Ben had somehow avoided a serious mauling by letting go of the door and spinning away from the impact, although he’d banged up his shoulder when he hit the ground.  “I’m hurt, bitch!” he yelled.

Irene slammed on the brakes and the broken door crashed shut with a screech that sounded like someone opening the bill for the repairs this smash-up would require. Ben, holding his shoulder, had pulled himself to his feet. He noticed us now for the first time. “You saw it! She tried to kill me!”

Kitty stopped the truck and we jumped out. Then she coaxed Irene out the passenger door. I reached in and pocketed the keys. The four of us stood panting in the wind, embarrassed, avoiding one another’s eyes. In the trailer our horses nickered. I felt light-headed, as if the sugar had been leached from my blood. Many years had passed since I was an eye-witness to my father’s impetuous, drunken mayhem, this clumsy pas de deux that’s played out in trailer courts and the parking lots of  Dew Drop Inns or squalid rural backwaters like Rat Flats thousands of times every night across our sea to shining sea.

Back in the house I sat with Ben in the kitchen, watching him nurse a beer. He was flushed and sweating and apologetic. I could hear Irene weeping in her bedroom as Kitty tried to soothe her.

“What happened here?” I asked him.

He waved his hand as if the answer were evident. “She’s just so cold,” Ben said at last.

“What are you fighting about?”

He shrugged. “Debbie.”

Part Four: Married soon after high school to an x-ray technician, my stepsister had a child right away, and then another. And now she wanted to borrow $10,000 from Ben so she could buy the Roxie Theatre up in Choteau, a windy prairie town at the foot of the Rockies where grizzly bears still wander down from the mountains to prowl the streets. The Roxie was a classic small-town movie theatre built on Main Street in 1946 in the Streamline Moderne style of architecture. On cold and blustery nights people were comforted by the sight of its extravagant neon marquee, reassurance that as wild and remote as the countryside might be Choteau itself was connected to the larger world (now the town’s most famous resident is David Letterman). Hosting live performances and stage plays as well as movies, the Roxie had always been a gathering place for several rural counties. But Ben was against it. He thought he’d never see his money again. The argument about this loan had become a lite motif of their recent conversations.

“Those one-horse towns up there,” he’d told Irene, “they’re all dying.”

“People drive a hundred miles to the Roxie,” Irene said.

“That’s what Debbie says. Use your noggin, hon. Why would people go to movies when they could stay at home with the tube?”

“That’s where you go to see people, Ben. Besides bars. Which kids can’t go to. You take a date to the movie. Didn’t you ever take a date to a movie?”

Ben waved her away, bored with the conversation.

“It’s a good investment,” Irene said.

“It’s money down a rat hole.”

While Ben was recounting this argument for me Irene suddenly screamed from the door of her bedroom, her voice rattling like someone dying of thirst. “He choked me, Billy! “He’s trying to kill me!”

Kitty managed to pull her back into the bedroom and get the door shut before there was more trouble.

Ben refused to look at me. “When she gets pissy like this I know just how hard to squeeze.”

“What?”

He made his big hands circle an imaginary neck to show how it was done, as if this information might be useful in my negotiations with Kitty. “It doesn’t hurt her. It’s just to get her under control.”

Suddenly Irene burst from her bedroom again, Kitty pleading with her to come back.

“Police!” she hissed as she ran through the living room, crashed against the screen door and careened outside. In a while Kitty came back alone. Irene had decided to bed down for the night in a tiny camping trailer parked next to the house.

The next morning Ben watched us eat the breakfast of eggs, grits and fried green tomatoes he’d fixed. Irene was nowhere to be seen. One of the vacuous Ray Coniff medleys my father enjoyed was playing on the stereo.

“Your Bronco needed a quart of oil,” he offered.

“Okay.”

“I put one in for you.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“I’m sorry you had to see that.”

Kitty pushed away her plate. “That’s what you’re sorry about?”

There passed briefly over Ben’s face a glower I hadn’t seen since I was a boy, a brooding, hooded menace that always meant watch yourself, buster. What was this? Was he going to give Kitty a little dose of control?

I decided I must have imagined it. After all, my wife and my father, much to my relief, had appeared to have been getting along these early years in our marriage. Well, at least on that superficial level where I liked my social life to dwell. But, of course, I had been deluding myself about their apparent rapport. And even after one Christmas unpleasantness, when Kitty had opened her present from Ben to discover flannel nightgowns from the Salvation Army reeking of bleach, I had told her to forget it, he just must be getting a little senile is all.

At the Sunday O-Mok-See the day after Ben’s brawl with Irene, as we sat on our horses waiting to compete in the barrel-racing event, I turned to her. “So how do you score it?”

“Score what?”

“The fight.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I score it a draw.”

“What?”

“Here’s why: To my way of thinking fighters who take on moving vehicles show such a lame understanding of physics that they should automatically lose the bout, I’ll give you that. But he’s the reigning champ. And he was already so far ahead in points when she smacked him I figure a draw is the best decision Irene can get.”

“That’s so funny,” she said.

“I told you what he was like.”

“He could have killed her.”

“And she could have killed him.”

But Kitty was right: It wasn’t very funny. For one thing, my wife’s relationship with my father would never be the same again. She’d seen him at his worst. And now that Kitty knew, he would become as contemptuous of her as was of all the women in his life, except for his daughter, whom he had always doted on and fussed over and championed. (When one of her boyfriends jilted her he drove to the small Montana town where the guy taught school, and, in front of his third-graders, ordered him out into the hall. Then, after dressing him down loud enough for the whole school to hear, he finally left when the principal threatened to call the sheriff.)


Part Five: The trail of tiny footprints led down the slope across Ben’s tomato garden straight to the scummy froth at the water’s edge. But they didn’t return.

On that heartbreaking day in May, Debbie had left Loren, her younger boy, with Irene at the Turkey Coop while she spent Saturday shopping in Great Falls. The afternoon turned warm and sunny, so Irene deposited the toddler in the sand box with his toys so she could watch him while she hung out laundry. In normal years there would have been no reason to look twice at this homey arrangement. But the Sand Coulee had roared back to life. Mammoth snowfall in the Little Belts the previous winter was melting under temperatures in the eighties, and the dry creek had become a maelstrom of filthy, surging foam hurtling toward the river with what struck me as calculated vengeance for all the years it had been abused.

Irene told the boy to stay put. Then she slipped into the house for another basket of clothes and a sip of vodka from her Diet Pepsi can. She wasn’t gone more than half a minute. But when she came back the sandbox was deserted. She called out Loren’s name. And called it again louder, now panicked to her core. She walked quickly in one direction, shouting into the wind, then another. Finally, she hurried towards the creek.

As I stood there later looking at Loren’s last moment I realized what day it was. It was Mother’s Day.

A tiny skeleton would turn up on a sand bar in the river two years later. Because it was wrapped in remnants of the red parka the boy was wearing when he was swept away, the case was closed. In the meantime Debbie’s insurance company sued Irene’s, and Debbie received a settlement. For Irene this was the beginning of the end. She began to drink every moment she wasn’t working, and her relationship with Ben became downright toxic.

In 1987 she was shopping for one last Christmas present at the Paris of Montana on Central Avenue in downtown Great Falls. As she picked through a table of men’s sweaters an excruciating pain shot through her chest. Dizzy, gasping for air, she somehow made her way to the escalator, passing by the mezzanine where gentrified ladies of the Electric City gathered in the afternoon for tarts and coffee, and staggered to her car. But instead of driving to the emergency room at Deaconess Hospital or Columbus she turned south toward Rat Flats.

When she got out of her car she fell into the snow as Ben watched from the big picture window in the living room, where he liked to stretch out on the shag carpeting next to his wood-burning stove. He rushed her back into town, but it was too late. Just as the surgeon opened her chest her pale and withered heart beat its last beat. She was 62.

Because the minister secured to perform the service had never met her he drove out to the house to learn something about her life that would sound good in the eulogy.

“She worked real hard,” Ben allowed.

“What kind of interests did she have, or hobbies?” the minister asked. “Was she involved with a charity? Or some organization?”

Ben thought. “She was devoted to her girls,” he said at last. “And was a real hard worker.”

I waited for him to mention the happier side of his third wife’s life—her skill with horses as a girl, the big hotel she was managing when he met her, the lemon trees she cultivated in the back yard during their five sunny years in California together, after he’d been transferred to Vandenburg Air Force Base when I was in college.

Even mortician’s makeup and years of despair couldn’t obscure the lines of merriment around her eyes that revealed a sweet life behind the soured one. I figured Ben must have been so distraught over facing an empty house that he had simply forgotten the good things about his third wife. But in fact the moment she fell dying into his arms he threw an emotional Maginot Line around her, a strategy that always spared him from confronting the guilt he felt about the women he had never understood.

Most of the mourners at the funeral were people from Irene’s side of the family, farmers from eastern Montana. Because deafness ran in her family, due to a congenital flaw, the wake following the service was a largely silent affair carried out in signing and the reading of lips. One by one a sister or a brother approached Ben and, laying a hand on his shoulder, shared a moment of quiet commiseration. These mute expressions of sorrow made him nervous. But they needn’t have. If Irene’s people knew about his record in the ring with the dearly departed, they’d already found ways to forgive.

Outside in the parking lot Laura and I shared a cigarette and watched smoke waft from the stack at the crematorium across the street.          

“He’ll be alright,” she said.

“Well, he’s got you here now.”

“Yeah. He’s got me.”

Laura had recently moved back to Great Falls, at the urging of our old man, after stints in Pennsylvania, Germany, Arizona, and Missoula. She was raising a son from a failed marriage to a beautiful but unfaithful college boy, and was working as a nurse. Irene had seen Laura’s return to Great Falls as an escalation of hostilities on the part of Ben.

Stepmother and stepdaughter sniped and glared at one other from the trenches, but one afternoon this phony war turned real. In the course of a conversation over beers on the deck of Laura's little house, which Ben had bought as a rental investment, Irene turned to Ben and told him he was a fool for bailing out this bitch time and again.

“Hah!” Laura responded. “You’re the bitch.”

“You little slut,” Irene shot back.

Suddenly, Laura unloaded a sucker punch that knocked Irene off her feet and onto the lawn. Before she could get up Laura tackled her and they began rolling around on the grass choking each other like a couple of barroom whores. Ben, who by now was actively siding with his kids against his wife, let this melee continue longer than a gentleman would have. Finally, he pulled them apart and extracted their counterfeit apologies.

Although I was saddened by Irene’s drunken and tragic life, I was indifferent to her death. Watching her family gather around the casket, I was also aware that I had done nothing to make it any better, although she had done her best to treat me fairly. Like Ben, I dealt with this symptom of a guilty conscience by ignoring it, thinking instead about other funerals and other times. I remembered the smell of the incense at the stately and life-affirming Mass for my grandfather, Joe, who lived every day of his life until he died at the age of 96.

My grandmother Mabel’s funeral was a more poignant affair because her life was cut short by lung cancer when she was 58 after years of heavy smoking. She spent the last months at home hooked to an oxygen tank, fighting for her next breath. When she died Joe was there, as always, holding her hand.

Part Six: Then there was the intolerably tragic death of my cousin, Diana, killed when her car was struck head-on by a car driven by a woman whose steering wheel had frozen after her engine had inexplicably died at highway speeds. Both women were pregnant. Diana hadn’t been strapped in because she was so big she couldn’t get the seat belt around her. Her baby, due to be delivered the next day by Caesarian, was also killed, although her four-year-old daughter, strapped into the back seat, was uninjured.

The funeral was a conventional ceremony held at St. Anne’s, but for some reason Diana’s body was displayed in an open casket. A ragged gash splitting her face had been repaired with what looked like spackle and talcum. As mourners filed past the casket and into the sun there was copious weeping and widespread shock at this sight, although it could have been more garish—there had been some talk of displaying her dead child in her arms, as well.

She and her husband had joined a cultish congregation whose members met in each other’s homes around the state and referred to themselves simply as The Friends. Regarded singly, any one of the women looked like a farm wife from an earlier decade or an aging hippie. But when you saw them together you realized that they all had long hair pulled into buns covered by scarves, and they all wore ankle-length dresses of the same rough weave and earthy color. They looked like Stepford Wives in homespun. At the reception, filled with bliss as their sister ascended to paradise, they bore tranquilized smiles while serving Jell-O and ham.

During the service The Friends surrounded the gravesite three deep and wouldn’t let anyone except Diana’s immediate family into the inner circle. Two of these people were her son and daughter from her first marriage, to a young black airman from Malmstrom who had knocked her up. In a reactionary and unimaginative town like Great Falls, which even now in the 21st Century seems as if it was flash-frozen in 1952, this union was such a scandal no one thought it would last very long. They were right.

I’ve been to so many funerals in Great Falls I’ve come to picture my home town as a vast, windy necropolis littered with headstones and mausoleums. But the most important funeral in my life was the one I wasn’t allowed to attend.

Part Seven: On January 5, 1956, a Thursday, Nancy Moran began her workday as usual. She got up at five-thirty, showered, then slipped into her white support hose and her starchy white uniform. As her coffee percolated she checked on her children asleep in their bedrooms. Their breathing was so light they might have been cats. When the coffee was ready she took a sip, left the cup on the table to cool, threw on her heavy winter coat, and went out to the tiny garage attached to the cottage she rented from Joe and Mabel, my grandparents. She opened the back door of the garage, then pulled open the double doors on the street and went back inside to start her cantankerous old Ford. The beast needed a tune-up or a valve job or a new timing chain, the mechanic couldn’t be sure. But whatever, money was scare.

She’d been divorced from Ben Vaughn for three months, and even with child support she found it a challenge to raise two kids on her RN’s salary of $380 a month. After she ground the starter for a minute the Ford coughed and rattled to life. She pumped the gas a couple of times to rev the engine, and when it was running without her help she went back into the house to finish her coffee. In the darkness and the subfreezing cold she drove from the west side of Great Falls six miles along Central Avenue to Malmstrom, where she worked at the base hospital.

In 1945, when she was 23, Nancy Chloe Moran graduated from the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and signed up for a one-year stint with the Army Nurse Corps, which commissioned her a 2nd Lieutenant and shipped her off to the war still raging in the Philippines. Of course, her letters home said nothing of the horrors she’d seen in the hospitals where she worked, on the big islands of Luzon and Mindoro. It wasn’t as if she was squeamish—after all, her favorites moments at nursing school had been the autopsies. During one of these butcheries she was delighted to have won a dime guessing the weight of a cadaver’s heart. But until the Japanese surrendered on August 15 of that year officers were compelled to censor themselves when it came to mentioning casualties or troop movements. And so her letters often sound like the journal of someone who’s gone native or is savoring a long tropical vacation.

“Commander Dunham of the Seabees picked up Helen and me after our shift and took us to his beach house for a party. We had Manhattans and then went swimming in the ocean, forty of us in all. Clean white sand all the way out and the water so clear you could see twelve feet down. We dove for oysters and paddled around on the kayak, and then were served dinner on the beach by twelve white-clad natives. Martinis and hors-d’oeuvres and fried chicken. The cook used to be Admiral King’s chef aboard his flagship so you can imagine how good that food was. There was a full moon and a trio of musicians. Then we went swimming again. The phosphorous algae that comes out in the moonlight looked like a million stars under the water. We brought a bottle full of them home to light our tent.”
 
She hung around with the aides of a two-star general, who invited her to dinner at his house a couple of times a week, loaned her his car and let her take the controls of his airplane. She played bridge and tennis and attended a formal ball in a gown sewn from a silk parachute, a white orchid in her red hair. She kept a monkey named Ambrosia and a white cockatoo named Ack-Ack and filled her tent with hibiscus flowers. She took a cruise along the jungly coast of Mindoro on a Captain’s pleasure boat with another nurse, passing crocodiles and six-foot fish that soared from the water as natives rowed out to the boat bringing gifts of bananas and coconuts and gardenias. A native woman came on board, playing the guitar and singing native songs, “Ave Maria,” and the woman’s favorite, “Pistol-Packin’ Mama.”

On September 3 of 1945 Nancy hitchhiked with two other nurses from the monastery that housed the Army’s 91st Division hospital to Ipo Dam in the hills above Manila, sight of a pivotal battle in 1943 in which Allied Forces wrested control away of this crucial watershed from the Japanese. There they were the only women to witness the formal surrender of the Imperial High Commander of the Philippines, General Tomoyuki Yamishita. “He looked very humiliated,” she observed. An American military commission later tried Yamashita for atrocities and war crimes. He was sentenced to death and hanged.

“Will never forget this day as long as I live,” Nancy wrote.

Now that censorship had been lifted she described for her family the cases of typhus, cholera, and hepatitis she was treating. But in general “there just isn’t anything of a military nature to tell you,” she wrote, although the fighting hadn’t ended with Yamashita’s surrender. “Dad, I haven’t had a chance to use my hunting knife yet but there may be a time. There is still a lot of fighting within a few miles.” Battles were being waged three months later when “a couple of fellows I know came for me and we rode in a C-47 all over Luzon spreading leaflets to the Japanese troops—about 10,000 of them in all that are holding out in the hills.” During her tour of duty she earned the usual decorations—the Philippine Liberation Ribbon, the Asiatic Pacific Service Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.

Part Eight: When she was mustered out of the Army and came home in 1946, Great Falls was jumping with veterans in full party mode. Some were working and some were laying back on the 52-20 Club, in which the government gave them $20 a week for a year not to work, a scheme intended to allow the job market to grow enough to absorb all this redundant labor.

But the ex-sailor from East Texas she met one night in a bar wanted nothing to do with the dole. After serving in the Coast Guard as a dog-trainer and later a gunner on troop transports in the Pacific, Ben Vaughn had heard about a civilian job in the sheet metal shops at this remote air base way up in old Montana. About as far as you could get from the chiggers and niggers, as he put it, it sounded a damn sight better than returning to his family’s decaying cotton farm on the Sulphur River in East Texas. (On the way to these 80 acres from Dallas you have to pass through the nearby town of Greenville, where as late as the mid-1960s there stood a water tower bearing the announcement:  “Blackest Land. Whitest People.”)

After you’ve seen the world, he told the young nurse as they danced away the night at the VFW Club and the Elks, you just don’t want to look at the business end of a mule ever again. In the sexual frenzy of America after the war, she was swept off her feet by his generosity, his good looks, his vulgar humor, his wavy black hair, and his raw cracker accent.

They were married in 1947, and moved into a public housing project called Boland Villa in order to save money for a place of their own. Nancy gave birth to me the next year and Laura three years after that. My parents skied together, went camping, fished and partied with their war-hardened buddies all over Cascade County, from the Italian bars and restaurants in Black Eagle to roadhouses like the Barge south of town.

Who knows where the trouble started. Maybe the corruption in their marriage was present at the wedding, like a boozy uncle everyone chose to ignore. Part of the tension was the difference in class. Ben was a prole hayseed whose view of the world was precisely what Marx meant by “the idiocy of rural life.” Nancy’s family was petty bourgeois—jewelers, home builders, accountants, the descendents of a landowner and a successful farmer who was one of Montana’s first settlers. The fact that they were among the territory’s oldest white blood wouldn’t impress the gentry of Rhode Island, say, or South Carolina, but the Morans were educated people—even my grandpa Joe had gone off for a couple of years in 1904 to study with the Jesuits at Gonzaga University in Spokane during an era when very few westerners went beyond high school. Ben fled Texas the day after his high school graduation with an academic record that was distinguished only by his fine penmanship. 

Although he did his best to please his new in-laws, he was never able to sell himself completely. Oh, the boy works like a dog, Joe told Mabel in their moments alone, you had to hand him that. But he can’t do a thing right—he doesn’t know how to swing a hammer or finish cement or size a shipment of lumber. He wouldn’t know what a book was for if you hit him over the head with one. And I worry that his temper is going to get him in trouble some day.

Joe kept one objection to himself, however, in the spirit of detente: Ben was not a Catholic. Hell, he wasn’t even a Presbyterian. His people were from something called the Church of Christ, surely one of those redneck congregations with snake-handling and tongue-talking and foot-washing and people named Sissy and Junior and Ruthie Ray and Cooter. Ben’s great-grandfathers on both sides of his family had been enlisted men who fought for the South in Texas regiments during the Civil War.

Of course, millions of fortress marriages have been built right over the top of these sorts of differences. But Ben brought to the union a troublesome habit—he just couldn’t keep it in his pants. And in an era as giddy and sexually charged as those months after the war, a young stud with no intention of remaining faithful had no business getting married (of course, if Ben had demonstrated a lick of common sense I wouldn’t be here).

He’d been confined to bases and ships at the height of his vigor for five long years, including a brief stint in the infirmary after he took a piece of Japanese shrapnel in the butt while firing a machine gun at Zeros on a troop transport in the Pacific, and all those gorgeous Yankee women were just too tasty to leave alone. Only he knew how many of them he bedded in the eight years he stayed hitched to my mother. Maybe he lost count. 

Part Nine: But for me, the only one that mattered was the one he got caught with. She was a tall, beautiful blonde named Chris who’d been married twice before and had a little girl from each marriage (just like Irene). When Chris came along my parents’ marriage was already battered beyond repair, both emotionally and probably physically, if you judge this marriage of Ben’s by the ones to follow. But this tryst was the blow that led to D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

The language in the papers was standard boilerplate. Ben was guilty of “extreme cruelty” toward Nancy in the infliction of “grievous mental suffering” that destroyed her peace of mind and happiness and defeated “the proper and legitimate objects of the marriage.” Because Ben was an able-bodied man who earned $5,000 per year he was ordered to pay $80 a month in child support and all of his children’s medical and dental bills. The court awarded Nancy custody. Ben was allowed to see us as long as his visits were in our “best interests.” The court, however, wasn’t willing to spell out what these “best interests” might be.

After the divorce Nancy moved us into that cottage on the west side of Great Falls. The little house sat on the front part of the lot where Joe had built a house for Mabel, himself and my Uncle Bob, a shadow man who was living at home because of his epilepsy and his love of the bottle. My great-grandfather, Mabel’s father, had lived in this cottage before he died, a little man named Edmund Bunker who liked to fall asleep in his rocking chair listening to Carmen and La Boheme on his phonograph, surrounded by his books and his shelves so packed with National Geographics it looked as if his walls were painted yellow.

On days when Nancy went to work, a neighbor lady came in to roust us from bed and see to our breakfasts. She stayed with Laura home for the day, or turned her over to Joe and Mabel, and I walked the three blocks to Franklin Elementary, where I was a proud first-grader. I had wowed my classmates by bringing to show-and-tell an entire Dan’l Boone cabin in one-quarter scale you assembled from cardboard simu-logs. Up to four kids could cram themselves inside and screech from the windows. This Christmas gift made me a hero, and I went around all week in a cloud. Not even the Black House could bring me down.

Up the street from our place, on a hill climbed by 2nd Avenue NW, stood a four-story Victorian that occupied a quarter of a city block. Even though it’s now a harmless bed and breakfast, it still looks like the sort of place where you’d see Vincent Price or Uncle Fester staring down from a window. When the sidewalks weren’t icy I pushed my red Schwynn up the hill so I could coast back down. Because I was ashamed of the training wheels bolted to the back frame, coasting and ringing the bell on the handlebars seemed a way for me to alert the neighborhood that the training wheels weren’t my idea. However, in order to do this and obey Nancy’s orders not to leave our side of the street I had to pass by the Black House. I called it that because in the seizure dreams I had begun to suffer I always found myself trapped inside it.

I’ve never seen anyone about these fits, even though they would persist until I married Kitty. Before I found out what they were I feared I had epilepsy and would turn into Uncle Bob, who told lame jokes and gave bookmarks for Christmas he made on Mabel’s looms. In these dreams, which always came to me just as I fell asleep, I found myself wandering through the cavernous, high-ceilinged rooms of the Black House without a clue about where I was going or how I’d get home. The only illumination came from heartless bands of moonlight that looked like they’d been painted on the hard black floors.

I knew I’d have to terminate this dream and shake myself awake up or I’d be sucked into deeper and more terrifying levels of the house and never escape. But I was paralyzed. The blackness, an inert, unyielding thing, pressed in from all sides. If I could only wiggle a toe or lift a finger or utter a single word I could free myself from the grip of the Black House and return to the world. I would be visited by this terror dozens of times, and every time I broke free of it I sat upright in bed covered with sweat, ears ringing, joints aching, head throbbing. (These frightening but harmless seizures and hallucinations are fairly common.

The folklore of every culture lays the blame for them on some ghoulish agent. My Irish peasant ancestors believed a horrible old hag entered your bed and sat on your chest. In fact, the dysfunction called sleep paralysis is caused when the brain, which paralyzes us during the course of a dream so we don’t try act it out, forgets to shut off the dream and the paralysis when we wake up. The condition can last a few seconds or even a couple of minutes. But it feels like it will never end. There are researchers who believe sleep paralysis is why some people swear they’ve been abducted by aliens.

Part Ten: After school on that mild and dry Thursday afternoon I walked my bike to the top of the hill I turned my eyes away from the Black House, as always. In the daylight it seemed nearly as menacing as it did in my dreams. But as I coasted toward it on the way down I was helplessly drawn to a second-story window that was on a level with my line of sight. Standing there was a man. Not an ogre or a ghost, but a man, with black hair, wearing a white shirt. I knew he’d been watching me. And as soon as he saw that I saw him he stepped away from the window, melting into the blackness within.

That night I stayed as close to Nancy as I could, clinging and getting underfoot. After dinner she took my temperature and felt my pulse. When I crawled into bed she tucked me in and listened to my prayers. As always, I asked God to watch over everyone I knew, listing them in an order that never varied from night to night. I ended with my most recent addition, the tigers I’d seen on the Wonderful World of Disney.

I have scoured my memory for any recollection of the events that followed. Maybe hypnosis could dislodge these images, or very good drugs. Or maybe some faded image will materialize at the end of one of my solitary and reflective days at Dark Acres, while I sit on the banks of the river with our dogs. What I do remember is what happened two days later. My aunt, Mary Ellis, led me up the staircase inside the house on the south side of Great Falls where my cousins John and Susie lived, which was across the street from where my cousins Cathy and Sheila lived. There, waiting in the loft-like expanse of the attic, was Ben. I didn’t have a clue about what he was doing up there. But, as always, I was glad to see him. After all, he was still my Daddy and I had no reason to blame him for the divorce, if indeed I even understood what divorce was all about.

“Son,” he said, looking down and putting a hand on my shoulder. “You know God loves you, don’t you?”

Now what was this all about?

“Yeah?”

“And you know that God comes down and takes everyone home with Him some day. No matter who they are.”

“Yeah?”

Ben took a deep breath. “Well, son, God has taken your mother.”

Part Eleven: On Friday, January 6, 1956, President Eisenhower spent the day in Key West playing golf and taking the sun. In Illinois a farm boy suffering from polio slipped into a coma and turned green. In Great Falls a 29-year-old man brought back a marriage license he and his fiancé had bought the week before from the clerk at District Court, announcing that he needed a marriage license like he needed a hole in the head. The weather was fair and moderate with a high of 36 and a low of 6. Only a trace of precipitation had fallen since the start of the year.

The Paris of Montana was having a sale featuring women’s “tambourine” hats with a veil for $4.98. At Wally’s grocery you could pick up Montana “fancy” grain-fed pot roast for 29 cents a pound or sirloin steak for 69 cents a pound. The Music Mixers were putting on three floor shows a night up on Gore Hill at the Horizon, “Montana’s Famous Airport Dining Room.” The “Amazing Black Light Girl Show” was slated to begin there on Monday. KFBB, the only television station in town, signed on at 5 p.m. and signed off at 11 p.m. after an Armchair Theatre broadcast of John Ford’s sea saga The Long Voyage Home. The Liberty Theatre was showing Teen-Age Crime Wave, and the Civic Center was showing The Spoilers, an action-adventure set in the Yukon featuring Rory Calhoun and a Montana actor named John McIntire. Over at the Rainbow Theatre you could see Glenn Ford and Barbara Stanwyck in The Violent Men or Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger in The Big Knife.

Any of these aspects of life in Great Falls was probably the topic of someone’s conversation that day, but the only news event on everyone’s mind was the vicious murders of an 18-year-old airman stationed at Malmstrom and his 16-year-old girlfriend. On Tuesday the body of Lloyd Bogle had been found beside his car in a “lover’s lane” west of the city, and the next day Patricia Kalitzke was found at the bottom of an embankment seven miles north of Great Falls—the Tribune carried a photo of her twisted body sprawled in the weeds.

The sweethearts had been shot in the back of the head, victims of what the paper called a “Chinese execution” (images of ruthless ChiCom hordes swarming across Korea’s Yalu River were still fresh in the collective memory). Because Bogle’s arms had been bound behind him authorities speculated that the girl had been forced to watch his murder before she was shot herself. The whole state was profoundly shocked and officials were under enormous pressure to find the killer.

At an inquest, Dr. C. E. Magner, the Cascade County coroner, presented what little evidence he had to a jury, which promptly ordered autopsies. Police Detective Capt. Tony Coppens assigned two of his detectives to work on nothing else until the case was solved. Not only were the police and the sheriff’s office focusing the majority of their man-hours on the search for the killer, the Highway Patrol and the provost marshal at Malmstrom were canvasing for leads all over the county. Large numbers of airmen at the base were being questioned. Even so, by the end of the day no one had a clue.


Part Twelve: The Great Falls Tribune the next day was dominated by news of the slayings. But the Morans and their many friends cared about only one headline on that front page: Local Woman Found Dead in Auto in Closed Garage. According to the article, the base hospital had called Joe in the afternoon to find out why Nancy hadn’t reported for duty. He walked across the yard to our cottage and searched the rooms, calling out Nancy’s name. Finally, at 3:30, he discovered her Ford still parked in the garage, whose wooden doors had been pulled shut. His oldest daughter, the vivacious, red-haired girl who loved to play cribbage and drink whiskey with him and talk for hours about Montana history and medicine and art, was slumped behind the wheel. The ignition was turned on but the car wasn’t running. She had just turned 34.

Dr. Magner said the cause of death, which was “investigated carefully” by county and city officials, was carbon monoxide poisoning. There was no evidence of foul play or suicide. “From all appearances,” he continued, “she slipped, falling backward on the grass and did not think she had been injured seriously. She then got up and went to the car in the usual manner and started it, not realizing her condition.

“She then became dazed or unconscious as a result of the fall and suffered asphyxiation.”
Mrs. Joaks, the neighbor lady who came in every morning to take get me off to school and watch over Laura, found us “ill from carbon monoxide fumes which had leaked from the attached garage.” Believing that Nancy had already left for work, the woman didn’t check the garage. “The children recovered,” the article reported.

Detective Coppens said there were some grass or weeds on the back of Nancy’s coat “but they could have come from dropping her coat or falling.” He said there was no indication of anything but an accident. Coroner Magner said no inquest was planned.

For nearly four decades this article sat in the archives of every library in the state waiting for me to come read it. But I grew up vigorously repressing any feelings about her death. As an adult, I told myself that knowing more about Nancy just didn’t fit into my strategy of avoiding stress and maximizing pleasure. The memories I had of her were all happy: standing on the front her skis as she sped down a slope at King’s Hill, a Moran family hobby run with a rope tow operated by a jeep engine; wading with her in Sand Coulee Creek; flying out over the water in the rope swing she was pushing. And that Halloween night in 1955 when she drove me to a party at my cousins’ house, dead leaves jumping against the windows of the car. And then she suddenly swerved around a body in the street, both of us shrieking, and then laughing when we saw that it was just overalls and a shirt stuffed with leaves by trick-or-treaters to simulate a body.

So why stir up more trouble in my brain than I already had?

But one day in 1994 it seemed I had no choice. Our normally obstinate postal lady had astounded me by actually driving a package right to the house instead of tossing a yellow slip in our mailbox out on the county road. The return address was the Veteran’s Administration at Ft. Harrison, Montana. Inside was a U.S. flag. Why would the VA send me a flag? Reading the label inside the box I saw what it meant. This flag represented the one that is traditionally handed to the next of kin at a military funeral. I had no idea why it took so long to finally make its way to me, but it seemed like a message.

The details of the Tribune’s account are sketchy. They might have been accurate, but as an explanation for my mother’s death could they possibly have been true? First, there’s the matter of her falling hard enough to cause some kind of delayed unconsciousness. It’s possible that she slipped on a patch of ice, but I remember the day before as dry—if there’d been ice on the sidewalks I couldn’t have ridden my bike. And the weather service reported almost no snow or rain the first week of 1956. Then there’s the matter of her car running in the garage. How could Mrs. Joaks, the lady who came to get us going in the mornings, not have heard it? Did Nancy commit suicide?

Although the cops didn’t think she did and no suicide note was ever found and she left her customary cup of coffee on the kitchen table to cool while she went out to start her car, sad people are capable of any sad act, including those that not only leave small children motherless but jeopardize their young lives as well. Verifying any of this “evidence” is impossible. As a matter of policy neither the Cascade County Sheriff nor the Coroner’s Office has records of this or any other accidental death from as far back as the 1950s. And because there wasn’t an inquest or an autopsy there wouldn’t be much to look at in these reports even if they still existed. The coroner, Dr. Magner, and the captain, Detective Coppens, are long dead. Grandpa Joe and Grandma Mabel are dead. Mrs. Joaks is dead.

After I was sent Nancy’s flag and my curiosity overcame my sense of psychic self-preservation, I learned that there was someone still alive who could shed light on the truth about her death. This person wasn’t mentioned in the Tribune article, either because the reporter didn’t ask the right questions or the authorities he questioned didn’t feel that the matter was important enough to mention (the reporter remains anonymous because editors in those days didn’t award bylines for purely routine work). At any rate, the night before she died, after I said my prayers and fell asleep, Nancy had a visitor. It’s not clear what time he arrived or what time he left. The police questioned him and apparently decided there was nothing in his answers to warrant further questioning.
That visitor, I discovered, was Ben. 

Part Thirteen: A year after my mother’s funeral Ben married Chris, the leggy blonde who broke up my parents, and moved the new addition to our family into the Turkey Coop. I was shy around Chris at first but after the September morning she took me to Largent School so I could register for the second grade, and everyone could see that here was a boy with a handsome big blonde mom, I figured I could do a lot worse. But the marriage was trench warfare from the start. I shared bunkbeds with her younger daughter, Christie, and Laura roomed with Cynthia. The new kids despised us as much as we despised them, and Ben was soon sparring with Chris around on a regular basis. I don’t know what their respective records might have been, but Chris was much better in the ring than would be Irene.

During one fight I saw her land a couple of hearty slaps to the face and a nice roundhouse to the jaw before Ben managed to employ his patented choke hold. Six months after the wedding the marriage ended in a flurry of parting shots. When I came home from school one day Chris and her girls and all of their stuff was gone, almost as if they had never existed. Exultant, I rushed into the bedroom I had been forced to share—my bedroom, again—and began jumping and screeching like a rabid monkey.

Ben became a zealous man-about-town, forcing us to go to church with him, babe-magnets that we were, where he was doted on by the Christian ladies he met there. And he liked to take us trolling in the bars with him, concentrating on the “divorcee clubs” like the Beacon and the Jay Bar Tee, a country-western joint on the west side where the country-western singer Charlie Pride got his start in the early 1960s.

I loved barhopping with Ben because the parental supervision during these outings was nonexistent, and he always bought me off with a handful of change so I could amuse myself with junk food and bar games like pinball and my favorite, a bowling game in which you slid a heavy stainless steel disc along a hardwood alley at a formation of metal pins. My favorite place was The Barge, a glorified boat dock with beer and burgers on the river a couple miles downstream from the Turkey Coop. They roasted a whole pig on a spit every Saturday during the summer. Plus, the management didn’t seem to mind if I scavenged for pop bottles worth good cash money at the supermarket. I also loved to stare at the lurid pictures they’d hung on the walls.

Because boaters from the city used the Barge as a watering hole as they raced their cabin cruisers up and down the river in a drunken spree every weekend, even the laissez-faire owner was compelled to post photos showing what high-speed propellers can do to human flesh. Still, I was bitterly disappointed when Ben postponed my first water-skiing lesson, however, because he had beaten me a little too hard for some insurrection or another, and my shoulders and back were covered with embarrassing bruises. 

My favorite image was a print issued by the Anheiser-Busch Brewing Company, a reproduction of a gory and explicit 1896 painting called Custer’s Last Fight, in which the Seventh Cavalry is depicted as piles of bloated, half-naked naked white men with slashes of blood where their scalps used to be. 

Despite my temper tantrums and Ben’s subsequent beatings, my recollection of life during the period after his divorce from Chris was of a boy who wandered around the world he had carved out for himself with the freedom of a wild dog. Every morning I strode into the happy glare and went about my business without, it seems to me now, a care in the world, whether it was rafting, sneaking out on summer nights to watch for UFOs, canoeing with my Boy Scout patrol, playing baseball, exploring the caves on the bluffs of the river, or hanging out in our tree fort on an island, where you could watch the deer swim back and forth to shore.

I don’t remember feeling sad about my mother’s death or cheated by fate. Ben mentioned her from time to time, always sticking to his story that she’d hit her head on the doorframe of her car as she got in to start it that morning. My memories of her began to fade. And life went on.

Part Fourteen: Less than a month after Irene’s funeral Ben was patrolling the aisles at St. Vincent DePaul looking for additions to his collection of western belt buckles when he met and soon bedded a fellow thrift store denizen named Denise. A recovering alcoholic who had served time in prison for shooting her husband, she was Irene’s opposite: loud and brassy and fond of tight, gaudy outfits that made her look like an extra in a Mexican soap opera. Ben would have his hands full for the next few months, especially after he encouraged Denise to jump off the wagon. “A couple now and then won’t hurt her,” he explained to me. “Helps takes the edge off.”

The high point of their adventures together was a road trip they took to Edmonton, Alberta. A Mormon, Denise had been barred from entering any of the temples in Utah because of her felonious past. She figured that because her eventual ecstatic rendezvous in heaven with God would be impossible if she didn’t get inside one, she convinced Ben to drive her to Canada so she could make an end run around church authorities in the U.S. But her misdeeds were on record there as well, and the couple returned to Great Falls with zero salvation.

One afternoon while playing in an amateur golf tournament in Raynesford, Montana, she met a rancher and promptly ran off with him. A few weeks later the affair fizzled, and she called Ben to see if he’d take her back.

But Ben had met somebody new, an elegant woman in her late fifties named Sarah whose various husbands had left her with plenty of money and an elegant old house near Paris Gibson Square in Great Falls. After a couple weeks of dating they heard a rumor in a bar one night that Denise had hired a hit man to kill them both. Excited by this news, and ecstatic about her love affair with Ben, Sarah revealed to Ben that her first husband, whom she had nursed through eight years of infirmity until his death, had suffered his stroke while having sex with Irene in a Billings hotel room, when Irene was married to the husband before Ben.

These revelations injected an agreeable element of danger and poetic justice into the relationship, which eyewitnesses reported was torrid. Two of these eyewitnesses were Laura and her third husband, a steady and affable Highwood Mountains rancher named Doran. The couple stopped by the Turkey Coop at Rat Flats one evening to say hello to Ben before they attended Laura’s high school reunion at Charles M. Russel HIgh (Go Rustlers!). Glancing through the big picture they saw Ben and Sarah having a romp on the dining room table. “Where we eat!” Laura would later tell me breathlessly.

Part Fifteen: Although he got involved with Sarah when he was 65, Ben agreed with her that before they consummated the relationship he should have a test for “the AIDS.”

Although the incubation period of the HIV virus is fifteen years Sarah figured better safe than sorry. The results were negative. Although their affair would continue for a decade it was not without its problems, although they apparently never erupted into violence. One day after Ben flew to east Texas for a family reunion Sarah became suspicious of a phone bill she found at Ben’s house while there to feed his brindle cat. It showed repeated calls from Rat Flats to a number in Mississippi. She hired a private detective, who reported that although Ben had indeed attended the reunion in Texas he also made a side trip to spend a couple of days with a woman he had been secretly seeing since the war.

In 1997 it was Sarah who called from Great Falls to tell me that Ben, then 75, had been admitted to the hospital with chest pains. Twenty-five thousand East Texas breakfasts of bacon and eggs, fried green tomatoes and buttered grits had finally packed his heart with sludge. If I cared at all about making my peace with him, she said, this might be my last chance.

When I walked into his hospital room I was shocked by the pale, shrunken being I found. He wasn’t able to sleep in the bed because his lungs filled with fluid, so the nurses had propped him up in a chair. It had been three years since we’d seen each other, but he didn’t seem surprised when he looked up from the photo album laid across his knees.
“Can’t get my breath when I lay down,” he explained, patting the bed beside him.
I took his hand. His eyes were rummy and his once powerful arms had the look of the drumsticks of a chilled chicken.

“How you feeling?”

“When did you start heating your house with kerosene?”

“How did you guess that?”

“I smell it on you.”

I sniffed my sleeve.

“I can smell everything now,” he said. “You had oatmeal for breakfast. With cinnamon. You dressed your boots last night with mink oil. Radish needs a bath.”

“We should get you on a game show that does smells.”

“There you go.”

“So what’s this?” I asked.

He lifted the photo album and handed it over, winded by the effort. His hands slumped into his lap like quail shot from the air. After I turned a few pages I saw that Ben was the subject of almost every picture. His vanity had always been robust—he rarely passed a mirror without taking a look—but I sensed that what he was doing today was trying to memorize his life.




Part Sixteen: Here was the virile twenty-year-old sailor, sporting a crown of wavy black hair as he restrained a lunging German Shepard in 1941 at the Coast Guard’s dog training school in Philadelphia. Here was the middle-aged civil servant receiving a certificate from the Strategic Air Command for outstanding performance in the test launch of a Minuteman missile from California into the Pacific. I paged through multiple shots of Ben as a retiree posing in various of the cowboy hats and boots and shirts from his western wear ensembles.

And here was a shot of him standing by the display case that housed his collection of belt buckles, a photo taken by the wife of a retired handyman named Tom, who sometimes drove around Montana with Ben on his drunken road trips.

Ben had wheeled the display case into the yard of the Turkey Coop in order to put it in the best light, and instructed Tom’s wife to back up a little in order to get both Ben and the entire display case in the frame. Unfortunately, Ben had forgotten that earlier in the day he’d removed the cover of his well in order to dredge out the sand that constantly crept into the sulphury water. Of course, the wife stumbled and fell, but was saved from a dunking when she came down face-first and spread-eagled across the well’s three-foot-wide casing. I had winced when Ben called that evening to tell me this story, figuring there’d be a lawsuit for sure.

“Is she hurt, Dad?”

“She ripped her t’aint,” he said.

“What?”

“You know, the part of a woman between the one thing and the other.” After he promised to pay the hospital bills the couple promised not to sue.

And here were some aspects of my father—always a child of the Depression—standing before the various outbuildings surrounding the Turkey Coop that housed his many used vehicles, and his hoards of canned goods, gasoline and tools. He owned two-dozen Phillips screwdrivers and sixty-eight tins of sardines.

I looked at the pictures, but what I was thinking about were events not recorded in this album. For one, there was his swollen and battered face the morning after he was jumped and pounded senseless in an alley outside a bar by two guys he’d been arguing with inside. They stopped kicking him only after he threw his wallet at them and told them to look inside at a snapshot of me and my sister. “Boys, I’m all these younguns got.”

And of course there aren’t any pictures of my own bruised self after one of Ben’s beatings, which he administered on a regular basis for various insubordinations from the time of my mother’s death until I was fourteen years old.

Part Seventeen: There’s also no record of that wild, sultry July evening the year Nancy died, when we were living for while in a small rented house in an alley downtown before moving back to Rat Flats. As we were watching television a scream and then another ripped the hushed air.

Without stopping to consider his own safety Ben banged through the screen door and rushed down the alley. What he found was a creep attacking a young woman with a lead pipe. Ben wrestled the pipe from the man’s hands, punched him in the face, chased the thug as far as he could, then returned to help the stunned and bleeding victim back to our house, which soon filled with cops and reporters. Ben Vaughn was a local hero for days. When I pleaded with him to run for mayor he looked down at me, and laughed.

I looked in vain for a photo of our memorable 1961 camping trip to Heart Lake, which started with a grueling five-mile hike into the mountains of the Scapegoat Wilderness. Although Ben had resisted my pestering for weeks I’d finally talked him into becoming Scoutmaster for the little rural troop I belonged to called the Skull Patrol. Our first Scoutmaster, a heart surgeon who lived in a big house on the Missouri upstream from the Turkey Coop, had abandoned not only the Skull Patrol, but his boys and his wife in order to run off to California with his nurse.

Nor was there any trace in the album of my appearance in 1959 on a local television show called the Pinski Amateur Hour. Tony Pinski, the owner of a plumbing supply business and a man of such girth the seats of his vehicles were equipped with special springs, began the program with “It’s A Grand Night For Singing,” rendered in his energetic tenor voice. Then he introduced the talent, the local musicians and dancers and magicians yearning for something more. I played Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” from memory and got through it with only a cooked stanza here and there, thanks to several years of piano lessons Ben had funded. Afterwards, a woman on KFBB’s staff told me I was the cutest thing.

Tucked into the album’s back flap along with Irene’s obituary was a faded envelope. In it were several small black-and-white snapshots. Even after fifty years the gray tones in these images were as crisp as the day they were printed. Here was my mother in a white tee shirt, waders and baggy slacks with mud on the seat, fishing in the pool of a mountain stream. Here she was lounging on a cot outside a tent, one foot resting on her knee while she flipped through a copy of Life magazine. Here were some winter scenes: Nancy in a heavy coat standing with Ben under the icicle-encrusted eave of a cabin, then the young couple on skis at King’s Hill, leaning into each other, their poles held at jaunty angles. And finally a blurred picture of Nancy down on all fours in the snow after taking a fall. I had never seen these photographs.

“Dad, tell me what happened when she died.”

Ben’s eyes shifted. “I thought we’d been all over this.”

“When I was a kid you said it was an accident. When I was in college you said it was suicide. Then you went back to the accident theory. It can’t be both.”

Part Eighteen: His gaze wandered to the window and the icy rooftops below as if he were planning his escape. I pushed on.

“You’ve always said how guilty you felt about her. Guilty about what?”

“I’m sorry I committed adultery,” he said at last. “I violated one of God’s ten commandments. I met Chris in June or maybe July. And you know what happened from there.”

“That’s what you feel bad about? Adultery?”

“Hell, I feel bad about everything. Is that what you want me to say?”

“What I want you to tell me is what happened, that’s all.”

“Why now? It never seemed to concern you much, never asking questions about her.”
“I know that.” 
                                              
“You’re trying to lay off our problems now, all of that, on me.”

I waited.

“Ah, well,” he sighed. “About two weeks before your mother died she told me she had contemplated suicide. I questioned her how she could even think of such. She explained to me she had no will to live. That’s the way that she felt. Then she told me later on that she knew it was foolish to even think about it. And I just figured it was forgotten. But then she did ask me what would happen to you children if something did happen to her. I told her I would take the children and do the best I could by raising them. Raising you all.”

He stopped to get his breath. “The night prior to her death, you know, she called me and says would I come and get you children, that she wasn’t going to be there. I said, well, where are you going? Up to Alabam and Sarah’s? No, not there, she says. And I should have known then that she had planned something. But anyway, I come over and she had a babysitter. I relieved the babysitter and she went home and then after a while your mother come home. She wasn’t drunk or maybe she was partly, I don’t know. She wasn’t real coherent. But enough that she could talk. I put her to bed down in the basement where she slept, put you kids to bed, told everybody good night. And then she called me back when I left her room and give me a hug and a kiss and said I want to tell you goodbye. I should have known right then that she was contemplating something.”

He had begun to sound like he was reading from a transcript or reciting a story to a cop.

Part Nineteen: “So you’re back on the suicide theory?” I asked.

“Bear with me.”

“Why would she call you to come get us if she already had a sitter?”

“Like I said, she just wanted to say goodbye one last time, I suppose.”

“Then what happened?”

“It was an icy morning that morning. It was cold. On the way to the garage she hit her head when she fell. Then she got up and went to the car and got in the car and closed the doors, all the windows up, not knowing what she was doing. She did not open the garage doors. Generally the first thing she would do is open those doors. I guess I was the last one to see her. I don’t know because I wasn’t there when it happened.”

A young nurse whose nametag said Judy bustled in to ask Ben what he wanted for lunch, the fish sticks or the chipped beef. Grateful for the interruption, he greeted her as if she were an old army buddy, and drew out this exchange as long as he could.

“He eats like he’s starving,” Nurse Judy said, offering me a conspiratorial wink.
I watched his face and I followed his eyes, thinking that if I stared hard enough the power of my gaze would peel away the layers there and reveal the truth underneath. But, as usual, all I could read was his chronic bad mood, and now a certain bleary, unfocussed weariness.

Ben seemed to miss Nurse Judy the moment she turned to leave.

“So on her way to kill herself,” I said, “she died accidentally.”

He regarded me without interest.

“Okay, then what?” I asked.

“The base hospital called several times. They were worried that she didn’t show up for work. I asked the old man where she was and your Grandpa Joe said I assume she’s gone to work. And I asked him to go over there and look again, go to the garage this time. And he went into the garage, found the car not running. It had run out of gas. And she was in the car slumped over the wheel. During the meantime Mrs. Joaks was taking care of you kids when your mother went to work, this Mrs. Joaks would. She got you off to school. And Laura was there with her and Laura got very sick. And Mrs. Joaks began to get sick. So she took Laura over to her house. She had asked you if there had been any dry cleaning, any spot removing that morning. You said no you didn’t think so. Anyway, you could have very easily been killed yourself. Laura could have been killed. Mrs. Joaks could have been killed . . .”

Ben tried to clear his lungs with a long, puny cough lacking the conviction that it was going to accomplish any clearing. I saw now how unguarded was the border between his life and his death and wondered how much stress it would take to push him to the other side. But I no longer wished him any grief—my revenge had been complete. I had calculated that the pain I had caused him by withdrawing from his life was equal to the pain he had caused me by terrorizing my childhood. Still, I had to know the truth. 

Part Twenty:  “Here’s the question, Dad. Tell me now, no more bullshit, no more theories. Did you have anything to do with her death?”

He eyes met mine. “If you’re saying did I ever hurt your mother. No, I never did hurt your mother. You’ll have to believe that. You should believe it—it’s true.”

“Swear it on your Bible.”

He raised his palms, as if surrendering. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, Bill. You have always been so sure I was a son of a bitch and you were a prince. The thing your mother tripped on—it was your bicycle.”

Four days later my father was dead. The causes were congestive heart failure, coronary disease, chronic high blood pressure and complications from diabetes. At the funeral he lay in an open casket dressed in his fanciest cowboy duds. His favorite boots, a pair of Dan Posts the color of butterscotch pudding, stood on a table beside him in a tableau morte reminiscent of the cavalry tradition of wrapping the boots of a fallen comrade in the stirrups of his horse during the funeral procession. My Uncle Joe, a Dallas real estate millionaire turned evangelist, delivered a service long on theology and short on the Bible thumping I thought Ben would have enjoyed. After Joe analyzed the nature of faith and the geography of heaven someone rose to attest to Ben’s Christian fervor in his later years, and to the peace and the acceptance he had demonstrated when he knew that the passing of his vessel was just a matter of time.

As we filed by the casket on the way to the hearses that would take us to Highland Cemetery, I reached out and touched Ben’s hand. It might have looked like the son saying goodbye to the father one last time. But I only wanted to make sure he was really dead. Just before the funeral I had learned from his sister that my father’s given name wasn’t, in fact, Ben Vaughn (he had told me once the family was too poor for middle names). He was actually born George Benjamin Vaughn, and had it legally changed before he went into the service.

His last words to me were what a doctor had told my grandfather, William Pleasant Vaughn, in 1933. Ben had always harbored a grudge against Daddy Williams, as he was called, because of his incompetence during the Depression, for running off to Dallas one winter to pursue a get-rich-quick scheme involving alleged gas and oil deposits he believed were under the family’s 180 acres of cotton (a belief that turned out fifty years later to have been true).

As the oldest son, Ben, or rather, George, had been forced to decide whether the family needed firewood more than it needed a certain split rail fence. When Daddy Williams had returned, Ben’s punishment was swift and sure. After the doctor examined the son he turned to the father. “Sir,” he said, “you are beating this boy too hard.”

A stinging breeze rose up as a bugler played taps. Seven riflemen fired into the air three times and a retired Air Force officer handed Laura a U.S. flag folded into a triangle. When my uncle asked the mourners to take a moment and join in silent prayer I looked into the wind, south across the brown steppes to the valley of the Sand Coulee Creek and the Little Belt Mountains beyond. •

Copyright © 2008 Bill Vaughn


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