Free Justice by Larry Watson Page B

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