Free Montana 1948 by Larry Watson Page A

everything. As a result, my plate was piled high with sweet potatoes and cooked carrots and sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese and kidney beans and corn bread and ham. And I had no appetite.
    Aunt Gloria chattered throughout the meal. She talked about the weather and the price of milk. She talked about how, even though the war had been over for three years, she still felt funny about throwing out a tin can. She taught first grade, and she talked about how she was going to make little construction paper Indian headbands for all her students, with their names on the feathers. She talked about her little brother who was in college in Missoula and who told her how the ex-GI’s pushed the professors around.
    I loved Aunt Gloria—she was sweet and beautiful and
good to me—yet that day I couldn’t bear to look at her. How could she act normal, I wondered, when she was married to Uncle Frank? How could she not know?
    Those were the cleanest thoughts I had. The ones I tried to suppress went something like this: Why would Uncle Frank want another woman when he had a wife like Gloria? And this line of thought was nudged along by my own desire. I thought Aunt Gloria was more than pretty....
    A year earlier I had stayed with Frank and Gloria when my parents were in Helena for a law-enforcement convention. I usually stayed home with Marie or with my grandparents at the ranch when my parents were out of town, but during that time Marie was doing something with her family and Grandmother was recovering from gall-bladder surgery.
    While my parents were gone, I came down with a case of tonsilitis, as I frequently did as a child. Uncle Frank gave me a shot of penicillin, and Aunt Gloria took better care of me than my own mother. She made me chicken soup and Jell-O, she brought me comic books and ginger ale, and she never let more than an hour pass without checking on me.
    She came in late one night to make sure I was covered. I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep, but when she bent down to feel my forehead I could smell her perfume. The scent itself seemed warm as it closed in on me. She backed away and went to the window, and I opened one eye. She was wearing just the top of a pair of pajamas, and as she stood before the window just enough light came in from the street lamp to silhouette her breasts perfectly. I
closed my eyes again, out of both shame and fear of being caught looking.
    From the doorway came Uncle Frank’s whisper. “Is he asleep? ”
    â€œShhh,” Aunt Gloria whispered back. “Yes.” She tiptoed out of the room. In the hall Uncle Frank said aloud, “So this is what it’s like to have kids. Damn.”
    Before long, I heard them through the wall in their own bedroom. Their bedsprings squeaked rhythmically; I thought I could hear breathing—a sound spreading through the house as if it were more than sound, as if it were a presence, like perfume, like darkness itself. Later I heard them in the bathroom together. I couldn’t make out anything they said, but that didn’t matter. By then I was concentrating on only one thing: one more reason to envy Uncle Frank.
    It was shame again that Sunday that kept me from looking at Aunt Gloria during our meal. And the day had one more similarity to that night. As Gloria leaned toward me to take a plate of tomatoes from Grandmother, I smelled my aunt’s perfume again. But the lush sweet floral scent—so out of place in that rough-timbered room and among all those odors of food—did not excite me this time. This time it made me so sad I wanted to cry.
    As soon as the meal was over, I asked if I could be excused to go riding. My parents gave me permission so quickly I wondered if they were planning to bring up the accusations against Uncle Frank as soon as I was out of the house. No, not in front of Grandmother. My father might have said something
to Grandfather, but they would have gone to any extreme to keep