Table of Contents
MORE FICTION FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS
Also by Larry Watson
In a Dark Time Leaving Dakota Montana 1948 Justice White Crosses Laura Orchard Sundown, Yellow Moon
To Susie
I WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD when I first saw a woman’s bare breasts, in itself an unremarkable occurrence. But when you consider that I also saw my first bullet wound on that same body, you have a set of circumstances truly rare. And if the boy standing beside me that day had not already been as close as a brother, the experience would have bound us to each other in a way even blood would find hard to match.
We were exposed to these phenomena in order that we might learn something, but then the lessons we learn are not always those we are taught....
1.
ON THANKSGIVING DAY IN 1962 I was seated at the dining room table with the Dunbar family, father and mother, eight-year-old twins Janet and Julia, and Johnny, who was my age. In fact, there were people in Willow Falls, Minnesota, who believed that the Dunbars had two sets of twins, so inseparable were Johnny and I. That one of us was dark and the other fair, one taller and one slighter, wouldn’t necessarily have dissuaded anyone from that belief; after all, sturdy Janet was blond and waifish Julia brunette. And since I walked in and out of the Dunbar house as I pleased, why wouldn’t someone assume that Johnny and I shared a last name?
But I was a Garth, an outsider, though this was genially ignored by the Dunbars. A few years earlier, when Miss Crane assigned Wuthering Heights to our eighth-grade English class, I was among the few who read the novel with interest. I identified with Heathcliff, not only because his brooding, headstrong character reminded me of my own, but also because I, too, had been welcomed into a prosperous, loving family. In fact, if my waking hours could have been totaled up, they likely would have revealed that I spent more time at the Dunbar house than I did at my own.
Where, incidentally, a holiday meal was not being served. My mother worked as a waitress at Palmer’s Supper Club, and Sam Palmer always remained open on holidays for the few customers who didn’t care to cook for themselves. Before she left for work she’d said she was sorry and offered to cook a turkey another time, just for the two of us, but I waved off her apology. She couldn’t afford to pass up the hours.
Besides, I was right where I wanted to be, sitting at the long mahogany table, candlelit and covered for the occasion with a linen tablecloth, and set with the dishes and silverware that appeared only on holidays. Despite the table’s ample proportions, there was not enough room for all the food Mrs. Dunbar had prepared. On the sideboard waited apple and pumpkin pies, an extra bowl of stuffing, a basket of rolls, and a sweet potato casserole. The meal would be wonderful, of that I was certain. Mrs. Dunbar was an excellent cook, a woman who took more delight in the preparation of food than its consumption.
Dr. Dunbar had just finished carving the turkey—repeating in the process the joke he made every year about how his surgical training finally came in handy—when the doorbell chimed. Calling uninvited on Thanksgiving generally would have been perceived as rude in Willow Falls, but not at the Dunbar home.
A few of the older people in the community still referred to the Dunbars’ grand Victorian mansion on the edge of town as the Gardiner place, after the wealthy merchant who built the house early in the twentieth century. But shortly after moving in, Dr. Dunbar had an addition built onto the house, and it was there that he practiced with George McLaughlin, the doctor who took the young Rex Dunbar into his practice, bringing the Dunbars to Willow Falls. Initially the doctors kept their offices downtown, on the second floor of the building that had Karlsson’s law firm and Burke’s Pharmacy on the first, but once the new addition was completed, they moved into the Dunbars’ house, along with Betty Schaeffer, their nurse-receptionist. Patients who required treatment beyond what doctors Dunbar, McLaughlin, or the four doctors in the Cumberland Clinic could provide had to travel fifty miles to the nearest hospital, which was located in Bellamy, Minnesota. Not until 1976 would Willow Falls have its own hospital, though the project had been proposed and debated for decades.
Because of Dr. McLaughlin’s age, Dr. Dunbar handled the more difficult cases, performed all the surgery, and put in the longest hours. But he did so without complaint, and if someone rang the bell, even on Thanksgiving Day, Dr. Dunbar would never consider not answering the call of duty. It might be Mr. Kolshak, clutching a hand that required stitches because the knife slipped when he was carving the turkey. Or it might be Mrs. Shea, hoping that