morning—Sunday—Mouse, or Williams, arrived at our house, stood in the yard with my father, and said what he’d said about killing us, a threat our father took very seriously. Williams also stated that he and his associates had incurred greater risk by stealing four cows instead of one, and had gone to much more perilous difficulty in butchering them and transporting them, and had been laughed at by the Negro Digby when they delivered the meat and demanded they be paid $600 instead of the $400 they were originally owed. Williams further told our father that one of his associates was under surveillance by the reservation police specifically due to the cow-stealing scheme, and needed money to make a trip to Wyoming to hide for several months. For which reasons, Williams said, he and his friends were now owed $2,000, and not $600 or the $400 they’d agreed to. Where the $2,000 amount came from he didn’t offer to explain.
Our father wasn’t a man accustomed to being threatened. He was accustomed to getting along well with people, amusing them, being admired for his looks, his nice manners, his southern accent, and for his valiant bombardier’s service in the war. Being threatened with murder exerted a big impact on him. He immediately began to brood and fester about how he could get the money, and quickly came to the extraordinary idea of finding a bank to rob. At that moment, it must’ve seemed better than having the Indians kill him and my mother and Berner and me, better than gathering us all three up, loading us into the Bel Air and abandoning everything in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Other ways of getting the money—borrowing it (he had no credit, his in-laws disliked him, he had no salary and nothing to borrow against), or of coping with the situation, such as by going to the Great Falls police or reasoning with Williams—either didn’t occur to him or, he might’ve felt, would only lead to worse problems. Later, when it might have occurred to him to go to the police and throw himself on their mercy, he’d already decided robbing a bank was a good idea, and that was that.
WHEN MY MOTHER was in the North Dakota Women’s Penitentiary in Bismarck, where she was imprisoned after her and my father’s trial, she wrote about the next days and the ones preceding them in her chronicle—an account that goes into great detail about what she and my father did. She’d had aspirations to be a poet when she was in college at Walla Walla, and possibly she thought a well-written version of their story would offer a future for her when she got out of prison—which she never did. In her chronicle she is extremely critical of our father and his flaws. She doesn’t excuse herself or plead she was crazy or forced into participating, or even try to explain how she was talked into it. (She does express sorrow about what happened to my sister and me.) In her writing she says she believed she was the person she’d always thought herself to be—reflective, smart, imaginative, possibly alienated and skeptical, conserving, mirthful. (She wasn’t that.) These were the values that caused her never to want Berner and me to assimilate in the places my father’s Air Force job took us. Those places, she felt, would dilute and corrupt what was good and important about us and render us stale and ordinary in terms specific to Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, places she had low regard for and considered unenlightened. She uses these words in the chronicle: dilute, conserving, alienated, stale, corrupt . She believed she and my father should never have married—she should’ve seen ahead that they both would’ve been happier if they hadn’t. This was where she wrote about marrying a college professor and having a life as a poet and other such things. She says she definitely should’ve left him the minute the subject of a robbery came up, since she was already considering leaving him. Except what she
Our father wasn’t a man accustomed to being threatened. He was accustomed to getting along well with people, amusing them, being admired for his looks, his nice manners, his southern accent, and for his valiant bombardier’s service in the war. Being threatened with murder exerted a big impact on him. He immediately began to brood and fester about how he could get the money, and quickly came to the extraordinary idea of finding a bank to rob. At that moment, it must’ve seemed better than having the Indians kill him and my mother and Berner and me, better than gathering us all three up, loading us into the Bel Air and abandoning everything in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Other ways of getting the money—borrowing it (he had no credit, his in-laws disliked him, he had no salary and nothing to borrow against), or of coping with the situation, such as by going to the Great Falls police or reasoning with Williams—either didn’t occur to him or, he might’ve felt, would only lead to worse problems. Later, when it might have occurred to him to go to the police and throw himself on their mercy, he’d already decided robbing a bank was a good idea, and that was that.
WHEN MY MOTHER was in the North Dakota Women’s Penitentiary in Bismarck, where she was imprisoned after her and my father’s trial, she wrote about the next days and the ones preceding them in her chronicle—an account that goes into great detail about what she and my father did. She’d had aspirations to be a poet when she was in college at Walla Walla, and possibly she thought a well-written version of their story would offer a future for her when she got out of prison—which she never did. In her chronicle she is extremely critical of our father and his flaws. She doesn’t excuse herself or plead she was crazy or forced into participating, or even try to explain how she was talked into it. (She does express sorrow about what happened to my sister and me.) In her writing she says she believed she was the person she’d always thought herself to be—reflective, smart, imaginative, possibly alienated and skeptical, conserving, mirthful. (She wasn’t that.) These were the values that caused her never to want Berner and me to assimilate in the places my father’s Air Force job took us. Those places, she felt, would dilute and corrupt what was good and important about us and render us stale and ordinary in terms specific to Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, places she had low regard for and considered unenlightened. She uses these words in the chronicle: dilute, conserving, alienated, stale, corrupt . She believed she and my father should never have married—she should’ve seen ahead that they both would’ve been happier if they hadn’t. This was where she wrote about marrying a college professor and having a life as a poet and other such things. She says she definitely should’ve left him the minute the subject of a robbery came up, since she was already considering leaving him. Except what she
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