The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [144]
David and I assumed that Kevin’s pickup had gotten stuck somewhere on a country road. We couldn’t imagine why he’d be out on a country road, but that seemed the best bet. You learn quickly here—sometimes by having to spend a night in your car—that in winter it’s not wise to drive down the roads that aren’t on a school bus route, as they’re the last to be plowed. When we got back to town, my husband went to the tavern where Kevin’s wife worked, hoping to hear that he was all right. Instead, he learned that Kevin’s body had been found, and that the police considered it a murder.
It’s hard to convey the disbelief that I felt when David phoned me. Murder had been the last thing on our minds. In the twenty-one years that we’ve lived in Lemmon, South Dakota, there had been just three murders in the area. Two elderly men were killed for their money; in both cases the murderers were incompetent and foolish enough to be caught and punished. Another sad case involved several young men high on drugs—angel dust is what I’ve heard—who beat another to death in a dispute over drugs and money.
Piecing the story together from all the talk downtown—wherever you went, people were talking of little else—we learned that Kevin had last been seen offering a ride home to a man who’d been in the area for a few weeks, working on a crew taking railroad ties from abandoned lines. A large, bullying man from Montana, he’d made his presence felt in the bars and cafes. A troublemaker, quick to pick fights, he stood out. People here can be plenty tough, but except for a few cowboys during their growing-up phase, they don’t usually feel called upon to prove it. In the more than ten years that my husband worked in a popular working-class bar downtown, he very seldom had to break up a fist fight, and never saw a weapon drawn, a fact that is all the more remarkable because so many people here own and use knives and guns as a matter of necessity (if you’re forty-five miles from town on a gravel road and a deer bolts from the ditch, breaking a leg on the front of your pickup, a gun is good to have).
David and I listened as people who had searched for Kevin told their stories; they knew his pickup truck had been found abandoned, and that they might have to abandon the search and wait for spring snowmelt to uncover him, but well over a hundred volunteers searched a 900-square-mile area in the subzero cold, on foot and horseback, in planes, and on snowmobiles. Two of Lemmon’s largest employers, the livestock auction and a jewelry manufacturing plant, let their employees join the search at full pay. Food and fuel for the searchers were donated by the local grocery stores and gas stations. Gruff ranchers interviewed at the cafe on Main Street spoke of “a sense of being violated,” and lamented that their sense of trust was diminished. It occurred to me that in this region, which most of the world considers “Godforsaken,” we still have the grace of being able to feel the loss of one man. There are no “crime statistics” here, only people, and a crime such as murder is taken as a personal affront. Still, you know that the next time you see a car broken down at the side of the road, you’ll stop and offer help. We don’t know any other way to survive in these open spaces.
No one knows exactly what happened that night. Kevin was a peacemaker; out for a few drinks with friends on a Saturday night, he’d helped to break up a fight earlier in the evening. Maybe to show that there were no hard feelings, he’d offered a ride to the man who’d started the fight. Kevin was half-Lakota, and proud of it. I wonder if his murderer—who, we later learned, had a long record of violent assaults—thought that since he was killing an Indian, no one would care. He was wrong. He’s in prison for life.
Here, we still know that murder is a momentous thing. We have no