Distinctly Montana Magazine

4 5 Y E A R S O F H A U N T E D W A T E R S 1 8 Montana, simply to acquaint himself with his surround- ings. "He liked to walk around in odd sections of the city," Norman told a coroner's inquest. "He was a news- paper reporter by trade, and he was from a small town. He liked to walk around, just to see the town, Saturday afternoons and sometimes at night. I had warned him that this was not Montana, and he couldn't walk around with impunity looking at the sights, but he didn't seem very particularly persuaded by my argument." Jessie thought it possible Paul had gone looking for trouble, as he sometimes had in Montana, and then found that Chi- cago didn't play by Montana rules. She often wondered if he had been given just a few more years and a lot more luck, whether he might not have turned a corner, mar- ried, started a family of his own, held a steady job, and found supportive friends. Paul would've had to give up a lot, though, for that sort of life. An investigating officer, Detective Sgt. Ignatius Sheehan, became interested in the story of the feigned stagger, and knowing that the university sometimes sent in private reports on vice in the district, he surmised that Paul may have been conducting an investigation for the school. University authorities denied this, as did my father and Paul's boss, George Morgenstern, who dis- missed the theory as utter nonsense. Another theory was that Paul's gambling caught up with him and he was at- tacked for bad debts. But this scenario, which was carried through in the movie version of the tale, is quite unlikely for late on a Sunday night, in a heavily African American neighborhood, supposing that debt enforcers were sent to collect or encourage repayment. After several weeks of investigation, Deputy Coroner C.J. McGarigle asked the police officer who oversaw the inquiry, Capt. Mark Boyle, for his conclusion. "Did the police come to an opinion as to how this occurrence happened, whether it was robbery or other- wise?" McGarigle said. "I am of the opinion it was a robbery," Boyle replied. And that's the way it remains on the police books to this day: a robbery gone bad, a murder unsolved. d d d Norman alone accompanied his brother's body back on the long, overnight train journey to Montana. When he once tried to tell me what the trip had been like, he couldn't find words. After the funeral in Missoula, he spent several weeks of compassionate leave with his parents at the cabin at Seeley Lake, and he was able to describe this experience years later. "It was early May, and the forest floor of the cathedral of thousand-year-old Tamaracks was covered with dog- tooth violets, which are really lilies. Around the lake they are often called glacier lilies, probably because it is only about twenty miles from our lake to the glaciers. We thought they were the most beautiful and fragile flowers we could ever see, and we tried not to walk on any of them. My father aged rapidly. He never hunted ducks again and had to give up most of his trout fishing. His feet dragged when he walked, as if his leg muscles had atrophied so he could not fish the big river anymore and even the creeks that were hard to get to. Mostly he fished in the lake in front of our cabin in a flat-bottomed boat he had made many years before." If Paul's story had ended there it would have remained a shocking family tragedy best left in the past. It did not. The portrait Norman managed to create in A River Runs Through It gave Paul a lasting afterlife as the charming rebel, doomed but beautiful and gifted with a fly rod. He was forever the younger brother who struggled for an in- dependent life and went down fighting. Norman's vision of him, though, brought the consolation of shared experi- ence, taken to an eloquent level, to a host of brothers and sisters who have reached out to wayward siblings only to see them twist and dodge away as Paul did. Many years later my father would come down from the cabin to the lake in the evening when the world had turned to gentleness, and I would sit on the bank watching for a fish to rise. Without acknowledging my presence but knowing I was there he would call out "Paul! Paul!" his face nearly incandescent with the light of remembrance and expectation. HE NEVER HUNTED DUCKS AGAIN AND HAD TO GIVE UP MOST OF HIS TROUT FISHING. HIS FEET DRAGGED WHEN HE WALKED, AS IF HIS LEG MUSCLES HAD ATROPHIED SO HE COULD NOT FISH THE BIG RIVER ANYMORE AND EVEN THE CREEKS THAT WERE HARD TO GET TO. MOSTLY HE FISHED IN THE LAKE IN FRONT OF OUR CABIN IN A FLAT-BOTTOMED BOAT HE HAD MADE MANY YEARS BEFORE. My father aged rapidly. WESLEY W. BATES

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