Breaking Blue (26 page)

When Jesuit missionaries first entered the area in the 1840s, members of the Pend Oreille tribe told them their land was called Sineleman, meaning “Place of Encirclement,” where tribes from throughout the inland Northwest gathered to trade and barter. Surrounded by humpbacks of granite and basalt that rise nearly two vertical miles, the valley is protected from the worst storms that gather over Montana for much of the cold season.

The most prominent human landmark in Saint Ignatius is the mission, established in 1854 and named for Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. The first version of the church was built of whipsawed lumber and held together by wooden pins. Forty years later, the priests finished their arched masterpiece, built, with Indian labor, of stone and a million red bricks the color of sunset. Brother Joseph Carignano spent most of his adult life on his back inside the church, painting fifty-eight murals on the ceilings and walls, finishing the last picture around 1920. The church draws tourists to Saint
Ignatius, a town of 877 people, which might not otherwise attract outside visitors. Well-traveled Catholic clerics says their outpost in western Montana is one of the five most beautiful churches in the world, a house of worship made all the more stunning by its setting, alone against the mountains, an inspirational chip off the granite block of the Mission Range. The priests intended Saint Ignatius to be a spiritual fortress; just as the mountains protected the valley, the church was supposed to be a shelter from the harsher impulses of humanity. In the spirit of that design, Brother Carignano’s murals depict scenes of great optimism instead of the usual Gothic gloom or graphic illustrations of the consequence of sin.

Pearl Keogh grew up in Saint Ignatius, raised in a mission school for Indians and whites, which the Sisters of Providence ran. When Bamonte told her that he had traced Clyde Ralstin to her girlhood home, Pearl detected the hand of God scripting a final and fitting act to both of their lives. She wanted to travel to Saint Ignatius by herself and confront Ralstin with September 1935. But Bamonte advised her against that; he promised to tell Pearl everything upon his return.

In Saint Ignatius, which the locals call Mission, there is a clear dividing line between the white and Indian sections of town. Members of the Flathead (or Salish), Pend d’Oreille (upper Kalispel), and Kootenai live near the church. Ralstin managed an apartment complex in the poor part of town, leasing the units out to Indians. He was not well liked by his tenants, who feared his flash temper. To be a few days late on a rent payment was enough to prompt an eviction threat from Ralstin. A few small businesses operate in the summer, selling dolls made of bear’s hair, and moccasins with traditional beadwork. The whites live in what some residents jokingly call the silk stocking district, in wood-framed houses, well kept, some with metal roofs to speed the melting of heavy snows. The general store in this neighborhood sells vials of scented cover for hunters—“guaranteed 100 percent elk urine.” At the local hangout, the Malt Shop, everybody knows everybody else’s business and stool assignment. Although the original Flathead Reservation comprised 1.2 million acres, it has long since been opened up to homesteading, allotment sales, and leasing
to non-Indians. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation now own less than half of the land promised them by the Hell Gate Treaty of 1855.

Bamonte found Clyde Ralstin’s house in the white part of town at 365 First Avenue, a small, single-story home with a green tin roof and white siding. Next to the front door was a wooden sign inscribed “The Ralstins.” Though the grass was still brown, newly unveiled from winter snow cover, the yard was neat and the hedges trimmed, reflecting the pride and the routine of its owner. The fruit trees in this neighborhood had yet to flower; their skeletal claws clacked against each other in the wind. Firewood was cut and stacked nearby. Bamonte drove by the house but did not stop his car.

When he checked in with the Lake County sheriff’s department—a common courtesy when a cop from one jurisdiction is investigating someone in another county—a deputy told him that within an hour of his arrival, Ralstin knew he was in town. Clyde had friends. Bamonte smiled and pulled up a seat. Scenting and circling was part of the ritual of the hunt. He had traced Ralstin from a bootlegger’s hangout in Spokane to a valley that seemed to be at the end of the earth.

R
ALSTIN SHARED
the little white house on First Avenue with his wife, Marie. They socialized mainly with non-Indians, retired people who talked about hunting, fishing, the weather, and fixing things up. On occasion, the Ralstins would go to dinner at the Indian cultural center, on the other side of town; in Saint Ignatius, there was consent that the food was far better at the tribal center than anywhere else in the valley.

When the first news story came out of Spokane, Clyde had suspected Bamonte would eventually catch up with him. And with each new article, he cursed the sheriff from Pend Oreille County. Bamonte became a distant nag, lingering out of view. Oflate, Ralstin’s breathing was erratic, and sometimes he would wake up coughing and pained. He told friends he had not slept well since the graduate student’s
project came to light in February. In that regard, he and Bamonte were alike.

When Marie and Clyde sat at breakfast, Ralstin would offer a prayer, repeated every morning since the Conniff story broke. “Lord, get this off my back,” said Clyde, his head bowed. “Please, Lord, make this go away.” But the circle only closed tighter; the pressure increased with each new piece of information trickling into Montana from Spokane.

“Dad,” his wife had asked him a few days before Bamonte arrived in Saint Ignatius, “what’s this all about?”

“It’s hogwash,” he replied. And in angrier moments, he called it “bullshit,” professing bewilderment that his life had taken such a strange turn. He told Marie that Bamonte must have thought he was dead; otherwise, he never would have stirred up so much trouble.

There was very little mystery to the Clyde Ralstin of 1989. He had come to Montana from Lapwai, riding into town on his reputation as a law-and-order man with fifty years of experience. He remodeled and managed his apartment complex, built a house outside Saint Ignatius, sold it, then moved into the little frame home on First. Most days, Clyde went for a long, slow walk, using his hand-carved willow cane for balance. To his neighbors, he was the sweetest octogenarian this side of the Divide. He respected his fellow citizens and he feared God. He was ever helpful. He was a fine storyteller. He had suffered from a peptic ulcer, and gout, and had a type of heart disease typical for a man his age; but overall, he was considered, by friends and by his doctor, to be a strong, well-preserved man. One thing he could
not
be, his neighbors were convinced, was a killer. To think that Clyde Willis Ralstin, the very embodiment of the self-reliant westerner, the pains and changes of the twentieth century etched in his face, this former judge, a longtime lawman, head of security at Hanford, kind and gentle neighbor, had once been a bootlegger of butter, and had fired four shots into the body of a small-town marshal—including a final, killing blast when Conniff was down—was a preposterous notion. As Clyde walked through town, offering advice on fixing a truck or finishing a chore, he was accorded
respect, the kind people want in their late years, the simple acknowledgment of a life well lived.

The Lake County sheriff’s deputy told Bamonte that he had stirred up a nest of trouble in the Ralstin home with his investigation of the 1935 killing.

“Imagine people will be mad at Clyde,” said Bamonte.

“More likely mad at you.”

“Me?”

“For bringing it up.”

At the Lily of the Valley flower shop, Clyde was known as a romantic, one of the best customers. About once a week, he’d come into the shop in the afternoon and buy a bouquet for Marie. The ladies who sold him his flowers did not care what was in his past. A person had a right to be forgiven and to move on with his life. “Even if he did kill that marshal,” said one of the store’s owners, “it’s so long ago, who cares? Are they gonna hound the man to his grave? I mean, that’s not fair.”

In the Tepee Tavern, where a schooner of Coors costs less than a dollar, Clyde was a hero. Among regulars at the Tepee, some hoped it was true that Ralstin had killed Conniff. “If he did it, and got away with it, more power to him,” said one patron. “There’s something to be said for a man who can pull it off, then live the rest of his life as a righteous man.”

A few doors away from the Ralstin house lived Olive Wehr, a columnist for the weekly Mission Valley
News
. Olive was the same age as Clyde, a few months shy of her ninetieth birthday, and she spent her days in a big house full of books and western antiques, with a large garden outside and a fenced-in quarter-acre of grass. She had written four books; one of them,
God’s Forgotten Garden
, a volume of poetry about runaway girls, won a Mark Twain Award for Literary Excellence in 1947. Olive Wehr still banged out her column, “The Saint Ignatius Grapevine,” every week in the local paper. What got her back up was when somebody dared to call her contribution a gossip column. Gossip was a form of torture, cruel and whispered. Olive dealt in facts, writing about grandchildren who came to town for a visit, comings and goings of her fellow townsfolk, who was sick
and who was well. There was a line that she would not cross. She had yet to write a thing about her neighbor, because she did not consider the rumors coming out of Spokane to be worth repeating in print. Nor had she talked about the killing with Clyde. “You don’t ask about certain things,” she said later. “Everybody has a past. We are a very close-knit and very protective community. In a small town, that’s the only way you can get along.”

She was outraged that Bamonte and his allegations had followed Clyde to Saint Ignatius in the last years of his life. “How would anybody feel if they’d lived their whole life only to have something like this thrown at them near the end?” she said. “I know Clyde Ralstin as a friend and a neighbor, not the person this sheriff says he is.”

She had first met Clyde when he moved into 365 First Avenue; it seemed so long ago she could not remember exactly when the Ralstins had come to town. Olive hired him to build a sun room, expanding a porch and covering it. A superb carpenter, reliable, steady, and meticulous, Clyde was a magician with circular saw and hammer. And he was charming, chatty; he certainly never made a pass at Mrs. Wehr or went into a gallop of foul language. “He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word,” she said. “He stands for the right things.”

After work, Clyde and Olive would sip lemonade and watch the golden light on the western flank of the Mission Range. He talked about the adventures of his life—the days in South America, the war period at Hanford, the years as a judge at the Nez Percé Reservation. “Once in a while he’d bring up something about his being a detective,” she said. “But there was nothing shameful, nothing scandalous. He told me he was quite a good policeman, is what I remember.”

As veterans discuss the war that scarred them for life, Olive and Clyde would sometimes talk about the Great Depression and what it did to them. They knew it was something that could not be understood by their children, or friends from a younger generation. You simply had to live through it—the humility, hunger, and long nights without hope, the dollar-a-day jobs, the lines for soup, the unheated rooms on winter nights—to understand what it did to people. A teacher in the 1930s, Olive was not paid in money; rather, at the end
of her work period she was given a ration of scrip, which she would take to local farmers and redeem for food.

“It seemed to us that life just stopped during the Depression,” said Olive. “It brought out the best and it brought out the worst in everybody.” Given the times, was it not possible that Clyde could kill another man over food? Olive had thought about this question since the whispered stories of Clyde’s awful past first came into town in mid-spring.

After much rumination, she had settled on an answer. She told about a rock in Saint Ignatius the size of a house, a remnant from an Ice Age glacier as it gouged its way north. Nobody asks about the rock or how it got there, said Olive Wehr. The neighborhood was built around it. Everybody accepts it for what it is.

B
ETTY
B
AMONTE
was late for work and looking for something at home in Metaline Falls. She went downstairs to the first floor of the brick building and started rummaging through a stack of papers next to her husband’s master’s degree project. Looking at the completed thesis, she thought of how she had been left out of the recent triumphs. He used to talk nonstop about how excited he was to be stirring up the past. If she let him, he would jabber on till dawn. On many nights, even after she kissed him and told him to put the project out of his head and go to sleep, his mind kept racing, and she shared the thumping heart. The entire bedroom seemed to pulse with his restless mind. As the initial breakthroughs came, she was the first to know; Tony rushed the information to her like a kid running home from school with his best report card. She was a partner in discovery. But in recent weeks, she learned of developments—the existence of Clyde Ralstin, the complete story of Pearl Keogh—from reading the newspaper. She felt no closer to her husband than the average subscriber might feel.

A section of computer paper buried in a stack on Tony’s desk caught her eye. Betty saw these words, in big letters spat out by the automated printer:

She stared at the paper in disbelief.

Was this what those Thursday nights in Spokane were all about? The reason he couldn’t look her in the face without turning away? Why he no longer asked the basic questions about the structure of her day?

She caught her breath, forcing the air out slowly. Now she was gasping; the oxygen had left the room. She didn’t care what happened to him now, if he ever came home or lived or died. If he returned to Metaline Falls today, she would not let him in this house. She would throw everything of his in a bag and tell him to be gone, off to some fleabag room down the road, where he belonged—out, out, out! When the flash of anger passed, she started to cry, alone with the hollowed-out feeling of the betrayed.