I played the cassette a third time on the kitchen table, with the volume as low as it would go and the curtains drawn. Static, then a cough, then the voice of my father reading the date. January 14, 1997. After that came a long hiss of wind and the metallic hum of a truck engine at idle. Then a man spoke, close to the microphone, clear as a bell. He said, “Energize the line, Orville. Go on. Throw it.” And there was a click, and a scream, and then nothing. The voice that gave the order was not Orville Kneip. I knew it at once.
It was Gil Marsh. I had known his voice all my life, from every Fourth of July picnic, from the Christmas he played Santa for the line crews, from the night he gave the eulogy at the funeral of my grandmother. Gil Marsh had been the district foreman of the power cooperative in 1997. Today he was seventy eight, retired, a deacon of the Lutheran church in Laurel, with a big white house and a plaque from the governor. I put my hand over my mouth. My father had never said his name. Not once.
I took the tape to Orville first, because I could not bear to go to anyone else. He lives alone in a cabin outside Red Lodge, eighty three years old, with a heart condition and a cat. He listened to the whole recording sitting on the porch step, hunched over his knees, and when it ended he took off his glasses and cleaned them slowly on his shirt. He said, “Your father taped that in the truck. I told him he was a fool. He said it was insurance.” He put the glasses on. “I wish to God we had used it.”
A conscience that cannot speak will sometimes leave its testimony on a cassette tape and wait patiently for a child to find it.
Orville told me what really happened that morning. A storm had dropped a line near Roundup. Tommy Haugen, a twenty four year old lineman with a wife and a baby girl, was up a pole with a hot stick, working on a dead circuit that had been tagged and locked out. Gil Marsh, behind schedule and under pressure from the head office, ordered the line re energized without confirming that Tommy was clear. Orville was at the switch. He hesitated. Gil raised his voice. Orville threw it. Tommy died on the pole before his father could reach him. He was in the crew.
The cooperative investigated itself. Gil wrote the report. He said Tommy had removed his own lockout tag, an act of carelessness, and the board accepted it. Orville and my father signed statements agreeing with that account because Gil told them they would be fired, and perhaps charged, if they said anything else. They were young, with mortgages. For twenty six years they kept it. The widow of Tommy was paid a small settlement and told it had been his own fault. Orville said, “She has been walking around with that for her whole life. That is the part I cannot forgive.”
I brought the tape and the signed affidavit of my father to a labor attorney in Billings, a woman named Dolores Quint, who had once sued the federal mine safety agency. She heard it in her office with the door shut. When it ended, she sat quietly for a moment and then said, “There is no statute of limitations on the honor of a family.” She also said, more usefully, that in Montana the law allowed a civil claim to be reopened where fraud had been used to conceal a wrongful death. She called the widow of Tommy. Her name was Carol Haugen, and she was sixty one.
Carol drove up to Billings the next week with her daughter, now twenty eight, named Jessie. They sat in the conference room of the law office with the cassette player on the table. I could not stay. I stood in the hall with my back to the wall. Through the door I heard the click, and the voice, and the scream, and then a sound I will carry the rest of my life, the sound of a woman who has just been told that what she suspected for twenty six years was true. It was a low, long cry, and then it stopped.
The cooperative settled before the lawsuit was filed. They did not wish for a trial. Gil Marsh was removed from his church position. A reporter from the state paper wrote it up, and the board of the cooperative issued an apology, in writing, to the Haugen family. The settlement was large enough that Carol could retire from the diner where she worked. More important to her, she said, was a plain letter that read, Thomas Haugen did not die by his own hand or by his own carelessness. We take responsibility.
Orville came down from Red Lodge to Billings for the memorial service, in a suit that had not fit him since 1994. He stood in the second row beside me. At the end, Carol walked to him and took both of his hands, and she said, “You hesitated. I heard it on the tape. You tried.” He bowed his head and could not answer. Jessie, beside her, put her arm around the shoulder of the old man. The three of them stood in the aisle of that church and held on, and no one disturbed them.
I kept the cassette. The lawyer made a copy for the court and returned the original to me in a clear case. It sits on my bookshelf now, next to the photograph of my father, the one where he is standing on the bumper of a line truck with a thermos and a grin. On the label he wrote JAN 97 in blue ink. I look at it each night when I turn off the lamp. I think he would be glad, in his quiet way, that the truth was finally played.