[read north dakota]
Excerpted from Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For by Brenda K. Marshall, published in 2010 by North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies. Copyright © 2010 by Brenda K. Marshall. Reprinted by permission of Brenda K. Marshall.
Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For By Brenda K. Marshall
In Which the Relationship Between Dirt and Insanity is Clarified Seated again, Alexander McKenzie reflected upon Mrs. Percy Bingham. Bingham was evidently a bigger fool than he had imagined if he didn’t know how to keep that woman by his side. When Percy had whined over his whiskey back in March that “a man needs his freedom,” McKenzie had expected to hear the old story of a man tied to a wife he could no longer tolerate. But as the night wore on McKenzie discovered that the wife was the focus of Percy’s anxiety, but not the cause itself. Percy Bingham, it seemed, was just a little boy who was still swinging at his daddy while held away at arm’s length. Thank God, McKenzie had thought to himself, that he had been born poor and had had the good sense to knock his own father down one day and set out to make his way in the world the next. Poor Percy Bingham couldn’t even figure out how to get his own wife out of his father’s house. Well, like most men who used those high-sounding words—freedom, honor, respect—what he really wanted was money. And for once, it couldn’t be his father’s. With enough money, Percy had said, he could provide his wife and son with a proper home, for it would be impossible to expect them to leave the comfort of the bonanza farm for a couple of rented rooms. With enough money, McKenzie had thought at the time, Percy Bingham was likely to drink himself to death just a little bit faster. But he would be useful in the meantime. McKenzie liked to watch people, and he had seen lots of unhappy marriages. There were the couples who snarled and snapped, the ones whose iciness toward each other could give a fellow frostbite just by standing nearby, the ones who called each other by pet names while cringing to the touch, but he’d never quite seen a pair like Percy and Frances Bingham. They weren’t pretending to ignore each other. They just weren’t interested. Well, McKenzie was interested. There was something in the woman’s eyes. Something unsettled, not so much hungry as restless. Potential there, one way or the other, he thought, returning his attention to the conversation that had moved from the bonanzas of the Red River valley to points west. “If I were a young man,” John Bingham was saying, “with a little money to invest, I believe that I would follow the lead of some of the fellows who have set up cattle operations north of the Mouse River.” “Cattle bonanzas?” “More or less.” 44
