by Ivan Doig
“I hope Lucas doesn’t inspect too close, then,” Rob tossed off. “Else we may get the door of the Great Maybe slammed in our faces.”
“Man,” I decided to tease, “who could ever slam a door to you? Shut with firmness and barricade it to keep you from their wives, daughters and maiden aunts, maybe, but—”
Rob gave my shoulder a push. “I can’t wait to see the surprise on Lucas,” he said, laughing. “Seven years. I can’t wait.”
“I wonder just what his life is like, there.”
“Wonder away, until sometime tomorrow. Then you can see the man himself and know.”
In truth, we knew little more than the least about Lucas Barclay in these Montana years of his. Rob said there had been only a brief letter from Lucas to Nethermuir the first few Christmases after he emigrated, telling that he had made his way to the city of Helena and of his mining endeavor there; and not incidentally enclosing as his token of the holiday a fine fresh green American banknote of one hundred dollars. You can be sure as Rob’s family was that more than a greeting was being said there, that Lucas was showing the stay-at-homes the fruit of his adventure; Lucas’s decision against the wheelwright shop and for America had been the early version of Rob’s: too many Barclays and not enough wagon wheels any more. Even after his letters quit—nobody who knew Lucas expected him to spend time over paper and pen—that hundred dollars arrived alone in an envelope, Christmas after Christmas. The Montana money, Rob’s family took to calling it. Lucas is still Lucas, they said with affection and rue for this strayed one of the clan; as freehanded a man as God ever set loose.
I won’t bother to deny that in making our minds up for America Rob and I found it persuasive that money was sent as Christmas cards from there. But the true trove over across in Montana, we considered, was Lucas himself. Can I make you know what it meant to us to have this uncle of his as our forerunner? As our American edition of Crofutt, waiting and willing to instruct? Put yourself where we were, young and stepping off to a new world in search of its glorious packets of land called homesteads, and now tell me whether or not you want to have a Lucas Barclay ahead, with a generous side that made us know we could walk in on him and be instantly welcome; a Lucas who would know where the best land for homesteading beckoned, what a fair price was for anything, whether they did so-and-so in Montana just as we were accustomed to in Scotland, whether they ever did thus-and-such at all. Bold is one thing and reckless is another, yes? I thought at the time and I’ll defend it yet, the steamship ticket could only take us to America and the railroad ticket could only deliver us across it—Rob and I held our true ticket to the Montana life we sought, to freedom and all else, in Lucas Barclay.
• • •
Helena had three times the people of Nethermuir in forty times the area. Helena looked as if it had been plopped into place last week and might be moved around again next week. Helena was not Hellenic.
A newcomer had to stand and goggle. The castellated edge of the city, high new mansions with sharp-towered roofs, processioned right up onto the start of the mountains around. Earth-old grit side by side with fresh posh. Then grew down a shambles of every kind of structure, daft blurts of shack and manor, with gaping spots between which evidently would be filled when new fashions of habitation had been thought up. Lastly, down the middle of it all was slashed a raw earthquakelike gash of gulch, in which nested block after block of aspiring red-brick storefronts.
“Quite the place,” I said.
“So it is,” said Rob.
Say for Helena, gangly capital city of the Territory of Montana and peculiar presbytery of our future with Lucas, it started us off with luck. After the Model Lodging House of Greenock, we knew well not to take the first roost we saw, and weary as we were, Rob and I trudged the hilly streets until we found a comparatively clean room at Mrs. Billington’s, a few blocks away from Last Chance Gulch. Mrs. Billington observed to us at once, “You’ll be wanting to wash the travel off, won’t you,” which was more than true. Those tubbings in glorious hot water were the first time since Nethermuir that we had a chance to shed our clothes.
“Old Barclay? Oh hell yeah,” the most veteran boarder at Mrs. Billington’s table aided us. “He works down at the depot. Watch sharp or you’ll trip right over him there.”
Here was news, Lucas in a railroad career, and our jauntiness was tinged with speculation as to how that could have come about. Down the steep streets of Helena Rob wore the success of our journey as if it was a helmet. And when we came into sight of the depot, his triumphant face could not have announced us more if he’d had a trumpet in front of it. I was proud enough myself.
Until we stepped into the depot, asked a white-haired shrimp of a fellow in spectacles where we might find the railway clerk named Barclay, and got: “I’m him. Elmer W. Barclay. Who might you be?”
Elmer W. was nothing at all like Lucas, but he definitely was the Barclay everyone in Helena seemed to know about, in our next few hours of asking and asking. We found as well the owner of the Great Maybe mine, but he was not Lucas either. Nor were any of the three previous disgusted owners we managed to track down. In fact, Lucas’s name was six back in the record of ownership the Second Deputy Clerk and Recorder of Lewis and Clark County grudgingly dug out for us, and there had been that many before Lucas. It grew clear to Rob and me that had the Great Maybe been a silver coin instead of a silver mine, by now it would be worn smooth from being passed around.
By that first night, Rob was thoughtful. “What do you suppose, Lucas made as much money from the Great Maybe as he thought was there and moved on to another mine? Or didn’t make money and just gave the mine up?”
“Either way, he did move on,” I pointed out.
“Funny, though,” Rob deliberated, “that none of these other miners can bring Lucas to mind.”
That point had suggested itself to me too, but I decided to chide it on its way. “Rob, how to hell could they all remember each other? Miners in Montana are like hair on a dog.”
“Still,” he persisted, “if Lucas these days is anything like the Lucas he was back in Nethermuir, somebody is bound to remember him. Am I right?”
“Right enough. We just need to find that somebody.”
“Or Lucas. Whichever happens first.”
“Whichever. Tomorrow we scour this Helena and make Lucas happen, one way or the other.”
• • •
But the next day Helena provided us not Lucas, but history. Rob and I met our first Montana frost that November morning when we set out, and saw our breath all the way to the post office, where we asked without luck about Lucas. We had just stepped from there, into sunshine now, to go and try at the assay office when I saw the fellow and his flag on a rooftop across the street.
“Stay”-something, he shouted down into the street to us, “stay”-something, “stay”-something, and ran the American flag with 41 stars on it up a tall pole.
Cheers whooped from others in the street gaping up with us, and that in turn brought people to windows and out from stores. Abruptly civilization seemed to be tearing loose in Helena as the crowd flocked in a tizzy to the flag-flying edifice, the Herald newspaper building.
“What is this, war with somebody?” Rob asked, as flabbergasted as I.
“Statehood!” called out a red-bearded man scurrying past. “The president just signed it! It took goddamn near forever, but Montana’s a state at last! Follow me, I’m buying!”
And so that eighth day of November arose off the calendar and grabbed Rob and me and every other Helena Montanian by the elbow, the one that can lever liquid up to the lips. Innocents us, statehood was a mysterious notion. However, we took it to mean that Montana had advanced out of being governed from afar, as Scotland was by the parliament in London, into running its own affairs. Look around Helena and you could wonder if this indeed constituted an improvement. But the principle was there, and Rob and I had to drink to it along with everyone else, repeatedly.
“Angus, we must’ve seen half the faces in Helena today,” Rob estimated after we made our woozy way back to the lodging house. “And Lucas’s wasn’t among them.”
“Then we know just where he is,” I found to say. “The other half.”
• • •
The day after that and the next several, we did try the assay office. The land office. The register of voters. The offices of the newspapers. The Caledonian Club. The Association of Pioneers. The jail. Stores. Hotels.
Saloons, endless saloons. The Grand Central or the Arcade or the Iroquois or the Cricket, the IXL or the Exchange or the Atlantic, it all ran the same:
“Do you know a man Lucas Barclay? He owned the Gre—a mine.”
“Sometimes names change, son. What does he look like?”
“More than a bit like me. He’s my uncle.”
“Is he now. Didn’t know miners had relatives.” Wipe, wipe, wipe of the bartender’s towel on the bar while he thought. “You do look kind of familiar. But huh-uh. If I ever did see your face on somebody else it was a time ago. Sorry.”
Boarding houses.
“Good day, missus. We’re trying to find the uncle of my friend here. Lucas Barclay is his name. Do you happen to know of him?”
“Barkler? No, never heard of him.”
“Barclay, missus. B-A-R-C-L-A-Y.”
“Never heard of him, either.”
• • •
Finally, the Greenwood cemetery.
“You boys are good and sure, are you?” asked the caretaker from beside the year-old gravestone he had led us to.
We stood facing the stark chiseled name. “We’re sure,” said Rob.
The caretaker eyed us regretfully.
“Well, then,” he declared, abandoning hope for this stone that read LEWIS BERKELEY PASSED FROM LIFE 1888, “that’s about as close as I can come to it for you. Sorry.”
“See now, we can’t but think it would need to be a this year’s burial,” Rob specified to the caretaker, “because there’s every evidence he was alive at last Christmas.” He meant by this that the Montana money from Lucas had arrived as always to Nethermuir.
“B-A-R-C-L-A-Y, eh?” the caretaker spelled for the sixth time. “You’re sure that’s the way of it?” Rob assured him for the sixth time he was. The caretaker shook his head. “Nobody by that name among the fresh ones. Unless he’d be there.” He nodded to the low edge of the graveyard, down near where the railroad right-of-way crossed the Fort Benton road. The grave mounds there had no markers.
Realization arrived to Rob and me at the same instant. The paupers’ field.
Past a section of lofty monuments where chiseled folds of drape and tassels were in style, we followed the caretaker down to the poorfield.
“Who are these, then?” asked Rob.
“Some are loners, drifters, hoboes. Others we just don’t know who the hell they are. Find them dead of booze some cold morning up there in the Gulch. Or a mine timber falls on them and nobody knows any name for them except Dutchy or Frenchy or Scotty.” I saw Rob swallow at that. The caretaker studied among a dozen bare graves. “Say, last month I buried a teamster who’d got crushed when his wagon went over on him. His partner said the gent called himself Brown, but a lot of folks color theirselves different when they come west. Maybe he’d be yours?”
It did not seem likely to either Rob or me that Lucas would spurn a life of wagons in Nethermuir and adopt one here. Indeed, the more we thought, the less likely it seemed that Lucas could be down among the nameless dead. People always noticed a Barclay.
• • •
Discouragement. Perplexity. Worry. All those we found abundantly that first week in Helena but no Lucas.
Not one least little bit did Rob let go of the notion of finding him, though. By week’s end he was this minute angry at the pair of us for not being bright enough to think where Lucas might be, the next at Lucas for not being anywhere. Then along came consternation—“Tell me truth, Angus, do you think he can be alive?”—and then around again to bafflement and irk: “Why to hell is that man so hard to find?”
“We’ll find him,” I said steadily to all this. “I can be stubborn and you’re greatly worse than that. If the man exists in this Montana, we’ll find him.”
• • •
Yet we still did not.
We had to tell ourselves that we’d worn out all investigation for a Helena version of Lucas, so we had better think instead of other possible whereabouts. The start of our second week of search, we went by train to try Butte. That mining city seemed to be a factory for turning the planet inside out. Slag was making new mountains, while the mountains around stood with dying timber on their slopes. The very air was raw with smelter fumes and smoke. No further Butte, thank you, for either Rob or me, and we came away somehow convinced it was not the place Lucas Barclay would choose either.
Back at Helena we questioned stagecoach drivers, asking if they had heard of Lucas at their destination towns, White Sulphur Springs and Boulder and Elkhorn and Diamond City. No and no and no and no. Meanwhile, we were hearing almost daily of some new silver El Dorado where a miner might have been drawn to. Castle. Glendale. Granite. Philipsburg. Neihart. We began to see that tracking Lucas to a Montana mine, if indeed he was still in that business of Great Maybes, would be like trying to find out where a Gypsy had taken up residence.
That week of search ended as empty as our first.
• • •
Sunday morning, our second Sabbath as dwellers of Helena, I woke before the day did, and my getting out of bed roused Rob. “Where’re you off to?” he asked as I dressed.
“A walk. Up to see how the day looks.”
He yawned mightily. “McAngus, the wheelwright shop is all the way back in Scotland and you’re still getting out of bed to open it.” More yawn. “Wait. I’ll come along. Just let me figure which end my shoes fit on.”
We walked up by the firebell tower above Last Chance Gulch. Except for the steady swimming flight of an occasional magpie, we were up before the birds. Mountains stretched high everywhere around, up in the morning light which had not yet found Helena. The business streets below were in sleeping gray. Over us and to the rim of the eastern horizon stretched long, long feathers of cloud, half a skyful streaked extravagantly with colors between gold and pink, and with purple dabs of heavier cloud down on the tops of the Big Belt Mountains. A vast sky tree of glow and its royal harvest beneath.
“So this is the way they bring morning into Montana,” observed Rob. “They know their business.”
“Now that I’ve got you up, you may as well be thoroughly up, what about.” I indicated the firebell tower, a small open observation cabin like the top of a lighthouse but perched atop an open spraddle of supports.
Rob paused as we climbed past the big firebell and declared, “I’d like to ring the old thing and bring them all out into the streets. Maybe we would find Lucas then.”
Atop the tower, we met more of dawn. The land was drawing color out of the sky. Shadows of trees came out up near the summit of Mt. Helena, and in another minute there were shawls of shadow off the backs of knolls. Below us the raw sides of Last Chance Gulch now stood forth, as if shoveled out during the night for the next batch of Helena’s downtown to be sown in.
Rob pondered into the hundred streets below, out to the wide grassy valley beyond. Nineteen thousand people down there and so far not a one of them Lucas Barclay. A breeze lazed down the gulch and up the back of our necks. “Where to hell can he be, Angus? A man can’t vanish like smoke, can he?”
Not unless he wants to, I thought to myself. But aloud: “Rob, we’ve looked all we can. There’s no knowing until Christmas if Lucas is even alive. If your family gets the Montana money from him again, there’ll be proof. But if that doesn’t happen, we have to figure he’s—” Rob knew the rest of that. Neither of us had been able to banish that Lewis Berkeley tombstone entirely from mind. I went on to what I had been mulling. “It’s not all that fa
r to Christmas now. But until then, we’d better get on with ourselves a bit. Keep asking after Lucas, yes. But get on with ourselves at the same time.”
Rob stirred. He had that cocked look of his from when we stepped past the drowned horse on the Greenock dock, the look that said out to the world surely you’re fooling? But face it, this lack of trace of Lucas had us fooled, fully. “Get on with ourselves, is it. You sound like Crofutt.”
“And who better?” I swept an arm out over the tower railing to take in Helena and the rest of Montana. As full sunrise neared, the low clouds on the Big Belts were turning into gold coals. On such a morning it could be believed there was a paunch of ore on every Montana mountain. By the holy, this was a country to be up and around in. “Look at you here, five thousand miles from Scotland and your feet are dry, your color is bright, and you have no divided heart. Crofutt and McCaskill, we’ve seen you through and will again, lad. But the time has arrived to think of income instead of outgo. Are we both for that?”
He had to smile. “All right, all right, both. But tell me this, early riser. Where is it you’d see us to next, if you had your way?”
We talked there on the bell hill until past breakfast and received the scolding of our lives from Mrs. Billington. Which was far short of fair, for she gained profit for some time to come from that fire tower discussion of ours. What Rob and I chose that early morning, in large part because we did not see what else to decide, was to stay on in Helena until Christmas sent its verdict from Nethermuir.
• • •
Of course we needed to earn while we tried to learn Montana, and if we didn’t have the guidance of Lucas Barclay we at least had an honest pair of hands apiece. I took myself down to a storefront noticed during our trekking around town, Cariston’s Mercantile. An Aberdeen man and thus a bit of a conniver, Hugh Cariston; but just then it made no matter to me whether he was the devil’s half-brother. He fixed a hard look on me and in that Aberdonian drone demanded:
