Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  I had a moment of wondering what was so vital to him about that specific item of dry goods. Then it dawned on me what he meant. Women. And from there it took no acrobatics of logic to figure out what sort of women.

  Rob raised his cup in a mock toast and left the question to me. Well, there was rough justice in that, you could say. I had been the first to investigate the scarlet district of Helena, with promptitude after I’d begun earning wages at the mercantile. Not that Rob was six counties behind me, for it had been the next time I said I was setting off up the gulch that he fidgeted, scratched an ear, cleared something major from his throat, then blurted: “You can stand company, can’t you?” That too had been new of America, transit from the allure of the Nethermuir mill girls with the boldest tongues to those Helena brothel excursions of ours winterlong. Without ever saying so to each other—it was the side of life Rob did not like to be noticed in—we both well knew that among the deepest of the Nethermuir traps we were escaping from was one of those accident marriages. A wedding beside the cradle, as was said. It happened to so many we knew and it had been just as likely to happen to either of us sooner or later, by the nature of things probably sooner. So, yes, America, Montana, Helena had been new open terms of possibility in more ways than one.

  “Worst thing about being a freighter,” Herbert was proclaiming after my tepid report on Helena, “is how far she is between calico. Makes the need rise in a man. Some of these mornings, I swear to gosh I wake up and my blanket looks like a tepee.”

  From Herbert the rest of that evening, we heard of the calico situation at the Canadian forts he freighted to. (Bad.) The calico situation in New Orleans, where he’d been posted as a soldier in the Union army. (Astounding.) The calico situation at Butte as compared with anywhere else in Montana. (A thousand times better.) The calico situation among the Mormons, the Chinese, the Blackfeet, the Nez Perce, and the Sioux.

  When we had to tell him no, we hadn’t been to London to find out the English calico situation, he looked regretful, tipped the last of his cup of whiskey into himself, and announced he was turning in for the night. “Men, there’s no hotel like a wagon. Warm nights your room is on the wagon, stormy nights it’s under it.” Herbert sniffed the air and peered upward into the dark. “I believe tonight mine’s going to be under.”

  • • •

  Herbert’s nose knew its business. In the morning, the world was white.

  I came out of my bedroll scared and stayed that way despite the freighter’s assessment that “this is just a April skift, maybe.” From Rob’s blinking appearance, he, too, could have done without a fresh white surprise this morn. After Helena’s elongated winter of snow flinging down from the Continental Divide, how was a person supposed to look at so much as a white flake without thinking the word blizzard? Nor was there any checking on the weathermaking intentions of the Divide mountains now, as they were totally gone from the west, that direction a curtain of whitish mist. Ridges and coulees nearest us still could be picked out, their tan grass tufting up from the thin blanket of freshfall. But our wagon trail, those thin twin wheel tracks—as far as could be told from the blank and silent expanse all around us, Herbert and Rob and I and the freight wagon and four horses had dropped here out of the sky along with the night’s storm.

  The snow had stopped falling, which was the sole hope I saw anywhere around. But was the sky empty by now? Or was more winter teetering where this plopped from?

  Rob put his head back and addressed firmly upward into the murk: “Can’t you get the stove going up there?” But he still looked as discomfited as I must have.

  “She sure beats everything, Montana weather,” Herbert acknowledged. “Men, I got to ask you to do a thing.”

  Rob and I took turns at it, one walking ahead of the wagon and scuffing aside the snow to find the trail ruts while the other rode the seat beside Herbert and tried to wish the weather into improvement.

  “When do you suppose spring comes to this country?” Rob muttered as he passed me during one of our walking-riding swaps.

  “Maybe by the end of summer,” I muttered back.

  Later: “You remember what the old spinster in the story said, when somebody asked her why she’d never wed?”

  “Tell me, I’m panting to know.”

  “ ‘I wouldn’t have the walkers, and the riders went by.’ Out here, she’d have her choice of us.”

  “She’d need to negotiate past Herbert first.”

  Later again: “Am I imagining or is Montana snow colder than snow ever was in Scotland?”

  “If you’re going to imagine, try for some sunshine.”

  Still later: “Herbert says this could have been worse, there could have been a wind with this snow.”

  “Herbert is a fund of happy news.”

  • • •

  It was morning’s end before Herbert informed us, “Men, I’m beginning to think we’re going to get the better of this.”

  He no more than said so when the mist along the west began to wash away and mountains shouldered back into place here and there along that horizon. The light of this ghostly day became like no other I had ever seen, a silver clarity that made the stone spines of ridges and an occasional few cottonwood trees stand out like engravings in book pages. Any outline that showed itself looked strangely singular, as if it existed only right then, never before. I seemed to be existing differently myself. Again as it had happened on that first full Atlantic morning of mine when I watched and watched the ocean, I could feel a slowing of the day; a shadowless truce while light speaks to time.

  At last the sun burned through, the snow began melting into patches, the wheel tracks emerged ahead of us like new dark paint. Our baptism by Montana spring apparently over, Rob and I sat in grateful tired silence on the freight wagon.

  • • •

  We were wagoneers for the rest of that day and the next, crossing the Teton River and observing some distant landmark buttes which Herbert said were near a settlement called Choteau. Then at supper on the third night Herbert reported, “Tomorrow ought to about get us there.” In celebration, we evaporated the final whiskey barrel to the level of the two previous nights’, congratulating ourselves on careful workmanship, and Herbert told us a number of chapters about the calico situation when he was freighting into Deadwood during the Dakota gold rush.

  Not an hour after we were underway the next morning, the trail dropped us into a maze of benchlands with steep sides. Here even the tallest mountains hid under the horizon, there was no evidence the world knew such a thing as a tree, and Herbert pointed out to us alkali bogs which he said would sink the wagon faster than we could think about it. A wind so steady it seemed solid made us hang onto our hats. Even the path of wagon tracks lost patience here; the bench hills were too abrupt to be climbed straight up, and rather than circle around endlessly among the congregation of geography, the twin cuts of track attacked up the slopes in gradual sidling patterns.

  Herbert halted the wagon at the base of the first long ruts angling up and around a benchland. “I don’t think this outfit’ll roll herself over, up there. But I thought wrong a time or two before. Men, it’s up to you whether you want to ride her out or give your feet some work.”

  If Herbert regarded these slopes as more treacherous than the cockeyed inclines he had been letting us stay aboard for . . . Down I climbed, Rob prompt behind me.

  We let the wagon have some distance ahead of us, to be out of its way in case of tumbling calamity, then began our own slog up the twin tracks. And how did you journey from Augusta to Gros Ventre, Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Barclay? We went by freight wagon, which is to say we walked. The tilted wagon crept along the slope while we watched, Herbert standing precariously on the lazy board, ready to jump.

  “Any ideas, if?”

  “We’re trudging now, I suppose we’d keep on. Our town can’t be that far.”

  “This is Montana, remember. You could put all of Scotland in the watch pocket of this pl
ace.”

  “True enough. Still, Gros Ventre has to be somewhere near by now. Even Herbert thinks so.”

  “Herbert thinks he won’t tip the wagon over and kill himself, too. Let’s see how right he is about that, first.”

  The benchlands set us a routine much as the snow had done: trudge up each slope with the wind in our teeth, hop onto the freight wagon to ride across and down the far side, off to trudge some more. The first hour or so, we told ourselves it was good for the muscles. The rest of the hours, we saved our breath.

  “Kind of slaunchwise country, ain’t she?” remarked Herbert when we paused for noon. Rob and I didn’t dare study each other. If Gros Ventre was amid this boxed-in skewed landscape; if this windblown bleakness was where we had plucked ourselves up across the world to find Lucas Barclay . . .

  Mid-afternoon, though, brought a long gradual slope which the wagon could travel straight up in no peril, and we were able to be steady passengers again. By now Rob and I were weary, and wary as well, expecting the top of each new ridgeline to deliver us back into the prairie infantry. But another gradual slope and widened benchland appeared ahead, and a next after that. And then the trail took the wagon up to a shallow pass between two long flat ridges.

  There in the gap, Herbert whoaed the horses.

  What had halted him, and us, was a change of earth as abrupt as waking into the snow had been.

  Ahead was where the planet greatened.

  To the west now, the entire horizon was a sky-marching procession of mountains, suddenly much nearer and clearer than they were before we entered our morning’s maze of tilted hills. Peaks, cliffs, canyons, cite anything high or mighty and there it was up on that rough west brink of the world. Mountains with snow summits, mountains with jagged blue-gray faces. Mountains that were freestanding and separate as blades from the hundred crags around them; mountains that went among other mountains as flat palisades of stone miles long, like guardian reefs amid wild waves. The Rocky Mountains, simply and rightly named. Their double magnitude here startled and stunned a person, at least this one—how deep into the sky their motionless tumult reached, how far these Rockies columned across the earth.

  The hem to the mountains was timbered foothills, dark bands of pine forest. And down from the foothills began prairie broader than any we had met yet, vast flat plateaus of tan grassland north and east as far as we could see. Benchland and tableland countless times larger than the jumbled ridges behind us, elbow room for the spirit.

  Finally, last in our looking, about a mile in front of us at the foot of the nearest of these low plateaus, a line of cotton wood trees along a creek made the graceful bottom seam across this tremendous land.

  I just sat and let it all dazzle at me. Rob was equally stone-still at my side.

  “Oh yeah, I see where we are now,” contributed Herbert. “There’s old Chief.” He pointed out to us Chief Mountain, farthest north on the mountain horizon and a step separate, independent, from the rest of the crags. “She’s Canada up beyond that. Between her and here, though, comes the Two Medicine River. Can’t see that from where we’re at, but this whole jography is called the Two Medicine country.”

  I so wish Rob and I right then had performed what we ought to: politely request Herbert to close his eyes and cover his ears, step off the wagon together, face ourselves to this Two Medicine country, and then leap high and click our heels in the air loud enough to be heard in Nethermuir. For every soul that has ever followed a notion bigger than itself, we ought to have performed that. To send our echo into the canyons of time: here is Montana, here is America, here is all yet to come.

  Now Herbert was finding for us the Sweetgrass Hills, a cluster of bumps on the plains far northeast of us. “Men, unless I’m more wrong than usual, those’re about seventy-five miles from where we’re at.” Montana distances made your head swim. “Then this kind of a tit over here, Heart Butte.” A dark breastlike cone that rose northwest near the rougher Rockies. Much closer to us, west along the line of creek trees, stood a smaller promontory like the long aft sail of a windship, with a tree-dark top. “Don’t know what that butte is, she’s a new one on me,” Herbert confessed as our wagon began to jostle down toward the creek’s biggest stand of Cottonwood trees. In this landscape of expanse the local butte did not stand particularly high, it was not monumentally shaped, yet it managed to speak prominence, separateness, managed somehow to preside. A territory of landmarks as clear as towers was this Two Medicine country. Already I felt able to find my way in this clean-lined land.

  Rob and I interrupted our gaping to trade mighty grins. All we needed now was Lucas Barclay and his coming metropolis.

  Herbert cleared his gallon of throat and gestured toward the Cottonwood grove ahead. When we didn’t comprehend, he said:

  “Here she is, I guess.”

  Gros Ventre took some guessing, right enough.

  Ahead of us under the trees waited a thin scatter of buildings, the way there can be when the edge of town dwindles to countryside. None of the buildings qualified as much more than an eyesore, and beyond them on the far bank of the creek were arrayed several picketed horses and a cook wagon and three or four tents of ancient gray canvas, as if wooden walls and roofs hadn’t quite been figured out over there yet.

  From the wagon seat Rob and I scanned around for more town, but no. This raggle-taggle fringe of structures was the community entire.

  Rather, this was Gros Ventre thus far in history. Across the far end of the single street, near the creek and the loftiest of the cottonwoods, stood a two-story framework. Just that, framework, empty and forlorn. Yellow lumber saying, more like pleading, that it had the aspiration of sizable enterprise and lacked only hundreds of boards and thousands of nails to be so.

  Trying to brighten the picture for Rob, I observed: “They, ah, at least they have big plans.”

  Rob made no answer. But then, what could he have?

  “Wonder where it is they keep the calico at,” issued from Herbert. He pondered Gros Ventre a moment further. “Wonder if they got any calico.”

  Our wagon rolled to a halt in front of what I took to be a log barn and which proved to be the livery stable. Rob and I climbed down and were handed our luggage by Herbert. As we shook hands with him he croaked out companionably, “Might see you around town. Kind of hard to miss anybody in a burg this size.”

  Rob drew in a major breath and looked at me. I tried to give him a grin of encouragement, which doubtless fell short of either. He turned and went over to the hostler who had stepped out to welcome this upsurge of traffic. “Good afternoon. We’re looking for a man Lucas Barclay.”

  “Who? Luke? Ain’t he over there in the Medicine Lodge? He always is.”

  Our eyes followed the direction the stableman jerked his head. At the far end of the empty dirt street near the bright skeleton of whatever was being built, stood a building with words painted across the top third of its square front in sky blue, startling as a tattoo on a forehead:

  MEdICINE

  LOdGE

  I saw Rob open his mouth to ask definition of a medicine lodge, think better of it, and instead bid the hostler a civil, “Thank you the utmost.”

  Gathering ourselves, bedrolls and bags, off we set along the main and only street of this place Gros Ventre. I was wrong about the street being empty; it in fact abounded with cow pies, horse apples, and other animal products.

  “Angus,” Rob asked low, as we drew nearer to the skelter of tents and picketed horses across the creek, “what, do they have Gypsies in this country?”

  “I wish I knew just what it is they have here.” The door into the Medicine Lodge whatever-it-was waited before us. “Now we find out.”

  Like Vikings into Egypt, we stepped in.

  And found it to be a saloon. Along the bar were a half dozen partakers, three or four others occupied chairs around a greentop table where they were playing cards.

  “Aces chase faces, Deaf Smith,” said one of the cardsters
as he spread down his hand.

  “Goddamn you and the horse you rode in on, Perry,” responded his opponent mildly, and gathered the cards to shuffle.

  Of course Rob and I had seen cowboys before, in Helena. Or what we thought were. But these of Gros Ventre were a used variety, in soiled crimped hats and thick clothing and worn-down boots.

  The first of the Medicine Lodge clientele to be aware of us was a stocky tan-faced man, evidently part Indian. He said something too soft for us to hear to the person beside him, who revolved slowly to examine us over a brownish longhorn mustache. I wish I could say that the mustached one showed any sign we were worth turning around to look at.

  Had someone been counting our blinks—the Indian-looking witness maybe was—they’d have determined that Rob and I were simultaneous in spying the saloonkeeper.

  He stood alone near one end of the bar, intently leaning down, busy with some task beneath there. When he glanced up and intoned deep, “Step right over, lads, this bunch isn’t a fraction as bad as they look,” there was the remembered brightness of his Barclay cheeks, there was the brand of voice we had not heard since leaving Nethermuir.

  Lucas possessed a black beard now with gray in it like streaks of ash. The beard thickly followed his jaw and chin, with his face carefully shaved above that. Above the face Lucas had gone babe-bald, but the dearth of hair only emphasized the features of power dispersed below in that frame of coaly whiskers: sharp gray eyes under heavy dark eyebrows, substantial nose, wide mouth to match the chin, and that stropped ruddiness identical to Rob’s.

  Rob let out a breath of relief that must have been heard all the way to Helena. Then he smiled a mile and strode to the bar with his hand out as far as it could go:

  “Mister Lucas Barclay, I’ve come an awful distance to shake your hand.”

  Did I see it happen? Hear it? Or sheerly feel it? Whichever the sense, I abruptly knew that now the attention of everyone in the saloon weighed on Rob and me. Every head had pivoted to us, every eye gauged us. The half-breed or whatever he was seemed to be memorizing us in case there was a bounty on fools.