by Ivan Doig
After a moment, Lucas resumed: “And now that you lads are here, I know it’ll get told without me. That’s a relief. Why I don’t know, but someway that’s a relief.”
• • •
Back in the saloon, when Lucas went to close up for the night and decided we needed one more drink to health and that happened to lead to another, we learned about Nancy.
“She came with, when I bought the Medicine Lodge and the house,” Lucas imparted. “Lads, you’re trying not to look shocked, but that’s the fact of it. Nancy was living with the DeSalises—this all goes back a few years, understand—when I bought out old Tom. You met Toussaint Rennie, the half-breed or whatever arithmetic he is, in here when you came. Toussaint is married to Nancy’s mother’s sister, and that’s all the family she has. The others died, up on the reservation in the winter of ’83. The Starvation Winter, these Blackfeet call that, and by Jesus they did starve, poor bastards them, by the hundreds. Pure gruesome, what they went through. The last of the buffalo petered out that year, and the winter rations the Blackfeet were supposed to get went into some Indian agent’s pocket, and on top of it all, smallpox. They say maybe a third of the whole tribe was dead by spring. Nancy was just a girl then, twelve or so, and Toussaint and his wife took her to raise. Then the winter of ’86 came, a heavier winter than ’83 ever thought of being, and Toussaint didn’t know whether he was going to keep his own family alive up there on the Two Medicine River, let alone an extra. So he brought Nancy in here and gave her to the DeSalises. There’s that shocked look again, lads.” Himself, Lucas somehow appeared to be both grim and amused. “They say when Toussaint rode into town with her, the two of them wrapped in buffalo robes, they had so much snow on them they looked like white bears. When I came up here and bought the saloon and the house and DeSalis pulled out with his family for Missouri, Nancy stayed on with me. She can be a hard one to figure, Nancy can. By now she’s part us and part them”—Lucas’s nod north signified the reservation and its Blackfeet—“and you never quite know which side is to the front, when. But Nancy has always soldiered for me. By Jesus, she’s done that. I need some things done, like these damn buttons and shaving and all little nuisances like that. She needs some place to be. So you see, it’s an arrangement that fits us both.” Lucas shrugged into his coat, thrust his arm ends into its pockets and instantly looked like a builder of Jerusalems again. “This isn’t old Scotland, lads. Life goes differently here.”
• • •
Differently, said the man. In the bedroom that night, I felt as if the day had turned me upside down and shaken me out. Lucas without hands. This end-of-nowhere place Gros Ventre. The saga of Nancy.
Rob looked as if he’d received double of whatever I had. “Christ of mercy, Angus. What’ve we gotten ourselves into here?”
It helped nothing to have the wind out of Rob’s sails, too. I tried to put a little back in by pointing out: “We did find Lucas, you have to say that for us.”
“Not anything like the one I expected. Not a—” He didn’t finish that.
“The man didn’t lose those hands on purpose, Rob.”
“I never meant that. It’s a shock to see, is all. How could something like that happen?”
“Lucas told. Tamping the blasting powder and someway—”
“Not that, Angus. What I mean, how could it happen to him?” To a Barclay, he really meant. My own weary guess was that fate being what it is, it keeps a special eye for lives the size of Lucas’s. A pin doesn’t draw down lightning. But how say so to Rob this unearthly night and make any sense. He was rattling at top speed now: “Lucas always was so good with his hands. He was Crack Jack at anything he tried—and now look at him. I tell you, Angus, I just—and Nancy Buffalo-whatever. There’s a situation, now. Housekeeper, he calls her. She must even have to help him take a piddle.”
“That’s as maybe, but look at all Angus does manage to do.”
“Yes, if it hadn’t been for that damned letter he managed to write—” Rob shook his head and didn’t finish that either.
Well, I told myself, here is interesting. A Barclay not knowing what to make of another Barclay. The history of the world is not done yet.
From our bedroom window I could see the rear of the Medicine Lodge and the patch of dirt street between the saloon and the forlorn hotel framework. Another whisper from Burns came to mind: Your poor narrow footpath of a street/where two wheelbarrows tremble when they meet. Those lines I had the sense to keep to myself and said instead: “Anyway, here is where we are. Maybe Gros Ventre will look more grand after a night’s sleep.”
Rob flopped onto his side of the bed but his eyes stayed open wide. All he said more was, “Maybe so, maybe no.”
• • •
And do you know, Gros Ventre did improve itself overnight, at least in the way that any place has more to it than a first glimpse can gather. In the fresh weather of dawn—Montana’s crystal mornings made it seem we’d been living in a bowl of milk all those years in Scotland—I went out and around, and in that opening hour of the day the high cottonwoods seemed to stand even taller over the street and its little scatter of buildings. Grave old nurses for a foundling town. Or at least there in the daybreak a person had hope that nurture was what was happening.
Early as the hour was, the flag already was tossing atop the Sedgwick flagpole. Beyond, the mountains were washed a lovely clean blue and gray in the first sunlight. The peaks and their snow stood so clear I felt I could reach out and run a finger along that chill rough edge. At the cow camp across the creek the cook was at his fire and a few of the cowboys, or riders, as Lucas referred to them, were taking down the tents. I heard one of the picketed horses whinny, then the rush of the creek where the water bumped busily across a bed of rocks.
“Angus, you are early,” came a voice behind me. “Are you seeing if the sun knows how to find Gros Ventre?”
I turned around, to Toussaint Rennie. Lucas had said Toussaint was doing carpenter work for Sedge on the famous hotel. Toussaint does a little of everything and not too much of anything. He’s not Blackfeet himself—it is not just entirely clear what he is—but he has a front finger in whatever happens in this country. Has had for years, and it’s not even clear how many years. A bit like a coyote, our Toussaint. Here and there but always in on a good chance. He comes down from the Two Medicine, works at a little something for a while, goes home long enough to father another child, comes down to work at whatever presents itself next. And came once in a blizzard to deposit his wife’s niece to the house I had just stepped from.
Was this person everywhere, every time? I managed to respond to Toussaint, “The day goes downhill after dawn, they say.”
“I think that, too,” he vouched. The strange lilting rhythm in his voice, whatever its origins; as if warming up to sing. “You live good at dawn.” Toussaint nodded toward the flagpole and its flapping banner. “You ought to have been here then.”
“Then?”
“That statehood. Sedge put up the flagpole in honor. Lila had the idea, fly the flag the first of anyone. We did, do you know. The first flag in Montana the state, it was ours. Here in Gros Ventre.”
I thought of the flag unfurling atop the Herald building in Helena that November morning, of the other flags breaking out all over the city, of the roaring celebration Rob and I had enlisted in. “How are you so sure this one was the first?”
“We got up early enough,” testified Toussaint. “Way before dawn. Sedge woke up me, I woke up Dantley, we woke up everybody. Wingo and his nieces, the Kuuvuses, the Fains, Luke and”—Toussaint glanced around to be sure we were alone—“that Blackfeet of his. Out to the flagpole, everybody. It was still dark as cats, but Dantley had a lantern. Lila says, ‘This is the day of statehood. This is Montana’s new day.’ Sedge puts up the new flag, there it was. Every morning since, he puts it up.” Toussaint chuckled. “That flag. The wind has a good time with it. Sedge will need a lot of flags, if he keeps on.”
• • •
The morning was young yet when Fain of the blacksmith shop came to ask if Rob might help him with a few days of wheelwork. Rob backed and filled a bit but then concluded he supposed he could, and I was glad, knowing he was privately pleased to be sought out and knowing, too, that a chance to use his skill would help his mood. The two of us had decided we’d give our situation a few days and conclude then whether to go or stay. I say decided; the fact that we had to wait anyway for another freight wagon or some other conveyance out of Gros Ventre was the major voice in the vote.
When Rob went off with Fain, I offered to Lucas to lend a hand—just in time I caught myself from putting it that way—in the saloon.
The notion amused Lucas. “Adam Willox taught you how to swamp, did he?”
I said I didn’t know about that, but people had been known to learn a thing if they tried.
“I’ve heard of that myself,” Lucas answered dryly. “You at least don’t lack attitude. Come along if you want, we’ll show you what it’s like to operate a thirst parlor.”
Swamping was sloshing buckets of water across the floor and then sweeping the flood out the door, I learned promptly, and when the saloon had been broomed out, there were glasses to wash and dry, empty bottles to haul out and dump, beer kegs to be wrestled, poker tables and chairs to be straightened, spittoons to be contended with. Lucas meanwhile polished the bar from end to end, first one foreshortened arm and then the other moving a towel in caressing circles on the wood. I am not happy to have to say this, but as happened the evening before when he was showing off Gros Ventre to us, the person that Lucas was to me depended on whether his stubs were in the open or out of sight as they now were in the towel. Part of the time I could forget entirely that Lucas was maimed as he was. Part of the time there was nothing I was more aware of. I wondered what kind of courage it took to go on with life in public after damage such as Lucas’s.
Eventually Lucas called a pause in our mutual neatening tasks. “Do you feel any thirst?” he asked. I did. He nodded and stated: “We can’t have people thinking we sit around in here and drink. So we’ll take a standing one, ay?”
I watched astounded as Lucas wrestled forth a small crock and poured us each a beerglass of buttermilk.
“Buttermilk until well into the afternoon, Angus,” he preached. “The saloonman doesn’t live who can toss liquor into himself all day long and still operate the place.”
As we sipped the cow stuff and Lucas told me another installment of Gros Ventre’s imminent eminence, my gaze kept slipping to his stubs. I needed to know, and since there was no good time to ask this it may as well be now as any.
“Lucas, would you mind much if I ask you a thing?”
He regarded me in the presiding way of Rob aboard the steamship. “About my hands, you mean. The ones I haven’t got. It’s pure wonderful how interesting they are to people. Everyone asks something eventually. All but Nancy. All the others—’But how do you tie your shoes,’ ” he mimicked. “ ‘But how do you get your dohickey out to take a piddle.’ Well? Bang away, Angus lad.”
I gulped, not just on the taste of buttermilk. “Do they—does it ever still hurt, there?”
Lucas looked at me a very long moment, and then around the Medicine Lodge as if to be sure there were no listening ghosts in its corners. “Angus, it does. Sometimes it hurts like two toothaches at once. Those are the times when it feels as if I still have the hands but they’re on fire. But I don’t have them, do I, so where does that pain come from?” The asking of that was not to me, however, and Lucas went on: “There, then. That’s one. Next question?”
“That one was all, Lucas.”
After Lucas began to see that I could do saloon tasks almost half as well with two hands as he could with none, he made strong use of me. Indeed, by the second day I was hearing from him: “Angus, I’ve some matters at the house. You can preside here till I get back, ay?” And there was my promotion into being in charge of the Medicine Lodge during the buttermilk hours of the day.
• • •
“How do, Red.”
The taller of the pair who were bowlegging their way to the bar gave me the greeting, while the short wiry one beside him chirped, “Pour us somethin’ that’ll cheer us up, professor.”
In that order of presentation, Perry Fox and Deaf Smith Mitchell these were. Riders for the Seven Block cattle ranch, out near the Blackfeet reservation. Progeny of Texas who, to hear them tell it, had strayed north from that paradisiacal prairie and hadn’t yet found their way back. The one called Deaf Smith was no more hard of hearing than you or I, but simply came from a Texas locality of that name. Not easy to grasp logically, was Texas.
In not much more time than it would have taken Lucas to serve an entire saloonful, I managed to produce a bottle and pour my pair of customers a drink.
They lifted a glass to each other and did honor to the contents, then Perry faced me squarely. “Red, we got somethin’ to ask you.”
This put me a bit wary, but I said: “I’m here listening.”
“It’s kind of like this. Luke’s been tellin’ us there’s these Scotch soldiers of yours that put a dress on when they go off to war. Is he pullin’ our leg, or is that the God’s truth?”
“Well, the Highlanders, yes, they have a history of wearing kilts into battle. But Lucas and Rob and I come from the Lowlands, we’re not—”
“Pay me,” Perry drawled to Deaf Smith. “Told you I could spot when Luke is funnin’ and when he ain’t.”
Deaf Smith grudgingly slid a silver dollar along the bar to Perry. To me, he aimed: “Just tell us another thing now, how the hell do you guys make that work, fightin’ in dresses? What’s the other side do, die of laughin’?”
The dilemma of the Lowlander. To venture or not into the Highlands thicket of kilts, bagpipes, the Clearances, clan quarrels, and all else, the while making plain that I myself didn’t number among those who feuded for forty generations over a patch of heather. The voice of my schoolmaster Adam Willox despairing over the history of the Highlands clans swam to mind: If it wasn’t for the Irish, the Highlands Scotch would be the most pixied people on earth. But Lucas’s voice floated there in my head, too: Conversation is the whetstone of thirst, Angus. These Montanians in their big country aren’t just dry for the whiskey, they’re dry for talk.
“Gents, let’s look at this from another way.” Before going on, I nodded inquiringly toward the bottle. Perry and Deaf Smith automatically nodded in turn. Pouring them another and myself a buttermilk, I made change from Perry’s fresh dollar and began: “As I hear it, this geezer Custer was more fully dressed than the Indians at the Little Big Horn. Am I right so far?”
• • •
“How do you suppose Lucas spends his afternoons?” Rob asked near the end of our arrival week in Gros Ventre, no freight wagon having reappeared nor news of any. We were waiting for Lucas to show himself and take over bar duty from me, so that we could go around to the house for our turn at supper.
“With Nancy on hand, how would you spend yours?” I asked back reasonably.
Rob looked at me with reproach and was about to say further when Lucas materialized, striding through the Medicine Lodge doorway as if entering his favorite castle. “Lads, sorry I’m late. Affairs of business take scrupulous tending, you know how it is. Carry yourselves over to the house now, Nancy has your feast waiting.”
“She does put him in a good frame of mind,” Rob mused as we went to the house.
“Man, that’s not just a frame of mind, there are other compartments involved, too.”
“You can spare me that inventory,” he retorted with a bit of an edge, and in we went to eat. But I was impressed from then on with Rob’s change of attitude about Nancy and her benefit to Lucas. Indeed, at supper he began the kind of shiny talk to her that for the first time since we landed in Gros Ventre sounded to me like the characteristic Rob.
• • •
The rumor is being bruited th
at a hotel, possibly of more than one story, is under construction in Gros Ventre. The notion of anyone actually desiring to stay overnight in that singular community: this, dear readers, is the definition of optimism.
Some such salvo was in each of the past issues of the Choteau newspaper I was reading through to pass time in the Medicine Lodge. But I thought little of them until the slow afternoon I came across the one:
Gros Ventre recently had another instance of the remarkably high mortality rate in that locale. Heart failure was the diagnosis. Lead will do that to a heart.
I blinked and read again. The saloon was empty, and in the street outside nothing was moving except Sedge’s and Toussaint’s hammers sporadically banging the hotel toward creation. Gros Ventre this day seemed so peaceful you would have to work for hours to start a dogfight. Even so, as soon as Lucas came in I pressed him about the Quill item.
“People die everywhere, Angus.”
“As far as I know, that’s so. But the Quill seems to say they have help here in Gros Ventre.”
“You know how newspapers are.”
“The question still seems to be how Gros Ventre is.”
“Angus, you are your father’s son, no mistake. Stubborn as strap iron and twice as hard to argue with. All right, then. A man or two died before his time here, the past year or so. But—”
“A man or two?”
“Three, if you must count. But what I’m saying if you’ll listen, two of those would have gone to their reward wherever they were. Cattle thieves. Not a race known for living to old age, lad.”
