by Ivan Doig
“Pictures are hard to eat,” he gave me for that. Maybe I was hoping too much, but I thought his stare had softened a bit as he heard more of my voice. At least the rifle hadn’t turned any farther in my direction. Any mercy there was to this situation, I would devoutly accept. He levied his next words: “You are new to here?”
“As the dew,” I admitted, and told him in general but quick about Rob and myself and our homesteading intention, and that if we needed any vouching it could be obtained in full at the Medicine Lodge saloon from none other than Lucas Barc—
By the time I caught up with what my tongue was saying, His Whiskerness made up his mind about me. “Lucas Barclay has had a misfortunate life,” he announced. “He can answer to God for it. Or knowing Lucas, more likely argue with Him about it until the cows come home to Canaan. But so far as I can see, you are not Lucas.” He slid the rifle into its scabbard. “My name is Duff.”
So. I could well believe that this personage and Lucas came keen against each other, as iron sharpens iron.
I introduced myself and we had a handshake, more or less. Ninian Duff immediately turned to inquisition:
“You are from?”
“Nethermuir, in Forfar.”
“Ay, I know of your town. Flora and I are East Neuk of Fife folk. As are Donald and Jen Erskine, next along the creek here. We made the journey together, three years since.” People were leaving even the fat farms of Fife, were they? Old Scotland was becoming a bare cupboard.
As if he had run through his supply of words for this hour, Ninian Duff was now gazing the length of the valley to where the far shoulder of the butte angled down to the North Fork. I kept a sideway eye on him as much as I dared. Ninian Biblical Rifleman Duff, scarecrow on a glorious horse. Was there no one in this Two Medicine country as normal as me? He sat silently studying the calm swale of green beneath us as if making certain every blade of grass was in place, as if tallying the logs in the two lonely homestead houses. Abruptly:
“You are not afraid of work?”
“None that I’ve met yet.”
The whiskers of Ninian Duff twitched a bit at that. “Homesteading has brands of it the rest of the world never heard of. But that is a thing you will need to learn for yourself. Were I you”—a hypothesis I wasn’t particularly comfortable with—“I’d have a look at the patch of land there aneath Breed Butte, along the top of the creek. Then you can dinner with us and we will talk.” Ninian Duff started his powerful red-brown horse down off the knob. “We eat at noon,” he declared over his shoulder in a way that told me he did not mean the first minute beyond twelve o’clock.
• • •
When I rode back into Gros Ventre it was nearly suppertime. I was vastly saddle-tired—cowboys must have a spare pair of legs they put on for riding, I was learning—but could feel the North Fork, the future, like music under my skin. Could bring back into my eyes that valley I rode up after encountering Ninian Duff, the long green pocket of creekside meadow, the immense ridges that were timber where they weren’t grass and grass where they weren’t timber, the Montana earth’s giant sawline of mountains against the sky beyond, the nearer gentler soar of the timber-topped prominence called Breed Butte. Could hear echo all of what Ninian told me at dinner: I have found that cattle do well enough, but the better animal hereabout may be sheep. A person can graze five or six of them on the same ground it takes for one cow. Ay, these ridges and foothills, the mountains themselves, there is room up here for thousands and thousands of sheep. The Lord was the shepherd of us, so we have His example of extreme patience to go by, too. But nothing born with wool on its back can be as troublesome as we who weave it before wearing, I believe you will agree . . . Don’t come thinking a homestead is free land. Its price is serious sweat, and year after year of it . . . But were I you, the one place I’d want to homestead is here along the North Fork while there is still the pick of the land . . .
Too thrilled yet to settle into a chair, I decided instead I’d relieve Lucas in the saloon, let him have a long supper in preparation for a Medicine Lodge Saturday night. Then Rob and I could go together for our own meal and talk of our homesteads. By the holy, the two of us would be owners of Montana yet.
Stopping by the house to tell Nancy this calendar, I swung off the pinto horse like a boy who has been to the top of the world. The kitchen door was closest for my moment’s errand. With my mind full of the day’s discovery, in I sailed.
In on Rob and Nancy.
She was at the stove. He was half-perched, arms leisurely crossed, at the woodbox beside the stove. True, there was distance between them. But not quite enough. And they were too still. Too alike in the caught look each cast me.
All this might have been mistakable. It is no long jump to the nearest conclusion, ever. There was something more, though. The air in the room seemed to have been broken by me. I had crashed into the mood here as if it was a door of glass.
Rob recovered first. “McAngus, is there a fire?” he called out swift and smooth. “You’re traveling like there’s one in your hip pocket.”
“The prospect of supper will do that to me.” I almost added You’re in here amply early yourself, but held it. “Nancy, I just came to say I’ll go to the saloon for Lucas, then eat after he does, if you please.”
Her dark eyes gave away nothing. “Yes,” she acknowledged.
I turned to Rob again. “Get your eyes ready for tomorrow, so I can show you heaven.”
“The homesteads? You’ve found a place?”
“I have, if you like the land there an inch as much as I do. Lord of Mercy, Rob, I just wish you’d been with me today to see it all. It’s up the North Fork, good grass and water with trout in it and timber to build with and the mountains standing over it and—”
“I’ll hope it doesn’t blind me, all that glory,” Rob broke in. “So tomorrow I need to hoist myself onto a horse, do I?”
“You do. Rob, you’ll fall head over heels for this land as quick as you see it.”
“I’d bet that I will.” He came across the kitchen with a smile and clapped me on the shoulder. “Angus, you’ve done a rare job of work, finding us land already.”
My riding muscles did not feel like already, but I let that pass. “Right now I’d better find Lucas for supper. Come along, can’t you? I’ll even serve you the first drink and keep the majority of my thumb out of it.”
“This North Fork must be a place, it’s sending you that giddy,” Rob said back, still smiling in his radiating way. “But I’ll stay on here to keep Lucas company for supper. You’ll owe me that drink later.”
Well, I thought as I crossed the space to the saloon, it’s time to stir the blood around in our man Rob, and soonest best.
• • •
That evening in the Medicine Lodge I managed to put a few extra drinks into myself, and Rob followed without really noticing. As matters progressed, Lucas sent us a couple of looks but evidently decided we deserved to celebrate my discovery of our homesteads-to-be. He moved us down to the quiet end of the bar he called the weaning corner, set a bottle in front of us and went to tend some parched Double W riders who had just stormed in. After a bit, I proposed:
“Let’s go see about the calico situation, why don’t we. Those calico nieces of Wingo’s down the street.”
Rob looked surprised, and when he hesitated with an answer, I pressed:
“Man, haven’t you noticed, the bedcovers on my side look like a tepee these mornings?”
He laughed loud and long over that. I was sober enough to notice, though, that he didn’t make the logical joke in return about our bedding resembling a two-pole tent.
But he went with me, and the bottle came along, too.
• • •
On our way back from Wingo’s belles, I was feeling exceptionally clever about having invented this mind-clearing evening for Rob, and we were both feeling improved for the other reason, so we halted ourselves in front of the hotel framework for nocturnal contemplat
ion and a further drink or so. Not that we could hold many more without tamping them in.
A quarter moon lent its slight light into the Montana darkness. I commemorated dreamily, “It is the moon, I know her horn.”
“This Montana even has its own moon,” declared Rob in wonder, lurching against me as he peered upward. “You don’t find a place like this Montana just any old where.”
I chortled at how wise Rob was. Right then I couldn’t see how life could be any better.
Rob tugged at my sleeve and directed my attention down the lonely single street of Gros Ventre. “See now, Angus. This is what a coming town looks like by night.”
“Dark,” I observed.
“But its day will dawn, am I right?” He made his voice so much like Lucas’s it startled me. Now Rob straightened himself with extreme care and peered like a prophet along the dim street. “You’ll see the day soon, lad, when the Caledonian Railway”—the line of our journey from Nethermuir to Greenock—“will run through the middle of this town Gros Ventre. By Jesus, I think I can hear it now! Whoot-toot-toot! Whoot-toot-toot!”
“The train will stop exactly here”—I made a somewhat crooked X in the dirt with my foot—“and Queen Victoria and the Pope of Rome will climb off and step into the Medicine Lodge for a drink with us.”
“And I’ll own all the land that way”—Rob pointed dramatically north—“and you’ll own all the other”—now pointing south—“and we’ll have rivers of red cattle we’ll ship to Chicago on our train.”
“And we’ll have Texas cowboys,” I threw in. “Thirteen dozen of them apiece.”
Rob was laughing so hard I thought he would topple both of us into the dirt of the street. “Angus, Angus, Angus. I tell you, man, it’ll be a life.”
“It will,” I seconded. And we lurched home to the house of Lucas and Nancy.
• • •
As clear as today, I remember how that next morning went. The weather was finer than ever and even had the wind tethered somewhere, the mountains stood great and near, and as Rob and I rode past my knob of yesterday onto Breed Butte to see straight down into the heart of the valley, I thought the North Fork looked even more resplendent than I had seen it the day before. We sat un-speaking for a while, in that supreme silence that makes the ears ring. Where the bevels of the valley met, the creek ran in ripples and rested in beaver ponds. A curlew made deft evasive flight across the slope below us as if revealing curlicues in the air. Everything fit everything else this day.
Rob too said how picture-pretty a patch of the earth this truly was. Then he started in with it.
“I don’t just know, though. Maybe we ought to wait, Angus.”
“Wait? Isn’t that the thing that breaks wagons?” I tossed off, although I was stung. Wait for what, Eden to reopen? “Man, I’ve seen this country from here to there, these past days, and there’s none better than this valley. It decides itself, as far as I’m concerned. This North Fork is head and shoulders over anything else we could choose. But if you want to ride with me around to where I’ve been and see for yourself, tomorrow we can—”
“Angus, I mean wait with this whole idea of homesteading.”
I thought my ears were wrong. Then I hoped they were. But the careful look on Rob told me I’d heard what I’d heard.
“Rob, what’s this about? We came half across the world to find this land.”
“Homesteading would be a hard go,” he maintained. “We’d better do some thinking on it before we rush in. See now, we’re too late in the year to buy cattle and have calves to sell this fall. As to sheep, we’d need to bring sheep from Christ knows where and we don’t have the money for that. Two houses to build, fences, everything to be done from the ground up—it’d be main sweat, all the way.” As if our lives so far have been made of silk, do you mean, Rob? But I was so dumbstruck that the words didn’t find their way out of me. Rob gazed down at the North Fork and shook his head once as if telling it, sorry, but no.
And then he had a matter to tell me. “Angus, I’m thinking strong of going in with Fain. There’s plenty of work for two in his shop. Everything in Montana with a wheel on it can stand repair. Fain’s offered to me already, and it’d be a steady earn. And a chance to stay on in Gros Ventre, for a time at least.” He glanced off at the North Fork again, this time not even bothering to dismiss it with a headshake. “I’d be nearer to Lucas that way.”
“Lucas? Man, Lucas is managing in this life at least as well as either of us. He has—” It hit me before her name fell off my tongue. “Nancy.” The mood I broke when I walked in on the two of them the evening before. The way Rob outshined himself at every meal. The change from his first night’s distaste for Lucas’s domestic arrangement. I almost somersaulted off my horse just thinking of how much more there was to this than I’d noticed. This was no routine rise of the male wand, this was a genuine case of Rob and Nancy, and maybe what would be greatly worse, of Nancy and Rob. Whoever the saint of sanity is, where are you when we need you?
“Angus, think it over,” Rob was going on. “There’s always a job for a schooled man like yourself in a growing town. When we see how things stand after we get some true money together there in Gros Ventre, well, then can be the time to decide about homesteading. Am I right?”
I answered only, “I’ll need to think, you’re right that far.” Then I touched the pinto into motion, down off the butte toward the North Fork and Gros Ventre, and Rob came after.
• • •
I thought of nothing else but Rob and Lucas and Nancy the rest of that day and most of the next. I hadn’t been so low in mood since those first Atlantic nights in the pit of the Jemmy’s stomach. Within my mind I looked again and again and again from one of these alarming people to the other to the third, as you would scan at the corners of a room you were afraid in.
Nancy seeing Rob as a younger Lucas. A Lucas fresh and two-handed. Nancy whose life had been to accept what came.
Lucas in his infatuation with town-building not seeing at all that under his own roof, trouble was about to grow a new meaning.
Rob—Rob unseeing too, not letting himself see the catastrophe he was tipping himself and Lucas and Nancy toward. Rob who could make himself believe water wasn’t wet. Of his sudden catalog of excuses against the North Fork, not a one came anywhere close to the deep reason of why he wanted to stay in Gros Ventre. But if I knew that, I also knew better than to try to bend Robert Burns Barclay from something he had newly talked himself into. Take and shake Rob until his teeth rattled and they’d still be castanets of his same tune.
Here the next of life was, then. A situation not only unforeseen from the stone streets of Nethermuir or the steerage berth in the Jemmy or the fire tower hill of Helena or the freight wagon seat from which Rob and I first saw Gros Ventre, it couldn’t have been dreamed of by me in thousands of nights. Rob coveting—not another’s wife in this case, but close enough. There was an entire commandment on that and you didn’t have to be John Knox to figure out why. Particularly if the one coveted from was not mere neighbor but of one’s own blood.
Dampness in my eyes, the conclusion to the floodtide of all this. Normally I am not one to bathe in tears. But it ought to make the sea weep itself dry, what people can do to people. I had undergone family storm in Nethermuir and that was enough. I had not come to Montana to watch the next persons closest to me, Rob and Lucas, tear each other apart; in the pitting of a Barclay against a Barclay no one could ever win unripped. Even the North Fork, grandeur though it was, wasn’t worth taking sides in this. Nothing was. Search myself and the situation in every way, this I could see nothing to do but leave from.
• • •
I said as much—just the leaving; I didn’t want to be the one to utter more than that—to Lucas as soon as he strode humming into the saloon near the end of that second afternoon.
“Up to the North Fork already? Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? You and Robbie will need to file your homestead claims
at the land office in Lewistown first, you know.”
“No, leaving is what I mean. Away from here.”
Lucas broke a frown and studied me, puzzled. “Not away from this Two Medicine country, you don’t mean.”
“Lucas, I do mean that. Away.”
“Away where?” he erupted. “Angus, are you demented? You know there’s no better country in all of Montana. And that’s damn close to meaning all of the world. So where does leaving come in, sudden as this? Here, let’s have some buttermilk and talk this over.”
“Lucas, it’s just that I’ve had—second thoughts.”
“Your first ones were damn far better.” Lucas had plunked down a glass of buttermilk apiece for us, instantly forgot them and now was violently polishing the bar I had just polished. “Leaving! By Jesus, lad, I don’t know what can have gotten into you and Robbie. I have heard strange in my time, but you two take the prize. Now if the pair of you can just get enough of a brain together to think this through, you’ll—”
“It’s only me leaving. Rob intends to stay on with Fain.”
“Robbie says that, after coming all the way from Nethermuir to get away from the wheel shop?” Lucas polished even more furiously. “Put a hammer in a Barclay’s—” he stopped, then managed to go on—“a Barclay’s hand and he doesn’t know when to put it down, ay?”
I let silence answer that, and Lucas was immediately back at me: “Tell me this, now. If you’re so set on leaving, what wonderful damn place is it you’re going to?”
“I’ll maybe go have another look at that Teton River country we came through on the freight wagon. Or around Choteau—”
“The Teton? Choteau?” I might as well have said the Styx and Hades to this man. “Angus, are you entirely sober?”
I assured him I was never more so. Lucas shook his head and tried: “Well, at least you can stay on for a bit, can’t you?”
My turn to shake a head.
“Lad, what’s your headlong hurry?” Lucas demanded, as peeved as one person could be. “Weary of my hospitality, are you?”
