Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “Just half a moment, before you get to being me too strenuously. What brings this on?” It wasn’t like Lucas to suddenly speak up for womanhood at large. “Is this what you’re prescribing today for all your customers?”

  “Just the redheaded ones.” My eyebrow found a new direction to cock itself. Why was I the subject of this sermon instead of Rob? He was the one Lucas had needed to negotiate away from Nancy.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” and as usual, he did. “But that’s another case entirely, our Robbie. The first bright mare who decides to twitch her tail at Robbie, she’ll have him. He’s my own nephew, but that lad is sufficiently in love with himself that it won’t much matter who he marries. Whoever she is, she’ll never replace him in his own affections. You though, Angus. You’re not so much a world unto yourself. You, I’d say, need the right partner in this old life.”

  I hoped the Lucas Barclay Matrimonial Bureau was about to close for the day. “I’m already in partnership with a pair of Barclays,” I pointed out, “which seems to keep me occupied twenty-five hours a day eight days a week.”

  “Mend your tongue,” Lucas answered lightly, but with a glance that seemed to wonder whether I’d heard any word he’d been saying. “Robbie and I’ll have you so prosperous you can take your pick of womanhood. But who’s that going to be, ay? It wouldn’t hurt you a bit to start thinking in that direction.”

  • • •

  “And was Lucas in fettle?” asked Rob as we unloaded the wagon of groceries.

  “Lucas was Lucas,” I attested, “and then some.”

  • • •

  Was it a long winter Rob and I put in together, that first homestead one? Yes, ungodly so. And no, nothing of the sort. How time can be a commodity that lets both of those be equally true, I have never understood.

  November and December only snowed often enough to get our attention, but the North Fork had ice as thick as a fist and we were chopping a water hole for the sheep and our workhorses each morning. Of course that was the time of the year the bucks were put with the ewes to breed spring lambs, and so at least there was warm behavior in the pastures, so to speak.

  “See now, McAngus, don’t you just wish it was spring? To watch those lambs come—man, it’ll be like picking up money along the road.”

  “That’s what it had better be like, or we’re going to be in debt to Lucas down to our shoe soles.”

  You might not think it, but with winter we saw more of the other homesteaders than ever. People neighbored back and forth by horse and sled to escape cabin fever, and no more than a few weeks ever passed without Scotch Heaven having a dance that brought out everyone, for even the Duffs and Erskines were not so skintight they could resist waving a foot to a tune. I thought many a time that to watch Ninian on the dance floor was like hearing a giggle out of God.

  Not, let me say, that Ninian got all that much of my watching that winter, nor Rob’s nor George Frew’s nor Allan Frew’s nor old Tom Mortensen’s either. We of the bachelor brigade were too busy appreciating that Scotch Heaven’s balance sheet of men and women was less uneven than it had been, with the teacher Mavis Milgrim and Archie Findlater’s sister Judith, newly come from Scotland, now on hand. Miss Milgrim always had a starch to her that she thought a schoolma’am had to have, and Judith Find-later had a startling neck that was not so much swanlike as gooselike, but they helped the situation of the sexes, they helped. Most especially Judith. She was a sweet, quiet woman, of the kind in the old saying she’s better than she’s bonny, and there were moments at those dances when I had to wonder whether she was that prescription of Lucas’s for me. Along those lines, the single time I found a decent chance to get Judith aside and coax a kiss out of her, she delivered one that I could feel all the way to my ears.

  Something to put away for spring, although whenever I looked in a mirror I still was not seeing anything that resembled marriage.

  When the last day of the calendar came—no Hogmanay commemorative portrait of Rob and myself this year, except the one that memory draws—we were invited down to see out the eve at the Duffs’, together with the five Erskines and the six Findlaters, as many people as could breathe in one house that size. The right way to bridge years, in company with those we had come to know best in our homestead effort. Donald Erskine was a fretful man, who changed his mind so often he went around half-dizzy. Yet Donald would leap a mile to your aid, letting his own work stand while he pitched in on yours. Ninian Duff on the other hand would think three times before offering to lend you the sleeves of his vest, but there was no one more sound in advice than God’s solemn brother Ninian. Their wives Jen and Flora were equally broad women, grown wide as wagons in childbearing, and each as capable as a mother lion. Archie Findlater was a plump man, like a grouse—I admit, his roundness caused me to wonder what Judith’s future shape would be—but sharp in his head, a calculator. Grace Find-later did the talking of their household, but as she was the one person in Scotch Heaven who could quote more verse than I could, I figured she had every right.

  As midnight neared, there was acclamation from all these, led by Judith with a bit more enthusiasm than I was comfortable with that I of course had to be one to first-foot the new year in for Ninian and Flora.

  “Can’t I wait for a year when the weather is better out there?” I protested. But at a minute before 1891, out I went into the cold blustery middle of the night.

  I stood alone there in the mountainous dark where weather comes from, where years come from. Then turned myself around to the homestead house.

  “Now there’s a year’s worth of good luck if I ever saw him,” announced Rob after I stepped back in across the Duff threshold without a word, strode to the stove and poked the fire into brisker flame. Not that any of us at all believed the superstition about a tall unspeaking man who straightway tended the hearth fire being the year’s most propitious first foot, but still.

  “He will do,” granted Ninian, while Flora handed us steaming cups of coffee with just a tip of whiskey therein. “Warm yourselves, you may need it riding home.”

  “What do you make of this weather, Ninian?” I wondered. By the sound of it the wind was whooping harder every minute. “A squall, is this?”

  “It may be. Or it may be the start of winter.”

  For the next eight days, all the wind in the world tore at Scotch Heaven. We had wind that took the hay as we struggled to feed the sheep, wind that coated us and the workhorses with snow, wind every breath of the day and wind in our sleep.

  And then came cold. Probably Rob and I were lucky not to know until later that from the tenth of January until the twenty-second, Donald Erskine’s thermometer never rose above fifteen below zero.

  “Angus, you’re my favorite man, but there are times when I wish your name was Agnes.”

  This was ribald from Rob. I gave him back: “What times are those, I wonder? January can’t be one, surely. A month of snow-white purity—”

  “You say snow one more time and you’ll be out in it.”

  Winter engines, us now. The pale smoke of Rob’s breath as he chopped ice from the waterhole, I could see from the top of the haystack two hundred yards away. As our workhorses Sadie and Brandy pulled the haysled in a great slow circle in the snow while we fed the hay off, they produced regular dragonsnort. Our exertions were not the only ones there in the air; there was the whacking sound of Tom Mortensen at his woodpile over the ridge from my place, and the spaced clouts of George Frew next down the creek breaking out the water hole for his livestock. It was a new way to live, bundled and laborious and slow, oddly calm, and you had to wonder how Eskimos put up with it all the time.

  A Saturday of February. The day had been blue and still. Rob’s whistling was the liveliest element around. We had not been to Gros Ventre since Christmas, and we were preparing to remedy that. Haircuts had been traded, baths had been taken, boots blacked with stovelid soot. Mustaches were our winter project, which meant meticulous trimming. We
were putting on our clean shirts when a white gust was flung past the south windows, as if someone had begun plucking geese.

  “Don’t be that way,” Rob told the weather.

  “Probably it’s only a flurry.”

  “It had better be.”

  It was not. The snow drove and drove, sifting out of the silent sky as if to bury the planet. In minutes the west window to the mountains was caked white.

  “That’s that, then,” Rob admitted at last. “Goodbye, Gros Ventre.”

  “We’ll go twice next time.” That was brighter than I felt, for I was as keen as Rob for a meal cooked by Lila Sedge, for a drink poured by Lucas, for talk in the air of the Medicine Lodge, for what waited at Wingo’s.

  “Next time is the story of homesteading, I’m beginning to think,” Rob gloomed.

  “You’re coming down with winter fever. Elk stew is the only known antidote.” Or at least the only supper we had now that Lila Sedge’s cuisine was out of the picture.

  “Lord of mercy, man. No town, and now Ninian’s elk that bends forks?”

  “The same famous one.” The bull elk shot by Ninian was so elderly he had a set of antlers that would have scaffolded Canterbury Cathedral. “Old Elky, grandfather of beasts.”

  “And enemy of teeth. Tell me again the price of mutton.”

  I raised my thumb to him. “One, the cost of a sheep herself.” Then extended my first finger. “Two, the cost of the hay she’s eaten so far this winter.” Next finger. “Three, the loss of her lamb next spring.” Next finger. “Four, the loss of her fleece next summer.” Final finger. “Five, explaining to Lucas that we’ve been sitting out here eating an animal he put up good money for.”

  Rob studied my display. “McAngus, if you had more fingers on that hand, you’d have more reasons too. All right, all right, the sheep are safe again. Elk stew by popular demand.”

  To cheer him up while I heated the familiar stew, I resorted to: “Surely you’ve never heard the story about Methuselah and his cook?”

  “This weather has me to the point where I’ll listen to anything. Tell away.”

  “Well, Methuselah’s cook got tired of cooking for that houseful. All those begattings, more and more mouths at every meal—a couple of hundred years of that and you can see how it would start to get tiresome. So she went to Methuselah and said, ‘What about some time off, like?’ ‘No, no, no,’ he tells her, ‘we can’t possibly spare you, you’re too good a cook. In all these years have I ever complained once about your food?’ She had to admit he hadn’t. ‘No, nor will I,’ he says. ‘If you ever hear me complain, I’ll do the cooking myself, for the rest of my life.’

  “The cook went away thinking about that. Methuselah was only around four hundred years old at the time, still doing all that begatting, and he looked as if he maybe had another five hundred years or so in him. The cook kept thinking, five hundred years off from all that cooking if she could just get Methuselah to complain. So the next morning for breakfast, the first thing she does is put a handful of salt in Methuselah’s coffee and send it out to the table. Methuselah takes a big swallow and spews it right back out. The cook starts to take her apron off. ‘By Jehovah!’ he says, and she can hear him coughing and sputtering, ‘the coffee is full of salt!’ She’s just ready to step out of that kitchen forever when she hears him say: ‘Just the way I like it!’ ”

  After laughter, Rob went quiet during the meal. I was hoping that after the last bite of elk he might put down his fork and proclaim Just the way I like it, but no, the evening was not going to be that easy. He pushed back his chair and said instead: “Angus, do you know what I think?”

  “When it starts out that way, probably not.”

  “I think we need more sheep.”

  “What, so we can eat some? Rob, it won’t be elk forever. As soon as we can get to town—”

  “I’m serious here,” Rob attested. “More sheep would be just the ticket we need, is what I think.”

  “If I understand right what those bucks were doing to those ewes, we’re pretty soon going to have more.”

  “Not just the lambs, man. We ought to be thinking about buying more ewes. Another five hundred, maybe another thousand. It can’t be that much more trouble to run two thousand sheep than it is a thousand.”

  “It’s twice the hay, though.” My meadows were just enough to get us through a winter such as this, if we were lucky. “Where’s that going to come from?”

  “We can buy it. Jesse Spedderson would a lot rather sell us his hay standing in the field than exert himself to put it up, I’ll bet you this kitchen table on that.”

  “Say he does, then. What do we use to buy these famous further sheep with?” Although I thought I knew.

  “We’ll get Lucas to back us.”

  “Rob, we’re already in debt to Lucas a mile deep.”

  “Angus, look at it this way: if we’re going to be in debt, Lucas is our best choice anywhere around. Naturally there’s a bit of risk, taking on more sheep. But if you’re going to homestead, you have to take risk, am I right?”

  I peered over at him, to be sure this was the same Rob who had been ready to spurn the North Fork for going in with Fain in the blacksmith shop.

  “These sheep we have now can be just the start of us, man,” he galloped right on. “That’s why it was worth coming from Scotland. Worth even finding Lucas—the way he is. His hands maybe are gone but none of his head went with them. No, Lucas has the fact of it. This Two Medicine country will grow. It’s bound to. And we’re in on the ground floor.”

  I directed his attention to the white outside the window. “Actually we may be down in the cold cellar.”

  “Angus, Angus. By damn, I wish it was spring. You’d be in a brighter mood, and you’d see in a minute what I’m talking about here.”

  If my ears were to be trusted, he was talking about the theory of sheep, which is the world’s best. In theory a band of sheep is a garden on legs. Every spring a crop of lambs, every summer a crop of wool. Feed us and clothe us, too; not even potatoes yield so beneficially. But the fleecies are a garden that wanders around looking for its own extinction, and in the Two Medicine country there were many sources willing to oblige their mortal urge. Coyotes, bear, cliffs, blizzards, death camas, lupine. Not least, themselves. I can tell you to this moment the anguish when, the second day after we had trailed our yearlings home to the North Fork from their former owner in the Choteau country, Rob and I found our first dead sheep. A fine fat ewe on her back, four legs in the air like hooved branches. In her clumsy cocoon of wool she had rolled helplessly onto her back when she lay down to scratch a tick itch and couldn’t right herself again. Rob was shocked, and I admit I was a bit unsettled myself. And as any sheep owner must, we began thinking the terrifying arithmetic: what if we lose another ewe two days from now . . . Lord of mercy, what if we lose one again tomorrow . . . A little of that and in your mind you soon not only have no sheep left, you possess even fewer than that—cavities of potential loss of however many sheep you could ever possibly buy to replace the ones that right now are out there searching for ways to die. Thus you draw breath and try to think instead of the benefits of sheep. Watch them thrive on grass a cow wouldn’t even put its head down for. Watch the beautiful fleeces, rich and oily to the touch, unfold off them as they are sheared. Dream ahead to when you can watch your first crop of lambs enlarge themselves week by week. As Rob was doing now in his winter rhapsody about more sheep. But I didn’t want that tune, expensive as it promised to be, to get out of hand, and so I responded:

  “Rob, I see that we don’t even know yet if we’re going to get through this winter with these sheep alive, let alone twice that many that we don’t have.”

  “With an attitude like that,” he retorted a bit quick and sharp, “you’re not looking ahead beyond the end of your nose, you know.”

  And you’re looking right past all the precipices there are, I thought but managed not to say. This was new. Usually when R
ob and I disagreed it was about some speck of a matter that was gone by the next day. Even during our months here in the white cave of Montana winter, our most spirited argument had been over whose turn it was to bring in the firewood. But I knew too well that if Rob Barclay decided to believe in a thing as if it were fairy gold, words weren’t an antidote. I shook my head now, both at Rob and at the silliness of us filling the kitchen with debate about phantom sheep. “You’re working hard on the wrong source here,” I pointed out to him. “It’s Lucas’s wallet you’re going to have to persuade.”

  “I can see winter isn’t the season to reason with you,” he gave me back. “Let’s talk this over in the spring, what do you say.”

  “I say, knowing you, we’re sure to talk it over, all right.”

  That at last drew a smile and a short laugh from him, and he got up and went to the south window. The snow no longer was flailing past, but clouds covered the mountains, and more storm was only minutes away.

  “McAngus, who of your old poets called clouds the sacks of heaven?”

  “Undo the silver sacks of heaven,/seed the sky with stars./See every gleam grow to seven,/something something Mars. I can’t think now, which.”

  “He ought to be shot,” Rob stated.

  • • •

  Then in March, this.

  “There. Hear that?” We were feeding the sheep their hay beside the North Fork, on a morning as icy as any of the winter had been.

  “Hear what? The sound of me pitching hay and you standing there with your ears hanging out?”

  “There, that rushing sound up in the mountains. That’s new.”

  “Just the wind.”

  “What wind? There isn’t a breath of one.”

  “Running water, then?”

  “That creek is frozen stiffer than I am.”

  “Creature, maybe?”

  “Making a noise that size? We’d better hope not.”