Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “Do you, Davie? Can we hear it now?”

  Another salvo of swallows. Then out quavered:

  I came down from Cimarron, alooking for a job

  riding for the outfit they call the Jinglebob.

  The boss told me “Stranger, let’s have ourselves some fun.

  Come and throw your saddle on our horse called Zebra Dun.”

  Oh, that old zebra dun,

  that bucking son of a gun,

  a-pitching his walleyed fit,

  while upon him I did sit.

  The punchers came and gathered, laughing up their sleeves

  counting on their zebra bronc to do just what he pleased.

  And when I hit the saddle, old Dunny quit this earth

  went right up to try the sky, for all that he was worth.

  Susan Duff was wrinkling her nose at Davy’s minstrelsy. But as soon as I gave her a severe look, she joined in the chorus with Davie and me, and the rest of the children followed her. Onward Davie warbled with his verses:

  Old Dunny pawed the moon and passed right by the sun

  He chased some clouds a while then came down like a ton.

  You could see the tops of mountains under our every jump

  But I stayed tight upon his back just like the camel’s hump.

  We bucked across the prairie, scattered gophers as we went

  kicked the cook and stewpot right through the boss’s tent.

  But when the fray was over and Zebra done all he did

  No doubt was left in this world: that outlaw I had rid.

  The boss whooped hurrah! and threw the hat high off his head.

  He shook my hand until it ached and here is what he said:

  “If you can toss the lasso like you rode old Zebra Dun

  You’re the man I have looked for since the year of one.”

  “Davie Erskine, that was—remarkable.” It was more than that. There were days when Davie was so drifty he could scarcely remember how many fingers he had. “And where did you learn that tune?”

  “From Mr. Fox and Mr. Mitchell.” I had to expend a long moment to translate Mr. Fox and Mr. Mitchell: the riders Perry and Deaf Smith. “They took supper with us, when they were riding for strays. They said it’s a song from Texas,” Davie reported as if the place was blue heaven. “Texas is where I’m going when I grow up.”

  “That may be, Davie. But for now you’re going to arithmetic. Davie and Susan and Daniel and Einar, your book is page 132. Karen, show the others where they’re to read, please.”

  At the close of school that day, I stepped out as always to watch the children start for home, the walkers up the South Fork, the riders up the North Fork. The white horseload of little Find-laters, Susan Duff aboard her blood bay and Jimmy Spedderson on his black pony with the blaze face and Betsy Frew atop her old sorrel, Davie Erskine urging his roan with Rachel tight behind him. It was Davie I was seeing most of all. Seeing older Davies, although their names were Rob and Angus, hearing their own tunes of a far place.

  • • •

  A late afternoon near the end of the school year, Ninian Duff appeared in the schoolroom as I was readying to go home.

  “Angus, I’ve been by to see Archie and Willy and we have made our decision on next year’s schoolteacher.”

  “Have you, now?” I’d been more and more aware that my time at the South Fork was drawing to a close, but it made me swallow to hear the fact. “I hope you’ve found a right one.”

  “Ay, we do too,” he delivered right back. “It is you again. Temporary, of course, just for another year.”

  • • •

  Three times more in the next three years, Ninian made that same ay-it-is-you-again call on me at the schoolhouse. “Ninian,” I at last inquired of him, “did you ever happen to have a look at the word temporary in a dictionary?” But he knew as well as I did that the teaching job pleased me, and I was more than glad, too, to have its wage, because in that set of years spawned by the economic crash of 1893 the rewards of raising sheep were more aptly counted in small coins than in major currency. Even our prophet of profit Lucas looked perturbed, as if the sun had begun coming up in the wrong end of the sky. I don’t know who among us in Scotch Heaven said in 1894 or 1895 or 1896 that despite the calendar, it still seemed to be 1893. But ever after, we spoke of this hard time as the years of ‘93.

  In truth, though, the years of ‘93 were most harsh not in their lamb and wool prices—money is only money—but in abrupt occurrences among our people of the North Fork. Events that might have happened anyway took on darker shadow from the weight of the times. We had an unforgettable lesson when Archie Findlater lost half his band of sheep to a May blizzard, ewes and lambs smothered and frozen by the hundred out on the distant foothills where he had put them a week too soon. We had a heartsickening departure when the Spedderson family simply vanished, abandoning their ramshackle homestead and leaving in the night without a word to any of us. My next several days I taught with a lump in my throat, thinking of small Jimmy in that family that slunk from one piece of earth to the next.

  And we had our first deaths. Gram Erskine, Donald’s mother who had come with the Erskines and the Duffs on the ship to America when she was nearly eighty, died on a first fine green spring day. Odd, how the old so often last through the winter and then let go. Not a week after Ninian said the words over Gram Erskine, Rob and I had to be the ones to find Tom Mortensen. We were moving a bunch of ewes and week-old lambs over onto a slope of new grass just south of my place, and from there we noticed that, chilly day though it was, no smoke was rising from the chimney of the Mortensen cabin. When the two of us went down to see, a magpie was strutting along the ridgepole of the cabin, watching us cagily. Tom we found sprawled beside his chopping block, on his side, curled up as if napping. I knelt beside him, had a look, and threw up. Rob saw over my shoulder and did the same.

  “Lord of mercy, if there is one,” Rob choked out after we both retched ourselves dry and I managed to go to the house for a blanket to put over Tom. Rob grabbed up a stone and flung it clattering along the cabin roof toward the black and white bird, causing the magpie to swim away silently through the air. “I’ll find something here to make a coffin,” he said. I said, “And I’ll fetch Ninian.”

  At Ninian’s I told him it looked as if Tom’s heart had given out. He started to the house for his Bible, saying “I’ll come in the wagon with Flora, she can help lay out the body.”

  “No. Don’t bring Flora.”

  “Ay? Whyever not? Flora has seen a man dead before.”

  “Not like this one. Ninian, the magpies have been at his eyes.”

  • • •

  Death had been to Nethermuir, too. I remember bringing out the letter, small taut handwriting on it I did not recognize, when I came back from a grocery trip into Gros Ventre, and Rob at the wagon ripping it open as quick as he saw that writing. The news was on his face, although he read all the letter before passing it to me with the words, “My father’s dead.” Vare Barclay in the woodyard of the wheelshop, my father and Lucas beside him; Vare who had given me work as his clerk—the letter was from Rob’s sister Adair, telling that her mother could not bring herself to write yet, that the Barclay house on River Street had been sold for what little they could get, that she and her mother would live now with Rob’s oldest brother, who was closing down the wheelwrighting but would try to stay in business by making wheelbarrows and suchlike small stuff. As much sadness as paper can absorb was in that letter.

  Rob set his jaw to go into the house to tell Judith and then make the ride into town to tell Lucas. But first he put a hand on my shoulder. “We were right to come, Angus. Hard as times ever can get here, we’re better off than them over across in Scotland.” I thought of Rob’s mother and young Adair, being seen to in a household not their own. Being seen to. Not much of a prospect in life, not much at all. I had sheep waiting and school preparation waiting, but I stood and watched the erect American back of Rob as
he took the news of his father’s death into the house on Breed Butte. And watched again not half a year later, when word came that his mother, too, had passed away, dwindled away really. The strangest news there is, death across a distance; the person as alive as ever in your mind the intervening time until you hear, and then the other and final death, the one a funeral is only preliminary to, confusedly begins.

  • • •

  “By Jesus, the woollies do make a lovely sight,” intoned Lucas. “If we could just sell them as scenery, ay?”

  The time was September of 1896, a week before shipping the lambs, and Lucas and Rob and I were holding a Saturday war council on the west ridgeline of Breed Butte where we could meanwhile keep an eye on our grazing bands. By now Rob and Lucas’s sheep had accumulated into two oversize bands, nearly twenty-five hundred altogether, as Rob kept back the ewe lambs each year since ‘93 rather than send them to market at pitiful prices. The band he and I owned in partnership I always insisted keeping at a regular thousand, as many as my hay would carry through a winter. So here they were in splendid gray scatter below us, six years of striving and effort, three and a half thousand prime ewes and a fat lamb beside each of them, and currently worth about as much as that many weeds.

  “Next year is going to be a bit tight,” Rob affirmed, which was getting to be an annual echo out of him.

  “These tight years are starting to pinch harder than I’m comfortable with,” he was informed by Lucas. Lucas’s Jerusalem, Gros Ventre, was not prospering these days. Nowhere was prospering these days. I noticed how much older Lucas was looking, his beard gray now with patches of black. The years of ‘93 had put extra age on a lot of people in Montana. “So, Robbie lad, we have sheep galore. Now what in the pure holy hell are we going to do with them?”

  “Prices can’t stay down in the well forever,” Rob maintained. “People still have to wear clothes, they still have to eat meat.”

  Lucas squinted at the neutral September sun. “But how soon can we count on them getting cold and hungry enough?”

  “All right, all right, you’ve said the big question. But Lucas, we’ve got to hang onto as many sheep as we can until prices turn around. If we don’t, we’re throwing away these bands we’ve built up.”

  “Robbie,” said Lucas levelly, “this year we’ve got to sell the ewe lambs along with the wether lambs. Even if we have to all but give the little buggers away with red bows on them, we’ve just got to—”

  “I’ll meet you halfway on that, how about,” Rob put in with a smile.

  “Halfway to what, bankruptcy?” retorted Lucas in as sharp a tone as I had ever heard from him.

  I saw Rob swallow, the only sign of how tense a moment this was for him. Then he brought it out: “Halfway on selling the lambs, Lucas. I’m all for selling the ewe lambs, just as you say. But this year let’s keep the wether lambs.”

  “Keep the wethers?” Lucas stared astounded at Rob. “What in the name of Christ for? Are you going to make history by teaching the wethers”—which was to say, the castrated male sheep whose sole role was mutton—“how to sprout tits and have lambs?”

  “We’d keep them for their wool,” Rob uttered as rapidly as he could say it. “Their wool crop next summer. Lucas, man, if we keep the wethers until they’re yearlings they’ll shear almost ten pounds of wool apiece. And if wool prices come back up to what they were—”

  Lucas shook his head to halt Rob and brought up a stub to run vigorously along his beard. “I never listen to a proposition beyond the second if.”

  “Lucas, it’s worth a try. It’s got to be.” If conviction counted, Rob right then would have had the three of us in bullion up to our elbows. “See now, the man McKinley is sure to be president, and that’ll be like money in the bank for the sheep business.” True, there was talk that McKinley could bring with him a tariff on Australian wool. If he did, prices for our fleeces then could climb right up. Pigs could fly if they had wings, too.

  “Angus, what do you say to this new passion of Robbie’s for wethers?”

  “Maybe it’s not entirely farfetched,” I conceded, earning myself a mingled look from Rob.

  Lucas still looked skeptical. “Here’s the next thing you can enlighten me about, Robbie—how in holy hell do you handle that many sheep next summer? Tell me that, ay?” I knew it already was costing dear on them to hire herders for their two bands while Rob and I shared the herding of our one, and for them to add a third herder—

  He was ready, our Rob. “I’ll herd the wether band myself. Judith will have kittens about my doing it.” And well she might, because with Rob herding in the mountains all summer she would need to manage everything else of the homestead, not to mention three daughters. “But she’ll just have to have them, she married Breed Butte when she married me.”

  I regarded Rob for a waitful moment, Lucas glancing uncomfortably back and forth between us. Finally I said what was on my mind and Lucas’s, even if it didn’t seem to be within a hundred miles of Rob’s:

  “That leaves just one band of sheep unaccounted for.”

  “Yours and mine, of course,” Rob spoke up brightly. “And there’s where I have a proposition for you, Angus. If you’ll take our band by yourself next summer, I’ll give you half of my half.”

  I made sure: “On the wool and the lambs both?”

  “Both.”

  Translated, half of Rob’s half meant that I would receive three-fourths of any profit—wool and lambs both, the man had said it—on our band of sheep next year. And if wool went up as Rob was betting on . . . if lamb prices followed . . . Never listen to a proposition beyond the second if, ay, Lucas?

  “Done.” I snapped up Rob’s offer, which would make me money while he made money for himself and Lucas on the wethers. “That is, if Lucas agrees to your end of it.”

  Lucas studied the two of us, and then the three-about-to-be-four bands of sheep below.

  “There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all,” he at last said, as much to the sheep as to us. “All right, all right, Robbie, keep the wethers. We’ll see now if ’97 is the year of years, ay?”

  • • •

  Let me give the very day of this. The twentieth of April, 1897. Here in the fourth springtime that I had watched arrive outside the windows of the South Fork school, I perched myself on the water-bucket stand at the rear of the classroom while Karen Peterson, small but great with the occasion, sat at my big desk reading to us from the book of stories.

  “One more sun,” sighed the king at evening, “and now another darkness. This has to stop. The days fly past us as if they were racing pigeons. We may as well be pebbles, for all the notice life takes of us or we of it. No one holds in mind the blind harper when he is gone. No one commemorates the girl who grains the geese. None of the deeds of our people leave the least tiny mark upon time. Where’s the sense in running a kingdom if it all just piffles off into air? Tell me that, whoever can.”

  “If you will recall, sire—”

  In the trance of Karen’s reading, even Daniel Rozier squirmed only ritually, and I took quiet pleasure in seeing those still rows of oh so familiar heads in front of me. I swear to heaven Susan Duff could have ruled France with the crown of her head. How such chestnut luster and precise flow of tress had derived from old dust-mop Ninian was far beyond me. But Davie Erskine’s crownhair flopped in various directions and no definite one, and that seemed distinctly Erskinian. But then there was the bold round crown of Eddie Van Bebber, so that you’d have thought half the brains of the human race were packed under there, and Eddie Van Bebber was only barely bright enough to sneeze.

  “Why is it that the moon keeps better track of itself than we manage to? And the seasons put us to shame, they always know which they are, who’s been, whose turn now, who comes next, all that sort of thing. Why can’t we have memories as nimble as those? Tell me that, whoever can.”

  “Sire, you will recall—”

  Each of
those South Fork and Scotch Heaven heads in front of me, a mind that I as teacher was to make literate and numerate. The impossibly mysterious process of patterning minds, though. How do we come to be the specimens we are? Tell me that, whoever can.

  “Oblivion has been the rule too long. What this kingdom needs in the time to come is some, umm, some blivion. There, that’s it, we need to become a more blivious people. Enough of this forgettery. But how to do it, it will take some doing. What’s to be done? Tell me that, whoever can.”

  “If you will recall, sire, this morning you named a remembrancer.”

  “Eh? I did? I mean, I did. And what a good idea it was, too. For a change things are going to be fixed into mind around here. Send me this remembering fellow.”

  “Bring forth the king’s remembrancer!”

  In time to come, during what the fable king would call blivion, I always remembered Daniel Rozier more vividly than Karen Peterson, and in no way under heaven was that fair.

  In time to come, when Susan Duff had grown and herself become a teacher in Helena—I’ve always been sure that Helena is the better for it—I could wonder if I truly affected that in any meaningful way.

  In time to come, when Davie Erskine—

  But that was waiting some hundreds of days to come, Davie’s time. Memory still had everything to make between here and there.

  • • •

  This was a full-fledged spring day in the Two Medicine country, breezy along with sunny, melt and mud along with greening grass and first flowers. The afternoon was better than my afterschool chore, which was to call on the replacement teacher newly arrived at Noon Creek. Old Miss Threlkeld, who held forth there since Cain and Abel, toward the end of winter had suffered palpitation of the heart, and about this sudden successor of hers I more than half knew what to expect and fully dreaded it.

  “Ramsay is her name,” Ninian Duff reported, “they are a new family to here, down from Canada. Man and wife and daughter. The Mrs. seems to be something of an old battle-axe, I do have to say.” Coming from Ninian, that was credential for her indeed. “They bought the relinquishment up there to the west of Isaac Reese,” he went on, “with a bit of help from Isaac’s pocket from what I hear.”