Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “—Stormy nights it’s under it,” I couldn’t help but complete the chorus. Our first prairie night out from Helena was beginning to seem another life ago. I still wasn’t ready to relent to Rob. Jaunting for jaunt’s sake was not something I was in the mood for, having better moods to tend to, and to the railroad and back was a journey of three days. “So your clinching argument is the opportunity to sleep out with the coyotes, is it?”

  “Angus, Angus. Trust me to carry more than one motive at a time. I thought we could spend the going-up night there on the Two Medicine at Toussaint Rennie’s place. You won’t pass up the chance for a dose of Toussaint, now will you? The two of you can gab history until you’re over your ears in it.”

  As Rob full knew it would, this cast a light of interest. Visiting Toussaint on his home ground would be like seeing where they put the music into fiddles. Besides, Rob was indubitably right that after shearing next week there would be a long summer in the mountains, stretched all the longer by Anna being away. The two weeks since she left had taken at least twice that much time to pass. Anna and the railroad, though. Here now, as Lucas would have put it, was a pregnant thought. Maybe, if I had the luck that love ought to have, just maybe the Reese crew plowing fireguard strips would be somewhere on the section of railroad where Rob was headed. A bonus chance to see Anna, however slight—

  “You’ll come, certain sure?” Rob specified. When I agreed so, he assured me: “Herbert would be proud of you.”

  • • •

  “You know that Nancy,” said Toussaint in making the introduction of his Blackfeet wife Mary Rides Proud to us the next night. “This is another one.”

  I am sure as anything I saw a flick of curiosity as Mary looked at Rob. About a heartbeat’s worth. Then she moved to the stove and the fixing of supper, as if she were a drawing done of her niece at that moment in the kitchen of Lucas’s house, but with blunter pencil.

  The household’s indeterminate number of leather-dark children eyed Rob and me with wariness, but Toussaint himself seemed entirely unsurprised at the sight of us, as if people were a constant traffic through this remote small reservation ranch. I see now that in Toussaint’s way of thinking, they were. In his mind, time was not a calendar bundle of days but a steady unbroken procession, so that a visitor counted equally whether he was appearing to Toussaint at the very moment or long past.

  “Toussaint, this reservation opened my eyes for me today,” Rob said as we sat to supper. “There’s a world of grass up here.”

  “The buffalo thought so,” agreed Toussaint. “When there were buffalo.”

  “Now there’s a thing you can tell us, Toussaint,” Rob the grazier speaking now. “Where did those buffalo like to be? What part of this country up here was it that they grazed on?”

  “They were here. There. About. Everywhere.” Another Toussaint chuckle. “All in through here, this Two Medicine country.”

  The knit of Rob’s brow told me he was having some trouble with a definition of here that took in everywhere. I tried another angle for him. “What, Toussaint, were they like the cattle herds are now?” I too was trying to imagine the sight the buffalo in their black thousands made. “Some here and there, wherever you looked?”

  “The buffalo were more. As many as you can see at one time, Angus.”

  Supper was presented on the table to us the men, but Toussaint’s wife Mary ate standing at the stove and some of the children took their meals to a corner and others wandered outside with theirs and maybe still others went up into the treetops to dine, for all that Rob or I could keep track of the batch. Domestic arrangements interested me these days, but this one was baffling. So far as I could see, Toussaint and Mary paid no heed to one another. That must have had limits, though, because somehow all these children happened.

  The supper meat was tender but greasy. After a few thoughtful forkfuls Rob let fall: “Now you have me asking myself, Toussaint, just what delicacy is this we’re eating?”

  “Bear.”

  Rob cocked an eyebrow to me. Then swung half around in his chair and called to Toussaint’s yokemate in life, “Absolutely the best bear I’ve ever eaten, Mary.”

  “This cream separator,” wondered Toussaint about our tomorrow’s cargo, “is it a Monkey Ward one?”

  Rob took a slow sip of coffee, in what I knew was his way of hiding a smile, then exclaimed: “The exact very make, Toussaint. See now, Montgomery Ward and anything else in the world is right out on our doorstep with this railroad. What a thing it’s going to be for this country,” he went on, sounding more and more like the echo of Lucas. “Homesteaders can come straight from anywhere to here, they can hop from the train into a buckboard and go find a claim without even needing to set foot on the ground. Not quite like when you and I hoofed in all the way from Augusta, Angus.”

  “Jim Hill’s haywagons,” Toussaint summed the Great Northern railroad and its builder, and chuckled. “One more way people will bring themselves.”

  People and what they are. As Rob and Toussaint talked I was thinking of the expanse of country-to-be-peopled that Rob and I had come through that day, I was thinking of Anna out there somewhere under its waiting horizon, summerlong her erect presence beside the fresh steel road of rails, I was thinking of the intricate come and go that weaves us and those around us, of how Toussaint inexplicably was partnered in existence with Mary Rides Proud, Rob now with Judith, Lucas with Nancy. “The winter of ‘86, Toussaint,” I suddenly found myself at. “What was that like, up here?”

  “That winter. That winter, we ate with the axe.”

  Rob made as if to clear an ear with his finger. “You did which?”

  “We ate with the axe. No deer, no elk. No weather to hunt them in. I went out, find a cow if I can. Look for a hump under the snow. Do you know, a lot of snowdrifts look like a cow carcass?”

  Rob was incredulous. “Toussaint, man, you mean you’d go out and find a dead cow to eat?”

  “Any I found was dead,” Toussaint vouched. “Chop her up, bring home as much as the horse can carry. West wind, all that winter. Everything drifted east. You had to guess. Whether the horse could break snow far enough to find a cow.” Toussaint seemed entertained by the memory. “That winter was long. Those cattlemen found out. I had work all summer, driving wagon for the cowhide skinners. That was what was left in this country by spring. More cowhides than cows.”

  “A once in a lifetime winter,” Rob summarized, “and I’m glad enough I wasn’t here to see it. Now we know to have hay and sheds, anyway. It’s hard luck that somebody else had to pay for that lesson, but life wasn’t built even, was it.”

  Mary Rides Proud rose from her chair by the stove and went out, I supposed to the outhouse, if there was one. By now Nancy is part us and part them, Lucas’s voice that day we arrived to Gros Ventre, and all this, and you never quite know which side is to the front, when. 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.

  “That winter must’ve made it hard to get to Gros Ventre,” I said to Toussaint. He gave away nothing in his look to me. Rob glanced over at me, curious about my curiosity, nothing more. “If you ever had to,” I added.

  “When I had to, I did that ride,” said Toussaint. “One time was all.”

  • • •

  Setting out from Toussaint’s to the railroad the next morning, Rob and I traveled the brink of the Two Medicine River’s gorge for several miles to where the main trail crossed it by bridge. It was as if the earth was letting us see a secret street, the burrowing route of its water.

  “Now why do you suppose they put a river all the way down there, Angus? It’d save us a lot of hill grief if it was up here with the rest of the country.” The Two Medicine would have needed to flow in the sky to match Rob’s lofty mood this morning.

  “Talk to the riverwright about it,” I advised him. Below us in its broad canyon the Two Medicine wound and coile
d, the water base for all the world that could be seen. The sentinel cottonwoods beside the river rustled at every touch of wind. Up where we were and out across the big ridges all around, pothole lakes made blue pockets in the green prairie. Anna, you need to see this with me, I vowed that June morning on the green high bluffs of the Two Medicine. Sometime we must come, just the two of us, and on a morning such as this watch summer and the earth dress each other in light and grass.

  “No help for it that I can see,” Rob announced as he peered down the long slope to the river and up the longer one on its north side. “Here’s where our horses earn their oats.” Down we went and across, beside sharp stark bluffs.

  The buffalo cliff, Toussaint had indicated the rock-faced heights along the river here with a nod. It was a good one. These Blackfeet put their medicine lodge near. Two times. The river got its name. Looking at the gray cliff I could all but see the black stampede in the air as the Blackfeet drove the buffalo over. Eyes whitely mad with flight, legs stiff for shock they could never withstand, the animals would have been already dying in midair. Lucas’s little recital off a tombstone that first-ever night Rob and I spent in Gros Ventre, in the Two Medicine country: I fell through life. . . . That had been one of the sagas here too, in a time of other people, other creatures. Maybe epitaphs were the same everywhere.

  At the summit of the lofty grassy ridge above the Two Medicine, the land opened again into billowing prairie with mountains filling the western horizon. It took some looking as we rattled along in the wagon to spot our destination. This was before Browning was a town, and before it was even Browning. Willow Creek, the site had been dubbed for its stream, and what differentiated it from the absolute prairie was the depot and the buildings of the Blackfeet Indian Agency. Those and the railroad, a single thin iron trellis across all this prairie, bringing the world to Montana, taking Montana to the world. From here at wan Willow Creek, Browning-to-be, now you could go straight by train to either ocean.

  Rob may have been thinking of the wool that would travel these tracks to the mills of Massachusetts in a few weeks, of the lambs that would go to Chicago at summer’s end. For once he did not speak his thoughts, but sat there next to me looking royally satisfied. I was the opposite of that, for nowhere along the miles of railroad in sight was there any dark turned earth of plowed fireguards, no crew of teamsters. No cook tent. No Anna. She was somewhere east beyond the grass horizon, at Havre, Harlem, Malta, places as distant as they sounded. Had I known to a total certainty that there would be no sight of her, I would have passed up this wagon jaunt with Rob as if it was cold gravy. But even love can’t see clearly over the curve of the earth. Rob clucked to the team and we headed for the depot.

  Now that there was no prospect of Anna, I was anxious to head home and begin using up the days of this summer of waiting. Rob was showing impatience, too, at the lack of whoever ought to be in charge of railroad freight.

  “What do they do, put coats of vanishing paint on depot agents?” he pronounced annoyedly. “McAngus, give a look for the rascal inside and I’ll try the freight room, why not.”

  I stepped quickly into the waiting room. The sole person there was a young woman, auburn-haired and bright-cheeked, likely the out-of-place daughter or very young and trying-not-to-be-abject wife of some Blackfeet Agency clerk. A fetching enough girl, but not a fraction of Anna. “Hello,” I tossed with some sympathy, still glancing around for the depotman, and then turned my eyes back to this other to ask whether she’d seen him lately. She was looking at me pertly, as if expecting answer from me instead. And then uttered:

  “Hello yourself, Angus McCaskill with a mustache.”

  Nethermuir. Nethermuir in the voice. That shined-apple complexion and her gray eyes. She had to be, but couldn’t possibly—

  “Adair?” I got out. “Are you, you can’t—”

  Uproar burst in on us then, Rob laughing and hooting and hugging his sister and pounding me, “He never guessed! Adair, we did it to the man! It was perfect as can be, he never had a clue you’d be here! Angus, wait until they hear in Scotch Heaven how you let a slip of a girl sneak up on you all the way from Scotland!”

  By now I had enough wit and wind back to enlist in the laughing, and Adair gave me a quick timid hug and asked, “Do you mind the surprise, Angus? It was this dickens Rob’s doing, he insisted we not tell you.”

  “Mind, how could I mind. It’s a thing I never expected, is all—finding you in a Montana train station, Dair Barclay. But, but what’re you doing here?”

  “What, you can’t tell by the sight of me? Adair is a tourist,” she defined herself with a self-mocking small smile. Of course I knew in my mind that Adair had grown from the scrap of a girl she was when Rob and I left Nethermuir. She was, what, twelve then. But knowing that was different from understanding, as my eyes were having me do, that she now had reached nineteen and was certifiably more than a girl in every way that I could see. “It was Rob’s notion for me to come spend a bit of time. To see this famous Montana of yours.”

  “Rob is definitely a wonder,” I said with a trickle of suspicion beginning in me. “And so how long are you here for?”

  “The summer,” was Adair’s all innocent answer, “to keep Judith company while Rob and you are out being shepherds.” But Rob had his own expanded version as he gave his sister the fifth hug of the past minute: “She’s here for as long as we can keep her. The lads of Nethermuir will just have to cry at the moon.”

  The former lad of Nethermuir who was me looked those words over, looked over their source as thoroughly as I could and still keep a reasonably pleasant face for Adair. I had major questions to put to Rob Barclay as soon as I could get him alone and he knew it, he oh most definitely knew it.

  “See now, McAngus, I did bring you along for a reason,” he said brightly, “to help load Adair’s things. Then we’d better make miles before dark, hadn’t we?”

  “One of your better thoughts recently,” I told him, and set off for the luggage. As I went I heard Adair ask, “What, we won’t reach Scotch Heaven by tonight?” and Rob answer, “No, not quite.” So far, Dair Barclay and I were even in the day’s surprises.

  After we started across the prairie, Adair kept up with the first rush of talk from Rob while I mmmed and hmmed in the spots between, but I could see her glancing around restlessly at the land, the grass, the Indians, and for that matter at Rob and myself. Time and again she turned her head toward the mountains. After a bit she said of herself: “Forgive Adair for the amount of green in her, but she has to ask. You don’t mean those are the mountains where the two of you will be with the sheep?” Myself, I thought the Rockies looked particularly stately this calm sunlit day, purple old widows at tea.

  “The very ones,” Rob and I chorused.

  “But they’re nothing but cliffs and snow. Where is there even a place for you to find a foothold?”

  “Just the country for sheep and Scotchmen,” Rob assured her. “Angus and I will come down from the top of the world there in a few months with our fortunes trotting in front of us.”

  Adair continued to study the vast jagged line of mountains as if they might pounce out at us. Well, well. This sister of his whom Rob thought was a Montanian in the making might hold a surprise for him as well.

  “Do the full recitation of them for her,” Rob urged me. “Adair, what this person on the other side of you doesn’t know about the Two Medicine country isn’t worth knowing.”

  Adair turned to me with a wisp of a smile. “Are you guilty of all that?”

  “He’s greatly worse,” Rob declared. “I’ve only told you the top part about him. This is a coming man, this McCaskill person. Even I have to say so.”

  “I am in trouble,” I agreed feelingly with Adair, “if I’m in the good graces of our Rob. But our mountains, now, since you’re keen to know.” I took her through the catechism of the peaks and crags rising above Scotch Heaven: Jericho Reef, Guthrie Peak, Phantom Woman Mountain, Rooster Mountain,
Roman Reef, Grizzly Reef.

  By the time I finished, Adair had turned from the mountains toward me again. “You say them as if they were lines of verse,” she remarked almost in a questioning way.

  “Now you’ve gone and done it, Adair. You have to watch your step all the time around this man,” Rob enjoined, “or you’ll give him the excuse to start spouting—”

  “—Burns, did I hear someone start to say?” I thrust in. “Beware a tongue/that’s smoothly hung, for instance? Now there’s a major piece of advice, Dair, for being around this brother of yours.” Pick the bones out of that for a while, Rob, why don’t you.

  Adair laughed, a pretty enough sound, fully half as melodious as Anna’s. “You mean you haven’t been able to change him at all in seven years?”

  “Thank heaven I can recognize jealousy when I hear it,” Rob gave us equably, and slapped the reins lightly on the team’s rumps. “It’s time to let the wheels chase the horses,” he emulated our stagecoach driver from Craig to Augusta those years ago. “Next stop, Badger Creek.”

  • • •

  At least I knew better than that. Any schoolteacher could have informed Rob that unless girls of Nethermuir grew up with iron bladders these days, a stop was imminent somewhere in the hours before we would reach Badger Creek. Nor did Rob help his own cause by being too busy with talking, when we crossed the Two Medicine, to think of offering Adair a pause within its sheltering grove. So when we topped the Two Medicine gorge’s southern rim and Adair took her first look at the naked world ahead, no concealment higher or thicker than a spear of grass for miles in any direction, I truly believe I discerned her first squirm of realization. Forgive me this, Dair Barclay, I thought to myself, but you may as well meet the bare facts of this country sooner than later. And both of us were going to be the better off the quicker I could get Rob alone and wring out of him what he was up to in bringing her here.