by Ivan Doig
Scorpion’s ears pricked, his horse view of life alert to the stark lone outline standing ahead of us on the benchland. The pole gateframe of the Double W ranch, gallows-high. As we passed the lofty gate I turned my head to the other side and looked back to where the misery began. The Noon Creek schoolhouse was a square white speck now, under the mountains with their evening roof of cloud and beside the longsail rise of Breed Butte and nearest of all to a spacious creekside ranch that was Reese horseland.
Angus, I’m afraid it’s Isaac I feel actual love for. Just that way. As if we two men were jars of jam on the table and she was saying, this is strawberry, this is plum, I’ll have plum from now on. Anna was marrying him for the sake of those parents of hers, to tie the leaky boat of Ramsay finances to the ark of Isaac. She was marrying him because she felt sorry for him, damned Dane gabbler him. She was marrying him because she had temporarily lost her mind. Amnesia. A blow on the head she couldn’t recall. The instant she came out of this sad mad drift of her senses . . .
She was marrying Isaac because she chose to. Because she wanted to. Because some form of the love infection that had happened to me had now happened to her. I knew that, to the bone. Knew it indelibly and with no possible mistake because Anna Ramsay in her honesty made plain the difficulty of her decision. Angus, you are a rare man. Maybe the rarest I’ve ever met. Her half-smile seemed wistful, or did I imagine. The frank faction of her, though, the Not Proven verdict-giver, went right on to say: But I think you don’t know yet what you want of life. But I did, did, did. Everything I wanted was standing here telling me she was marrying someone else.
And you do, I raged, and his name is Isaac?
How can I ever say it as well as you deserve? Angus, you are one who wants to see how many ways life can rhyme. I just—I just want it to add up as sensibly as I can make it do. And while I didn’t at all intend it to, this summer told me how much I want to be with Isaac. Her perfect face looked at me with steady regret. Angus, I’m so sorry. I am sorrier for you than can ever be said. She put her hand gently on my wrist, half a grasp which she must have thought was better than none. I can tell you this. If I ever see that Isaac and I are not right for each other, I’ll know where to turn for better. Any woman would do well to marry you, Angus.
Scorpion was snorty and nervous, our shadow a restless one on the road in front of us from his head-tossing and twitching. If truth could show itself as sunlight throws down our outlines, there would have been a third form there in our composite shadow—the dread that rode me. There is nothing else to call it, a dread as harsh and bottomless as the smothering one I had felt in the steerage bunk those first Atlantic nights out from Scotland. For what was tearing at me was not simply that Anna had turned me down. No. No, the greatly worse part was that even now I could not stop myself from siding with her, defending her against myself even as I derided her reasons in favor of mumblejumble Isaac. I still loved that woman. And if this day had not changed that fact, what ever could?
• • •
“By Jesus, Angus, you look as if the dog ate your supper.”
I gave Lucas an answering eyeshot that sent his stubs reaching for a large glass for me. Lucas Barclay, author of my homesteading venture, commandant of the Medicine Lodge and the tall house behind and Nancy in that house. All this without even having hands. Isaac Bedamned Reese barely had approximate English. Yet here was I, supposedly complete but womanless. Less the exact one woman I wanted.
I explained to Lucas in the one word: “Anna.” Misunderstanding the situation as something that could be mollified he said: “A spat, ay? Don’t be so down, lad, you’re not the first—”
“She told me to go chase myself,” I told him. I told him about the Anna-Isaac wedding-to-be, told him my bafflement, told him a couple of rapid drinks’ worth.
“Bad,” he agreed. “But you will mend, you know.”
I wanted to blaze to him that this wasn’t like Rob being infatuated with Nancy, he’d sing a different tune if he were me right now. For that matter, something of the sort must have flared, because Lucas now was steering me to the weaning corner of the bar and casting keep-away looks at the few other customers as they drifted in. “Another glass or so will do you more good than harm, Angus, but that’s the end of the night for you then.”
Harm, did I hear him say. From that day when Rob and I walked into this Medicine Lodge and Lucas laid his lack of hands before us to see, I had wondered what so harmed a life was like, how Lucas must feel, true and deep, about enduring the rest of existence as less than he had been. Now Lucas was the one who did not, could not, know anything near the full sum of damage I felt. Come put on my bones, Lucas. Come and wear Angus McCaskill like borrowed clothes, let our hearts pump in tune, our eyes sight together at this rascal thing life. Come stand here under my skin and find what this is like, I will learn your loss and you mine.
“Angus, Angus. Take it slow, now. Both on this whiskey and yourself.”
Slow, is it. My whole life is slow as anything can be now, indeed it’s halted, bogged, stranded . . . This was my Bell Rock. My time of stone, with obliteration all around. The ocean was coming to cover me, ready to put salt pennies on my eyes, and it may as well, why live if this was what living amounted to. I’m here to tell you. No boat on the reef and none in sight anywhere. Land stood a dozen miles distant from the Bell Rock; yes, that was the ever same unswimmable distance, from here in the Medicine Lodge to that Noon Creek schoolroom where Anna had told me no, Isaac yes.
“Angus, man, you’re full. No more of the wet stuff for you tonight. Sedge and Toussaint, each grab an end of him, can you, and take him around to the house. Angus, here now, just let the lads lift you, there’s the way. You’ll be different in the morning.”
Let the tide come. The Atlantic, the Annalantic. Take my ankles, shins, knees, rise, damn you, bless you, sweep me off this reef, blanket me with water, arms and throat and eyes and higher yet, the whole hopeless thing I am.
• • •
What followed, an exact month from that day Anna said no to me, even yet seems the kind of dream a puppet must have, each odd moment on its own string of existence, now dangled, now gone, no comprehension allowed between. Around the wedding pair a cloud of faces, high nimbus and low, years-married couples remembering with faint smiles and their children curious but fidgety. Inevitable breeze, blowing the few strands of the Gros Ventre minister’s gray hair down into his eyes as he begins to read the ceremony, We are gathered . . . Mountains up over the valley in their eternal gather. The couple, in voices as brave as they can make them, reciting vows for life. The thought caught up with me: Life. That could be a long time. Then moved on through my slowly registering mind. Here the last of the dreambead instants, this tardy and this soon, the ring being handed by the brightfaced best man.
I shifted slightly, turning to the woman beside me. Onto Adair’s finger I slipped the ring warm from Rob’s grasp and it was done. We were wed.
The minister gave out that last intonation to us. “You may kiss the bride.” Leaning my head down to Adair’s, I saw she had her eyes closed, as if casting a wish. It all revisited me, the pieces of time that had never really passed, simply drifted from corner to corner within me, dreamlike yet never with a dream’s innocence. Rob’s voice beginning by saying Her Highness gave you a flick of her handkerchief, I hear, when I rode home the morning after my night of forlorn souse and found him there, crossing the yard to feed my indignant chickens. Those Ramsays think they’re God’s first cousins, though where they get it from I can’t see. Angus, she’s not the only woman in this world. No. There was another. In three days, when I hoped I was some semblance of a human again, I rode to Breed Butte, asked Adair to walk with me to the brow of the butte, and there my words came out with cloppety boots on, but they came out. Dair, you know what’s happened with me. She: I know about Anna, Angus, and I’m sorry for you. She did not entirely know, though, nowhere nearly all. Could not know how thoroughly the lovespell
for Anna still gripped me, that neither disappointment nor anger nor reason nor laughing at myself nor crying with myself nor anything else among the storms going through me seemed to loosen at all. Nor did I dare even try to bring out my hopelessness for Adair to see, because the bargain we needed to make could not withstand full truth. I spoke fact instead: That’s the past now, Dair. And I’m asking you not to go back to Scotland. I’m asking you to stay and marry me. Further fact silent but plain behind each line aloud: I no longer could stand to face life by my solitary self, could not reverse myself into the awaiting watcher I was before Anna changed me; Adair who had come across an ocean believing I was awaiting her did not want to return empty-handed to a stone Scottish town: we two together at least were a different sum than either of those awkward results. She made her choice, more pity to her, Adair said softly without touching Anna’s name. Then said the rest in that lofty little way as if outside herself, speculating. And Adair has made hers. Angus, I’ll marry you any number of times over. I: We can start with once. And Rob again, exultant: McAngus, man, this is the best news in the world! Have the wedding here on Breed Butte, what do you say? We’ll throw you two a shindig that’ll not be forgot.
Someone of the crowd calling out now, “That kiss ought to more than do the job, you two. You’ll be married a couple of hundred years on the strength of that!”
Adair looked as if I had taken every bit of breath from her, she looked as if she’d heard a wild rumor prove true. In front of us the minister hemmed and hankered as he wished us well. Faces of my pupils had been astounded into giggles.
“I thought all the kissing had to be done at once,” I alibied to the world at large and drew Adair snug against my side. “You mean to tell me there’s more of that to come, Dair Bare—” I stopped and laughed with the rest until I could manage the correction—“Dair McCaskill?”
I heard more giggles, shushes, whispered bulletins, as if echoing ghostly up the butte from my schoolroom. Then unmistakably Susan Duff announcing, “We have a song for Mr. and Mrs. McCaskill.” I turned and Adair with me, to the every-sized choir that had crept behind us; my pupils in slicked-down hair and stiff Sunday clothes, descending in grinning disorder around the central figure of Susan Duff, Susan long and tall, Susan princess of my classroom, Susan of that silvered voice that now soared out and coaxed the wavery others:
Dancing at the rascal fair,
Adair Barclay, she was there,
gathering a lad with red hair,
dancing at the rascal fair.
Angus McCaskill, he was there,
paired with a lass named Adair,
dancing at the rascal fair.
Feel love’s music everywhere,
fill your heart, fill the air,
dancing at the rascal fair.
“Some people,” I declaimed after the applause died and Adair and I thanked Susan Duff to the limit, “will try anything to get on the good side of their teacher.” Laughter met that, Adair met my pupils one and all, and after them it would be their parents and everyone. The song had helped, I told myself. Maybe I did know what I was doing, maybe Adair did, too, maybe we were going to be a good fit. But tell myself whatever I would, the other refused to leave my mind. I tried and tried not to think any of it, which only incited the factions up there all the more. Anna, come today. No, don’t come, not this day that is by every right Dair’s day.
Married life was proceeding from there. Congratulations from the men filling my ears, Adair receiving bushels of advice from the women about how to perfect me. Lucas at one point provided me brief rescue with a generously full glass captured between his stubs. “Have a drop of angel milk,” he directed. “You look as though you need it, ay?”
It was a lovely whiskey, like drinking the color off a ripe wheat field. “This is the house brand in the Medicine Lodge now, is it?” I advocated.
“Don’t get wild ideas, lad. It happens to be a bottle that’s a precious commodity. Only the advent of good sense in you, marrying a Barclay, makes me crack it open.”
Lucas’s face did not live up to our banter, either; he was eyeing me in a diagnosing way. And so he knew, knew for certain that my tongue had just vowed for one woman but my thoughts still chose another.
I waited for words from this man who always could see through me and out the other side. For once, there were none. Lucas gravely nodded—was it simply acknowledgment? or lodge greeting of the maimed?—and left Adair and me to our congratulators.
Scotch Heaven was here without exception, and nearly everyone from the South Fork and down the main creek as well, and many from Gros Ventre and several from Noon Creek, although not the two most on my mind. Seven days ago, Anna and Isaac had gone through this same ceremony at Fort Benton on one of his horse-merchant trips. Anna, come. No, stay away. Anna, I just want to see you, before Adair and I make our life, to ease you from my mind. No, I want to see you because that is what I always want, the hunger I always have, and so Anna, don’t—
I felt Adair startle, startling me. A round walnut-colored face, crinkles of amusement permanently at the corners of its eyes, regarded the two of us as if we held the secrets it had forever wanted to know.
“I came to see the cream separator,” spoke Toussaint. “She looks like the good kind.”
All simultaneously I was exclaiming in relief and shaking hands hello with Toussaint and introducing him to Adair, who was looking as if she’d encountered a feathered Zulu. When Toussaint had paid us his chuckling respects and gone she asked, “Who on earth was that?”
“The king’s remembrancer, except that the Two Medicine country doesn’t have the king. I’ll try to explain Toussaint later.”
As much to herself as to me she said softly, “Adair has much to get used to in your Montana.”
“And she will,” I said with a heartiness based on my own need to believe that. “First, though, she has to meet all these Montanians who admire my taste in wives.” Countless more introductions were undergone to the tune of Angus, we wondered who you’ve been waiting for.
When the next chance came I asked her, low, “Dizzy with names yet?”
“At least,” she said, close to breathless again. She looked a bit abstracted, too, as if having stepped off a sudden little distance from the proceedings. Deciding that since I was now a husband I’d better undertake to be husbandly, I announced to our assemblage: “Time for our first war council. We’ll be back before you can get your whistles wet.” I led her up the butte a little way, just far enough to be by ourselves.
Adair asked in wonder, “Do people flock out this way for every wedding?”
“Only the ones I’m in,” I vouched.
“Angus.” She put her hand on my arm. “Angus, I’ll try with whatever’s in me to be a good wife. I don’t want you disappointed in me.”
“Dair, what’s this about?” The unexpected note of doubt in her voice hit deep in me, colliding with my own fears. But I made the words light enough to float away. “It’s been most of an hour already since the vows and I’m not ready to trade you in yet.”
“I want you to know. I’ll be all I can for you.”
“Then that ought to be more than enough.”
“A person just doesn’t know . . .” Her words faltered. “Or least this one doesn’t know.”
In my chest the sound thudded in echo: know . . . know . . . know . . . or was it no . . . no . . . no . . . I made the fatal little round sound become her word again: “Know? Know what, Adair?”
“I don’t know how I’ll be. Amid all of this.” She swerved from my staring quiz of her, and the two of us looked out over as much of all as eyes can ever see. The homesteads along the creek, the unpopulated miles all around, the cluster of wellwishers for this occasion, our occasion—Rob with Judith, Lucas and Nancy, Ninian Duff and Flora, Toussaint, the children of my school, people and people and people—and the mountains patiently propping the sky.
“We have the rest of our lives to find that out, Dair
,” I at last offered. “Let’s not worry about ourselves until we have to.”
Our public was calling to us from the tables of wedding supper. Here now, the lovey-dovey stuff just will have to wait a bit . . . Angus, you’ve got the ring on her finger now, you can afford to share her with us . . . Rob’s voice emerging over the others: We’re moving on to important matters such as food and drink, you two, so bring yourselves on down here.
“Hadn’t we better?” Adair said, and tried to give me a smile. I manufactured one in return and confirmed, “By popular demand.” And in me that desperate double chorus I could not be rid of. Anna, come. No, don’t.
Anna.
And Isaac. Just arriving. The sight of Adair and me coming down the butte to join the wedding crowd halted the two of them at the far edge of the throng as though it was a wall.
There wasn’t a chance in this world to know what Isaac Reese was thinking above that drooping mustache, behind those horse trader’s eyes. As well go read a fencepost as try to decipher that Dane. But Anna registered on me exactly, instantly as a mirror reflection. I saw in Anna a great judiciousness, a careful holding back as she met my gaze with hers, and understood at once that this was the total of our meeting today, these exacting looks across the wedding crowd: a man beside his yet-to-be-known bride, casting every glance he can toward the woman he knows every inch of. Propriety was delivered now by Anna and Isaac being here, now there could be no behind-back talk as to why schoolkeeper Anna was absent the day of schoolkeeper Angus’s wedding, weren’t they seeing one another, for a time? You don’t suppose . . .
