by Ivan Doig
And now I had my private answer as to whether the sight of Anna here, unattainable, the past in a glorious glossy braid, would begin to heal my pang for her or make it worse. Seeing her did absolutely neither. Not a candleworth of difference one way or the other in the feeling for Anna that burned like a sun in me. That heartfire had persisted past her choice of Isaac for a husband, it was persisting past my vow to this new presence at my side, my wife. But it couldn’t persevere on and on in the face of all the rest of life to come, could it? Could it, Angus? I drew breath. I had to hope not. I had to make it not.
I put my hand in a reassuring clasp over Adair’s, where it held hard to the corner of my arm. “That brother of mine,” she was saying, “you never know the next from him.”
Rob had climbed onto a chair. He stood amidst all of us of the wedding crowd, half again as tall as anyone. A glass of Lucas’s magic whiskey was raised in his hand. “A toast!” he called out. “In fact, many more than one toast before this day is nearly done, but this one first.”
Rob turned toward Adair and me, his eyes met mine and our looks locked as they had so many times. Of everyone there on Breed Butte—Adair, his own Judith, Lucas, Nancy, the many of Scotch Heaven and Noon Creek and Gros Ventre—of this day’s entirety of people, Rob was speaking straight to me. “Angus, man, you and I have been all but family.” He held his glass as high in the air now as he could reach, as if toasting the sky, the earth, all. “And now we’re that.”
THE ’STEADERS
* * *
The Great Herdsman Above must have thrown up his hands over the territory of bald plains between here and North Dakota and ordained it to be eternally stampede country. First of all, He turned loose the buffalo there; next the cattle herds in the days of open range; and now the homesteaders are flocking in by the thousand. Nearest us, a Paris of the prairie called Valier already exists on the maps the irrigation company is providing to hopeful immigrants, and there can even be found in the townsite vicinity occasional buildings which, if rounded up and bedded down, may constitute some sort of a town eventually.
—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, MAY 13, 1909
I MEAN this better than it will sound. Adair was the biggest change my life had known since sheep came into it.
• • •
“Dair? You don’t snore.”
She stopped the work of her fork, that breakfast time in the early weeks of our marriage, and gazed across at me curiously. “Such high praise so early in the day.”
“All I meant was—it’s a nice surprise.” Surprise and cause for wonder, this small woman silent in the dark as if she wasn’t there in the bed beside me. My years of alone life had made me think that adding a second person to a household would be like bringing in a crowd. Whenever you looked up, there would be a presence who hadn’t been, now at the stove, now at the window, now in the chair across from you, now in the blanket warmth next to you. But not so, with Adair. She was not what could be called a throng of wives. No, instead she was proving to be a second solitude on the homestead, a new aloneness daily crisscrossing my own. Constantly now I had to try to fathom this sudden young gray-eyed woman with my name joined onto hers. This quietly-here newcomer from the past. This afterthought bride in the lane of time where I foresaw only Anna.
That was the parallel I meant with the sheep: the saying is that to be successful with sheep, even when you’re not thinking about them you had better be thinking about them a little. Now that I was coupled into life with Adair, even when I was trying not to wonder I had to wonder whether I was up to this.
I was letting this be seen bald by remarking to the presence across the breakfast eggs from me about her snorelessness, wasn’t I. Figuring I had better get out of the topic before damage was done, I deployed: “You’re sure you’re related to Rob Barclay, the Scotch Banshee?”
“Would you like me to ask Rob for lessons in sawing with my nose?” she said back, lightly enough.
“No, no, no. I can step out and listen to the coyotes whenever I feel too deprived.”
My wife lifted her chin at me and declared softly, “Adair has the same news for you, old Angus McCaskill. You aren’t a snorer, either.”
“Where do you get the evidence for that?” For if she was asleep as she seemed while I lay there searching the night—
“I wake up early, well before you do. And you’re there, quiet as a gatepost.”
So Adair and I were opposite wakefulnesses, were we, at either end of the night. The dark quiet between, we shared.
• • •
“I always knew marriage would agree with you,” Rob accorded me. “You don’t have that bachelor look on you any more.” He sucked his cheeks into hollows and meanwhile crossed his eyes, just in case I didn’t happen to know what abject bachelorhood looked like.
• • •
Adair had barely come across the threshold when Rob and I had to trail his wethers and my lambs to the railhead for shipping. Quick after that, school began again and I was making the daily ride from homestead to the South Fork and then back. In weekends and other spare minutes, winter had to be readied for. It sometimes seemed I saw more of Scorpion than I did of my new wife.
She said nothing of my here-and-gone pace, just as I said nothing of her beginning attempts at running a household. Accustomed to tea, Adair applied the principle of boiling to coffee and produced a decoction nearly as stiff as the cup. Her meals were able enough, but absentminded, so to speak; the same menu might show up at dinner and at supper, then again at the same meals the next day, as if the food had forgotten its way home. Courage, I told my stomach and myself, we’d eventually sort such matters out; but not just yet. There already was a problem far at the head of the line of all others. Adair’s lack of liking for the homestead and, when you come all the way down to it, for Montana.
Again, her words were not what said so. I simply could see it, feel it in her whenever she went across the yard to fling out a dishpan of water and strode back, all without ever elevating her eyes from her footsteps. The mountains and their weather she seemed to notice only when they were at their most threatening. I counted ahead the not many weeks to winter and the white cage it would bring for someone such as Adair, and tried to swallow that chilly future away.
Before winter found its chance to happen, though, there was a Friday end-of-afternoon when a session of convincing Ninian on the need for new arithmetic books—ay, are you telling me there are new numbers to be learned these days, Angus?—didn’t get me home from the schoolhouse until suppertime. During my ride, I had watched the promise of storm being formed, the mountains showing only as shoals in the clouds by the time I stepped down from Scorpion.
“Sorry, Dair,” I said, providing her with a kiss, and headed sharp for the washbasin while she put the waiting food on the table. “It’s just lucky I didn’t end up arguing with Ninian by moonlight.”
“The old dark comes so early these days,” she said, and took the glass chimney off to light the lamp wick.
“We get a little spell of this weather every year about now,” I mollified her as I craned around to peer out the window at the clouds atop the mountains, hoping they would look lessened, “but then it clears away bright as a new penny for a while. We’ll be basking in Indian summer before you know what’s hap—” The sound of shatter, the cascade of glass, spun me to Adair.
She was staring dumbstruck at the table strewn with shrapnel of the lamp chimney, shards in our waiting plates and in the potatoes and the gravy and other food dishes as if a shotgun loaded with glass had gone off. In her hand she still held a glinting jagged ring of glass, the very top of the chimney.
I went and grasped her, wildly scanning her hands, arms, up the aproned front of her, up all the fearful way to her eyes. No blood. Mercy I sought, mercy I got. Adair gazed back at me intact. She did not look the least afraid, she did not look as if she even knew what the fusillade of glass could have inflicted on her. Tunnels of puzzle, those eyes above the
twin freckle marks. She murmured, “It just—flew into pieces. When I went to put it back on the lamp.”
“That happens the rare time, the heat cracks it to smithereens. But what matters, none of it cut you? Anywhere? You’re sure you’re all right, are you, Dair?”
“Yes, of course. It surprised me, is all. And look at poor supper.” Adair sounded so affronted about the surprise and the stabbing of supper that it could have been comical. But my heart went on thundering as I stepped to the shelf where I kept a spare lamp chimney.
• • •
In the morning I said what had lain in my mind through the night.
“Dair? You need to learn to ride a horse today.”
She thought it was one of my odder jokes. “I do, do I. What, do I look like a fox-hunting flopsie to you? Lady Gorse on her horse?”
“No, I mean it. As far back in here as we are, no one else near around, it’d be well for you to know how to handle a horse. Just in case, is all.” In case lamp chimneys detonate in innocent moments, in case any of the accidents and ailments of homestead life strike when I am not here with you, I was attempting to say without the scaring words. “I’m living proof that riding a horse isn’t all that hard. Come along out, Scorpion and I’ll have you galloping in no time.” I got up from my breakfast chair and stood waiting.
“Now?”
“Now. Out to the barn.” I put my arm in hers, ready escort. “Scorpion awaits.”
Her gaze said all right, I will humor you, show me what a horse is about if you must.
At the barn I demonstrated to her the routine of saddling, then unsaddled Scorpion and said: “Your turn.”
“Angus. This is—”
“No, no, you don’t do it with words. Hands and arms are unfortunately required. They’re there at the ends of your shoulders if I’m not wrong.” No smile from her. Well, I couldn’t help that. “Just lift the saddle onto him and reach slowly under for the cinch.”
Beside the big gingerbread-colored horse, Adair was a small pillar of reluctance.
“Now then, Dair,” I encouraged. “Saddle him and get it over with.”
She cast me a glance full of why?
“Please,” I said.
The saddle seemed as big as she was, but she managed to heave it onto Scorpion. Then in three tries she struggled the cinch tight enough that I granted it would probably hold.
“There,” she panted. “Are you satisfied?”
“Starting to begin to be. Now for your riding lesson. Over Pegasus I’ll fling my leg / and never a shoe will I need to beg.” Verse didn’t seem to loft her any more than the rest of my words. “What you do is put your left foot in the stirrup,” I demonstrated with myself, “take hold of the saddle horn, and swing yourself up this way.” From atop Scorpion I sent my most encouraging look down to Adair, then swung off the horse. “Your turn. Left foot into stirrup.”
“No.” She sounded decisive about it.
“Ah, but you’ve got to. This isn’t Nethermuir. Montana miles are too many for walking, and there are going to come times when I’m not here to hitch up the team and wagon for you. So unless you’re going to sprout wings or fins, Dair, that leaves you horseback.”
“No, Angus. Not today. I have this dress on. When I can sew myself a riding skirt—”
“There’s nobody around to see you but me. And I’ve glimpsed the territory before, have I not?” I hugged her and urged her, wishing to myself that I knew how to snipper Barclay stubbornness into five-foot chunks to sell as crowbars. “You can do this. My schoolgirls ride like Comanches.”
“I’m not one of your wild Montana schoolgirls. I’m your wife, and I—”
“I realize that makes your case harder, love, but we’ll try to work around that handicap.” She didn’t give me the surrendering smile I’d hoped that would bring, either. By now I realized she wasn’t being stubborn, she wasn’t being coy, she was simply being Adair. At her own time and choosing, riding skirt newly on, she might announce her readiness. Fine, well, and good, but this couldn’t wait. “I’m sorry, Dair, but there’s no halfway to this. Come on now,” I directed. “Up.”
“No.”
I suppose this next did come out livelier than I intended.
“Dair, lass, you came across the goddamned Atlantic Ocean! Getting up into a saddle is no distance, compared. Now will you put your foot here in the stirrup—”
“No! Angus, I won’t! You’re being silly with all your fuss about this.” Adair herself wasn’t quite stamping that foot yet, but her voice was. She sounded as adamant as if I’d wakened her in the middle of the night and told her to go outside and tie herself upside down in the nearest tree.
The only thing I could think of to do, I did. I stepped to Adair and lifted her so that she was cradled in my arms. Surprised pleasure came over her face, then she giggled and put her arms rewardfully around my neck. The giggling quit as I abruptly took us over beside Scorpion.
“Angus, what—”
“Upsy-daisy, lazy Maisie,” I declared. “Whoa now, Scorpion,” and with a grunt I lifted Adair, feet high to clear the saddle horn and I hoped aiming her bottom into the saddle.
“Angus! AnGUS! ANGUS, quit! What’re you—”
“Dair, let yourself down into the saddle. Whoa, Scorpion, steady there, whoa now. Don’t, Dair, you’ll scare the horse. Just get on, you’re all but there. Whoa now, whoa—”
Her small fists were rapping my back and chest, and not love taps, either. But with no place else but midair to go, at last she was in the saddle, my arms clasped around her hips to keep her there. Scorpion gave us a perturbed glance and flicked his nearest ear. “Dair, listen to me. Sit still, you have to sit still. Scorpion isn’t going to stand for much more commotion. Just sit a minute. You have to get used to the horse and let him get used to you.”
She was gulping now, but only for breath after our struggle; her tears were quiet ones. “Angus, why are you doing this?”
“Because you have to know how to handle a horse, Dair. You just absolutely do, in this country.” I buried my face in her dress while the sentences wrenched themselves out of me. “Dair, I’m afraid for you. I could never stand it if something happened to you on account of marrying me. An accident, you here alone, this place off by itself this way . . .” The ache of my fear known to both of us now. I had lost one woman. If I lost another, lost her because of the homestead—“But this place is all I’ve got. We’ve got. So you have to learn how to live here. You just have to.”
A silent time, then I raised my head to her. She was wan but the tear tracks were drying. “Hello you, Dair Barclay. Are you all right?”
“Y-yes. Angus, I didn’t know—how much it meant to you. I thought you were just being—”
I cleared enough of the anxiety out of my throat to say: “Thinking will lead to trouble time after time, won’t it. Now then, all you need do is to take these reins. Hold them in your right hand, not too slack but not too tight either, there’s the way. Don’t worry, I’ll be hanging tight onto Scorpion’s bridle and first we’ll circle the yard. Ready?”
• • •
You won’t find it in the instructions on the thing, but for the first year of a marriage, time bunches itself in a dense way it never quite does again. Everything happens double-quick and twice as strong to a new pair in life—and not just in the one room of the house you’d expect.
Here, now, in the time so far beyond then, when I see back into that winter after Adair and I were married, it abruptly is always from the day in May. The day that stayed with us as if stained into our skins. Take away that day and so much would be different, the history of Adair and myself and—
Even on the calendar of memory, though, winter must fit ahead of May, and that first winter of Adair and myself outlined us to one another as if we were black stonepiles against the snow. After the first snowfall the weather cleared, the air was crisp without being truly cold yet. Being outside in that glistening weather was a chance to glimpse
the glory the earth can be when it puts its winter fur on, and Rob and I tried any number of times to talk Adair into bundling up and riding the haysled with us as we fed the sheep. “Come along out and see the best scenery there is. They’d charge you a young fortune for an outing like it in the Alps.” But nothing doing. Adair quietly smiled us away, brother as well as husband. “Adair can see the winter from where she is,” she assured us.
For a while my hope was that she was simply content to be on the inside of winter looking out, the way she paused at any window to gaze out into Scotch Heaven’s new whiteness. That hope lasted until a choretime dusk soon after the start of the snow season when George Frew, quiet ox in a sheepskin coat and a flap cap, trooped behind me into the house. “Anything you’d like from town besides the mail, Dair?” I asked heartily. “George is riding in tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she responded, although you couldn’t really say it was to George or myself. Times such as this, conversing with her was like speaking to a person the real Adair had sent out to deal with you. Wherever the actual mortal was otherwise occupied at the moment, the one in front of us stated now: “Adair would like a deck of cards.”
George positively echoed with significant silence as he took those words in. Flora Duff might want darning thread, Jen Erskine might want dried peaches for pie, but what did Adair McCaskill want but a—
“You heard the lady, George,” I produced with desperate jollity. “We’re in for some fierce cribbage in this household, these white nights. Kuuvus’s best deck of cards, if you please. I’ll ride down and pick it up from you tomorrow night.”
