by Ivan Doig
Thereafter, Adair would indeed play me games of cribbage when I took the care to put my reading aside and suggest it in an evening. But her true game was what I had known she intended. Solitaire. After the deck of cards arrived, I began to notice the seven marching columns of solitaire laid out on the sideboard during the day. Aces, faces, and on down, the queues of cards awaiting their next in number. Adair amid her housework would stop and deal from the waiting deck to herself, play any eligible card where it belonged, and then go on about whatever she had been doing, only to stop again her next time past and repeat the ritual.
• • •
But I soon was repeating my own silent ritual that winter, wasn’t I. My own solitary preoccupation. Against every intention in myself, I was soon doing that.
The schoolhouse dances brought it on. At the first dance in my schoolroom, fresh silver of snowfall softening the night, I was in mid-tune with Adair when I caught sight of Anna and Isaac Reese entering. The sensation instantly made itself known within me, unerringly as the first time I ever saw Anna. Toussaint Rennie once told me of a Blackfeet who carried in his ribcage an arrowhead from a fight with the Crow tribe. That was the way the feeling for Anna was lodged in me: just there, its lumped outline under the skin same and strong as ever. Dair, here in my arms, what am I going to do with myself and this welt inside me? Marrying you was supposed to cure me of Anna. Why hasn’t it? Until that moment of Anna entering from the snow-softened dark, not having laid eyes on her since the day Adair and I were married, I was able to hope it was my body alone, the teasing appetite of the loins, that made me see Anna so often as I waited for sleep. I am not inviting any of this, Dair, I never invited it. Her in the midst of this same music, that first night of glorious dancing here in my schoolroom. Her in the Noon Creek school, turning to me under a word in the air, her braid swinging decisively over her shoulder to the top of her breast. Dair, I wish you could know, could understand, could not be hurt by it. Anna beneath me, watching so intently as we made the dawn come, arousing each other as the sun kindled the start of morning. Double daybreak such as I had just once shared with a woman, not the woman I had wed. Night upon night I had been opening my eyes to explode those scenes, driving sleep even farther away. Beside me, Adair who slept as if she was part of the night; there in the dark was the one place she seemed to fit the life I had married her into. But this other inhabitant of my nights—I knew now, again, that whether she was Anna Ramsay or Anna Reese or Anna Might-Have-Been-McCaskill, every bit of me was in love with the woman as drastically as ever.
How many times that winter, to how many tunes, was I going to tread the floor of my South Fork schoolroom or her Noon Creek one, glimpsing Anna while Adair flew in my arms? I couldn’t not come to the dances, even if Adair would have heard of that, which she definitely would not have. To her, the dances were the one time that Montana winter wasn’t Montana winter.
“She’s another person, out there in the music.” This from Rob. He meant it to extol, but that he said anything at all about an oddness of Adair was a surprise.
“She is that,” I couldn’t but agree. Dancing with Adair you were partnered with some gliding being she had become, music in a frock, silken motion wearing a ringleted Adair mask. It was what I had seen when she danced with Allan Frew after the shearing, a tranced person who seemed to take the tunes into herself. Where this came from, who knew. At home she didn’t even hum. But here from first note to last she was on the floor with Rob or me or occasional other partners, and it was becoming more than noticeable that she never pitched in with the other wives when they put midnight supper together. To Adair, eating wasn’t in the same universe with dancing.
“Angus, you look peaked,” Adair remarked at the end of that first schoolhouse dance. “Are you all right?”
“A bit under the weather. It’ll pass.”
• • •
But then the Monday of school, after that dance. A squally day, quick curtains of snow back and forth across the winter sun, the schoolroom alight one minute and dimmed the next. By afternoon the pupils were leaning closer and closer over their books and I knew I needed to light the overhead lanterns. Yet I waited, watching, puzzled with myself but held by the mock dusk that seemed to find the back of the schoolroom and settle there. Davie Erskine in the last desk gradually felt my stare over his head toward that end of the room. He turned, peered, then at me. “Is something there, Mr. McCaskill?”
“Not now there isn’t, Davie.” Of all the tricks of light, that particular one. Slivers of cloud-thinned sunshine, so like the moonsilver when Anna and I lay with each other on the floor there. You’ve got to let the moonbeams in on a dance, Davie. The silvered glim had come and gone in the past half-minute, a moment’s tone that I had seen in this schoolroom any number of times without really noticing, that now I would always notice.
“Davie!” I called out so sharply his head snapped up. “Help me light the lanterns, would you please.”
• • •
That winter, then. Adair and I so new to each other, and the snow-heavy valley of the North Fork so new to her. I at least believed I could take hope from the calendar. Even as the year-ending days slowed with cold and I fully realized that Adair’s glances out into the winter were a prisoner’s automatic eye-escapes toward any window, even then I still could tell myself that with any luck at all she would not have to go through a second Scotch Heaven winter with only cards for company. Any luck at all, this would be our only childless winter. Children, soon and several, we both wanted. Adair seemed to have an indefinite but major number in mind—it came with being a Barclay, I supposed—while I lived always with the haunt of that fact that my parents had needed to have four to have one who survived. It would be heartening to think the world is growing less harsh, but the evidence doesn’t often say so, does it. In any case, the next McCaskill, the first American one, was our invisible visitor from the winters to come.
• • •
It was a morning in mid-March when Rob and I declared spring. Or rather when the sheep did, and he and I, fresh from the lambing shed, came into the kitchen bearing those declarations, a chilled newborn lamb apiece.
“Company for you, Adair,” sang out Rob.
She gave a look of concern at our floppy infants, who in their first hours of life are a majority of legs, long and askew as the drone pipes of a limp bagpipe. “But whatever’s wrong with them?”
“A bit cold, is all,” I told her. “Bring us that apple box, would you please.”
“Poor things.” She went and fetched the box. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Put them in the oven, of course.”
“The oven?”
“A cold lamb’s best friend,” vouched Rob.
“In—this oven? The oven of my cookstove?”
“It’s the only oven there is,” I replied reasonably.
“But—”
“They’ll be fine,” I provided instruction to her as I dropped the oven door and Rob arranged his little geezer in the box next to mine, “all you need do is set the box behind the stove when they come to. In you go, tykes.” With their amplitude of legs out from sight under them, the lamb babes in the open oven now looked like a pair of plucked rabbits close to expiration, their eyes all but shut in surrender and the tips of their tongues protruding feebly. “They’re not as bad off as they look,” I encouraged Adair. “They’ll be up and around before you know it.”
“But, but what if they climb out of the box?”
“In a situation like that, Adair,” Rob postulated, “I’d put them back in. Unless you want designs on your floor.”
“How long are they going to be in here?”
Rob gawked around studiously. “Do you have an almanac? I can never remember whether it’s the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving when we take the lambs out of the kitchen. McAngus, can you?”
“You know better than to listen to him,” I counseled her. “He’ll be up to get these lambs when
they thaw out in an hour or so. Dair, the lambs are our living. We’ve got to save every one we can, and when they’re chilled, as a lot of them are always going to be, this is the only way to do it.”
“How long did you say lambing goes on?”
“Only about six weeks.”
• • •
So May was a double event for Adair, an end to lambs in the oven and the beginning of weather that wasn’t winter. Her spirits rose day by day, taking mine with them. Compared with how we had wintered, Adair and I were next things to larks the afternoon when we were to go to Gros Ventre for provisions.
“You’re ready for town, are you?” I called in through the doorway to her. “Or can you stand to be away from the company of lambs for that long?”
“Adair is more than ready for town,” she informed me.
“If she’s that eager she can practice her driving, can’t she. I’ll go see whether Jupiter and Beastie are agreeable to you handling their reins.”
“Tell them they’d better be if they know what’s good for them.”
The day was raw, despite the new green of the grass and the fact that the spring sun was trying its best. We were a bit late starting because I’d had to take a look at the last bunch of ewes and lambs that had newly been put out to graze. Even so, how fine it felt to have a change from the muck of the lambing shed.
“This must be what they mean by the civilized life,” I said with my arm around Adair as she handled the reins. “A carriage and a driver and the kind of day that makes poets spout. Have you heard this one: My life your lane, my love your cart / Come take my rein, come take my heart?”
“I’ve heard it now, haven’t I. Depend on you and your old verses.” We were almost at the side road up to Breed Butte. “Had we better see if Rob and Judith want anything from town?”
“Rob was in just yesterday, there’ll be no need. Let’s make up the time instead. Poke the team along a little, Dair, what about. Then I’ll take a turn driving after we cross the creek.”
Jupiter and Beastie stepped along friskily as we passed meadow after meadow of half-grown hay beside the North Fork. I never tired of reviewing Scotch Heaven, the knob ahead where I first gazed down into this valley, Breed Butte and the south ridges on either side of us and the plains opening ahead through the benchland gap made by the creek.
“A halfpenny for them,” spoke up Adair eventually. “Or are you too lost in admiration for my driving to have any thoughts.”
“Actually, I’ve been watching that horse.” Considerably distant yet, the stray animal was moving along the fenceline between the Findlater place and Erskines’ lower pasture. It acted skittish. Going and stopping, going again. Shying sideways. Too early in the season for locoweed. Odd.
“Dair, stop the team. I need to see over there.”
With the buckboard halted, I stood up and peered. The distant horse shied once more, and the inside of me rolled over in sick realization. That stray horse had a saddle on.
“Angus, what—” Adair let out as I grabbed the reins and slapped the team into a startled run.
“Something’s happened over there, we’ve got to go see what. Hang on, Dair.” She did, for dear life. We left the road behind and went across the Findlater pasture at a rattling pace.
The wire gate into the Erskine field was closed: it would be. I saw the scene in my mind as Adair held the team and I flung the gate aside. The rider starting to remount after having come through the gate and closed it, his foot just into the stirrup, the horse shying at the sudden flight of a bird or a dried weed blowing, then in alarm at the strange struggling thing hanging down from its stirrup . . .
I swerved our team from the worst rocks and dips in the ground but we could not miss them all and keep any speed, so we jolted, banged, bounced, Adair clinging part to me and part to the wagon seat, closer and closer ahead the antsy saddlehorse and the figure dragging below its flanks.
By the time I got our own horses stopped they were agitated from their run.
“Dair, you’ve got to get down and hold them by their heads. Don’t let go, whatever happens. Talk to them, croon to them, anything, but hold onto those halters. We can’t have a runaway of our own.”
“Good Beastie, good Jupiter, yes, you’re good horses, you’re good old dears . . .” Her words came with me as I slowly approached the restless saddlehorse, my hands cupped as if offering oats. I was halfway when there was a sharp jangle of harness and a clatter behind me; I looked fearfully around to where our team had jerked Adair off her feet for a moment, but she still clung to their heads, still recited “Beastie . . . Jupiter . . . be good horses now,” still bravely holding a ton and a half of animals in her small hands.
“Are you all right there, Dair?” I called with urgent softness, not to startle the saddlehorse off into another dragging of its victim.
“Yes,” she said, and resumed her chant to Jupiter and Beastie.
“Easy now,” my voice added to Adair’s horse chorus as I turned back to the saddlehorse, “easy now, fellow, easy, easy, easy . . .”
The false offer of oats got me to within a few steps before the saddlehorse snorted and nervously began to turn away. I lunged and caught the rein, then had both hands clinging to his bridle.
“Whoa, you son of a bitch, whoa, you demented bastard, whoa . . .”
The worst wasn’t done yet, either. Somehow I had to hold his head rock-firm and at the same time sidle along his side until I could reach the stirrup and the ankle and foot trapped in it. For once I was glad of the long bones of my body as I stretched in opposite directions to try this rescue.
When I managed to free the ankle and foot I had time to look down at the dragged and kicked rider.
The battering he had undergone, it took a long moment to recognize him.
“Dair,” I called. “It’s Davie Erskine. He’s alive, but just. You’ll have to lead the team and wagon over here. Slow and easy, that’s the way.”
Adair caught her breath when she saw how hooves and earth had done their work on Davie. “Angus. Is he going to live?”
“I don’t know that,” I answered, and tried to swallow my coppery taste of fear for poor Davie. He was a bloodied sight it made the eyes pinch together in pain just to look at. “He looks as if he’s hurt every way he can be. The best we can do is get him home to Donald and Jen.”
Now our ride to the Erskine homestead had to be the reversal of the careening dash we had just done; as careful as possible, our coats under Davie in the back of the wagon while Adair held his head steady, the saddle horse docilely tied to the tailgate.
By the time the doctor had been fetched to the Erskine place and delivered his verdict of Davie to white-faced Donald and Jen, his news was only what Adair and I expected. Oh, it is hindsight, there is no way she and I could have known as we conveyed him home in the creeping but still jolting wagon, that the places of shatter in Davie could never entirely true themselves, that he would lead the limping half-atilt life he had to afterward. But I still feel we both somehow did know.
• • •
Two days after that, Adair had the miscarriage.
• • •
“Angus, you dasn’t blame yourself.”
Seeing me silent and long-faced, Adair herself brought the matter into words. “We had to help Davie. That’s just the way it happened. You heard the doctor say it’s not even certain the wagon ride caused it. Maybe so, maybe no. Isn’t that the way everything is?”
I had heard. And as best I could divine, Adair entirely meant it when she said there was no blame on me. As well blame the rocks for jarring the wagon wheels, or the wheels for finding the rocks. No, I knew where Adair put the blame. On Scotch Heaven itself, on Montana, on a land so big that people were always stretching dangerously to meet its distances and season-long moods. Not that she came out and said so. Another case of dasn’t; she did not dare lay open blame on our homestead life, for she and I had no other footing of existence together.
You would have to say, then, Adair took the loss of our child-to-be as well as a person can take a thing such as that. Not so, me. To me, a double death was in that loss. The child itself, the packet of life, we had withheld from us; and the miscarriage also had cost us a possible Adair, Adair as she could be, Adair with the son or daughter she needed to turn her mind from the homestead, the isolation. I had lost my own best self when Anna spurned our life together. How many possibles are in us? And of those, how many can we ever afford to lose?
“Angus.” Adair by me now, touching me, her voice bravely bright. As if the ill person had climbed from bed to dance and cheer up the mourning visitor, she was doing her best to bolster me. “We’ll have other children,” she assured me. “You’re definitely a man for trying.”
That December, Adair miscarried again. This time, four months into her term.
I see that second winter of our marriage as a single long night. A night in the shape of the four walls of a bedroom. The man Angus with thoughts hammering at him from the dark. How has it turned out this way? I saw where my life ought to go, to Anna. Why then this other existence, if that is what it is, of Adair and me not able to attain the single thing we both want? The woman Adair this time the one staying grievous, silent as the frost on the window and as unknowable. A pair patternless as the night, us.
I turn onto my side, to contemplate again the sleeping stranger who is my wife. And am startled to meet her awake, her head turned toward me.
“Angus. Angus, what—what if we can’t have any children.”
Silence of darkness, our silence added into it. Until she says further: “If I can’t have any children.”
“You don’t seem anything like a stone field to me.” I move my hand to her. “Or feel like one either.”
“I need to know, Angus. Do you still want me for a wife, if?”
How to answer that, in the face of if?
“Dair, remember what the doctor keeps saying. ‘There’s not that much wrong; as young and strong as you are, there’s every chance . . .’ ”
