by Ivan Doig
“Every chance. But none has come yet, has it.” She didn’t add but it is there anyway: will it ever?
Suddenly I was angry with life. Not in the spit-against-the-wind way of exasperation, but vexed all the way up from my core, from whatever heartpit of existence I have. For life to be against this marriage of ours was one matter. Adair and I could answer for that, we were answering for it. But why begrudge us our child, life? A child would be the next link of time, the human knot woven from all McCaskills and Barclays there ever have been, the new splice of Scotland and America and Montana and what was and what needs to be. But here where our child ought to fit—by your own goddamn logic of us, life—the only strands of time in sight to us were the old harsh ones of winter and night. Well, you haven’t done us in yet, I vowed silently to the winter thorns of frost on the window and the faceless night, we will stave you off a while yet. Adair did her utmost to bolster me after the wagon ride cost us our first child. My turn now.
“Dair, listen to me.” I touch to her, stroking the gentle horizon of her body. “Dair,” I say with the kind of declaration that can be said only in bed, “we’ll get you a baby.”
We . . . I rise over her and kiss her lips . . . will . . . next kiss for the point of her chin . . . get . . . now down to her throat for the next kiss and the tender unbuttoning . . . you . . . this kiss on her breastbone . . . α . . . kissing back and forth on her breasts now . . . baby . . . as she lifts to me with her quickening breath.
• • •
It was one of those May mornings which could have just as well saved itself the trouble of posing as spring and simply admitted it was leftover February. A wash day, too, and Adair was hard at it when I pecked her cheek and went out into the day. In the gray chilliness of the barn I had untied my sheepskin coat from behind Scorpion’s saddle and gratefully put it on, and was ready to swing onto the horse when I heard Adair, calling from the house: “Angus! Come look!”
I wrapped Scorpion’s reins and hurried out of the barn. Snow had begun to fall, a fat and feathery May squall, so that I saw Adair as if through cloud tufts. I strode across the yard calling to her, “What’s happened?”
“Just look around you! It’s snowing!”
I peered at her, then had to laugh. “Either that or it’s awful early for dandelions to fly.”
Laugh was the least thing this wife of mine was in a mood to hear. She was the closest I had ever seen her to despair when she fastened her gaze on me and demanded: “But how can it snow? This is May! Almost summer!”
“Dair, in this country it snows any time it takes a sweet notion to.”
She scrutinized me as if I’d told her the sun was due to go cold. Then she was reminded of her basket of wet laundry. “My poor wash, though. What’ll I do about—”
“Hang it as usual. If nothing else it’ll freeze dry.”
“Angus, you really don’t care that it’s snowing in May?”
If I couldn’t say truth about the weather, then what could I. “Worse than that, Dair. I’m glad to see it.”
“Glad?” As if I’d said treason. “But what will this do to the grass? And the lambs?”
“I was on my way to shed up the ewes and newest lambs. They’ll be fine, under roof. And a spring snow is just exactly what the grass wants. After an open winter such as we had, the country needs the moisture.”
Adair blinked steadily against the snowflakes as we stood looking at each other. “A strange way to get it,” she told the country and me.
• • •
The next did not surprise me. I had only wondered when it would come.
Two days after the snow, when slush and mud were everywhere and spring was reluctantly starting over, Adair asked:
“Angus, do you ever have any feeling at all to see Scotland again?”
“No, Dair. It never occurs to me.” We might as well have the next into the open. “But it does to you, doesn’t it.”
“I don’t mean going back for good. But for a visit.”
“If it’s what you want, we can get the money ahead some way for you to go.”
“But you won’t come?”
“No.”
“Is it the ocean? Adair doesn’t really like the old Atlantic, either.”
“No, it’s not the ocean, at least not just. Dair, everything I have is here now. Scotland is an old calendar to me.” To hear that from me who once stood pining up the Clyde to yesterday. Angus, are we both for it? And to have the sister of Rob the America prophet turning back like a compass needle toward Nethermuir and all its defeats. Straight paths simply are not in people.
Adair at least deserved to have the terms between us made clear, here. “If you feel you want to, you can go—for however long you like.”
She did the next clarifying. “Do you want me to, Angus?”
“No.” The full answer was greatly more complicated than that, but that was the uppermost edge of how I felt. I wanted not to be alone in life, and whatever else marriage with Adair wasn’t, it was not utter aloneness. My way of saying so came out now as: “What would I do without you?”
She answered as simply as those gray eyes gave their knowledge of me: “You would still have a life to look ahead to.”
Time to be honest, said the thief in the noose. Since the moment of my wedding vow to this inexplicable woman, I had spent four-thirds of my time imagining how I might ever be found out, and here when it happened, it was nothing at all like the rehearsed versions. Time and again in those, out of somewhere it would come, Adair’s question Angus, after all this while, haven’t you been able to forget Anna? There we would be at last. On the terrible ground of truth that I had hoped we could avoid. Adair would be staring at me in appeal. Convince me otherwise, her look would be saying. And I would ready myself to begin at it. Dair, you are imagining. There is nothing between Anna and me any more, there has not been for—for years. You are my wife, you are the one woman I hold love for. The disclaiming would marshal all of itself that way in my head, ready to troop along my tongue. And instead I would look at Adair and in eight words give up all I had. Dair, you’re too right. I still love Anna.
But now it had happened, and not that way at all. Whether Adair saw it in the manner I tried not to watch Anna at the dances, or whether it simply stuck out all over me as I tried to be a husband, she knew my love for Anna was not changing. More than that. In her distance-from-all-this way of doing so, Adair had just told me she knew that Anna maybe was possible for me yet, in time. And more than that again. By invoking Scotland, Adair was saying that our marriage need not be a lasting barrier keeping me from Anna.
Straight paths are not in people: amidst all my relief that Adair knew, and granted, my helplessness about Anna, I was sad that the knowing had to cost her. She was carefully not showing so, she was staying at that slight mocking distance from herself as she calmly answered my gaze with her gray one. But cost surely was there, in her and in our marriage from here on.
Our marriage, if that was what it was going to continue to be. Wedding vows are one thing; the terms of existing together are another language altogether. “Dair, where are we coming out at here? Are you going back to Scotland?”
My wife shook her head, not meaning no, she wouldn’t like to go, just that she wasn’t deciding now. “I’ll see.” We both would.
• • •
“Adair seems a bit drifty lately,” Rob remarked when he rode by the next day.
“Does she,” I acknowledged without really answering.
His head went to one side as he studied me. “Angus, you know I only ask this because Adair is my sister and you’re all but my brother. Is life all right between you two, these days?”
“Right as ever,” I provided him, and managed to put a plain face over my quick moment of irk before I added: “But you didn’t come all the way to take the temperature of Adair and me, I know.”
“You’re right, you’re right, there’s other news. I’ve been up looking at the grass�
�—he gave a head toss toward Roman Reef, where we grazed our sheep each summer—“and there’s no reason we can’t trail the sheep in a week or so.” A good early start toward fat lambs in the fall, and I nodded in satisfaction with his news. Or rather, with that much of it. “We’ve got a new neighbor up there,” Rob went on. “The Double W.”
My turn to cock a look at him. “With how many cows?”
“No more than a couple of hundred head, is all I met up with. I gave them a dose of dog and pushed them north off where we’ve been pasturing. But that damn Williamson,” Rob said in what almost might have been admiration. “The man has already got cattle on every spear of grass he owns on Noon Creek, he ‘borrows’ on the reservation, and now he’s putting them up in the mountains. Old Wampus Cat must have invented the saying, ‘all I want is all I can get,’ ay?”
“We’d better hope he doesn’t make a major habit of putting cattle up there.”
Rob shook his head. “They’re big mountains. No, Angus, I don’t like having Double W cows within mouth distance of our summer grass any better than you do. But Williamson will have to put enough cows up there to tip over the world, before he makes any real difference to us. That’s what brought us here, wasn’t it—elbow room when we need it?”
True enough, Rob. But as you gave me a lifted hand of goodbye and rode away that day, Montana even then did not seem to me the expanse it had been.
• • •
At first I thought it was bad pork. Just an evening or two after our inconclusive circle of Scotland, Adair took her opening bite of supper and then swiftly fled outside, where I could hear her retching as if her toenails were trying to come up.
I pushed my plate back. Even our meals could not go right. When a marriage begins to come apart, the stain spreads into wherever it can find. The thunder between my father and mother within the stone walls of River Street. The worse silences between whatever Adair sought of life and the unattainable, the Anna shadow, that I wanted. Those mindblind days before Adair and I said the vow there on Breed Butte, why had I ever, why had she ever—
The screen door slapped again. Adair leaned against the doorway, one hand cupped onto her stomach. She still appeared a bit weatherish, but strangely bright-eyed, too. Fever next?
“Dair, are you all right?”
Her heart of a face had on the damnedest expression, a smiletry that wasn’t anything like a Barclay smile; a nominated look that seemed a little afraid to come out. Adair gazed at me with it for a considerable moment. Then she moved her cupped hand in a small arc out and down over the front of her stomach, as if smoothing a velvet bulge there.
I can only hope my face didn’t show the arithmetic racing through me before I stood and went to my wife-with-child. May-June-July-August-September-October-November?-December? That calendar of pregnancy could not have been worse. If we lost this child as we had the other two, it would be with Scotch Heaven winter staring Adair in the face again.
• • •
“McAngus, the third time is the charm,” Rob proffered with a hearty smile but worried eyes.
“Something grand to look forward to, Angus, pure grand,” from Lucas, his eyes not matching his words either.
• • •
We count by years, but we live by days. Rightfully, we should do both by seasons. Even now, looking back, it makes greater sense to me to recall how that springtime, when the baby was yet invisible in her, nurtured Adair’s hope along cautiously, as a sun-welcoming tree unobtrusively adds a ring of growth within itself. That summer, when the creekside meadows became mounded with haystacks, Adair began to round out prominently. Then as autumn came and remorselessly wore on toward worse weather, a gray strain began to show on Adair as well. But so far so good, we said to each other in our every glance. Each season in the procession had handed her along without jolt, without fatal jostle to the life she was carrying.
Drawing ever nearer to the birthtime, I cosseted her every way I could think of. The oldest Findlater daughter, Jenny, for months now had been on hand as hired girl to do our washing and other work of the house. Adair was the first to declare of herself, “Adair has the life of a maharanee these days.” I knew it was put somewhat differently by others in Scotch Heaven. “Adair is still feeling delicate, is she?” I was queried by Flora Duff, who marched babies out of herself as if they were cadets. Elbows of the neighbors I didn’t care about; Adair and her inching struggle to bring us a child were all that counted. She had become a kind of season herself, a time between other times. I noticed that once in a while now she would lay a game of solitaire, but only seldom. Almost all of her existence now was waiting. Waiting.
One single day of that time stands out to be told. The day of Isaac.
It came courtesy of Ninian Duff. “I am here to borrow a favor,” he announced straight off. “We have a wagon of coal coming for the school.” Ninian stopped to glance sternly at the sky. This was late October now; first snowfall could come any hour. “But Reese’s man can only deliver Sunday or never. Ay, he’s busy as the wind these days. Everyone in Gros Ventre has caught the notion they can’t live without coal now. A Sunday, though. You see my dilemma, Angus.”
I did. Any hard breathing on Sunday that wasn’t asthma was frowned upon by the Duffs and Erskines.
“Angus, I will trade you whatever help you need around your place when Adair’s time comes, if you’ll handle this.”
I agreed to be the welcomer of Sabbath coal, and on the day, the big wagon and its team of horses were no sooner in sight on the road from Gros Ventre than I knew. Isaac Reese himself was the teamster today.
“Annguz,” he greeted when he had halted the wagon. “You vish for coal?”
“Isaac,” I reciprocated, my throat tight. “I’ll see if your shovel fits me.”
Not much more was said as we began unloading the coal. I suppose we were saying without words, letting our muscles talk. Coal flew from our two shovels. I wondered if he had any least idea of my love for his wife. Of those words of hers to me, If I ever see that Isaac and I are not right for each other, I’ll know where to turn for better. Those were words with only the eventual in them, though. The ones with the actual in them had been the ones that counted: You know how we were, Angus, that last night there in your schoolroom. Isaac and I have been that way together all this summer. I sent a glimpse at him as we labored. Since when did Denmark manufacture Casanovas? Isaac Skorp Yun Reese. Scarecrow of sinew and mustache and unreadable face. If you had tried to tell me the day I bought Scorpion from him how this man was going to figure in my life, I would have laughed you over the hill. Yet, maybe Isaac in turn was living in silken ignorance of me and what I might someday—in the eventual—do to his life with Anna. Wasn’t that more than possible? With an ordinary human, yes, but with a horse dealer . . . I would have given a strip of skin an inch wide to know what Anna’s mate in life knew. In that mustached face, though, there was no sign I ever would. Through everything, I had never managed to hate Isaac Reese. Not for lack of trying; with him as a target my despair about Anna would have had a place to aim. But Isaac was not a man who could be despised. Calm, solid, entirely himself in the way a mountain is itself; that, and nothing else, so far as could be seen. I had might as well despise the coal we were shoveling. No, all I ever felt when I was around Isaac was a kind of abrupt illness. An ache that I was myself instead of him.
Exertion greatly warmed the chilly day, and as soon as Isaac stopped to peel off his coat, I did, too. As we stood and blew, he asked, “How are your missus?”
I told him Adair was fine, hoping as ever that our history of misfortune wasn’t making a liar of me at that precise moment. Then I was privileged to ask: “And your better half. How is she, these days?”
Isaac Reese gave me a probable smile under that mustache, nodded skyward and gabbled out: “Ve got a stork on de ving.”
I held my face together not to laugh, and cast a glance into the air around for the hawk or heron that Isaac was trying to
name. Then his meaning came.
“So, congratulations,” I got our, trying not to swallow too obviously. Anna now with child, now of all times? Now as I watched Adair grow with our own creation, Anna with this man’s—“When does the baby arrive?”
“Sometime of spring.” He gave me a twinkling look, unquestionably grinning under his handlebars now. “Foalz, calfs, lamps,” he recited, as if the busyness of the animal kingdom then was contagious. I stooped to more shoveling, more pondering. But Isaac’s hand came down onto the haft of my shovel. When I peered up at him I found he had something more he wanted to say. It came out: “Ve vill be feathers of our country, Annguz.”
I had to hope Isaac was right even if his corkscrew tongue wasn’t. I had to hope he and I indeed would be fathers of children whose dangerous voyages into life somehow would do no harm to the women we were each wed to.
• • •
On the eleventh of November, 1899, Adair’s baby came—weeks early but alive, whole, healthy, squalling for all he was worth.
“It’s a wonder a son of yours didn’t come out spouting verse,” Flora Duff tendered to me when she had done the midwifing.
In our bed with the tiny red storm of noise bundled beside her, Adair was wan except in her eyes. I leaned over her and said low and fervent, “He’s the finest there ever was. And so is his mother.” She smiled up while I smiled down. Our son found higher pitch. We didn’t care. He could yell for a year, if that was the fanfare it took to bring us a child. Softly Adair asked, “Whatever time of day is it?”
“Early. Flora is fixing breakfast and right after I’ll need to feed the sheep. And you’re going to have a feeding of your own to do, with a prettier implement than a pitchfork.”
When I went out into that day and its start-of-winter chores I felt as exultant as any being ever has, I felt that this was the morning the world was all possibilities. Adair and I and in the frosty November daybreak this miracle of a baby, our son of the sun.
To balance this boy of ours, Adair and I gave him a name from each side of the family. Varick because it was her father’s, and then the traditional McCaskill Alexander for a middle, in spite of it being my father’s.
