Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “Man, think of all the husky sons-in-law ahead,” I assuaged him. “Pretty soon you’ll have them wholesale.” His and Judith’s oldest girl, Ellen, already was out in the world of swains, working at the millinery shop in Choteau.

  “They aren’t the real item, though, are they,” Rob mused in a lamenting way that wrote off any future husbands of Barclay daughters. I was opening my mouth to point out that he and I were real enough in-laws, of the brother-in-law sort, when he went on: “Whether or not you know it, there’s no substitute for having a Varick.”

  “I at least know that much,” I affirmed to him lightly. Rob could brood if he wanted to, but on a day such as this my mood was top-notch. I stood there at the gate a moment with Rob beside me, just to enjoy all around. I didn’t come all the miles from one River Street to live down there on another. This day supported those lofty homestead-building words of Rob’s. The first fresh fall of snow shining in the mountains had sopped the forest fires, the air was cleansed and crisp with autumn now, and the view from Breed Butte was never better nor would be. My own outlook was just as fresh as the moment. Varick’s restored eye, another year in my schoolroom about to begin, the Valier minutes spent with Anna so significant in my mind—I felt as life had shed a scruffy skin and was growing a clean new one.

  Absorbed, I was about to swing up onto Scorpion when Rob stopped me with:

  “Angus, I think it’s time you had a talking to.”

  I turned to him with the start of a grin, expecting he had some usual scold to make about my taking the school again.

  “About Anna Reese,” he said, destroying my grin.

  “Rob. She’s not a topic for general discussion.”

  “But she’s one that’s generally on your mind, isn’t she. Angus, this is no way to be.”

  “Is that a fact?” It was and it wasn’t. By choice I would not be the way I was toward Anna, carrying this love through the years. But choice was not in this. “Rob, who the hell do you think you are, my recording angel?”

  Rob had the honesty to look uncomfortable. “I know you maybe think I’m poking my nose in—”

  “You’re right about that, anyway.”

  “—but Angus, listen, man. Adair is my sister. I can’t just stand by and see you do this to her.”

  “You’re going to have to.” My eyes straight into Rob’s eyes six feet away, suddenly a gap the size of life. “Dair and I are managing to live with it, it shouldn’t be a major problem for you.”

  “Living with it, are you? That’s what you call this, this infatuation you won’t let go of?”

  I wanted to shout in his face that there had been a time when he was the expert on infatuation, right enough. That if Lucas had not outwitted him and sent Nancy out of reach and us here to the North Fork, Robert High-and-Mighty Barclay would have taken his own uncle’s woman. What had been a quick infection in him had escaped every cure I could try on myself but it was the same ill. Why couldn’t he of all people see so, why—

  Rob was resuming, “I kick myself—”

  “You needn’t,” I tossed in on him, “I’ll be glad to help you at it.”

  “—Angus, serious now. I kick myself that I didn’t see this earlier, why you and Adair aren’t more glad with each other. It wasn’t until I saw you with Anna there in Valier that I put two and two together.”

  “Rob, you have a major tendency, when you put two and two together, to come out with twenty-two.”

  Rob surged on: “I’ve known you forever but I can’t understand this Anna side of you. How is it that you’re still smitten with her?” Smitten? I was totally harpooned, and this man was not willing to make himself understand that. Rob stood planted, earnest, waiting. “All I’m asking is how you can let a thing like this go on and on.” He meant for this conversation to work as a poultice, I knew. But it wasn’t going to.

  I had to be sure: “Do you hear any complaints out of Adair about me?”

  “She’s not the kind to. But—”

  “Let me understand this, Rob. You’re telling me I owe you more about this than my own wife is content with?”

  “Adair is not content with this, how can she be? You moping like a kicked pup, another man’s wife always on your mind. What woman can accept that?”

  What Barclay? was his real question, wasn’t it. Now that I saw where this storm had come from I was sad as well as angry. The old great gulf, life as it came to the McCaskills and as the Barclays expected it to come to them.

  But Rob, you. You who indeed had known me forever. You, now, who would not listen and then say, yes, I see, you have a friend in me for always, if I can help I will and if not I’ll stand clear. You who instead stood here in-lawing me relentlessly. I got rid of sad in a hurry and stayed with angry.

  “Rob, I’m telling you. This isn’t yours to do. You can’t interfere into my life and Adair’s this way. So don’t even start to try.”

  “Interfere? Angus, you’re not taking this in the spirit it’s meant. All I want is for you and Adair not to come apart over—over Anna. Can you at least promise me that?”

  “Promise—? Where in all hell do you think you get a right like that—that I have to promise you anything about my own marriage? Listen to yourself here a minute. This is idiots out at play, the pair of us yammering on and on at this, is what this is.”

  I swung up onto Scorpion and looked down at Rob. “If it’ll close you on this topic, I’ll tell you this much: Adair and I are not coming apart over Anna Reese. All right?”

  Rob as he studied up at me was a mixture of suppressed ire and obvious discomfiture. I at least thought the decent side, discomfiture, won out when he spoke:

  “All right, Angus. We’ll leave this at what you just said.”

  I let my breath out slowly over the next several days. But it seemed to have passed, that notion of Rob’s that he had a say in how Adair and I were to manage our marriage. Rob being all he was to me, I was able to forgive him the incident, although not forget it.

  • • •

  One last waft of that summer of smoke did not pass. Instead, it began to spread in the benchland country to the south of Scotch Heaven and Gros Ventre; the wind-blown and slope-skewed landscape where Herbert’s freight wagon tilted its way through, twenty years earlier, while a pair of greenlings named Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay trudged behind. The dry and empty bottom edge of the Two country, which now, who would have ever thought it, was drawing in people exactly because it was dry and empty.

  They were a few families at first, and then several, and then more. Homesteaders who were alighting on dry-land claims instead of the irrigated acres of Valier and the other water projects. It took Stanley Meixell to dub them so sadly right. After riding past one or another of their shanties optimistically sited up a wind-funneling coulee or atop a shelterless bench of thin soil and plentiful rock, Stanley bestowed: “Homestead, huh? Kind of looks to me like more stead than home.” And that is what they became in Scotch Heaven’s askance parlance of them. The ‘steaders.

  Settlers who were coming too late or too poor to obtain watered land and so were taking up arid acres and trusting to rainfall instead.

  Men and women and children who had heard of Montana’s bonanza of space and were giving up their other lives to make themselves into farmers instead.

  Investors of the next years of their hopes into a landscape that was likely to give them back indifference instead.

  Watching the ‘steaders come, the first few in 1910 and more in the next summer and the summer after that, I couldn’t not ask, if only to myself: Was this what that dry land was meant for—plowed rows like columns on a calendar, a house and chicken coop every quarter of a mile? In homesteading terms, it indubitably was. But when can land say, enough? Or no, not here? We of Scotch Heaven believed we were doing it as right as could be—you can’t live anywhere without some such belief, can you—but then we had the North Fork, water bright and clear on the land. At Valier and the other irrigation proje
cts, those settlers too had water, ditch water. But these ones out on the thirsty benchlands . . . I grant that Rob and I knew next to nothing about homesteading when we came to undertake it. But we were royal wizards compared to many of these freshcomers. Here were people straight from jobs in post offices and ribbon stores, arriving with hope and too little else onto the benchlands and into the June-green coulees. Entire families down to the baby at the breast, four-five-six people living in a shanty the size of a woodshed or in a tent while they tried to build a shanty. And meanwhile were struggling too to break the sod and plant a crop, dig a well, achieve a garden. I suppose these ‘steaders had to be as Rob and I were when we began in Scotch Heaven, not daring to notice yet that they were laboring colossal days and weeks for a wage of nothing or less. I suppose there is no other way to be a homesteader. Yet, bargaining yourself against the work and the weather is always going to turn out to be greatly more difficult than you can ever expect. Even in Scotch Heaven we had the absences around us, the Speddersons and Tom Mortensen, to remind how harsh and unsure a bet homesteading was. Yet and again, agog as I might be at the numbers of these incomers and aghast as I often was at how little they knew of what they needed to, I could not deny that the ‘steaders on their raw dry quarter-section squares were only attempting the same as we had, trying to plaid new lives into this proffered land.

  This was bright June. Winter waited four or five months away yet. Nonetheless I began saying a daily prayer to it: be gentle with these pilgrims.

  • • •

  Not many days later, Rob and Lucas waylaid me when I was in my lower meadow making a peaceful reconnaissance of the hay prospect there. Angling a look into the Ford as it halted briskly beside me, I couldn’t help but put the query:

  “What’s this, now—a war council of Clan Barclay?”

  Out they climbed, here they were. “Mark this day, McAngus,” Rob proclaimed, Lucas equally sunny beside him. “We’re here with the proposition of a lifetime for you.”

  “Wait. Before I hear it”—patting each appropriate neighborhood of my body I recited: “Testicles, spectacles, wallet, watch. There’s proof I had all my items before the two of you start in on me, just remember.”

  “Angus, Angus,” chided Lucas. “You’re as suspicious as one deacon is of the other. Just hear what we’ve got in mind, ay?”

  “That shouldn’t take all day. Bring it out.”

  “There’s hope for you yet, Angus,” Rob averred with a great smile. “Now here’s the word that’s as good as money in the bank: ‘steaders.” He cocked his head in that lordly way and waited a moment for my appreciation before proceeding. “You know as well as we do that they’re starting to come into this end of the Two country by the hatful and they can barely recognize ground when they’re standing on it.”

  “And?”

  Rob’s smile greatened more yet. “And we can be their land locators.”

  Lucas broke in: “Angus, it’s something I ought to’ve listened to when I first came, when I was mining.” Into his coat pockets went his stubs, as if he was whole again there at the start of Montana life. “Someone asked old Cariston there in Helena, the same geezer you worked for in his mercantile, Angus, what he did for a living. Do you know what he said? ‘I mine the miners, there’s where the real money is.’ And it’s pure true. Every word of it and then some. In a new country the one thing people need is supplies. And what’s the supply every homesteader needs first of any? Land, Angus. You and Robbie know all this land around here by the inch. You’re just the lads to supply homestead sites.”

  I studied from Lucas to Rob, back to Lucas again. Usually Lucas was as measuring as a draper, but Rob plainly had him entirely talked into the gospel of land locating. Rob alone I would have given both barrels of argument at once, but for Lucas’s sake I went gentler. “Just how does this rich-making scheme work?”

  “Simple as a dimple,” Rob attested. “I’ll meet people right at the depots, in Valier and Conrad and Browning—you know they’re pouring in by the absolute trainload.” They were that. Just recently an entire colony of Belgians came to the Valier land; men, women, children, grandparents, babes, likely cats and canaries, too! The Great Northern simply was throwing open the doors of freight cars in St. Paul, and Montana-bound families were tossing in their belongings and themselves. “I’ll ferry them out to here in the Lizzie,” Rob strategized, “and here’s where you come in, Angus. You’re the man with the eye for the land. You’ll locate the ‘steaders onto the claims, mark the claim for them, tell them how to file on it, all but give them their homestead on a china plate. Lucas just said it, really. What we’ll be is land suppliers, pure and simple.”

  The arguing point to all this couldn’t be ignored any longer. “If we had the goods, I could see your supply idea,” I told Rob. Then with a nod toward the south benchlands: “But what land is left around here is thin stuff for homesteading.” I paused and gave him a look along with this next: “Concentrate a bit and you’ll maybe remember what we thought of it ourselves, when you and I walked into this country behind Herbert.”

  “By our lights, maybe it isn’t the best land there ever was,” Rob granted. “But to these ‘steaders it’s better than whatever to hell they’ve had in life so far, now isn’t it? Man, people are going to come, that’s the plain fact of the matter. Whether or not we lead them by the hand, they’re going to file homestead claims all through this country. They might as well be steered as right as possible, by knowledgeable local folk. Which is the same as saying us. In that way of looking at it, McAngus, we’ll be doing them a major favor, am I right?”

  “And charging them a whack for it,” I couldn’t help saying of Rob’s version of favor.

  “Are you so prosperous you can do it for free?” came back at me from him. “Funny I don’t notice the bulges in your pockets.”

  “Lads, now,” Lucas interceded. “Angus, we’re not asking for your answer this very minute. Just put the idea on your pillow for a few nights, ay?”

  Had they been asking my answer right then, it would have been No, in high letters. But. The prosperous problem. The perpetual problem with homesteads, with livestock, or maybe just with McCaskills. Working yourself gray, year after year, and always seeing the debt years eat up most of the profit years. To now, Adair had never said boo about the fact that where money was concerned we were always getting by, hardly ever getting ahead. So the dollar thoughts were delaying my No a bit, and I decided to leave matters with the Barclays at: “I’ll need to do a lot of that pillow work, and to talk it over with Dair.”

  “You can save your breath there,” Rob tossed off. “She’s thoroughly for it.”

  I gave Rob a look he would have felt a mile away. “You know that already? From her?”

  “I happened to mention it to Adair, yes. Angus, she is my sister. I do talk to her once in a blue moon. Not that I’d particularly have to in this case. She’s bound to be for anything that’ll fetch money the way this will. Who wouldn’t be?”

  • • •

  “Angus, I know how you feel about this country and the ‘steaders,” Adair said that night. By then we had been thoroughly through it all. Adair’s point that here was a plateful of opportunity on Varick’s behalf, as easy a chance as we would ever have at money for his future, his own start in life and land in the years not far ahead now. My lack of any way to refute that, yet my unease about the notion of making myself into a land locator. “But change always has to happen,” she was saying, “doesn’t it?”

  “The big question is whether it happens for the better or the worse.”

  “Either case, what can you really do about it?” she responded. “You and Rob came here as settlers. So are all these others.”

  “If they were bringing their own water and trees and decent topsoil, I’d say let everybody and his brother come. But good Christ, this dry-land craziness—Dair, they say there are ‘steaders on the flats out north of Conrad now who haul all their water a couple of
miles, a barrel at a time on a stone boat. They strain that cloudy water through a gunny sack as they bucket it into the barrel. My God, what a way to try to live. And these have been wet summers and open winters. What are those people going to do when this country decides to show them some real weather?”

  “I suppose some will make it and some won’t,” she answered in all calmness. “It’s their own decision to come here and try. It’s not ours for them.” The deep gray eyes were steady on me, asking me to reason as she was.

  I could do that. What I wasn’t able to manage was the waiting conclusion: that I ought to join in, bells, tambourines and all, with Rob and Lucas in putting people onto land that ought not to have to bear any people.

  “There’s something more, Angus,” my wife offered now. “It’s not just Varick we need to plan for. It’s each other as well.”

  Her silence, my waiting. Then from her:

  “Adair doesn’t know if she can stay, after Varick is grown and gone.”

  So here it was, out. Adair and how long she would reconcile herself to Scotch Heaven, once it became a childless place to her again, had been in my mind with Anna at Valier and so I could not call this an entire surprise. Stunning, yes, now that it was here, openly said. But all the years since Angus, do you ever have any feeling at all to see Scotland again?, since Do you still want me for a wife, if?, all those years led here, if you were Adair.

  I reached her to me, but there was too much in me to speak straight to what she had just said. Adair herself, myself, Anna, past, future, now. It all crowded in me beyond any saying of it. No, only the one decision, the one I had to do at once rather than let the next years take care of, came to my tongue. If there were three McCaskill lives ahead that needed finance—mine of Scotch Heaven, Varick’s of the Two Medicine country, Adair’s of Scotland or wherever—then I had to find money.

  “All right, Dair,” I whispered. “We’re in business with a couple of Barclays.”

  • • •

  Squint as hard as you will, you can’t see to tomorrow. Had I been told in the wheelwright shop in Nethermuir, Angus, the day will arrive when you trace the hopes of homesteaders onto the American earth with a wagon wheel . . . when the turns of that wheel become the clock that starts dew-fresh families on years of striving . . . when the wheel tracks across the grass single out another square of earth for the ripping plow . . . I would have looked around from my own dreams and said skeptically, You have the wrong Angus. Yet there I was, that summer and the next, on the wagon seat with a white handkerchief tied around a wheelspoke to count revolutions by, counting the ordinations of wheelspin. Fifty. Seeing the craft of my unhearing father, the band of iron encircling the spokes, holding all together to write the future of ‘steaders onto prairie acres. That’s a hundred. Conveying, in a single day, lives from what they had abandoned to where they had dreamed of being. A hundred fifty. Here is your first corner of your claim, Mr. and Mrs. Belgium. Mr. Missouri bachelor. Miss Dakota nurse. Mrs. Wisconsin widow. Then to the next corner, and the next, and the next, and the square was drawn, here was your homestead utter and complete: SE1/4 Sec. 17, Tp. 27 N, Rge. 8 W: the land has been made into arithmetic. A sort of weaving, wasn’t it, these numerated homestead squares, the lives threaded in and out. But these bare dry-land patches amid the mesh of home-steading . . . It was said there were twice as many people in Montana now as five years ago. The growth, the ‘steader-specked prairies and benchlands and coulees, the instant towns, they were what Lucas dreamed of and Rob calculated on, and I was earning from. If I could dance ahead into time yet to come, what would I see in this procession of ‘steaders that ought not have been let to happen, and what ought to have been encouraged instead? But we never do dance ahead into time; every minute is a tune-step of ours to the past. Say it better, the future is our blindfold dance, and a dance unseen is strangest dance of all, thousands of guesses at once. That was what my ‘steaders amounted to, after all. Say that each of these people beside me on the wagon seat was a flip of the coin. Half would turn up wrong. And so for two summers I watched the ‘steaders, Rob and Lucas’s ‘steaders, my ‘steaders, and wondered just which of them were wrong tosses, which would meet only distress and failure and maybe worse here on this dry land which was free but not costless, not nearly.