Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  Mercy I sought, mercy came not. Where had this squall dropped on us from, besides out of the vasty blue? Abruptly my mind saw again the face of the girl Lisabeth, up out of the bedroll beneath the wagon, gazing levelly toward her mother, turning that gaze toward me. No accusation in her look, only judgment: choosing among the three verdicts, innocent or guilty or not proven. But even if she accounted me guilty, why would she have sought out Varick with poison such as this? Your father and my mother . . . A person with any of Anna in her, destructive and vindictive to this degree? In that young Anna-like face beneath the wagon, I just could not see—

  Accusation still stood here staring at me, waiting, wearing its painful mask of Varick. Pushing the echo of that question at me: Is that true?

  “Son,” a confused sound I added to the thudding of my heart, “I did see Anna, yes, but not—”

  Varick’s next was on its way: “Is that why you put sheep on the reservation? So you’d have a way to sneak off to her?”

  “For Christ’s sake, no!”

  “Unk says it was.”

  Disbelief filled me now.

  And in a sick terrible surge after it, belief.

  The voice I knew as well as any but my own, following me across the Two Medicine prairie. I’ll give you more than guff if you don’t get her out of yourself. But Rob, why this? Why drag Varick into the middle between Anna and my helpless love for her? Why in all hell did you ever resort to this, Rob?

  I struggled to concentrate through my fury at Rob and my anguish toward Varick, fight one welter of confusion at a time.

  “Varick. You’ve heard the worst possible version. Nothing anywhere near wrong happened between Anna and me at the Two Medicine.”

  “Then what were the two of you doing out there alone that morning?”

  “I asked her to watch the dawn with me.”

  Varick’s look said this confounded him more than ever. He swallowed and asked shakily, “What, are you in love with her?”

  Truth, were you going to be enough in this situation? Maybe so, maybe no.

  “Yes.” An answer that needed to go back seventeen years had to start somewhere. “This is hard to find the words for. But yes, I’ve always been in love with her, in spite of myself. Varick, this goes back farther in my life than you. Farther than your mother, even. She’s known how I feel toward—”

  “She knows? Mother knows?”

  “Ask her. If you’re intent on the history of this, you’d better get all sides of it.” Not just that meddling bastard Rob Barclay’s version. I tried again to swallow Rob away and say what was needed to make Varick understand. “Son, your mother and I—”

  “I don’t savvy any of this!” he blurted.

  “Listen to me half a minute, will you. What—”

  “You and Mother aren’t—” the words broke out of him. “You don’t—”

  “If you’re trying to say your mother and I don’t love each other, all I can tell you is we come close enough. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Wouldn’t be here challenging the years we had spent trying to have you, and then to raise you, Varick. “Let’s get a grip of ourselves here, and I’ll try again to make you see how this is. What I feel for Anna Reese has nothing to do with your mother. That’s the utter truth, son. It began before her, and nothing she or I have ever been able to do has changed it any. It’s something I have to live with, is all. And I pretty much do, except when that goddamned uncle of yours shoves his size twenty nose into the situation.”

  My words didn’t have effect. There wasn’t a semblance of understanding on Varick’s face. A hurt bafflement instead. My son who could so readily comprehend the land and its rhythms and its tasks, could not grasp my invisible involvement with a woman not his mother. Those stormy countries of the mind—love, loss, yearning—were places he had not yet been. And what words were strong enough to bring him there, make him see.

  “Varick, there is just no way to undo the way I’ve always felt for Anna. I know you’re upset about your mother and me, you’ve every right in the world to be. But we’ll go on as we have been. She and I will stay together at least until you’re grown and gone from home, I promise you that on all the Bibles there are.”

  But I could see I was losing. I could see from Varick’s pained stare at me that whatever I said, my son was going to look on me from here forward as someone he had not really known. Even that realization, though, nowhere near prepared me for what came now from him.

  “You don’t have to stay together on my account. Not any more, you don’t.”

  I eyed Varick and tried not to show how his words made me come undone inside. “Meaning what, son?”

  “I’m not coming home at the end of this summer. Or any other time.”

  The clod of realization choked my throat. Any other boy-man, man-boy, whichever this son of mine was, might have been pretending the determination behind that statement. But you could collect all the pretense in Varick on an eyelash; he was like Adair in that. He meant his declaration.

  He had gulped in enough breath for the rest, and now was rushing it out: “I’ll board in town for school, but weekends and summers I’m going to be working here for Stanley.”

  “Varick, you’re making this a whole hell of a lot worse than it needs to be.”

  “I’m not the one who started making it worse, am I. I don’t want to be”—his gaze said be around you—“be part of this situation, as you call it.”

  If only the tongue had an eraser on the end of it as a pencil does, this terrible set of minutes wouldn’t need to be called anything. Rob would unsay his monstrous slur, Varick would never need to blurt, Is that true? I would not have to frantically search for how to keep what little was left after my son’s declaration. “You can’t just walk out on your mother”—I swallowed miserably—“and me.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop me from it.”

  “By stirring your head with a stick, if I have to. Varick, behave toward me the way you feel you need to. But not your mother. Go to her and tell her you take her side in all this, tell her you’re on the outs with me, tell her whatever the hell. But don’t pull away from her.” I tried to will into him the urgency of what I was saying, tried to hold in the loss this was costing me. “If you’ll keep on terms with her, stay the same as ever with her, you can ignore me or throw rocks at me when you see me coming or whatever will make you feel any better. If you’ll do that, I won’t stop you from staying on with Stanley as much as you want.” Until you get your dismay at me out of your system. If you ever do.

  With a wordless nod, my son took that bargain. And turned away from me to his boiling task.

  • • •

  He was on his porch waiting when I rode to Breed Butte.

  I climbed down from Scorpion and tied his reins to the gate while Rob came across the yard to me.

  “McAngus, you’ve got a face on you that would curdle cream,” he began on me. “But man, something had to hammer it home to you about your foolishness over that woman. Maybe this will finally do the job.”

  The job? As if the life of my family was some task for him to take into his hands, bang us this way and that, twiddle our parts around—

  “If I know you,” his words kept soiling the air, “you’re going to drag out that old argument of yours that I don’t have any right to do anything about the mess you’re making of your marriage. But I told you before, and I’ll tell you till the cows come home. Adair is my sister and she’s my right to stop you from making a fool of yourself, any way it takes to do that.”

  Any way? Even by costing me my son? Was that the crazy gospel you still believed, Rob—sonless yourself, you were wishing on me the worst spite you could by tearing my son out of my life? After you had returned from the Two Medicine and hotly spilled your words to Varick, didn’t you want them back, want them unspoken? Want yourself not to have been the tool of anger that jealously ripped between Varick and me? I stared into you, needing to know. Your face
again now had as much anger as it could ever hold. But Rob, your eyes did not have enough of red emotion. Or of any other. Your tranced look, your helmeted mood when you had put yourself where it all could not but happen. And so I knew, didn’t I. Your own belief in your sabotage wasn’t total now, you had to trance yourself now against the doubt. Not let yourself bend now, from the angle you had talked yourself into. And now was too late. Doubt and trance didn’t count in your favor now. Nothing did.

  “You sanctimonious sonofabitch.” My fist following my words, I swung to destroy that Barclay jaw.

  Rob was ever quick, though. My haymaker only caught him pulling away, staggering him instead of sending him down. Which only meant he was still up where I could hammer at him. The single message thrummed in me, it had built in my blood from the instant I left Varick to come here and fight Rob. Will I kill him? How can I not, deserving as he is. He tried to set himself to return my blows, but I was onto him like fire, punching the side of his head, his shoulders, forearms, any available part of him. I beat that man as if he was a new drum. He took it grimly and struck back whenever he could manage. We struggled there, I see now, and fought through the years into our pasts, into the persons we had been. A Rob stands lordly and bright-faced on the Greenock dock, and my Angus of then pummels him in search of the being who hides inside that cocked stance. Rob on the sly with Nancy, and in Lucas’s behalf the me whirling in from my first-ever North Fork day pounds him with the hands for both of us. The exultant Rob of the depot at Browning, He never guessed! Adair, we did it to the man! and the Angus who only ever has wanted Anna smashes the words back down his throat. The Rob of his homestead site aloof above the rippling North Fork, of ever more sheep, of the ’steaders, I at last was finding them all with my fists. The final one, the monster Rob who had betrayed by turning my son against me, I wanted to butcher with my bare hands. In that Rob’s eyes, here, now, amid the thuds of my blows bringing blood out of him, there was the desperate knowledge that I was capable of his death.

  How many times Rob Barclay went down from my hitting of him, I have no idea. Not enough for my amount of rage against him and what he had done. Eventually he stayed down, breathing brokenly. The sound of him, ragged, helpless at last, came up to me as if it was pain from a creature trapped under the earth.

  A corner of my mind cleared and said, “You’re not worth beating to death. You’re worse off living with yourself.”

  I left him there in the dirt of his Breed Butte.

  • • •

  “I wish Rob hadn’t bothered.”

  “Bothered? Dair, bothered doesn’t begin to say it. The damn man has set Varick against me. Nobody has the right to cost me my son.”

  “I suppose Rob thought he was doing what he did for my sake.” Her glance went from me to the rimline of mountains out the window. “As when he brought me over here from Scotland.”

  “That’s as may be.” I drew a careful breath. “In both cases he maybe thought he had you at heart, I give him that much. But he can’t just glom into our lives whenever something doesn’t suit him. We’re not his to do with.”

  “No.” She acknowledged that, and me, with her gray eyes. “We’re our own to do with, aren’t we.” She stayed her distance from me across the kitchen, but her voice was entirely conversational, as if today’s results were much the same as any other’s. I almost thought I had not heard right when she quietly continued: “I’ll have to live in town with Varick when school starts.” Then, still as if telling me the time of day: “We’ll need to get a house in town.”

  Her words did worse to me than Rob’s fists ever could. On every side, my life was caving in. Varick. Rob. Now her. Our marriage had never been hazardless, but abrupt abandonment was the one thing we had guarded each other against.

  Suddenly my despair was speaking. Suddenly I desperately had to know the full sum against me, even if it was more severe than I had imagined.

  “Dair. Are you leaving me? Because if you are, let’s—let’s do the thing straight out, for once.”

  “Leaving?” She considered the word, as if I had just coined it. “All I’ve said is that I had better live in town with Varick during the school year.” She looked straight at me now. “Angus, in all these years you’ve never really been able to leave Anna. So do you think leaving is something that can be done, just like that?”

  “What do you call this, then, whatever it is you intend?”

  “I call it living in town with our son while he goes to school, so that he has at least one of us in his life.”

  My wife, the ambassadress to my son. How does a family get in such kinks? Trying to keep the shake out of my voice, I asked Adair next: “And summers?”

  “Summers I’ll come back here with you, of course.” Of course? Seventeen years with Adair and I still didn’t recognize what she saw as the obvious. She was adding: “If you want me to.”

  “I want you to,” I answered. And heard myself add: “Of course.”

  • • •

  Lucas tried to invoke peace. The first time I stopped in at the Gros Ventre mercantile after Rob and I divided, the message was there that Lucas needed to see me. That didn’t surprise me, but his absence at the Medicine Lodge when I went across to it did. “Luke just works Saturday nights now,” I was told by the pompadoured young bartender. Around to the house I went for my next Barclay war council.

  “Angus, I’ll never defend what Robbie did to you. We both know there was a time he was half into the honey jar himself.”

  Lucas inclined his head to the kitchen doorway. Nancy could be heard moving about in there, the plump woman of middle age who had been the curvaceous girl at the stove when I walked in on Rob and her. Her lifted front lip, inquiring my verdict on them. Rob quick to ask my hurry, to blur the moment with his smile. So long ago, yet not long at all. “That lad needs some sense pounded into him every so often,” Lucas was going on, then paused. “As I hear you undertook to do, ay?”

  “I was too late with it.”

  “Maybe more of it sank in than you think,” Lucas speculated behind a puff of his pipe. Does humankind know enough yet, Lucas, to determine what has and hasn’t sunk into a Barclay skull? Enough of that thought must have come out in my gaze at him, for Lucas now went to: “None of this has to be fatal, Angus. It’s one pure hell of a shame Varick got dragged into this, but he’ll get over it sooner or later, I hope you know.”

  “I don’t know that at all. Nothing I’ve tried to say to him does a bit of good. He has that edge to him. That way of drawing back into himself, and the rest of the world can go by if it wants.”

  “But in the eventual, Angus, he’ll—”

  Lucas, Lucas. In the eventual was time I could not spare. In the eventual lay the only possible time-territory of Anna and myself, when our lives would find their way together if they were ever going to. No, it was in the now, in these years before the possibility of Anna and myself, that I had to regain my son. To have him grow up understanding as much of me as he could. But the impossibly knotted task of that, so long as Varick refused to come near me in mind or self. My father, in his iron deafness. Myself, encased in my love for Anna. They look at us, our fleeceless sons do, and wonder how we ever grew such awful coats of complication. To understand us asks so much of sons—and for all I knew, daughters—at the precise time when they least know how to give.

  “Angus, I know that what’s between you and Varick, the two of you will have to work out,” Lucas was onto now. “But maybe I’m not without some suasion where Robbie is concerned. Or where you are either, I hope.” He peered at me in his diagnostic way, and wasn’t heartened by the signs. “By Jesus, lad”—Lucas threw up his hands, or what would have been his hands at the empty ends of those arms—“I tell you, I just don’t see how it helps the situation any for you and Robbie to be reaming the bones out of each other this way.”

  I shook my head. No, it helped nothing for Rob and me to be in silent war, and no, I would do nothing to change
it. The hole in my life where Varick had been was a complication I wouldn’t have but for Rob. In exchange, he could have my enmity.

  Lucas’s last try. “Angus, all those years of you and Robbie count for something.”

  I looked steadily at Lucas, the age on him gray in his beard and slick on his bald head. Here was a man who knew time, and I wanted to answer him well about those years of Rob and myself: our lives, really.

  “The trouble is, Lucas, they don’t count for the same in each of us. Maybe they never have, with Rob and me. He sees life as something you put in your pocket as you please. I never find it fits that easily.”

  “That’s as may be, Angus,” he said slowly, deliberatingly, when I was done. “But those differences weren’t enough to put you at each other’s throats, in all the time before.” He gave me one more gaze that searched deep. “I just can’t think it’s forever, this between the two of you.”

  “If it’s not forever, Lucas,” I responded, “it’s as close as can be.”

  • • •

  In less time than is required to tell it, Rob and I took apart twenty-four years of partnership.

  With Adair and Judith, each of them silent and strained, on hand to restrain us, everything went. He took my share of the Two Medicine sheep, I took his share of the band we had in the national forest. I bought his half-ownership in the sheep shed we had built together at the edge of my homestead nearest his. Oh, I did let him know he still had watering freedom on my portion of the North Fork whenever he had sheep at Breed Butte—my grudge was not against his animals, after all—if he wanted, and while he most definitely did not want so, he had no choice when the situation was water or no water. But of all else, we divvied everything we could think of except Scorpion. There, Rob would not touch the money I put on the table for his long-ago grand insistence that he stand half the price of my saddle horse. Bruised and scabbed as he was from my beating of him, Rob still wore that disdainful guise. There could not be more contempt than in the wave of his hand then, and his banishing words: “Keep your goddamn Reese horse, as a reminder.”