Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  Or so I thought, about the limits of disdain, until that September. When there was the morning that I looked up from my ride to school and saw teams of horses and earth equipment coming across the shoulder of Breed Butte. It seemed too many for road work, but then who knew what royal highroad Rob Barclay had to have to travel on.

  Riding home at the end of that schoolday, I saw what the project was. The soil was being scraped, hollowed, beneath the spring at the west edge of Rob’s homestead.

  “Rop’s ressavoy,” Isaac Reese confirmed to me when I went up to see closer. “Ve build him deep.”

  Rob had always said I would see the day he would build a reservoir here. As I stood beside Isaac, watching the fresnoes and teams of big workhorses with the Long Cross brand on their sides as they scraped the hillside down into a dam, it seemed to me one last barrier was going up between Rob and myself. Spurning my offer that he could use my portion of the North Fork for his sheep, he was choosing to store up the spring’s trickle instead. Choosing to create water of his own. That was Rob for you.

  As the reservoir rose, it changed the face of the North Fork valley. A raw dirt pouch beneath the silver eye of the Breed Butte spring; a catchment inserted into a valley built for flow. Then when Rob brought the Two Medicine sheep home from the reservation for the winter, each few days I would see him on horseback pushing the band back and forth across the top of the earthen dam to pack down the dirt, a task which the sharp hooves of sheep are ideal for. Him and his gray conscript column, marching back and forth to imprison water. I know I had an enlarged sense of justice, where Rob Barclay was concerned. But that private earthen basin of his up there on Breed Butte only proved to me, as if I needed any more proof, the difference in the way he saw the planet and the way I did.

  As those sheep tamped and tamped the Breed Butte reservoir into permanence, I tried to settle myself into the long seasons without Adair and Varick that Rob had inflicted on me. Back across time’s distance, when America and Montana began for me at the Greenock dock, I thought the Atlantic was worth fear. But the Atlantic was a child’s teacup compared to the ocean that life could be. The unexpected ferocities of family I now was up against, their unasked hold on me, were as implacable in their way as the seawater ever was. This too was a sick scaredness of the kind that gripped me in the steerage compartment of the Jemmy, down in the iron hole in the water. Suddenly again my life was not under my own control, now that everyone I had tried to stretch myself toward had yanked away from me. I felt so alone on the homestead that if I had shouted, I would have made no echo. When I tried to occupy myself with tasks and chores, even time was askew. Hours refused to budge, yet days went to no good use. I did not even have the usual troublesome company of sheep, for after Rob and I went our separate ways, that autumn at shipping time I sold my band of the sheep to provide for Adair and Varick living in town; somehow two households cost three times as much to run as one did. I told myself I would soon have heart enough again to go back into the sheep business, but I did not. Back there in my ocean fear, the worst that could happen was that my life might promptly end that way. Now the worst was that my life, without Varick at all, without Adair most of the time, without Anna yet, my so-called life might go on and on this way.

  I believe this: my South Fork schoolhouse saved my sanity, gave me a place to put my thoughts and not have them fly back shrieking into my face. Day after day I was mentally thankful for the classroom distraction of Paul Toski and his tadpoles in a jar; thankful, too, that he hadn’t quite figured out how to jug up skunks, coyotes, bears. There was the slow circling intelligence of Nellie Thorkelson to watch, and to wonder where it would alight. There was Charlie Finletter’s war cry at recess-time disputes with Bobby Busby, you whistledick! There was the latest generation of Roziers, none as lethal as Daniel but formidable enough, formidable enough.

  During that school year and then next after that, Scotch Heaven saw Adair ensconced in a rented house in town with Varick and of course assumed that she and I had had a falling out and Rob was aloof to me because of that. But then glance out some sunny start-of-summer day and here Adair was, like the turn of the calendar from May into June each year, at the homestead with me again, wasn’t she. And Varick nearby, working for Stanley at the ranger station or up in the national forest.

  The McCaskills dwelt in some strange summer truce, did they? I knew not much more of it than you did, Scotch Heaven. I turned my brain inside-out with thinking, and still none of it came right. Varick, Adair, Rob, Anna as ever—each had extracted from my life whatever portions of themselves it suited them to, and I knew nothing to do but try to trudge along with whatever was left.

  These were years, 1915 and 1916, when it seemed downright unpatriotic not to be thriving. I could stay as sunk as a sump if I wanted, but the homestead boom was rollicking along. ’Steaders were not only retaining those dry-land footholds of theirs that I thought were so flimsy and treacherous, they were drawing in more ’steaders; Montana in these years attracted like a magnet amid iron filings. And while the dry-land acres of farming extended and extended, even the weather applauded. The winters were open and mild. Each spring and summer, rain became grain. There was even more to it: thanks to the endless appetite of the war in Europe, the price of anything you could grow was higher than you had ever dreamed. I had been dubious about whether prairie and benchland ought to be farmed, had I? Obviously I didn’t know beans from honey.

  The other person who did not join in the almost automatic prosperity was named Rob Barclay. Not for lack of trying, on his part. But to my surprise, he sold the Two Medicine band of sheep even before lambing time of the next spring after our split. Rob’s decision, I learned by way of Lucas, was to put all his energy into land-dealing. See now, there’s just no end to people wanting a piece of this country: I could hear him saying every letter of it. His misfortune in deciding to become a lord of real estate was that the buying multitudes had their own ideas. When Rob took the plunge of purchasing every relinquished homestead he could lay his hands on, under the notion of selling land to ’steaders as well as delivering them onto it, he then found that the next season’s seekers were seeking elsewhere, out in the eastern sweeps of the state where there still was fresh—“free”—land for homesteading. When he decided next to enter the sod-breaking business, buying a steam tractor half the caliber of a locomotive and the spans of ripping plows and hiring the considerable crew for the huge apparatus, that was the season he discovered he was one of many new sodsters, so many that there wasn’t enough ’breaking business to go around. No, the more I heard of Rob’s endeavors in these years, the more he sounded to me like a desperate fisherman trying to catch a bait grasshopper in his hat—always at least one jump behind, and sometimes several.

  Hearsay was my only version of Rob Barclay now, and that was plenty for me. He and I had not spoken to one another since the day of severing our partnership, we tried not even to lay eyes on each other. This was the other side of the mirror of the past twenty-five years; the two of us who had built ourselves side by side into the Two Medicine country now were assiduously separate existences.

  “Angus, it’s not for me to say so,” Ninian began once, “but it seems unnatural to see Robert and you—”

  “—then don’t say it, Ninian,” I closed that off.

  “Angus, lad,” from Lucas toward the end of that time, “Robbie is losing his shirt in his land dealing, and he’d go all the way to his socks if I’d let him. By Jesus, I don’t mind telling you it’s time I straightened his head around for him again. So I’m going to back him in buying maybe fifteen hundred head of prime ewes. These prices for wool and lambs are just pure glorious. If I can talk Robbie into it, I wonder if you’d consider coming in with us on the deal.”

  “You can stop wondering, Lucas,” I said, “because I won’t do any considering of that sort.”

  • • •

  And then it was our own war year, 1917. Wilson and America had been saying long an
d loud that they never would, but now they were going into Europe’s bloody mud with both feet. That first week of April, I put down the Gleaner with its declaration-of-war headline, I thought of the maw of trenches from Belgium all across France, and I felt as sick as I ever had. This was the spring Varick would finish high school in Gros Ventre. If the war did not stop soon, a war that had so far shown no sign it would ever stop, Varick in all soldier-age inevitability would go to it or be sent to it.

  • • •

  “Angus?” from Adair, one of that year’s first summer evenings, the dusk long and the air carrying the murmur of the North Fork flowing high with runoff from the mountains. Her first evening at the homestead with me, now that the school year was done. Now that our son no longer had the safety of being a schoolboy. “I need to tell you. There’s something terrible I wish. About Varick.”

  This was new. I have to truthfully say that each other June, Adair reappeared here in this house just as if she had never been away from me. The homestead simply seemed to take on a questioning air, the same as it had when she first came here, straight from our Breed Butte wedding. But this was open agitation of some sort.

  “What’s this now, Dair? I don’t believe the terrible in anything you could—”

  “I wish he’d lost that eye.” She gazed at me steadily, her voice composed but sad. “When the stick of kindling flew up, that time, I wish now it had taken his eye, Angus.”

  “Because, because of the war, you mean.”

  “Is that wrong of me, Angus?” To wish a son saved, from the army, from the trenches, from metal death? When Samuel Duff enlisted, Ninian subscribed to the daily newspaper from Great Falls and the war news came to us in that, the battle for some French hill in one headline, the sinking of half a convoy in another, in pages worn from reading as they traveled up the North Fork valley. As if tribes were fighting in the night, and messengers were shouting guesses at us. A person had to wonder. Was this what all the effort, the bringing of yourself around the bend of the world to another life, the making of homesteads, raising of children, was this what it all came to? Our armies trading death with their armies?

  “No,” I answered my wife. “No, I can’t see that you’re wrong at all, Dair. You brought him into the world. You ought to have every right to wish the world wouldn’t kill him.”

  • • •

  Only a night later, Adair and I had just gone to bed when the scuff of hooves arrived in the yard, then the creak of a saddle being dismounted from. I pulled clothes on, went and opened the door. To Rob.

  Our stiff looks met one another. “I have something to say to Adair,” was as much as he let me know.

  From behind us, Adair’s voice: “Anything you ever say to me, you say to Angus as well.”

  Rob stepped in around me, toward his sister. He began huskily, “Lucas—”

  His voice cut off, swallowed by the emotion of his news. He did not really need to wrench out the rest; Adair and I knew the sentence.

  • • •

  “Do you know, Angus,” Lucas’s death spoke itself in Toussaint’s words the afternoon of the funeral, “we thought he was funning us. Saturday night, everybody in the Medicine Lodge. Luke pouring drinks left, right, sideways. All at once, he says: ’My hands hurt. They’re like fire.’ We didn’t know. To laugh or not. He rubbed both his stubs slow on his chest, like so. Then he fell. Doc was right there. But no use. Luke’s heart went out, Doc says.”

  Lucas’s funeral brought everyone. In its way, Gros Ventre itself seemed to attend, the town and its tree columns of streets at a respectful distance from the green graveyard knoll. Around me at his graveside, the years’ worth of faces. Anna and Isaac. Rob and Judith. Duffs, Erskines, Frews, Findlaters, Hahns, Petersons, the rest. Varick arrived with Stanley Meixell, a faded but clean work-shirt on each of them, and strode across to join his mother and me, saying nothing to me. Nancy with us, too, not wearing widow’s weeds . . . All of us, except the one whom death had chosen for this first whittle into us, Lucas’s slit in the earth.

  I blinked when Ninian Duff stepped from amid us to the head of the grave.

  “I have asked Robert whether I may say some words over Lucas,” he announced. The feedbag beard looked even mightier now that it had cloudswirls of gray in it. I could see in my mind how that asking went. Not even Rob could turn down Ninian.

  “It is no secret that Lucas and I did not see eye to eye about all of life.” Lad, Lucas’s voice to me in the Medicine Lodge that year Rob and I arrived to Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country, how many Bibles do you suppose old Ninian’s worn the guts out of? “I bring no Bible here today,” Ninian was all but thundering now, “yet there is one passage that I believe even Lucas would not overly mind to hear, if said in its proper light. It is of sheep, and those of us who make them our livelihood. One of the most ancient livelihoods, for as you will remember, Adam’s first son Abel was a keeper of sheep.” Ninian, you’re as spry as King David up on his hind feet. “The old treasured words come to us from ancient Israel, where the tending of sheep was a work far different from the sort we know. The flocks of that ancient time were small in number and each sheep possessed its own name, and answered to that name when the familiar voice of his shepherd called forth.” May we all go out with the timbre of a Ninian accompanying us; a voice such as that would shut down Hell. “Ay, and a shepherd of Israel did not herd his little flock from behind, as we do with our bands of a thousand and more. Rather, that shepherd of old went before his flock, finding out the safer ways, and his sheep followed him in confidence, depending upon him to lead them to safe watering places and to good pasturage.” The North Fork there, that’s sinfully fine country. I’ll tell you lads what may be the thing, and that’s sheep. As sure as the pair of you are sitting here with your faces hanging out, sheep are worth some thinking about. “And too, that same shepherd of Israel carried certain items necessary to the guarding and care of his sheep. His rod was a club of some heft, nailed through at one end, and was used for fighting off wild creatures and robbers. His staff was a longer, lighter tool, used to beat down leaves from trees and shrubs for his sheep to eat when the grass was short, and it had too a crook in one end, for the rescuing of sheep caught in the rocks or tumbled in a stream. Ay, very like our own sheephooks, they were.” I’ll go with you on them. I’ll partner the two of you in getting sheep. What do you say to the idea, Angus? Can I count on you both?

  Ninian paused, as if to let the wind carry his words where it wanted before he gave it more to transport. Then he resumed:

  “Lucas was stubborn as a stone. They seem to be like that in Nethermuir. But he was no bad man. And like the others of us, all of us who draw breath, he is part of the flock who in one way or another speak through time in the words of the Twenty-third Psalm.” Ninian’s beard rose as he put his head back to recite:

  “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

  By Jesus, the woollies do make a lovely sight. If we could just sell them as scenery, ay?

  • • •

  As the funeral crowd began to disperse, and Adair was taking condolences, I singled out Rob. I would rather have been made to pull my own toenails out one by one, but this I needed to do.

  “Rob,” I stepped in while several others were around him and his family, so that he had no private chance to ignore me, “see you a minute, I need to.”

  He aloofly followed down the slope of the graveyard after me, far enough where we wouldn’t be heard.

  I began with it. “I’ve a thing to ask of you.”

  “You can always try,” issued back from him, wintry.

  “The remembrance of Lucas for the Gleaner. I, I’d like to write it.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you.” It didn’t come from Rob as any kind of
commendation. “When all is done, you come prissing around wanting to have the saying of it, don’t you. That’s been a failing in you since—” Since the dock at Greenock, Rob, do you mean? Since the moment you and I put foot into Helena? Gros Ventre? Scotch Heaven? Where and when did I become something other than the Angus you have known the length of your life? Specify, Rob. If you can, man, specify. I’m here waiting.

  He didn’t finish, but went to: “Well, you’ve asked. And I’m telling you no, in big letters. I’ll write that remembrance myself. It’s for a Barclay to have final say about a Barclay. And Christ knows, you’ve never even come close to being one.”

  • • •

  Two days from then, in the lawyer Dal Copenhever’s office up over the First National Bank of Gros Ventre, Rob sat at one end of the arc of chairs in front of the lawyer’s desk, I at the other with Adair and Nancy between us. Gros Ventre’s streets of cottonwood trees had grown up through the years until they now made a shimmering green forest outside this second-story window, and I stared out into the lace of leaves while trying to collect my mind. The reading of Lucas’s will was just over, and its effect was beginning.

  “Dal, is this some sort of joke lawyers make?” Rob broke out. “To see if they can rile up the audience? If so, you’ve damn well succeeded in that.”

  The lawyer shook his head. “I’ve only read you what’s on the paper. It’s an unusual document, I’m the first to admit.”

  Unusual, he said.

  I, Lucas Barclay, being of sound and disposing mind and memory and mindful of the uncertainty of human life . . . do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last will and testament . . .

  First: I give and bequeath to Nancy Buffalo Calf Speaks my residence in Gros Ventre, Teton County, Montana, and all my household furniture, linen, china, household stores and utensils, and all personal and household effects of whatsoever nature. Further, I direct that my business property, the Medicine Lodge Saloon, shall be sold, at public or private sale, by my executor; and that said executor shall pay over the proceeds of that sale, together with all funds on deposit under my name in the First National Bank of Gros Ventre, to Nancy Buffalo Calf Speaks in such monthly sums as may reasonably be expected to sustain her for the remainder of her life . . .