by Ivan Doig
Well and good, Lucas. Even Rob, after his involuntary grimace at the news of all that was being bequeathed to Nancy, did not seem unduly surprised. But the rest of that piece of paper.
Second: I direct that my share of the sheep, approximately one thousand five hundred head, either owned outright by me or with my personal lien upon them, that are operated in partnership with Robert Burns Barclay, shall be conveyed thusly: said sheep I give and bequeath to Robert Burns Barclay, Adair Sybil McCaskill née Barclay, and Angus Alexander McCaskill, share and share alike, provided that they operate said sheep in partnership together for three years from the effective date of this will. I expressly stipulate that within that same period of time said sheep cannot be sold by the beneficiaries, nor the proceeds of any such sale derive to them, unless all three beneficiaries give full and willing agreement to such sale. In the event that said beneficiaries cannot operate in partnership and cannot agree unanimously to sell said sheep, my executor is directed to rescind said sheep and all rights thereunto from said beneficiaries and sell said sheep forthwith, with all proceeds of that sale to be donated to the municipality of Gros Ventre, Montana, for the express purpose of establishing a perpetual fund for the care and upkeep of the Gros Ventre cemetery.
. . . I hereby nominate and appoint Dalton Copenhaver to be the executor and trustee of this my last will.
“The three of us couldn’t pet a cat together,” from Rob now, thoroughly incredulous, “and Lucas full well knew that! So how in the hell are we supposed to run fifteen hundred head of sheep?”
With the supreme patience of a person being paid for his time, the lawyer stated: “If it’s indeed the case that you can’t cooperate in a partnership, then Lucas left you the remedy here in plain sight. The three of you only need to agree to sell, and the money from the sheep holdings can be split among you in equal shares.”
From his face, Rob evidently didn’t know which to be at this prospect of getting only a third of what he’d been anticipating, enraged or outraged. But at least he could be quickly rid of me by agreeing on sale of the sheep. “That’s readily enough done,” he spoke with obvious effort not to glare in my direction. I nodded sharp agreement. With all that lay between us, there was no way known to man by which the two of us could work as sheep partners again.
“No.”
That from Adair. Rob cast her an uncomprehending glance and asked what my mind was asking too: “No what?”
“Just that.” She returned Rob’s gaze, gray eyes to gray eyes. “No.”
Silence held the law office. Then the three male tongues in the room broke into wild chorus.
“Dair,” I chided—
“Adair,” Rob blurted—
“Mrs. McCaskill,” the lawyer overrode us, “we must be very clear about this. You refuse to divide these sheep?”
Adair gave him a floating glance as if he was the biggest silly in the world, talking about dividing sheep as if they were pie pieces. “I refuse, yes, if that’s what it has to be called.”
In any other circumstance, I would have sat back and admired. My wife looked as though she had a lifetime of practice at being an intractable heiress. Small, slim, she inhabited the big round-backed chair as if it were a natural throne. Not a quiver in the ringlets above her composed face. How many times had I seen this before. Wherever Adair was in that head of hers, she was firmly planted there. But as rich as the value was in watching Rob goggle at his sister, this was going to be expensive entertainment. Unless her no could be turned around, neither she nor I nor Rob was going to get so much as a penny from the sale of Lucas’s sheep.
Rob gamely began on her. “Adair, what’s this about? Unless you agree, the cemetery gets it all when the sheep are sold.” Try his utmost, the look on Rob and the strain in his voice both told what a calamity he saw that as. Robbie is losing his shirt in his land dealing, and he’d go all the way to his socks if I’d let him. Well, well. The skin of Rob’s feet were closer to touching disaster than I’d even thought. He was urging Adair now, “And surely to Christ that isn’t what you want to happen, now is it?”
“Of course it isn’t,” she responded. “And you don’t either.” She regarded Rob patiently. “We can keep that from happening by the three of us running the sheep.”
That brought me severely upright. Rob and I exchanged glances of grim recalcitrance.
“See now, Adair”—credit him, Rob sounded valiantly reasonable under the circumstances—“we can all grant that Lucas intended well with this piece of paper of his. But you know better than anyone that Angus and I—we’d just never jibe, is all. The two of us can’t work together.”
“You did,” she said, cool as custard. “You can learn to again.”
“Dair, it’d be craziness for us to even try,” I took my turn at reasoning with her, past my apprehensions that reasoning and Adair weren’t always within seeing distance of each other.
“Trying is never crazy,” she reported as if telling me the weather. “Lucas wished us to try this together, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Rob shifted desperately around in his chair to confront the lawyer again. “Give us a bit of mercy here, why not. All that rant in the will about ‘sound mind’ and what is it, ‘disposing memory’ and such; surely to Christ this sheep mess Lucas came up with can’t be called sane, am I right?”
“It was up to Lucas to dispose of those sheep as he saw fit,” responded Copenhaver. “All I can tell you is, this will is plainly legal in its language.” He pushed the paper toward Rob. “And here’s Lucas’s signature validating it.” Even from where Adair and I and Nancy sat, that royal coil of signature could be recognized. Lucas’s stubs propelling a pen, proudly saying to Scotland, This place Gros Ventre is a coming town, leading Rob and me from Helena with its loops and swirls. Why did I write it, after these years? Matters pile up in a person. They can surprise you, how they want out. They were out now, weren’t they, Lucas. You saying with this last signature of yours that Rob and Adair and I must make ourselves look at reconciliation, must face it if only to reject it.
“Moreover,” the lawyer was asserting to Rob, “the will has been attested by the requisite two witnesses”—he glanced closer at the pair of much smaller ragged scrawls—“Stanley Meixell and Bettina Mraz.”
Rob shot the accusatory question to Adair and me, but neither of us knew the name Bettina Mraz either.
“Bouncing Betty,” said Nancy quietly.
The other four of us swung to Nancy in stupefaction. Her dark eyes chose Rob to look back at. The lifted middle of her lip made it seem as if she was curious to know what he would make of her news to him. “Wingo’s ‘niece,’ once. A year, two, ago. Stanley’s favorite. Young. Yellow hair. And—” Nancy brought her hand and arm up level with her breasts, measuring a further six inches or so in front of them. “Bouncing Betty,” she explained again.
Rob was out of his chair as if catapulted now, his knuckles digging into the lawyer’s desktop as he leaned forward to half-demand half-plead: “Dal, man, a will witnessed by a forest ranger and a whore can’t be valid, can it?”
Adair faced around to Rob reproachfully. “Really now, Rob. Just because Stanley Meixell is a forest ranger doesn’t give you reason to question—”
“Mrs. McCaskill,” the lawyer put up a hand to halt her, “I imagine your brother has reference to the competency of Miss”—he checked again the bottommost signature on the will—“Mraz as a witness. But unless she has ever been convicted of practicing her purported profession, she is as competent to witness as any of us. And convictions of that sort are hardly plentiful in Montana, I would point out to you. No, there really isn’t much hope of contesting this will on the basis of its witnesses, in my opinion. Nor on any other that I’m aware of.”
Rob looked as if he’d been kicked on both shins. “Adair,” he intoned to her bleakly, “you’ve got to get us out of this sheep mess Lucas put us in.”
“You know how much I hate to admit it,
Dair,” I chimed in at my most persuasive, “but for once in his life Rob happens to be right.”
She stated it for us once more. “No.”
There was a long moment of silence except for the rattle of the breeze in the cottonwood trees. But everything in my mind was as loud as it could be and still stay in there. Adair, it banged again and again, what now?
“Gentlemen,” the lawyer summed, “Mrs. McCaskill is entirely within her rights. If and when you three heirs decide to divide the sheep, I can draw up the necessary papers. But until that decision is reached, you are in the sheep business together.”
• • •
At home that night, I tried again.
“Dair, I don’t know what it is you want, in this matter of Rob and me.”
“I want the two of you to carry out Lucas’s wish.”
“It’s not as if I want to go against something Lucas had his heart set on.”
“Then you won’t,” she said.
“If you want us back in the sheep business so badly, I’ll find the money somewhere to buy a band of our own.”
“We already have sheep,” she instructed me, “as of today.”
“Dair. Dair, you know as well as I do that there’s every reason under the sun for me to say a no of my own.” No to her hopeless notion that Rob and I together could ever run that band of sheep, yes to the perpetual upkeep of the green bed, ay, Lucas? Yes to a ruination of Rob, as glad a yes as I could utter.
“I’m hoping you won’t. I’m asking you not to.”
“Because why?”
“Because this is another chance, for each of the three of us. Angus, I’ve never asked you these words before, but I am now. Will you do this for me?”
Put that way, this notion of hers resounded. Put that way, it had an inescapable echo. Here was the other end of the bargain she quietly broached to me those years ago: You would still have a life to look ahead to. Her acceptance, her grant, all through our marriage that I still loved Anna. And now this asking, that I make a demented try to partner with Rob again. Because why? Because for better or worse, Adair and I had each other, our marriage, until time told us otherwise. The Atlantic itself was a field of battle now; there could be no Scotland for Adair until the war wore itself out. Anna’s Lisabeth was grown now, I had heard that she was going away to the teachers’ college at Dillon in the fall, but Peter was still a few years from homeleaving. All the hinges that life turns on. And in the meantime Adair at last asking a thing of me, repeating it gently as if wondering aloud to herself:
“Will you, Angus?”
How many times had I seen this, now. A Barclay locked into an iron notion. Lucas becoming a builder of the Montana that had torn his hands from him. Rob so outraged toward me about Anna that he pried my son away from me. And now Adair bolting Rob and me into impossible partnership.
“Dair, I don’t even want to be around the man. How under thunder am I supposed to run sheep with him?”
“The sheep won’t care whether you and Rob have anything to say to one another.”
I studied her. “Does Adair? Do you care?”
“In my way, I do.”
• • •
I went to Breed Butte to begin lockstep sheep-raising.
The sheep were grazing complacently on the shoulder of the butte nearest Rob’s reservoir. As I rode Scorpion across the narrow top of the dam I saw that Rob had been packing its dirt down again with the sheep, their small sharp hoofprints leaving every inch of it as pocked as a grater. The damn man and his damn dam.
Rob came out into his yard looking baleful in the extreme. I planted myself to face his harsh silence.
Nothing, from either of us.
Then some more of it.
Eventually I asked:
“How are we going to do this, by signal lamp?”
“Don’t I wish.”
“Rob, wishing isn’t going to help this situation.”
“You’re one to tell me not to toss away life by wishing, are you. Surprising.’ ”
“We’d better stick to the topic of sheep.”
Rob looked bleakly past me, down the slope of Breed Butte to the sheep shed that had been ours and now was mine. Then he shifted his gaze to the contented cloud of sheep. I followed his eyes there with my own. At least neither of us was new to the sheep part of this; after nearly thirty years, we could be said to have commenced at starting to make a stab at a beginning toward knowing a thing or two about the woollies.
After enough stiff silence, he made himself say it. “What brings you? Shearing?”
I confirmed with a nod.
He rapped back, “You know my thoughts on it. Or at least you goddamn ought to, after all these years.”
“That doesn’t mean I agree with them a whit,” I pointed out. “I’m for shearing at the end of this month, to be as sure as possible of the weather.”
“That’s just the kind of pussyfoot idea you’d have, right enough. I say shear now and get the sheep up on the forest grass.”
“You’ve said it, and I don’t agree.”
The next jerked out of him savagely, not simply at me but at the situation. “Goddamn it all to hell, this can never work. We both know Adair means well, but a half-assed situation like this, neither of us able to say a real yes or a real no—how to hell are we ever going to settle anything about the sheep?”
He was right about one matter. Nothing he or I could provide was going to ordain anything to the other. I reached in my pocket and showed him what Adair had handed me before I left the house.
Rob stared down at my hand, then sharply up into my eyes. “What’s this, now?”
“What it looks like. A deck of cards. Adair says when we can’t agree, we’re to cut for who gets to decide.”
“Jesus’ suffering ass!” Rob detonated. “We couldn’t run a flock of chickens on that basis, let alone fifteen hundred goddamn sheep!”
“Adair has one more stipulation,” I informed him. “Low card always wins.”
You never know. Adair’s second stipulation so dumbfounded Rob that his howl of outrage now dwindled to the weary mutter, “It’d take that sister of mine to think of that.”
“Anyway it’s a change from letting magpies decide,” I reminded him. Turning around to Scorpion, I used the seat of his saddle to shuffle the cards on three times, then held the deck toward Rob: “Your cut.”
He produced the five of diamonds.
Grabbing the deck as if he wanted it out of sight of him, he shuffled it roughly, then thrust it out to me.
I turned up the ten of clubs.
“Well, then,” Rob ground out. “We’ll shear now, won’t we.”
I nodded once, and left.
• • •
The summer went that way. The thousand and a half sheep and Rob and I and our goddess of chance, also known as Adair. To ask myself how I had got swallowed into all this was to bewilder myself even more, so I tried instead to set myself to wait it through. Waiting was what I had practice in by now.
The deck of cards did me one inadvertent favor. In early August, when I was trying to finish the last of haying, Rob and I cut cards to see who had to camptend Davie that week, and I lost. Nothing to do but pocket my exasperation and begin the journey on Scorpion up into the national forest with the pack horse of Davie’s supplies behind.
It was one of those mornings of Roman Reef looming so high and near in the dry summer air that my interest wandered aloft with it rather than toward the barbwire gate of the boundary fence I was nearing. When I came to earth and glanced ahead and discovered the person off his horse at the gate, performing the courtesy of waiting for me to ride through too before he closed it, at first his brown Stetson made me hope it was Varick. I saw in my next minute of riding up, no, not quite that tall and far from that young. Stanley Meixell.
“Hullo, Angus,” the ranger spoke up as I rode through and stopped my horses on the other side of the gate. “What do you know for sure?”
&nbs
p; Never nearly enough, Stanley. But aloud: “I know we could use rain.”
“That we could. There’s never enough weather in Montana except when there’s too much of it.”
Both of us knew I had stopped for more than a climate chat. I threw away preamble and asked:
“How’s Varick doing for you?”
“Just topnotch. He’s about a man and a half on anything I put him to. Regular demon for work, and what he can’t do a first time he learns before a next time gets here. I tell you, the Yew Ess Forest Service is proud of him.” Stanley paused, then casually tacked on: “You maybe heard, he’s getting to be just quite a bronc stomper, too.”
I had heard, unenthusiastically. The Sunday gatherings of young riders at the Egan ranch on Noon Creek were no longer complete without Varick atop a snorty horse, the report was.
Stanley studied me, then Roman Reef, as if comparison was his profession. “I guess you’d kind of like to know his frame of mind about you, Angus. It ain’t real good.”
“I wish that surprised me.” What I went on to say did startle myself: “You know what it’s about, this between Varick and me?”
“I do, yeah. Him and me had a session right after the blowup first happened between you two.” Stanley regarded me thoughtfully for a moment before saying: “The ladies and us. Never as tidy as you’d think it ought to be, is it.”
Definitely not for some of us, Stanley. Others of us, and I could name you one quick, the Bouncing Bettys ricochet soundlessly off of and never leave a whisper in the world.
“Angus, I’ve tried and tried to tell Varick to let it drop, the ruckus between him and you. And I’ll keep on trying. But I’ve got to say, Varick ain’t easy to budge, wherever he gets that from.” Stanley paused again, then: “This probably don’t help none, but my guess is it ain’t just you that’s burring him, Angus. It’s him wanting to be away from home, get out in the world a little.”
