Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “He can be out in the world and still have a father.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. It’s a whole hell of a lot easier for you and me to see that than it is for him, though.”

  It was my turn to glance away at Roman Reef. This deserved to be said, Stanley in his Stanley way had earned the hearing of it:

  “Stanley. If I can’t have Varick around me at this time of his life, there’s nobody I’d rather he was with than you.”

  The only answer from under the brown hat was a brief session of throat-clearing. After a considerable moment: “Yeah, well, I better get on up the mountain. See you in choir practice, Angus.”

  • • •

  At shipping time that fall, for once in our yoked partnership Rob and I did not need to cut the cards to find a decision.

  “Ones like these, I’m going to take leave of my senses and go up to 171/2 cents on,” the lamb buyer offered. “However you Scotchmen manage to do it, you grow goddamn fine lambs.”

  While keeping a careful straight face Rob glanced at me. I was already glancing implacably at him. When we both nodded and got out ritual admissions that we supposed we could manage to accept such a sum of money, the flabbergasting deal was done. Eighty-five pounds per lamb × 1500 lambs × 171/2¢. In the years of ’93, Rob and I and all other sheepmen would have gone through life on our knees to get three cents a pound for our lambs instead of two, and now these unasked lofty prices of wartime. Life isn’t famous for being evenhanded, is it.

  “This doesn’t mean one goddamn bit that I want to go through another year of this with you,” Rob lost no time in imparting to me outside the stockyard as we were pocketing our checks. “If you had the least lick of sense, you’d go home right now and ask Adair if she won’t let us sell the ewes this fall, too.”

  “I already asked,” I gave him in identical tone. “She won’t.”

  • • •

  The next two months of numbers on the calendar, I hated to see toll themselves off. Why can’t time creep when you want it to instead of when you don’t. I stood it for half the toll, then on a mid-October Sunday afternoon I told Adair I was riding up into the foothills to see where our firewood was for this winter and instead rode across the shoulder of Breed Butte to Noon Creek.

  Elderly Scorpion being pointed now to the country where I bought him: Skorp Yun, lad, what about that? What about it indeed. A woman looking up from the teacher’s desk, a woman with the blackest of black hair done into a firm glossy braid, a glory of a woman: I am called Anna Ramsay. How long had it been in horse years, Scorpion? How long since Anna, at her schoolhouse or at the old Ramsay place, began being my automatic destination at Noon Creek? My destination anywhere in life, for that matter. But not now, not today, not yet, when I was reining Scorpion instead toward the round corral at the Egan ranch.

  • • •

  He was there atop a corral pole with the other young Sunday heroes when I arrived. Varick, whom I had come to lay eyes on before the eleventh day of the next month made him eighteen years of age. Before he became war fodder.

  He saw me across the corral as I dismounted. I gave him a hello wave, he nodded the minimum in return, and with public amenities satisfied, we left it at that. Maybe more would eventuate between us later, but I did not really expect so. No, today I simply was bringing my son my eyes, the one part of me he could not turn away from on such a public afternoon as this.

  As I tied Scorpion where he could graze a little, I heard a chuckle from the passenger on a horse just arriving. “You are here to ride a rough one, Angus?”

  I looked up, at the broad-bellied figure in the saddle. “That I’m definitely not, Toussaint. A bronc has to bring me a note of good behavior from his mother before I’ll go near him. But you. What fetches you down from the Two Medicine?”

  “The riding. The young men riding.” As if such a sight was worth traveling all distances for. Well, I had come no small way myself, hadn’t I, to peruse Varick.

  I chatted with Toussaint about the fine green year, his job as ditch rider on the reservation’s new Two Medicine irrigation canal—“Did you know a man can ride a ditch, Angus?”—the war in Europe—“those other places,” he called the warring countries—until I saw the arrival of a buckboard drawn by a beautiful team of sorrels. My breath caught. But this time the Reese wagon was not driven by Anna but by Isaac, with the boy Peter beside him. I might have known that wherever horses were collected, here would be Isaac.

  “Toozawn, Annguz,” he greeted us benignly, and headed on toward the corral. Peter’s eyes registered me but didn’t linger, flew on to the happenings within the circle of poles. I felt relief that he didn’t dwell on me. Yet some pang, too, that the immensity of the past between his mother and me did not even generate a speculative gaze from this boy. Add inches to him for the next year or two, 1918, 1919, and he would be out into life. About the time when Adair and Rob and I would have done our duty to Lucas’s will and could all go our separate ways. I had thought through the arithmetic of these next few years a thousand times: the Reese nest would be empty and Anna would be able to judge just on the basis I had waited so long for, Isaac or me.

  “That Isaac,” declared Toussaint. “He knows.”

  I could feel my face going white or red, I couldn’t tell which. I stared at Toussaint. “Knows?”

  “He knows horses like nobody’s business, that Isaac.”

  I recovered myself, told Toussaint it was time I became a serious spectator and found a place along the corral. Men helloed and Angused me in surprise as they passed. Quite a crowd in and on the corral by then. Besides Varick and Pat Egan’s son Dill and other local sons, riders from the Double W and Thad Wainwright’s Rocking T abounded here today, and just now, the last one they had been waiting for before starting was arriving with a whoop and a grin, young Withrow from the South Fork.

  “Angus, good to see you here,” Pat Egan called out as he came over to me. “Heard about the special attraction, did you?”

  When my blank look said I’d heard no such thing, Pat told me that after the bronc riding there was to be a bucking exhibition of another sort. “Some guy from Fort Benton brought over this critter of his. Claims he’s trained the thing to toss any rider there is. Our boys are going to have to show him how real riding is done, don’t you think?”

  Away went Pat, as he said, to get the circus started. Across the pole arena from me, the Withrow lad had climbed onto the fence beside Varick. “How you doing, Mac?”

  “Just right, Dode. How about you?”

  “Good enough, if they got some real horses here for us.”

  “They’re rank enough, probably. I see you’re dressed for the worst they can do, though.” Withrow was always the dressiest in a crowd, and for today’s bronc riding he sported a pair of yellow-tan corduroy trousers with leather trim at the pockets, new as the moment. Except for his habit of dressing as if he owned Montana, he was an engaging youngster, of a sheep-ranching family that had moved to the South Fork from the Cut Bank country in the past year or so. I perched there, watching Varick and Dode, listening to their gab of horses. Aching at the thought of how much of Varick I had not been able to know, these years of his climb into manhood.

  Shortly the afternoon began to fill with horsehide and riders. Even just saddling each bronc was an exercise in fastening leather onto a storm of horse. The animal was snubbed to a corral post by a lasso tight around his neck while the saddlers did their work. Any too reluctant horse or a known kicker was thrown onto his side in the corral dirt and saddled while down. The rider would poise over him and try to socket himself into the saddle and stirrups as the horse struggled up. It looked to me like a recipe for suicide.

  My throat stoppered itself when I saw that Varick had drawn one of the saddle-in-the-dirt rides.

  “Watch out for when this sonofabitch starts sunfishing,” I heard Dode counsel him, “or he’ll stick your head in the ground.”

  Varick nodded, tugged his hat down severely t
oward his eyes, and straddled with care across the heaving middle of the prostrate pinto horse. Then said to the handlers: “Let’s try him.”

  The pinto erupted out of the dirt, spurts of dust continuing to fly behind his hooves as he bucked and bounced, querulously twisting his spotted body into sideway crescents as if determined to make his rump meet his head. While the horse leapt and crimped, Varick sat astride him, long legs stretched mightily into the stirrups. My blood raced as I watched. What son of mine was this? Somehow this bronc rider, this tall half-stranger, this Sunday centaur, was the yield of Adair and me. I was vastly thankful she was not here to see our wild result.

  When Varick had ridden and the other braves of the saddle tribe had taken their turns at rattling their brains, Pat Egan hollered from beside the corral gate: “Time for something different, boys!”

  Pat swung the gate open and in strolled a man and a steer.

  At first glimpse, the Fort Benton critter looked like a standard steer. Red-brown, haunch-high to a horse, merely beef on the hoof. But when you considered him for a moment, this was a very veteran steer indeed, years older than the usual by not having gone the route to the slaughterhouse. An old dodger of the last battle, so to say. He was uniquely calm around people, blinking slow blinks that were halfway toward sleep as the onlookers gathered around him. The circle gave way considerably, however, when he lifted his tail like a pump handle and casually let loose several fluid feet of manure.

  For his part, the Fort Benton man was a moonface with spectacles; a sort you would expect to see behind the teller’s wicket in a bank instead of ankle deep into a corral floor. The fiscal look about him was not entirely coincidental. He was prepared, he announced, to provide twenty-five dollars to anyone who could ride this steer of his. He also would be amenable, of course, to whatever side bets anybody might care to make with him about his steer’s invincibility.

  At once, everybody in the corral voted with their pockets. All the young riders wanted a turn at the steer, or professed to. But the Fort Bentonian shook his head and informed the throng that was not how steer riding worked, it was strictly a one-shot proposition. One steer per afternoon, one rider per afternoon: what could be more fair? Then he set forth the further terms of steer riding, Fort Benton mode: the rider had to stay astride the steer for a total of three minutes in a ten-minute span. Naturally this Sunday assortment of bronc conquerors was free to choose the best rider among them—the bland spectacles suggested there had been a lot of other claims of “best” that came and went—and if the rider could stay on the steer the required sum of time, the twenty-five dollars was his.

  Somebody spoke up: surely the steer impresario didn’t mean three minutes straight, uninterrupted, aboard the animal, did he?

  He did not. The rider could get off and on again any hundred number of times he wanted to during the overall time span. Did he need to add, he added, that the steer would be glad to help the rider with the offs.

  What about a hazer, to even the odds for the rider getting back on?

  The eyebrows lifted above the moonface in surprise. But the Fort Bentonian allowed that one man hazing on foot maybe wouldn’t do lasting harm to his cherished pet.

  I saw Isaac come into the corral, stoop, sight along the steer’s backbone—I could all but hear him mentally compare it to a horse’s—and then step over and gabble something to Varick, Dode Withrow and the others. They surveyed the territory for themselves, then somebody put it to the Fort Bentonian. How were they supposed to saddle something with as square a back as that?

  Any old which way they desired, came the answer.

  The young riders conferred again. Discussion bred inspiration. Could they tie on the saddle as well as cinch it?

  They could entwine the steer a foot thick in rope if that was their way of doing things, the steer’s spokesman bestowed, but they had better decide soon, as darkness was only hours away.

  At last the terms of the contest were as clear as tongue could make them, and all bets were laid. Someone called out the next conundrum:

  “Who’s gonna climb on the thing?”

  Faces turned toward Varick and the Withrow lad. Varick looked at young Withrow, and young Withrow at him. “Toss you for him, Dode,” offered my son.

  “Heads, Mac. Let her fly.”

  The silver dollar that spun into the air, I tried to exert to come down heads; not to send danger toward another man’s son, simply away from my own. Name me one soul who could have done different. But I had my usual luck where Varick was concerned.

  “You got on the wrong pants for riding a male cow anyway,” Varick consoled Dode after the coin fell tails. Then, “I guess I’m ready for this if your steer is, Mister Fort Benton.”

  Varick and his adherents gathered around the steer. The steer blinked at them. As Dode Withrow approached with the saddle, someone moved from behind the steer to watch. The steer’s right rear leg flashed, the hoof missing the pedestrian by an inch.

  “Now, now, McCoy,” the Fort Bentonian chided his pet. “That’s no way to act towards these boys.” He scratched the steer between its broad eyes as if it were a gigantic puppy, and it stood in perfect tranquility while Dode and the others saddled and trussed. The kick had done its work, though, as now both Varick and Dode, who was going to be his hazer, knew they would have to avoid the steer’s rear area during the corral contest.

  When the saddlers had done, a rope ran around the steer’s neck and through the forkhole of the saddle. Two further ropes duplicated the route of the saddle cinch encircling, if that was the word for such a shape, the steer. And it had been Dode Withrow’s ultimate inspiration to run a lariat around the animal lengthwise, chest to rump and threaded through the rigging rings of the saddle, like the final string around a package. “You people over here sure do like rope,” observed the Fort Bentonian.

  Dode Withrow gripped the halter with both hands at the steer’s jaw while someone passed the halter rope up to Varick. He took a wrap of it in his right hand and put his left into the air as if asking an arithmetic question in my classroom. He called to Pat Egan and the Fort Bentonian, the two timekeepers: “Let’s try him.”

  The moonface boomed out, “GO, MCCOY!” and the steer writhed his hindquarters as if he were now a giant snake. A giant snake with horns and hooves. Varick’s head whipped sideways, then to the other side, like a willow snapping back and forth. Then the steer lurched forward and Varick whipped in that direction and back.

  MURRRAWWWW issued out of McCoy, a half-bellow, half-groan, as he and Varick began storming around the circle of the corral. It was like watching a battle in a whirlwind, the steer’s hooves spraying the loose minced dirt of the arena twenty feet into the air.

  I watched in agony, fear, fascination. So I wanted to know about Varick’s Sunday life, did I. We spend the years of raising children for this, for them to invent fresh ways to break their young necks?

  At about McCoy’s dozenth MURRRAWWWW, Varick continued left while the steer adjourned right.

  “That was fifty-one seconds!” Pat Egan shouted out as Varick alit in the corral earth.

  His words still were in the air when Dode dashed beside the steer to grab the halter rope. As he reached down for it, the animal trotted slightly faster, just enough to keep the rope out of reach. Dode speeded up. McCoy speeded up even more, circling the corral now at a sustained pace that a trotting horse would have envied. As the seconds ticked by in this round race between Dode and McCoy, it became clear what they used for brains in Fort Benton. Before the considerable problem of climbing onto McCoy and staying on, there was going to be the trickier problem of catching him each time.

  Varick by now had scrambled to his feet and joined the chase. “I’ll cut across behind the sonofabitch, you run him around to me,” Dode strategized in a panting yell.

  He started his veer behind McCoy. Sudden as a clock mechanism reaching the hour, McCoy halted in his tracks and delivered a flashing kick that missed Dode by the width of
a fiddlestring.

  But while McCoy was trying to send his would-be hazer into the middle of next week, Varick managed to lay hands on the halter rope and hold the steer long enough for Dode to gain control of the halter. Time sped as Dode desperately hugged McCoy by the head and Varick remounted, then the writhing contest was on again. The steer bounced around the arena always in the same direction, with the same crazy seesaw motion, and I thought Varick was beginning to look a bit woozy. Then MURRRAWWWW again and my son flew into the dirt another time.

  “Another forty-six seconds!” shouted Pat. “That’s five and a half minutes,” chimed the Fort Bentonian. Away went McCoy, away went the puffing Dode after him, in a repeat race until Varick managed to mount again and the bucking resumed.

  They rampaged that way, McCoy and McCaskill, through three further exchanges, man onto steer, steer out from under man. Each time, Varick’s tenancy atop McCoy was briefer; but each time added preciously toward the three minute total of riding, too.

  Now McCoy sent Varick cloudchasing again, and I half-hoped my stubborn son would find enough sense to give up the combat, half-wished his heavy plummet into the arena would conk him hard enough that he had to quit. But no, never. Varick was one long streak of corral dust, but he was onto his feet again, more or less. Gasping as if he’d been running steadily in tandem with McCoy ever since their bout began, he cast a bleary look around for his adversary. Over by the corral gate Dode Withrow had McCoy by the halter again, snugging the animal while urging Varick: “Now we got the sonofabitch, Mac! One more time!”

  The steer casually studied young Withrow, then tossed his head and slung Dode tip over teakettle into the expanse of fresh green still-almost-liquid manure he had deposited just before the riding match commenced. The dazzling corduroy trousers and most other fabric on Dode abruptly changed color. While he slid and sloshed, the steer started away as if bored. But Varick had wobbled close enough to grab the halter rope as it flew from Dode, and now somehow he was putting himself aboard McCoy again.