Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  The steer shook him mightily, but whatever wild rhythm McCoy was cavorting to, Varick also had found. The clamped pair of them, creature and rider, MURRRAWWWW and gritting silence, shot around the corral in a steady circle, if up-and-down isn’t counted. Varick grasped the halter rope as if it was the hawser to life. McCoy quit circling and simply spun in his tracks like a dog chasing its tail. Varick’s face came-went, came-went . . .

  “Time!” yelled Pat Egan. “That’s three minutes’ worth! And still half a minute to the limit!”

  “Whoa, McCoy,” the Fort Benton man called out sourly. At once the steer froze, so abruptly that Varick pitched ahead into its neck. With a great gulp of air, Varick lowered himself from McCoy’s back, held out the halter rope and dropped it.

  Blearily my son located the figure, manure-sopped but grinning, of young Withrow.

  “Dode,” Varick called out, “you’re awful hard on a pair of pants.”

  1918

  * * *

  It is now one year, a year with blood on it, since America entered the war in Europe. Any day now, the millionth soldier of the American Expeditionary Force will set foot into France. Nothing would be less surprising, given the quantities of young men of Montana who have lately gone into uniform, than if that doughboy who follows the 999,999 before him in the line of march into the trenches should prove to be from Butte or from Hardin, from Plentywood or from Whitefish—or from here in our own Two Medicine country. We can but pray that on some future day of significance, a Pasteur or a Reed or a Gorgas will find the remedy to the evil malady of war.

  —GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, APRIL 11, 1918

  “AS SURE as thunder falls into the earth and becomes stone,” cried the king the next morning, “I am struck dumb by what you are saying, Remembrancer! You can stand there in truth’s boots and say time will flee from us no matter what we do? The sparks as they flew upward from the fireplace last evening were not adding themselves into the stars? The whipperwhee of the night bird did not fix itself into the dark as reliably as an echo? The entire night that has just passed is, umm, past? Where’s the sense in all this remembering business, then?”

  “Those things yet exist, sire. But in us now, not in the moments that birthed them.”

  “If that is so, we’ll soon overflow! Puddles of memory will follow us everywhere like shadows! Think of it all, Remembrancer! The calm of a pond lazing as it awaits the wink of a skipping stone. The taste of green when we thumb a summer pea from its pod. The icicle needles of winter. The kited fire of each sunrise. How can our poor heads hold the least little of all there is to remember? Tell me that, whoever can.”

  “Let’s stop there for today, Billy, thank you the world,” I called out from my perch at the rear of the classroom to the boy so earnestly reading aloud at my big desk.

  Blinking regretfully behind his round eyeglasses, like a small owl coming out of beloved night into day, Billy Reinking put the place marker carefully into the book of stories and took his seat among my other pupils. “Now tomorrow,” I instructed the assortment of craniums in front of me, “I want your own poor heads absolutely running over with arithmetic when you walk into this schoolhouse, please.” Then out they went, to their saddle horses or their shoeworn paths, Thorkelsons and Keevers and Toskis and the wan Hebner girl and the bright Reinking boy to their ’steader families in the south benchlands, the Van Bebber and Hahn girls up the South Fork, the Busby brothers and the new generation of Roziers and the Finletter boy down the main creek.

  After watching them scatter like tumbleweeds, I picked my own route through the April mud to my new mount, a lively bay mare named Jeannette. Scorpion I’d had to put out to pasture, he was so full of years by now. I felt a little that way myself—the years part, not the pastured one—as I thought of the lambing shed duties waiting for me before and after supper. Of Rob, scowling or worse, telling me in fewest words which of the ewes were adamant against suckling their newborn and needed to be upended so their lambs could dine. I would like to see the color of the man’s hair who could look forward to ending his day with stubborn ewes to wrestle and Rob Barclay as well.

  Prancy Jeannette and I entered the wind as soon as we rounded the base of the knob hill and were in the valley of the North Fork, but it was not much as Montana breezes go. Reassuring, in a way. The waft felt as if it was loyally April and spring, not a chilly leftover of winter. My mood went up for the next minutes, until I rode past the Duffs’, where Ninian was moving a bunch of ten-day lambs and their mamas up the flank of Breed Butte onto new grass. Across the distance I gave him a wave, and like a narrow old tree with one warped branch Ninian half-lifted an arm briefly in return and let it drop.

  I rode on up the North Fork, in the mix of fury and sorrow that the sight of Ninian stirred in me. Scotch Heaven now had its first dead soldier, Ninian and Flora’s son Samuel. Long-boned boy fascinated with airplanes and wireless. Little brother of the immortal Susan. Heir to all that Ninian and Flora had built here in the North Fork the past thirty years. Corpse in the bloody mud of France. A life bright against the dark/but death loves a shining mark. Samuel was our first casualty but inevitably not our last. Suddenly every male in Montana between milkteeth and storeteeth seemed to have gone to the war. Was it happening this drastically in all of America? A nation of only children and geezers now? Why wouldn’t Europe sink under the Yankee weight if our every soldier-age man was arriving over there? Of my own generation, only Allan Frew was young enough to enlist, and he of course figured on settling the war by himself. But our sons, our neighbors, boy upon boy upon boy who had been pupils of mine, were away now to the war. Maybe that was my yearfull feeling, the sense of being beyond in age whatever was happening to those who were in the war. Yet, truthfully, who of us were not in it? Here at our homestead that I was riding into sight of, Adair would be in her quiet worry for Private Varick A. McCaskill of Company C, 361st Regiment, 181st Brigade, 91st Division, in training at Camp Lewis in the state of Washington. And Anna, invisible but ever there, on the other side of Breed Butte from me Anna was doubtless riding home now from the Noon Creek school just as I was from mine, maybe with her own thoughts of pupils who already were in the trenches of France but definitely with the knowledge that her own son Peter was destined into uniform, too, if the war went into another year. Like the inescapable smoke of the summer of 1910, the war was reaching over the horizon to find each of us.

  • • •

  “Hello, you,” I gave to Adair as spiritedly as I could when I came up from the lambing shed to supper.

  She knew my mood, though. She somehow seemed to, these days. The winter just past was the first that Adair and I had spent together since Varick turned his face from me. The first, too, of trying to live up to this horn-locked partnership with Rob. To my surprise, when he and I had begun feeding hay to the sheep, she insisted on getting into her heavy clothes and coming with us. I can drive the sled team for you, she said, and did. Of course the reason was plain enough. She was putting herself between the slander Rob and I could break into at the least provocation. And it had worked. Seeing her there at the front of the hayrack, small bundled figure with the reins in her hand, seemed to tell both her brother and me that we may as well face the fact of her determination and plod on through this sheep partnership. At least that was my conclusion. I could never speak for Rob these days. By midway through the winter I was able to tell Adair she could abstain from her teamstering. Rob and I are never going to be a duet, but we can stand each other for that long each day. She scrutinized me, then nodded. But you’ll let me know if you need me again? I hoped it would never be again that I needed her between myself and Rob, but I answered, Dair, I’ll let you know. I most definitely will.

  “How many today?” Adair asked as she began putting supper on the table.

  “Forty,” I gave the report of the day’s birth of lambs.

  She gave me a smile. “I’m just as glad you didn’t bring them all in for the oven at once.” I h
ad to laugh, but I was still hearing her how many? question. This was the first lambing time Adair had ever asked that, night after night, the first time she had shown interest in the pride and joy of any shedman, his daily tally of new lambs. A new ritual, was this. Well, I would take it. Anything that emphasized life, I would gladly take.

  • • •

  At the end of May came our news of where Varick would be sent next by the army.

  It’s going to look just a whole lot like where I’ve been, he wrote in the brief letter to Adair. Maybe because it’s the same place.

  He was staying stationed at Camp Lewis, he explained, in a headquarters company. They think they found something I can do, without me jeopardizing the entire rest of the army, so for now they’re going to keep me here to do it. So here I stay, for who knows how long. I sure as h——don’t, and I think maybe the army doesn’t either.

  As they did each time, Varick’s words on the paper brought back the few that had passed between him and me before he went off to the army. He had ridden into the yard just after I had come home from the school. I stepped out of the house to meet him. He dismounted and said only, I came to see Mother.

  Unless you close your eyes quick, you’ll see me, too, I tried.

  No grin at all from him. Well, that could be because of the war rather than just me. But for three years it hadn’t been.

  Your mother’s out at the root cellar, I informed him. But I couldn’t stand this. Since time out of mind, Varick was the first McCaskill to wear the clothes of war. A ticket of freedom had let my great-grandfather shape the blocks of stone at the Bell Rock rather than face the armies of Napoleon. Neither my Nethermuir grandfather nor my deaf father were touched by uniform, nor was I. Which led inexorably to the thought that Varick was bearing the accumulated danger for us all.

  Varick. Son. Can’t we drop this long enough to say goodbye? Who knows when—if, I thought—I’ll see you again.

  Sure, we can say that much. And that was going to be all, was it. Varick held no notion that this could be our last occasion. He was at that priceless age where he thought he was unkillable. He drew a breath, this man suddenly taller than I was, and came to me and thrust out his hand. Goodbye then.

  Goodbye, Varick. Your mother . . . and I . . . you’ll be missed every moment.

  I saw him swallow, and then he went off around the house to the root cellar. I felt my eyes begin to stream, tears that have been flowing since the first man painted blue fought the first man painted green and still have not washed away war.

  Now Adair was putting Varick’s letter in the top drawer of the sideboard with his others. Without turning, she asked, “And which do we hope for now, Angus? That they keep him and keep him in that camp, or that they ship him to France?”

  I knew what was in her mind, for it was abruptly and terribly at the very front of mine as well. The army camps were becoming pestholes of influenza. Generally that was not something to die of, but people were dying of it in those camps. We had heard that the oldest son of the Florians, a ’steader family south of Gros Ventre, was already buried at a camp in Iowa before his parents even had word that he was ill. And now there in the midst of it at Camp Lewis was going to be our son, the child who came down with something in even the mildest of winters; Varick would be a waiting candidate for influenza as the months of this year advanced. But to wish him into the shrapnel hell of the fighting in France, no, I never could. Twin hells, then, and our son the soldier being gambled at their portals.

  • • •

  In earliest June, Rob and I met to cut the cards for a shearing time. This year mine was the low card, contradictory winner in Adair’s order of things, and so we would shear later in the month, when I thought the weather was surest. Rob looked as sour as usual at losing, but before I could turn away to leave, he broke out with: “Any word from the Coast lately?”

  By that he meant the Pacific Coast and Camp Lewis and Varick, and I stood and studied him a moment. We would never give each other the satisfaction of saying so, but he and I at last did have one thing we agreed on, the putrid taste of the war. They’re rabid dogs fighting in a sack, England and Germany and France and all of them, I had heard him declare in disgust to Adair. Why’re we jumping in it with them? Yet I knew, too, that the war’s high prices for wool and lambs were the one merit he found in this partnership of ours. Well, nobody ever said Rob Barclay was too insubstantial to carry contradictions.

  “Nothing new,” I said shortly, and turned from him.

  • • •

  In the Fourth of July issue of the Gleaner was published the Two Medicine country’s loss list thus far in the war.

  THE MEN WHO GAVE ALL

  Adams, Theodore, killed in action at Cantigny.

  Almon, John, fought in the taking of Boureches, died of wounds.

  Duff, Samuel, killed by a high explosive shell in the Seicheprey sector.

  Florian, Harold, contracted influenza and died at Camp Dodge, Iowa.

  Jebson, Michael, while returning from a furlough, was killed in a train wreck between Paris and Brest.

  McCaul, George, saw service in France, taken ill with influenza, died in hospital of lobar pneumonia.

  Ridpath, Jacob, killed in action at Château-Thierry.

  Strong Runner, Stephen, entered the service at Salem Indian Training School in Oregon, died of tuberculosis at the Letterman General Hospital, San Francisco.

  Zachary, Richard, killed in action at Belleau Wood.

  A hot noon in the third week of August, the set of days that are summer’s summer. I had my face all but into the washbasin, gratefully swashing off the sweat of my morning’s work with cupped handfuls of cool well water, when Adair’s hand alighting on my back startled me.

  “Angus,” she uttered quietly, “look outside. It’s Rob coming. And Davie.”

  The first of those was supposed to be taking his turn at camptending our herder with the sheep up in the mountains, and the other was that herder. They could not possibly both be here, because that would leave the sheep abandoned and—yet out the west window, here they both came, slowly riding.

  I still was mopping myself with the towel as I flung out to see what this was, Adair right after me. At the sight of us, Rob spurred his horse ahead of the lagging Davie and dismounted in a hurry almost atop Adair and myself.

  “Davie’s come down ill,” he reported edgily. “I didn’t know what the hell else to do but bring him out with me. It’s all he can do to sit on that horse.” Rob looked fairly done in himself, showing the strain of what he’d had to do. His voice was rough as a rasp as he went on: “Davie has to be taken on home to Donald and Jen, but one of us has got to get up there to those sheep, sharp. Do we cut to see who goes?”

  “No, I’ll go up. You tend to Davie.” I stood planted in front of Rob, waiting for what he would be forced to tell me next.

  “The sheep are somewhere out north of Davie’s wagon, a mile or so more. I threw them into the biggest open patch of grass I could.” He told it without quite managing to look at me. If you ever wanted to see a man cause agony in himself, here he was. Leaving a band of sheep to its own perils went against everything in either of us. I could all but see the images of cliff, storm, bear, mountain lions, coyotes, stampeding in Rob’s eyes; and for a savage moment I was glad it was him and not me who’d had to abandon that band to bring Davie.

  I went over to the sagging scarecrow on the horse behind Rob’s. “Davie, lad, you’re a bit under the weather, I hear.”

  His feverish face had a dull stricken look that unnerved me more than had his bloody battered one beneath the horse’s hooves, the day of that distant spring when Adair and I jolted across the Erskine field to him; that day. Now Davie managed in a ragged near-whisper, “Couldn’t . . . leave the . . . sheep.”

  “I’m going up to them this minute. The sheep will be all right, Davie, and so will you.” If saying would only make either of those true.

  As Rob and his medical burde
n started down the valley toward Davie’s parents’ place, I headed for the barn to saddle the bay mare. I hadn’t gone three steps when I heard: “Angus. I’m coming with you.”

  I turned to my wife, to the gray eyes and auburn ringlets that had posed me so many puzzles in our years together. “You don’t have to, Dair. I’ll only be a day or so, until Rob can fetch another herder up.”

  “I’m coming anyway.”

  I hesitated between wanting her along and not wanting her to have to face what might be waiting up there, a destroyed band of sheep. The wreck of all our efforts since the reading of Lucas’s will. “The sheep are a hell of a way up onto the mountain, Dair.” I jerked my head to indicate Roman Reef standing bright in the sun, its cliffs the color of weathered bone. “It’s a considerable ride.”

  “Adair knows how to ride, doesn’t she.”

  True. But true enough? The saddle hours it would take to climb Roman Reef, through the sun blaze of the afternoon heat, to the grim search for adrift sheep—I recited the reasons against her coming, then asked: “Do you still want to?”

  I swear she said this, as if the past twenty-one years of her avoidance of the Two Medicine country’s mountainline were unceremoniously null and void. She said, “Of course I want to.”

  • • •

  All afternoon Adair and I went steadily up and up, not hurrying our saddlehorses but keeping them steady at the pace just short of hurry. At midpoint of the afternoon we were halfway up Roman Reef, the valley of the North Fork below and behind us, Scotch Heaven’s log-built homesteads becoming dark square dots in the distance. Our own buildings looked as work-stained as any. Then a bend of the trail turned us north, and the valley there was Noon Creek’s, with the Reese ranch in easy sight now. Easy sight to where Anna was. Anyone but me would not have known the years and years of distance between.