Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  Varick swung down from the borrowed horse. Reins at the ready to tie to the haystack fence, he called up to me: “Can you stand a hand with that hay?”

  “Always,” I said.

  • • •

  When the sheep were fed and Rob went off alone and silent to Breed Butte, Varick rode home with me on the hay sled, his horse tied behind, and we talked of the wonderful mild winter, of his train journey from Seattle to Browning with his discharge paper in his pocket, of much and of nothing, simply making the words bridge the air between us. I am well beyond the age to think all things are possible. I had been ever since Anna’s name on the death list in the Gleaner. But going home, that first day of the year, my son beside me unexpected as a griffin, I would have told you there is as much possibility in life as not.

  As the crunching sounds of our sled and the team’s hooves halted at the barn, Varick cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted toward the house:

  “MOTHER! YOUR COOKING IS BETTER THAN THE ARMY’S!”

  Adair flew out and came through the snow of the yard as if it wasn’t there. She hugged the tall figure, saying not a word, not crying, not laughing, simply holding and holding.

  Ultimately Varick said down to the head of auburn ringlets, “You better get in out of the weather. We’ll be right along, as soon as I help this geezer unharness the horses.”

  Amid that barn chore, Varick’s voice came casual above the rattle and creak of the harnesses we were lifting off. “I hear we just about lost you.”

  “As near to it as I care to come.” I hung my set of harness on its peg. When my throat would let me, I said the next painful words: “Others didn’t have my luck.”

  “Dad, I heard about Mrs. Reese.” Varick stood with his armful of harness, facing me. His eyes were steady into mine. They held no apology, no attempt at reparation for the years he had held himself away from me; but they conceded that those years were ended now. The Varick facing me here knew something of the storm countries of the mind, latitudes of life and loss. Now he said with simple sympathy: “It must be tough on you.”

  “It is,” I answered my son. “Let’s go in the house to your mother.”

  • • •

  At long last now, Varick’s life took its place within comfortable distance of mine and his mother’s. Stanley Meixell provided him work and wage at the ranger station through the next few months of that shortest and mildest of winters, then in calving time the job of association rider for the Noon Creek cattlemen came to him.

  “I don’t remember raising a cow herder,” I twitted Adair. “He must be yours.”

  “And I don’t remember doing him by myself,” she gave me back, with a lift of her chin and a sudden smile.

  The other climate kept getting warmer, too. Spring came early and seemed to mean it. By lambing time the last of the snow was gone from even the deepest coulees. Rob and I shed our overshoes a good three weeks earlier than usual, and the nights of March and on into April stayed so mild that Adair did not even have to have lamb guests in her oven.

  So if I was never far from the fact that Anna was gone, that fact which stood like a stone above all tides, at least now I had the shelter of Varick and Adair. What I did not have, as spring hurried its way toward the summer of 1919, was any lessening of Rob.

  At first I figured it was simply a case of seasonal bachelorhood. Now that their girls were grown and gone, Rob had installed Judith and himself in a house in Gros Ventre—or quite possibly Judith in her quiet way had done the installing—and so during the feeding time of winter and the start of lambing, Rob had been staying by himself at the Breed Butte place. With just one more year ahead of us to the fulfillment of Lucas’s will and the sale of the sheep, you’d have thought he would have been gritting hard and putting all his energy into enduring the next dozen months. You’d have been as wrong in that expectation as I was. A day soon after lambing began in mid-March, when I asked him something he at first didn’t answer at all, simply kept on casting glances out the shed door to the valley and the ridges around. Eventually he rounded on me and declared as if lodging a complaint: “There isn’t enough green in this whole goddamn valley this spring to cover a billiard table.”

  Despite his tone, I forbore from answering him that the wan spring wasn’t my fault, that I knew of. “It’s early yet,” I said instead. “There’s still time for the moisture to catch up with the season.”

  But when the rest of March and all of April brought no moisture, I became as uneasy as he was. It ought to have been no bad thing, to have us joined in concern about the scantiness of the grass and the grazing future of the sheep. The air around us could stand a rest from our winter of silent antagonism. But Rob took that spring’s lackings as an affront to him personally.

  “Sweet Jesus!” he burst out in early May when we were forced to throw the sheep back onto a slope of Breed Butte they had already eaten across once, “what’s a man supposed to do, pack a lunch for fifteen hundred sheep?”

  Before thinking, I said to him the reassurance I had been trying on myself day after day. “Maybe we’ll get it yet.”

  It. A cold damp blanket of it, heavy as bread dough. It had happened before; more than a few times we had known mid-May snowfalls to fill this valley above our shoe tops. Normally snow was not a thing Scotch Heaven had to yearn for, but we wildly wanted it now, one of May’s fat wet snowstorms, a grass bringer. Let that soak the ground for a week, then every so often bestow a slow easy rain, the kind that truly does some good, and the Two country’s summer could be salvaged.

  Not even so much as a dour retort from Rob. He simply sicced the dog after a lagging bunch of ewes and their lambs and whooped the rest of the sheep along. I swung another look to the mountains, the clear sky above them. What was needed had to begin up there. No sign of it yet.

  • • •

  On through the moistureless remainder of May, I wanted not to believe the mounting evidence of drought. But the dry proof was everywhere around. Already the snowpack was gone from the mountains, the peaks bare. Hay meadows were thin and wan. The worst absence, among all that the drought weather was withholding from the usual course of spring, was of sound from the North Fork. The rippling runoff of high water from the mountains was not heard that May.

  The creek’s stillness foretold the kind of summer that arrived to us. With June the weather turned immediately hot and stayed that way.

  The summer of 1918 had been dry. This one of 1919 was parched.

  • • •

  “Fellows, I hate like all hell to do it,” Stanley Meixell delivered the edict to Rob and me when we trailed the sheep up onto our national forest allotment. “But in green years when the country could stand it I let you bend the grazing rules a little, and now that it’s a lean year we got to go the other way. I like to think it all evens out in the end.”

  Rob looked as if he’d been poked in a private place. I did a moment of breath catching, myself. What the forest ranger was newly rigorous about was the policy of moving our band of sheep onto a new area of the scant grass every day. Definitely moving them, not letting them graze at all in the previous day’s neighborhood.

  “We can’t fatten sheep by parading them all over the mountains every day!” Rob objected furiously. “What you’re asking is damn near the same as not letting them touch the grass at all. So what in the goddamn hell are we supposed to do, have these sheep eat each other?”

  “It’s a thought,” Stanley responded, looking at Rob as if in genial agreement. “Lamb chops ought to taste better to them than grass as poor as this.”

  “Just tell me a thing, Meixell,” Rob demanded. “If we can’t use this forest for full grazing now when we most need it, then what is it you’re saving it for?”

  “The idea is to keep the forest a forest. Insofar as I can let you run sheep on it—or Wampus Cat Williamson or the Noon Creek Association run cattle on it—I do. But I think I maybe told you somewhere before along the line, my job is to not let an
y of you wear it out.”

  “Wear it out?” burst from Rob. “A forest as far as a person can see?”

  “It all depends,” answered the ranger, “how far you’re looking.”

  • • •

  What do you do when the land itself falls ill with fever?

  Throughout that summer in Scotch Heaven and the rest of the Two country, each day and every day the heat would build all morning until by noon you could feel it inside your eyes—the wanting to squint, to save the eyeballs from drying as if they were pebbles. And the blaze of the sun on your cheekbones, too, as if you were standing too near a stove. Most disquieting of all, the feel of the heat in your lungs. Not even in the fire summer of 1910 had there been this, the day’s angry hotness coming right into you with every breath.

  Then after the worst of the heat each day, the sky brought the same disappointment. Clouds, but never rain. Evenings of July, as sundown neared, the entire sky over the mountains would fill with thick gray clouds. While the clouds came over us they swirled into vast wild whorls, as if slowly boiling. Then there would be frail rainlike fringes down from the distant edges of the cloud mass; if those ever reached the ground, it was not in the valley of the North Fork or anywhere else near. Ghost showers.

  The first to be defeated by the hot brunt of the summer were the ’steaders. With no rain, their dry-land grain withered day by day. The high prices of the war were gone now, too; last year’s $2-a-bushel wheat abruptly was $1-a-bushel or less. By the first of August, the wagons of the ’steaders and their belongings were beginning to come out of the south benchlands. The Thorkelsons were somehow managing to stay, and to my surprise, the Hebners; but then there was so little evidence of how the Hebners made a living that hard times barely applied to them. The others, though, were evacuating. The Keevers, family and furniture. A wagonload of the Toskis. Billy Reinking rode down to return the copy of Kidnapped I had lent him and reported that his family was moving into Gros Ventre, his father was taking a job as printer at the Gleaner office.

  I watched the wheel tracks of the ’steaders now undoing the wheel tracks from when I had marked off their homestead claims. And I watched Rob for any sign that he regretted the land locating we had done. I saw none in him, but by now I knew you do not glimpse so readily into a person.

  • • •

  It was midsummer when I rode up onto Roman Reef on a camptending trip and heard a dog giving something a working-over. The barking was not in the direction of our herder and sheep, but farther north; unless I missed my guess, somewhere in the allotment of the Noon Creek cattle. At the next trail branch in that direction, I left the pack horse tied to a pine tree and rode toward the commotion.

  I met the red-brown file of Double W cattle first, lolloping down the mountainside. Then the dog who was giving close attention to their heels. Then the roan horse with Varick in its saddle.

  My son grinned and lifted a hand when he saw me. “That’s enough, Pooch,” he called to the dog.

  “That’s not very charitable of you,” I observed as I rode up and stopped next to Varick. “All Warren Williamson wants is your grass as well as his.”

  “We go through this about once a week, Dad,” he told me with a laugh. “Wampus Cat sends somebody up to sneak as many cattle as he can here onto the Association’s allotment. As soon as I find them, I dog them back down the countryside onto his allotment. Those cows are going to have a lot of miles on them before the summer’s over.”

  Watching the last tail-switching rumps disappear into the forest, I was doubly pleased—at the thought of Wampus Cat Williamson having to contend with a new generation who pushed back as quick as he pushed, and at this impromptu chance to visit with Varick. “Other than having the Double W for a neighbor, how is cow life?”

  “About as good as can be expected.” Varick’s tone was a good deal more cheerful than the words. In fact, he looked as if this was high summer in Eden instead of stone-dry Montana. He lost no time in letting me know why.

  “Dad, there’s something you better know about. I’m going to marry Beth Reese.”

  Everything in me went still, as if a great wind had stopped, gathering itself to hurl again. Across the plain of my mind the girl—almost woman—Lisabeth looking at me in that steady gauging way, the Two Medicine morning. Knowing there had been something between her mother and me, something, but having no way to know that from my direction it was deepest love. Maybe worse if she did know, if she had asked Anna, for Anna would have told her it all. That springtime pairing, Anna and I, that had come unclasped. And now the two resemblances of us, about to clasp?

  I managed to say to Varick: “Are you. When’s all this to happen?”

  He grinned. “She doesn’t quite know it yet.”

  I stared at this son of mine. Doesn’t any generation ever learn the least scrap about life from the—

  “Don’t give me that look,” Varick said. “Beth and I aren’t you and—her mother. All this got started at a dance last spring when we kind of noticed each other. I didn’t know what the hell else to do, so I just outright tried her on that. Told her that I hoped whatever she thought of me it was on my own account, not anything that had to do with our families. She told me right back she was born with a head with her own mind in it, so there was no reason why she couldn’t make her own decisions. You know how she has that Sunday voice when she gets going.” Like Anna. “Christamighty,” Varick shook his head, “I even love that voice of hers.”

  • • •

  Varick won where I had not. Beth said yes to his proposal, they were to be married that autumn after shipping time. Alongside my gladness for the two of them was my ache where Anna had been. Solve that, Solomon. How do you do away with a pang for what you have missed in life, even as you see it attained by your son?

  If you are me you don’t do away with it, you only shove it deeper into the satchel of that summer’s hard thoughts. The latest worry was waiting for me in the hay meadows beside the trickle of the North Fork. I knew this was the thinnest hay crop I’d ever had, but until I began mowing it there was no knowing how utterly paltry it was. This was hay that was worth cutting only because it was better to have little than none. I could cover the width of each windrow with my hat.

  I stood there with the sweat of that summer on me, dripping like a fish, and made myself look around at it all. The ridges rimming the valley, the longsail slopes of Breed Butte, the humped foothills beneath the mountains, anywhere that there should have been the tawny health of grass was instead simply faded, sickly-looking. The stone colonnades of the mountains stood out as dry as ancient bones. There was a pale shine around the horizon, more silvery than the deeper blue of the sky overhead. The silver of heat, today as every other day.

  But the sight that counted was the one I was avoiding looking down at, until at last I had to again. The verdict was written in those thin skeins of dry stalks that were purportedly hay. Now the summer, the drought, had won. Now there was a yes I absolutely had to get.

  When I came into the house for supper at the end of that first day of cutting hay, Adair looked drained. Cooking over a hot stove on such a day would boil the spirit out of anybody, I supposed. I took a first forkful of sidepork, then put it back down. I had to say what I had seen in the scantiness of the hayfield.

  “Dair, Lucas’s sheep. We’ve got to sell them this fall.”

  “The lambs, you mean. But we always—”

  “I mean them all. The ewes too, the whole band.”

  She regarded me patiently. “You know I don’t want us to.”

  “This isn’t that. This time I don’t mean because of Rob and me. I can go on with it for as long as he can and a minute longer, you know that. No, it’s the sheep themselves. There’s just not enough hay to carry them through the winter. We won’t get half enough off our meadows. We can buy whatever we can find, but there isn’t any hay to speak of, anywhere, this summer.” She still looked at me that same patient way. “Dair, we dasn’t
go into winter this way. That band of sheep can’t make it through on what little feed we’re going to have, unless we teach them to eat air.”

  “Not even if it’s an open winter?”

  “If it’s the most open winter there ever was and we only had to feed the least bit of hay, maybe, they might.”

  “Last winter was an open one, Angus.”

  “That was once, Dair. Do you really want to bet Lucas’s sheep on it happening twice in a row?”

  She studied her plate, and then gave me her grave gray-eyed look. “Those sheep will die?”

  “Dair, they will. A whole hell of a bunch of them, if not all. They and the lambs in them. We’ve never had so poor a grass summer, the band isn’t going to be as strong as it ought to be by fall. And you know what winter can be in this country. I realize this is sudden, but I figured if I pointed it out to you now we’d still have time to get out of this sheep situation with our skins on. All I ask is that you start thinking this over and—”

  “I don’t need to,” she answered. “Sell the sheep, Angus.”

  • • •

  “Sell the sheep now?” Rob repeated in disbelief. “Man, did you and Adair check your pillows this morning, to see whether your brains leaked out during the night?”

  He may have been right. Certainly I felt airheaded at this reaction of his to my news of Adair’s willingness to sell. This person in front of me, Robert Burns Barclay as far as the eye could attest, from the first minute in the lawyer’s office had been the one for selling Lucas’s sheep, and now—

  “There’s not money to be made by selling while prices are as low as they are,” he was saying to me contemptuously. “A babe coming out of his mother could tell you that. No, we’re not selling.”