by Ivan Doig
Where had this Rob come from, out of the years? Watching him at this kind of behavior, I couldn’t help but remember another Rob, of another spring, of another hard time. A lambing time, back in the years of ’93. It had been one of those days to wonder why I didn’t just walk away from the sheep business and join other certified lunatics in the asylum. The bunch herder we’d hired had lost thirty lambs in the past ten days, and another five had died on him that day. At that rate, by shipping time Rob and I were going to need to buy him a total new supply of lambs if we wanted to have any lambs to ship.
We’ve got to send this geezer down the road, I had said to Rob that remembered day.
I know, I know, he agreed glumly. The man is a mortal enemy to sheep. I’ll take the band while you trundle him to town, why not. Hire the nearest breathing body in the Medicine Lodge, McAngus. You can’t do any worse than we did with this disgrace to the race.
What if the nearest is Lucas? We both had to laugh.
Then the sheep would hear in a hurry what’s expected of them, Rob vouched. Lads and lasses, his voice so very like Lucas’s, that’s pure wonderful grass you’re walking around on, so I want to see your noses down in it, ay? Do you know how much money you’re costing me by your silly habit of dying? So let’s have no more of that, you woollies, and we’ll all get along together grand.
As I had gone off, still laughing, I stopped to call back: Rob, do you ever wonder if we’re in the right line of work?
His cocked head, his bright face. There’s an occasional minute when I don’t, McAngus.
In those times I would have walked into fire for Rob, and he for me. Yet that was the Rob who eventually cost me Varick, those years after the Two Medicine. Yet again, that was the Rob who had gained me Adair, all but brought her with frosting and candles on. Done that, and then put a boot through my family because of Anna. Where was the set of weights to measure such things; where was balance when you tried to align the different Robs. If they were different ones.
Going home that day, I heard another clap of Rob’s Winchester thunder. He wasn’t getting much done in life except trying to ambush coyotes. The man had me worried.
• • •
I had some downright dread the next morning. I knew this was the day we were going to have to move the sheep to a new and higher feedground, the chinook having made a soggy mess of where we had been feeding them in my hay meadow. In other times it would have been a task as automatic and easy as scratching an ear, but I could already hear Rob in full bay about having to work the sheep to a fresh site. Then, too, there was the small chore of liberating Scorpion out onto the coming grass, and Rob had already made himself known on the topic of the old horse and his menu.
And so I asked Adair. “What about coming with us today?”
“You want me to, do you?”
I smiled to the extent I could. “It can’t hurt, and it might help.”
“All right then,” she agreed readily. “I’d better come see spring while it’s still here, hadn’t I.”
“Then why don’t you ride Scorpion out and we’ll turn him loose to graze up there where the sheep are going to be—he and the woollies will be some company for each other, that way. I’ll saddle him for you, all right?”
“No,” she informed me. “I’ve known how to saddle a horse ever since five minutes after I married you. You get your old workhorses ready, Scorpion and I will take care of ourselves.”
A good sight to see, Adair atop Scorpion as the pair of them accompanied alongside the hay sled and myself. If she pressed me to the hilt, I would have had to say that the day’s most enchanting vision was the rivulets of melt running from beneath every snowdrift we passed. Glorious, the making of mud where winter had stood. But definitely this wife of mine and the tall brown horse, elderly and stiff as he was, made the second finest scene today.
Try tell that or anything else to Rob, though.
“What’s this, a mounted escort for us on our way to the poorhouse?” he met us with at the haystack.
Degraded as that was, it seemed to be the top of his mood this day. I told him shortly that Scorpion was on his way out to pasture, which drew only Rob’s scornful study of the elderly horse. At least he didn’t start a recapitulation of how mawkish I was in keeping Scorpion among the living. But then as soon as I suggested that we needed to move the sheep from the muddy feedground in my meadow, the Rob response to that was hundred-proof sarcasm.
“So that hay can be grown to be fed to sheep that are worth less than the hay, do you mean? That definitely sounds like the McCaskill high road to wealth, I can be the first to vouch.”
“Rob, there’s no sense in being owly about a little thing like this. Christ, man, we always put the sheep onto a fresh feedground after a chinook. You know that as well as I do.” Or you would if you’d let your Barclay mind rule your Barclay mouth, for a change. “They can at least get a little grass into them if we move them onto the butte there,” I went on, indicating with a nod the slope beside his reservoir, where broad swathes of ground showed themselves amid the melting patches of snow. The earthwork of the reservoir itself was already clear of snow, a chocolate pocket on the mottled slope of Breed Butte.
“Put the bastards up the backside of the moon, for all I care,” Rob grumped next, and turned his back on me. He climbed onto the hay rack and hung his rifle by its sling onto the upright. “Let’s get this damn feeding done,” was his next impatient pronouncement.
Adair’s gaze seemed to silence him after that, at least during our effort of loading the hay onto the sled rack. When we were done and standing there puffing, she announced she would drive the team for us now rather than ride Scorpion up the slope. “Adair needs the practice,” she stated. Scorpion could follow, his reins tied to the back of the hay rack as they were; no problem to that. The problem anywhere in the vicinity went by the name of Rob, and I knew as well as Adair that the true need for her to be on the sled was to stay between her brother and me when he was this sulphurous.
The sheep were curious about the sled going up the slope instead of toward the meadow and them. Prrrrr prrrrr, I purled as loudly as I could, and the bellwether Percy and the first few ewes began to get the idea and started toward the slope.
The siege of winter was withdrawing but not yet gone. Gray snowdrifts still clutched the treeline of Breed Butte and any swale of the broad slope. The entire country looked tattered and hungry. Up here above the still-white valley our sled runners were passing across as much muddy ground as they were snow, and in those bare damp patches the sickly grass from last year lay crushed, flattened by the burden of a hundred and fifty days of winter. Yet under the old clots of stems there was a faint almost-green blush, even today, after just this half-week of chinook and thaw, that said new grass was making its intentions known.
“Where to, gentlemen?” Adair called back to us from her position at the team’s reins.
I asked Rob, “What do you think, maybe here?”
He said acidly, “It’s the same muck everywhere, so this is as good as any.”
He was going to be thoroughly that way today, was he. Then the thing to do was to get this hay flung off the sled and the sheep up here onto their new venue and be done with the man and his red mood. That curative for today—tomorrow would have to contrive its own Rob remedy as needed—could begin just as soon as Scorpion was turned loose out of the path of the hay, and so I climbed swiftly down to take his saddle and bridle off. I was untying Scorpion’s reins from the back of the hay rack when Rob’s voice slashed above me.
“Angus.”
The first time in years he had used my name. And now it snapped out quick and bitter, as if he wanted to be rid of it.
I swung around to see what this fusillade was going to be.
“Don’t turn that geezer of a horse loose yet,” Rob directed. “I just saw something I need to do with him.”
“What’s that, now?” I said up to him in surprise.
“My
reservoir. This is a chance to tamp it.” There atop the hay, he was gazing in a stony way along the slope to the long narrow mound of the dam and the ice-skinned impoundment behind it. Rob aiming his chin down at the valley and its creek, now and that first time I had watched him do it: By damn, I didn’t come all the miles from one River Street to live down there on another. “The sheep have got to come up here anyway,” he was saying, “the bastards might as well tromp across the dam and do me some good while they’re at it. I’m going to ride old horsemeat here down and start shoving them to the reservoir.”
“Why don’t you wait with that until the next time we move the band,” I tried. “The ground will be drier by then and the tamping will go better.”
“Rob, yes,” Adair interceded. “Angus is right about waiting for another day. Let’s just get on with the feeding.”
That brother of hers shook his head, his gaze still fixed across at the reservoir and its watery gray disc of ice. So far as I could see, winter and spring were knotted together there, ice and slush in the swale behind the dam versus mud on its sides and top; whatever moment of opportunity Rob Barclay thought he was viewing there made no sense whatsoever to me. But then we had made our separate decisions about water, about Breed Butte and the North Fork, a full thirty years ago, so when had we ever seen with the same eyes?
One thing I was determined to enforce: “Scorpion isn’t the best horse for this, after all winter in the barn. You’d be as well off on foot. I’ll walk down with you to the sheep, what about, and the two of us can—”
Rob came down off the hay sled. But I saw he hadn’t come anywhere toward my line of thinking. His face was tight as a drumhide, and I suppose my own was taut enough. His tone was its most scornful yet, as he unloaded the words onto me:
“Pushing the sheep across that dam is a minute’s work, is all. This goddamn horse has been gobbling up hay and doing not one thing to earn it all winter long. And you’d let it be that way.” His helmeted look, his high-and-mighty mood when he wouldn’t hear any words but his own. He gave me a last lash: “Your heart always has been as soft as your head.”
Through it all, he still scanned with determination the reservoir, the sheep, the saddle horse. He would not so much as glance at me. Heart, mind, tongue, and now eyes, the last of Rob that was left to turn from me.
“Rob, Angus,” Adair spoke up from the front of the hay sled where she had been waiting for this to abate. “You know how you’re supposed to settle these things.”
I hated to toss Scorpion to chance one more time. But if that’s what it took . . .
“All right,” I said with disgusted resignation, “we’ll cut the cards for it, then,” and reached into my coat pocket for the well-worn deck. “If I draw the low, Scorpion gets turned loose here and now. If you draw it—”
“No.”
Before I knew it he had Scorpion’s reins out of my hand, snatched into his.
“This horse has been living beyond his time ever since you won that other card cut.” The face in front of me was cocked to one side, atilt with anger and the abrupt spill of declaring it. “He can do this one bit of work, and he’s by Christ going to.” With that, Rob shoved his overshoed foot into the stirrup and swung heavily up onto Scorpion, the horse grunting in surprise at the force of the rider clamping onto him.
I managed to grab hold of Scorpion’s bridle and kept Rob from reining the brown head around as he was trying to do.
“Rob, I’m telling you, once,” I delivered my own cold anger to this situation. “Behave yourself with this horse or I’ll talk to you by hand.”
There was a startled whinny from Scorpion as Rob jammed his heels into him and spun the horse out of my grasp, down the slope toward the approaching straggle of sheep.
“Go operate a pitchfork,” Rob flung back at me without looking. “It’s what you’re good for.”
So we had reached this, had we. Rob storming off, breaking the last of the terms I knew for enduring him. How in the name of anything were we going to survive lambing, shearing, summering the sheep in the national forest, all the steps that needed decision, if the damn man wouldn’t hew to any way of deciding? We had come through the winter and now here was winter coming out of Rob as a white rage.
I climbed onto the back of the hay sled. His coyote rifle hung there on the upright from its sling.
I reached and unslung it, the grip of the wooden stock cold in my hand.
I could feel Adair’s eyes on me.
I met her gaze as I jacked the shells out of the rifle one by one and pocketed them. When I had checked the breech to be thoroughly sure the weapon was empty, I hung the Winchester back where Rob had left it. “Just in case that temper of his doesn’t know where to quit,” I said to Adair.
“I’ll talk to him, Angus,” Adair said. “Let him get today out of his system, and I’ll talk to him.”
“I’m afraid his case is more than today, Dair.”
“We’ll just have to see. Why don’t we get on with the feeding. It’ll bring the sheep up here that much faster if they see the hay.”
She was right. This day and Rob Barclay in it should be sped along, any way possible. I nodded to her to start the team, and began breaking the bales and pitching the dry brown Dakota hay off the sled. I cast glances along the slope as Rob commenced to work the sheep up to the embankment of the reservoir. They were not keen for the scheme. Recalcitrant sheep weren’t going to help his mood at all. I would have to try every way in me to steel myself to let this behavior of Rob’s pass until tomorrow, as Adair was asking of me. Because I knew, as if it was a memory in my fists, that I would pound Rob if I saw him mistreat Scorpion down there. With the rifle empty, he would be able to do nothing but take my beating, if it came to that. I would try not let it come to fists again, but given the mood the damn man was in, the trend wasn’t promising.
I kept a watchful eye on Rob’s doings while I kept at the feeding task. At last the sheep were skittishly filing across the top of the dam, a first few, then several, then many, the avalanche of behavior by which they went through life. Even now that the sheep were crossing the dam in maximum numbers, Rob kept reining Scorpion back and forth impatiently close behind the waiting remainder of the band. Scorpion was performing creakily but gamely, like an octogenarian going through remembered steps on a dance floor. The wind blew, the hay flew, and for a bit I had to take my attention from the escapade at the reservoir to feed some bales off the lee side of the sled.
When I looked again, the last of the sheep were halfway across the dam and Rob was right on top of them with Scorpion, shoving them relentlessly. Half that much commotion would gain him twice the results. There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all, and our Rob was determined to try them all out today, ay, Lucas? By Jesus, I missed Lucas. If he were alive, Rob would not be down there in a major pout, furiously performing the unnecessary and making an overage horse labor like a—
I saw Scorpion make his stumble, then his hindquarters slip off the edge of the embankment toward the reservoir as he tried to find his footing there at the middle of the dam.
Rob did not even attempt to vault off him to safety. Instead he yanked the reins and stood back hard into the stirrups, seeming to want to stiffen the horse back into steadiness with the iron line of his own body. But Scorpion still was not able to scramble back securely onto the muddy rim of the dam. He tottered. There was an instant of waver, as if the horse’s sense of balance was in a contest with his aged muscles. Then Scorpion began to flounder backwards down the brown bank, sliding, skidding.
It took a moment for the sound to travel to me—a crisp clatter, thin iceskin breaking as horse and man tumbled through. The sheep ran, heads up in alarm, never looking back.
“DAIR!” My shout startled her around to me. “Turn the team! Get us to the reservoir!”
She jerked the team and sled in a quick half-loop as I plunged through the hay to the front of the rack. There be
side her I grabbed the rack frame with one arm and held Adair upright with my other as she whipped the team with the loose ends of the reins and the hay sled began to trundle and jolt. The sled seemed monumentally awkward, slow, although I knew it was going faster than I ever could on foot through the mud and snow.
Ahead of us there in the reservoir I kept expecting Rob to throw himself out of Scorpion’s saddle and lunge or swim his way the eight or ten feet to the embankment. But he and the horse continued to be a single struggling mass amid the shattered ice. Scorpion was thrashing terrifically while Rob clung down onto his back and brown-maned neck. The stubborn fool, to be trying to maul Scorpion out of that water instead of getting himself to the shore.
The top of the reservoir was too narrow for the hay sled. Where the embankment began, Adair jerked the team to a halt and I leaped down from the sled, running as I alit. Adair’s cry, “Angus, be careful!” followed me.
Rob and Scorpion were thrashing even worse now, Scorpion tipping far down onto one side with all of Rob except head and arms under him, struggling together like water beasts fighting. The goddamn man, why didn’t he leave the horse and start toward—Rob’s face, shining wet, appeared for an instant between Scorpion’s jerking neck and the murky water. His expression was perplexed, as if the world had rolled over beneath him and left him hanging horizontal this way. Then I heard his hoarse gasped shout of the word.
“STIRRUP!”
Good Christ, he’s caught in the stirrup, those overshoes of his. Rob was not stubbornly staying with Scorpion, he was trapped on the underside of the off-balance horse.
I ran and ran, slipping, sliding, at last slewing myself on one hip down the bank to where they had tumbled in.
The star-jagged circle of broken ice. Brown roily water. Scorpion’s head and neck and side, crazily tilted as if he was trying to roll in a meadow and dark water had opened under him instead.
The water, waiting, welling in steady arcs toward me from the struggling pair. I had to force myself not to back away, up the bank away from the awful water of the reservoir. If Varick were here. If anyone who could swim, could face water without my blood-deep fear of it, were here. It all returned into me—the black steerage gut of the Jemmy where I lay in sick scared sweat, the ceaseless waiting sea, the trembling dread of having water over me. You ask was I afraid, the McCaskill family voice ever since the treacherous work on the Bell Rock lighthouse. Every hour and most of the minutes, drowning was on my mind. I was afraid enough, yes. Out in the water Scorpion floundered in fresh frenzy, Rob’s arms clenching his wet-maned neck.
