by Ivan Doig
While he went and attended to that, Del walked in a tight circle, hands thrust in his pockets and shoulders hunched so high he looked like a scarecrow, still wearing that strange expression he’d had in the confines of the van. Watching him, Zoe picked at her elbow nervously and I kept swallowing with a dry throat. Was he going to charge France with something so awful, it would get her thrown into the adult version of juvie? That was more than I bargained for, but it was out of my hands now.
Pop arrived back, took one look at the circling figure, and simply folded his arms and waited.
France came buzzing through the door from the front, towel still in hand like a true bartender. “What was it you wanted, T—”
She jammed to a halt at the sight of us all. Natalie Wood stopped by a cop for something. Apprehensively she asked, “Somebody call a prayer meeting?”
Pop inclined his head to the determined keeper of the Gab Lab. “So, Delano, what’s eating you?”
As though an electrical current was running between us, Zoe and I shared that held-breath feeling of drama, the theatrical high point when Rosalind reveals her identity to Orlando, when Lady Bracknell bestows her lofty blessing on Algernon and Cecily and Jack and Gwendolen, when the confusions of love are solved and all’s well that ends well. Only in this case, one lover was about to lower the boom on the other.
Del shifted restlessly, looked around at us all, and blurted it out.
“I’m not leaving.”
The big room was silent as this registered on us in individual ways. I nearly swallowed my Adam’s apple for good.
“Isn’t that phenomenal?” Del was grinning as much as his face could hold. “The powers that be were so impressed with the mudjacks tapes and transcripts, they want me to stay and keep right on with the Missing Voices, here. Do another series of interviews before a subgroup vanishes from history.” He beamed at each of us in turn, last and longest at France. “They, ah, gave me another grant.” He looked almost bashful. “Alan Lomax usually gets them all.”
There went that, I savvied before he was even finished speaking. Not a chance in the world that a diagnosis of kleptomania would be forthcoming from him if the midnight meetings in the van were going to go merrily on. According to the way he was gazing at her, France could be stealing the fillings out of his teeth and he wouldn’t notice. Beside me, Zoe was thinking the same, I could tell. We had to be happy for Del, fellow bit player that he was, and glad he wasn’t going away yet, but we knew there was no approaching him about France and her problematic habit, now. We weren’t up to the role of heartbreakers yet.
“Well, swell, Dellie.” France sounded relieved and enthusiastic all in the same breath. She gave him the nicest kind of smile. “We’d miss you around here.”
“Yeah, we wouldn’t want things to get dull,” Pop seconded that. He squinted companionably at his partner in mudjack lingo. “So, Delano, who’s got their voices missing now?”
“Sheepherders.”
Roomful of silence again.
No one wanted to be the first to say it. Finally, twisting her towel as if wringing out the words, France ventured, “You dead sure about that, Dellie?”
Pop was looking nearly as stunned as if he had been hit by a flying elbow. “She’s right, where the hell do you get the idea sheepherders are vanishing? Cripes, most of the time you can hardly turn around in the Two Medicine country without bumping into one. Delano, are you sure you don’t have any tick fever?”
“Trust me on this.” Del held up his hands as if heading all of us off. “I did some research, before I came out here from the Library. You have to understand, the sheep business is in what economists call a gravitational decline, which means steep. Sheepmen are simply up against too much.” He fingered his elaborate shirt, not a stitch of wool in it, as evidence. “Synthetics, cheaper imported lamb, new grazing regulations, higher costs of everything—the usual kinds of horsemen of the apocalypse that do in old family businesses.” He paused somberly. “It’s sad, of course, but it can’t be helped. And when sheep ranchers go, it’s perfectly plain what that will mean for herders.”
“The marble farm,” Zoe said in a ghostly voice.
“Well, no, they’re not exactly going to die off like dinosaurs,” Del belatedly sought to temper that. “But their numbers are bound to decline, and now’s the best chance to record their lives for the archive.” He paused again, as if a thought had only now struck him, or at least gave a good imitation of it. “Ah, Tom, I wonder if I might ask you for a favor.”
“While that’s going on,” France saw her chance, “hadn’t I better get back to tending bar?”
“What? Yeah. Do that.” Pop and the other two of us tried not to be too obvious about looking on while she and Del did not quite blow kisses to one another, but the hint was there. As soon as she was gone, Del turned to Pop, bright as a button. “What I was wondering . . .”
“Delano, I know all about your wondering and the answer is no. I cannot trot around hunting up sheepherders with you, I have a fishing derby to get everything ready for and a joint with a green bartender to oversee and every other damn thing that takes up time in life. Got that?”
Even if his words had not registered on Del, Pop’s dangerously wrinkled brow would have. “I just thought I’d ask,” he murmured, burying his hands in his pockets again.
“Besides”—Pop started to reach for his cigarettes until he saw me looking—“herders aren’t anywhere you can get to them right now, anyway.”
Del went stone still. He turned his head to one side as if to make sure he’d heard what he’d heard. “They’re not? Where did they go?”
“Where they always do this time of year,” Pop said impatiently, “when they’re not in here drinking their wages away. Way to hell and gone up in the mountains, herding on the national forest.”
Zoe was nodding, even she knew that. Evidently the self-trained expert on the subgroup called sheepherders did not.
“But . . . but,” Del spluttered, “when do they come back down?”
“Shipping time,” said Pop. “That’s, oh, three or four weeks yet. You can take life easy for a while.”
“No, I can’t! My grant calls for an immediate start,” the ins and outs of oral history practically poured forth in a babble, “the powers that be think I already have interviews lined up and waiting. I had to, ah, stretch matters a trifle in the proposal.”
“You got to be kind of careful in proposing,” Pop advised. But he didn’t like to see Del in distress any more than we did. Squinting in thought, one eye in particular toward half closed, he muttered: “Of course, there’s always that ess of a bee Canada Dan.”
Del brightened as if a switch had been thrown. “Perfect! I never did get to ask him what a turster is!”
“Dode has him herding some kind of bunch up the South Fork,” Pop was saying to me. “Seen the wagon on the way to fishing, remember?” Before I could even bob my head, Del was asking eagerly, “Do you think he’d consent to be interviewed?”
“I wouldn’t predict what he’ll do from one breath to the next”—Pop seemed bemused at the thought of Canada Dan fending with Del and vice versa—“but you can try him.” Then his conscience must have kicked in. “Better take Rusty along, he knows Dan. That might help.”
Del was back to buoyant just that fast. Gravely he bowed in our direction. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in coming along, Miss Zoe, parental authorities permitting?”
“Pleeeaase?”
“Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll keep an eye on them.”
“I was more thinking about them keeping an eye on you.”
—
I WAS NOT ANY too enthused about being assigned to this. To me, Canada Dan represented several kinds of a headache, from that wayward elbow that floored Pop, up to and including the dispute with France t
hat had cost me five dollars. As far as I was concerned, he could fester in obscurity forever and it would serve him right.
Pop did have a point, though. It would be just like the old cuss to give Del a hard time or even run him off, simply because he could. With me on hand representing Pop and the Medicine Lodge, sort of, his manners might—might—improve. Riding in the passenger seat to be navigator, I was silent with such thoughts—at least it was a brief respite from having a kleptomaniac half sister on my mind—as Del drove us toward the sheep camp that afternoon, a rare sunny one. Dode Withrow’s pasture was nice green bottomland where the South Fork of English Creek ran down a long coulee. With the mountain cliffs stretching up and away everywhere ahead of us and the Rainbow Reservoir dam at the far end of the creek, like the front step to their succession of heights, our journey from town was actually quite a scenic excursion. Zoe occupied the back of the van, perched behind the seat as I had been on the Fort Peck trip, she and Del talking away.
Gandering through the windshield at the wall rocks and crags of the national forest that rose and rose all the way to the Continental Divide, he exclaimed, “What luck that he’s not herding somewhere up there. I wonder why not?”
“Maybe he gets nosebleeds in high places,” Zoe theorized.
Del chuckled that away as he turned off the county road onto the rutted set of tracks where I was pointing. A not very large flock of sheep grazed picturesquely at the bottom of the steep coulee. “Likely he’s been given this spot down here because it’s less rugged terrain for a man of his age, wouldn’t you think, Rusty?”
“He’s afraid of the timber.”
“Hmm? Run that by again?”
“Canada Dan is scared to death of herding in the timber, where he can’t see all his sheep every minute and he’s no good at it. The ranchers know it and they don’t put him any closer to the mountains than this.” I did not add that Canada Dan only got herding jobs at all because he was living and breathing and handily available when he wasn’t drunk.
By now the van was jolting down the track to the creek, where the white-canvased sheep wagon sat next to the willows. “I see,” Del said in a less sure voice as a stumpy figure came peering out the Dutch door of the wagon at our approach.
When the van bumped to a stop in the small creek-side clearing, Zoe and I scrambled out while Del composed himself in more professional fashion, smoothing his various pocket flaps and so on. We were met by a mottled white-and-gray sheepdog, growling as it came.
“Quit, Moses,” Canada Dan called off the dog but not his distrustful eyeing of us. “What’s this, a Sunday-school picnic?”
“Whoo,” murmured Zoe, getting her first good look at the herder. People still had goiters then, and Canada Dan had a dandy, as if he had swallowed a lemon. Long underwear yellowed with age showed at the neck of his shirt. The cud of tobacco that had given me so much spittoon work showed in his cheek. The hard effects of time and weather and drink showed on the rest of his face and personage. Not exactly a picture of hospitality standing planted there in the wagon doorway, but Del forged ahead.
“Mr. . . . ah, Dan? I wonder if I could have a little of your time.”
“There’s plenty of it out here in the sticks, that’s for sure.” He gave me a grudging nod out of respect for Pop and included Zoe because she seemed to be with me, but Del received something between a frown and a scowl. “What’s on your mind, when you’re not in the way of my sheep?”
Del forced a chuckle about that incident and explained about his interviewing mission.
“That a fact?” Canada Dan stepped down out of the wagon as though he had to inspect him for common sense. “You come all the way out from town to talk to a mutton conductor?” Spitting an amount of tobacco juice that did not seem to diminish the cud in his cheek, he shuffled over to us and gestured to the nearby grazing ewes and lambs, as if we were welcome to them. “Got the goddamn mutton on the hoof for you, that’s for sure.”
“Rusty,” Zoe was whispering, “what’s wrong with those sheep?”
Before I could tell her, Del had caught up with the bedraggled nature of the creatures in Canada Dan’s care. “What kind of a, mmm, flock do you call this?”
The herder laughed harshly. “What’s it look like? It’s the hospital bunch, next thing to pelters. Some has got maggots. Others got blue bag, can’t nurse their lambs. Some is just old and broken down, like me.”
“I see. Well, that doesn’t really matter, I suppose.” A false supposition, if Zoe and I had ever heard one. Plain as anything, these sheep were down on their luck, and anyone assigned to herd them was even deeper in misfortune. Dode Withrow may have been ready to wring Canada Dan’s neck for that loss of lambs in the spring blizzard, but he had since given him what amounted to a charity job. Tending these cripples and invalids barely qualified as sheepherding. Nonetheless, Del held out an inviting hand toward the open van and its recording equipment waiting at the ready. “Let’s just step in and I’ll get the tape going and—”
“Nothing doing.” The one-man subgroup of Missing Voices backed away from the van. “Come on in the wagon, where we can gab comfortable-like.”
Momentarily thrown, Del was quick to improvise. “I’ll be right there, just let me grab a portable recorder.” It hardly rated that description, Del digging out a hefty machine with a handle on it like a suitcase. While he was hurriedly threading tape reels, Zoe scrambled to find him a spare microphone, and I commiserated in a low voice, “Pop always says if there are any more ways Canada Dan can be a pain in the wazoo, they have yet to be invented.”
“No, no, it’s all right. I’ll get this done,” he said with determination. “I need to send in something in a hurry so my grant doesn’t get pulled. Alan Lomax is always around to scoop up loose funding.”
Anticipatory audience of two, Zoe and I followed as he swung the recorder and then himself into the sheep wagon. The design of a sheep wagon is on a narrower wagon bed than, say, the prairie schooner we all know from history books, and the canvas roof is more snug and igloo-like, compressing the inside into something remarkably on the order of a grown-up dollhouse: small stove, miniature cabinets, a bunk where one person will just fit. A really dirty dollhouse, in the case of Canada Dan’s abode. The grimy cooking utensils on the blackened stove showed he had the cooking philosophy that a washed pot never boils. I recoiled at how tight the quarters were, and sensed Zoe doing the same, but Del seemed right at home. Setting up the tape recorder and microphone on the little gateleg table where Canada Dan had slid in on one side, he took the other, and practically knee to knee, he beamed across at his interview subject. “Ready for some conversation, are you?”
“I guess I got nothing better to do,” the herder muttered unpromisingly. Since Zoe and I would practically be on top of the pair of them no matter where we tried to sit, I took the initiative in saying we’d wait outside, if that was all right. “Suit yourself,” our host grunted. “Moses is shaded up under the wagon. He might growl at you now and again, but he don’t mean it.”
Shading up sounded right to us, and we scooted under the wagon box, where we could lounge against some sacks of sheep salt and cottonseed cake in something like comfort. The dog kept watch on us with those pale border collie eyes, but made no sound. Zoe reached to pet him. “Huh-uh,” I warned in a whisper. “Sheepherders don’t like to have their dogs spoiled by petting.”
“Poor pooch,” she whispered solemnly.
“Shall we get started?” Del’s voice reached us. We grinned at each other. We could hear everything, right overhead. This was as good as the vent at the saloon. “Your full name is . . . ?”
“Daniel Korzenowski.”
“Age, please, Mr. Korzenowski?”
“Too goddamn much of it, that’s for sure.”
Del chuckled a little, waiting, but that seemed to be the full answer. “I’m only
asking for archival purposes, you understand. So, the year of your birth?”
“Back there a ways, let’s just say.”
“Mr. Korzenowski—Dan. Surely you don’t want me to have to guess the year you were born.”
“Don’t matter to me.”
“Very well, then. Eighteen hundred and ninety-”
“Eighteen hundred nothing! Nineteen hundred even, damn it.”
“That makes you sixty, am I right? As old as the century.”
“Both of us are showing it, too.”
“And born where in Canada?”
“Who said I was hatched up there? I’m pure hunnerd percent American. Born right up here this side of the border, on the Milk River. My folks was homesteading, or thought they was. I don’t know where you got that Canada notion.”
“Hear that?” Zoe was whispering in wonderment. “He doesn’t know he’s called Canada Dan?”
“He knows. He just doesn’t want to.”
“Sorry about that, I must have misheard something,” Del scrambled to recover. “What can you tell me about life on the homestead? It must have been rugged in those days.”
“Rugged! That don’t begin to say it.” This set the raspy voice going without stop. The family was skunk broke most of the time, to hear him tell it. If grasshoppers didn’t get the crops, hail did. The nearest neighbors were a mile away and the nearest town was thirty, so if a person was sick or hurt in an accident, you might as well say your prayers. Zoe and I listened hard as he came to the part about riding horseback to a one-room school. “My schooling stopped in the third grade. Had to help out at home, it didn’t matter none that I was just a kid.” That gave me a twinge of sympathy for him, although a person can be deprived and still be naturally ornery. Del let him talk on, occasionally nudging or coaxing with a quick question, until steering him toward the sheepherding life.
“It ain’t for everybody,” the coarse voice started in slowly. “You see this sheep wagon—not exactly the Waldorf, is it. Out like this, you have to live with muskeeters and mice and skunks and pack rats and all those. Hell, I been in places where I couldn’t leave my bridgework out at night.”
