English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  up, and left for good—and bought the old Barclay place here on Breed Butte for next to nothing.

  Pony was trudging up the butte in her steady uninspired way, and I had nothing to do but continue my long-distance conversation with Walter. Not that I figured there was any real chance that Walter would be studying down here exactly then, and even if he was I would be only a gnat in the spyglass lens and certainly not a conversationalist on whom he could perform any lip reading. But I went ahead and queried in the direction of the distant reef: "Walter, how the hell do people get so crosswise with one another?"

  For last night’s rumpus continued to bedevil me from whatever angle I could find to view it. The slant at which Alec and my parents suddenly were diverging from each other, first of all. In hindsight it may not seem such an earthquake of an issue, whether Alec was going to choose college or the wedding band/riding job combination. But hindsight is always through bifocals; it peers specifically instead of seeing whole. And the entirety here was that my father and my mother rested great hopes on my brother, especially given all that they and others of their generation had endured in the years past, the Depression years they had gotten through by constantly saying within themselves "Our children will know better times. They’ve got to." Hopes of that sort only parents can know. That Alec seemed not to want to step up in life, now that the chance at last was here, went against my parents’ thinking as much as if he’d declared he was going to go out on the prairie and dig a hole and live a gopher’s existence.

  Walter Kyle had seen a lot of life; his mustache, which must have been sandy in his youth, now was as yellow-white as if he’d been drinking cream from a jar. “What about that, Walter? From your experience, has Alec gone as goofy as my folks think?" And got back instead of Walter’s long Scotch view of life my father’s briefer Scotch one, his last night’s reasoning to Alec: "Why not give college a year and then see? You got the ability, it’s a crime not to use it. And Bozeman isn’t the moon. You’ll be back and forth some times during the year. The two of you can see how the marriage notion holds up after that." But Alec wasn’t about to have time bought from him.

  “We’re not waiting our life away," ran his constant response. "Our life": that convergence of Alec and Leona and the headlong enthusiasm which none of the rest of us had quite realized they were bringing to their romance. Well, it will happen. Two people who have been around each other for years and all of a sudden find that nobody else in history has ever been in love before, they’re inventing it themselves. Yet apply my mind to it in all the ways I could, my actual grasp of their mood wasn’t firm, for to me then marriage seemed about as distant as death. Nor did I understand much more about the angle of Leona and—I was going to say, of Leona and my parents, but actually of Leona and the other three of us, as I somehow did feel included into the bask she aimed around our kitchen. Leona, Leona. "Now there is a topic I could really stand to talk to you about, Walter." Yet maybe a bachelor was not the soundest source either. Perhaps old Walter Kyle knew only enough about women, as the saying goes, to stay immune. Anyhow, with all care and good will I was trying to think through our family situation in a straight line, but Leona brought me to a blind curve. Not nearly the least of last evening’s marvels was how much ground Leona had been able to hold with only a couple of honest-to-goodness sentences. When my father and mother were trying to argue delay into Alec and turned to her to test the result, she said just “We think we’re ready enough." And then at the end of the fracas, going out the door Leona turned to bestow my mother one of her sunburst smiles and say, "Thank you for supper, Beth." And my mother saying back, just as literally, "Don’t mention it."

  The final line of thought from last night was the most disturbing of all. The breakage between my father and Alec. This one bothered me so much I couldn’t even pretend to be confiding it to Walter up there on Roman Reef. Stony silence from that source was more than I could stand on this one. For if I’d had to forecast, say at about the point Alec was announcing marriage intentions, my mother was the natural choice to bring the house down on him. That would have been expected. It was her way. And she of course did make herself more than amply known on the college/marriage score. But the finale of that suppertime was all-male McCaskill: "You’re done running my life," flung by Alec as he stomped out with Leona in tow, and "Nobody’s running it, including you," from my father to Alec’s departing back.

  * * *

  Done running my life. Nobody’s running it, including you. Put that way, the words without the emotion, it may sound like something concluding itself; the moment of an argument breaking off into silence, a point at which contention has been expended. But I know now, and I somehow knew even then, that the fracture of a family is not a thing that happens clean and sharp, so that you at least can calculate that from here on it will begin to be over with. No, it is like one of those worst bone breaks, a shatter. You can mend the place, peg it and splint it and work to strengthen it, and while the surface maybe can be brought to look much as it did before, the deeper vicinity of shatter always remains a spot that has to be favored.

  So if I didn’t grasp much of what abruptly was happening within our family, I at least held the realization that last night’s rift was nowhere near over.

  * * *

  Thinking heavily that way somehow speeds up time, and before I quite knew it Pony was stopping at the barbwire gate into Walter Kyle’s yard. I tied her to the fence on a long rein so she could graze a little and slid myself between the top and second strands.

  Walter’s place looked hunky-dory. But I did a circle of the tool shed and low log barn and the three-quarter shed sheltering Walter’s old Reo Flying Cloud coupe, just to be sure, and then went to the front of the house and took out the key from behind the loose piece of chinking which hid it.

  The house too was undisturbed. Not that there was all that much in it to invite disturbance. The sparse habits of hotel living apparently still were in Walter. Besides the furniture—damn little of that beyond the kitchen table and its chairs of several stiff-back varieties—and the open shelves of provisions and cookery, the only touches of habitation were a drugstore calendar, and a series of coats hung on nails, and one framed studio photograph of a young, young Walter in a tunic and a fur cap: after Scotland and before Montana, he had been a Mountie for a few years up in Alberta.

  All in all, except for the stale feel that unlived-in rooms give off, Walter might just have stepped out to go down there on the North Fork and fish a beaver dam. A good glance around was all the place required. Yet I stood and inventoried for some minutes. I don’t know why, but an empty house holds me. As if it was an opened book about the person living there. Peruse this log-and-chinking room and Walter Kyle could be read as thrifty, tidy to the verge of fussy, and alone.

  At last, just to stir the air in the place with some words, I said aloud the conclusion of my one-way conversation with the mustached little sheepman up on the Reef: "Walter, you’d have made somebody a good wife."

  * * *

  Pony and I now cut west along the Hank of Breed Butte, which would angle us through Walter’s field to where we would rejoin the North Fork road and my father. Up here above the North Fork coulee the outlook roughened, the mountains now in full rumpled view and the foothills bumping up below them and Roman Reef making its wide stockade of bare stone between the two. On this part of our route the land steadily grew more beautiful, which in Montana also means more hostile to settlement. From where I rode along this high ground, Walter Kyle’s was the lone surviving ranch to be looked back on between here and the English Creek ranger station.

  The wind seemed to think that was one too many, for it had come up from the west and was pummeling everything on Walter’s property, including me. I rode now holding on to my hat with one hand lest it skitter down to the North Fork and set sail for St. Louis. Of all of the number of matters about the Two country that I never have nor will be able to savvy—one life is not nearly enough
to do so—a main one is why in a landscape with hills and buttes and benchlands everywhere a person is so seldom sheltered from the everlasting damn wind. I mean, having the wind of the Two forever trying to blow harmonica tunes through your rib cage just naturally wears on the nerves.

  The Two, I have been saying. I ought to clarify that to us the term meant both the landscape to all the horizons around—that is pretty much what a Montanan means by a "country"—and the national forest that my father’s district was part of. In those days the six hundred square miles of the Two Medicine National Forest were divvied into only three ranger districts: English Creek; Indian Head, west of Choteau ; and Blacktail Gulch, down by Sun River at the south end of the forest. Actually only my father’s northmost portion of the Two Medicine National Forest had anything at all to do with the Two Medicine River or Two Medicine Lake: the vicinity where the forest joins onto the south boundary of Glacier National Park and fits in there, as a map shows it, like a long straight-sided peninsula between the park and the Continental Divide and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. So the Two Medicine itself, the river that is, honestly is in sight to hardly any of the Two country. Like all the major flows of this region the river has its source up in the Rockies, but then the Two Medicine promptly cuts a sizable canyon east through the plains as it pushes to meet the Marias River and eventually the Missouri. Burrows its way through the prairie, you might almost say. It is just the ring of the words, Two Medicine, that has carried the name all the way south along the mountains some thirty miles to our English Creek area. The derivation as I’ve heard it is that in distant times the Blackfeet built their medicine lodge, their place for sacred ceremony, two years in a row at a favorite spot on the river where buffalo could be stampeded over nearby cliffs, and the name lasted from that pair of lodges. By whatever way Two Medicine came to be, it is an interesting piece of language, I have always thought.

  My father was waiting at another rutty offshoot from the North Fork road. This one had so many cuts of track, some of them dating from the era of wagon wheels, that it looked like a kind of huge braid across the grassland. My father turned his gaze from the twined ruts to me and asked: "Everything under control at Walter’s ?"

  "Uh huh," I affirmed.

  "All right." His businesslike expression had declined into what I think is called dolor. “Let’s go do it." And we set oft into the weave of tracks toward the Hebner place.

  * * *

  No matter what time of day you approached it, the Hebner place looked as if demolition was being done and the demolishers were just now taking a smoke break. An armada of abandoned wagons and car chassis and decrepit farm equipment—even though Good Help Hebner farmed not so much as a vegetable garden—lay around and between the brown old buildings. A root cellar was caved in, a tool shop had only half a roof left, the barn looked distinctly teetery. In short, not much ever functioned on the Hebner place except gravity. Out front of the barn now as we rode in stood a resigned-looking bay mare with two of the littler Hebner boys astraddle her swayed back. The pair on the horse must have been Roy and Will, or possibly Will and Enoch, or maybe even Enoch and Curtis. So frequent a bunch were they, there was no keeping track of which size Hebner boy was who unless you were around them every day.

  I take that back. Even seeing them on a constant basis wouldn’t necessarily have been a foolproof guide to who was who, because all the faces in that Hebner family rhymed. I don’t know how else to put it. Every Hebner forehead was a copy of Good Help’s wide crimped-in-the-middle version, a pale bony expanse centered with a kind of tiny gully which widened as it went down, as if the nose had avalanched out of there. Across most of the left side of this divided forehead a hank of hair flopped at a crooked angle. The effect was as if every male Hebner wore one of those eye patches shown in pictures of pirates, only pushed up higher. Then from that forehead any Hebner face simply sort of dwindled down, a quick skid of nose and a tight mouth and a small ball of chin.

  The tandem horsebackers stared us the length of the yard. It was another Hebner quality to gawp at you as if you were some new species on earth. My father had a not entirely ironic theory to explain that:

  "They’ve all eaten so goddamn much venison their eyes have grown big as deers’." For it was a fact of life that somewhere up there in the jackpines beyond the Hebner buildings would be a woolsack hanging from a top limb. The bottom of the sack would rest in a washtub of water, and within the sack, being cooled nicely by the moisture as it went wicking up through the burlap, would be a hindquarter or two of venison. Good Help Hebner liked his deer the same way he preferred his eggs—poached.

  "Actually, I don’t mind Good Help snitching a deer every so often," my father put it. “Those kids have got to eat. But when the lazy SOB starts in on that goddamn oughtobiography of his—how he ought to have been this, ought to have done that—"

  “Morning, Ranger! Hello there, Jick !"

  I don’t know about my father, but that out-of-nowhere gust of words startled me just a little. The greeting hadn’t issued from the staring boys on the mare but from behind the screen door of the log house. “Ought to have been paying attention to the world so I’d seen you coming and got some coffee going."

  "Thanks anyway, Garland," said my father, who had heard years of Good Help Hebner protocol and never yet seen a cup of coffee out of any of it. "We’re just dropping off some baking Beth came out long on."

  "We’ll do what we can to put it to good—" Commotion in front of the barn interrupted the voice of Good Help. The front boy atop the old horse was whacking her alongside the neck with the reins while the boy behind him was kicking the mount heartily in the ribs and piping, "Giddyup, goddamn you horse, giddyup !"

  "Giddyup, hell !" Good Help’s yell exploded across the yard. It was always said of him that Good Help could talk at a volume which would blow a crowbar out of your hand. "The pair of you giddy off and giddy over to that goshdamn woodpile!"

  We all watched for the effect of this on the would-be jockeys, and when there was none except increased exertion on the dilapidated mare, Good Help addressed my father through the screen door again:

  "Ought to have taken that pair out and drowned them with the last batch of kittens, way they behave. I don’t know what’s got into kids any more."

  With the profundity of that, Good Help materialized from behind the screening and out onto the decaying railroad tie which served as the front step to the Hebner house. Like his place, Good Help Hebner himself was more than a little ramshackle. A tall yet potbellied man with one bib of his overalls usually frayed loose and dangling, his sloping face made even more pale by a gray-white chevron of grizzle which mysteriously never matured into a real mustache. Garland Hebner: nicknamed Good Help ever since the time, years back, when he volunteered to join the Noon Creek cattlemen when they branded their calves and thereby get in on a free supper afterward. In Dill Egan’s round corral, the branding crew at one point looked up to see Hebner, for no reason that ever became clear, hoisting himself onto Dill’s skittish iron-gray stud. Almost before Hebner was truly aboard, the gray slung him off and then tried to pound him apart while everybody else bailed out of the corral. Hebner proved to be a moving target; time and again the hooves of the outraged horse missed the rolling ball of man, until finally Dill managed to reach in, grab hold of a Hebner ankle, and snake him out under the corral poles. Hebner wobbled up, blinked around at the crowd, then sent his gaze on to the sky and declared as if piety was natural to him: "Well, I had some Good Help getting out of that, didn’t I?"

  Some extra stickum, was added to the nickname, of course, by the fact that Good Help had never been found to be of any use whatsoever on any task anybody had been able to think up for him. "He has a pernicious case of the slows," Dode Withrow reported after he once made the error of hiring Good Help for a few days of fencing hay-stacks.

  "Ranger, I been meaning to ask if it mightn’t be possible to cut a few poles to fix that corral up with," Good Hel
p was blaring now. The Hebner corral looked as if a buffalo stampede had passed through it, and translated out of Hebnerese, Good Help’s question was whether he could help himself to some national forest pine without paying for it. "Ought to have got at it before now, but my back . . ."

  His allergy to work was the one characteristic in which the rest of the family did not emulate Good Help. They didn’t dare. Survival depended on whatever wages the squadron of Hebner kids could earn by hiring out at lambing time or through haying season. Then at some point in their late teens each Hebner youngster somehow would come up with a more serious job and use it as an escape ladder out of that family.

  Alec and I had accidentally been witnesses to the departure of Sanford, the second oldest Hebner boy. It occurred a couple of springs before when Ed Van Bebber came by the ranger station one Friday night and asked if Alec and I could help out with the lambing chores that weekend. Neither of us much wanted to do it, because Ed Van Bebber is nobody’s favorite person except Ed Van Bebber’s. But you can’t turn down a person who’s in a pinch, either. When the pair of us rode into Ed’s place early the next morning we saw that Sanford Hebner was driving the gutwagon, even though he was only seventeen or so, not all that much older than Alec at the time. And that lambing season at Van Bebber’s had been a rugged one; the hay was used up getting through the winter and the ewes thin as shadows and not particularly ready to become mothers. Ed had thrown the drop band clear up onto the south side of Wolf Butte to provide any grass for them at all, which meant a tough mile and a half drive for Sanford to the lambing shed with each gutwagon load of ewes and their fresh lambs, and a played-out team of horses by the time he got there. With the ewes dropping eighty and ninety lambs a day out there and the need to harness new horses for every trip, Sanford was performing about two men’s work and doing it damn well. The day this happened, dark had almost fallen, Alec and I were up on the hillside above the lambing shed helping Ed corral a bunch of mother ewes and their week-old lambs, and we meanwhile could see Sanford driving in with his last load of lambs of the day. We actually had our bunch under control just fine, the three of us and a dog or two. But Ed always had to have a tendency toward hurry. So he cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled down the hill: