English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  “HEY THERE YOU HEBNER! COME UP HERE AND HELP US CORRAL THESE EWES AND LAMBS !"

  I still think if Ed had asked properly Sanford probably would have been fool enough to have climbed up and joined us, even though he already had put in his workday and then some. But after the season of man’s labor he had done, to be yelled at to come up and help a couple of milk-tooth kids like us chase lambs: worse than that, to not be awarded even his first name, just be shouted to the world as a Hebner—I still can see Sanford perched on the seat of that gutwagon, looking up the slope to us, and then cupping his hands to his mouth the same way Ed had, and hear yet his words carry up the hill:

  "YOU GO PLUMB T0 HELL YOU OLD SON OF A BITCH !"

  And he slapped his reins on the rumps of the gutwagon team and drove on to the lambing shed. At the supper table that night, Sanford’s check was in his plate.

  Sanford and that money, though, did not travel back up the North Fork to this Hebner household. When Alec and I headed home that night Sanford rode double behind me, and when we dismounted at the ranger station he trudged into the dark straight down the English Creek road, asking at every ranch on the way whether a job of any sort could be had. "Anything. I’ll clean the chicken house." The Busby brothers happened to need a bunch herder, and Sanford had been with them ever since; this very moment, was herding one of their bands of sheep up in the mountains of the Two. To me, the realization of Sanford’s situation that evening when Ed Van Bebber canned him, Sanford knocking at any door rather than return home, having a family, a father that he would even clean chicken houses to be free of; to me, the news that life could deal such a hell of a situation to someone about the age of Alec and me came as a sobering gospel.

  "Missus !" Having failed to cajole my father out of free timber, Good Help evidently had decided to settle for the manna we’d come to deliver. "Got something out here."

  The screen door opened and closed again, producing Florene Hebner and leaving a couple of the very littlest Hebners—Garlena and Jonas? Jonas and Maybella ?—gawping behind the mesh. Since the baked goods were tied in a dish towel on my saddle, I did the courteous thing and got off and took the bundle up to Florene. Florene was, or had been, a fairly good-looking woman, particularly among a family population minted with the face of Good Help. But what was most immediately noticeable about her was how worn she looked. As if she’d been sanded down repeatedly. You’d never have guessed the fact by comparing the two, but Florene and my mother went through grade school at Noon Creek together. Florene, though, never made it beyond the second year of high school in Gros Ventre because she already had met Garland Hebner and promptly was pregnant by him and, a little less promptly on Garland’s part, was married to him.

  She gave a small downcast smile as I handed her the bundle, said to me, "Thank your ma again, Jick," and retreated back inside.

  “Funny to see Alec not with you," Good Help was declaiming to my father as I returned from the doorway to Pony. "But they do grow and go."

  "So they do," my father agreed without enthusiasm. "Garland, we got sheep waiting for us up the mountain. You ready, Jick?" My father touched Mouse into motion, then uttered to Good Help in parting, purely poker-faced: "Take it easy."

  * * *

  The route we rode out of the Hebner place was a sort of topsy-turvy L, the long climbing stem of ruts and then the brief northwestward leg of the North Fork trail where it tops onto the English Creek-Noon Creek divide. Coming onto that crest, we now would be in view of the landmarks that are the familiar sentries of the Two country.

  Chief Mountain; even though it is a full seventy miles to the north and almost into Canada, standing distinct as a mooring peg at the end of the long chain of mountains. Also north but nearer, Heart Butte; no great piece of geography, yet it too poses separate enough from the mountain horizon that its dark pyramid form can be constantly seen and identified. And just to our east the full timber-topped profile of Breed Butte, a junior landmark but plainly enough the summit of our English Creek area.

  With all this offered into sight I nonetheless kept my eyes on my father, watching for what I knew would happen, what always happened after he paid a visit to the Hebner place.

  There at the top of the rise he halted his horse, and instead of giving his regard to the distant wonders of Chief Mountain and Heart Butte, he turned for a last slow look at the Hebner hodgepodge. Then shook his head, said, "Jesus H. Christ," and reined away. For in that woebegone log house down there, and amid those buildings before neglect had done its handiwork on them, my father was born and brought up.

  Of course then the place was the McCaskill homestead. And the North Fork known by the nickname of Scotch Heaven on account of the several burr-on-the-tongue-and-thistle-up-the-kilt families who had come over and settled. Duffs, Barclays, Frews, Findlaters, Erskines, and my McCaskill grandparents, they lit in here sometime in the 1880s and all were dead or defeated or departed by the time the flu epidemic of 1918 and the winter of ’19 got done with them. I possessed no firsthand information on my father’s parents. Both of them were under the North Fork soil by the time I was born. And despite my father’s ear to the past, there did not seem to be anything known or at least fit to report about what the McCaskills came from in Scotland. Except for a single scrap of lore: the story that a McCaskill had been one of the stonemasons of Arbroath who worked for the Stevensons—as I savvy it, the Stevensons must have been a family of engineers before Robert Louis cropped into the lineage and picked up a pen when they were putting the lighthouses all around the coast of Scotland. The thought that an ancestor of ours helped fight the sea with stone meant more to my father than he liked to let on. As far as I know, the only halfway sizable body of water my father himself had ever seen was Flathead Lake right here in Montana, let alone an ocean and its beacons. Yet when the fire lookout towers he had fought for were finally being built on the Two Medicine forest during these years it was noticeable that he called them "Franklin Delano’s lighthouses." Looking back from now at that matter of my McCaskill grandparents I question, frankly, whether my mother and father would or could have kept close with that side of the family even if it had still been extant. No marriage is strong enough to bear two loads of in-laws. Early on the choice might as well be made, that one family will be seen as much as can be stood and the other, probably the husband’s, shunted off to rare visits. That’s theory, of course. But theory and my mother together—in any case, all I grew up knowing of the McCaskills of Scotch Heaven was that thirty or so years of homestead effort proved to be the extent of their lifetimes and that my father emerged from the homestead, for good, in the war year of 1917.

  “Yeah, I went off to Wilson’s war. Fought in blood up to my knees." As I have told, the one crack in how solemn my father could be in announcing something like this was that lowered left eyelid of his, and I liked to watch for it to dip down and introduce this next part. "Fact is, you could get yourself a fight just about any time of day or night in those saloons outside Camp Lewis." That my father’s combat had been limited to fists against chins in the state of Washington seemed not to bother him a whit, although I myself wished he had some tales of the actual war. Rather, I wished his knack with a story could have illuminated that war experience of his generation, as an alternative to so many guys’ plain refrain that I-served-my-time-over-in-Frogland-and you-by-God-can-have-the-whole-bedamned-place. But you settle for what family lore you can.

  My father’s history resumes that when he came back from conducting the war against the Camp Lewis saloonhounds, he was hired on by the Noon Creek cattle ranchers as their association rider. "Generally some older hand got the job, but I was single and broke, just the kind ranchers love to whittle their wages down to fit"—by then, too, the wartime livestock prices were on their toboggan ride down—"and they took me on."

  That association job of course was only a summer one, the combined Noon Creek cattle, except those of the big Double W ranch, trailing up onto the national forest
grass in June and down out again in September, and so in winters my father fed hay at one cow ranch or another and then when spring came and brought lambing time with it he would hire on with one of the English Creek sheepmen. I suppose that runs against the usual notion of the West, of cow chousers and mutton conductors forever at odds with each other. But anybody who grew up around stock in our part of Montana knew no qualm about working with either cattle or sheep. Range wars simply never were much the Montana style, and most particularly not the Two Medicine fashion. Oh, somewhere in history there had been an early ruckus south toward the Sun River, some cowman kiyiing over to try kill off a neighboring band of sheep. And probably in any town along these mountains, Browning or Gros Ventre or Choteau or Augusta, you could go into a bar and still find an occasional old hammerhead who proclaimed himself nothing but a cowboy and never capable of drawing breath as anything else, especially not as a mutton puncher. (Which isn’t to say that most sheepherders weren’t equally irreversibly sheepherders, but somehow that point never seemed to need constant general announcement as it did with cowboys.) By and large, though, the Montana philosophy of make-do as practiced by our sizable ranching proportion of Scotchmen, Germans, Norwegians, and Missourians meant that ranch people simply tried to figure out which species did best at the moment, sheep or cows, and chose accordingly. It all came down, so far as I could see, to the doctrine my father expressed whenever someone asked him how he was doing: “Just trying to stay level."

  In that time when young Varick McCaskill became their association rider there still would have been several Noon Creek cattle ranchers, guys getting along nicely on a hundred or so head of cows apiece. Now nearly all of those places either were bought up by Wendell Williamson’s Double W or under lease to it. "The Williamsons of life always do try to latch on to all the land that touches theirs" was my father’s view on that. What I am aiming at, though, is that among those Noon Creek stockmen when my father was hired on was Isaac Reese, mostly a horse raiser but under the inspiration of wartime prices also running cattle just then. It was when my father rode in to pick up those Reese cattle for the drive into the mountains that he first saw my mother. Saw her as a woman, that is. "Oh, I had known she had some promise. Lisabeth Reese. The name alone made you keep her somewhere in mind."

  Long-range opportunities seemed to elude my father, but he could be nimble enough in the short run. “I wasn’t without some practice at girling. And Beth was worth some extra effort."

  The McCaskill—Reese matrimony ensued, and a year or so after that, Alec ensued. Which then meant that my father and mother were supporting themselves and a youngster by a job that my father had been given because he was single and didn’t need much wage. This is the brand of situation you can find yourself in without much effort in Montana, but that it is common does not make it one damn bit more acceptable. I am sure as anything that the memory of that predicament at the start of my parents’ married life lay large behind their qualms about what Alec now was intending. My father especially wanted no repeat, in any son of his, of that season by season scrabble for livelihood. I know our family ruckus was more complicated than just that. Anything ever is. But if amid the previous evening’s contention my father and Alec could have been put under oath, each Bibled to the deepest of the truths in him, my father would have had to say something like: "I don’t want you making my mistakes over again." And Alec to him: "Your mistakes were yours, they’ve got nothing to do with me."

  * * *

  My brother and my father. I am hard put to know how to describe them as they seemed to me then, in that time when I was looking up at them from fourteen years of age. How to lay each onto paper, for a map is never the country itself, only some ink suggesting the way to get there.

  Funny, what memory does. I have only a few beginning recollections of the four or so years we spent at the Indian Head ranger station down there at the middle of the Two Medicine National Forest, where my father started in the Forest Service. A windstorm one night that we thought was going to take the roof off the house. And Alec teaching me to mooch my way onto the back of a grazing horse, as I have told about. But clearest of all to me is a time Alec and I rode double into the mountains with our father, for he took us along on little chore trips as soon as we were big enough to perch on a horse. How can it be that a day of straddling behind the saddle where my brother sat—my nose inches from the collar of Alec’s jacket, and I can tell you as well as anything that the jacket was green corduroy, Alec a greener green than the forest around us—is so alive, even yet? Anyway, after Indian Head came our move to English Creek and my father’s rangering of the north end of the Two ever since. Now that I think on all this, that onset of our English Creek life was at the start of Alec’s third school year, for I recall how damn irked I was that, new home or not, here Alec was again riding off to school every morning while I still had a whole year to wait.

  Next year did come and there we both were, going to school to Miss Thorkelson at the South Fork schoolhouse, along with the children of the ranch families on the upper end of English Creek, the Hahn boys, a number of Busbys and Roziers, the Finletter twins, the Withrow girls, and then of course the Hebner kids, who made up about half the school by themselves. Alec always stood well in his studies. Yet I can’t help but believe the South Fork school did me more good than it did him. You know how those one-room schools are, all eight grades there in one clump for the teacher to have to handle. By a fluke of Hebner reproductive history Marcella Withrow and I were the only ones our age at South Fork, so as a class totaling two we didn’t take up much of Miss Thorkelson’s lesson time and she always let us read extra or just sit and partake of what she was doing with the older grades. By the time Marcella and I reached the sixth grade we already had listened through the older kids’ geography and reading and history and grammar five times. I still know what the capital of Bulgaria is, and not too many people I meet do.

  Stuff of that sort I always could remember like nobody’s business. Numbers, less so. But there Alec shined. Shined in spite of himself, if such is possible.

  It surprised the hell out of all of us in the family. I can tell you the exact night we got this new view of Alec.

  It had been paper day for my father, the one he set aside each month to wrestle paperwork asked for by the Two Medicine National Forest headquarters down in Great Falls, and more than likely another batch wanted by the Region One office over in Missoula as well. The author of his sorrow this particular time was Missoula, which had directed him to prepare and forward—that was the way Forest Service offices talked—a report on the average acreage of all present and potential grazing allotments in his English Creek ranger district. "Potential" was the nettle in this, for it meant that my father had to dope out from his maps every bit of terrain which fit the grazing regulations of the time and translate those map splotches into acreage. So acres had been in the air that day in our household, and it was at supper that Alec asked how many acres there were in the Two Medicine National Forest altogether.

  Alec was twelve at the time. Which would have made me eight, since there were four years between us. Three years and forty-nine weeks, I preferred to count it, my birthday being on September fourth and Alec’s the twenty-fifth of that same month. But the point here is that we were both down there in the grade school years and my father didn’t particularly care to be carrying on a conversation about any more acreage, so he just answered: "Quite a bunch. I don’t know the figure, exactly."

  Alec was never easy to swerve. "Well, how many sections does it have?" You likely know that a section is a square mile, in the survey system used in this country.

  "Pretty close to 600," my father knew offhand.

  “Then that’s 384,000 acres," imparted Alec.

  "That sounds high, to me," my father responded, going on with his meal. "Better get a pencil and paper and work it out."

  Alec shook his head against the pencil and paper notion. “384,000," he said again. "Bet you
a milkshake."

  At this juncture my mother was heard from. "There’ll be no betting at the supper table, young man." But she then got up and went to the sideboard where the mail was put and returned with an envelope. On the back of it she did the pencil work—600 times 640, the number of acres in a section—and in a moment reported: "384,000."

  "Are you sure ?" my father asked her.

  My mother in her younger days had done a little schoolteaching, so here my father simply was getting deeper into the arithmetic bog.

  “Do you want to owe both Alec and me milkshakes ?" she challenged him back.

  "No, I can do without that," my father said. He turned to Alec again and studied him a bit. Then: "All right, Mister Smart Guy.

  How much is 365 times 12?"

  This too took Alec only an instant. "4,380," he declared. “Why? What’s that?"

  “It’s about how many days a twelve-year-old like you has been on this earth," my father said. “Which is to say it’s about how long it’s taken us to discover what it is you’ve got in that head of yours."

  That, then, was what might be called the school year portion of Alec. An ability he couldn’t really account for—"I don’t know, Jicker, I just can," was all the answer I could ever get when I pestered him about how he could handle figures in his head like that—and maybe didn’t absolutely want or at least welcome. The Alec of summer was another matter entirely. What he didn’t display the happy knack of, in terms of ranch or forest work that went on in the Two country at that season of year, hadn’t yet been invented. Fixing fences, figuringhow to splice in barbwire and set new braceposts, Alec was a genius at; anytime an English Creek rancher got money enough ahead for fence work, here he came to ask Alec to ride his lines and fix where needed. When Alec, at age thirteen, came to his first haying season and was to drive the scatter rake for our uncle Pete Reese, after the first few days Pete put him onto regular windrow raking for a while instead. As a scatter raker Alec was working the job for more than it was worth, trotting his team of horses anywhere in the hayfield a stray scrap of hay might be found; the regularity of making windrows, Pete said, slowed him down to within reason. That same headlong skill popped out whenever Alec set foot into the mountains. On our counting trips before this year, he perpetually was the first to see deer or elk or a red-tailed hawk or whatever, before I did and often before our father did. The combination of all this in Alec, I am sure as anything, was what inspired my father and mother to champion college and engineering for him. They never put it in so bald a way, but Alec’s mathematical side and his knacky nature and his general go-to-it approach seemed to them fitted for an engineer. A builder, a doer. Maybe even an engineer for the Forest Service itself, for in those New Deal times there were projects under way everywhere a place could be found for them, it seemed like. The idea even rang right with Alec, at first. All through that winter of his last year in high school Alec kept saying he wished he could go right now, go to the college at Bozeman and get started. But then Leona happened, and the Double W summer job again, and the supper ruckus about marriage over college.