English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  There he had me. My turn to be less than complete. I answered:

  "Not rather, really. Just might have been, is all."

  An answer that didn’t even start toward truth, that one was. And not the one I would have resorted to anytime up until supper of the night before. For until then if I was to imagine myself happening to be anybody else, who could the first candidate have been but Alec?

  Wasn’t all the basic outline already there? Same bloodline, same place of growing up, same schooling, maybe even the same body frame if I kept growing at my recent pace. Both of us September arrivals into the world, even; only the years needed swapping. The remarkable thing to me was that our interests in life were as different as they were, and I suppose I had more or less assumed that time was going to bring mine around to about where Alec’s were. But now, precisely this possibility was what was unsettling me. That previous night at the supper table when Alec made his announcement about him and Leona and I asked “How come?" what I intended maybe was something similar to what my parents were asking of Alec. Something like "Already ?" What was the rush? How could marriage and all be happening this soon, to my own brother? Yes, maybe put it this way: what I felt or at least sensed and was trying to draw into focus was the suggestion that Alec’s recent course of behavior in some way fore-shadowed my own. It was like looking through the Toggery window in Gros Ventre at a fancy suit of clothes and saying, by the Christ, they’ll never catch me dead in those. But at the same time noticing that they seem to be your exact fit.

  "Like who?" my father was asking in a tone which signaled me that he was asking it for the second time.

  “Who?" I echoed, trying to think of anything more.

  "Country seems to be full of owls tonight," he observed. Yet he was still attentive enough in my direction that I knew I had to come up with something that resembled an answer.

  "Oh. Yeah. Who." I looked at the fire for some chunk that needed kicking farther in, and although none really did, I kicked one anyway.

  “Well, like Ray. That’s all I had in mind, was Ray and me." Ray Heaney was my best friend at high school in Gros Ventre. "Us being the same age and all, like you and Dode."

  This brought curiosity into my father’s regard of me. "Now that takes some imagination," he said. “Dode and me are Siamese twins compared to you and Ray."

  Then he rose, dusting twigs and pine needles off the back of him from where he had lain. "But I guess imagination isn’t a struggle with you. You maybe could supply the rest of us as well, huh? Anyway, let’s give some thought to turning in. We got a day ahead of us tomorrow."

  * * *

  If I was a believer in omens, the start of that next morning ought to have told me something.

  The rigamarole of untangling out of our bedrolls and getting the campfire going and making sure the horses hadn’t quit the country during the night, all that went usual enough. Then, though, my father glanced around at me from where he had the coffeepot heating over a corner of the fire and asked: "Ready for a cup, Alec?"

  Well, that will happen in a family. A passing shadow of absent-mindedness, or the tongue just slipping a cog from what was intended. Ordinarily, being miscalled wouldn’t have riled me. But all this recent commotion about Alec, and my own wondering about where anybody in this family stood anymore, and that fireside spell of brooding I’d done on my brother and myself, and I don’t know what the hell all else—it now brought a response which scraped out of me like flint:

  "I’m the other one."

  Surprise passed over my father. Then I guess what is called contrition.

  "You sure as hell are," he agreed in a low voice. "Unmistakably Jick."

  * * *

  About my name. John Angus McCaskill, I was christened. As soon as I began at the South Fork school, though, and gained a comprehension of what had been done to me, I put away that Angus for good. I have thought ever since that using a middle name is like having a third nostril.

  I hadn’t considered this before, but by then the John must already have been amended out of all recognition, too. At least I can find no memory of ever being called that, so the change must have happened pretty early in life. According to my mother it next became plain that "Johnnie" didn’t fit the boy I was, either. “Somehow it just seemed like calling rhubarb vanilla," and she may or may not have been making a joke. With her you couldn’t always tell. Anyhow, the family story goes on that she and my father were trying me out as “Jack" when some visitor, noticing that I had the McCaskill red hair but gray eyes instead of everybody else’s blue, and more freckles than Alec and my father combined, and not such a pronouncement of jaw as theirs, said something like: "He looks to me more like the jick of this family."

  So I got dubbed for the off card. For the jack that shares only the color of the jack of trumps. That is to say, in a card game such as pitch, if spades are led the jack of clubs becomes the jick, and in the taking of tricks the abiding rule is that jack takes jick but jick takes joker. I explain this a bit because I am constantly dumbfounded by how many people, even here in Montana, no longer can play a decent hand of cards. I believe television has got just a hell of a lot to answer for.

  Anyway, Jick I became, and have ever been. An odd tag, put on me out of nowhere like that. This is part of the pondering I find myself doing now. Whether some other name would have shifted my life any. Yet, of what I might change, I keep deciding that that would not be among the first.

  * * *

  This breakfast incident rankled a little even after my father and I saddled up and resumed the ride toward the Roman Reef counting vee where we were to meet Walter Kyle’s sheep at around noon. Nor did the weather help any. Clouds closed off the peaks of the mountains, and while it wasn’t raining yet, the air promised that it intended to. One of those days too clammy to go without a slicker coat and too muggy to wear one in comfort.

  To top it all off, we now were on the one stretch of the trail I never liked, with the Phantom Woman Mountain burn on the slope coming into sight ahead of us. Everywhere over there, acre upon acre upon acre, a gray cemetery of snags and stumps. Of death by fire, for the Phantom Woman forest fire had been the one big one in the Two’s history except for the blazing summer of 1910.

  Ahead of me, my father was studying across at the burn in the gloomy way he always did here. Both of us now moping along, like sorrow’s orphans. If I didn’t like the Phantom Woman neighborhood, my father downright despised it. Plainly he considered this gray dead mountainside the blot on his forest. In those times, when firefighting was done mainly by hand, a runaway blaze was the bane of the Forest Service. My father’s slate was as clean as could be; except for unavoidable smudges before lightning strikes could be snuffed out, timber and grass everywhere else on his English Creek ranger district were intact, even much of the 1910-burnt country restoring itself by now. But the awful scar here was unhealed yet. Not that the Phantom Woman fire was in any way my father’s own responsibility, for it happened before this district was his, while he still was the ranger at Indian Head rather than here. He was called in as part of the fire crew—this was a blaze that did run wild for a while, a whole hell of a bunch of men ended up fighting Phantom Woman before they controlled it—but that was all. You couldn’t tell my father that, though, and this morning I wasn’t in a humor to even try.

  When time has the weight of a mood such as ours on it, it slows to a creep. Evidently my father figured both the day and I could stand some brightening. Anyway it was considerably short of noon—we were about two thirds of our way up Roman Reef, where the North Fork hides itself in a timber canyon below and the trail bends away from the face of Phantom Woman to the other mountains beyond—when he turned atop Mouse and called to me: "How’s an early lunch sound to you ?"

  "Suits me," I of course assured him.

  Out like this, my father tended to survive on whatever jumped out of the food pack first. He did have the principle that supper needed to be a cooked meal, especially if it cou
ld be trout. But as for the rest of the day, if leftover trout weren’t available he was likely to offer up as breakfast a couple of slices of headcheese and a can of tomatoes or green beans, and if you didn’t watch him he might do the exact same again for lunch. My mother consequently always made us up enough slab sandwiches for three days’ worth of lunches. Of course, by the second noon in that high air the bread was about dry enough to strike a match on, but still a better bet than whatever my father was apt to concoct.

  We had eaten an applebutter sandwich and a half apiece and were sharing a can of peaches for dessert, harpooning the slices out with our jackknives to save groping into the pack for utensils, when Mouse suddenly snorted.

  "Stand still a minute," my father instructed, which I already was embarked on. Meanwhile he stepped carefully backward the three or four paces until he was beside the scabbard on Mouse, with the 30.06 rifle in it. That time of year in the Two, the thought was automatic in anybody who at all knew what he was doing: look around for bears, for they are coming out of hibernation cantankerous.

  What Mouse was signaling, however, proved to be a rider appearing at the bend of the trail downhill from us. He was on a blaze-face sorrel, who in turn snorted at the sight of us. A black pack mare followed into sight, then a light gray pack horse with spots on his nose and his neck stretched out and his lead rope taut.

  "Somebody’s new camptender, must be," my father said and resumed on our peaches.

  The rider sat in his saddle that permanent way a lot of those old-timers did, as if he lived up there and couldn’t imagine sufficient reason to venture down off the back of a horse. Not much of his face showed between the buttoned-up slicker and the pulled-down brown Stetson. But thinking back on it now, I am fairly sure that my father at once recognized both the horseman and the situation.

  The brief packstring climbed steadily to us, the ears of the horses sharp in interest at us and Pony and Homer and Mouse. The rider showed no attention until he was right up to my father and me. Then, though I didn’t see him do anything with the reins, the sorrel stopped and the Stetson veered half out over the slickered shoulder nearest us.

  "Hullo, Mac."

  "I had half a hunch it might be you, Stanley. How the hell are you?"

  "Still able to sit up and take nourishment. Hullo, Alec or Jick, as the case may be."

  I had not seen him since I was, what? four years old, five? Yet right then I could have tolled off to you a number of matters about Stanley Meixell. That he was taller than he looked on that sorrel, built in the riderly way of length mostly from his hips down. That he had once been an occasional presence at our meals, stooping first over the washbasin for a cleanse that included the back of his neck, and then slicking back his hair—I could have said too that it was crow-black and started from a widow’s peak—before he came to the table. That unlike a lot of people he did not talk down to children, never delivered them phony guff such as “Think you’ll ever amount to anything?"

  That, instead, he once set Alec and me to giggling to the point where my mother threatened to send us from the table, when he told us with a straight face that where he came from they called milk moo juice and eggs cackleberries and molasses long-tailed sugar. Yet of his ten or so years since we had last seen him I couldn’t have told you anything whatsoever. So it was odd how much immediately arrived to mind about this unexpected man.

  "Jick," I clarified. " ’Lo, Stanley."

  It was my father’s turn to pick up the conversation. "Thought I recognized that black pack mare. Back up in this country to be campjack for the Busby boys, are you?"

  "Yeah." Stanley’s yeah was that Missourian slowed-down kind, almost in two parts: yeh-uh. And his voice sounded huskier than it ought to, as if a rasp had been used across the top of it. "Yeah, these times, I guess being campjack is better than no jack at all." Protocol was back to him now. He asked my father, "Counting them onto the range, are you ?’

  “Withrow’s band yesterday, and Kyle’s and Hahn’s today."

  "Quite a year for feed up here. This’s been a million dollar rain, ain’t it? Brought the grass up ass-high to a tall Indian. Though I’m getting to where I could stand a little sunshine to thaw out with, myself."

  "Probably have enough to melt you," my father predicted, "soon enough."

  "Could be." Stanley looked ahead up the trail, as if just noticing that it continued on from where we stood. “Could be," he repeated.

  Nothing followed that, either from Stanley or my father, and it began to come through to me that this conversation was seriously kinked in some way. These two men had not seen each other for the larger part of ten years. So why didn’t they have anything to say to one another besides this small-change talk about weather and grass? And already were running low on that? And both were wearing a careful look, as if the trail suddenly was a slippery place?

  Finally my father offered: "Want some peaches? A few in here we haven’t stabbed dead yet."

  "Naw, thanks. I got to head on up the mountain or I’ll have sheepherders after my hide." Yet Stanley did not quite go into motion; seemed, somehow, to be storing up an impression of the pair of us to take with him.

  My father fished out another peach slice and handed me the can to finish. Along with it came his casual question: "What was it you did to your hand?"

  It took me a blink or two to realize that although he said it in my direction, the query was intended for Stanley. I saw then that a handkerchief was wrapped around the back of Stanley’s right hand, and that he was resting that hand on the saddle horn with his left hand atop it, the reverse of usual procedure there. Also, as much of the handkerchief as I could see had started off white but now showed stains like dark rust.

  "You know how it is, that Bubbles cayuse"—Stanley tossed a look over his shoulder to the gray pack horse—was kind of snaky this morning. Tried to kick me into next week. Took some skin off, is all."

  We contemplated Bubbles. As horses go, he looked capable not just of assault but maybe pillage and plunder and probably arson, too. He was ewe-necked, and accented that feature by stretching back stubbornly against the lead rope even now that he was standing still. "A dragger," the Forest Service packer Isidor Pronovost called such a creature. "You sometimes wonder if the sunnabitch mightn’t tow easier if you was to tip him over onto his back." The constellation of dark nose spots which must have given Bubbles his name—at least I couldn’t see anything else nameable about him—drew a person’s attention, but if you happened to glance beyond those markings, you saw that Bubbles was peering back at you as if he’d like to be standing on your spine. How such creatures get into packstrings I just don’t know. I suppose the same way Good Help Hebners and Ed Van Bebbers get into the human race.

  "I don’t remember you as having much hide to spare," my father said then to Stanley. During the viewing of Bubbles, the expression on my father’s face had shifted from careful. He now looked as if he’d made up his mind about something. "Suppose you could stand some company?" Awful casual, as if the idea had just strolled up to him out of the trees. "Probably it’s no special fun running a packstring one-handed."

  Now this was a prince of an offer, but of course just wasn’t possible. Evidently my father had gone absent-minded again, this time about the counting obligation he’d mentioned not ten sentences earlier. I was just set to remind him of our appointment with Walter’s and Fritz’s sheep when he added on: "Jick here could maybe ride along with you."

  I hope I didn’t show the total of astonishment I felt.

  Some must have lopped over, though, because Stanley promptly enough was saying: "Aw, no, Mac. Jick’s got better things to do than haze me along."

  "Think about morning," my father came back at him. “Those packs and knots are gonna be several kinds of hell, unless you’re more left-handed than you’ve ever shown."

  "Aw, no. I’ll be out a couple or three days, you know. Longer if any of those herders have got trouble."

  “Jick’s been
out that long with me any number of times. And your cooking’s bound to be better for him than mine."

  “Well," Stanley began, and stopped. Christamighty, he seemed to be considering. Matters were passing me by before I could even see them coming.

  I will always credit Stanley Meixell for putting the next two questions in the order he did.

  "It ought to be up to Jick." Stanley looked directly down at me. "How do you feel about playing nursemaid to somebody so goddamn dumb as to get hisself kicked?"

  The corner of my eye told me my father suggested a pretty enthusiastic response to any of this.

  "Oh, I feel fine about—I mean, sure, Stanley. I could, uh, ride along. If you really want. Yeah."

  Stanley looked down at my father now. "Mac, you double sure it’d be okay ?"

  Even I was able to translate that. What was my father going to face from my mother for sending me off camptending into the mountains with Stanley for a number of days?

  “Sure," my father stated, as if doubt wasn’t worth wrinkling the brain for. “Bring him back when he’s dried out behind the ears."

  "Well, then." The brown Stetson tipped up maybe two inches, and Stanley swung a slow look around at the pines and the trail and the mountainslope as if this was a site he might want to remember. More of his face showed. Dark eyes, blue-black. Into the corners of them, a lot of routes of squint wrinkles. Thin thrifty nose. Thrift of line at the mouth and chin, too. A face with no waste to it. In fact, a little worn down by use was the impression it gave. “I guess we ought to be getting," Stanley proposed. “Got everything you need, Jick?"

  I had no idea in hell what I needed for going off into the Rocky Mountains with a one-handed campjack. I mean, I was wearing my slicker coat, my bedroll was behind my saddle, my head was more or less on my shoulders despite the jolt of surprise that all of this had sent through me, but were those nearly enough? Anyway, I managed to blurt: