English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  "What, are you another one of the famous fist-fighting McCaskills?" Alec’s flooring of Earl Zane at the Fourth of July dance was of course the natural father of that remark.

  "No, I’m the cut-and-shoot type," I cracked back. "When the trouble starts, I cut through the alley and shoot for home."

  You just never know. That joke had gray whiskers and leaned on a cane, but it drew a big laugh from the Double W yayhoos even so. There followed some more comment, probably for the fortieth time, about how Alec had whopped Earl, and innumerable similar exploits performed in the past by various of this crew. You’d have thought the history of boxing had taken place in that bunkhouse. But I was careful not to contribute anything further. The main rule when you join a crew, even if it’s only for the duration of a rainstorm, is to listen more than you talk.

  Alec still didn’t look overjoyed that I was on hand, but I couldn’t help that. I didn’t order up the damn electrical storm, which still was rumbling and crashing around out there.

  "So," I offered as an opener, "what do you know for sure?"

  "Enough to get by on," Alec allowed.

  “Been doing any calf-roping?"

  "No."

  That seemed to take care of the topic of calf-roping. Some silence, then Alec hazarded: “How’s the haying going at Pete’s?"

  "We’ve pretty close to got it. A few more days left. How’re they doing here ?"

  "More like a couple of weeks left, I guess."

  And there went the topic of haying. Alec and I just sat back and listened for a little to where the discussion had now turned, the pair of slots for town. Some grumping was going on about Cal Petrie’s edict that only two of the crew were going to get to see the glories of Gros Ventre on a Saturday night. This was standard bunkhouse grouse, though. If Cal had said the whole shebang of them could go to town with him there’d have been grumbling that he hadn’t offered to buy them the first round of drinks as well. No, the true issue was just beginning to come out: more than half the hay crew, six or so guys, considered themselves the logical town candidates. The variety of reasoning—the awful need for a haircut, a bet to be collected from a guy who was going to be in the Medicine Lodge only this very night, even a potential toothache that necessitated preventive remedies from the drugstore—was remarkably well rehearsed. This Double W bunch was the kind of crew, as the saying went, who began on Thursday to get ready on Friday to go to town on Saturday to spend Sunday. Long Mike and Plain Mike and a sort of a gorilla of a guy who I figured must be one of the two stackmen of this gang were among the yearners for town. Plain Mike surprised me by being the one to propose that a game of cards settle the matter. But then, you just never know who in a crew will turn out to be the tiger rider.

  The proposal itself eliminated the big stackman. “Hell with it, I ain’t lost nothing in that burg anyway." At the time I thought his sporting blood was awfully anemic. It has since dawned on me that he could not read; could not tell the cards apart.

  Inasmuch as Plain Mike had efficiently whittled off one contender, the other four felt more or less obliged to go along with a card game. "We need an honest banker," Plain Mike solicited.

  "You’re talking contradictions," somebody called out.

  "Damn, I am at that. Honest enough that we can’t catch him, will do. Hey there, Alec’s brother! How about you being the bank for us ?"

  "Well, I don’t know. What are you going to play ?"

  "Pitch," stipulated Plain Mike. “What else is there?"

  That drew me. Pitch is the most perfect of card games. It excels poker in that there can be more than one winner during each hand, and cribbage in that it doesn’t take an eternity to play, and rummy and hearts in that judgment is more important than the cards you are dealt, and stuff like canasta and pinochle can’t even be mentioned in the same breath with pitch.

  "I guess I could," I assented. "Until the rain lets up." It still was raining like bath time on Noah’s ark.

  "Pull up a stump," invited Plain Mike, nodding toward a spare chair beside the stove. "‘We’ll show you pitch as she is meant to be played."

  Uh huh, at least you will, I thought to myself as I added my presence to the circle of card players. But I will say this for the Double W yayhoos, they played pitch the classic way: high, low, game, jack, jick, joker. It would just surprise you, how many people go through life under the delusion that pitch ought to be played without a joker in the deck, which is a skimpy damned way of doing it, and how many others are just as dim in wanting to play with two jokers, which is excessive and confusing.

  My job of banker didn’t amount to all that much. Just being in charge of the box of Diamond wooden matches and paying out to each player as many matches as he’d made points, or taking matches back if he went set. Truth be told, I could have kept score more efficiently with a pencil and sheet of paper, and Alec simply could have done it in his head. But these Double W highrollers wanted to be able to squint around the table and count for themselves how much score everybody else had.

  From the very first hand, when the other players were tuning up with complaints like “Is this the best you can deal, a mess like this ?" and Plain Mike simply bid three, "in them things called spades," and led with the queen, it was worth a baccalaureate degree in the game of pitch to watch Plain Mike. He bid only when he had one sure point, ace for high or deuce for low, with some other point probable among his cards, so that when he did bid it was as good as made. But during a hand when anybody else had the bid, he managed to run with some point, jack or jick or joker, for himself, or at least—this, a real art of pitch—he managed to sluff the point to somebody besides the bidder. I banked and admired. While the other cardsters’ scores gyrated up and down, with every hand Plain Mike added a wooden match or two to his total.

  Around us the rest of the crew was carrying on conversation. If you can call it that. There is no place like a bunkhouse for random yatter. One guy will grouch about how the eggs were cooked for breakfast and another will be reminded of a plate of beans he ate in Pocatello in 1922. Harness the gab gas of the average bunkhouse and you’d have an inexhaustible fuel.

  I was taking it all in, eyes and mind pretty much on the card game and ears shopping around in the crew conversation, when one of the pitch players popped out with: "Aw hell, there goes Jick."

  I blinked and sat up at that. Anybody would, wouldn’t he? All right, so my attention was a bit divided: so what the hell business was it of some stranger to announce it to the world? But then I saw that the guy hadn’t meant me, he was just bemoaning because he’d tried to run the jick past Plain Mike and Plain Mike had nabbed it with his jack of trump.

  The only one to notice my peeved reaction was Plain Mike himself, who I would say did not miss many tricks in life as well as in cards. "A jick and a Jick we got here, huh ?" he said now. “Who hung that nickname on you, that battling brother of yours?"

  Actually my best guess was that it’d been Dode Withrow who suggested I looked like the jick of the McCaskills, but my parents were vague about the circumstance. I mean, a person wants to know his own history insofar as possible, but if you can’t, you can’t. So instead of trying to go into all that before this Double W crowd I just responded: "Somebody with an imagination, I guess."

  "Lucky thing he didn’t imagine you resembled the queen of hearts," observed Plain Mike and turned his attention back to the pitch game. By now Alec, looking restless and overhearing all this name stuff, had come over and joined me in watching the card game. This was certainly a more silent brother than I’d ever been around before. Maybe it had something to do with his surroundings, this hay crew he and the other riders now had to share the bunkhouse with. Between checking out the window on the progress of the rain and banking the pitch game, I started mulling what it would be like to workin this hay crew instead of Pete’s. If, say, ranches were swapped under Alec and me, him up the creek at the Reese place as he’d been at my age and me here at the Gobble Gobble You. Some direct c
omparison of companions was possible. Wisdom Johnson was an obvious choice over the gorilla of a guy who was one of the Double W stackmen, and a rangy man called Swede who more than likely was the other one. A possible advantage I could see to the gorilla was what he might have inflicted on Good Help Hebner for trying to drown him in hay, but that was wishful thinking. Over on the conversation side of the room, Mike the Mower looked somewhat more interesting than Bud Dolson. He was paying just enough attention to the pair of storiers not to seem standoffish.

  His bunk was the most neatly made, likely showing he had been in the army. All in all, though, Mike the Mower showed more similarity to Bud than difference. Mower men were their own nationality.

  From how they had been razzing one another about quantities of hay moved, three of the five pitch players—Plain Mike and Long Mike and a heavy-shouldered guy—were the horse buckrakers. I was pretty sure how they shaped up on the job. The heavy-shouldered guy, who looked like a horseman, was the best buckraker. Long Mike was the slowest. And Plain Mike did just enough more work than Long Mike to look better.

  A couple of younger guys, around Alec’s age but who looked about a fraction as bright, likely were the stacker team drivers in this outfit. Then a slouchy elderly guy in a khaki shirt, and a one-eyed one; I suppose it doesn’t say much for my own haying status that I was working down through this Double IV crew, getting to the bunchrakers and whoever the scatter raker was, when the telephone jangled at the far end of the room.

  The ring of that phone impressed me more than anything else about the Double W had yet. I mean, there was no stipulated reason why there couldn’t be a telephone in a bunkhouse. But at the time it seemed a fairly swanky idea.

  Cal Petrie stepped out of his room to answer it. When he had listened a bit and yupped an answer, he hung up and looked over toward where Alec and I were on the rim of the card game.

  "Come on up for supper with us," the foreman directed at me. "Give the mud a little more chance to dry out, that way."

  Cal declaimed this as if it was his own idea, but I would have bet any money as to who was on the other end of that phone line. Meredice Williamson.

  * * *

  Not long after, the supper bell sounded the end of the card game. The heavy-shouldered guy had the highest score, and yes, Plain Mike had the next. Now that they were the town-bound pair they received a number of imaginative suggestions of entertainment they might seek in there, as the crowd of us sloshed over to the kitchen door of the house. While everybody scraped mud off his feet and trooped on in I hung back with Alec, to see what the table lineup was going to be. “Jick," he began, but didn’t go on with whatever he had in mind. Instead, “See you after supper," he said, and stepped into the house, with me following.

  The meal was in the summer room, a kind of windowed porch along the side of the house, long enough to hold a table for a crew this size. I of course did know that even at a place like the Double W, family and crew ate together. If the king of England had owned Noon Creek benchland instead of Scottish moors, probably even he would have had to go along with the ranch custom of everybody sitting down to refuel together. So I wasn’t surprised to see Wendell Williamson sitting at the head of the table. Meredice sat at his right, and the old choreboy Dolph Kuhn next to her. At Wendell’s left was a vacancy which I knew would be the cook’s place, and next to that Cal Petrie seated himself. All five of them had chairs, then backless benches filled the rest of both sides of the table, which was about twenty feet long.

  I felt vaguely let down. It was a setup about like any other ranch’s, only bigger. I suppose I expected the Double W to have something special, like a throne for Wendell Williamson instead of a straightback kitchen chair.

  Alec and Joe and Thurl, as ranch regulars, took their places next to the head-of-the-table elite, and the hay crew began filling in the rest of the table to the far end. In fact, at the far end there was a kitchen stool improvised as a seat, and Meredice Williamson’s smile and nod told me it was my place.

  This I had not dreamt of. Facing Wendell Williamson down the length of the Double W supper table. He now acknowledged me by saying: "Company. Nuhhuh. Quite a way to come for a free meal, young fellow."

  Before thinking I said back: "Everybody says there’s no cooking like the Double W’s."

  That caused a lot of facial expressions along the table, and I saw Alec peer at me rather firmly. But Wendell merely said “Nuhhuh" again—that "nuhhuh" of his was a habit I would think anybody with sufficient money would pay to have broken—and took a taste of his cup of coffee.

  To me, Wendell Williamson always looked as if he’d been made by the sackful. Sacks of what, I won’t go into. But just everything about him, girth, shoulders, arms, even his fingers, somehow seemed fuller than was natural; as if he always was slighty swollen. Wendell’s head particularly stood out in this way, because his hair had retreated about halfway back and left all that face to loom out. And the other odd thing up there was, what remained of Wendell’s hair was thick and curly and coal-black. A real stand of hair there at the rear of that big moonhead, like a sailor might wear a watchcap pushed way back. The cook came in from the kitchen with a bowl of gray gravy and handed it to Wendell. She was a gaunt woman, sharp cheekbones, beak of a nose. Her physiognomy was a matter of interest and apprehension to me. The general theory is that a thin cook is a poor idea.

  Plain Mike was sitting at my left, and at my right was a scowling guy who’d been one of the losers in the pitch game. As I have always liked to keep abreast of things culinary, I now asked Plain Mike in an undertone: "Is this the cook from Havre?"

  "No, hell, she’s long gone. This one’s from up at Lethbridge."

  What my mother would have commented danced to mind: “So Wendell Williamson has to import them from Canada now, does he? I’m Not Surprised."

  I kept that to myself, but the scowler on my right had overheard my question and muttered: "She ain’t Canadian though, kid. She’s a Hungrarian."

  "She is ?" To me, the cook didn’t look conspicuously foreign.

  "You bet. She leaves you hungrier than when you came to the table."

  I made a polite "heh-heh-heh" to that, and decided I’d better focus on the meal.

  The first bowl to reach me contained a concoction I’ve never known the actual name of but in my own mind I always dub tomato smush. Canned tomatoes heated up, with little dices of bread dropped in. You sometimes get this as a side dish in cafes when the cook has run out of all other ideas about vegetables. Probably the Lunchery in Gros Ventre served it four days a week. In any case, tomato smush is a remarkable recipe, in that it manages to wreck both the tomatoes and the bread.

  Out of chivalry I spooned a dab onto my plate. And next loaded up with mashed potatoes. Hard for any cook to do something drastic to mashed potatoes. The gravy, though, lacked salt and soul. Then along came a platter of fried liver. This suited me fine, as I can dine on liver even when it is overcooked and tough, as this was. But I have observed in life that there is no middle ground about liver. When I passed the platter to the guy on my right, he mumbled something about “Lethbridge leather again," and his proved to be the majority view at the table.

  There was some conversation at the head of the table, mostly between Wendell and the foreman Cal about the unfairness of being rained out at this stage of haying. In light of what followed, I see now that the rainstorm was largely responsible for Wendell’s mood. Not that Wendell Wiliamson ever needed a specific excuse to be grumpy, so far as I could tell, but this suppertime he was smarting around his wallet. If the rain had started before noon and washed out the haying, he’d have had to pay all this hay crew for only half a day. But since the rain came in the afternoon he was laying out a full day’s wages for not a full day’s work. I tell you, there can be no one more morose than a rancher having to pay a hay crew to watch rain come down.

  Anyway, the bleak gaze of Wendell Williamson eventually found its way down the length of the table to me. To
my surprise, since I didn’t think anybody’s welfare mattered to him but his own, Wendell asked me: "How’s your folks ?"

  "Real good."

  "Nuhhuh." Wendell took a mouthful of coffee, casting a look at the cook as he set down his cup. Then his attention was back on me: "I hear your mother gave quite a talk, the day of the Fourth."

  Well, what the hell. If Wendell goddamn Williamson wanted to tap his toe to that tune, I was game to partner him. The McCaskills of this world maybe don’t own mills and mines and all the land in sight, as some Williamson back in history had managed to grab, but we were born with tongues.

  “She’s sure had a lot of good comments on it," I declared with enthusiasm. Alec was stirring in his seat, trying to follow all this, but he’d missed Mom’s speech by being busy with his roping horse. No, this field of engagement was mine alone. "People tell her it brought back the old days, when there were all those other ranches around here. The days of Ben English and those."

  "Nuhhuh." What Wendell would have responded beyond that I will never know, for Meredice Williamson smiled down the table in my direction and then said to Wendell: "Ben English. What an interesting name, I have always thought." Mr. Double W didn’t conspicuously seem to think so. But Meredice sallied right on. "Was he, do you think?"

  "Was he what ?" retorted VVendell.

  "English. Do you suppose Mr. English was of English extraction ?"

  "Meredice, how in hell—" Wendell stopped himself and swigged some more sour coffee. "He might’ve been Swedish, for all I know."

  "It would be more fitting if he were English," she persisted.

  “It would be more fitting to the memory of the man and his times." She smiled toward me again. “To those old days." Now she looked somewhere over my head, and Plain Mike’s, and the heads of all of us at our end of the table, and she recited: