English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  • • •

  So here was my major duty of “running” English Creek in my father’s absence, Digging the new hole to site the toilet over.

  • • •

  Let me be clear. The job itself I didn’t particularly mind. Shovel work is honest sweat. Even yet I would sooner do something manual than to diddle around with some temperamental damn piece of machinery. No, my grouse was of a different feather than that. I purely was perturbed that here was one more instance of my father blindsiding me with a task I hadn’t even dreamt of. First Stanley, now this outhouse deal. Here was a summer, it was beginning to seem like, when every time I turned around some new and strange avenue of endeavor was already under my feet and my father was pointing me along it and chirping, “Right this way, Jick.”

  All this and I suppose more was on my mind as my father’s pickup vanished over the rise of the Gros Ventre road and I contemplated my work site.

  Moving an outhouse may not sound like the nicest occupation in the world. But neither is it as bad as you probably think. Here is the program: when my father got back from Missoula we would simply lever up each side of the outhouse high enough to slip a pole under to serve as a skid, then nail crosspieces to keep the pair of skids in place and, with a length of cable attached to the back of the pickup, snake the building over atop the new pit and let it down into place, ready for business.

  So the actual moving doesn’t amount to all that much. The new pit, though. There’s the drawback. The pit, my responsibility, was going to take considerable doing. Or rather, considerable digging.

  At the spot my father had paced to and marked, I pounded in four stakes with white kitchen string from one to another to represent the outhouse dimensions. Inasmuch as ours was a two-holer, as was considered good-mannered for a family, it made a considerable rectangle; I guess about half again bigger than a cemetery grave. And now all I faced was to excavate the stringed-in space to a depth of about seven feet.

  Seven feet divided by, umm, parts of five days, what with the week’s other jobs and general choring for my mother. I doped out that if I did a dab of steady digging each afternoon I could handily complete the hole by Saturday when my father was due back. Jobs which can be broken down into stints that way, where you know that if you put in a certain amount of daily effort you’ll overcome the chore, I have always been able to handle. It’s the more general errands of life that daunt me.

  I don’t mean to spout an entire sermon on this outhouse topic, but advancing into the earth does get your mind onto the ground, in more ways than one. That day when I started in on the outhouse rectangle I of course first had to cut through the sod, and once that’s been shoveled out it leaves a depression about the size of a cellar door. A sort of entryway down into the planet, it looked like. Unearthing that sod was the one part of this task that made me uneasy, and it has taken me these years to realize why. A number of times since, I have been present when sod was broken to become a farmed field. And in each instance I felt the particular emotion of watching that land be cut into furrows for the first time ever—ever; can we even come close to grasping what that means?—and the native grass being tipped on its side and then folded under the brown wave of turned earth. Anticipation, fascination. Part of the feeling can be described with those words or ones close to them. It can be understood, watching the ripping plow cut the patterns that will become a grainfield, that the homesteaders who came to Montana in their thousands believed they were seeing a new life uncovered for them.

  Yet there’s a further portion of those feelings, at least in me. Uneasiness. The uneasy wondering of whether that ripping-plow is honestly the best idea. Smothering a natural crop, grass, to try to nurture an artificial one. Not that I, or probably anyone else with the least hint of a qualm, had any vote in the matter. Both before and after the Depression—which is to say, in times when farmers had money enough to pay wages—kids such as I was in this particular English Creek summer were merely what you might call hired arms; brought in to pick rocks off the newly broken field. And not only the newly broken, for more rocks kept appearing and appearing. In fact in our part of Montana, rock-picking was like sorting through a perpetual landslide. Anything bigger than a grapefruit—the heftiest rocks might rival a watermelon—was dropped onto a stoneboat pulled by a team of horses or tractor, and the eventual load was dumped alongside the field. No stone fences built as in New England or over in Ireland or someplace. Just raw heaps, the slag of the plowed prairie.

  I cite all this because by my third afternoon shift of digging, I had confirmed for myself the Two country’s reputation for being a toupee of grass on a cranium of rock. Gravel, more accurately, there so close to the bed of English Creek, which in its bottom was a hundred percent small stones. We had studied in school that glaciers bulldozed through this part of the world, but until you get to handling the evidence shovelful by shovelful the fact doesn’t mean as much to you.

  I am dead sure this happened on the third afternoon, a Wednesday, because that was the day of the month the English Creek ladies’ club met. There were enough wives along the creek to play two tables of cards and so have a rare enough chance to visit without males cluttering up the scene. Club day always found my mother in a fresh dress right after our noon meal, ready to go. This day, Alice Van Bebber stopped by to pick her up. “My, Jick, you’re growing like a weed,” Alice crooned out the car window to me as my mother got in the other side. Alice always was flighty as a chicken looking in a mirror—living with Ed likely would do it to anybody—and away the car zoomed, up the South Fork road toward Withrows’, as it was Midge’s turn to be hostess.

  I know too that when I went out for my comfort station shift, I began by doing some work with a pick. Now, I didn’t absolutely have to swing a pick on this project. With a little effort the gravel and the dirt mixed with it were shovelable enough. But I simply liked to do occasional pickwork. Liked the different feel and rhythm of that tool, operated overhand as it is rather than the perpetual reach-down-and-heave of shoveling. Muscles too need some variety in life, I have always thought.

  So I was loosening the gravelly earth at the bottom of the hole with swings of the pick, and on the basis of Alice Van Bebber’s blab was wondering to myself why a grownup never seemed to say anything to me that I wanted to hear, and after some minutes of this I stopped for breath. And in looking up saw just starting down toward the ranger station from the rise of the county road a string of three horses.

  Sorrel and black and ugly gray.

  Or, reading back down the ladder of colors, Bubbles and the pack mare and the saddle horse that Stanley Meixell was atop.

  I didn’t think it through. I have no idea why I did it. But I ducked down and sat in the bottom of the hole.

  The moment I did, of course, I began to realize what I had committed myself to. They say nine tenths of a person is above the ears, but I swear the proportion sometimes gets reversed in me. Not that I wasn’t safely out of sight squatting down there; when I’d been standing up working, my excavation by now was about shoulder deep on me. No problem there. No problem so long as Stanley didn’t get a direct look down into the hole. But what if that happened? What if Stanley stopped at the station, for some reason or other? And, say, being stopped anyway he decided to use the outhouse, and as he was headed out there decided to amble over to admire this pit of mine? What then? Would I pop up like a jack-in-the-box? I’d sure as the dickens look just as silly as one.

  I was also learning that the position I had to squat in wasn’t the world’s most comfortable. And it was going to take a number of minutes for Stanley and company to saunter down from the rise and pass the station and go off up the North Fork road, before I could safely stand up. Just how many minutes began to interest me more than anything else. Of course I had no watch, and the only other way I knew to keep track of time was to count it off like each five-second interval between lightning and thunder: one a-mile-from-here-to-there— But the problem there, how mu
ch time did I have to count off? That I’d have to work out in my head, Alec style. Let’s see: say Stanley and his horses were traveling 5 miles an hour, which was the figure Major Kelley was always raising hell with the Forest Service packers about, insisting they by God and by damn ought to be able to average that. But the Major had never encountered Bubbles. Bubbles surely would slow down any enterprise at least half a mile an hour, dragging back on his lead rope like a tug of war contestant the way he did. Okay, 41/2 miles an hour considering Bubbles, and it was about a mile from the crest of the county road to down here at the ranger station; then from here to where Stanley would pass out of sight beyond the North Fork brush was, what, another third of a mile, maybe more like half a mile. So now: for Stanley to cover one mile at 41/2 miles an hour would take—well, 5 miles an hour would be 12 minutes; 4 miles an hour would be 15 minutes; round the 41/2 mile an hour pace off to say 13 minutes; then the other one third to one half mile would take somewhere around 6 minutes, wouldn’t it be? So, 13 and 6, 19 minutes. Then 19 times 60 (60 seconds to the minute), and that was, was, was . . . 1100-something. And divide that by the five seconds it took to say each—

  Never mind, I decided. This hunching down in a toilet hole was all getting dismal enough without me trying to figure out how many a-mile-from-here-to-theres there are in 1100-something. Besides, I had no idea how much time I had already spent in the calculating.

  Besides again, numbers weren’t really what needed thinking on. The point to ponder was, why was I hiding anyway? Why had I plunked myself into this situation? Why didn’t I want to face Stanley? Why had I let the sight of him hoodoo me like this? Some gab about the weather, inquire as to how his hand was getting along, say I had to get back to digging, and that would have been that. But no, here I was, playing turtle to the bottom of an outhouse pit. Sometimes there’s nobody stranger in this world than ourselves.

  So I squatted and mulled. There is this for sure about doing those two together, they fairly soon convince you that you can think better standing up. Hell with it, I eventually told myself. If I had to pop up and face Stanley with my face all pie, so be it.

  I unkinked and came upright with some elaborate arm-stretching, as if I’d just had a nice break from work down there. Then treated myself to a casual yawn and began eyeing around over the rim of the pit to determine which direction I had to face embarrassment from.

  And found nobody.

  No Stanley. No Bubbles. Nothing alive anywhere around, except one fourteen-year-old fool.

  • • •

  “So,” my mother inquired upon return from her ladies’ club, “everything peaceful around here?”

  “Downright lonesome,” I said back.

  • • •

  Now let me tell of my mother’s contribution to that week.

  It ensued around midday on Thursday. First thing that morning Isidor Pronovost showed up and I spent the front of the day working as cargodier for him, helping make up packs of supplies to take up to the fire lookouts.

  “Balance,” Isidor sermoned as he always did. “We got to balance the buggers, Jick. That’s every secret of it.” Harking back to my Bubbles experience I thought to myself, Don’t I know it.

  Then Isidor was not much more than out of sight with his packstring when here came my mother’s brother, Pete Reese. English Creek was getting about as busy as Broadway.

  Pete had driven into town from his ranch on Noon Creek on one errand or another, and now was looping home by way of English Creek to drop off our mail and see how we were faring. He stepped over and admired my progress on the outhouse hole. “Everybody on the creek’ll be wanting to patronize it. You thought of charging admission?” Then handed me the few letters and that week’s Gleaner. His doing so reminded me I was the temporary host of the place and I hurriedly invited, “Come on over to the house.”

  We no sooner were through the door than my mother was saying to Pete, “You’re staying for dinner, aren’t you,” more as declaration than question. So Pete shed his hat and offered that he supposed he could, “if it’s going to be something edible.” Pete got away with more with my mother than just about anyone else could, including my father. “Park your tongue then,” she simply retorted, and went to work on the meal while Pete and I chinned about the green year.

  That topic naturally was staying near the front of everybody’s mind. By now the weather service was declaring this the coolest June in Montana since 1916 and the wettest in almost as long, news which was more than welcome. In Montana too much rain is just about enough. All the while the country had been greening and greening, the crop and livestock forecasts were flourishing, too. Pete imparted that Morrel Loomis, the biggest wool buyer operating in the Two country, had come up from Great Falls for a look at the Reese and Hahn and Withrow bands, and that Pete and Fritz and Dode all decided to go ahead and consign their wool to Loomis on his offer of twenty-one and a half cents a pound. “Enough to keep me floating toward bankruptcy,” Dode had been heard to say, which meant that even he was pretty well pleased with the price.

  “Beats last year by a couple of cents, doesn’t it?” I savvily asked Pete.

  “Uh huh, and it’s damn well time. Montana has got to be the champion next-year country of the entire damn world.”

  “How soon did you say you’d be haying?” my mother interrogated without looking around from her meal work at the stove. I wish now that she had in fact been facing around toward Pete and me, for I am sure my gratitude for that question was painted all over my face. Whenever haying began I was to drive the scatter rake for Pete, as I had done the summer before and Alec had for the few summers before that. But getting a rancher to estimate a date when he figured his hay crop would be ready was like getting him to confess to black magic. The hemming and hawing did have the basis that hay never was really ready to mow until the day you went out and looked at it and felt it and cocked an eye at the weather and decided this was as good a time as any. But I also think ranchers cherished haying as the one elastic part of their year. The calendar told them when lambing or calving would begin, and shipping time loomed as another constant, so when they had a chance to be vague—even Pete, of the same straightforward lineage as my mother, now was pussyfooting to the effect that “all this rain, hay’s going to be kind of late this year”—they clung to it.

  “Before the Fourth?” my mother narrowed the specification.

  “No, I don’t suppose.” It was interesting to see comments go back and forth between this pair; like studying drawings of the same face done by two different artists. Pete had what might be called the kernel of my mother’s good looks. Same neat nose, apple cheeks, attractive Reese chin, but proportioned smaller, thriftier.

  “The week after?”

  “Could be,” Pete allowed. “Were you going to feed us sometime today or what?”

  Messages come in capsules as well as bottles. The content of “Could be” was that no hay would be made by Pete Reese until after the Fourth of July, and until then I was loose in the world.

  • • •

  There during dinner, it turned out that Pete now was on the question end of the conversation:

  “Alec been around lately?”

  “Alec,” my mother reported in obituary tones, “is busy Riding the Range.”

  “Day and night?”

  “At least. Our only hope of seeing him is if he ever needs a clean shirt.”

  • • •

  My personal theory is that a lot of misunderstanding followed my mother around just because of her way of saying. Lisabeth Reese McCaskill could give you the time of day and make you wonder why you had dared to ask. I recall once when I was about eleven that we were visited for the morning by Louise Bowen, wife of the young ranger at the Indian Head district to the south of us. Cliff Bowen was newly assigned onto the Two, having held down an office job at Region headquarters in Missoula all the time before, and Louise was telling my mother how worried she was that her year-old, Donny, accustomed t
o town and a fenced yard, would wander off from the station, maybe fall into the Teton River. I was in the other room, more or less reading a Collier’s and minding my own business, but I can still hear how my mother’s response suddenly seemed to fill the whole house:

  “Bell him.”

  There was a stretch of silence then, until Louise finally kind of peeped: “Beg pardon? I don’t quite—”

  “Put a bell on him. The only way to keep track of a wandering child is to hear him.”

  Louise left not all too long after that, and that was the extent of our visits from her. But I did notice, when my father drove down to borrow a saw set from Cliff a month or so later and I rode along, that Donny Bowen was toddling around with a lamb bell on him.

  • • •

  Pete was continuing on the topic of Alec. “Well, he’s at that age—”

  “Pete,” she headed him off, “I know what age my own son is.”

  “So you do, Bet. But the number isn’t all of it. You might try and keep that in mind.”

  My mother reached to pass Pete some more fried spuds. “I’ll try,” she allowed. “I Will Try.”

  • • •

  When we’d eaten and Pete declared, “It’s time I wasn’t here” and headed home to Noon Creek, my mother immediately began drowning dirty dishes and I meanwhile remembered the mail I’d been handed, and fetched it from the sideboard where I’d put it down. There was a letter to my mother from Mr. Vennaman, the Gros Ventre school superintendent—even though Alec and I were gone from the English Creek school my mother still was president of its board and so had occasional dealings with the education muckymucks in Gros Ventre and Conrad—and a couple of Forest Service things for my father, probably the latest kelleygrams. But what I was after was the Gleaner, thinking I’d let my dinner settle a little while I read.