English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  As usual, I opened to page 5. The newspaper was always eight pages and page 5 was always the At Random page, carrying the editor Bill Reinking’s own comments, and syndicated features about famous people or events, and local history, and even poetry or quotations if Bill felt like it. Random definitely was the right word for it, yet every week that page was a magnet for a mind like mine.

  I’d been literary for maybe three minutes when I saw the names.

  “Mom? You and Pete are in the paper.”

  She turned from where she was washing dishes and gave me her look that said, you had now better produce some fast truth.

  I pinned down the newsprint evidence with my finger: “See, here.”

  25 YEARS AGO IN THE GLEANER

  Anna Reese and children Lisabeth and Peter visited Isaac Reese at St. Mary Lake for three days last week. Isaac is providing the workhorses for the task of building the roadbed from St. Mary to Babb. Isaac sends word through Anna that the summer’s work on this and other Glacier National Park roads and trails is progressing satisfactorily.

  As she read over my shoulder I thought about the journey that would have been in those days. Undoubtedly by democrat wagon, from the Reese place on Noon Creek all the way north almost to Chief Mountain, the last peak on that horizon. I of course had been over that total route with my father, but only a piece at a time, on various riding trips and by pickup to the northernmost part. But to do the whole journey at once, by hoof and iron wheel, a woman and two kids, struck me as a notable expedition.

  “Sounds like a long time in a wagon,” I prompted cannily. “You never told me about that.”

  “Didn’t I.” And she turned and went back to her dishpan.

  Well, sometimes you could prompt my mother, and sometimes you might as well try conversing with the stove poker.

  • • •

  I retreated into my hole, so to speak. Yet, you know how it is when you’re doing something your body can take care of by itself. Your mind is going to sneak off somewhere on its own. As the rest of me dug, mine was on that wagon journey with my mother and Pete and their mother.

  There wouldn’t have been the paved highway north to Browning and the Park then, just the old road as the wheels of the freight wagons had rutted it into the prairie. Some homesteads must have still existed between Gros Ventre and the Blackfeet Reservation boundary at Birch Creek, but probably not many. Those were the years when the Valier irrigation project was new and anybody who knew grain grew on a stem was over there around Lake Frances trying to be a farmer. Mostly empty country, then, except for livestock, all the way to Birch Creek and its ribbon line of cottonwoods. Empty again from there north to Badger Creek, where I supposed some of the same Blackfeet families lived then as now. There near Badger the Reese wagon would have passed just west of the place where, a century and some before, Meriwether Lewis and the Blackfeet clashed. That piece of reservation country to us was simply grass, until my father deduced from reading in a book of the Lewis and Clark journals that somewhere off in there near where Badger flows into the Two Medicine River was the place Lewis and his men killed a couple of Blackfeet over a stealing incident and began the long prairie war between whites and Indians. Passing that area in a pickup on paved highway never made that history seem real to me. I would bet it was more believable from a wagon. Then up from Badger, the high benches to where the Two Medicine trenched deep through the landscape. Maybe another couple of days of travel beyond that, through Browning and west and then north across Cut Bank Creek and through that up and down country above it, and over the divide to St. Mary, and there at the end of it all the road camp, its crews and tents and workhorses. In my imagination I saw it as somewhat like a traveling circus, but with go-devils and scrapers and other road machines instead of circus wagons. And its ringmaster, my grandfather, Isaac Reese. He was the only one of my grandparents yet alive when I became old enough to remember and I could just glimpse him in a corner of my mind. A gray-mustached man at the head of the table whenever we had Sunday dinner at the Reeses’, using his knife to load his fork with food in a way which would have caused my mother to give Alec or me absolute hell if we had dared try it. I gather, though, that Isaac Reese got away with considerably more than that in life—I suppose any horse dealer worth his reputation did—and it was a thriving Reese ranch there on Noon Creek that Pete took over after the old man’s death.

  This Reese side of the family wandered into the conversation whenever someone would learn that my mother, although she was married to a man only a generation or so away from kilts, herself was just half Scottish. “The other half,” my father would claim when he judged that she was in a good enough mood he could get away with it, “seems to be something like porcupine.” Actually, that lineage was Danish. Isak Riis left Denmark aboard the ship King Carl sometime in the 1880s, and the pen of an immigration official greeted him onto American soil as Isaac Reese. In that everybody-head-west-and-grab-some-land period, counting was more vital than spelling anyway. By dint of what his eyes told him on the journey west, Isaac arrived to North Dakota determined on a living from workhorses. The Great Northern railroad was pushing across the top of the western United States—this was when Jim Hill was promising to cobweb Dakota and Montana with railroad iron—and Isaac began as a teamster on the roadbed. His ways with horses and projects proved to be as sure as his new language was shaky. My father claimed to have been on hand the famous time, years later, when Isaac couldn’t find the words “wagon tongue” and ended up calling it “de Godtamn handle to de Godtamn vagon.”

  Within days after sizing up the railroad situation “the old boy was borrowing money right and left from anybody who’d take his note, to buy horses and more horses”—my father was always a ready source on Isaac, I guess greatly grateful to have had a father-in-law he both admired and got entertainment from—and soon Isaac had his own teams and drivers working on contract for the Great Northern.

  When construction reached the east face of the Rockies, the mountains held Isaac. Why, nobody in the family ever could figure out. Certainly in Denmark he must never have seen anything higher than a barnyard manure pile. And unlike some other parts of Montana, this one had no settlement of Danes. (Though, as my father pointed out, maybe those were Isaac’s reasons.) In any case, while his horses and men worked on west through Marias Pass as the railroad proceeded toward the coast, Isaac stayed and looked around. In a week or so he horsebacked south along the mountains toward Gros Ventre, and out of that journey bought a homestead relinquishment which became the start of the eventual Reese ranch.

  Isaac Reese was either shrewd as hell or lucky as hell. Even at my stage of life I am not entirely clear whether there is any appreciable difference between the two. By whichever guidance he lit here in a region of Montana where a couple of decades of projects were standing in line waiting for a man with a herd of workhorses. The many miles of irrigation canals of the water schemes at Valier and Bynum and Choteau and Fairfield. Ranch reservoirs (“ressavoys” to Isaac). The roadbed when the branch railroad was built north from Choteau to Pendroy. Street grading when Valier was built onto the prairie. All those Glacier Park roads and trails. As each appurtenance was put onto the Two country and its neighboring areas, Isaac was on hand to realize money from it.

  “And married a Scotchwoman to hang on to the dollars for him,” my father always injected at this point. She was Anna Ramsay, teacher at the Noon Creek school. Her I knew next to nothing about. Just that she died in the influenza epidemic during the war, and that in the wedding picture of her and Isaac that hung in my parents’ bedroom she was the one standing and looking in charge, while Isaac sat beside her with his mustache drooping whimsically. Neither my mother nor my father ever said much about Anna Ramsay Reese; which helped sharpen my present curiosity, thinking about her trundling off to St. Mary in that wagon. Like my McCaskill grandparents she simply was an absent figure back there, cast all the more into shadow by my father’s supply of stories about Isa
ac.

  In a sense, the first of those Isaac tales was the genesis of our family. The night my father, the young association rider, was going to catch Isaac by ambush and request my mother in marriage, Isaac greeted him at the door and before they were even properly sat down, had launched into a whole evening of horse topics, Clydesdales and Belgians and Morgans and fetlocks and withers and hocks. Never tell me a Scandinavian harbors no sense of humor.

  When my father at last managed to wedge the question in, Isaac tried to look taken aback, eyed him hard and repeated as if he was making sure: “Marriage?” Or as my father said Isaac pronounced it: “Mare itch?”

  Then Isaac looked at my father harder yet and asked: “Tell me dis. Do you ever took a drink?”

  My father figured honesty was the best answer in the face of public knowledge. “Now and then, yes, I do.”

  Isaac weighed that. Then he got to his feet and loomed over my father. “Ve’ll took one now, den.” And with Mason jar moonshine reached down from the cupboard, the pairing that began Alec and me was toasted.

  • • •

  When I considered that I’d done an afternoon’s excavating, physically and mentally, I climbed out and had a look at the progress of my sanitation engineering. By now the pile of dirt and gravel stood high and broad, the darker tone on its top showing today’s fresh shovel work and the drier faded-out stuff the previous days’. With a little imagination I thought I could even discern a gradation, like layers on a cake, of each stint of my shovelfuls of the Two country, Monday’s, Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s, and now today’s light-chocolate top. Damn interesting, the ingredients of this earth.

  More to the immediate point, I was pleased with myself that I’d estimated the work into the right daily dabs. Tomorrow afternoon was going to cost some effort, because I was getting down so deep the soil would need to be bucketed out. But the hole looked definitely finishable.

  I must have been more giddy with myself than I realized, because when I went over to the chopping block to split wood for the kitchen woodbox, I found myself using the ax in rhythm with a song of Stanley’s about the gal named Lou and what she was able to do with her wingwangwoo.

  When I came into the kitchen with the armload, my mother was looking at me oddly.

  “Since when did you take up singing?” she inquired.

  “Oh, just feeling good, I guess,” I said and dumped my cargo into the woodbox loud enough to try prove it.

  “What was that tune, anyway?”

  “ ‘Pretty Redwing,’ ” I hazarded. “I think.”

  That brought a further look from her.

  “While I’m at it I might as well fill the water bucket,” I proposed, and got out of there.

  • • •

  After supper, lack of anything better to do made me tackle my mother on that long ago wagon trip again. That is, I was doing something but it didn’t exactly strain the brain. Since hearing Stanley tell about having done that winter of hairwork a million years ago in Kansas, I had gotten mildly interested and was braiding myself a horsehair hackamore. I was discovering, though, that in terms of entertainment, braiding is pretty much like chewing gum with your fingers. So:

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  She was going through the Gleaner. “Sleep when?”

  “That time. When you all went up to St. Mary.” I kept on with my braiding just as if we’d been having this continuing conversation every evening of our lives.

  She glanced over at me, then said: “Under the wagon.”

  “Really? You?” Which drew me more of her attention than I was bargaining for. “Uh, how many nights?”

  I got quite a little braiding done in the silence that answered that, and when I finally figured I had to glance up, I realized that she was truly studying me. Not just taking apart with a look: studying. Her voice wasn’t at all sharp when she asked: “Jick, what’s got your curiosity bump up?”

  “I’m just interested, is all.” Even to me that didn’t sound like an overly profound explanation, so I tried to go on. “When I was with Stanley, those days camptending, he told me a lot about the Two. About when he was the ranger. It got me interested in, uh, old times.”

  “What did he say about being ranger?”

  “That he was the one here before Dad. And that he set up the Two as a national forest.” It occurred to me to try her on a piece of chronology I had been attempting to work out ever since that night of my cabin binge. “What, was Dad the ranger at Indian Head while Stanley still was the ranger here?”

  “For a while.”

  “Is that where I remember Stanley from?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Did you and Dad neighbor back and forth with him a lot?”

  “Some. What does any of that have to do with how many nights I slept under a wagon twenty-five years ago?”

  She had a reasonable enough question there. Yet it somehow seemed to me that a connection did exist, that any history of a Two country person was alloyed with the history of any other Two country person. That some given sum of each life had to be added into every other, to find the total. But none of which sounded sane to say. All I did finally manage was: “I just would like to know something about things then. Like when you were around my age.”

  No doubt there was a response she had to bite her tongue to keep from making: that she wasn’t sure she’d ever been this age I seemed to be at just now. Instead came:

  “All right. That wagon trip to St. Mary. What is it you want to know about it?”

  “Well, just—why was it you went?”

  “Mother took the notion. My father had been away, up there, for some weeks. He often was, contracting horses somewhere.” She rustled the Gleaner as she turned a page. “About like being married to a ranger,” she added, but lightly enough to show it was her version of a joke.

  “How long did that trip take then?” Now, in a car, it was a matter of a couple or three hours.

  She had to think about that. After a minute: “Three and a half days. Three nights,” she underscored for my benefit, “under the wagon. One at Badger Creek and one on the flat outside Browning and one at Cut Bank Creek.”

  “How come outside Browning? Why not in town?”

  “My mother held the opinion that the prairie was a more civilized place than Browning.”

  “What did you do for food?”

  “We ate out of a chuck box. That old one from chuckwagon days, with all the cattle brands on it. Mother and I cooked up what was necessary, before we left.”

  “Were you the only ones on the road?”

  “Pretty much, yes. The mail stage still was running then. Somewhere along the way I guess we met it.”

  She could nail questions shut faster than I could think them up. Not deliberately, I see now. That was just the way she was. A person who put no particular importance on having made a prairie trek and seen a stagecoach in the process.

  My mother seemed to realize that this wasn’t exactly flowering into the epic tale I was hoping for. “Jick, that’s all I know about it. We went, and stayed a few days, and came back.”

  Went, stayed, came. The facts were there but the feel of them wasn’t.

  “What about the road camp?” I resorted to next. “What do you remember about that?” The St. Mary area is one of the most beautiful ones, with the mountains of Glacier National Park sheering up beyond the lake. The world looks to be all stone and ice and water there. Even my mother might have noticed some of that glory.

  Here she found a small smile, one of her surprise sidelong ones. “Just that when we pulled in, Pete began helloing all the horses.”

  She saw that didn’t register with me.

  “Calling out hello to the workhorses in the various teams,” she explained. “He hadn’t seen them for a while, after all. ‘Hello, Woodrow!’ ‘Hello, Sneezer!’ Moses. Runt. Copenhagen. Mother let him go on with it until he came to a big gray mare called Second Wife. She never thought the name of that one was as funny
as Father did.”

  There is this about history, you never know which particular ember of it is going to glow to life. As she told this I could all but hear Pete helloing those horses, his dry voice making a chant which sang across that road camp. And the look on my mother told me she could, too.

  Not to be too obvious, I braided a moment more. Then decided to try the other part of that St. Mary scene. “Your own mother. What was she like?”

  “That father of yours has been heard to say I’m a second serving of her.”

  Well, this at least informed me that old Isaac Reese hadn’t gotten away with nearly as much in life as I’d originally thought. But now, how to keep this line of talk going—

  “Was she an April Fool too?”

  “No,” my mother outright laughed. “No, I seem to be the family’s only one of that variety.”

  Probably our best single piece of family lore was that my mother, our unlikeliest candidate for any kind of foolery, was born on the first of April of 1900. “Maybe you could get the calendar changed,” I recall that my father joked this particular year, when he and Alec and I were spoofing her a little, careful not to make it too much, about the coincidence of her birthday. “Trade dates with Groundhog Day, maybe.” She retorted, “I don’t need the calendar changed, just slowed down.” It sobers me to realize that when she made that plaint about the speed of time, she was not yet two thirds of the age I am now.

  —“Why did I What?” The Gleaner was forgotten in front of her now, her gaze was on me: not her look that could skin a rock, just a highly surprised once-over.

  I swear that what I’d had framed in mind was only further inquiry about my grandparents, how Anna Ramsay and Isaac Reese first happened to meet and when they’d decided to get married and so on. But somewhere a cog slipped, and what had fallen out of my mouth instead was “Why’d you marry Dad?”

  “Well, you know,” I now floundered, searching for any possible shore, “what I mean, kids wonder about something like that. How we got here.” Another perilous direction, that one. “I don’t mean, uh, how, exactly. More like why. Didn’t you ever wonder yourself? Why your own mother and father decided to get married? I mean, how would any of us be here if those people back then hadn’t decided the way they did? And I just thought, since we’re talking about all this anyway, you could fill me in on some of it. Out of your own experience, sort of.”