by Ivan Doig
My mother looked at me for an eternity more, then shook her head. “One of them goes head over heels after anything blond, the other one wants to know the history of the world. Alec and you. Where did I get you two?”
I figured I had nothing further to lose by taking the chance: “That’s sort of what I was asking, isn’t it?”
“All right.” She still looked skeptical of the possibility of common sense in me, but her eyes let up on me a little. “All right, Mr. Inquisitive. You want to know the makings of this family, is that it?”
I nodded vigorously.
She thought. Then: “Jick, a person hardly knows how to start on this. But you know, don’t you, I taught most of that—that one year at the Noon Creek school?”
I did know this chapter. That when my mother’s mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918, my mother came back from what was to have been her second year in college and became, in her mother’s stead, the Noon Creek teacher.
“If it hadn’t been for that, who knows what would have happened,” she went on. “But that did bring me back from college, about the same time a redheaded galoot named Varick McCaskill came back from the army. His folks still were in here up the North Fork. Scotch Heaven. So Mac was back in the country and the two of us had known each other, oh, all our lives, really. Though mostly by sight. Our families didn’t always get along. But that’s neither here nor there. That spring when this Mac character was hired as association rider—”
“Didn’t get along?”
I ought to have known better. My interruption sharpened her right up again. “That’s another story. There’s such a thing as a one-track mind, but honestly, Jick, you McCaskill men sometimes have no-track minds. Now. Do you want to Hear This, Or—”
“You were doing just fine. Real good. Dad got to be the association rider and then what?”
“All right then. He got to be the association rider and—well, he got to paying attention to me. I suppose it could be said I paid some back.”
Right then I yearned for the impossible. To have watched that double-sided admiration. My mother had turned nineteen the first of April of that teaching year; a little older than Alec was now, though not a whole hell of a lot. Given what a good-looker she was even now, she must have been extra special then. And my father the cowboy—hard to imagine that—would have been in his early twenties, a rangy redhead who’d been out in the world all the way to Camp Lewis, Washington. Varick and Lisabeth, progressing to Mac and Bet. And then to some secret territory of love language that I couldn’t even guess at. They are beyond our knowing, those once young people who become our parents, which to me has always made them that much more fascinating.
—“There was a dance, that spring. In my own schoolhouse, so your father ever since has been telling me I have nobody to blame but myself.” She again had a glow to her, as when she’d told me about Pete helloing the horses. “Mac was on hand. By then he’d been hired by the Noon Creek ranchers and was around helping them brand calves and so on. That dance”—she shrugged, as if an impossible question had been asked—“that dance I suppose did it, though neither of us knew it right then. I’d been determined I was never going to marry into a ranch life. Let alone to a cow chouser who didn’t own much more than his chaps and hat. And later I found out from your father that he’d vowed never to get interested in a schoolmarm. Too uppity to bother with, he always thought. So much for intentions. Anyway, now here he was, in my own schoolroom. I’d never seen a man take so much pleasure in dancing. Most of it with me, need I say. Oh, and there was this. I hadn’t been around him or those other Scotch Heaveners while I was away at college, and I’d lost the knack of listening to that burr of theirs. About the third time that night he said something I couldn’t catch, I asked him: ‘Do you always talk through your nose?’ And then he put on a real burr and said back, ‘Lass, it saves wearrr and tearrr on my lips. They’rrre in prrrime condition, if you’rrre everrr currrious.’ ”
My father the flirt. Or flirrrt. I must have openly gaped over this, for my mother reddened a bit and stirred in her chair and declared, “Well, you don’t need full details. Now then. Is that enough family history?”
Not really. “You mean, the two of you decided to get married because you liked how Dad danced?”
“You would be surprised how large a part something like that plays. But no, there’s more to it than that. Jick, when people fall in love the way we did, it’s—I don’t mean this like it sounds, but it’s like being sick. Sick in a wonderful way, if you can imagine that. The feeling is in you just all the time, is what I mean. It takes you over. No matter what you do, what you try to think about, the other person is there in your head. Or your blood, however you want to say it. It’s”—she shrugged at the impossible again—“there’s no describing it beyond that. And so we knew. A summer of that—a summer when we didn’t even see each other that much, because your father was up in the Two tending the association cattle most of the time—we just knew. That fall, we were married.” Here she sprung a slight smile at me. “And I let myself in for all these questions.”
There was one, though, that hovered. I was trying to determine whether to open my yap and voice it when she took it on herself. “My guess is, you’re thinking about Alec and Leona, aren’t you.”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Lord knows, they imagine they’re in a downright epidemic of love,” my mother acknowledged. “Alec maybe is. He’s always been all go and no whoa. But Leona isn’t. She can’t be. She’s too young and”—my mother scouted for aptness—“flibberty. Leona is in love with the idea of men, not one man. And that’s enough on that subject.” She looked across at me in a way that made my fingers quit even pretending they were manufacturing a horsehair hackamore. “Now I have one for you. Jick, you worry me a little.”
“Huh? I do?”
“You do. All this interest of yours in the way things were. I just hope you don’t go through life paying attention to the past at the expense of the future. That you don’t pass up chances because they’re new and unexpected.” She said this next softly, yet also more strongly than anything else I’d ever heard her say. “Jick, there isn’t any law that says a McCaskill can’t be as forward-looking as anybody else. Just because your father and your brother, each in his own way, looks to the past to find life, you needn’t. They are both good men. I love the two of them—the three of you—in the exact way I told you about, when your father and I started all this. But, Jick, be ready for your life ahead. It can’t all be read behind you.”
I looked back at her. I wouldn’t have bet I had it in me to say this. But it did come out: “Mom, I know it all can’t. But some?”
• • •
That next afternoon, Friday, was the homestretch of my digging. It needed to be, with my father due home sometime the next morning. And so once more unto the bowels of the earth, so to speak, taking down with me into the outhouse pit an old short-handled lady shovel Toussaint Rennie had given my father and a bucket to pack the dirt out with.
My mood was first-rate. My mother’s discourse from the evening before still occupied my thinking. The other portion of me by now was accustomed to the pit work, muscles making no complaint whatsoever, and in me that feeling of bottomless stamina you have when you are young, that you can keep laboring on and on and on, forever if need be. The lady shovel I was using was perfect for this finishing-off work of dabbing dirt into the bucket. To make it handy in his ditch-riding Toussaint always shortened the handle and then ground off about four inches of the shovel blade, cutting it down into a light implement about two thirds of a normal shovel but which still, he proclaimed, “carries all the dirt I want to.” And working as I had been for a while each day without gloves to get some good calluses started, now I had full benefit of the smooth old shovel handle in my bare hands. To me, calluses have always been one of the marks of true summer.
How long I lost myself to the rhythm of the lady shovel and the bucket I don’t kn
ow. But definitely I was closing in on the last of my project, bottoming the pit out nice and even, when I stepped toward my ladder to heft up a pailful of dirt and found myself looking into the face of a horse. And above that, a hat and grin which belonged to Alec.
“Going down to visit the Chinamen, huh?”
Why did that get under my skin? I can run that remark of Alec’s through my ears a dozen times now and find no particular reason for it to be rilesome. In my brother’s lofty position I’d likely have commented in similar fashion. But there must be something about being come upon in the bottom of an outhouse hole that will unhinge me, for I snapped right back to Alec:
“Yeah, we can’t all spend our time roosting on top of a horse and looking wise.”
Alec let up on his grinning at that. “You’re a little bit owly there, Jicker. You maybe got a touch of shovelitis.”
I continued to squint up at him and had it framed in my mind to retort “Is that anything like wingwangwoo fever?” when it dawned on me that Alec was paying only about half attention to our conversation anyway. His gaze was wandering around the station buildings as if he hadn’t seen them for a decade or so, yet also as if he wasn’t quite seeing them now either. Abstracted, might be the twenty-five-cent word for it. A fellow with a lot on his mind, most of it blond and warm.
One thing did occur to me to find out:
“How much is 19 times 60?”
“1140,” replied Alec, still looking absent. “Why?”
“Nothing.” Damned if I was going to bat remarks back and forth with somebody whose heart wasn’t in it, so I simply asked, “What brings you in off the lone prairie?” propped an arm against the side of my pit and waited.
Alec finally recalled that I was down there and maybe was owed some explanation for the favor of his presence, so he announced: “I just came by for that town shirt of mine. Need it for rodeo day.”
Christamighty. The powers of mothers. Barely a full day had passed since Mom forecast to Pete that it would take the dire necessity of a shirt to draw Alec into our vicinity, and here he was, shirt-chaser incarnate.
It seemed to me too good a topic to let him have for free. “What, are you entering the pretty shirt contest this year?”
Now Alec took a squint down at me from the summit of the horse, as if I only then really registered on him. “No, wisemouth, the calf roping.” Hoohoo. Here was going to be another Alec maneuver just popular as all hell with our parents, spending money on the entry fee for calf-roping.
“I guess that color of shirt does make calves run slower,” I deadpanned. The garment in question was dark purplish, about the shade of chokecherry juice. Distinctive, to put it politely. “It’s in the bottom drawer there in our—the porch bedroom.” Then I figured since I was being helpful anyway, I might as well clarify the terrain for Alec. “Dad’s in Missoula. But maybe you’d already heard that, huh?”
But Alec was glancing around in that absent-minded way again, which was nettling me a little more every time he did it. I mean, you don’t particularly like to have a person choosing when to phase in and out on you. We had been brothers for about fourteen and five-sixths years, so a few seconds of consecutive attention didn’t strike me as too awful much to expect of Alec.
Evidently so, though. He had reined his horse’s head around to start toward the house before he thought to ask: “How’s Mom’s mood?”
“Sweet as pie. How’s yours?”
I got nothing back from that. Alec simply passed from sight, his horse’s tail giving a last little waft as if wiping clean the field of vision which the pit framed over me.
As I was reaching down to resume with my bucket of earth, though, I heard the hooves stop and the saddle creak.
“Jicker?” Alec’s voice came.
“Yeah?”
“I hear you been running the mountains with Stanley Meixell.”
While I knew you couldn’t have a nosebleed in the English Creek valley without everybody offering you a hanky for a week afterward, it had never occurred to me that I too was automatically part of this public pageant. I was so surprised by Alec knowing of my Stanley sojourn that I could only send forth another “Yeah?”
“You want to be a little more choosy about your company, is all.”
“Why?” I asked earnestly of the gape of the pit over me. Two days ago I was hiding out from Stanley in this very hole like a bashful badger, and now I sounded like he was my patron saint. “What the hell have you got against Stanley?”
No answer floated down, and it began to seem to me that this brother of mine was getting awful damn cowboyish indeed if he looked down on a person for tending sheep camp. I opened my mouth to tell him something along that line, but what leaped out instead was: “Why’s Stanley got everybody in this damn family so spooked?”
Still nothing from above, until I heard the saddle leather and hooves again, moving off toward the house.
• • •
The peace of the pit was gone. Echoes of my questions to Alec drove it out. In its stead came a frame of mind that I was penned down here, seven feet below the world in a future outhouse site, while two members of this damn McCaskill family were resting their bones inside the house and the other one was gallivanting off in Missoula. To each his own and all that, but this situation had gotten considerably out of proportion.
The more I steamed, the more a dipper of water and a handful of gingersnaps seemed necessary to damper me down. And so I climbed out with the bucket of dirt, flung it on the pile as if burying something smelly, and headed into the house.
• • •
“Your mind is still set,” my mother was saying as I came through the doorway into the kitchen.
“Still is,” agreed Alec, but warily. Neither of them paid me any particular attention as I dippered a drink from the water bucket. That told me plenty about how hot and heavy the conversation was in here.
“A year, Alec.” So she was tackling him along that angle again. Delay and live to fight again another day. “Try college for a year and decide then. Right now you and Leona think the world begins and ends in each other. But it’s too soon to say, after just these few months.”
“It’s long enough.”
“That’s what Earl Zane likely thought, the day before Leona dropped him for you.” That seemed to me to credit Earl Zane with more thought capacity than he’d ever shown. Earl was a year or so older than Alec, and his brother Arlee was a year ahead of me in school, and so far as I could see the Zane boys were living verifications that the human head is mostly bone.
“That’s past history,” Alec was maintaining.
I punctuated that for him by popping the lid off the Karo can the gingersnaps were kept in. Then there was the sort of scrabbling sound as I dug out a handful. And after that the little sharp crunch as I took a first bite. All of which Alec waited out with the too patient annoyance of somebody held up while a train goes by. Then declared: “Leona and I ain’t—aren’t skim milk kids. We know what we’re doing.”
My mother took a breath which probably used up half the air in the kitchen. “Alec. What you’re doing is rushing into trouble. You can’t get ahead on ranch wages. And just because Leona is horse happy at the moment doesn’t mean she’s going to stay content with a ranch hand for a husband.”
“We’ll get by. Besides, Wendell says he’ll boost my wages after we’re married.”
This stopped even my mother, though not for long. “Wendell Williamson,” she said levelly, “has nobody’s interest at heart but his own. Alec, you know as well as anybody the Double W has been the ruin of that Noon Creek country. Any cattle ranch he hasn’t bought outright he has sewed up with a lease from the bank—”
“If Wendell hadn’t got those places somebody else would have,” Alec recited.
“Yes,” my mother surprised him, “maybe somebody like you. Somebody who doesn’t already have more money than he can count. Somebody who’d run one of those ranches properly, instead of gobbling i
t up just for the sake of having it. Alec, Wendell Williamson is using you the way he uses a handkerchief to blow his nose. Once he’s gotten a few years of work out of you”—another kitchen-clearing breath here—“and evidently gotten you married off to Leona, so you’ll have that obligation to carry around in life, too—once he’s made enough use of you and you start thinking in terms of a real raise in wages, down the road you’ll go and he’ll hire some other youngster—”
“Youngster? Now wait one damn min—”
“—with his head full of cowboy notions. Alec, staying on at the Double W is a dead end in life.”
While Alec was bringing up his forces against all this, I crunched into another gingersnap.
My brother and my mother sent me looks from their opposite sides of the room, a convergence about as taut as being roped with two lassos simultaneously. She suggested: “Aren’t you supposed to be shoveling instead of demolishing cookies?”
“I guess. See you around, Alec.”
“Yeah. Around.”
• • •
Supper that night was about as lively as dancing to a dead march.
Alec had ridden off toward town, Leona-ward, evidently altered not one whit from when he arrived, except for gaining himself the rodeo shirt. My mother was working out her mood on the cooking utensils. I was a little surprised the food didn’t look pulverized when it arrived to the table. So far as I could see, I was the only person on the place who’d made any true progress that day, finishing the outhouse hole. When I came in to wash up I considered announcing cheerfully “Open for business out there” but took a look at my mother’s stance there at the stove and decided against.
So the two of us just ate, which if you’re going to be silent is probably the best thing to be doing anyway. I was doubly glad I had coaxed as much conversation out of her last night as I had. I sometimes wonder if life is anything but an averaging out. One kind of day and then its opposite.
