English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  In about the way that shovel was carried in that scabbard, the history of the Two country rested there in Toussaint’s memory, handy to employ. And sharpened by steady use. It never was clear to me how Toussaint, isolated way to hell and gone—he bached out there a few miles west of where the highway crossed the Two Medicine River, about fifteen miles from Browning and a good thirty from Gros Ventre—could know news from anywhere in the Two country as fast as it happened. Whatever the network was (my father called it moccasin telegraph) Toussaint was its most durable conductor. He came to the Two in the time of the buffalo, a boy eight or so years old when his family roved in from somewhere in the Dakotas. The Rennies were part French; my father thought they might have started off as Reynauds. But mostly tribal haze. Of their Indian background Toussaint himself was only ever definite in declaring himself not a Blackfeet, which had to do with the point that the Two Medicine woman he married, Mary Rides Proud, was one. The usual assumption was that the Rennie lineage was Métis, for other Métis families had ended up in this general region of Montana after the Riel rebellion in Canada was put down in 1885. But count back across the decades and you found that Toussaint already had grown to manhood here in the Two country by the time the Canadians were hanging Louis Riel and scattering his followers. Toussaint himself was worse than no help on this matter of origin, for all he would say was to claim pedigree from the Lewis and Clark expedition: “I come down from William Clark himself. My grandfather had red hair.”

  Thinking back on it now, I suspect the murk of Toussaint’s lineage was carefully maintained. For the one thing unmistakable about the Rennie family line was its knack for ending up on the side of the winners in any given contest of the Montana frontier. “The prairie was so black with buffalo it looked burnt. I was with the Assiniboines, we came down on the buffalo from the Sweetgrass Hills,” one Toussaint tale would relate, and the next, “The trader Joe Kipp hired me to take cattle he was selling to the Army at Fort Benton. He knew I kept Indians from stealing them.” Able to straddle that way, Toussaint had a view into almost anything that happened in the early Two country. He was with the bull teams that brought the building materials for the original Blackfeet Reservation agency north of Choteau, before there was a Choteau or a Gros Ventre. “Ben Short was the wagon boss. He was a good cusser.” After the winter of ’86, Toussaint freighted cowhides off the prairie by the thousands. “That was what was left in this country by spring. More cowhides than cows.” He saw young Lieutenant John J. Pershing and his Negro soldiers ride through Gros Ventre in 1896, herding a few hundred woebegone Crees north to push them back over the line into Canada. “Each creek those soldiers crossed, English Creek and Birch Creek and Badger Creek and all of them, some more Crees leaked away into the brush.” He saw the canals come to the prairie, the eighty-thousand-acre irrigation project that built Valier from scratch in 1909 and drew in trainloads of homesteaders. “Pretty quick they wondered about this country. Dust blew through Valier there, plates were turned facedown on the table until you turned them up to eat off of. One tree, the town had. Mrs. Guardipee watered it from her wash tubs.” And the Two Medicine canal he himself had patrolled for almost a quarter century, the ditch rider job he held and held in spite of being not a Blackfeet: “It stops them being jealous of each other. With me in the job, none of them is.” The first blats of sheep into this part of Montana were heard by Toussaint. “I think, 1879. People called Lyons, down on the Teton. Other sheepmen came fast. Charlie Scoffin, Charlie McDonald, Oliver Goldsmith Cooper.” The first survey crews he watched make their sightings. “1902, men with telescopes and Jacob’s staffs.”

  —“The first Fourth of July you ever saw here,” my father was prompting. “When was that, do you think?”

  Toussaint could date it without thinking. “Custer’s year. ’76. We heard just before the Fourth. All dead at the Little Bighorn. Everybody. Gros Ventre was just only a hotel and saloon then. Men took turns, coming out of the saloon to stand sentry. To look north.” Here Toussaint leaned toward Pete’s wife Marie and said in mock reproach: “For Blackfeet.”

  All of us echoed his chuckle. The tease to Marie was a standard one from Toussaint. Married to Pete, she of course was my aunt, and if I’d had a thousand aunts instead of just her she still would have been my favorite. More to the point here, though, Marie was Toussaint’s granddaughter, and the only soul anywhere in that family who could get along with him. Most of Toussaint’s sons wouldn’t even speak to him, his daughters had all married out of his orbit as rapidly as they could, and down through the decades any number of his Rides Proud in-laws had threatened to shoot him. (Toussaint claimed he had a foolproof antidote to such threats: “I tell them bullets can fly more than one direction.”) I myself remember that the last few years of her life, Toussaint and his wife Mary didn’t even live under the same roof; whenever my father and I stopped by their place, Toussaint was to be found in residence in the bunkhouse. Thus all the evidence said that if you were a remove or two from him Toussaint could be a prince of the earth toward you, but anybody sharing the same blood with him he begrudged. Except Marie. Marie was thin and not particularly dark—her father was Irish, an office man at the agency in Browning—and only her black hair, which she wore shoulder-long, brought out the Blackfeet ancestry and whatever farther east Indian heredity it was that Toussaint transmitted. So her resemblance to Toussaint really was only a similar music in her voice, and the same running chuckle at the back of her throat when she was pleased. Yet be around the two of them together for only a minute and you knew without mistake that here were not merely natural allies but blood kin. There just was something unmistakably alike in how each of them regarded life. As if they had seen it all before and shared the amusement that things were no better this time around.

  But Toussaint’s story of the first Fourth wasn’t quite done. “I took a turn at sentry. I was in there drinking with them. In the saloon. Already an old man, me. Fifteen.”

  “Ancient as Jick,” Marie murmured with a smile in my direction. If she but knew. Maybe my toot with Stanley that night in the cabin didn’t break any saloon records, but it was spree enough for a starter.

  “Jick has a few months to go yet,” my mother corrected Marie’s observation.

  “I’m getting there as fast as I can,” I defended, drawing a laugh from our assemblage.

  • • •

  As you can see, an all but perfect Fourth of July picnic so far. I say all but, because the year before, Alec had been with us instead of off sparking Leona. The only awareness of him this year was the way people took some care not to mention him to my parents.

  • • •

  My mother turned to Marie and asked: “Do you suppose these scenery inspectors have earned any food?”

  “We’ll take pity on them,” Marie agreed, and the picnic provisions began to emerge from the pair of grub boxes.

  The blanket became like a raftload of food, except that such a cargo of eating likely would have sunk any raft.

  There were the chickens my mother spent part of the morning frying. Delectable young spring fries with drumsticks about the thickness of your thumb. This very morning, too, Toussaint had caught a batch of trout in the Two Medicine and now here they beckoned, fried up by Marie. Blue enamel broilers of fish and fowl, side by side. The gateposts of heaven.

  Marie’s special three bean salad, the pinnacle of how good beans can taste. My mother’s famous potato salad with little new green onions cut so fine they were like sparks of flavor.

  New radishes, sweet and about the size of a marble, first of Marie’s garden vegetables. A dozen and a half deviled eggs arrayed by my mother.

  A jar of home-canned pickled beets, a strong point of my mother’s. A companion jar of crabapple pickles, a distinction of Marie’s.

  A plate of my mother’s corn muffins. A loaf of Marie’s saffron bread. Between the two, a moon of Reese home-churned butter.

  An angelfood cake by Marie. A chocolate sour cr
eam cake from my mother.

  My eyes feasted while the rest of me readied to. My father urged, “Dive in, Toussaint,” and the passing of dishes got under way.

  “Been a while since breakfast,” Pete proclaimed when he had his plate loaded. “I’m so excited to see food again I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat.”

  “Too bad about you,” Marie said in that soft yet take-it-or-leave-it way so like Toussaint’s. And my mother didn’t overlook the chance to put in: “Wait, we’ll sell tickets. People will line up to see Pete Reese not eat.”

  “Come on now, Bet,” came the protest from Pete. “I have never eaten more than I could hold.”

  As they should do at a picnic, the conversing and the consuming cantered along together in this fashion. I think it was at the start of the second plateload, when we were all letting out-dubious hmmms about having another helping of this or that but then going ahead and having it, that Pete asked my father if fire school in Missoula had made him any smarter than he was before.

  “Airplanes,” my father announced. “Airplanes are the firefighting apparatus of the future, at least according to this one hoosier we heard from over there.”

  “The hell. How’s that gonna work?”

  “I didn’t say it was going to work. I just said what the hoosier told us. They’re going to try parachutists—like these guys at fairs?”

  “Say on,” urged Toussaint, squinting through a mask of eager puzzlement. Toussaint always was avid to hear developments of this sort, as if they confirmed for him the humorous traits of the human race. “That radio stuff,” he had declared during the worst of the drought and the dust storms, “it monkeys with the air. Dries it out, all that electric up there.”

  “They’re just now getting ready to test all this out,” my father continued his report of latest up-in-the-air science. “Send an airplane with a couple of these parachutists over a mountain smoke and see if they can jump down there and tromp it out before it grows to a real fire. That’s the cheery theory, anyhow.”

  Pete shook his head. “They couldn’t pay me enough to jump out of one of those.”

  “Hell, Pete, the jumping would be easy money. The landing is the only drawback.” My father readied to plow into another of Toussaint’s trout, but first offered as if in afterthought: “Fact is, I told them I’d volunteer”—my mother’s full skepticism sighted in on him now, waiting to see if there was any color of seriousness in this—“if the parachute was going to be big enough for my saddle horse and packstring too.”

  The vision of my father and assorted horses drifting down from the sky the way the cottonwood fluffs were floating around us set everybody to laughing like loonies.

  Next it was Toussaint’s inning again. The mention of horses reminded him of a long ago Fourth of July in Gros Ventre when everybody caught horse race fever. “How it happened, first they matched every saddle horse against every other saddle horse. Ran out of those by middle of the afternoon. Still plenty of beer and daylight left. Then somebody got the notion. Down to the stable, everybody. Brought out the stagecoach horses. Bridled them, put boys on them bareback. Raced them against each other the length of Main Street.” The Toussaint chuckle. “It was hard to know. To bet on the horse, or how high the boy would bounce.”

  Which tickled us all again. Difficult to eat on account of laughing, and to laugh on account of eating. Give me that dilemma anytime.

  All this horse talk did remind me about Mouse, and I excused myself to go picket him onto another patch of grass. Truth to tell, getting myself up and into motion also would shake down some of the food in me and make room for more.

  • • •

  Thinking back on that scene as I wended my way to the edge of the park where Mouse was tethered, I have wished someone among us then had the talent to paint the portrait of that picnic. A group scene that would have preserved those faces from English Creek and Noon Creek and Gros Ventre and the out-east farming country and, yes, Toussaint’s from the Two Medicine. That would convey every one of those people at once and yet also their separateness. Their selves, I guess the word should be. I don’t mean one of those phony-baloney gilt concoctions such as that one of Custer and all his embattled and doomed troopers there at the Little Bighorn, which hangs in three fourths of the saloons I have ever been in and disgusts me every single time. (To my mind, Custer can be done justice only if shown wearing a tall white dunce cap.) But once I saw in a magazine, Look or Life or one of those old every-week ones, what one painter tried in this respect of showing selves. He first painted little pictures of tropical flowers, in pink and other pastels; wild roses I guess would be our closest comparison flower here in the Two country. Some several hundred of those, he painted. Then when all these were hung together in the right order on the wall, the flower colors fit together from picture to picture to create the outline of a tremendously huge snake. In any picture by itself you could not see a hint of that snake. But look at them together and he lay kinked across the entire wall mightier than the mightiest python.

  That is the kind of portrait I mean of the creek picnic. Not that very many of those people there in the park could be called the human equivalent of flowers, nor that the sum of them amounted to a colossal civic snake. But just the point that there, that day, they seemed to me all distinctly themselves and yet added up together too.

  I have inquired, though, and so far as I can find, nobody ever even thought to take a photograph of that day.

  • • •

  When I came back from retethering Mouse, my parents and Pete and Marie were in a four-way conversation about something or other, and Toussaint was spearing himself another trout out of the broiler. His seemed to me the more sensible endeavor, so I dropped down next to him to inflict myself on the chicken supply. I was just beginning to do good work on my favorite piece of white meat, a breastbone, when Toussaint turned his head toward me. The potato salad had come to rest nearest my end of the blanket and I reached toward it, expecting that he was going to ask me to pass it to him. Instead Toussaint stated quietly: “You are a campjack these days.”

  • • •

  Probably I went red as an apple. I mean, good Christamighty. Toussaint’s words signaled what I had never dreamt of: moccasin telegraph had the story of my sashay with Stanley.

  Everything that coursed through me in those moments I would need Methuselah’s years to sort out.

  Questions of source and quantity maybe hogged in first. How the hell did Toussaint know? And what exactly did he know? My dimwitted approach to a barbwire fence in an electrical storm? My tussle with Bubbles? My alcoholic evening in the cabin? No, he couldn’t know any of those in detail. Could he?

  The unnerving possibility of Toussaint having dropped some mention of that last and biggest matter, my night of imbibing, into the general conversation while I was off tending Mouse made me peer toward my mother.

  No real reassurance there. Her mood plainly had declined since the parade of the food onto the blanket, she now was half listening to my father and Pete and half gazing off toward the ripples of English Creek. Whatever was occupying her mind, I could only send up prayers that it wasn’t identical to the topic on mine.

  Geography next. How far had the tale of Jick and Stanley spread? Was I traveling on tongues throughout the whole damn Two country? “Hear about that McCaskill kid? Yeah, green as frog feathers, ain’t he? You wonder how they let him out of the house by himself.”

  And beyond that, philosophy. If I was a Toussaint topic, just what did that constitute? The mix of apprehension and surmise was all through me. Plus a flavor of something which seemed surprisingly like pride. Better or worse, part of me now was in Toussaint’s knowledge, his running history of the Two. In there with Phony Nose Gorman and the last buffalo hunt and the first sheep and the winter of ’86 and Lieutenant Black Jack Pershing and the herded Crees and—and what did that mean? Being a part of history, at the age of fourteen years and ten months: why had that responsibility picked me
out?

  They say when a cat walks over the ground that will be your grave, a shiver goes through you. As I sat there that fine July noon with a breastbone forgotten in my hand, Toussaint again busy eating his trout after leaving the track of those six soft words across my life—“You are a campjack these days”—yes, I shivered.

  My father’s voice broke my trance. “If Toussaint and Jick ever would get done eating for winter, we could move along to the delicacy part of the meal. Some fancy handle-turning went into the making of that ice cream, you know. Or at least so I hear by rumor.”

  My mother was up, declaring she’d bring the cups of coffee if a certain son of hers would see to the dessert. Toussaint chuckled. And put up a restraining hand as I started to clamber to my feet, ready to bolt off to fetch dishes of ice cream, bolt off anywhere to get a minute of thinking space to myself.

  “Do you know, Beth,” Toussaint began, stopping her and my heart at the same time, “do you know—your potato salad was good.”

  • • •

  A picnic always slides into final contentment on ice cream. All around us as each batch of people finished dessert and coffee, men flopped onto their backs or sides while the women sat up and chatted with one another.

  I, though; I wasn’t doing any sliding or flopping, just sitting there bolt upright trying to think things through. My head was as gorged as my stomach, which was saying a lot.

  My father, though, acted as if he didn’t have a thing in the world on his mind. To my surprise, he scootched around until he had room to lie flat, then sank back with his head in my mother’s lap and his hat over his face.