English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  What she was achieving was a feat I hadn’t known could be done. While her words were expressing outright the fate of those Noon Creek ranching families, she was telling an equally strong tale with the unsaid. “All the ranches down Noon Creek but one” had been her phrase of indictment. Everybody in this park this day knew what “but one” meant; knew who ended up holding the land, by outright buy or by lease from the First National Bank of Gros Ventre, after each and every of those sales and foreclosures. A silent echo I suppose sounds like a contradiction in terms, yet I swear this was what my mother was ringing into the air: after every “sold—foreclosed—gone from here,” the reverberating unspoken fact of that family ranch swallowed by the Double W.

  “English Creek,” she was going on, “thankfully has been spared the Noon Creek history, except once.” We knew the next of her litany; it stared us in the face. “The English place. After Ben’s death, sold to the Wyngard family who weren’t able to make a go of it against the Depression. Foreclosed on, the Wyngards gone from here.

  “A little bit ago, Max Vennaman said this is a day for friends and neighbors and families. So it is. And so too we must remember these friends and neighbors and families who are not among us today because they were done in by the times.” This said with a skepticism that suggested the times had familiar human faces behind them.

  “But an auction hammer can shatter only a household, not the gifts of the earth itself. While it may hurt the heart to see such places as the home of Ben English occupied only by time and the wind, English Creek is still the bloodstream of our valley. It flows its honest way”—the least little pause here, just enough to seed the distinction from those who prosper by the auction hammer—“while we try to find ours.”

  She looked up now, and out across us, all the islands of people. Either she had this last part by heart or was making it up as she went, because never once did she glance down at her sheaf of pages as she said it.

  “There is much wrong with the world, and I suppose I am not known to be especially bashful about my list of those things. But I think it could not be more right that we honor in this valley a man who savvied the land and its livelihood, who honored the earth instead of merely coveting it. It could not be more right that tall Ben English in his black hat amid his green fields, coaxing a head of water to make itself into hay, is the one whose name this creek carries.”

  She folded her sheaf of papers once, then again, stuck them in the pocket of her dress and stepped down from the stump.

  Everybody applauded, although a few a lot more lukewarmly than others. Under our tree we were all clapping hard and my father hardest of all, but I also saw him swallow in a large way. And when he realized I was watching him, he canted himself in my direction and murmured so that only I could hear: “That mother of yours.”

  Then she was back with us, taking compliments briskly. Pete studied her and said: “Decided to give the big boys some particular hell, didn’t you?” Even Toussaint told her: “That was good, about the irrigating.” But of us all, it was only to my father that she said, in what would have been a demand if there hadn’t been the tint of anxiousness in it: “Well? What did you think?”

  My father reached and with his forefinger traced back into place a banner of her hair that the creek breeze had lifted and lain across her ear.

  “I think,” he said, “I think that being married to you is worth all the risk.”

  • • •

  I lead the world in respect for picnics, but I do have to say that one was enough to last me for a while.

  Toussaint’s murmur to me, my mother’s speech to the universe. A person’s thought can kite back and forth between those almost forever. It was just lucky I now had specific matters to put myself to, fetching Mouse from where he was tethered and riding through the dispersing picnickers and heading on across the English Creek bridge to the rodeo grounds.

  I was to meet Ray Heaney on the corral alongside the bucking chutes, the best seats in the arena if you didn’t mind perching on a fence pole. Again this year my father drilled home to me his one point of rodeo etiquette. “Just so you stay up on that fence,” he stipulated. “I don’t want to see you down in there with the chute society.” By which he meant the clump of fifteen or twenty hangers-on who always clustered around the gates of the bucking chutes, visiting and gossiping and looking generally important, and who regularly were cleared out of there two or three times every rodeo by rampaging broncs. When that happened, up onto anything climbable they all would scoot to roost, like hens with a weasel in their midst, and a minute or so after the bronc’s passage they’d be right back in front of the chutes, preening and yakking again. I suppose the chute society offended my father’s precept that a horse was nothing to be careless around. In any case, during the housecleanings when a bronc sent them scrambling for the fence it was my father’s habit to cheer loudly for the bronc.

  No Ray yet, at our fence perch. So I stayed atop Mouse and watched the world. In the pens behind the chutes the usual kind of before-rodeo confusion was going on, guys hassling broncs here and calves there, the air full to capacity with dust and bawling and whinnying. Out front, about half the chute society was already planted in place, tag-ends of their conversations mingling. “That SOB is so tight he wouldn’t give ten cents to see Christ ride a bicycle backwards. . . . Oh hell yes, I’ll take a quarter horse over a Morgan horse any time. Them Morgans are so damn hot-blooded. . . . With haying coming and one thing and another, I don’t see how I’m ever going to catch up with myself. . . .”

  I saw my mother and father and Pete and Marie and Toussaint—and Midge Withrow had joined them, though Dode wasn’t yet in evidence—settling themselves at the far end of the grandstand, farthest from the dust the bucking horses would kick up.

  Other people were streaming by, up into the grandstand or to sit on car fenders or the ground along the outside of the arena fence. I am here to recommend the top of a horse as an advantageous site to view mankind. Everybody below sees mostly the horse, not you.

  Definitely I was ready for a recess from attention. From trying to judge whether people going by were nudging each other and whispering sideways, “That’s him. That’s the one. Got lit up like a ship in a storm, out there with that Stanley Meixell.”

  Keen as I could be, I caught nobody at it, at least for sure, and began to relax somewhat. Oh, I did get a couple of lookings-over. Lila Sedge drifted past in her moony way, spied Mouse and me, and circled us suspiciously a few times. And the priest Father Morrisseau knew me by sight from my stays with the Heaneys, and bestowed me a salutation. But both those I considered routine inspections, so to speak.

  People kept accumulating, I kept watching. A Gros Ventre rodeo always is slower to get under way than the Second Coming.

  Then I happened to remember. Not only was I royally mounted, I also was carrying wealth.

  I nudged Mouse into action, to go do something about that four-bit piece my father had bestowed. Fifty whole cents. Maybe the Depression was on the run.

  The journey wasn’t far, just forty yards or so over to where, since Prohibition went home with Hoover, the Gros Ventre Rotary Club operated its beer booth. I swung down from Mouse and stepped to the plank counter. Behind it, they had several washtubs full of icewater and bottles of Kessler and Great Falls Select stashed down into the slush until only the brown necks were showing. And off to one side a little, my interest at the moment, the tub of soda pop.

  One of the unresolved questions of my life at that age was whether I liked orange soda or grape soda better. It can be more of a dilemma than is generally realized: unlike, say, those picnic options of trout or fried chicken, you can’t just dive in and have both. Anyway, I voted grape and was taking my first gulp when somebody inquired at my shoulder, “Jick, how’s the world treating you?”

  The inquirer was Dode Withrow, and his condition answered as to why he wasn’t up in the grandstand with Midge and my folks and the others. As the expression
goes, Dode had fallen off the wagon and was still bouncing. He was trigged out in a black sateen shirt and nice gray gabardine pants and his dress stockman Stetson, so he looked like a million. But he also had breath like the downwind side of a brewery.

  “ ’Lo, Dode. You looking for Midge and the folks? They’re down at the far end.”

  Dode shook his head as if he had water in his ears. “That wife of mine isn’t exactly looking for me.” So. It was one of the Withrow family jangles that Dode and Midge built up to about once a year. During them was the only time Dode seriously drank. Tomorrow there was going to be a lot of frost in the air between Midge and Dode, then the situation would thaw back to normal. It seemed to me a funny way to run a marriage; I always wondered what the three Withrow daughters, Bea and Marcella and Valerie, did with themselves during the annual temper contest between their parents. But this summer was showing that I had everything to learn about the ways of man and woman.

  “Charlie, give me a couple Kesslers,” Dode was directing across the beer counter. “Jick, you want one?”

  “Uh, no thanks,” dumbly holding up my grape soda the way a toddler would show off a lollipop.

  “That stuff’ll rot your teeth,” advised Dode. “Give you goiter. St. Vitus’ dance.”

  “Did you say two, Dode?” Charlie Hooper called from one of the beer tubs.

  “I got two hands, don’t I?”

  While Dode paid and took a swig from one bottle while holding the other in reserve, I tried to calculate how far along he was toward being really drunk. Always tricky arithmetic. About all that could be said for sure was that of all the rodeo-goers who were going to get a skinful today, at this rate Dode was going to be among the earliest.

  Dode tipped the Kessler down from his mouth and looked straight at me. Into me, it almost seemed. And offered: “Trade you.”

  I at first thought he meant his bottle of beer for my grape pop, and that befuddled me, for plainly Dode was in no mood for pop. But no, he had something other in mind, he still was gazing straight into my eyes. What he came out with next clarified his message, but did not ease my bafflement. “My years for yours, Jick. I’ll go back where you are in life, you come up where I am. Trade, straight across. No, wait, I’ll toss in Midge to boot.” He laughed, but with no actual humor in it. Then shook his head again in that way as if he’d just come out from swimming. “That’s in no way fair. Midge is okay. It’s me—” he broke that off with a quick swig of Kessler.

  What seemed needed was a change of topic, and I asked: “Where you watching the rodeo from, Dode? Ray and I are going to grab a fence place up there by the booth. Whyn’t you sit with us?”

  “Many thanks, Jick.” He made it sound as if I had offered him knighthood. “But I’m going to hang around the pens awhile. Want to watch the broncs. All I’m good for any more. Watching.” And off he swayed, beer bottle in each hand as if they were levers he was steering himself by. I hated to see Dode in such a mood, but at least he always mended quick. Tomorrow he would be himself, and probably more so, again.

  Still no Ray on the fence. The Heaneys were taking their sweet time at the family shindig. When Ray ever showed up I would have to compare menus in detail with him, to see how the Heaneys could possibly outeat what we had gone through at the creek picnic.

  By now my pop had been transferred from its bottle into me, and with time still to kill and figuring that as long as I had Mouse I might as well be making use of him, I got back up in the saddle.

  I sometimes wonder: is the corner of the eye the keenest portion of the body? A sort of special sense, operating beyond the basic ones? For the corner of my right eye now registered, across the arena and above the filing crowd and top pole of the fence, a chokecherry-colored shirt; and atop that, a head and set of shoulders so erect they could not be mistaken.

  I nudged Mouse into motion and rode around to Alec’s side of the rodeo grounds.

  When I got there Alec was off the horse, a big alert deep-chested blood bay, and was fussing with the loop of his lariat in that picky way that calf ropers do. All this was taking place out away from the arena fence and the parked cars, in some open space which Alec and the bay and the lariat seemed to claim as their own.

  I dismounted too. And started things off with: “I overheard some calves talking, there in the pens. They were saying how much they admired anybody who’d rope them in a shirt like that.”

  “Jicker!” he greeted me back. “What do you know for sure?” Alec’s words were about what they ever would have been, yet there hung that tone of absent-mindedness behind them again. I wanted to write it off to the fact that this brother of mine had calf roping on his mind just then. But I couldn’t quite convince myself that was all there was to the matter.

  It did occur to me to check whether Alec was wearing a bandanna this year, and he wasn’t. Evidently my father at least had teased that off him permanently.

  “Think you got a chance to win?” I asked, just to further the conversation.

  “Strictly no problem,” Alec assured me. All the fuss he was giving that rope said something else, however.

  “How about Bruno Martin?” He was the young rancher from Augusta who had won the calf-roping the previous year.

  “I can catch a cold faster than Bruno Martin can a calf.”

  “Vern Crosby, then?” Another quick-as-a-cat roper, who I had noticed warming up behind the chute pens.

  “What, you taking a census or something?” Alec swooshed his lariat overhead, that expectant whir in the air, and cast a little practice throw.

  I explored for some topic more congenial to him. “Where’d you get the highpowered horse?”

  “Cal Petrie lent him to me.” Cal Petrie was foreman of the Double W. Evidently Alec’s ropeslinging had attracted some attention.

  I lightly laid fingertips to the bay’s foreshoulder. The feel of a horse is one of the best touches I know. “You missed the creek picnic. Mom spoke a speech.”

  Alec frowned at his rope. “Yeah. I had to put the sides on Cal’s pickup and haul this horse in here. A speech? What about? How to sleep with a college book under your pillow and let it run uphill into your ear?”

  “No. About Ben English.”

  “Ancient history, huh? Dad must have converted her.” Alec looked like he intended to say more, but didn’t.

  There wasn’t any logical reason why this should have been on my mind just then, but I asked: “Did you know he had a horse with the same name as himself?”

  “Who? Had a what?”

  “Ben English. Our granddad would say ‘T’ank Godt vun of t’em vears a—’ ”

  “Look, Jicker, I got to walk this horse loose. How about you doing me a big hairy favor?”

  Something told me to be a little leery. “Ray’s going to be waiting for me over on the—”

  “Only take a couple minutes of your valuable time. All it is, I want you to go visit Leona for me while I get this horse ready.”

  “Leona? Where is she?”

  “Down toward the end of the arena there, by her folks’ car.”

  As indeed she was, when I turned to see. About a hundred feet from us, spectating this brotherly tableau. Leona in a clover-green blouse, that gold hair above like daybreak over a lush meadow.

  “Yeah, well, what do you mean by visit?”

  “Just go on over there and entertain her for me, huh?”

  “Entert—?”

  “Dance a jig, tell a joke.” Alec swung into the saddle atop the bay. “Easy, hoss.” I stepped back a bit and Mouse looked admiring as the bay did a little prance to try Alec out. Alec reined him under control and leaned toward me. “I mean it, about you keeping Leona company for me. Come get me if Earl Zane shows up. I don’t want that jughead hanging around her.”

  Uh huh. Revelation, all twenty-two chapters of it.

  “Aw, the hell, Alec. I—” was about to declare that I had other things in life to do than fetch him whenever one of Leona’s ex-boyfriends came
sniffing around. But that declaration melted somewhere before I could get it out, for here my way came one of those Leona smiles that would burn down a barn. Simultaneously she patted the car fender beside her.

  While I still was molten in the middle of all that, Alec touched the bay roping horse into a fast walk toward some open country beyond the calf pens. So I figured there was nothing for it but go on over and face fate.

  “ ‘Lo, Leona.”

  “Hello, John Angus.” Which tangled me right at the start. I mean, think about it. The only possible way in this world she could know about my high-toned name was from Alec. Which meant that I had been a topic of conversation between them. Which implied—I didn’t know what. Damn it all to hell anyway. First Toussaint, now this. I merely was trying to have a standard summer, not provide word fodder for the entire damn Two country.

  “Yeah, well. Great day for the race,” I cracked to recoup.

  Leona smiled yet another of her dazzlers. And said nothing. Didn’t even inquire “What race?” so I could impart “The human race” and thereby break the ice and—

  “You all by your lonesome?” I substituted. As shrewd as it was desperate, this. Not only did it fill the air space for a moment, I would truthfully tell Alec I had been vigilant about checking on whether or not Earl Zane was hanging around.

  She shook her head. Try it sometime, while attempting to keep a full smile in place on your face. Leona could do it and come out with more smile than she started with. When she had accomplished this facial miracle she leaned my way a little and nodded her head conspiratorially toward the other side of the car.

  Holy Jesus. Was Earl Zane over there? Earl Zane was Alec’s size and built as if he’d been put together out of railroad ties. Alec hadn’t defined to me this possibility, of Earl Zane already being on hand. What was I supposed to do, tip my hat to him and merrily say “Hi there, Earl, just stand where you are, I’ll go get my brother so he can come beat the living daylights out of you”? Or better from the standpoint of my own health, climb back on Mouse and retreat to my original side of the arena?