by Ivan Doig
Raymond Edmund Heaney von Kaltenborn broke off, and it was just Ray again. “On and on that way, Jick. If you think too much, you make it into a whole dictionary of going for a ride. Instead of just going. See what I’m saying?”
“Goddamn it now, Ray, what I mean is more important than goddamn riding a horse.”
“It’s the same with anything. It’ll get to you if you think about it too much, Jick.”
“But what I’m telling you is, I don’t have any choice. This stuff I’m talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be.”
Ray took a look at me as if I had some sort of brain fever that might be read in my face. Then in another of his radio voices intoned: “Have you tried Vicks VapoRub? It sooooothes as it wooooorks.”
There it lay. Even Ray had no more idea than the man in the moon about my perplexity. This house where we sat tucked in blue-painted sills, above its broad lawned yard and under its high cottonwoods, this almost second home of mine: it ticked to an entirely different time than the summer that was coursing through me. The Heaney family was in place in the world. Ed was going to go on exiting the door of his lumber yard at six every evening and picking up his supper fork at ten after six and clicking on that Silvertone radio at seven, on into eternity. Genevieve would go on keeping this house shining and discovering new sites for doilies. Mary Ellen would grow up and learn nursing at the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls. Ray would grow up and take a year of business college at Missoula and then join his father in the lumber yard. Life under this roof had the rhythm of the begattings in the Bible. The Heaneys were not the McCaskills, not even anywhere similar, and I lacked the language to talk about any of the difference, even to my closest friend.
“Swing, swing, and swing ’em high!
Allemande left and allemande aye!
Ingo, bingo, six penny high!
Big pig, little pig, root hog or die!”
The dance was under way, but only just, when Ray and I wandered down there to the Sedgwick House to it. Which is to say the hall—I suppose old C. E. Sedgwick or maybe even Lila Sedge conceived of it as a ballroom, but everybody else considered it the dance hall—was crammed to an extent that made the Medicine Lodge look downright lonely across the street, but not all that many people were dancing yet. Visiting, circulating, gathering an eyeful of everybody else, joking, trying to pry out of a neighbor how many bushels an acre his wheat looked like or what his lambs weighed by now, but only one square of actual dancers out there footing it to Jerome Satterlee’s calling. Partly, everybody knew it took Jerome a little while (translate that to a few drinks) to get his tonsils limbered up. And then he could call dances until your shoes fell off your feet.
“A little thin out here on the floor, it looks to me like,” Jerome was now declaring, preparatory to the next dance. “You know what I mean? Let’s get one more square going here, make it look like we mean business. Adam, Sal, step on out here, you can stand around and grab any time. How about all you Busbys, you’re half a square yourselves. Good, good. Come on now, one more couple. Nola plays this piano twice as good when we got two squares on the floor.” At the upright, Nola Atkins sat planted as if they’d simply picked up the piano bench from the creek picnic with her on it and set them both down here on the band platform. Beside her, Jeff Swan had his fiddle tucked under his chin and his bow down at his side as if it was a sword he was ready to draw. “One more couple. Do I have to telephone to Valier and ask them to send over four left feet? Whup, here they come now, straight from supper, dancers if I ever saw any. Leona Tracy and Alec McCaskill, step right in there. Alec, you checked your horse and rope at the door, I hope? Now, this is somewhat more like—”
Stepping in from the Sedgwick House dining room, rodeo prize money in his pocket and free supper under his belt and a grin everywhere on his face there was any space for it, Alec looked like a young king coming home from his crowning ceremony.
Even so, to notice this glorious brother of mine you had to deliberately steer your eyes past Leona. Talk about an effort of will.
Leona took the shine in any crowd, even a dance hall full. The day’s green blouse was missing. I mean, she had changed out of it. Now she wore a white taffeta dress, full and flouncy at the hem. In square dancing a lot of swirling goes on, and Leona was going to be a swirl worth seeing.
I shot a glance around the dance hall. My parents had missed this grand entry. They’d gone out to J. L. and Nan Hill’s ranch, a couple of miles up English Creek, for supper and to change clothes, and were taking their own sweet time about getting back in. And Pete and Marie were driving Toussaint home to the Two Medicine, so they’d be even later arriving. I was the sole family representative, so to speak, to record the future Mr. and Mrs. Alec McCaskill come swanking in.
“Ready out there? Sure you are. You’ll get to liking this so much, before the night is out you’ll want to trade your bed for a lantern.” Jerome, when he got to going good, put a lot of motion into his calling, using both arms to direct the traffic of dancers; kind of like a man constantly hanging things here and there in a closet. His gestures even now said he was entering into the spirit of the night. “All right, sonnies and honeys. Nola, Jeff, let’s make ’em prance. Everybody, here we go:
“First four forward. Back to your places.
Second four follow. Shuffle on back.
Now you’re getting down to cases,
Swing each other till the floorbeams crack!”
Here in the time I am now it seems hard to credit that this Fourth of July dance was the first I ever went to on my own. That is, was in company with somebody like Ray instead of being alone as baggage with my parents. Of course, without fully acknowledging it Ray and I also were well on our way to another tremendous night, the one when each of us would step through this dance hall doorway with a person neither parent nor male alongside. But that lay await yet. My point just now is that where I was in life this particular Fourth night, closing in on fifteen years of age, I had been attending dances since the first few months of that total. And Alec, the all-winning rodeo-shirted sashayer out there on the floor right now, the same before me. Each a McCaskill baby bundled in blankets and cradled in chairs beside the dance floor. Imbibe music along with mother’s milk: that was the experience of a lot of us of Two country upbringing. Successors to Alec’s and my floorside infancy were here in the Sedgwick House hall this very night: Charity Frew’s half-year-old daughter, and another new Helwig baby, and a couple of other fresh ones belonging to farm folks east of town, a swaddled quartet with chairs fenced around them in the farthest corner of the dance hall.
“Salute your ladies, all together.
Ladies, to the gents do the same.
Hit the lumber with your leather.
Balance all, and swing your dame!”
It might be said that the McCaskill dancing history was such that it was the portion of lineage that came purest into Alec and me. Definitely into Alec. Out there now with that white taffeta back and forth to him like a wave of the sea, he looked like he could romp on forever. What little I knew of my father’s father, the first McCaskill to caper on America’s soil instead of Scotland’s, included the information that he could dance down the house. Schottisches and Scotch reels in particular, but he also adopted any Western square dances. In his twinkling steps, so to speak, followed my mother and father. Dances held in ranch houses, my mother-to-be arriving on horseback with her party dress tied on behind the saddle, my father-to-be performing the Scotch Heaven ritual of scattering a little oatmeal on the floor for better gliding. Schoolhouse dances. In the face of the Depression even a hard times dance, the women costumed in gunnysack dresses and the men in tattered work clothes. And now Alec the latest McCaskill dancer, and me beginning to realize I was on my way.
“Bunch the ladies, there in the middle.
Circle, you gents, and dosie doe.
Pay attention to old Jeff’s fiddle.
Swing her around and away you go!”
Can it be that all kinds of music speak to one another? For what I always end up thinking of in this dancing respect is a hymn. To me it is the one hymn that has ever seemed to make much sense:
“Dance, dance, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the dance,” said he,
“And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the dance,” said he.
I almost wish I had never come across those words and their tune, for they make one of those chants that slip into your mind every time you meet up with the circumstances they suggest. It was so then, even as Ray nudged me to point out the Busby brothers going through a fancy twirl with each other instead of with their wives and I joined Ray and everybody else in laughing, and it is so now. Within all else those musical words, a kind of beautiful haunting. But I suppose that is what musical words, and for that matter dances and dancers, are for.
“Gents to the center, ladies round them.
Form a circle, balance all.
Whirl your girls to where you found them.
Promenade all, around the hall!”
This concluding promenade brought Alec and Leona over toward where Ray and I were onlooking, and spying us they trooped right up. Leona in the flush of the pleasure of dancing was nearly more than the eyes could stand. I know Ray shifted a little nervously beside me, and maybe I did too.
“Mister Jick again,” she greeted me. At least it wasn’t “Hello, John Angus.” “And Raymond Edmund Heaney,” she bestowed on Ray, which really did set Ray to shifting around.
So high in flight was Alec tonight, though, that nobody else had to expend much effort. A lank of his rich red hair was down across his forehead from the dancing, and the touch of muss just made him look handsomer.
“Here’s a pair of wall guards,” he observed of Ray and me while he grinned mightily. “You guys better think about getting yourselves one of these things,” giving Leona a waist squeeze.
Yeah, sure, right. As if Leonas were as plenty as blackberries. (I have wondered often. If Marcella Withrow had been on hand that night instead of at the Conrad hospital with her father, would Ray have nerved himself up and squired her out onto the floor?) But if you can’t carry on conversation with your own brother, who can you? So to keep mouth matters in motion, I asked: “How was it?”
Alec peered at me and he let up on that Leona squeezing. “How was what?”
“Supper. The supper you won for handcuffing that poor little calf.”
“Dandy,” he reported, “just dandy.” And now Leona awarded him a squeeze, in confirmation.
“What’d you have, veal?” Ray put in, which I thought was pretty good. But Alec and Leona were so busy handling each other’s waists they didn’t catch it, and Alec said, “Naw, steaks. Dancing fuel.” He looked down at his armful of Leona. “Speaking of which—”
“TIMBERRR!”
I was not the only one whose ears almost dropped off in surprise. That cry was a famous one at any dance such as this. It dated back to Prohibition days, and what it signaled back then, whenever somebody stuck his head in through the dance hall doorway and cut loose the call, was the availability of Mason jar moonshine for anybody who cared to step outside for a sip.
So my surprise was double. That the cry resounded through the hall this night and that the timber crier there in the doorway, when I spun around to see, proved to be my father, with my mother on his arm.
He wore his brown pinstripe suit coat, a white shirt, and his newest Levis. She was in her blue cornflower frock with the slight V neckline; it was pretty tame by today’s standards, but did display enough of throat and breastbone to draw second glances. Togged out that way, Varick and Lisabeth McCaskill made a prime pair, as rangers and wives often did.
Calls and claps greeted my father’s solo.
“You’d be the one to know about timber, Mac!”
“Hoot mon, Scotch Heaven has come to town!”
“Beth, tell us fair and square: has he been up in the Two practicing that?”
Even Alec wagged his head in—admiration? consternation? both and more?—before declaiming to Leona, “There’s dancing to be done. Let’s get at it before the rowdy element cuts loose with something more.”
Ray and I sifted over to my parents’ side of the hall. My father was joshing Fritz Hahn that if Dode could still ride a bronc like that, it was Fritz’s turn next Fourth to uphold the South Fork reputation. Greta and my mother were trading laughter over something, too. Didn’t I tell you a dance is the McCaskill version of bliss?
“Here they are, the future of the race,” my father greeted Ray and me. “Ray, how’re you summering?”
“Real good,” Ray responded, along with his parenthetical grin. “Quite a rodeo, wasn’t it.”
“Quite a one,” my father agreed, with a little shake of his head which I knew had to do with the outcome of the calf-roping. But at once he was launched back into more visiting with Fritz and Ray, and I just parked myself and inventoried him and my mother. It was plain my father had timbered a couple of drinks; his left eyelid was down a little, as if listening to a nightlong joke. But no serious amount. My mother, though. My mother too looked bright as a butterfly, and as she and my father traded grab with the Hahns and other people who happened by to say good words about her Ben English speech or his timber whoop, both her and him unable to keep from glancing at the back-and-forth of the dancers more than at their conversationalists, a suspicion seeded in me. Maybe, more than maybe, my mother had a drink or two in her, too.
here you guys been?” I voiced when I got the chance.
And received what I deserved. “Places,” stated my mother, then laughed.
Well, I’d had one escape this day. Getting in and out of the Medicine Lodge without coinciding with my own parents there.
Out on the floor, the swirl was dissolving as it does after the call and music have hit their climax, and Jerome was enlisting everybody within earshot for the next variety of allemande and dosie doe. “Now I can’t call dances to an empty floor, can I? Let’s up the ante here. Four squares this time, let’s make it. Plenty of territory, we don’t even have to push out the walls yet.”
“The man needs our help,” my father suggested to my mother and the Hahns, and off they all went, to take up places in the fourth square of dancers forming up.
The dance wove the night to a pattern all its own, as dances do. I remember the standard happenings. Supper hour was announced for midnight, both the Sedgwick House dining room and the Lunchery were going to close at one A.M. Ray and I had agreed that supper hour—or rather, an invitation to oyster stew at the Lunchery, as my parents were certain to provide—would be our personal curfew. Jerome at one point sang out, “Next one is ladies’ choice!” and it was interesting to see some of the selections they made, Alice Van Bebber snagging the lawyer Eli Kinder and immediately beginning to talk him dizzy, pretty Arleta Busby putting out her hand to that big pile of guff Ed Van Bebber, of all damn people. My parents too made South Fork pairings, my mother going over to Fritz Hahn, Greta Hahn coupling onto my father’s arm. Then after one particularly rousing floor session, Jerome announced that if anyone cared to pass a hat he and the musicians could manage to look the other way, and collection was taken to pay him and Nola and Jeff.
As I say, all this was standard enough, and mingled with it were some particularities of this night. The arrival of Good Help and Florene Hebner, magically a minute or so after the hat had been passed. Florene still was a presentable-looking woman, despite a dress that had been washed to half its original color. Good Help’s notion of dressing up was to top off his overalls with a flat cap. My mother once commented, “A poor-boy cap and less under it.” The departure of the grocery store family, the Helwigs, with Luther Helwig wobbling under the load of booze he had been taking on and his wife Erna beside him with the bawling baby plucked from the far end chair corral. In such a case you always have to wonder: was a strategic mot
herly pinch delivered to that baby? And my eventual inspiration for Ray and me to kill off the last of my fifty-cent stake with a bottle of pop apiece. “How about stepping across for something wet?” was the way I proposed it to Ray. He took on a worried look and began, “I don’t know that my folks want me going in that—” “Christ, not the Medicine Lodge,” I relieved him, “I meant the Lunchery.” Through it all, dance after dance after dance, my tall redheaded father and my white-throated mother in the musical swim at one end of the hall, my tall redheaded brother and Leona starring at the other end.
It was in fact when Ray and I returned from our pop stop that we found a lull in the dancing and made our way over to my parents again, to be as convenient as possible for an oyster stew invite.
“I suppose you two could eat if you had to?” my father at once settled that issue, while my mother drew deep breaths and cast a look around the hallful.
“Having fun?” I asked her, just to be asking something, while my father was joshing Ray about being girl-less on such a night.
“A ton,” she confirmed.
Just then Jerome Satterlee appeared in our midst, startling us all a little to see him up close instead of on the platform. “What, did you come down for air, Jerome?” my father kidded.
“Now don’t give an old man a hard time,” responded Jerome. “Call this next one, how about, Mac. Then we can turn ’em loose for midnight supper. Myself, I got to go see a man about a dog.”
My father was not at all a square dance caller of Jerome’s breadth. But he was known to be good at—well, I will have to call it a sort of Scotch cadence, a beat of the kind that a bagpipe and drum band puts out. Certainly you danced smoother to Jerome’s calling, but my father’s could bring out stamping and clapping and other general exuberation. I think it is not too much to say that with my eyes closed and ears stuffed, I could have stood there in the Sedgwick House and told you whether it was Jerome or my father calling the dance, just by the feel of how feet were thumping the hall floor.
