English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Those first days after the Fourth of July, the hay was very nearly ready for us and I was more than ready for it. Ready to have the McCaskill family situation off my mind for the main part of each day, at least. It did not take a great deal of original thinking to realize that the deadlock between my parents and Alec now was stouter than it had been before. If Alec ever needed any confirming in his rooting tooting cowboy notion of himself, his rodeo day calf-roping and pugilistic triumph had more than done so. Both of those and Leona too. Alec’s feet might not even touch the ground until about August. Anyway, I had spent so much thought on the Alec matter already that summer that my mind was looking around for a new direction. My father, my mother, my brother: let them do the sorting out of Alec’s future. I now had an imminent one haying at Noon Creek—all my own.

  I might have known. “The summer when,” I have said my mother ever after called this one. For me, the summer when not even haying turned out as expected. The summer when I began to wonder if anything ever does.

  • • •

  To be quite honest, on a task like those first few days of readying the equipment for haying I provided Pete more company than help. I mean, I can fix machinery when I have to but I’d rather be doing anything else. My point of view is that I would be more enthusiastic about the machine era if the stuff healed itself instead of requiring all the damn repair it does. And Pete was much the same as me where wrench work was involved.

  But I still maintain, companionship is no small thing to create. Amid all that damn bolting, unbolting, rebolting, bushing, shimming, washering, greasing, oiling, banging, sharpening, straightening, wouldn’t you welcome a little conversation? And the farther removed from the mechanical chore at hand the better? At least my uncle and I thought so. I recall Pete, just right out of the blue, telling me about the Noon Creek Kee-Kee bird. “You never heard of the Kee-Kee bird we got around here? Jick, I am surprised at you. The Kee-Kee bird shows up the first real day of winter every year. Lands on top of the lambing shed over there and takes a look all around. Then he says, ‘Kee-Kee-Keerist All Mighty, this is c-c-cold c-c-country!’ and heads for California.” I in return favored Pete with a few of the songs from Stanley’s repertoire, starting with the one about the lady who was wild and wooly and full of fleas and never had been curried above her knees. He looked a little surprised at my musical knowledge, but was interested enough.

  This sticks with me, too: how startling it was to hear, from a face so reminiscent of my mother’s, the kind of language Pete unloosed on the haying equipment during those repair days. It also was kind of refreshing.

  All in all, then, Pete and I got along like hand and glove. And I have already recited Marie’s glories, back there at the Fourth of July picnic. If anybody in the Two country could cook in the same league as my mother, it was Marie. So my ears and the rest of me both were well nourished, that couple of days as Pete and I by main strength and awkwardness got the haying gear into running order. It never occurred to me at the time, but I suppose Pete welcomed having me around—and Alec in the earlier summers when he was in the raking job—because he and Marie were childless. Their son died at birth, and Marie very nearly died with him. Her health in fact had never been strong since. So for a limited time, at least, someone my age was a privileged character with the Reeses.

  Even so, I held off until Pete and I were finishing up the last piece of equipment, replacing broken guards on the mowing machine, before I tried him on this:

  “Pete, you know Stanley Meixell, don’t you?”

  “Used to. Why?”

  “I’m just sort of curious. My folks don’t say much about him.”

  “He’s been a long time gone from this country. Old history.”

  “Were you around him when he was the English Creek ranger?”

  “Some. When anybody on Noon Creek who could spell K-O-W was running cattle up there on the forest. During the war and just after, that was.”

  “How was he as a ranger?”

  “How was he?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, did Stanley go about things pretty much the way Dad does? Fuss over the forest like he was its mother hen, sort of?”

  “Stanley always struck me as more of a rooster than a mother hen.” That, I didn’t get. Stanley hadn’t seemed to me particularly strutty in the way he went about life. “But I will say this,” Pete went on. “Stanley Meixell and your father know these mountains of the Two better than anybody else alive. They’re a pair of a kind, on that.”

  “They are?” That the bunged-up whiskey-sloshing camptender I had squired around up there in the Two was as much a master of the mountains as my father—all due respect to Pete, but I couldn’t credit it.

  Figuring maybe Pete’s specific knowledge of Stanley was better than his general, I asked: “Well, after he was the English Creek ranger, where was his ticket to?”

  “His ticket?”

  “That’s the saying Forest Service guys have about being transferred. After here, where’d Stanley get transferred to?”

  “The Forest Service isn’t my ball of string, Jick. How do you feel about sharpening some mower sickles? There’s a couple against the wall of the shop somewhere.”

  • • •

  “How’s she going, Jick?”

  The third morning I rode over to Pete and Marie’s, the mower man Bud Dolson greeted me there at breakfast. Pete had gone into Gros Ventre to fetch him the night before, Bud having come up on the bus all the way from Anaconda. Ordinarily he was on the bull gang at the smelter there, a kind of roustabout’s job as I understood it. “Good to get out in the real air for a change,” Bud claimed was his reason for coming to mow hay for Pete summer after summer. Smelter fumes would be sufficient propulsion to anywhere, yes. But I have a sneaking hunch that the job as mower man, a month of being out here by himself with just a team of horses and a mowing machine and the waiting hay, meant a lot in itself to somebody as quiet as Bud.

  • • •

  The first genuine scorching day of summer arrived with Bud, and by about nine o’clock the dew was off the hay and he was cutting the first swath of the nearest of the Noon Creek meadows, a path of fallen green beside the standing green.

  • • •

  “How do, Jick.”

  While I was saddling Pony to go home to English Creek at the end of that afternoon, Perry Fox came riding in from Gros Ventre.

  You still could find Perry’s species in a lot of Montana towns then, old Texas punchers who rode north on a trail drive somewhere before the turn of the century and for this reason or that never found their way back to Texas. Much of the time when I was growing up, Gros Ventre had as many as three of them: Andy Cratt, Deaf Smith Mitchell, and Perry Fox. They had all been hands for the old Seven Block ranch when it was the cattle kingdom of this part of Montana, then afterward hung on by helping out the various small ranchers at branding time and when the calves were shipped, and in between, breaking a horse for somebody now and again. Perry Fox was the last of them alive yet. Into his seventies, I guess he had to be, for Toussaint Rennie told my father he could remember seeing both Perry and Deaf Smith Mitchell in the roundup of 1882, skinny youngsters aboard big Texican saddles. Now too stove-up for a regular ranch job, Perry spent his winters in Dale Quigg’s saddle store helping out with harnessmending and other leather work and his summer job was on the dump rake for Pete.

  As I responded to Perry’s nod and drawl of greeting and watched him undo his bedroll and warbag from behind his saddle—like Bud, Perry would put up in the bunkhouse here at Pete’s now until haying was done—I couldn’t help but notice that he had a short piece of rope stretched snug beneath his horse’s belly and knotted into each stirrup. This was a new one on me, stirrups tied like that. That night I asked my father about it.

  “Come to that, has he,” my father said. “Riding with hobbled stirrups.”

  I still didn’t savvy.

  “At his age Perry can’t afford to get thrown any more,” my
father spelled it out for me. “He’s too brittle to mend. So with the stirrups tied down that way, he can keep himself clamped into them if his horse starts to buck.”

  “Maybe he just ought to quit riding horseback,” I said, without thinking it through.

  My father set me straight on that, too. “Guys like Perry, if they can’t ride you might as well take them out and shoot them. Perry has never learned to drive a car. The minute he can’t climb onto a horse and keep himself there, he’s done for.”

  • • •

  The fourth morning, Pete had me harness up my team of horses and take my rake to the mowed field to help Perry get the dump-raking under way.

  Truth be told, that day I was the one who did the majority of the dump-raking—scooping the hay into windrows, that was—while Perry tinkered and tinkered with his rake teeth and his dump lever and his horses’ harness and so on. Right then I fully subscribed to what Pete said about his custom of hiring Perry haying after haying: “He’s slow as the wrath of Christ, but he is steady.” I suppose if my behind was as aged and bony as Perry’s, I wouldn’t have been in any hurry either to apply it to a rake seat for the coming four or five weeks.

  At the end of that day of windrowing, when Perry and I had unhitched our teams and Pete was helping us look them over for any harness sores, up the road to the ranch buildings came the Forest Service pickup and in it my father and my mother as well. They’d been to Great Falls on a headquarters trip my father had to make and before starting home they swung by First Avenue South to chauffeur the last of the haying crew to Pete.

  He tumbled out of the back of the pickup now. The stackman, Wisdom Johnson.

  “Hey, Pete!” cried Wisdom. Even after the two-hour ride from Great Falls in the open breezes Wisdom was not what could be called even approximately sober. On the other hand he wasn’t so swacked he had fallen out of the pickup on the way to the job, which was the hiring standard that counted. “Hey, Perry!” the greeting process went on. “Hey, Jick!” If the entire population of Montana had been there in the Reese yard, Wisdom would have greeted every one of them identically. Wisdom Johnson’s mind may not have been one of the world’s broadest, but it liked to practice whatever it knew.

  “As I savvy it, Wisdom,” acknowledged Pete, “that’s what you’re here for all right. Hay.”

  “Pete, I’m ready for it,” Wisdom testified earnestly. “If you want to start stacking right now, I am ready. You bet I am. How about it, ready to go?” Wisdom squinted around like Lewis and Clark must have. “Where’s the field?”

  “Wisdom, it’s suppertime,” Pete pointed out. “Morning will be soon enough to start stacking. You feel like having some grub?”

  Wisdom considered. “No. No, I don’t.” He swallowed to get rid of the idea of food. “What I need to do is sort of sit down for a while.”

  Perry stepped forward. “I’ll herd him to the bunkhouse. Right this way, Wisdom. Where’d you winter?”

  “Out on the coast,” reported Wisdom as he unsteadily accompanied Perry. “Logging camp, up north of Grays Harbor. Rain! Perry, do you know it’d sometimes rain a week steady? I just did not know it could rain that much.”

  Chin in hand and elbow propped on the doorframe, my mother skeptically watched all this out the rolled-down window of the pickup. Now she opened the door and stepped out. Not surprisingly, she looked about two-thirds riled. I don’t know of any Montana woman who has never gritted her teeth, one time or another, over that process of prying men off bar stools and getting them launched toward whatever they’re supposed to be doing in life. “I’ll go in and visit Marie,” she announced, which my father and Pete and I all were glad enough to have happen.

  Pete made sure my mother was out of earshot, then inquired: “He in Sheba’s place, was he?”

  “No, in the Mint, though he did have Bouncing Betty with him. She wasn’t about to turn loose of him as long as he had a nickel to his name.” Upon study, my father looked somewhat peevish, too. Wisdom Johnson must have taken considerable persuading to part with Bouncing Betty. “So at least I didn’t have to shake him directly out of a whore’s bed. But that’s about the best I can say for your caliber of employee, brother-in-law.”

  Pete broke a grin at my father and razzed: “I wouldn’t be so damn hard up for crew if you’d paid attention to the example of Good Help Hebner and raised anything besides an occasional scatter raker.”

  Somehow Pete had known what the moment needed. Pete’s kidding had within it the fact that the other of the rake-driving McCaskill brothers had been Alec, and he was not a topic my father particularly cared to hear about these days. Yet here it came, the half wink of my father’s left eye and the answer to Pete’s crack: “Scatter rakers were as good as I could do. Whatever that says about my caliber.”

  • • •

  The fifth day, we made hay.

  The windrows that Perry and I had raked formed a pattern I have always liked. A meadow with ribs of hay, evenly spaced. Now Perry was dump-raking the next field down the creek and Bud was mowing the one beyond that.

  Those of us in the stacking crew began our end of the matter. We sited the overshot stacker toward the high edge of the meadow, so the haystack would be up out of the deepest winter snowdrifts along Noon Creek. With the power buckrake, Pete shoved several loads of hay into place behind the stacker. Then Wisdom maneuvered and smoothed that accumulation with his pitchfork until he had the base of his stack made the way he wanted it. An island of hay almost but not quite square—eight paces wide, ten paces long—and about chest high.

  “You said last night you’re ready, Wisdom,” called Pete. “Here it comes.” And he bucked the first load of hay onto the fork of the stacker. “Send it to heaven, Clayton.”

  The final man, or I should say member, of our haying crew was the stacker team driver, twelve-year-old Clayton Hebner. Pete always hired whichever Hebner boy was in the twelve-to-fourteen-year range for that stacker team job and they were pretty much interchangeable, a skinny kid with a forelock and nothing to say for himself; apparently the volume knob for that whole family was on Good Help Hebner. All that was really noticeable about Clayton was his Hebner way of always eyeing you, as if you were the latest link in evolution and he didn’t want to miss the moment when you sprouted wings or fins. At Pete’s words Clayton now started into motion his team of horses hitched to the cable which, through a tripod-and-pulley rig within the stacker, lifts the twin arms of the stacker and the hay-loaded fork, and the hay went up and up until—

  It occurs to me: does everybody these days think that hay naturally comes in bales? That God ordained that livestock shall eat from loaves of hay tied up in twine by thirteen-thousand-dollar machinery? If so, maybe I had better describe the notion of haying as it used to be. All in the world it amounted to was gathering hay into stacks about the size of an adobe house; a well-built haystack even looks as solid and straightforward as an adobe structure, though of course stands higher and has a rounded-off top. But try it yourself sometime, this gathering of ten or twelve tons of hay into one stack, and you will see where all the equipment comes in. Various kinds of stackers were used in various areas of the West, beaver slides, Mormon derricks, two-poles, jayhawks, but Pete’s preference was an overshot. An overshot stacker worked as its name suggests, tossing a load of hay up over a high wide framework which served as a sort of scaffolding for the front of the haystack. If, say, you hold your arms straight out in front of you, with your hands clutching each end of a basket with hay piled in it: now bring your arms and the basket straight up over your head with a little speed and you are tossing the hay exactly as an overshot does. In short, a kind of catapult principle is involved. But a calculated one, for it is the responsibility of the stacker team driver to pace his horses so that the overshot’s arms and fork fling the hay onto whichever part of the stack the stackman wants it. Other than being in charge of the speed of the team, though, driving the stacker team is a hell of a dull job, walking back and forth
behind the horses as they run the overshot up and down, all damn day long, and that’s why a kid like Clayton usually got put on the task.

  So hay was being sent up, and as this first haystack and the day’s temperature both began to rise, Wisdom Johnson suffered. This too was part of the start of haying: Wisdom sweating the commerce of Great Falls saloons out of himself. Soaking himself sober, lathering into the summer’s labor. We all knew by heart what the scene would be this initial morning, Wisdom lurching around up there atop the mound of hay as if he had a log chained to each leg. It was a little painful to watch, especially now that my camptending sojourn with Stanley Meixell had taught me what a hangover truly is.

  Yet agonized as Wisdom looked, the stack was progressing prettily, as we also knew it would. The stackman, he was maestro of the haying crew. When the rest of us had done our mowing or raking or bucking or whatever, the final result of it all was the haystacks the stackman built. And Wisdom Johnson could build them, as he put it, “high and tall and straight.” No question about it, Wisdom was as big and brawny as the ideal stackman ought to be; nine of him would have made a dozen. And he also just looked as if he belonged atop a haystack, for he was swarthy enough to be able to pitch hay all day up there without his shirt on, which I envied much. If I tried that I’d have burned and blistered to a pulp. Wisdom simply darkened and darkened, his suntan a litmus each summer of how far along our haying season was. As July heated up into August, more than once it occurred to me that with the sweat bathing Wisdom as he worked up there next to the sun, and his arm muscles bulging as he shoved the hay around, and that dark leathering of his skin, he was getting to look like the heavyweight fighter Joe Louis. But of course that wasn’t something you said to a white person back then.

  This was the second summer of Wisdom being known as Wisdom instead of his true name, Cyrus Johnson. The nickname came about because he had put up hay a number of seasons in the Big Hole Basin down in the southwestern part of the state, and according to him the Big Hole was the front parlor of heaven. The hay there was the best possible, the workhorses all but put their harnesses on themselves each morning, the pies of Big Hole ranch cooks nearly floated off into the air from the swads of meringue atop them. The list of glories ran on and on. Inasmuch as the Big Hole had a great reputation for hay even without the testimony of Cyrus Johnson, the rest of us at the Reese table tended to nod and say nothing. But then came one supper-time, early in the first summer I hayed for Pete, when Cyrus started in on a fresh Big Hole glory. “You take that Wisdom, now. There’s my idea of a town. It’s the friendliest, drinkingest, prettiest place—”