English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Alec and I, September children, native Noon Creekers. And my mother’s birthplace down the creek at the Reese ranch house itself. Odd to think that of the four of us at the English Creek ranger station all those years, the place that answered to the word “home” in each of us, only my father originated on English Creek, he alone was our link to Scotch Heaven and the Montana origins of the McCaskills. We Americans scatter fast.

  And something odder yet. In a physical sense, here at the upper place I was more distant from Alec than I had been all summer. The Double W lay half the length of Noon Creek from where my rake now wheeled and glided. Mentally, though, this advent to our mutual native ground was a kind of reunion with my brother. Or at least with thoughts of him. While I held the reins of Blanche and Fisheye as they clopped along, I wondered what saddle horse Alec might be riding. When we moved the stacker from one site to the next, I thought of Alec on the move too, likely patrolling Double W fences this time of year, performing his quick mending on any barbwire or post that needed it. By this stage of haying Wisdom Johnson a time or two a day could be heard remembering the charms of Bouncing Betty, on First Avenue South in Great Falls. I wondered how many times a week Alec was managing to ride into Gros Ventre and see Leona. Leona. I wondered—well, just say I wondered.

  With all this new musing to be done, the first day of haying the Ramsay meadows went calmly enough. A Monday, that was, a mild day following what had been a cool and cloudy Sunday. Wisdom Johnson, I remember, claimed we now were haying so far up into the polar regions that he might have to put his shirt on. Anyway, a Monday, a getting-under-way day.

  The morning of the second Ramsay day, though, began unordinary. I started to see so as soon as Pony and I were coming down off the benchland to the Reese ranch buildings. My mind as usual at that point was on sour milk soda biscuits and fried eggs and venison sausage and other breakfast splendors as furnished by Marie, but I couldn’t help watching the other rider who always approached the Reeses’ at about the time I did. This of course was Clayton Hebner, for as I’d be descending from my benchland route Clayton would be riding in from the Hebner place on the North Fork, having come around the opposite end of Breed Butte from me. Always Clayton was on that same weary bay mare my father and I had seen the two smaller Hebner jockeys trying to urge into motion, at the outset of our counting trip, and always he came plodding in at the same pace and maybe even in the same hooftracks as the morning before. The first few mornings of haying I had waved to Clayton, but received no response. And I didn’t deserve any. I ought to have known Hebners didn’t go in for waving.

  But etiquette of greeting was not what now had my attention. This particular morning, Clayton across the usual distance between us looked larger. Looked slouchy, as if he might have nodded off in the saddle. Looked somehow—well, the word that comes to mind is dormant.

  I had unsaddled Pony and was turning her into the pasture beside Pete’s barn when it became evident why Clayton Hebner didn’t seem himself this morning. He wasn’t.

  “Hello there, Jick!” came the bray of Good Help Hebner. “Unchristly hour of the day to be out and about, ain’t it?”

  • • •

  “Clayton buggered his ankle up,” Good Help was explaining in a fast yelp. Even before the sire of the Hebner clan managed to unload himself from the swaybacked mare, Pete had appeared in the yard with an expression that told me ranch house walls did nothing to dim the identification of Good Help Hebner. “Sprained the goshdamn thing when him and Melvin was grab-assing around after supper last night,” Good Help sped on to the two of us. “I tell you, Pete, I just don’t know—”

  —what’s got into kids these days, I finished for Good Help in my mind before he blared it out.

  Yet just about the time you think you can recite every forthcoming point of conversation from a Good Help Hebner, that’s when he’ll throw you for a loop. As now, when Good Help delivered himself of this:

  “Ought not to leave a neighbor in the lurch, though, Pete. So I’ll take the stacker-driving for you a couple days till Clayton mends up.”

  Pete looked as though he’d just been offered something nasty on the end of a stick.

  But there just was no way around the situation. Someone to drive the stacker team was needed, and given that twelve-year-old Clayton had been performing the job, maybe an outside chance existed that Good Help could, too. Maybe.

  “Dandy,” uttered Pete without meaning a letter of it. “Come on in and sit up for breakfast, Garland. Then Jick can sort you out on the horses Clayton’s been using.”

  • • •

  “Kind of a racehorsey pair of bastards, ain’t they?” Good Help evaluated Jocko and Pep, the stacker team.

  “These? Huh uh,” I reassured him. “They’re the oldest tamest team on the place, Garland. That’s why Pete uses them on the stacker.”

  “Horses,” proclaimed Good Help as if he had just been invited to address Congress on the topic. “You just never can tell about horses. They can look logy as a preacher after a chicken dinner and the next thing you know they turn themselves into goshdamn mustangs. One time I—”

  “Garland, these two old grandmas could pull the stacker cable in their sleep. And just about do. Come on, I’ll help you get them harnessed. Then we got to go make hay.”

  • • •

  The next development in our making of hay didn’t dawn on me for quite some time.

  That is, I noticed only that Wisdom Johnson today had no cause to complain of coolness. This was an August day with its furnace door open. Almost as soon as all of us got to the hayfield at the upper place, Wisdom was stripping off his shirt and gurgling a drink of water.

  How Wisdom Johnson did it I’ll never know, but he drank water oftener than the rest of us on the hay crew all together and yet never got heatsick from doing so. I mean, an ordinary person had to be careful about putting cool water inside a sweating body. Pete and Perry and Clayton and I rationed our visits to the burlapwrapped water jug that was kept in the shade of the haystack. But Wisdom had his own waterbag, hung on the stacker frame up there where he could reach it anytime he wanted. A hot day like this seemed to stoke both Wisdom’s stacking and his liquid consumption. He’d swig, spit out the stream to rinse hay dust from his mouth. Swig again, several Adam’s apple swallows this time. Then, refreshed, yell down to Pete on the buckrake: “More hay! Bring ’er on!”

  Possibly, then, it was the lack of usual exhortation from Wisdom that first tickled my attention. I had been going about my scatter raking as usual, my mind here and there and the other, and only eventually did I notice the unusual silence of the hayfield. Above the brushy bend of the creek between me and the stack, though, I could see the stacker arms and fork taking load after load up, and Wisdom was there pitching hay energetically, and all seemed in order. The contrary didn’t seep through to me until I felt the need for a drink of water and reined Blanche and Fisheye around the bend to go in to the stack and get it.

  This haystack was distinct from any other we had put up all summer.

  This one was hunched forward, leaning like a big hay-colored snowdrift against the frame of the stacker. More like a sidehill than a stack. In fact, this one so little resembled Wisdom’s straight high style of haystack that I whoaed my team and sat to watch the procedure that was producing this leaning tower of Pisa.

  The stacker fork with its next cargo of hay rose slowly, slowly, Good Help pacing at leisure behind the stacker team. When the arms and the fork neared the frame, he idly called, “Whoap,” eased Jocko and Pep to a stop, and the hay gently plooped onto the very front of the stack, adding to the forward-leaning crest.

  Wisdom gestured vigorously toward the back of the stack. You did not have to know pantomime to decipher that he wanted hay flung into that neighborhood. Then Wisdom’s pitchfork flashed and he began to shove hay down from the crest, desperately parceling it toward the lower slope back there. He had made a heroic transferral of several huge pitchforkfuls when
the next stacker load hovered up and plooped exactly where the prior one had.

  Entrancing as Wisdom’s struggle was, I stirred myself and went on in for my slug of water. Not up to me to regulate Good Help Hebner. Although it was with difficulty that I didn’t make some crack when Good Help yiped to me: “Yessir, Jick, we’re haying now, ain’t we?”

  From there on Wisdom’s sidehill battle was a lost cause. When that haystack was done, or at least Wisdom called quits on it, and it was time to move the stacker to the next site, even Perry stopped dump-raking in the field next door and for once came over to help.

  The day by now was without a wisp of moving air, a hot stillness growing hotter. Yet here was a haystack that gave every appearance of leaning into a ninety-mile-an-hour wind. Poles and props were going to be necessary to keep this stack upright until winter, let alone into winter.

  Wisdom glistened so wet with sweat, he might have just come out of swimming. Side by side Perry and I wordlessly appraised the catty-wampus haystack, a little like mourners to the fact that our raking efforts had come to such a result. Pete had climbed off the buckrake and gained his first full view and now looked like he might be coming down with a toothache.

  “Pete,” Wisdom started in, “I got to talk to you.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” said Pete. “Let’s get the stacker moved then we’ll gab.”

  • • •

  After the stacker was in place at the new site and Pete bucked in some loads as the base of the next stack, he shut down the buckrake and called Wisdom over. They had a session, with considerable head-shaking and arm-waving by Wisdom. Then Pete went over to Good Help, and much more discussion and gesturing ensued.

  Finally Good Help shook his head, nodded, spat, squinted, scratched, and nodded again.

  Pete settled for this and climbed on the buckrake.

  For the next little while of stacking hay there was slightly more snap to Good Help’s teamstering. He now had Jocko and Pep moving as if they were only half asleep instead of sleepwalking. Wisdom managed to get his back corners of the stack built good and high, and it began to look as if we were haying semi-respectably again.

  Something told me to keep informed as I did my scatter-raking, though, and gradually the story of this new stack became clear. Once more, hay was creeping up and up in a slope against the frame of the stacker. But that was not the only slope. Due to Wisdom’s determined efforts to build up the back corners, the rear also stood high. Prominent behind, low in the middle, and loftiest at the front where Good Help again was dropping the loads softly, softly. Something new again in the history of hay, a stack shaped like a gigantic saddle.

  Wisdom Johnson now looked like a man standing in a coulee and trying to shovel both sidehills down level.

  My own shirt was sopping, just from sitting on the rake. Wisdom surely was pouring sweat by the glassful. I watched as he grabbed his waterbag off the frame and took a desperate swig. It persuaded me that I needed to come in and visit the water jug again.

  I disembarked from my rake just as Wisdom floundered to the exact middle of the swayback stack and jabbed his pitchfork in as if planting a battle flag.

  “Drop the next frigging load right on that fork!” he shouted down to Good Help. So saying, he stalked up to the back of the haystack, folded his arms, and glowered down toward the pitchfork-target he had established for the next volley of hay.

  This I had to watch. The water jug could wait. I planted myself just far enough from the stack to take in the whole drama.

  Good Help squinted, scratched, spat, etcetera, which seemed to be his formula of acknowledgment. Then he twirled the ends of the reins and whapped the rumps of Jocko and Pep.

  I suppose the comparison to make is this: how would you react if you had spent the past hours peacefully dozing and somebody jabbed a thumb between your ribs?

  I believe even Good Help was more than a little surprised at the flying start his leather message produced from Jocko and Pep. Away the pair of horses jogged at a harness-rattling pace. Holding their reins, Good Help toddled after the team a lot more rapidly than I ever imagined he was capable of. The cable whirred snake-like through the pulleys of the stacker. And the load of hay was going up as if it was being fired from one of those Roman catapults.

  I spun and ran. If the arms of the stacker hit the frame at that runaway velocity, there was going to be stacker timber flying throughout the vicinity.

  Over my shoulder, though, I saw it all.

  Through some combination of stumble, lurch, and skid, Good Help at last managed to rare back on the reins with all his weight and yanked the horses to a stop.

  Simultaneously the stacker arms and fork popped to a halt just inches short of the frame, the whole apparatus quivering up there in the sky like a giant tuning fork.

  The hay. The hay was airborne. And Wisdom was so busy glowering he didn’t realize this load was arriving to him as if lobbed by Paul Bunyan. I yelled, but anything took time to sink in to Wisdom. His first hint of doom was as the hay, instead of cascading down over the pitchfork Good Help was supposed to be sighting on, kept coming and coming and coming. A quarter of a ton of timothy on a trajectory to the top of Wisdom’s head.

  Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Wisdom ought to have humped up and accepted the avalanche. He’d have had to splutter hay the next several minutes, but a guy as sturdy as he was wouldn’t have been hurt by the big loose wad.

  But I suppose to look up and see a meteorite of hay dropping on you is enough to startle a person. Wisdom in his surprise took a couple of wading steps backward from the falling mass. And had forgotten how far back he already was on the stack. That second step carried Wisdom to the edge, at the same moment that the hayload spilled itself onto the stack. Just enough of that hay flowed against Wisdom to teeter him. The teetering slipped him over the brink. “Oh, hell,” I heard him say as he started to slide.

  Every stackman knows the danger of falling from the heights of his work. In Wisdom’s situation, earth lay in wait for him twenty feet below. This lent him incentive. Powerful as he was, the desperately grunting Wisdom clawed his arms into the back of the haystack as he slid. Like a man trying to swim up a waterfall even as the water sluices him down.

  “Goshdamn!” Good Help marveled somewhere behind me. “Will you look at that!”

  Wisdom’s armwork did slow his descent, and meanwhile a sizable cloud of hay was pulling loose from the stack and coming down with him, considerably cushioning his landing. As it turned out, except for scratched and chafed arms and chest and a faceful of hay Wisdom met the ground intact. He also arrived to earth with a full head of steam, all of which he now intended to vent on Good Help Hebner.

  “You satchel-ass old son of a frigging goddamn”—Wisdom’s was a rendition I have always wished I’d had time to commit to memory. An entire opera of cussing, as he emerged out of the saddle-back stack. But more than Wisdom’s mouth was in action, he was trying to lay hands on Good Help. Good Help was prudently keeping the team of horses between him and the stackman. Across the horses’ wide backs they eyed one another, Wisdom feinting one way and Good Help going the other, then the reverse. Since the stacker arms and fork still were in the sky, held there only by the cable hitched to the team, I moved in and grabbed the halters of Jocko and Pep so they would stand steady.

  By now Pete had arrived on the buckrake, to find his stacking crew in this shambles.

  “Hold everything!” he shouted, which indeed was what the situation needed.

  Pete got over and talked Wisdom away from one side of the team of horses, Good Help pussyfooted away from their opposite side, and I backed Jocko and Pep toward the stack to let down the arms and fork.

  Diplomacy of major proportions now was demanded of Pete. His dilemma was this: if he didn’t prune Good Help from the hay crew, Wisdom Johnson was going to depart soonest. Yet Pete needed to stay on somewhat civil terms with Good Help, for the sake of hanging on to Clayton and the oncom
ing lineage of Hebner boys as a ready source of labor. Besides all that, it was simply sane general policy not to get crosswise with a neighbor such as Good Help, for he could just as readily substitute your livestock for those poached deer hanging in his jackpines.

  Wisdom had stalked away to try to towel some of the chaff off himself with his shirt. I hung around Pete and Good Help. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

  “Garland, we seem to have a problem here,” Pete began with sizable understatement. “You and Wisdom. He doesn’t quite agree with the way you drive stacker team.”

  “Pete, I have stacked more hay than that guy has ever even seen.” By which Good Help must have meant in several previous incarnations, as none of us who knew him in this lifetime had ever viewed a pitchfork in his hands. “He don’t know a favor when it’s done to him. If he’d let me place the loads the way they ought to be, he could do the stacking while setting in a goshdamn rocking chair up there.”

  “He doesn’t quite see it that way.”

  “He don’t see doodly-squat about putting up hay, that fellow. I sure don’t envy you all his haystacks that are gonna tip assy-turvy before winter, Pete.”

  “Garland, something’s got to give. Wisdom won’t stack if you’re going to drive.”

  The hint flew past Good Help by a Texas mile. “Kind of a stubborn bozo, ain’t he?” he commiserated with Pete. “I was you, I’d of sent him down the road long since.”

  Pete gazed at Good Help as if a monumental idea had just been presented. As, indeed, one had.

  “I guess you’re right. I’d better go ahead and can him,” Pete judiciously agreed with Good Help. I gaped at Pete. But he was going right on: “I do need to have somebody on the stack who knows what he’s doing, though. Lucky as hell you’re on hand, Garland. Nobody else on this crew is veteran to the stacking job like you are. What we’ll do, I’ll put you up on the stack and we’ll make some hay around here for a change, huh?”