Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

“Don’t I wish I knew. I hear everything you’re saying, his color can get in his way that quick. But knocking on stage doors will have to be his own concern, or Wes Williamson’s. I don’t care if he were made of Limburger, my part in this is to train that voice of his.”

  “That mightn’t be popular with some.”

  “I’ve been spat on before,” she said levelly.

  He knew that look on her. The Susan who was the leader of the girls in the garter snake fights with the boys, the Susan who had brains by the bushel and curiosity by the cubit; the Susan he many a time would have traded places with on the checkerboard of life, truth be told.

  “You know my inclination,” Angus had ready now. “Teach away. You remember the approach I took with you,” he made the old joke of the timid preacher being urged by the deacon to cut loose in his sermons: “ ‘For the Lord’s sake, man, fire the popcorn at the porcupine—some of it may stick.’ ”

  They laughed together.

  “I’ve yammered on,” he chided himself after a bit. “There’s not that much conversation to be made around here, anymore.”

  “No.” This cobwebbed room that had rung with Bible and rhyme. Susan glanced around, then at him. “I noticed on the way up here, the graves are kept.”

  “Yes, I see to that.”

  “Angus, it haunts me that they came to Helena to me at just the wrong time.”

  “People die everywhere, lass, so far as I know.” He stepped to the stove and coffeed up again, his back to her. “They went like flies here, too, during the flu.” She heard him swallow, on more than a bite of cracker. She knew there was particular loss, Anna Reese by name, his equal at the Noon Creek school and the woman he had waited half his life for, in that slight sound.

  Susan had her own tightness of throat to talk past.

  “I’ve been across to Samuel’s grave. Twice now.”

  “Ah. Have you.”

  His turn to silently bolster her. It was six years on, since his own son Varick had come home from the Great War, and the brother whom Susan had raised like a son had not. Somewhere in his schoolhouse even yet was the homemade telegraph rig that incanted from one end of the room to the other the name of its long-boned inquisitive young maker in Morse code: Samuel Duff, ajump with ideas. Susan had taken the bright lad under her wing for high school in Helena, and right after, seen him climb onto the troop train that never brought him back. Then, their hearts out of them, no sooner had Ninian and Flora lodged themselves in Susan’s care than the capricious influenza epidemic doubled back and took them. Angus winced within. The flood of death around Susan, there at the end of the Great War, would have knocked anyone off her feet.

  “You’ve been through the thick of things, I know,” he resorted to. “But maybe this is your turn at some of the thin. One pupil, mind you—shall I change the name of Scotch Heaven to Easy Street for you, Miss Duff?”

  She made a face at that, as he hoped.

  Next task prominently waiting, Angus gave the doorway a pat of promise on his way through as Susan followed him out.

  She watched him swing into his saddle and as he departed the yard, she thanked him with the instruction: “Don’t you dare be scarce, you and Adair. Ham supper here, as soon I can get the ingredients.”

  “We’ll bring our appetites.”

  * * *

  Why this, Wesley bastardly Williamson?

  Angus turned that over and over as he went home and hitched his team of workhorses to the wagon he had been using for fixing fence on Breed Butte. By now the wagon ought to know the way up to the Barclay place by itself, he paused only long enough to muse; then climbed on and gave the reins a flip to start the horses.

  As the rescue vessel for Susan’s door splashed across the North Fork and began lurching its way over the years-old ruts up the slope of the timber-topped butte, Angus swayed on the wagon seat and in the course of his thoughts as well. Great treat that it was to have Susan back in the vicinity, where in the book of reckoning did this open-handedness by the lordly Major come from? A singing school for one, fluffed into Scotch Heaven by Williamson money generous as feathers? A change that was. Angus’s mouth soured at the ancient history of contention with old Warren Williamson and his hoofed locusts branded with the Double W. And now the magical Wesley, next thing to a governor, kindly turns the valley into a music parlor? Nothing against the man Rathbun, but since when was a choreboy a logical candidate for the Susan Duff Conservatory of Music?

  Arrival at the Barclay homestead silenced all this in Angus. He climbed down into the yard where he and Adair Barclay had exchanged their marriage vows, Scotch Heaven’s legion of people three deep around them then. Clapped a hand to his hat to firm it down against the chronic mischief of the wind up here so near the brow of the butte. Walked past the caved-in root cellar where Varick, forest ranger in charge of half the mountains in the Two Medicine country now, had played billy-of-the-hill endless afternoons with his girl cousins. Gingerly approached the house of logs built by himself and Rob, his onetime partner, eventual brother-in-law, and ultimate nemesis. Thirty-five years, gone again in the space of his steps; how was it possible?

  McAngus, you’re not immune to the calendar, he chided himself. Looking the door over and finding it still fit for service, he went back to the wagon for prybar and clawhammer. Again now the hair on the back of his neck was up a little about the Williamsons. The original of the outfit, old Warren, four or so years ago had gone to his reward—it would take a Dante to know, but Angus figured his was a reasonable guess—on some coast of Hell. But the dirt had barely begun to settle on that well-earned grave when the next in command of what promised to be unending Williamsons, the Major, materialized right here in this yard. Angus thought back through that with care, looking for snares. He had happened to be here on some errand in his ordained role, landlord of the empty. It was soon after Rob’s widow, Judith, had loyally sold him the Breed Butte homestead—“Angus, you already made the down payment in sweat”—and with that and the lease Susan had given him on the Duff grazing land, he had been going around feeling fortified about keeping the Double W from buying in on Scotch Heaven. Therefore the appearance of that gorgeous matched gray team and the buckboard with a figure of significance in it coming over the ridgeline had only tweaked his curiosity.

  The grays came like winged things, then had halted smartly, as if on target, in the center of the yard. “I merely came over to clarify something, I hope you don’t mind,” the squire at the reins delivered with a winning expression. Major Williamson was a famous smiler, and Angus didn’t doubt he meant most of it, except merely. “I understand you put the run on my agent the other day.”

  “Tsk, Major. I nicely asked him to keep his feet off my soil.”

  “Does that still go?”

  Angus’s gaze took in the unnaturally propped leg there on a padded bolster, as if it were an item of cargo that didn’t fit with the rest of the imposing person in the buckboard. “Come on down for a stretch if you’d like.”

  Wrapping the reins in a way that the grays would not get any ideas, the Major descended smoothly enough, considering. Angus watched him alight in fine Western boots but with walker heels; specially made, those, he had no doubt, since the man could no longer put that limb to the stirrup of a saddle. From his end of things, the Major was all manners:

  “Angus, if I may?”

  That would be an improvement, Angus had come close to saying. In his time the elder Williamson had one boxcar name for all of them over here, Damnscotchprotestant.

  “We’ve never been able to deal with—reach a deal with those of you on the North Fork,” the Major was saying in a voice with none of his father’s rasp. “Wouldn’t you agree it’s about time for a fresh start?”

  “I’d agree it’s time the Double W had a fresh dealer, if that’s what you are, Major,” Angus had set the man straight. “To us over here, your father was every kind of a sonofabitch, and Whit I’d say takes after him.”

  “
You’re still here in spite of them, or I wouldn’t be standing in this yard with the wind blowing through my every aperture, trying to talk sense to you.”

  Angus had chuckled. “I’m with you on the wind, at least.” They moved into the lee of the house.

  “Regrets about Barclay, by the way,” the Major had said as though the house reminded him. “I know you and he went back a long way.”

  Angus’s glance followed the other man’s to the reservoir, off along the slope to the west, where Rob and his horse had slid on the embankment slick with spring and drowned. A life he had known as well as his own, Rob’s, and he still could not make its pluses and minuses come out to a proven sum. The fit recitation cropped out almost without his knowing: “ ‘That blind night waiting, all men darkward go / Unto Inferno, or Paradiso.’ ”

  “Cheyne, is that? ‘A tourist, I, on the ring roads of Hell’?”

  Angus had to grant that an eyebrow of approval. “Teach him even at Harvard, do they?”

  The Major had not seen fit to remark that in Copeland’s course on literature of the ages, Copey had delighted in citing Cheyne as the poor man’s Dante. With a covering cough, the Major brought matters back down to earth. “Can we talk business?”

  “One of us no doubt will.”

  “Angus, I know you’ve worked like anything, trying to build an operating ranch over here. But in country like this, it takes a real swath of land to run livestock. Your quarter-sections”—the Major inclined his head around to the quilt-pattern acreages of the Duff place and this one and Angus’s own—“are always going to be too small. Homesteads were an Act of Congress, and you know what happens when somebody has congress with you.” No chuckle from Angus at that. The Major backed up to the straight and narrow: “Homesteads everywhere are going under. You’ve seen that yourself.”

  “I have. That’s why I thought to shore mine up.”

  The Major looked him over as if he were a checkerboard. “Let’s try this. Double what my fool of an agent offered. It’s a lot for empty country, Angus.”

  “Imagine. Money raining, and there wasn’t even any thunder.”

  “That still doesn’t sound exactly like ‘yes.’ ”

  Angus had not been able to resist. Puckish as a Shakespearean, he confided: “Potter in at the bank has kindly offered to take all this off my hands.”

  That had sharpened the expression on his visitor right up. Angus had no way of knowing how much under it took on an immediate edge, too. If the Major had wanted to spell it out, whenever his father and Potter at the Valley Stockmen’s Bank were not trying to outfox each other for some piece of land, the rancher and the banker had done ordinary business together in cordial dislike that went back approximately to their cribs. That galvanized Yankee in at the bank was Warren Williamson’s offhand scorn for Potter’s ineradicable hardscrabble Missouri family origins. That slab of cold roast Yankee, Potter doubtless dripped back in his genial drawl whenever the Boston-degreed patriarch of the Double W, or for that matter the similar Major, got on his business nerves. It made wicked sense for Angus to do his dealing with Potter and let the Williamsons choke on the bone, and the Major too well knew it. He still was trying to muster the barrage of argument to counter that when Angus’s face twitched toward a grin.

  “Potter has pockets all over him,” Angus said dismissively. “I’m not selling this to any of you creatures.”

  “I hadn’t thought I would go home counting that a gain,” the Major manfully granted, and made the climb back into his buckboard. To his surprise, Angus held him from going by grasping the near horse’s rein. “Potter did have one thing interesting to say. You’re buying up homesteads all the way east to the Highwood Mountains, are you?”

  “Where they fit into our pasture picture, I am.” His tone as much as added: With both hands.

  “Tell me this, Major. How much ground would you say a man can swallow before he turns into an island?”

  No answer given, that day or this. Standing there akimbo, looking out over the gentle spill of valley and the meandering creek he and Rob had followed to here like giddy pilgrims all those years ago, Angus put aside the past for the moment, which was as long as he was ever able to. He remained bothered over the open hand of the Major, back down the slope where Susan was strenuously setting up shop. But Susan had always known her own mind, had she ever. Telling himself to confine his prying to the stubborn hinges of the door, Angus set to work opening the house on Breed Butte to the elements.

  * * *

  That night Susan put into her diary:

  So much for wishing for ghosts, when they line up in the mind to volunteer.

  EARLY sun was sorting the green plaids of spring—blue-green of the timberline on Breed Butte, mossy green of her doddering barn roof, meadow green of the volunteer hay fostered by the creek—when Susan stepped out into the morning and around the corner of the house to gaze north. From growing up here, she could catch sight of a coyote the instant its lope broke the pattern of the grass on the farthest butte. So, she spotted without effort the horseback figure on its way across the benchland from Noon Creek, then could not blink away the duplicate figure next to it.

  Eventually the two riders clopped into the yard and swung down, facing her with their reins drooping in their hands.

  “Morning, Miss Susan,” Monty said in short fashion. She could tell at a glance that he was full of second thoughts over this, about to go back for thirds.

  Dolph appeared no more happy to be along than Monty was to have him. The pint-size cowboy reported unwillingly, “Ma’am, the boss says I got to tag along with Monty here, do any chores while you’re schooling him up on this singing.”

  Susan paused over the knot of logic by which, if a woman was at risk from a man, two men were sent.

  “You can chink.” She indicated gaps between the logs of the house where hard weather had done its work. “The whole place can stand chinking, I’m sure. Mister Rathbun, come on in.”

  Looking doubly doleful, Dolph moved off in search of buckets and the nearest clay bank as Monty traipsed into the house after her. He was surprised to see it wasn’t much of a layout. The kitchen was the center of everything, as was to be expected, but this one appeared to have had a boxcar of peddler’s goods emptied into it. All of it made his own room at the back of the Double W washhouse seem a model of order. But through a doorway to the room beyond the kitchen he glimpsed a hulking piano, its white keys like bared teeth.

  He kept on looking at every possible thing in the house except the woman standing there like Lady La-De-Dah. All of a sudden he remembered to take off his hat and then had no idea what to do with it.

  Susan snagged the unmoored hat, hanging it on her father’s peg nearest the door in a way that told Monty there was where it belonged from now on. She wasn’t displeased that he didn’t sail in here and make himself at home. He had been awkward as a schoolboy there at the Gates of the Mountains dock, too, but for her purposes better that than slick and stuck on himself.

  “Let’s go on in here.” She led the way as if he were the hundredth pupil in this log cubbyhole instead of her first and only.

  The piano sitting waiting, Monty edged into the room.

  “Ready, I hope?”

  “Miss Susan—”

  Whatever he had intended to say, he took it back to makings as she watched. Finally he nodded, a sharp inch of inclination and then as quickly gone, and issued only: “I guess I can’t count on getting any younger.”

  I just wish flashed in Susan, right past the ramparts of determination and teacherly creed she had been trying to maintain. In singer’s years the man in front of her was a near-eternity older than the pupils who had to prove themselves in her Helena music parlor, and now that he stood here fresh off a horse and in work-worn togs instead of that handsome greatcoat, she was fully faced with the task Wes was letting her in for. And. And of course those considerations paled, so to speak, alongside the fact that among all her pupils ever, there
had never been a colored person of whatever age, dress, or capability. Well, she instructed herself, that’s why the two of them were here, wasn’t it, to drown out never with song.

  “Don’t look so nervous,” she passed the mood of instruction toward him. “No one dies of music except in opera. Now then, let’s first of all hear how you sound on dry land. That same song, please, and take your time with it.”

  The flutters in him saw their chance again. Kill this off before it got started. Croak out the spiritual, off-key; cough in the middle; tell her his voicebox had come to the belated realization that it was too old to go to school. Quit before you even start? some banshee in his conscience howled back at that. Why not scoot on home under your momma’s bed and play with the cat, while you’re at it?

  Feeling like a first-class fool but choosing that over running and hiding, he nodded again and resolutely gathered himself to put what he could into the air.

  “One moment, Mister Rathbun. May I?” She strode over to him and pushed his slaunched shoulders back and into straighter alignment, Monty flinching with surprise. “A singer mustn’t stand all caved in.” Her dress swishing, she stepped back to demonstrate. “High chest. Level head, no, not as if you’re gandering around for rain, merely level does the trick. Here, watch again.” She looked ready to give the Gettysburg Address, while he felt like he was being turned into one of those hat-store mannequins.

  “Go Down, Moses” came out about as it did with the accompaniment of the Missouri, Monty’s phrases like one bell after another but no arc of sound in between, his voice punctuating the melody rather than following it. Again Susan was bothered by the labored way he squeezed air in and out of himself, as if his chest were a polka accordion, and she despaired for a moment over the lengthening mental list of items to be worked on.

  Yet there was the genuine article somewhere in there, she was back to thinking by the time he was done with the song. When he stood planted (pigeon-toed as only someone who had spent a lifetime in cowboy boots could be, she added to the mental list) and let loose, somehow you ended up hearing more than he seemed to have sung, as if his voice had a shadow made of sound. At the Gates of the Mountains, she had wondered if it was a trick of the canyon echo; here as there she had to try to keep a rein on her sense of excitement at the way his knells of song stayed on for that unaccountable moment, lingering in the ear, the auditorium of the head. That vocal quality was rare and it was the one thing this problem pupil had going for him.