Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  “Spirituals suit your voice nicely,” she said to be saying something uncritical. “Your mother always sang those at her work, the Major told me.”

  “She did. She came from church people.” He hesitated. “Although it was hard, out here.”

  “No doubt.”

  The slap of wet clay against a furrow of logs startled them both. Dolph had chosen to start chinking outside the exact room where they were. The pair of them tried to keep straight faces at being chaperoned with mud and trowel.

  “Let’s get ourselves under way,” she did away with that distraction and set right to work on what was nagging at her the most, the drag of his breathing as he sang. “The first of many first things”—the quick toss of her head was meant to take the edge off that, and didn’t quite—“is that you must learn to properly draw air into yourself.”

  Disappointment clouded him over. He hadn’t come here to take his nose for a walk.

  “This all counts more than you may think,” Susan came close to a coax a lot sooner than she wanted to. “You can’t expect to sing your way to the top of the world without your wind under you, now can you.” Suppose not, Monty’s manner came around to, and he presented himself for whatever she had in store. She drilled into him that he was going to have to breathe from deep down, bulge his middle so his diaphragm would let air all the way into the lower region of his lungs. “It’s like cleaning out the bottom of a closet so the rest of your things will hang right.” He gave it try after try, and his intake still was the worst part of his vocal wardrobe.

  “Don’t worry, there are exercises. Mister Rathbun, you’re not to let yourself be perturbed about whatever you think I’m inflicting on you. Are we agreed? Now then, pretend you are smelling a rose.”

  He gave a minimum sniff.

  “A nine-year-old girl can do a better job of it than that.” She looked stern until he inhaled lustily. “That’s not bad,” she commended. “Now put your fist in front of your mouth as if holding a bugle.”

  How does she know these things? His sudden little amused expression took Susan by surprise. He had a good contained grin. She felt silly. What had she expected, a minstrel show gawp?

  “Mister Rathbun? What is it?”

  “I have me a bugle. I do. Played it all the time when I was a bit of a thing.”

  “Angeline, the boy is driving us mad with that bugle.”

  “I’ll have him put it up, Mister Warren. It was his father’s.”

  “Then you know very well what I’m asking of you, don’t you,” Susan swept on. “Put your clenched hand up, no, against your lips. As if with a bugle, for heaven’s sake. Now smell the rose, but put the air back out through your fist. Deep breath, now blow out, make it sound like a tea kettle. Again—in, out. Until I tell you to stop. Again. Once more. Take your hand down, keep that same rhythm of breathing. There. Feel the muscles work? Down there in your flanks?”

  His flanks felt as if they were an unwilling topic of conversation. “Some, I guess.” He wondered how much of this Dolph was hearing, outside.

  “That’s what you must practice,” she decreed. “At home, in the mirror. Do it a dozen times first thing each morning and again over the noonhour and again at night, and I guarantee, I can tell whether or not you have been doing them.” Monty considered himself notified. “Next let’s acquaint you with the notes.”

  Apprehensively he listened while she demonstrated how to sing the scale. Her voice was smooth, each note up the ladder a tease of song; how was he ever going to get there? She would hold pitch, he would frown in concentration and then sic his voice onto hers. After considerable of this she called a break, with tea and honey for his throat and enough advice from her to make his head swim. Then back to traversing the notes. It took many tries, but finally she granted that he had approximated the scale.

  By the time they called it a day, he felt as if he had gone fifteen rounds. Heading for his way out, he made his manners and said he would see her tomorrow.

  “You will not,” Susan informed him with a slight smile. “Three lessons a week are as much as a voice can stand. Every other day and Sunday off. But practice the breathing exercise in between, don’t forget.” He stood there at the door looking as if he had been swatted with the calendar, but she couldn’t help that. “Wait, let me give you my list for some more provisions. And tell Whit Williamson for me that I am going to need a milk cow.”

  Monty fiddled with his hat while she kept jotting down foodstuffs. The adjusted ciphering of musical career that he was doing in his head was not coming out well at all. “Miss Susan? How long you figure I’m going to need to take lessons?”

  “Oh, forever,” she said absently, still writing her grocery list.

  “How—how’s that work?” His dismay was the purest note he had hit all day, causing her head to snap up. “I can’t be coming here until they lay me away!”

  “No, no. I only meant that every singer needs refresher lessons, all through life. As to how long these sessions need to go on—we’ll just have to see.” Her face gave away nothing, but the provisions list she handed to him looked long enough to endure a siege.

  Monty turned at the door. “Mind if I ask? These lessons forever—who gives you yours?”

  “I administer them myself. I take my own medicine, Mister Rathbun, don’t worry.”

  * * *

  Nights run slow here, rationed out by the wick. Why hadn’t I remembered?

  She moved the lamp some more until it almost touched the open diary, annoyed at how spoiled the electricity of Helena had made her. There was no great reason why a person couldn’t write and read by courtesy of kerosene. Compose an operetta.

  “Fiddle Strings, will you quit.” The cat tickled its moppy fur back and forth across her ankles, purring without shame or letup. “You’re a tyrant, you are,” she addressed downward. Rather than go out in the dark to the springhouse for milk from the pail, she resorted to the can of condensed milk she used on coffee, cutting off the top to get the last teaspoon into the cat pan. The cat looked a trifle critical, but lapped it up.

  She fed the fire next, last of the night’s chores except for the load of good intentions she had brought here with her. Piqued by Monty’s question, she nightly put her voice through its paces before she ever sat down to the diary and the waiting noteless sheets of score. Good thing, too, because if she held off on her vocal exercises until she accomplished what she wanted on the page these nights, she would be in direct competition with Angus McCaskill’s rooster as it summoned the dawn up there at the head of the valley.

  Having given herself enough of a scolding, she resumed at the table again. Prairie Tide lay there side by side with the diary; inert, the weight of ten years on it. How could this be, that the mud-road cavalcade for the vote refused to shape itself to music for her, after she had been the one to pour forth its soul in song? She could see, fresh as this moment, the famous trio of flivvers, dubbed the Niña, the Pinta, and the Susan B., grinding from town to town along the length of the Yellowstone River and then looping north to the wide plains of the High Line and the even newer counties and sprigs of towns there along the immigrant seedbed of the Great Northern Railroad. Blindfold her and spin her dizzy and she could still perform the evening of favorites that drew the homestead families to the scattered one-room schoolhouses and the fledgling motion-picture emporiums, so that on the heels of her rousing songs the speakers could have at those audiences on behalf of the statewide suffrage referendum. “Our ambassadress to the shanties,” she was deemed by Jeannette Rankin, high-born and connected and said by everyone to be Congress-bound as soon as Montana women wielded the vote. Susan, her father’s daughter in quickness to take umbrage, had swallowed that from Jeannette because there was a flavor of truth to it; as the carloads of the crusade trundled past isolated gulches where kerosene lamps glowed yellow, puddles of light such as she had come from, she felt singled out by some circular law of the draw.

  Of course even then she ha
d known that the performance of a lifetime would not go uncriticized. The costs, back in Helena. “Miss Duff, I must know—are you one of those suffs? My child does not need a singing teacher who believes in disrupting the home.”

  “Then she will never have the historic privilege, Mrs. Moberley, of a teacher who believes the female of the species has the right to be distinguished from the lower animals by possession of the ballot. Are we not persons?”

  In the end, all had been worth it. The overshoe counties, the prairie tide of settlers, carried the day in the so close referendum on suffrage. It was a famous victory, and lacked only its snatches of tune. The moment Wes proposed Scotch Heaven to her in this charitable enterprise of his, to call it that, Susan saw the interlude here as her chance to remedy that lack. Here she had solitude, that Cheshire countenance of creation: find the face of what you wanted to do and lock on to it without blink or hesitation, wasn’t that the prescription? Here she was even paid (“All right then, triple,” the most welcome words Wes had spoken to her in those four years) to sit and stew over music. (Unbidden, the schoolyard song chanted in her: A diller, a dollar / a high-collar scholar. Why on earth should that take up room in her head, and not some passage fit for an operetta? Maybe there was her answer, have Angus’s tots compose the lyrics that seemed beyond her.) Here she had but a single student—although he frequently seemed like more—standing in the way of the time and strength and patience that ought to set that pageant of mud and glory to music. And tonight again she couldn’t capture any of it, the flivver journey of 1914 as scattered as the Milky Way.

  “Trunk songs,” she delivered the verdict on this work of hers to the noncommittal cat. What little she had composed so far was only worth being closed away under a firm lid, in there to ferment with the mothballs. With Prairie Tide swept away one more time, she went back to the diary and today’s other frustrating musical chapter.

  I am so down I can hardly write. Monty works hard at these lessons, but there is no reservoir of breath in him. It’s as if the man has no diaphragm! He chops along from note to note. This morning I braced him as to whether he was doing his exercises when he is out of my sight. “Religiously,” he had me know. I must hope that did not mean only on Sundays.

  * * *

  The next day came blowy, perfect bad weather for staying in and facing unwritten music, and she was trying to get under way when a voice outside resounded like the language of kings:

  “Susan! I’ve brought you a person of importance!”

  Angus’s hail drew her to the window. He rode past to his schoolhouse every morning about now, but the bundled-up figure perched on the saddlehorse next to his, those formerly auburn pincurls peeping out from beneath a severe scarf—Adair, at this early hour?

  She was more wrenlike than ever, Susan saw during the doorway effusions, the years carving her down to delicacy. Most un-Scottish, for a woman born not a pathlength away from her hewn husband, but then Adair had always been the other side of category.

  “Come in, hang your hat on the floor,” Susan fell back on the habit of the house.

  “Not I, thank you just the same,” came back from Angus at once. “I have to go put roundish thoughts into squarish heads.”

  “And you wouldn’t have it any other way,” Susan told him, Adair chipping in with “You’d mope like a spent rose without that old school of yours.”

  “Leave it to Scotch women to shed a ray over the affairs of men,” he jested. “If one of you doesn’t tell me what I’m about, the other one will.”

  It took two to set the likes of him straight, they assured him, and off he went to his schoolday. Susan turned and groped at the cupboard.

  “Adair? I have coffee on, but beyond that, I’m afraid it’s graham—”

  Adair produced a dishtowel bundle. “I brought you a loaf.”

  The bread was still warm from the oven. Susan sent her a look. A woman who had baked bread before breakfast? And then ridden down here in the dew hours to spend, what, the day? From girl on, when Susan had sung at the wedding of Angus and Adair where even to a knock-kneed schoolmaid it had been obvious how Angus’s eyes searched past his bride of convenience to Anna Reese, Susan had tried to fathom what this person’s view of things must be. But there seemed no knowing, no way in past those deflecting gray eyes with their odd guardpost of freckles directly beneath each. In the time after Adair’s second stillbirth when the women of the other homesteads would visit in and always find a deck of cards laid out in columns in front of this woman, Susan’s mother would come home shaking her head and say, “Adair and solitaire,” not a commending rhyme. Now Adair was fixedly saying, “It’s so fresh, it may be hard to cut.”

  “No, no. It’ll be a treat.”

  Susan mauled off two large floppy underdone slices and the two women silently buttered and ate. They brushed their hands of that, and took up one of those dutiful conversations about the how of things, how was the Rathbun man doing, how were the further generations of McCaskills coming along. Susan was delving desperately—she was relieved out of all proportion when a gust rattled the kitchen windowpane as if wanting to come in out of its own weather and join them, and the two women were able to say almost in chorus that today’s was a thieving wind, it had stolen through snow somewhere—when Adair came out with:

  “Susan, I’ll not keep you from yourself.”

  With a start—written all over me, is it—Susan began to say something patently insincere about company other than herself probably being good for her once in a while. The other woman interjected:

  “I only came to ask a bit of a favor. I would like lessons.”

  Serves me right, Susan let herself have, suddenly longing for the procession of sugarplums with ringlets through her Helena music parlor. “Adair, really, I’m just here to tutor this one pupil.”

  “Every other day, according to when I see him and his wetnurse riding across the bench.”

  “That’s so. But—”

  “That leaves the other days.”

  Susan gave up any pretense of politeness. “What brings this on?”

  “I’m not asking you to make me into a fine singer or famous or anything of the sort.” I’m spared that, at least, Susan thought with relief. “It would be something to do with myself, is all.” Adair spoke this as if from a slight mocking distance away from herself. She floated a glance to Susan. “A person can sing to herself and not be thought soft in the head, can’t she.”

  Susan blinked a couple of times. “It’s a help, I suppose. Music is delirium on purpose.” She wrinkled her nose. “Who came up with that? Chopin? Puccini? Madame Schumann-Heink? Me?” In the bit of time this had bought, she made up her mind to the songless soul across the table. “Adair, I always need to know—what manner of music do you have in mind for yourself?”

  “Songs with the old country in them,” Adair stated. “Your mother’s songs would do me.”

  Susan that night thought long and hard about the populace of solitude. About the dots of humankind, connected and not, strung through the weathered valleys and across the girth of prairie like constellations reflected on the ground. The Adairs, the Anguses—and those between them even when no longer there—of the flivver trip: the women hungry for any other women to talk to, even dressed-up ones from Helena; the men half-bemused and half-alarmed that they would be hearing these suffrage arguments from their wives and daughters forever after. Then episodes began to come back to her, the elongated memory shadows from the dots. The syrup sandwiches that were all the supper that could be mustered by the host family fresh from their emigrant railcar near Ingomar. The proud Pledge of Allegiance in Danish by the Frisian colony gathered civically in their church in their fledgling town of Dagmar. The way smoke would fall to the ground before a storm, the smell of the weather riding out to the road to meet them as the Niña, the Pinta, and the Susan B. chugged into view of yet another isolated homestead chimney.

  “Out of my way, star boarder,” she directed the drow
sy cat. She fetched the sheets of composition paper to the table and spread them there in the wash of light.

  By midnight she had unraveled two lines for every one she had written, and endured her way through another one of those spasms of hopelessness when not even the prepositions seemed to fit into her sentences, but she had a few lyrics and something hummable to show for the night.

  HOW come the Major is so generous on this singing of yours, and not on my trick riding?”

  “Dolph, the only riding trick you know is to climb on the side of your horse a person is supposed to, and you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance on that.”

  “What the hell you talking about?” Dolph sputtered. “I can do the saddle stand, and the Comanche tuck, and, and—” Monty’s effort to hold in laughter registering on him, he grinned sheepishly. “Tune up your tonsils, then. But you end up back at rodeoing instead of concertizing, I’ll ride circles around you any day.”

  “Fair enough,” Monty said soberly.

  “Here, I’ll barn the horses, you git in there and take your medicine from her,” Dolph rattled on as they dismounted in the now familiar yard. “Ask her for me what she’s doing with all the milk from that damn cow, feeding an orphanage?”

  As he approached the house Monty could hear her in there plinking the piano in a testing way, da dum, da dum da da. Knowing she was just waiting her turn at him, he knocked and already had the door handle in his grip and his hat ready to flip onto the peg by the time she called the customary “Come on in, Mister Rathbun.”

  She didn’t migrate into the kitchen to swoop him in as usual, though, only poked the top part of her around the inner doorway like the front end of a clipper ship. “Here’s an idea. Come see.”