Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  He and the escort climbed with odd austere care, the dark maroon topcoat and the blue dress uniform the only advancing spots of color in the dun landscape. The rise of ground was so pitted with shell hole upon shell hole there was barely room to walk in single file between, and to Wes’s irritation the escort periodically steadied him with a hand to his elbow. Fresh earth was turned wherever the French graves registration teams had been about their business of exhuming and removing bodies to the memorial cemetery. Across about a hundred and sixty acres, Wes estimated—a quarter section, back home—lay the litter of old rifles, helmets, ruptured canteens, even scraps of uniforms and bone bits.

  Beforehand he had set himself a mental exercise of trying to anticipate what would be most uncomfortable about this journey back to where he had made his name and countless others faded onto tombstones; but of all things it seemed to be simply the stillness, lack of any of the signature commotions common to entrenched armies, that was getting under his skin. Nowhere he had ever been was so gruesomely silent, nor so hard on the ears.

  The French officer kept to himself whatever thoughts he had about the formidable American insistent upon the view from the top; merely more of the battlefield. Nevertheless, Wes needed to see back through time in more ways than one. But Lord, to spell it out in bones: he swallowed on that as if trying to get rid of an overpowering taste. From the first day he and his company of men marched in here, he had recognized the Western Front for what it was: history’s most gargantuan stockyard. Trenches and bunkers and sentry posts rather than chutes and corrals and cutting gates, but the herd-handling system, the organizing principle, was shockingly the same as the Middle Ages abattoir he and Phil Sherman had traced out of its famed ruins near Aylesbury, as a lark, in their wander summer after Harvard. First and foremost, the cattle pens—except that here, the constructed containments had been insanely built in unending quantity, across half a thousand miles from the ocean to the Alps. Then the commodity on the hoof to fill the expectant channels, in this instance a million soldiers on each side, and when those were consumed, another million and another. Feed them, water them, care for them as best you could, these penned droves: then hope against hope that their weight, the avoirdupois of armaments and guts, would tip the scales. Whether it did or didn’t, adjacent to the slaughter yards waited the next sites in the process: the trade yards (replacement depots and hospitals), the tanyards and the boneyards (cemeteries and ossuaries such as this hill). Modern continental war this may have been, here, but in grotesque recourse to the invention of organized slaying it was also fundamentally medieval—a four-year market in the alive, the dead, and the in-between.

  Wes pivoted away. This was not a situation where he could say he was satisfied, but he had certainly seen enough, again. “Ready when you are, Captain.”

  They picked their way back down the hill. Then he climbed into the staff car beside the French captain to go into St. Mihiel and meet the others of the delegation.

  * * *

  Come all the way to the heart of France, and the first notable sight that meets you has to be Wesley Williamson grandly hoisting a glass of champagne? Susan snorted to herself at life’s nearsighted ticketing. Quickly covering her reaction—“Merely the bouquets, pardon,” she made the requisite face to her concerned escort—she squared her shoulders and strode on into the gauntlet of introductions in the St. Mihiel municipal chambers that appeared to have been dipped in national concoctions of red, white, and blue.

  She stayed close by the stammering Missoula haberdasher who was state chairman of their committee for the memorial project; his red-eyed wife, with two sons in the cemetery which all but surrounded this town, was worse than no help in this situation. Gently pummeled with hospitality as they were, Susan let her stage sense steer her through. Back when her voice was still regarded as finding its promise rather than having reached its limits, she had performed throughout Europe—cities a cut below Paris and Vienna and Berlin, true, but a swath of Europe nonetheless—but never at an occasion so bedecked as this. Franco-American tricolors aside, everyone there knew this gathering was intrinsically auspicious, coinciding as it did with the imminent date on the calendar which would put the worst of wars one full year into the gentling distance of the past, into calculable history. Here at St. Mihiel, where America’s doughboys and France’s Poilus had fought together and broken the German salient, their countries would erect for all the world to see a monument of that hardest alloy to attain, peace. If her given part in that was to hold herself high enough tonight for the French to sight along, she could stiffen herself to it.

  Yet under this sense of mission Susan, for all her common allegiance with the other Americans who had been sent, was there to represent the postage-stamp trust territory populated entirely by herself and Samuel. The colossal memorial statue, to rise out of the field of white crosses marching in place, she had not bothered to have an opinion about, and could not believe Samuel would have. But the archive proposed by the French, to hold forever the letters and diaries of the killed soldiers—their stories in whatever scrawled moments, adding up to the last chapter of a sacrificed generation—she would have skated the Atlantic to see done. Tucked in her luggage back at the clammy stonewalled pension was the packet of Samuel’s letters, the most costly of donations.

  Dear Susan—Funny place this world, where they put a fellow on a troop train at [censored] and he gets off a ship at [censored]. Where’s any progress in that? She had seen him and the other recruits off at the Great Northern depot at Havre, therefore he had alit at Le Havre, the first of the pushpins she deployed on the wall map of Europe newly put up in the music parlor. Without him, the house seemed howlingly empty. Four crammed years, his high school years when his rambunctious intelligence broke the boundaries of the homestead as her voice once had done, he had been both the man of the place and its kaleidoscope of boy. It was with an eye to Samuel’s future, and the music academy for wherewithal, that she had taken the great step of buying the house on Highland Street.

  Sister dearest—They do have wind here. Reminds me a bit of a constant chinook, but more of a washelli. Samuel, with his love of code and collector’s passion for language. She went to his notebooks, found the one with his lexicon of wind names, across the airy face of the earth: chinook, williwaw, datoo, mistral . . . washelli, a coastal Indian word for “west wind.” She took another pushpin from her supply and, eyes all but closed, thrust it into the map on the Western Front.

  Susan, ma chérie—“Solve this, Solomon,” as Mr. McCaskill would say: With my size 111/2s, I am now a runner. My lord and master hands me orders, I twist and dart and squirm through—there is no flat-out running in these slits in the ground crowded with thousands of us, it is more like carnival dodge ’em—and deliver the message, wait for the reply, then struggle back to HQ. There were three letters after that, brimming with the intrigued jottings of a big-shouldered bright man somehow singled out to trot slips of paper through Europe’s artificial canyons of men and earth; and then instead of the mail one day, the apologetic adjutant from the armory across town was at her door, sent specially.

  With duty in France now up to her, Susan managed to put aside emotion except to keep tensely dabbing in, sotto voce, the correction “Mademoiselle” on the endlessly effusive welcomes from the endless officials. Not to take away anything from the grief of others, but she considered the loss of an only brother worse than widowhood would have been. A bereft wife could remarry.

  The rest of it, this initial evening, was a matter of maintaining a measured smile and accepting apologies for the inclemency of climate within the confines of France. She played the role of weatherproof visitor to the hilt until inevitably her little group was brought face-to-face with the famous Major Williamson, whom they surely knew? Oh, they did not?

  “Sad circumstances to meet in, Mr. Averill, Mrs. Averill,” the distinctive voice undiluted in the several years since she had heard him speak at the suffrage convention—he was
the state senator from Pondera County, as a Williamson or one of their bootlickers customarily was—and the commanding mien that even then had his listeners whispering higher office was similarly undiminished, quite the contrary. Wesley Williamson looked like he always had a cushion under him about six inches higher than anybody else’s.

  As amused as the occasion would allow, Susan watched him turn in her direction and read her family resemblance with surprise and probably worse; you could not be the daughter of Ninian Duff and pass for anyone else. Uneasy though he plainly was, he spared her any pat remark about resemblance or coincidence and seemed to step back in himself in unexpected apology. He must be here, she realized, as the representative of the veterans, which was to say the survivors, the lucky ones. But how does one qualify for such luck? The Lord called Samuel, her father had put a trembling finger to the Bible passage so many times the page bore a smudge, and he answered, Here am I; she herself would no longer go near a God who summoned by way of the epidemic of madness called war.

  But that was neither here nor there, the concern of the moment was to come up with enough manners to obscure those grudges, older than themselves, that met at fencelines back in the Two Medicine country. Fortunately the occasion was running over with politeness, so she and he could simply extend a hand to each other and apply enough as needed. For public consumption one or the other of them murmured something to the effect that their families long had been acquainted—each would later tease the other for being so slick at watering it down that way—and that was the extent of it.

  Curious, Susan checked to either side of him in the crowd, but the high-and-mighty Wesley Williamson seemed to be unaccompanied. Somewhere he had a wife to tend to, rumored to be high society, doubtless taking in Mont-Saint-Michel or Lourdes while he dirtied his hands with this obligation. Momentarily Susan was distracted by a freshly bubbling glass someone placed in her hand. By now the mingled Montanans had become the object of ceaseless toasts. Tonight and tomorrow belonged to them. Missing no chance to underscore the cost in lives caused by the foe across the Rhine, the French had expressed the wish to honor before the great gathering of memorial delegations from all of the United States those from the state that, per capita, had bled most grievously in the war.

  When the honoring sips and accolades to the bravery of les soldats du Montana were done, naturally Wesley Williamson was gestured up onto the bunting-draped rotunda by their hosts. Susan had to stifle the little something at the back of her throat again when, a sudden study in concentration, he disposed of his champagne glass to the monocled military aide as if to the nearest waiter.

  Exactly as she remembered, his speech-making voice sounded sandy, unvarnished, and the more appealing for that. He spoke not in thunderous phrases, but as if concerned to find the right words, the path to their ears. He did not pander to this audience with bits of college French or frontlines franglais and while it was not clear how much of his well-carpentered tribute to the fallen of all nations was understood, Susan noted that the French men of government, in their various sashes and decorations, angled their heads in connoisseurial appraisal. Was there anyplace in the world, she wondered ruefully, that didn’t eat out of a Williamson hand?

  The haberdasher followed in the speaking order and stuttered out how honored, deeply honored, they were to be there.

  Her turn. Susan stepped forward and in a voice clear as mint delivered the fiscal report—the amount pledged from bereaved Montanans toward the Great War memorial over here—to somber applause. Then onward to the banquet, and no backward glances until the morrow.

  * * *

  “In the style of Saint-Gaudens, is all I am saying. I have in mind ‘Grief,’ a statue which a family I’ve known—”

  “The Adamses, you must mean, Major? In memory of the sad case of Henry’s wife, Clover, isn’t it?”

  “You have seen it then, Miss Duff?”

  “Of course. It is indulgently weepy to the point of lugubrious.”

  The French members of the advisory committee on the design of the memorial were managing to appear appreciative of spirited debate rather than appalled at the American war hero and the American woman going at one another as though they wore spurs on their tongues. The haberdasher from Missoula doodled circles in the margin of his agenda sheet, looking at neither Wes nor Susan.

  “And you aren’t one for weeping?”

  “Oh come, Major. Tears have their time and place. But we can’t bawl our way through life or we’d end up drowning in them, wouldn’t we. Saint-Gaudens is irredeemably that way. And Clover Adams, I’m sorry to have to point out, took her own life. The tragedy we’re trying to commemorate is of a different order altogether. A grief incalculably more vast, if you will pardon my saying so. The memorial here should speak to the soul and the mind rather than the tear ducts.”

  “You’re a hard critic.”

  “I take it you have never had your career tremble on the words of a music reviewer.”

  To his credit, she had to grant, Wesley Williamson laughed.

  * * *

  On the day that was to culminate in the closing ceremony, Susan would have been nervous if she had let herself. But, dressed in her aqua green best and with enough on under it to compensate for the cobblestone chill of the town square, she sat like a picture of poise through the speeches that began at mid-morning in both languages, or in instances when the French tried to incorporate English or the Americans made forays into French, pulverized fractions of the two. Then through the rainbow swirls of folk-dances. Then through a rather carousel-like version of Sousa marches by the French military band.

  Nerves were one thing, brain cells were another. Yesterday’s tour of the cemetery had set matters off. All during it and up to the present moment, she found herself thinking back to the homestead and the dead pile—the heap outside the lambing shed where the dead ones were thrown. Some of the lambs when they ended up there still were yellow with birth fluids. Pink tongues poking out of others. Stick legs, ribs showing. Eyeless; magpies lost no time. Similarly Samuel was plowed under the lifeless mass of crosses here, torn who knew how by a barrage somewhere in the labyrinth of trenches. The sickening aptness, rising to mind the way an insistent nightmare would, she had not been able to get rid of in the past twenty-four hours. She closed her eyes a moment, against everything that crept back. Breath-work came to her rescue, the cadence she made herself feel in the rise and fall of her trained diaphragm muscles, the calm of air supporting her from inside. She had never fainted in her life, and did not intend to start now.

  To distract herself further she directed her gaze—very much as if she were taking all this in for the sake of writing it down for Samuel—to this homely old town’s black iron lampposts, so ornamented atop that they seemed to be wearing ponderous crowns, and to the ambling patterns of its spotless policemen, making their rounds at the edge of the crowd like, well, like gendarmes sampling from one pâtisserie to the next. Almost before she knew it, she was being beckoned up to the platform by the beaming mayor of St. Mihiel.

  This had not been her own idea at all. After someone had put it in the mayor’s ear that she was a singer—Susan strongly suspected Vandiver, national director of the Over There committee and indiscriminately given to expressions of headlong amity—His Honor had come importuning in person for his most favorite of American songs, could she not possibly oblige? Resigned to doing what she could with the tumpty-tum tiresomeness of “Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word, over there! That the Yanks are coming . . .” as she had at endless Liberty Bond rallies, when she heard the mayor’s actual request she burst out laughing, she couldn’t help it. So much for George M. Cohan.

  Now, presenting the song as precisely as if it were a set of linked pensées, each haunting line in dance with itself to the last downcurl of its comma, she stood onstage and, a capella, delivered:

  “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,

  As I walked out in Laredo one day,
>
  I spied a dear cowboy wrapped up in white linen,

  Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.

  ‘I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy’—”

  She had been up half the night polishing this presentation, but it was paying off. When her voice was in good working order like this, the audience became a kind of pantomime accompaniment, she had never seen it fail: heads nodding, feet patting out rhythm. This crowd, pensive to start with, had begun to sway, American shoulders and French shoulders touching as they wove the air in unison, and verse by ode-like verse Susan gave the song her alto all, to the immemorial last lines:

  “We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,

  And bitterly wept as we bore him along;

  For we all loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome,

  We all loved our comrade although he’d done wrong.”

  The applause thundered off the stone buildings of the town square. She bowed her head the sufficient number of times in acknowledgment and deftly made her exit. Schoolchildren followed on to the platform, shyly waving handkerchief-sized flags. The band pranced into action again.

  At ease and pleased enough with her performance, Susan relaxed into her seat. Spectator now, she could watch as a contingent of military braid thickened in the nearby archway leading in to the square. Some of the American military leaders in the cluster she could match to their newspaper pictures, others not. Her attention was taken by what must have been a staff officer who detached from the group and made his way along her row of dignitaries to the far end where Wesley Williamson sat, obviously sent to fetch him. So Susan witnessed it: Wes rising and following, the surprise impromptu ceremony at the archway obviously keyed to this place where Major Williamson had saved the day, the medal being pinned to the lapel of his highly unmilitary topcoat by an officer whom she realized with a start was Pershing himself. The tidy cookie duster mustache, the tannic personality that could be felt from here, the dour nickname “Black Jack” that was all but stenciled on his tunic: the supreme general chatted in rapid-fire fashion, Wes showing commendable at-attention poise during the medal ceremony but appearing more and more startled to be held in conversation by Pershing.