Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

“Keep Dolph at the ranch, when I go for my lessons? Dolph is the sort, anything that comes into his head runs out his mouth.”

  “Am I hearing right, Monty? Here I thought the two of you were fast friends, all this time.”

  “Something like that, I guess. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a tongue on him like a longbox wagon.”

  “That’s as may be. Whit insists you have somebody along with you over there.”

  “Then how about somebody right there handy?” Monty had in reserve. “School’s let out, I was thinking that what’s-his-name teacher—Mister McCaskill?—maybe he could be around to do it.” This was an original approach, Wes had to admit; he hadn’t expected Monty to already be finicking over the exact composition of his entourage. He would need to ask Susan if artistic temperament was the first thing she taught.

  Head still turned to implore, his erstwhile chauffeur kept on: “Couldn’t we work it out some way, he be the audience or whatever when I’m at my lessons, and I pitch in on his chores?”

  Only at times such as this did Wes long to be back in the military, when he could snap out an order and watch everybody involved fall all over themselves following it without any quibble. “Damn it, Monty, this is Whit’s department,” he confined himself to. And he knew Whit wouldn’t speak to Angus McCaskill if he met him in Hell in charge of the ice concession. Still, if it would smooth Monty’s feathers any, maybe someone else from the ranch crew could go in Dolph’s place. “Oh, all right, I’ll take the matter up with Whit. But I don’t promise anything. Now, does this car still have a motor?”

  Monty wheeled away from the depot, creeping the car over the pot-holed byways that passed for back streets here in Valier. At the intersection where the three-story hotel anchored the young town, he was actually looking forward to the road back to the ranch when he heard the backseat command:

  “The other direction.”

  Mystified, he slowly turned the Duesenberg onto the road out to the eastward prairie. The man just came from this way.

  Taking a pleasure in this that he knew he shouldn’t, Wes let him drive a mile or so, shoulders skewed questioningly, before saying:

  “I should have warned you to bring your baby pictures. We’re going to Fort Assinniboine for the day.”

  “Fort Skin-and-Bone?” Monty blurted. “I thought there’s not much there anymore.”

  “Enough to buy,” Wes replied mildly. It was true that the abandoned fort persisted in burning down, from vandals or lightning fires or spontaneous friction with the prairie it so incongruously reared out of. But there had been so much of it, when it was built as a Presidio of the north to make sure the plains tribes did not rise from defeat, that rambling buildings still stood and the land that had pastured hundreds of cavalry horses still grew grass.

  Monty glanced at him by way of the rearview mirror. “The Double W need its own fort now? You gonna take on Canada?”

  “Very funny.” Wes didn’t smile. “The whole military reservation is being auctioned, the buildings come with. They’ll do for a line camp.” He was a bit miffed at the turn the topic had taken. The need, and Monty and every other bunkhouse prognosticator doubtless perfectly well knew it, was for a ranch to set up for Whit’s son, Wendell, whenever he flailed his way out of Stanford. The Eastern Front, Whit had called the quiltwork of prairie they had their eye on, until Wes’s reaction cured him of it. Wes now gave due regard to the human question box serving as his driver, and in turn wanted to know: “Remember it when, do you?”

  Remembering had already taken Monty over. In his farthest reach of mind the Tenth Cavalry wheeled on the vast parade ground at Fort Assinniboine. The big, big horses, clatter of everything on the men and animals, the band tootling on horseback, too. Here and there a white officer, but all the blue riders, faces on them like his mother’s and his. “See him, Montgomery? See your papa? Can you salute him like a little man?”

  “Only barely,” he finally answered the Major. Those first three or four years of life might as well have happened in Bible times, so far removed were they from growing up under the crisscross of clotheslines at the Double W. Distance was the only reliable arithmetic he knew for Fort Assinniboine. The road unrolling straight ahead of the car, Monty calculated the time to the Marias River and a similar stretch after that to Big Sandy Creek, and then they would begin trending north. “The fort, it’s a ways.”

  “This will give you and the Doozy some exercise,” Wes replied, settling as comfortably as he could and reaching for his attaché case.

  “That’s a thing I never did get a good understanding of.” Monty checked quickly over his shoulder, getting this in before the Major drifted too far into his thicket of paper. “How my folks ended up at the ranch from all the way over there?”

  As neutrally as he could, Wes gazed back at the dark face that was the remaining result of that other. “As far as I know, your father rode in out of the blue. There was a job on the place for someone like him, he was quite something on horseback. And of course, for your mother when he fetched the two of you.”

  “Been different if I could remember much about the man,” Monty chanced slightly farther. “It sort of keeps the curiosity going.”

  “Montgomery, sit down here by me. You know you’re my treasure. More so now.” Her face so twisted, it hurt him, too. “Your papa—Mister Warren tells me he quit the country on us. Him and another. I don’t quite know what they got up to. But the mister, he tells me we better not look for him back.”

  “It would have been different, yes.” Wes, older, all too well remembered Mose Rathbun. The same dark brow on Monty, maybe some of the same slant of shoulders from a life on horseback. If Monty was lucky, all resemblance stopped there. Mose’s ilk, in denatured white form, Wes had met up with again and again in the AEF: lifer sergeants, old stripers, who thought the chevrons on their arms meant they could get away with anything. He’d had to bust some of them so far down in rank they slunk around saluting civilians, but Mose Rathbun had never been his to command, thank the Lord. Soldiers not in the manuals became the pencilings of fate.

  “Major? Something I did?”

  “Why, is there something on your conscience?”

  “Not any more than usual.”

  “Then concentrate on the road for a change, will you.”

  That put a stopper in Monty, and Wes tried to find his way into the maze of papers in his lap. In them lay the route to bring bald-faced cattle to the dun hills of the Fort Assinniboine country, a fresh new Williamson brand seared on their left hips. But this other business, the Rathbuns and their wander into nagging orbit around his own father and now Whit and him, kept slipping in between the lines.

  “Damn it,” he murmured. Then notched up more civilly: “Monty, I take it back.”

  What now? was registered in the pair of eyes that met Wes’s in the car mirror.

  “These papers can wait a bit. How’s that voice of yours?”

  “In operating order, I guess.”

  “Then why don’t we have a sample.” Wes swished his sheaf of papers down onto the seat next to him as if the matter was decided. “What type of thing are you and Miss Susan working up?”

  “You’ve pretty much heard them, one time or another,” Monty hedged.

  “Try me on a fresh one then.”

  “Uhm, lot of songs in the world, Major.”

  “The kind your mother would have sung.”

  For once Monty was glad of all Miss Susan’s bellyaching at him about posture, what with the man making him sing while he had to sit here like a lump. He squared himself up behind the steering wheel, pouter-pigeoned his chest for all available capacity, lifted his chin to a goodly elevation, and here came as safe a song as he could think of:

  “Look there, my son, my sleepyhead one,

  the moon followed you home.

  It’s yours to keep, while you sleep.

  Show it your dream and it won’t roam

  Until the night is done. . . .”


  “Very moving,” Wes stated when the last verse was finished, leaving Monty in doubt as to whether it was high praise or he was merely acknowledging that the song had propelled them a little way along the day’s long road. Back into his documents went the Major, and Monty once more settled into chauffeurdom.

  Both men were accustomed to Montana’s long-legged miles. But this journey on a day that had grown sultry, the car turning into a roaster even with the windows open, seemed to go on and on, methodically, doggedly, hypnotically. Gradually the tawny hills gave way to homestead farms, spotted onto flats of land rimmed by benchland. On the section-line roads across the prairie they met no other travelers, black-locomotived Great Northern trains passing them by distantly to the north the only other moving things in the blaze of afternoon. Wes caught himself drowsing, snapped awake and checked on Monty; he was peering ahead over the steering wheel the same as ever.

  “Hateful weather,” Monty eventually offered above the steady purr of the Duesenberg. Wes entirely agreed.

  Time upon time now, the big car topped a rise and the two men were gazing down at another lustreless expanse. There had been a distressed air to farms all along the way, the houses and outbuildings brown howls of dry wood, the cropland even more stricken. Coat and tie off in vain sacrifice to the heat, Wes put his papers aside to keep them from getting sticky and simply stared out at the fatigued fields. To every horizon, the earth had been plowed and anemic grain was trying to grow, but its stalks would barely tickle a person’s ankles. This turn of weather, he could tell, would furl up even more of the homesteaders, those who were still left. He had been reluctant to see it on his route from the East, but the puddled settlements on the great prairie were drying up, too. Banks were evaporating, entire towns would go next. It was incredible, the reversal of the wave of settlers that had made Montana and the Dakotas the coming places, before the war. Buy, he knew he was going to hear out of Whit the minute he set foot on the ranch, get out there and buy them out. That had been the Williamson way, it had built the Double W ever since their father had come into the Two Medicine country on the fading hoofprints of the buffalo and swamped the prairie with cattle.

  This drought, though, good God, how many summers of this were there going to be? Wes felt himself turning into hot salt soup in the stifling car. “What do you think,” he solicited Monty’s opinion as though the day might be more readable from the front seat, “might this bring rain?”

  “Got me. The air does feel sort of funny.”

  Even though the road ran straight as a rail for a dozen miles ahead, Monty never shifted his eyes from it. Wes, gandering, was the one who puzzled at the smudged sky to the west. The banked horizon of hills was dimming away into the sky’s haze. He knew it had to be cloud, but the formation was strangely edgeless, almost more a tint than anything else. “Does weather always have that much trouble making up its mind out here, I wonder?”

  Monty sneaked a look, then jerked his foot off the accelerator and all but stood on the clutch and brake pedals until the car slewed to a halt. He put his head out the window and studied the mass of murk to be sure.

  “Dust,” he said as if afraid of the word. “We better get ourselves there before it does.”

  The butter-bright car sped on the dimming road for the next five minutes, ten, fifteen, with Monty pursed and restless over the steering wheel while Wes tried to watch both the road and the phenomenon approaching from the west, the earth rising in wrath. A half-light, yellow-green, descended, perceptibly darkening as if a shadow-dye from the dust storm was flowing ahead into it. Wind began buffeting the car, the steering gone woozy in Monty’s clenched hands. Wes registered, to the instant, the full arrival of the dust, the prairie flooding by him in the air, a dirt-sea surging up into the next element.

  Abruptly a cascade of antelope, blazewhite at throat and rump, fled across the road, flickers of Africa in the dust eclipse.

  Monty braked and veered, swearing, and just managed to miss the last leaping animal. “Your headlamps!” Wes ordered in a shout and Monty already had darted a hand to the button on the dashboard. In the headlight beams, dust blew across the surface of the road like a ground blizzard of brown snow.

  Before Monty could see it coming, a rolling washtub met the Duesenberg’s radiator grille and bounced away. They were in past the parade ground before they could discern any of the buildings of Fort Assinniboine.

  Monty managed to steer in close to an abandoned barracks that sat broadside between them and the dust storm, the building’s turret dim over them like a castlement in the fog of some terrible era. The dust fury kept on without letup. The pair of men could hear it stinging wherever it could find wood, scouring off the paint of buildings around them. And they watched astounded as on the pathway between this barracks and the next, not mere dirt but gravel, actual small stones, blew into long thin drifts. Tumbleweeds spun tirelessly across the parade ground, and every so often a stovepipe flew by.

  Held in confinement by the groundstorm, each man went into himself as he sat waiting it out in the increasingly grimy sanctuary of the car. Wes’s mind was doing its best to reinforce itself with sound principles for investment here, the airborne nature of Fort Assinniboine at the moment notwithstanding. But Monty’s thoughts were speculative. Hidden somewhere out there was everyplace a sergeant of colored cavalry had courted a hymn-singing laundress, and the exact room in the married men’s quarters where they had done their business of conceiving and he had squalled his way onto this earth. But for the life of him he could not pull back anything substantial from his first handful of years here. What he best remembered, as if he could reach down at this instant and touch its magical cool skin, was the fire escape at the post hospital. It must have been the latest thing, a chute like a metal tunnel that even a mite of a boy could climb up inside, barefoot, and then slide ecstatically down. He wasn’t to go climbing the ones of the other big buildings, the post headquarters and like that, but the hospital’s was the best one anyway. Up he would go, then the glorious seat-of-the-britches ride down, shooting out the end, and there would be his mother in the white field of wash. But that, and nothing beyond dimness about the parade-ground figure whose seed deposited him into this Jericho of the prairie. That and his mother’s drumbeat of verdict: “I tried so, with that man. And for him to pick up on us with never a word.”

  At last Wes roused and peered out into the lessening hurricane of murk. “I think we better give it a try, now.”

  Monty crept the car through the ghostly fort until Wes leaned over the seat and pointed. An aftergust of the storm caught them before they could make a run for it to the building where other vehicles were haphazardly parked and lights glowed wanly in the first-floor windows. The brown blown grit could be heard doing no favors to the glossy finish on the Duesenberg, and they could feel the dust collecting on them as deep as their teeth, the air about thick enough to chew. Wes tied his handkerchief over his face like a bandanna, and at a motion from him, Monty quickly followed suit. They struggled against the wind to the door of the building. When they clambered in, the small crowd of bankers and ranchers and the bowler-hatted auctioneer looked around in alarm at the masked invaders. Wes yanked his bandanna down, and Monty rapidly followed suit. As they swatted dust off themselves, Wes said to those assembled: “The Fort Assinniboine land, gentlemen—we had better hope it’s not blowing by for good out there.”

  IT’S GOING to be the ruin of a good choreboy.”

  “Whit, he has a rare voice. You’ve said so yourself any number of times.” Still feeling sanded raw by the dust blizzard of the day before, Wes was in no particular mood for debate, but that had never stopped his brother.

  “Calling cows is one thing,” Whit stated. “Putting on a bib and tucker and squalling out ‘Doo Dah’ is another.”

  Wes plumped up a neglected cushion of the chair on the visitor side of the desk—his brother made a point of doing the same on his rare New York visits—and settled in. “For Lord’s s
ake, man, you had him sing for the Archbishop.”

  “That was here. Under our own roof.”

  “Monty deserves this chance to get out on his own. He’s not ours to do with as we please, forever and ever, amen.”

  “Next thing to it. Monty still wouldn’t have a pot to put under his bed if we didn’t keep giving him a job.”

  “Giving him?” Wes grated the words out. “You know better than that.”

  Whit ran a hand across his forehead. “Aaah. There’s the woman, too.”

  “Susan Duff came into this of her own free will. She can take it.”

  “So you’ve already proved once.”

  “I told you at the time she’s no concern of yours,” Wes abruptly was giving this private speech his all. Whit eyed his brother there on the far side of the scarred old desk. Was his case of petticoat fever coming back? No, there had been more to the Duff woman than that. Which must have made it even worse for Wes. There were times, though, when he wondered whether Wes was secretly glad to have been cut out of the governor’s race, even the hell of a way it was done. Not glad, that would be too much to say. But relieved, maybe? Absolved somehow? Whit still couldn’t tell. Wes was too complicated for him.

  “What she gets out of this is her damnedest pupil ever. Are you listening, Whit? I’m seeing to it myself that she’s taken care of, on the money end. I don’t tell you how to run the cattle—”

  “Good thing, too. When it comes to cows, you don’t know which end eats.”

  “—and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t volunteer your every thought about this.”

  “Have it your way. But this haywire notion of Monty’s that Dolph all of a sudden isn’t good enough to tag along with him—does he want tea and crumpets, too? I’m not pulling Dolph off this and putting someone else to it, no way in hell. There’s no sense in creating hard feelings among the crew.” Whit settled deeper into the ancient office chair on his side of the desk. “Could we talk some business about where we’re going to put cows, you think?”

  * * *