Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Word always raced around the ranch when the Major, natural inspector-general of corral-sitters and dawdlers, set foot out of the big house, but for once it failed to reach Monty and Dolph before he did. Splattered just short of polka dots, they halted amid their task of whitewashing the harness room and looked around at him.

  “Caught you at it,” Wes said sternly enough to maintain his reputation. “Working. Are you trying to ruin the reputation of the whole crew?”

  The two told him that choreboys always had more to do than they knew what to do with, which for both of them had an element of truth in it, and stood waiting to see what he wanted, brushes dripping.

  Conveyance to the North Fork, he informed them.

  Where’s this come from? Monty’s thoughts lined up in alarm. Why don’t he just go over there with us tomorrow when we do? Very slowly he wiped his hands. “Take me a little while to get cleaned up enough to bring the car around.”

  Wes waved that off. “Let’s keep life simple. Hitch up the grays for me, I’ll go cross-country.” Everybody on the Double W knew singular from plural, particularly when uttered by a Williamson, and Monty and Dolph apprehensively slid away into the main barn to fetch the horses.

  They watched the Major drive the buckboard up to the big house, hating to admit to themselves that he handled the reins as spiffily as either of them could. Minutes later, team and well-kept wagon went back past them at rattling velocity and kept on at a smart pace until starting up the incline of the benchland.

  “So what do you suppose?” Dolph was intrigued. “He’s heading over there to git your report card from her?”

  “Or maybe yours,” said Monty.

  Once atop the broad bench of land, Wes spanked the reins across the rumps of the horses, setting them into a prancy trot again, and anxiously studied the sky to the west for indication of how the weather was going to behave. Indeterminate, as usual in the Two Medicine country. He put the weather question aside as best he could and concentrated on handling fine horses again, the leather feel of the reins tethering him to the moment. A kind of pleasure he had almost forgotten took him over, the team of grays fresh and wanting exercise and snappy at the ends of the reins, the bolster beneath his knee with almost the feel of a saddle, although he knew that was stretching imagination some. The commanding officer who came up out of the cavalry had singled him out even in France, that incredible time, to remark on how lucky Wes was to have grown up in such glorious horse country for a soldier. Wes ruminated on that now, the assumption that where you were born fitted you to the country. As sure as anything, before his wound he would have cantered across this benchland on a saddlehorse as if under a satin guidon. But he didn’t mind at all having been dealt out of Indian fighting by chance of birthdate. San Juan Hill and the St. Mihiel salient had been enough wars to hold him. Those and Montana politics.

  So, he concluded contentedly, take the saddlehorse part out of the equation and it still was glorious country on a day such as this. Up here on the level divide between the creek valleys the scope of earth opened, the Rockies suddenly enlarging with the skyline expanse of cliff and reef and cuts of crag chipped like the faces of arrowheads, and the sun-browned prairie boundless in the other direction. As ever to Wes’s eye and mind, the sweep of it all curved away through the profound distances of the Two Medicine country to where geography turned into history. This reach of earth drew its name from the canyoned river thirty miles to the north where the Blackfeet tribe in legendary times twice built their medicine lodge for sacred ceremonies; but in more ways than that, Wes knew to the innermost timber of his being, this had been a land of two medicines, two sets of the most potent beliefs a people could hold. The struggle for the prairie could be said to have begun here, when Meriwether Lewis and his exploring party bloodied the Blackfeet in a parley that turned into shooting, in 1806, on the banks of the Two Medicine River. Evidently inheritors by nature, one of the creeds of the Williamsons which they did not even need to discuss out loud was that if they had not put together a cattle empire on swaths of land here for the taking after the eventual diminishing of the Indians and the buffalo, someone else would have. It played through Wes’s mind now that he was on his way to take his medicine from Susan, who had once told him that when it came to owning chunks of the Two Medicine country, he and his father and Whit behaved like Saint Bernards in a windowbox.

  Long thoughts ended abruptly as he reached the edge of the benchland and had to wagoneer the still-spirited team down the slope and across rough meadow to the ford of the North Fork. He eased the team and wagon into the clear creek. Pulling into the yard with the wheels still shedding water, he whoaed the horses vigorously enough to announce himself, but no one appeared. Women’s voices in duet carried from the house. Wes had to smile. Susan would not interrupt a song no matter what. He stayed in the buckboard, listening, the ears of the matched horses up sharp in curiosity.

  When the singing concluded, the door of the house opened with alacrity. “If it isn’t Major Williamson,” Susan announced for the benefit of the interested. He saw her shoot a look past him for Monty and Dolph.

  A smaller figure joined Susan at the doorway. Wes climbed down from the wagon and made himself sociable:

  “Mrs. McCaskill, isn’t it? Don’t break up your songfest on my account. You sounded like a set of larks.”

  “No, it’s time I wasn’t here.” Adair too seemed to search the air around him, more than addressing him with her eyes.

  “Please, don’t let me run you off.”

  Adair looked squarely at him now, as did Susan beside her. Uncomfortably Wes amended: “I didn’t know I would be interrupting anything, I only came over to make sure everything is squared away. With the music enterprise and all.”

  “I dasn’t take too much advantage of Susan,” Adair said, leaving the impression there might not be enough to go around. She plucked out a pocket purse and paid some coins into Susan’s hand. “If I don’t go home and get at things, we’ll have to eat sin for supper. And probably borrow the salt and bread from you for that, even.”

  Susan gave a hoot at the old saying. “Careful, or you’ll set off that sin-eater you’re married to. He’ll be rhyming sin and thin at you until the words wear out.”

  “Wouldn’t he, though.”

  Wes let all this pass as if he had wandered into a conversation between Frenchwomen. Adair mounted her horse in climbing fashion as Wes held it by the bridle, then her small solo form went from sight around the bend of the chattering creek.

  He assembled himself again for what he had come for. “Here I am, as summoned.”

  “ ‘Summoned,’ that will be the day. Won’t New York fall down, without you there to support it? We thought you had forgotten your way back to Montana.” The tingle of the song still seemed to be all over Susan. She spun to go back in the house, but he made no move to follow. “Wes? You could step in. Homesteads don’t bite.”

  “Actually, I was hoping we could make an outing of it—I haven’t been up under the Reefs in ages.” He stayed rooted in the yard, appearing abashed. “More fool, me. I’d forgotten that even up here there would be the matter of the neighbors.”

  For her part, Susan looked highly amused. “Neighbor, singular. You haven’t that much to worry about, here. Adair McCaskill holds to herself, in every way I can think of.”

  “Well, then.” Wes drew himself up. “If this won’t set tongues off, near and far—I brought fried spring chicken and hard-boiled eggs and fresh biscuits and chokecherry jam and a jar of Mrs. Gustafson’s dreaded pickles and a bottle of Chenin Blanc.”

  “A picnic! Who would have thought the soldier man had jam in him.”

  “Susan, damn it—if you don’t want to go, just say so.”

  “Don’t be so touchy, of course I want to go. What’s left for me to provide? Ah. A representation of strawberries. There’s a patch of wild ones along the creek bank. Let me change, and pick those, and I’m at your service, Major.”

&n
bsp; * * *

  Their route took them west on the uneven scrape of road, hedged with tall bromegrass. After the climb out of the creek valley they were up onto the shoulder of Breed Butte, the buildings of the abandoned Scotch Heaven homesteads here and there below them like wagons in a looping circle, left to fall apart. Wes clucked encouragement to the horses when he wasn’t regaling Susan with everything he had stored up for this. She listened eagerly to his account of what was on in New York, even to his dodgy report of subscription evenings—“conscription is more like it”—at Carnegie Hall with Merrinell’s circle, and all the good dirt about politics in Coolidge climes. When this ran out they found enthusiastic things to say about the day’s weather, the sun holding the Two Medicine wind at bay for once. To look at, the two of them might still have been lovers unencumbered by discovery.

  But Susan was careful not to promote touching against each other in the sway of the buckboard over the thin-tracked road, and they both looked relieved when the wagon reached timberline. They agreed on an open grassy circlet that gave an opening of view there near the top of a foothills ridge, where the rimrock of Roman Reef capped the entire sky west of them. Finding a spot with a welcoming smattering of wildflowers, they spread a serviceable tarp. Cork came out of bottle, mutual faces were made in scorn of Prohibition, and they sipped at the wine and the day.

  “You were right,” Susan gave him his due. “It’s best to be up here, before the summer gets everything again.”

  Wes smiled absently. “Even a tossed coin comes down right half the time.”

  Turning his head, he searched along the base of the towering reef to a particular swatch of timber with an open park many times the size of the grass pocket they were in. “That’s where my father took Roosevelt after elk, that time,” he said as if refreshing his knowledge from a guidebook. He and Whit along as youngsters who would be heirs to such behavior someday, watching in awe and envy as the men sat around the campfire drinking whiskey chilled with fistfuls of snow. Theodore Roosevelt full of bounce as he emerged from his tent the next morning and woke the entire camp with his yelp to their father, “Perfectly bully country, Warrie!”

  Wes grew aware Susan was watching him with her studying expression. “What?”

  She merely shook her head and put her eyes to the same use again behind a sip of wine.

  Caught by the day and the chance to see it all from up here, he scanned out eastward over the dun grasslands and fields. To him it resembled a sand map, in the vastest headquarters, but instead of the croupier sticks of staff colonels and toy troop movements, the contest for land was deployed on that miniature of earth. He could have recited it to the nearest dollar to Susan, if she wouldn’t have batted him off the ridge. There below them the west pasture of the Double W broke off, like a salient that had been blunted by the boundary of the Two Medicine National Forest. Wes could even pick out the wood gate, called so because the Double W used it as access to timber for firewood and corral poles and buckrake teeth. Over the shoulder of Breed Butte from there lay the North Fork of English Creek, the old Duff and Erskine and other homestead pastures where Angus McCaskill’s band of freshly sheared sheep were as visible as peeled eggs. Beyond the last barb of McCaskill’s wire fence the rangeland was the Double W’s, all the way to the irrigated farms around the fledgling town of Valier and the blue eye of lake there which seemed to be returning Wes’s appraisal. Once more he was helpless against too much memory. In the boom before the war he’d had to talk like a good fellow to convince Whit to yield that Valier land to the Minneapolis grain concern and their irrigation engineers—Cattle are no good to us unless there are stomachs around for them to find their way to. He had been ahead of things then, guessing with terrible rightness that the dry-land farming that was bringing needed people to Montana would someday go drier yet. Irrigation, roads, towns that amounted to more than wooden tents, progress paid for by taxing the extractors; he had seen the shape of what could be. On what proved to be the sand of a political career.

  Susan brought him back to himself. “Wes. On most picnics, there’s food.”

  “Let’s dig in, then.”

  The wicker picnic basket disgorged. They passed its ingredients back and forth, forgoing conversation for flavor, until Wes no longer could stand not to ask.

  “All right, I give. What’s a sin-eater?”

  “If you were lucky enough to be a Lowlander instead of one of those ridge-runners in plaid skirts,” Susan responded with mock severity, “you wouldn’t have to ask such a silly question.”

  The ins and outs of the Scotland-born were beyond him; Williamsons had been this side of the ocean since hiking their kilts after the Battle of Culloden. “Deprived as I am, you could take pity on me.”

  “I’m to instruct you in sin-eating, am I. Very well then, it’s, mm, a kind of wake. To relieve the dead of earthly sins, I suppose you’d say. I wasn’t all that old when Gram Erskine passed away and I saw it done, right there.” She inclined her head toward the Erskine homestead, next up the North Fork from the Duff place. Wes felt the stir of his father’s voice in him: “That Erskine is another one—in cahoots with Ninian Duff.”

  Susan was saying, “Scotch Heaven’s first death, she must have been. So, they were all still full of the old country,” pronouncing it auld countrrry, “and nothing doing but they had to have a sin-eater. They take and put a piece of bread and a salver of salt—oh, it’s easier to show you. Assume for the moment I’m not among the living.” She took one of the biscuits and the salt shaker in either hand, lay back on the tarp, and carefully positioned them atop her chest, where her clavicles met her breastbone. With eyes shut and held breath, she made a perfectly still body there on the shroudlike canvas. Wes watched, fixed as if hypnotized, as one hand ever so slowly came up out of the grass holding a single shooting star and joined the other hand in folded repose beneath her breasts, the tiny flower in mischievous droop there.

  “You’re spoofing and you know it,” he burst out. “That damned posie—”

  “You caught on, but a wee wilted bouquet is a nice dramatic touch, isn’t it,” she sat up and tossed the tiny flower at him as biscuit and salt cascaded off her to the tarp. “The rest of it, though, I swear to you is done just that way. I remember being surprised my father wasn’t the one to do it for Gram,” she glanced again to where the Erskine place was in slow descent into kindling. “Anything civic and grim usually fell to him. But maybe he was too much artillery for the occasion. ‘Ay, Gram, as ye were better than ye were bonny, it is beyond our imagining that ye could have been up to anything, in your younger time over across the water. But on the odd chance that ye strayed from the beaten path into yon bushes of sin, we’ll relieve ye of that indiscretion now.’ ”

  Her uncanny mimicry of her father sent Wes’s blood a bit chill. Susan sobered out of her role, but her lips twitched at the complicated remembrance. “The Erkines asked Angus McCaskill to be the sin-eater instead. He always had the knack, at any of that old ritual. There he stood, right by the corpse, I can see him yet. Eating of the bread and salt, to lift the sins off the poor old deceased.”

  Wes seemed to be in one of his deeper mullings. After a long moment he said: “A penitent for all concerned, it sounds like.”

  “If you have to be Latinate about it.”

  Stung, he scowled across the carpet-width of tarp at her.

  Tell her, it all screamed in him. See how she likes knowing. Let her try all the bread and salt in the world, then judge the lot of us.

  “Leave it to me to take the shine off a picnic,” Susan apologized, torn by the abrupt twist in his expression. Someone who had been patted by presidents and supreme generals, and she was having him on as if she were a devilish schoolgirl. She never would see why he let a stuffy church stand in the way of all else available in a life such as his, but—“Wes, really, I’m sorry I got so wound up.”

  Wes sat up. “Water under old bridges, some in Rome and some not.” His face found its mas
k of command. “Wasn’t I promised strawberries?”

  They ate the thimbles of flavor, then Wes, seeing the afternoon go, brought out the name of Monty and it was Susan’s turn at serious.

  “That’s what I need to talk to you about. I have to know, how long are you willing to put into this? He has quite a way to go.”

  “How do you mean?” Wes propped on his side facing her directly, the better to take issue. “Training in anything worth doing takes some while, why should singing be different? I thought you told me once there were songs it had taken you all your life to learn.”

  “Monty picks up most things, he’ll outwork the clock,” Susan granted. “With any other pupil, I’d be thrilled silly by now at what comes out of him at times.” She stopped to gather the exact words. “But there’s something holding him back, he cannot seem to get his wind built up. I’ve tried everything on him but a tire pump. His breath capacity simply isn’t there. Without it, he’ll never be more than a kind of human hurdy-gurdy.”

  Wes had to laugh. “All the lungpower he puts into conversations when he’s ostensibly driving me, I’d have thought Monty has as much breath in him as anybody.”

  “He needs half again as much as mortals with tin ears,” she took a bit of the point off with a smile.

  The expression on Wes she could no longer read. He retrieved the crumpled shooting star from the surface of the tarp, sniffed it as a bullfighter might a rose, and tossed it back to her. “As long as it takes, Susan.”

  She hoped they were talking about the same thing. “Very well, then. We’ll battle on, Monty and I.”

  “That’s what I bargained for. Oh, speaking of, I need to borrow our prize student back around the end of this week. Helena business, a couple of days should be enough.”

  “Make him practice his breathing while he’s in your tender care.”

  “What am I, the assistant choirmaster now? Here we go, there’s a drop of wine apiece left. Mustn’t let it go to waste.” He sat up to perform the pouring. They toasted out of habit, then Wes put his glass out of harm’s way and turned half toward her. “I did recognize that song when I pulled in, I’ll have you know. Not bad, for me.”