Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Monty gingerly stepped into the breakfast room.

  “Let me hear your side of this.” The Major, as if he had a wayward boot recruit in front of him.

  “Things got a little out of hand, is all.”

  “A little? I have to bail you out of jail and haul Doc Walker away from his breakfast to wrap you like a mummy and that doesn’t amount to anything?”

  “Major, I got more than I bargained for.” This was tricky ground, Monty knew, but it had to be negotiated. Saturday night had to belong to a wage hand, not a lot else in life did. “Knocked up, locked up, and doctored up, like they say—I didn’t go looking for any of those.”

  “How are your ribs?”

  “Tenderized.” He winced with the word. They would have to go after his ribs. Those Chicago brakemen had some sort of instinct, when it came to working a person over. Ten years ago, he’d have taken any of them on, the entire Zanzibar if it came to that. But that was ten years of the general wear and tear of living. Deep down he knew he had been lucky last night’s brawl had been only fists. Clore Street wasn’t a gun place so much, but you could easily get cut there. At least he hadn’t run into somebody who would have worked those ribs over with a clasp knife. “Honest, Major, it don’t amount to anything. I can be on the job right this minute, I can drive.”

  “What was it this time? Fantan again?”

  “No, sir,” indignation ringing through. Pause. “Wrong spots on my ponies.” He could still see the fatal dots on the dice that wiped him out of the craps game. “Had them loaded, is what I think, and slipped them in on me despite how I was watching. I called this bruiser on it, and next thing I know, him and another ugly case were giving me what Paddy gave the drum.”

  Wes still eyed him, standing there stubborn as a government mule. From long experience he knew you couldn’t take the spree out of a man, but you could shunt the man out of a spree. He would make sure there was no more Helena for Monty for a good long time. As to the here and now, what harm had been done, other than to Monty’s epidermis?

  “This stays between us, you hear? It’s not to reach the ranch, and particularly not the North Fork.”

  THE North Fork was murmuring a diminished tune now that spring runoff was past, and Susan could hear the first splashes of the pair of saddlehorses finding their footing as they forded the creek these mornings. Readying herself, she kept track of the scuff of hooves coming up from the creek crossing, then heard tones of voice that sent her out into the yard.

  “Makes no difference to me what you do,” Monty was saying crossly to Dolph.

  “Snowball, I still bet you there are fish in there big enough to halter, now that the water is down.” Dolph dismounted and came over to her at just short of a trot. “Ma’am? I’m pretty much caught up on the chores except milking and the woodpile and little stuff like that. Would you mind if I was to go fishing awhile? I’d be right down there at the creek, first hole or two.”

  “I would very much like for you to go fishing, Dolph, especially if you guarantee a batch for my supper.”

  “The fish doesn’t live that can resist me, ma’am.” Whistling, he headed off to dig worms for bait.

  Monty was a case of another sort today, she saw at a glance. His trip into Helena with Wes did not seem to have refreshed him. His eyes were not exactly bloodshot, but they were not the picture of milk-like calm either.

  He hugged his elbows warily, aware that she was looking him over as if she were candling an egg.

  “Ready?” she asked in a tone that was pretty close to an opposite verdict.

  She put him through the same songs as before. As the last note waned prematurely, she did not even have to say the obvious.

  He ventured: “Can’t I stick to songs that don’t take that much breath?”

  “Only if you want a career of singing Mother Goose ditties,” she snapped and stormed across the room. “One thing singing is, is processed air. Breath made wonderful, into a kind of painting that the ear can see. Yours is still daubs.”

  She swung around and stood gazing at him as if he were put together wrong. “Monty, I can’t understand this,” she expressed the obvious, her voice wound tight. He watched her warily. She could crank out indignation like a jay when she got going, but he had never seen her like this. “This runs against human nature,” she let him know in no uncertain terms, “that your breathing isn’t working up the way it should. I saw Jack Johnson in his prime. He had a chest like an ox”—elbows flung back, she dramatically held her hands wide either side of her own not inconsiderable chest—“he could have sung Caruso off the stage in Pagliacci!”

  “I’m no kind of a Jack Johnson!”

  “That’s not the point, you’re not any approximation of a living breathing singer and by now there’s no reason you shouldn’t be!” She flung out a hand as if to indicate him to himself. “You don’t have that many years on you. And you haven’t led as dissipated a life as some, I wouldn’t think.” He looked askance at her, but she seemed to intend that as a compliment. Susan dropped silent for about a breath and a half, then said as if draining the last words out of herself: “I have tried until I’m sick of myself at it, you seem to give it all that’s in you, and we get nowhere on this. I have to tell you, I don’t know why but we’re up against it.”

  Monty shifted around, trying to decide. She would wear him down to a dishrag, with these everlasting exercises, if he didn’t own up to it.

  “There was this bull.”

  * * *

  One moment your feet are under you, dancing zigzag in the arena dirt, the scarred steel barrel all the barrier you’ve ever needed between you and the horns, then you take the least little step wrong and stumble, maybe on a hank of a rider’s grip rope, maybe on a heel-size rock brought up by the frost since last year’s rodeo here, maybe just on the blunt edge of the law of averages. The crowd responds with glee, thinking you are teasing, pretending to go down on a knee in prayer in front of the bull. The noise reverses to a gasp as the bull piles in on you, butting, hooking. Over by the chutes they all yell at the bull and someone dashes out and bats it across the face with a pair of chaps, keeping the animal off you until Dolph can wedge his horse between. Whit Williamson charges down on you, whey-faced. “Snowball! It get you?” You can’t quite catch your breath to answer. Somebody knows enough to keep them from moving you until the doctor waddles from the grandstand with a black bag in his hand.

  * * *

  The hell with it, he tried to maintain to himself after the story spilled out of him. If this’s all she wrote, then that’s how it has to be. Telling her lifted the teeter-totter off him, the ceaseless back-and-forth in himself about whether the goring was a mere excuse or an everlasting pinch his body was in. But at the same time it emptied him, left him voiceless inside as well as out. Dully he looked back at the fierce face throwing questions at him.

  “How deep did the horn go?” Susan demanded for what was probably the third time.

  “Collapsed my lung.”

  “Aha!” Apparently sympathetic as an ice pick, she pressed him: “And when exactly was this?”

  The terror of that time flooded back. White sheets, unnaturally so, and while he was flat on his back like death warmed over, the real thing kept trundling by, its spore maybe in every labored breath he took. Lying out there in the arena dirt after getting gored was nothing compared to weeks in that Helena hospital with corpses being wheeled past almost hourly. Remembering, he gritted all the way to his wisdom teeth before managing to get the words out:

  “Same year as all the flu.”

  For a moment Susan seemed stopped in her tracks. Then she asked in steely fashion: “Why on earth wasn’t I let in on this?”

  “Wasn’t any way to, was there,” he burst out. “What was I supposed to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a one-lunger’? The minute you figure I’m some sort of cripple in the chest, you’d drop me like a bad habit.”

  “That’s not so!”

  Isn’t it?
everything in his stance asked.

  Susan thought furiously. All this time she had been trying to build up diaphragm strength in this man but if the muscles in there were mangled beyond repair—she glanced in despair for her copy of Hargreave’s Illustrated Musical Corpus, snugly on its shelf in the music parlor of the house in Helena, then rounded on the living subject.

  “Take off your shirt, please.”

  Monty looked everywhere around, then straight at her. “I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “There are only the two of us here,” she said.

  “That’s why it wouldn’t be right.”

  Red spots appeared on her cheeks. “Monty, for heaven’s sake. I need to see your ribcage, is all. If you’re going to be bashful about it, it’s merely a matter of pulling your shirttail out and yanking it up to about here,” she pointed a finger to the base of her breast.

  He shook his head, eyes cutting to the nearest window. You never knew.

  “Very well. I’ll fetch Dolph up from the creek to—”

  His “NO!” filled the corners of the room. The last thing in Creation he wanted was to have the whole Double W bunkhouse in on this.

  “Please.” He angled half away from her, but his plea was painfully direct. “If this counts so much, I can come back tonight, on my own. Get Mister Angus here, can’t you? His missus, too, if she’ll come.”

  “Honestly, Monty.” The rosettes were not entirely gone from her face. “If that’s what you want, I can fetch them.”

  * * *

  Angus contemplative, Adair indeterminate, and Susan grim, the three of them gathered on straightback chairs.

  Susan leaned to the lamp and turned up its wick as far as it would go, casting more light to where Monty was standing tense as a stag.

  “I’m still sorry about the need for this,” she said delicately to him, knowing he was on simmer, “but I don’t see any way around it. Now then. Please show us.”

  He stayed still, gazing across the circle of light to the jury of their eyes. Even the cat came out from between ankles and leveled him a green gaze, its pupils like black darts. Monty felt like the biggest fool there was. Why had he bothered to come back over here on his own? It wasn’t as if he was able to trust white people, even these toned-down ones. Yet how could he get anywhere in this lopsided world without them, most especially her, sitting there as if she held all the secrets.

  Hating the moment, all it brought back—Memory is what we forget with, Monty, his mother’s baffling prescription whenever he pestered her too much about then instead of now—slowly he tugged the tail of his shirt out of his pants, unbuttoned, and pulled the cloth up. He looked at it with the rest of them. There on the right side of his ribcage, centered on the dark bronze skin, the puckered scar where the horn went in was the size of a large tire patch.

  Susan arose and came over. As if with her head down into an anatomy text, she traced spread fingers back and forth above the wrecked skin, careful not to touch him.

  “Missed your sausage works,” Angus contributed. “There was a bit of luck.”

  “Mister Angus,” Monty set him straight, “there’s been too many times when if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

  Nodding to herself, Susan still was examining him. “Wait. Those scraped places—those are still healing.”

  “Those were something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “Little difference of opinion.”

  “At the level of your chest?”

  Monty wadded his shirttail in his fist, then let out a weary sigh. “Couple of people jumped me, when I was in town.”

  Susan’s face said she knew which town and which part of town.

  “Poor old body.” Adair’s murmur surprised them all. “It’s all a person can do to rub along in this world, isn’t it.”

  Not sure whether that was specific sympathy or ready-to-wear epitaph, Monty attended to the matter of his bare skin. He looked straight at the one who had put him through this. “Miss Susan? Are you happy now?”

  Susan managed to meet his eyes. “Monty, hear me out. As much damage as we can see there, I can tend to.” He closed his shirt, dubious. “I promise you,” she insisted, “I see now how to build up your breath. A lot was learned from the lung cases in the war, there’s an entire literature on it. But there isn’t one thing easy about it. You’ll need to work at it until you’re blue in the face.”

  He stared at her. Angus and Adair, their heads to one side in owlish fascination, kept mum.

  “Monty, I only meant—”

  He allowed himself the smallest of grins. “That could be quite some while.”

  AIR was at a premium. How had he ever outrun all those bulls but one?

  Breed Butte loomed over him, he was barely halfway up its slope but pretty far toward done in. He gasped, trying to make more breath gust into him than was whooshing out. Both directions, it burned between the back of his nose and the bottom of his chest. The rest of his laboring body simply wanted to call it quits. His feet, in the shoes for this that were the Major’s latest contribution, felt heavy as buckets of water.

  Riding a dozen yards behind him, leading his horse behind hers, she called out: “A bit faster if you can stand it. The day is hotting up in a hurry.”

  Susan was having him run on the shank of midday, after his voice exercises but before the blaze of noon bore down on them. “It’s merely roadwork of the sort Dempsey and Gibbons put themselves through all the time,” she told him at the onset, sheer reasonableness. “And at the end, you don’t have to do battle with either of them.”

  No, only with her. Monty concentrated on the ground in front of him, picking out a stunted jackpine ahead alongside the baked set of wheeltracks and forcing himself to keep in motion that far, then taking aim on the weathered gatepost beyond that and closing his mind to anything but making it to that stout pillar of wood.

  Water was the reward when he jolted into the yard of the old Barclay place at the brow of the butte and could at last pull to a halt. Susan swung down out of her saddle and proffered the canvas waterbag to him. She watched critically as he swished water in his mouth, spat it out, then took a few moderate gulps from the bag. They did not speak much, Monty generally too winded and Susan absorbed in putting him through his pulmonary paces. The Barclay homestead here was the halfway mark on the course she’d picked out, the steep half as he could have told anybody. The next leg was the old sheep trail angling west under the shoulder of the butte, across the dry cracked reservoir, and gradually down the long incline of the valleyside to the road, where she permitted him a cooling-down horseback ride home to the Duff place. In Susan’s mind it was a perfectly logical circuit, uphill at first and then coasting downhill. To Monty it was like running up one side of a Nile pyramid and down the other.

  Barely visible back at their starting point, Dolph was hammering battens over the cracks in the barn walls, and Monty imagined that even at this distance he every so often could see him gawking up here and shaking his head in disgust over these jackrabbit games.

  “Ready?” she asked promptly as a metronome.

  “Not so you could notice, but let’s go,” he said as usual, and set off onto the sheep trail at a lope. His gait improved with every long stride on the more level trail and by the time he was jouncing down the welcome incline toward the creek, you could see hints of the limber rodeo clown.

  Susan would not exactly have said she was happy to be out here running him ragged, but there was undeniable pleasure in being on horseback again. She rode astraddle, in her comfortable old velveteen divided skirt, and sat as natural on a steed as only someone brought up on the back of one from the age of three could. The first day Wes came across the butte in his buckboard to take a bemused look at this new regimen, she galloped down on him as if he were the buffalo and she the huntress. Whirling to a stop, she lit into him. “Why didn’t you tell me I’m dealing with damaged goods?”

&nbs
p; “That’s a bit strong, isn’t it? Maybe Monty is somewhat beaten up around the edges, but—”

  “His goring? That’s more than edges.”

  “His what? When?”

  “He told me it was during the—it was in 1918.”

  “Susan, I was overseas, wasn’t I. All I ever heard from Whit about ranch doings in those scraps of letters from him were the sky-high prices of hay. I knew Monty had been laid up somehow from rodeoing. But he never told me he had caught a horn, I swear to you.”

  She had looked at him as if she could not believe it. But neither could she doubt it. His brother’s habit of paying no more attention to other members of the human race than if they were the Williamson family furniture seemed to irk Wes, she was glad to see. Meanwhile Monty, standing at a distance, panting, had his mind solely on the swimming bath he would take in the creek when this sweaty jaunt was over, the water as warm as fresh milk.

  Weeks went this way, then a month, but time of this sort cannot be so easily summed. For there came a particular day when Monty did not plow to a stop and seize the reins of his horse from Susan when he reached the road but instead loped on for another quarter of a mile, the ease of it leading him on and on in astonishment at himself, until he finally spun around to her with the realization he had run years off himself.

  I MUST take care to put this down with every exactness, she wrote of their turning point. Angus would have the poetry appropriate to it, Adair its cockeyed essence, Wes would chalk it up to the wily ways of God and the reward of duty. I have only my pair of astonished witnesses, my ears.

  It already had been a day to mark on the wall. Monty’s vocal exercises had gone well—this in itself is like saying the earth took a turn around the moon—and his performance of the practice repertoire grows stronger as he does; it is the sort of leaping progress that a teacher always hungers for. He just then had ripped through “Moses” without evident effort (at last!) and I was about to call it good for the day when he announced: “I have me something of my own I want to sing.”