Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  He went to take his mood out on the first posthole. Feet splayed substantially wide of the target—“Ay, Angus,” Ninian Duff had pointed out to him all those years ago when he was a greenling at this, “you don’t want to have to count your toes after a day of fencing”—he hefted the crowbar and in a double-handed thrust jabbed the point of it downward with full force and conviction. A chip of earth about half the size of his palm flaked away. He took a half-comical gander at the crowbar to make sure he was using the chisel end rather than its blunt top. This invincibly dry summer had left the ground harder than ever. And while he never would have said he might be getting a trifle old for this sort of thing, the crowbar had definitely put on weight over the winter. Excuses never counted for much in this life, though, as far as he had found; and hard labor generally led him to hard thinking. So, knowing he would have to go some to finish with this by dark, he hoisted the digging implement again with a grunt.

  From posthole to posthole as he broke ground, shoveled, set fresh-peeled posts and tamped them in, Angus bothered the question. It had only been twenty-four hours now since he had contrived to bring telling shape to the story, but it felt like the majority of a lifetime. He went back over and over it like an apprentice minstrel, still disturbed, still shy of what he knew he ought to do. Maybe better not to have ever known for sure; but Monty Rathbun was not the only one with curiosity for a habit. Besides, after enough time suspicion gets to be even worse company than Double W cows.

  Ceasing crowbar rhythm for a moment, Angus ran a finger around the inside leather of his hat, wiping the sweat out. It had taken the wearing of his other hat, his snappy dove-gray town Stetson to the county superintendent’s yearly summoning of all the teachers at Valier yesterday, to funnel all this into his head. Just as soon as he could decently take leave of the teacherly gathering, he had beelined across town to the irrigation project headquarters. In luck, he found the ditch rider, Toussaint Rennie, just unsaddling from his rounds of inspecting canals.

  “Angus. You have on your clothes for marrying or burying.”

  “It’s one of those rare times I need to be presentable, is all. Have time for a gab, do you, Toussaint?”

  Part Cree, part Canadian French, part seed of the loins of the Lewis and Clark expedition, part in-law to the Blackfeet by his contentious marriage to one, part roving ditch rider and more than a little coyote when it came to sniffing out what people had been up to, Toussaint as a one-man League of Nations possessed a memory as deep as anyone’s in the Two Medicine country, and Angus had shopped there countless times before for delight and intrigue. This time, one of those would have to do, and it was not delight.

  He could have taken and shaken himself for not seeing it before. But who knew how three-sided a picture this was? He’d had to alibi to Toussaint like a good fellow as to his interest in matters practically back to Genesis, in terms of the earliest days of landtaking here. But there it at last was, clicking into place like the orbiting shards of a kaleidoscope. All it took had been to fit Toussaint’s canny gossip about a long-ago shenanigan or two up there in Cree and Blackfeet territory onto that oldest rumor, distant but so echoing now, within his own compass of memory at this end of the Two Medicine country. Stopping again to blow, Angus rested his hands atop the crowbar and his chin on his hands. Still thinking full-tilt, he stared up the slope of Breed Butte to the falling-down homestead there and the now doorless house where he and Rob Barclay batched together when they first came. No more than six months old, that lingering indistinct whisper must have been, when the two of them rode in here in search of the land America promised. Straight from Scotland, Rob and he were the youngest young men there ever were, but between them they possessed brain enough to recognize something that probably was not wise nor healthy to pursue. Which did not lessen Angus’s discomfort now that the old haunt of an incident was in apparent pursuit of him.

  Hawk weather, like now, that first Scotch Heaven season of theirs had been, and Angus for another half-minute watched as an evening lift of breeze carried a windhover above him, around and around. The reddish tailfeathers of the sleek bird caught some last sun in the upward twirl of its flight. Under such seasonal spirals all of Scotch Heaven had lived, when it lived. He had to wonder: did Wesley Williamson, coveting this valley in the glandular way that ran in his family, ever even bother to enumerate its inhabitants in memory, or were they just ciphers of acreage to him? Sharp-pointed Ninian Duff and genial Donald Erskine and Rob and himself counted as specific burrs, no doubt, for they had bothersomely tenanted the North Fork before the Double W managed to get its head turned in this direction. But the Frew cousins, George and Allan, hard to reason with as anvils and as sturdy. The feckless Speddersons, short-lived here but loyally selling off to their neighbors instead of the bank in town or the land hoggery on Noon Creek. The populous Findlaters; old sad bachelor Tom Mortenson. The wives, most of them formidable, who went the limits of their lives on these homesteads, and the cavalcade of children on horseback who descended on the schoolhouse down there at the forks of English Creek and madly recited their way through the schoolyears under the tutelage of Angus McCaskill. Scotch Heaven empty country? No country that has ever had human eyes pass over it is empty of memory. What about it, Major—when you orchestrate this way, how many of us are words to your tune? Maybe the man himself no longer knew. Not even a contortionist, Angus thought tiredly, could see all sides of himself at once.

  Never mind that. Just make up his own mind whether or not to speak up. He could not believe that the cat’s cradle of Susan, Monty, and the manipulating Major would hold together if he were to sidle up to the right one and murmur, “I hate more than anything to say this. But for the welfare of all concerned, you ought to know . . .” Could even do it by note delivered by the silky hand of Wesley Williamson his very self, a notion that brought Angus a fleeting grin. But he sobered back to the question: spell out or leave lay. It was one thing to let bygones be gone, allow the long silence over this to keep its seal; but hellishly another to hold your tongue when some inflamed dunce hiding under a hood but able to peep through a rifle sight could yet get Susan and Monty in reach.

  Despite the nearness of dusk, the sweat still rolled from him. He slammed the crowbar into the making of the next posthole. A piece of Adair’s dried-fruit pie and a sip of coffee would be uncommonly welcome before bed. He hadn’t said anything so far, needing to think, but tonight would need to be a war council with her. Adair couldn’t read the weather, she had not much more notion of the ins and outs of the Two Medicine country than when she was deposited into it thirty-five years ago, but she knew more than he wanted to admit about the wear of living with silences.

  Angus glanced west. Nearly to the corner-post now, one post in between to go. He clucked the horses to attention, and they dutifully paced forward with the workwagon until he called “Whoa.” He felt more tired than he should, but it was worth a bit more strain if he could put this fenceline away for another year and rewardfully head home to—

  The spasm hit him dead-center in his chest, and he knew. Clutching himself there, he tried for all he was worth to catch his breath. His arms felt afire. All the wonder he had ever had about this tipping point of life coming out of him in gasps, he lurched his way to a cutbank. The dog came and nosed at him urgently. Angus hunched there, holding hard to himself, but slipping and slipping in his wrestle with the last pain ever.

  MONTY was the first to hear the Duesenberg pull in, the next evening.

  Looking not at all like a man who again tonight was cleaning out the Gustafsons and Susan at poker in the parlor, he had just ruefully flicked in his next ante from his heap of winnings. Kitchen matches. Where was this run of luck back on those silver-dollar paydays when he could have really put it to use? On the other hand, the Zanzibar Club’s poker habitues generally had not placed as much faith in a pair of treys as the Gustafsons tended to, or for that matter shown Susan’s abiding sense of conviction that she could fill an ins
ide straight on a two-card draw. At the moment, she was vowing what she would do to him if she ever got him in a game of rummy.

  He and Gustafson peered at each other in confusion at the sound of the big car. After driving the Major to the Double W the day before, Gus had hitched right back with the camptending truck. Major’s orders; one more sign to Monty that there was still nothing but delay ahead on the Klan front.

  All four of them around the table heard the click of a rifle being cocked by whatever bruiser was on duty on the verandah. Then Bailey’s call into the dark: “Major? Is he one of yours?”

  “It’s all right. He drove me, is all.”

  Bailey and a couple of hastily summoned operatives came in first like sweepers before a processional. Looking compelled, Wes stepped in, Dolph immediately behind him as if in tow.

  “Monty, kiddo. And ma’am.” These salutations hung there, until Dolph managed a further blurt. “How you faring?” Eyeing around, he seemed to be in awe of the contingent it took to tend Monty and Susan here, when he had managed it single-handed on the North Fork.

  For all Monty knew, Dolph’s only transgression was his bad case of mouth when they’d had to ride across there together. When his yap wasn’t open, he’d do. “Just ducky, Dolphus,” Monty gave him back generously enough, “how about yourself?” Susan only sent him a distracted nod, focusing on Wes and whatever had put him on the road this late in the day.

  Wes’s eyes stayed steady on hers.

  “You’d want to know—Angus McCaskill passed away. I’m sorry, honestly.”

  Frozen there in her chair, she looked the question to him.

  “He was fixing fence,” Wes told her as much as there was, “his heart gave out.”

  Monty sat there helplessly next to her, hands doubled to fists under the table so they couldn’t touch to hers in sympathy in front of all these. After a moment Susan broke through the awkward pall they had all retreated into:

  “The funeral is when?”

  “She’s not going.”

  “Hold off a minute, Bailey. He’s right, though, Susan, it’s not the best idea.”

  “Don’t even try,” she halted that from Wes. “I’ll make my goodbye to Angus if I have to crawl to get there.”

  It took none of the accumulated detective powers in the room to know that she would do just that. Wes seemed to be shuffling mental papers and not finding the precise one he was looking for. Bailey appeared ulcerous. He began, “We’re still not—”

  On the instant, Monty decided. “Miss Susan, I hate to butt in, but if you’re going to be away—suppose we could work in that night runthrough you promised, first? Tonight, yet? The evening’s still a pup.”

  The faces in the room were a silent ring around him after that came out. Even to himself his words had sounded as cold as if chipped out with an ice pick. But right now he figured that was what it took. Susan looked as if she wanted to hit him, but while he watched, silently willing her, her expression came around to consideration. “Maybe we had better,” she said in a tone no warmer than his had been. “It would get that out of the way, wouldn’t it. We’ll need the auditorium lit.” She tore her eyes from Monty to seek out Gustafson.

  After a moment Wes stormily seconded her look. “I get the coal oil lamps going,” Gustafson vouched and left the room.

  “Excuse me, all,” Monty said hastily and went out behind him.

  Wes’s brow still held thunder. Susan’s words came before he could say anything. “Leave us to this. Monty is at a point where this means quite something to him.”

  “It must.” Mustering himself, Wes looked around to where the fresh arrival to their midst was standing there looking fidgety. “Dolph, I know you’re new at this. Just hold on here, while Bailey finds you a bunk.”

  * * *

  Wes waited up for her. The fort had quieted. The moon was at its most tentative—the crescent of its new phase, thin as thin can be, mingling with the almost-circle of the darkened waning one like an escape of light from a shuttered portal—and delineating only the outlines of buildings, their details staying hidden. With only the general night for company this way, he thought back over everything.

  “You went on late,” he called out when he at long last heard the screendoor slap closed behind her.

  “Sorry. What we’re at takes time, too.” Susan sounded done in. She came through the scarcely lit hallway out to where he was, surprised him with a touch on the shoulder, and navigated from that to the wicker chair next to his.

  “I hope he was in good voice, at least?”

  “He’s always that, it’s the rest of him that takes the work.”

  They were on the big screened-in rear porch of the commandant’s house. A brick wall enclosed an oddly prim garden area back there which the Fort Assinniboine seasons probably had always rendered more theoretical than botanical, but it did provide a place to talk in private. This night itself seemed a kind of seclusion. The soft dark gentled everything except the sound of the graveyard shift of sentries as they called out now to the coffee caddy making his middle-of-the-night round with a hot pot in a bucket of coals. Wes listened, checking the arithmetic, until the shouts matched the number of towers. “Quite a collection of people Monty has in his entourage now,” he mused. “Even me.”

  “You brought it on yourself, remember.”

  “You know what road they say is paved with good intentions.” He could sense her attention rouse at that. To head off what she might ask, he hurried out his own loop of question: “Monty out of sorts, that way—how close are you to done with him?”

  Susan seemed to consider this from numerous sides, until finally replying: “He’s nearly there. I’d say another week of practice and he’ll have everything down pat.”

  “Do you think that could be made two weeks?”

  “What then? Does Bailey count on the Klan flying south with the swallows?”

  “Susan, he—we’re doing our damnedest.” He rubbed a hand along the wicker corrugations of the chair arm, whetting what he wanted to say next. “I know you’re bothered by a lot tonight. I wish it didn’t have to be so.”

  “It’s ghastly to me, Angus gone,” she said, dry grief in her voice. “From girl on, I looked to him. For everything from the ways of words to justice in our fights at recess. But do you know what’s odd? I spent all those years in his classroom, I can tell you the exact part in his hair and every mood of his mustache, yet when I think of him it’s at the schoolhouse dances. He and Adair could shine together at that, at least, and at every dance the time would come when people would make him step out on his own.” A remembering laugh unsteady in its sound, which increased Wes’s ache for her. “He wasn’t the inflated breed of Scot,” she tried to lighten this with a mock chiding, “like you Highlanders. But somewhere he picked up the Highland Fling.” Wes could just see her profile as she looked up into the night, gave a hum to find her note, then softly sang:

  “I saw the new moon, late yester e’en

  with the old moon in her arm—”

  She ended the chorus with a croon that swept upward like the flung hand of he who danced to it: “Hiiiyuhhh!” The drums and pipes of Edinburgh came to Wes’s ears, the similar cry of the Black Watch drillmaster drifting up to that balcony that had held the two of them. The medley of it all, the coarse beat of time mixed with the magical lilt of Susan’s voice then and now, overpowered him. “I didn’t mean to carry on like this,” Susan’s strained speaking voice broke that memory. “I realize you and Angus had your differences.”

  “We were born to them, let’s just say, Susan.”

  “This is a night I’m not made for,” she concluded as if regarding herself from a distance. Across it, across the years stretching back to those other nights, her hand found his. “Keep me company? As before?”

  For a moment he thought he had imagined those words. But this was Susan, imagination could not begin to keep up with her. They rose, not exactly steadying each other but needing to feel th
eir way together, and went to the bedchamber where, in the courses of other lives, commandant and lady had lain together under a mingled moon.

  * * *

  Does what we were at give off some spoor he picks up? Or has he had enough experience of bedsprings that it amounts to an instinct?

  Breakfast was in every conceivable stage, knives and forks still in action among those of them left at the table when the morning shift of tower guards scraped their plates into the scrap bucket and tromped out, while over at the stove Mrs. Gustafson was forcefully dolloping hotcake batter onto the griddle in anticipation of the graveyard shift coming in hungry.

  Susan met Bailey’s eyes again across the table, over their coffee cups. She was as sure as in any performance she had ever given that she showed no outward sign of last night, and Wes was managing what she thought was a perfectly passable impersonation of himself as the fated officer who had drawn the duty of the morning. But Bailey knew. All the way since the infamous Missoula hotel room? she wondered. Did he read forward into people’s lives, that clear-as-glass gaze of his more certain than any crystal ball, that they would again and again be caught at what they had done before? We’ll see.

  Bailey settled his cup to the table and turned back to Wes. “With the funeral on Friday, that doesn’t give us enough time to get our ducks in a row, Major. The number-one thing I don’t like about this is it splits our force. We can maybe—maybe—keep her safe if we put half our men around her there at the graveyard. That leaves us thin here. What would help like everything would be for Rathbun to lay low, keep in his room in case of any snoopers. No prancing around the parade ground on a pony, just for instance.”

  At this, Dolph looked up from spearing a bite of hotcake into the yolk of his fried egg, wagging his head chidingly in the direction of Monty’s place at the table. Susan again wondered about the inner workings of someone like him, human equivalent of a shirttail on Wes or Whit, whichever one on any given day tucked him toward a back pocket of ranch life as needed: milk this, saddle up that, which this time happened to be a Duesenberg. Perhaps the little man simply saw all this as something he could tell endlessly in the bunkhouse. Certainly he had been sopping in everything that was said since he alit here, far and away more attentive than he had ever been to chores for her. She tried to set aside her irk at his witnessing this; there was enough else strumming away on her nerves.