Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Now Wes glanced at the empty plate waiting for Monty. “I know he’s entitled to sleep in after singing half the night, but he ought to be in on this.” Bailey left the table, stepped out and said something to one of the guards coming off shift, and was already laying out the plan by the time he sat back down. “McCaskill would have belonged to the Woolgrowers’ Association, I figure we can put three of the boys in the crowd as a delegation from the Helena office of that. Myself and one of the others, anybody asks, we can say we’re stockbuyers he dealt with—”

  “Only if you say it in gabardine, Mr. Bailey,” Susan informed him.

  “I’m afraid she’s right,” Wes said impassively enough. “You can’t show up there looking like you’re dressed for a Butte wake.”

  Grimacing, Bailey jotted into a notebook a shopping trip to the haberdashery in Havre. “All right. So. The five of us can cover the funeral, just. Now to get her back here in one piece, we’ll need to make like she’s heading to Helena, then swing off—”

  “It’s Rathbun!” The guard who had been sent to fetch Monty half tumbled into the room, his footing out from under him in more ways than one. “He lit out of here! Bedroll’s gone!”

  “How?” Bailey looked swiftly at Susan.

  “Goddamned if I know,” the guard said as the others from his shift scrambled to their feet and crowded around him. “I was in the tower but could hear them both in the auditorium there, her playing and talking away and every so often he’d let out with a song—”

  “Or somebody would play a recording of Roland Hayes, would she, Susan?” This came from Wes, and was not impassive at all.

  Bailey’s agonized forehead made her take pity. “Oh, if it makes that much difference to you. Once we were in the auditorium, all Monty needed to do was to go up to the balcony and slide down the fire chute.”

  “He’ll be horseback, with plenty of head start. The whole damn prairie he can choose from.” The way Bailey spoke it, Monty had gone to ground and pulled the hole in after him. “Major, how many people am I supposed to protect who won’t let themselves be protected?”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Susan told them as if she did too. Hard as it was, she faced Wes directly. In front of the others, he had to hold in the arrowstorm of questions, the sudden entire nightful of them. She alone saw in his shaken expression the deeps of their time together it came from; motives off the map left a person that way. “Wes, if we take care of our end of things”—the sweep of her words was not lost on Bailey either—“Monty can handle his. You’ll see.”

  Gruff as she had ever heard him, Wes said back: “Try to be reasonable, Susan. We’d know better about that if you’d tell us where he’s gone.”

  “You’ll have to take it on faith.”

  It became the frieze of Fort Assinniboine ever after for those of them in that room, the faces spaced around that table then. Susan had been in front of skeptical audiences before, but these were ready to pucker with it. Bailey could be seen to be revising her, for better or worse she probably would never know. In back of him, the men on shift when Monty ghosted away into the night looked as if the same case of distemper had swept through them all. Dolph appeared to be in tattler’s heaven. Wes had the look of a man whose hand had been forced. Still bleakly turned toward Susan, he intoned to Bailey: “Ready or not, now we have to.”

  * * *

  You have the day for it at least, Angus.

  Scrubbed by yesterday’s local rain, a piece of weather the rest of the Two Medicine country would have paid hard cash for, the valley of English Creek and the beveled benchlands around it showed a surprise blush of green. Beyond and more than a mile up, the reefs of the Rockies were standing rinsed in the sun, blue and purple in their cliffs. Along with her sense of loss Susan felt the distinct touch of the day, the vast old clockless surroundings playing tag with memory. “You could eat the air here,” her father liked to proclaim on such rare fine mornings. “We’ll need to,” her mother would have ready, “if you don’t butcher one of your darling creatures.”

  With one of the Neds beside her and others of Bailey’s crew drifting nervously nearby, Susan had detached from the other earlycomers toward the rows of markers. The graveyard here on the hill overlooking Gros Ventre held more people than she knew down there in the town anymore. She visited for several minutes among the stones and their epitaphs. The names, the names. They filled the years of her younger self. Now, with Angus, every family of the Scotch Heaven homesteads was incised, a member or two or all, in this knoll. She stepped last to the graves of her parents; stood there held by the thought of how much the world had turned over in the handful of years since their deaths.

  At her back she heard the slick whisk of gabardine pantlegs approaching. Bailey was gray-sheened as a dove from head to toe, his dandy new Stetson and boots matching the cut of everything but his eyes. “The family’s arriving,” he said as if introducing himself. “So’s half the county, it looks like. It would help if you would take yourself over there”—he was gazing around at the Two Medicine country’s sculpted perimeter of buttes and peaks and benchlands but only, she knew, as far as a rifle could carry—“and blend in with the others. What do you say?”

  “I’ll be where Adair wants me,” she told him. “Give them a minute to sort themselves out and then I’ll come.”

  Bailey sucked his teeth as she stood there, tallest woman for miles around, sticking out perfectly for any Klan gunsight.

  “Mister Bailey? I do hope you know, there’s movement down there in the brush every once in a while.”

  He rapidly checked on the brushy line of the creek as if to make sure it hadn’t crept closer to the cemetery. Then turned and sized her up again, and this time it had nothing to do with her height. She either had extreme guts or pure lack of common sense.

  “Double W riders working the brush, is what you’re seeing,” he told her, hoping that was a hundred percent true. “The Major had Whit take his best brushpoppers and sift through in there, just in case.”

  “It’s nice they’re being put to use on something besides cows,” Susan commended.

  “What would be really nice,” Bailey put his professional best into this, “would be to know whether Rathbun is anywhere in the neighborhood. Just for instance, do we have to worry about the Klan siccing itself on two of you here today in these lovely surroundings, would you say? He’s not going to pull some stunt like popping up here to sing a hymn over this gentleman, is he? Miss Duff? Is he?”

  She calculated for some moments more and decided she could safely say: “I’m the one whose singing you will have to put up with. Monty will be here in spirit only.”

  “That’s something, at least.” No less gloomy than before, Bailey cast another put-upon look around the general scenery. Sighing, he signaled with a tug at his earlobe and as quickly as the nearest of his men tagged onto Susan in the rotation of protection, he himself trudged off to keep an eye on the crowd. In his considerable experience, trouble could happen so damn many ways. You never knew.

  Susan watched him move off, to have someplace to keep her eyes occupied instead of trying to stare through clumps of brush. So far she seemed to be up to this role, but the curtain was not very far up yet, was it. She marked in herself that she did not feel anything resembling brave about being here; stubbornness would have to do. The inescapable question rose in her again: terminally stubborn, if it came to that? Her Duff blood was answer enough. If so, so. She was not going to let lunatics who tromped around at night with their heads in pillowcases have their way. If this was what it took to bring the Klan out where they could be got at and propel the Baileys and the Williamsons of the universe at them, she could play the lure.

  She waited a bit longer, tensed as if taking on music she did not thoroughly know. The day seemed to rest its weight on this exact plot of ground, on her. The air was still, the canopy of cottonwood leaves motionless as a pale-green roof of domes over the town, down at the base of the knoll. Some
where there, Wes at his business, surprisingly coldblooded about matters of that sort over this one. He had dodged like a Nijinsky when she wanted him to attend Angus’s funeral. Dealings to be done, he intimated; it would do no good for him to be on hand, he protested, Bailey had set everything possible into place. Under her unquitting stare, he put it at its simplest:

  “I’m not wanted there.”

  Susan levied that back at him. “You know, don’t you, I’m probably not either, with the exception of the McCaskills.”

  Wes had digested that in silence. The past couple of days of tension between them—held off from one another by the forcefield of unsayable motives but in the pull of what each still needed the other for—showed on him as if a mask had slipped. She knew it was all he had in him to tell her when he said at last: “Some dealings won’t wait.”

  Speaking of. Susan bolstered herself and crossed the cemetery to the graveside. By now people were pouring in. Maybe it was just as well for Wes’s vanity that he hadn’t come, this was a crowd befitting a governor. This entire end of the county had passed through Angus’s South Fork classroom, and she catalogued faces by family resemblance. Some, such as the wrinkled bard Toussaint Rennie, gave her a nod of recognition. A good many carefully gave her nothing.

  When she reached the McCaskills, Varick as the new head of the family shook her hand and thanked her for coming. Beside him, Beth was resoundingly pregnant. The boy Alec was too old to cry but too young to stand still in the family grouping. Then Adair, eyes glistening, turned from the Bible-holding minister—Oh, Angus, surely they’ll balance that off with a helping of Burns—and clasped her.

  “You sang in his schoolyard, you sang at our wedding,” Adair spoke as tranced as if telling a fortune. “I knew you wouldn’t stop short now.”

  Delicately as possible, Susan hurried out the necessary as the minister began to thumb into his Bible: “Dair, is there a particular hymn? Or do you want me to pick—”

  “A ballad, I’d like,” Adair’s voice held no doubt. “He was something of one himself, wasn’t he.” Susan blinked her way from hymnal considerations to far different ones. What unpredictable bits and pieces we are made of, Adair was causing her to know anew. “Do a bit of old rhyme for Angus,” Adair was saying, “do this one,” with sudden softness humming the air of the old song that went:

  “World enough, world enough

  Did I search till there was thee.

  And at last, oh at last,

  The discovery of your charms

  Is world enough for me.”

  After the bit of hum Adair braced back from Susan, dabbed away the tears which had joined the freckles beneath each eye, and looked off as if for the missing. “Fickle old wind. Angus would laugh, this is the one day it didn’t come by to pay him its respects.”

  * * *

  The town looked as if it could use a customer, any make of customer, this morning. Wes checked his watch, although he could have told the time by looking at the street: the customary point of day when funerals were held in the Two Medicine country, late enough after morning chores to dress up and make the trip to town, time left for work in the afternoon. He felt some relief now that he could mentally put matters into operative categories, thinking back over the war council he’d had with Whit and the handpicked Double W squad before tending to this other. Patting his pocket to make sure of the day’s documents, he climbed out of his backseat workspace in the Duesenberg, parked as discreetly as something like it could be behind the Sedgwick House hotel, and walked on up the empty main street of Gros Ventre. Still making his calculations but careful of the off-angle set of steps into the Valley Stockmen’s Bank, he went in. He could see Potter riffling papers of his own, and he headed on back.

  “Well, Major,” the banker said cordially, looking up over his desk. “Business first thing in the morning?”

  “That’s why daylight was invented, George.”

  “With me, the only crack of dawn is my sacroiliac as I roll over in bed.” Wes was sure his father had heard the same ritual joke from Potter in one financial go-round or another in this same room. “But that’s how the Double W gets the jump on the rest of us, hmm? Have a seat, and what can I do you for?”

  Through the open door of the banker’s office Wes glanced out to where the tellers were going about business as usual. He asked idly, “Why didn’t you close for the funeral?”

  * * *

  Holding her head high, standing tall there at the brow of ground in front of them all, Susan sang the closing verse as if it could reach over horizons.

  “Long enough, long enough

  Were my heart and I at sea.

  Now at last, oh at last,

  The circle of your arms

  Is world enough for me.”

  She took a step back from the graveside, and the stiffly dressed crowd watched somberly as Varick sprinkled a handful of earth slow as salt into the grave.

  * * *

  “Whose? McCaskill’s?” Potter had the air of genial sharing that he employed on everything from foreclosure notices to remarks about the weather. “We can’t shut down every time there’s one less homesteader.”

  Wes stepped over and closed the office door. He said as though it had only now occurred to him: “Do you realize there’s only one letter’s difference between skulk and skunk?”

  “You lost me there, Major.” The banker rocked forward in his chair, staying attentively tilted.

  “I’ll bet.” Wes reached into the breast pocket of his suit and brought out the documentation. Realm of Pondera County, Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, each of the membership-and-dues cards in the packet was headed. Each was about the size of a schoolchild’s report card and was thorough down to height, weight, color of eyes and hair, and date of oath. They were alphabetical, and he riffled rapidly to the P’s. He flipped a card across the desk.

  Potter’s glance rebounded instantly from the card with his name on it to Wes’s confronting eyes. “Where did you get those?”

  “Don’t make me tired. At your house, where else.” Wes watched him as he would something that crawled. “Not me personally, of course, but someone who knows how to deal with firebugs and cow killers and would-be assassins.”

  “You Williamsons always think you’re good at running a bluff.” Potter’s mettle as a hater was fully in his voice by now, but so was last-ditch cunning. “I would imagine you’re a clubman yourself, Major—you must know there’s no law against belonging to a fraternal organization.”

  “Maybe not, but then there’s trespass at our place, breaking and entering at Susan Duff’s, malicious destruction of property, reckless endangerment—”

  “You want to get giddy citing laws, try the one against miscegenation. That woman and that horse cock you keep around.”

  Wes in that instant wished bayoneting was legal without a congressional declaration of war. He looked at Potter as he would a gob of spit on a dinner plate. “Even if there was anything to it, you yellowbelly,” the words snapped out of him in pellets of cold rage, “there’s no witness.” Dolph, for safekeeping, by now would be halfway to Chicago on the cattle train, his conscience long since repaired—“Major, I better tell you, there’s some bastards in town trying to git me in on their funny stuff”—and his wages handsomely upped for stringing the Klan along while the Williamsons readied their fist. His Klan card, Wes would tuck away for him as a souvenir and reminder, but the one on the desk stayed pointing at the pale-faced banker like a deadly warrant. “And don’t count on any others of that skulking bunch you head up. They’re busy being reasoned with.”

  Potter glanced involuntarily at the clock behind Wes. “That includes that henchman of yours,” Wes took extreme satisfaction in letting him know, “the one you sent off into the brush with a hunting rifle. It’s not hunting season anymore, Potter, particularly that kind.” Caught and hogtied and ready for delivery to the sheriff, the Klan’s second-in-command was in for the rare privilege of having
a Duesenberg serve as his paddywagon. The rest of the bunch were having the run put on them. Whit and his men right now were going name to name from those cards through this town. The remainder of Bailey’s force was doing the same in Valier; the rejuvenated sheriff and muscular deputies were spreading the gospel of persuasion in the county-seat town of Conrad. Across the state at this hour, Wes’s old political allies were hitting the Klan with what he knew would be varying effectiveness, but some of it was sounding effective enough; the sheriff at Butte had put out a public declaration that any Klan members caught lingering would be shot like wolves.

  The specimen across the desk from Wes made another try at dodging. “I have standing in this town, you’re dreaming if you think you can turn people—”

  “Potter,” Wes said as if instructing the clumsiest member of the awkward squad, “half the banks in this state have gone under in the past couple of years. I’d only need to lift a finger to push yours over that edge. And the bank examiners would pretty quickly find out if any depositors’ funds went to pay for white sheets and rednecks and Klan rifles and ammunition, wouldn’t they.”

  The man sat very still, trying to see beyond the corner Wes had him in. He moistened his lips enough to speak. “Maybe I got swept up in this more than I should have.”

  “Fine. You get to tell that to whatever hooded fools are above you. Now I suggest you close this bank for that funeral, even if the decency is a little late. Then go home and pack a bag, and get out of the state. I’m sure you can find a rock to live under, somewhere else.”