Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  * * *

  The crowd began to disperse from the cemetery, back to common day. “This mother of mine,” Varick was saying to Susan at his first chance to do so without being overheard, “has her own idea of one last thing you could do for Dad. I think it asks a hell of a lot of you, frankly. But I said I’d try it out on you.”

  “Anything,” said Susan.

  “Let me go get Fritz Hahn,” Varick said with a ghost of Angus’s smile. “He’s head of the South Fork school board.”

  THE convoy of cars, Susan’s dust-caked Tin Lizzie in the middle like a ragamuffin caught up in a royal parade, pulled into Highland Street as Helena’s dusk was turning to evening.

  Bulked into the passenger seat, Wes had ridden with her so they could talk. Words had been abundant on the trip from Gros Ventre, understandings less so. “You feel you have to?” he had pressed her when she told him she had agreed to take on the South Fork teaching job for the year. “Have to, and want to,” was her double-barreled response to that. “For once they go together.” Eight grades: she knew that she would be running up and down the stairsteps of lessons like the keeper of a mental lighthouse in the months ahead, but she could always come back to the mark of the presence she was standing in for. While she could never be Angus, she would have no shortage of notions about how he would have done things.

  Wes wondered wearily whether the two of them were always going to be like people on passing trains, her chronically in the West and him chronically due back East, coinciding once in a while in the middle of nowhere as in their Fort Assinniboine night together and then the distance doubling between them, over and over, from the split second the engines of their lives flashed past each other again. Silly, a word he wasn’t used to using on himself, came to mind along with such thinking; he hadn’t been in mental sweats of this sort since Harvard mixers. But there Susan sat in the driver’s seat, set on her own course until school let out next spring. “All right,” he’d finally said in a tone to the contrary, “step in Angus’s schoolmaster slippers if you must,” and in return she’d given him a look that seemed to say they might try each other on again after that.

  At the moment, though, he could not let her vanish into that house taking Monty’s whereabouts with her.

  “I give, one more time. Where is he, up Houdini’s sleeve? Susan, I’m begging you. Bailey and I can’t swear we nailed every last Klan thug, Monty may still need whatever protection we can give him. And what if he’s out there laid up on the prairie somewhere—a horse can break a leg in a gopher hole, any number of things can happen riding alone—”

  He broke off, at the slight sidelong grin on her. Until that moment he had never counted cunning among Susan’s many talents. She said simply, “Come in.”

  As they got out and Wes looked uncertainly toward the other cars where Bailey and his crew awaited orders, she told him: “We won’t need Mister Bailey’s services.”

  He handled Bailey as diplomatically as circumstances allowed, then went over to the Duesenberg and told Gus and the Mrs. to go and open up his house, he would be along later. Susan had waited for him at the front door and let him do the honors with the key.

  They stepped in to apparent emptiness. Wes did not know whether to feel vindicated or crestfallen. Helena had been searched these past days, the one Negro policeman on the force shaking Clore Street by the heels, Bailey’s men casing other parts of the city, and Monty had not turned up. Nor did he now. Susan, however, was everywhere at once in her downstairs, opening a window to let fresh air in, putting a shoulder to the music parlor doors, asking Wes what time it was as she set the grandfather clock and wound it back to life. Catching sight of herself in the hallway mirror, she abruptly stopped everything else she was doing. Wes looked on, the apprehensively fascinated way men do at women tending to themselves, as she plucked out hairpins unerringly. Her hair flowed to her shoulders.

  “Come up.” She was already on her way to the stairs.

  Wes swallowed hard. Have mercy for once, Lord. If she was hiding Monty in her own bedroom and word of it ever got out—

  The long loft room was so full of belongings it took him several moments to be certain none of them was alive and breathing. Susan was making her way through them on some course known only to her, trailing fingertips over some, the cupped palm of her hand on corners of others as she passed. With Wes watching as if trying to learn the secret of the ritual, she bypassed her desk to a cabinet along the wall. A crackling noise took over the room. She tinkered with the radio set until the static quit.

  * * *

  Monty watched the clock.

  He squared himself up, attentive now on the figure almost shoulder to shoulder with him. Somebody else made a pointing motion, which after the workings-over Susan had given him in the auditorium he would never have to think twice to recognize as a cue.

  “Now for your listening pleasure here on station CINE, our latest troubadour of the Medicine Line, Montgomery Rathbun.” The announcer looked at him sidelong but kept his mouth aimed at the almighty microphone on its spear of stand between them. “Welcome to ‘Evening Encore.’ For those of you not fortunate enough to have been introduced to him through his music earlier today, Mister Rathbun’s background is an unusual strand in our prairie background. Your father was a member of the colored cavalry down in the States—the buffalo soldiers, as they were called, I believe?”

  “He was,” Monty said easily into his hemisphere of the mike. The first time, he had worried he would need this written out, along with the music, but talking on the radio was proving to be a snap; an invisible audience was just right. “Sergeant in the Tenth Cavalry, right across the line at Fort Assinniboine. He was in charge of troopers, my mother was in charge of laundry, and I seem to be the result.”

  “And a lucky outcome it was for music-lovers,” the announcer orated from inches away. “For those of you who do not know the Fort Assinniboine story and the part it played in our Medicine Line past”—here he resorted to a script of what these radio people called canned history, for what Monty knew would be the next two minutes.

  Making sure of his music sheets, in that noiseless way they’d shown him so the rustle of paper wouldn’t make ten thousand listeners think their radio sets were on fire, Monty drew everything of the past half week into him for the effort to come. That feverish after-dark conference with her as soon as they were by themselves in the auditorium, in absolute agreement that they had to get the Major and Bailey into gear somehow. He had left her in loud conversation with herself and the Victrola version of a night’s singing, thrown her a wave from the balcony, and gone down the fire chute. Led the saddlehorse out of the fort with the blanket over it. Reins in one hand, the 30.06 in his other; take some of the bastards with him, he would, if he met up with any of the Klan out there in the dark. The long ride north to here, couple of hard days’ worth; it had been like riding in the roundup again, except he couldn’t remember ever being so saddle-weary during even the longest loops out after cattle. By the time he was across the border—the section-line roads he had been following ran out at Canada, the only way he could tell—and sorted out the town of Medicine Hat to find the radio station, he was feeling hard-used. A hot meal and a scrub-up at the hotel, then presenting himself in full singing rig to the station manager exactly the way she had said to do. The man had been intrigued enough to try him out on a few songs in the back room, and then excited enough to sign him on, a full week to start.

  All that was lacking was her. He wished like everything she was over there governing the keys for this. Wherever the station had dragged up this accompanist, the woman plowed around on the piano like she was doing Sunday school. But he would make up for it. Oho! The first perfect singer there ever was? As perfect as he could make it, on this.

  The announcer was finishing his scripted patter. “And now, out of that historical heritage, here is Montgomery Rathbun to sing the ballad of the Tenth Cavalry.”

  Monty took the cue, an
d out into the air, out over the Medicine Line and the weedy parade ground of the old fort and the time-browned washhouse of the Double W and the silent homesteads of Scotch Heaven, his voice began to travel.

  “Forty miles a day

  on beans and hay.

  Scenery all the way

  on cavalry pay.

  When I was young and in my prime,

  I dabbed my X on the Medicine Line.

  Suited up blue, and since that time,

  Boots and saddle have suited me fine.

  Forty miles a day

  on beans and hay. . . .”

  As the piano accompaniment went into a romp that made Susan wince, she said: “Even I’ll admit, Monty is full of surprises. I thought I knew all his songs, but I’ve never heard this.”

  “Buffalo soldiers, that’s our lot.

  Midnight sons of the Medicine Line.

  Prairie life is all we’ve got,

  I’ll stand your guard if you stand mine.

  Forty miles a day

  on beans and hay. . . .”

  It had taken him any number of nights, with a stub of pencil always within reach on the apple-box bedstand, to bring all the verses back. A dab at a time all the way back in memory to the parades, the band rattling out the turbulent tune that his father practically horseback-danced to, man and mount in flourish there at the head of the rank of blue coats. Other bits remembered from the drifts of song from the barracks nearest where he and Angel Momma and his father lived, when the troopers would pass the night with songs he knew his boy ears were not supposed to be hearing, but always ending up with this one. The chorus—even his father would bellow that out if he was in a good enough mood, slapping the sides of his belly in rhythm like beans and hay were battling it out in there. When Monty eventually had it all down and softly crooned it in his quarters at night—he had intended to surprise her with it, whenever their finale in the auditorium would have been—the old song seemed to bring him the feel of the dark displaced men who had been stationed there at the farthest north edge of the American prairie, singing to keep their spirits up.

  On oldest maps, a cloud maestro blows benediction to those who travel the edges of the world. Now Monty similarly gathered breath and all else into the last of the song:

  “Sergeant Mose and old Black Jack,

  They make you toe the mark on the Medicine Line.

  Trot you to Hell, gallop you back,

  Seat of your britches take on quite a shine.

  Forty miles a day

  on beans and hay. . . .”

  “It’s a rouser,” Susan appraised, patting hand into palm in contemplative applause. “A bit off the spiritual side, but he can make good use of it in his program as— Wes, do you feel all right?”

  “Just my knee taking a fit.”

  He had risen from his perch on the bed and gone over to the window alcove as Monty’s next song was enthusiastically introduced. Stood there full-front to the night so Susan could not read his face. He did not want to know himself what was written there. Susan may think the Scotch know something about sin-eating, but—Mose Rathbun resuscitated by Monty’s balladry. Lord, what next? The scene that no longer would stay put away suffused Wes. The Tenth Cavalry parade song had set it all off again, like a phosphorus recon flare freezing into light that particular pounded ground of memory. The day of the medal from Pershing. Small talk from lordly Black Jack himself, surprisingly companionable with his entourage restless around him, strung along the edge of the St. Mihiel town square. Did Major Williamson by any chance know the Medicine Line country there in Montana? “I know it quite well, sir. Some of our range runs nearly to Canada.” Coincidence, said the general. Had an interesting piece of service at a Medicine Line fort himself in cavalry days; there was nothing like the Montana prairie as horse country, was there, except of course in the instance of that vapid gloryhound Custer. Anyway, Fort Assinniboine: known as the Presidio of the north then, but was that before your time, Major? Wes, startled: “I was not aware you had served there, sir.” Most decidedly; colored troops on station there at the time, but it was a truth of war that soldiers were all the same shade in the reddest part, wasn’t it. Had a bit of adventure out of his first command there at least; escort duty along the Two Medicine Trail, over west of the fort, to put a band of Crees back into Canada. Queer sort of chore, the great man went on now as Wes had listened with everything in him. Like trying to carry water in a basket; the Crees would leak away into the brush of every creek his Troop D forded with them. Pershing laughed the dryest laugh Wes had ever heard; he had about worn the stripes off his ruffian of a sergeant siccing him after them.

  STRIPER

  · 1888 ·

  “SERGEANT, CLOSE UP their ranks again. They don’t need to smear themselves across the entire prairie, this isn’t one of their buffalo hunts.”

  “Yes, sir. Good as done.” Drawing on his long experience at the pretense that all orders from a white officer were created equal, Mose Rathbun spun his mount from beside Lieutenant Pershing and spurred off to pass the word to his men as they endeavored to herd Indians. The line of march of the captured Crees, to call it that, had funneled nice as anything through the single street of Gros Ventre, but out here north of town the Indians were dribbling off again. The few good wagons with Little Bear and other chiefs were drifting out of line, already almost side by side across the grassland, and behind them kinked the long train of limping buggies and scraggly travois and even a few groaning Red River carts, with the spotted herd of horses fanned out behind. From past episodes of rounding up Crees, Sergeant Rathbun figured that the Indians gravitated out that way so as not to eat each other’s dust, but this new lieutenant could be a stickler when he wanted to. Pershing in fact reminded him of the bristles on a grooming brush, with that brisk cookie-duster mustache and his parade-ground way of sitting in the saddle even out here on the march. Not gonna cost me my honorable if I have anything to do with it, though. This was the big roundup, Little Bear’s band, and Mose Rathbun’s last before his retirement discharge at month’s end, and he was trotting along through it with a short-timer’s determination not to get out on skin ice with his commanding officer.

  “Tinsley, Goggins, all you,” Mose called to his corporals and his troopers, “poke them up in here, or old Black Jack’s going to have you cleaning the stables until you’re gummers.” He stood in his stirrups and made a bunching motion to the trudging mob of Crees, not that he expected it to do any good. “Ride herd on those women and young ones, too,” he warned his men, “next creek we hit. They’ll light off out of here on their own, quick as anything.”

  The greenhorn of his complement of men had the misfortune to catch his eye. “Bovard!” Mose bellowed. “Shove them together there, or I’ll curry your head with a quirt.” From everything Private Bovard had heard, it would not be the first such occurrence. He threw the heavy-shouldered sergeant a flustered salute and began swatting the nearest Indian pack ponies with the ends of his reins.

  Mose knew he was going heavy on his troopers. But it paid. Their blue field uniforms were never more crisp, every buckle and button on them gleamed with polish, they wore their campaign hats cocked just so. The men naturally groused about it but by making them snap to, he pointed them up in the estimation of the white officers like Pershing. Call it a personal conceit, but here on his last time around he most definitely did not want any man of his written up for sloppy behavior. And the entire troop was doing him proud so far; they looked like saddle soldiers ought to look, if he did say so himself. Give those play-pretty Mounties something to see, when Troop D handed these godforsaken Crees back to them yet another time.

  Trotting back along the column to keep everybody on their toes, the sergeant impassively scanned the miserable parade of Indians for broken-down wagons or any other contrivances of delay that the Crees seemed to be so good at. Truth be told, he still rather would have been fighting this blanket bunch than shooing them back across the Medicine Li
ne like a flock of chickens. Days of the prairie campaigns seemed to be over for good, though, to his regret. It was sad, sort of, for tribes like the Crees as well as the cavalry, in his estimation; having to trudge along in each other’s dust like this instead of scrapping it out in a whirl of horses and whooping. War was hell but peace was boring; what was a man to do? His sympathy for the Crees stopped about there, though. Canada and the U.S. had been flinging these vagabond Indians back and forth across the border like a game of Auntie-I-over ever since the Riel Rebellion, up north there. Louis Riel had found himself on the wrong end of Her Majesty’s rope and the Crees had found themselves on the losing side and without a homeland. The sergeant knew the iron rules of fate when he saw them, and he had seen them more than enough. Down here, if the South had won the big war, the Tenth Cavalry as a frontier regiment of freed black men would never have come into being and Mose Rathbun right this minute would be in some hopeless procession himself, with a hoe on his slave shoulder.

  By now he had busied himself all he could in putting the troop on its toes, and the line of march had accordioned into a better semblance of order. Still restless, wanting to stir his blood more than escort duty allowed for, he rode rapidly back up the column to where Pershing was conferring with Lieutenant Hardeman of Troop C, which had drawn the candy end of this assignment, lackadaisically strung out around the Indians who were herding the tribe’s horses. Two West Point shavetails in one spot; Mose made sure his salute practically sang through the air. “They’re bunched better, sir. Permission to reconnoiter on ahead to that next creek? Corporal Tinsley can see to the men, be good for him.”

  Pershing cast a cold eye over the long winding procession and reluctantly decided to call it tidy enough. “Very well, Sergeant,” he granted. “While you’re at it, find out if that provisioner is making any progress on our rations for this bunch. Tell him the company commanders said we could all stand some slow elk on the plate for a change.”