Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

Mose ate and ate, still saying nothing, sitting there in something like a state of daze, as if the success of his journey was just now catching up with him. By damn, it had worked. You could never tell whether a white man would even look at you sideways, second time around. He had stood on the porch of the big ranch house waiting with his still respectable campaign hat swatting nervously against the leg of his best civilian pants. Then all at once Warren Williamson practically came flying out the door, over to him in a second and appearing monumentally annoyed at having been summoned to deal with this kind of caller.

  “If you’re looking for a meal, you ought to know enough to come around back and the cook will—” Something about Mose registered then, maybe the hat.

  “You’re that sergeant.” Just that fast, Williamson’s expression went from clouded to amused and suggestive. “Not still looking for that runaway Cree, are you? I believe I saw you and your private come back without him, just his horse.”

  “That one?” Mose had come three days’ ride to take this chance. “Just between us, sir, he got cured of that with a lead pill.”

  “I figured he did.” Now the ranch owner looked at Mose man-to-man, and any hesitation in him didn’t last much longer than a couple of heartbeats. “I’ll tell you what. If you’re on the grub line now, I could maybe use a man who knows what he’s doing on horseback.”

  Just like that. It still confounded Mose: you just never knew how things would work out. There on that porch he’d had his good piece of paper ready in his shirt pocket, but Warren Williamson never even asked whether he was discharged or had deserted.

  Angeline realized she was swiping back and forth across the piece of clothing in front of her with a cold iron. She drew a breath and took the plunge:

  “Mose? Two Medicine, you say? Isn’t that over by where you threw those Crees across the line?”

  “General vicinity, is all. I’ll be riding for a big ranch, Angel. Be herding cattle instead of Crees.”

  * * *

  Nose against the screendoor, Monty peered in at the grownups, impatient with their talking and eating. He could not wait any longer for the best thing about his father coming home, the moment when he would be grabbed up in those big arms like he didn’t weigh anything at all and tossed in the air, way up by the ceiling, and caught and tossed over and over again—he knew it scared Momma, and for that matter it sort of scared him, but it was a treat from his father, catching him up like that. He slipped past the screendoor into the kitchen where they were, and when the two of them looked around at him, he raced headlong before Momma could stop him. “Papa! Papa! Make me fall up!”

  UPTOWN AND DOWN

  · 1925 ·

  AS USUAL BY this hour of morning, Monty was out onto the street for the third time.

  Habit stirred him awake early to do the chores even here, two-thirds of the continent away from the Double W, and even though the nature of the doing had changed beyond recognition. His first excursion, embarked on while it was still too soon to tell what the pinch of sky between the rooflines held for the day, always was around the corner and a few blocks over to the public school and its playground space out back, where he cinched up the roadwork shoes and ran to keep his breath built. At that hour only a few of the more fly types—Harlem never seemed to have any shortage whatsoever of types—out early or in late on activities that did not bear inquiring about were around to levy looks at the heavy-shouldered man, long way from a kid, bounding across the skip-rope scuffs. Back to the apartment for a washup after that, then gratefully to his big feed of the day, breakfast. He took his meals by the month at the E & B—Earl and Bea’s 24-hour Buffet—in a nightlife district nearby; the Eat ’Em and Beat ’Em, if you could put away enough grub in the course of thirty days, and he had brought his appetite with him from the ranch. Ham and eggs and unlimited cornbread to set him up for the day, quite the life if he did say so himself. Steak and eggs, for two bits more, on concert days like yesterday.

  He was getting his teeth into New York life in other ways, too. Each day he felt less like some sort of permanent tourist as he strode through the well-heeled neighborhood called Strivers Row. The tree-lined street brimmed with morning-faced people by this hour. Harlem, he was finding, operated as if every little while some signal was given to open a floodgate and it became the turn of this ten thousand or that to pile out to go to work, to school, to church, to nightlife, to wherever there was maybe another rung on the climb from dun beginnings. Every one of those street-set faces, the astonishment still struck him as soon as he hit the sidewalk, somewhere on the same prism of color as his. Oh, there were white countenances even here—harness-bull cops on the beat and bowtied owners of stores and theaters, mostly—but hardly any in comparison; white raisins in the dark plum cake, all they amounted to in Harlem.

  He thought about this at some level even when he was thinking about everything else. Sometimes after breakfast he would linger on his counter stool just to watch through the big cafe-front window the start of the morning rush, the domestics and elevator men and streetcleaners and dishwashers and myriad other doers of chores heading for the elevated railway station in order to be on the job downtown when the white world there cranked open for business, and he could not help but marvel at the way things had swung his way. Last year at this time he had been in their shoes, even if his came with cowboy bootheels and milk-cow manure on them; and the Klan trying to cut his tracks, besides. Now he put on a suit every day of his life, and the fanciest of black cloth to perform in at night, and was it any wonder he felt far enough up in the world to tingle when he took his morning constitutional along Strivers Row and beyond?

  Still, there was something more that kept trying to register in him on this particular outing. Feels like the day it’ll hit, the rhythm of the notion came to him as steadily as his stride. Feels like the odds are saying to hell with theirselves today. He realized he of course did not have a whit of fact to back that up—luck doesn’t let you know beforehand that it is about to change, like the more generous weather—but the impression tingled too much to ignore. It was somewhat like the jangle that went through him back there on the boat at the Gates of the Mountains, that incredible first day. He clenched one hand, just from nerves, as he navigated from one block of toney addresses to the next. His mind played with the idea that maybe there was such a thing as odds mounting up to the point where they vibrated like bees in a hive, sending something off into the air. In any case, he could not shake off the feeling of good fortune about to alight and start tickling him silly, did not want to even try to shrug that away; he had too many years of his life invested in finally reaching the vicinity of luck.

  But maybe it was just the atmosphere. Strivers Row, after all, knew its stuff about prosperity. This later crowd stepped smartly into the day according to Harlem’s own clock rather than downtown New York’s, and while Monty had clued in that this given neighborhood carried a justifiable reputation for being snooty—it was swankily confident enough to joke of itself as being the home of America’s leading second-class citizens—the evidence of the eyes was that this particular canyon of brownstones was indeed Harlem’s hit-it-rich gulch, where the shared color was of a different luster than gold but at this time and place panning out just as nicely. Well-dressed men so dark of face that they made him look like a moonlight shadow nodded a respectful good morning to him and forged off to put fillings in people’s mouths or plead their cases for them or align their voting habits. Kids dressed as spotless as little royalty flashed down tall sets of steps from the rowhouses and bounced one another in the general direction of their schoolday. Now and again a boy spilling over with mischief would skip in behind him and walk the cowboy way Monty did, toed in and just enough bowlegged to suggest horseback heroics, until the mother on sentry at a window called down in a well-modulated voice not to be pestering Mister Rathbun like that, hear? Monty knew better than to grow spoiled by such circumstances, but it gratified him every time to walk along here as reco
gnized as a man chalked down the back.

  His mind on all this and as always somewhat on tonight’s music as well, he nonetheless grew leery as he approached the corner where the fancy stoops gave out and opportune storefronts suddenly lined up like they were clothespegged to the second-floor windows. Strivers Row could be as grand as it wanted, but the enterprises beyond were as forthright as a trapline. Even the fruit stands posted prices that seemed to want argument—the elocution-schooled wives from the rowhouses would be along to do their shopping any minute now, primed for debate—and somewhere on any block an apartment-room church with Eureka or Oasis in its name waited to reel in your soul and take it to heaven or Africa, and within a bottle’s throw of those were cabaret speakeasies aswim with bootleggers, con men, cardsharps, touts of this or that, women with their hooks out, and other manner of lowlife ready, he well knew, to drain off what his singing was bringing in.

  Making sure to sharpen up his eyes, the way he used to start watching out for the Loomises as soon as he lit onto Clore Street, he arrowed ahead past all the diversions. Tut-tutted sympathetically to the well-rehearsed hard-luck stories that cadenced from the strategic scatter of beggars and kept on the move. Even the accents of the blandishments were tricky here, the gumbo lingo of the cottonbacks up from the South and the lullaby intonations of the Caribs and the rounded declamations from the diction wallopers who might be genuine street preachers and might be something else entirely. This flange of Harlem struck him as remarkable in its way as Strivers Row, with its absolute necessity to keep your wits about you along here or there were just all kinds of pockets they could fly off into. Fortunately, within a couple of blocks his daily destination poked up like a smudged thumb out of all this concerted grasping, the newsstand where the ink of headlines practically obliterated the gray-napped proprietor within.

  Exchanging greetings, Monty shopped the array of front pages the newsstand was wreathed in until he spotted the particular one he wanted today. The World; that ought to be ample enough. He handed the vendor the pennies for the newspaper, then a paper dollar for the number he wanted to play. “Three-oh-six again, how about.”

  “Straight or combination?”

  “Straight again.”

  “A man can strop a razor on what you pick, Mister Rathbun.” The old vendor jotted the number and Monty’s bet on the cheatsheet, then handed him his slip of paper. “How’d it go last night?”

  “I’m about to find out.”

  Back in his apartment, though, he took his time about that. Over and over he had told himself he shouldn’t still be, but he was smarting from Boston last week, where he’d had a cold and his performance suffered accordingly. Some of the reviews there worked him over practically down to his shoeshine. “The crickets,” J.J., his manager, pooh-poohed the critics; “you leave the crickets to me, Montgomery.” Good sound logical advice, as far as Monty was concerned, just impossible to follow. Wasn’t a person always going to be curious about what was written about him? Half the people he’d met in New York lived on that precise curiosity.

  But he didn’t have to let it smack him in the face this very moment. He did his voice exercises first. (“Make that such a habit you’ll feel absolutely undressed without it,” one of those precepts cross-stitched into him back at the North Fork and the Fort Assinniboine auditorium by you-know-who.) Straightened up his bed. Did some mindful dusting, wary in the vicinity of radiators and doorknobs where spark shocks lurked when a person lived on carpets all the time. Recalled that it was rent day, and the tab at the E & B had to be covered too, and his walking-around money needed an infusion as well. Humming, he dug out his bankbook, sneaked a look as if checking a hole card, and gave the kind of whistle he had been waiting a lifetime to give when holding his financial worth in his hand. How it did add up, each whopper of a deposit after one of the big performances, and even the smaller steady take from the Saturday-morning jumps, held at the Plaza Hotel and the Barbizon and those places. Cecil tickling the piano, him putting forth maybe half a dozen songs, eight tops. All due respect to the Double W and life as the Rathbuns previous to him had known it, but this beat looking at wet sheets on a clothesline or the back ends of cows.

  Contentedly stashing the bankbook away, he came across yesterday’s number slip in the dresser drawer, under his socks. He wadded it into a tiny ball and put today’s in its place. To tell the truth, he would not be surprised if the number never did hit. But it was the luxury he allowed himself, a dollar a day to play the numbers; as much as his month’s wages had been on the ranch, and here he didn’t even miss it. Other than that buck-a-day bet, he had himself staying so tight to the straight and narrow he could have taught rope-walking. If I don’t know by now not to blow it all, how many hard knocks does it take?

  Still holding off on the newspaper, he could not help glancing toward it, its masthead New York World expectant on the table. Quite the world, all right. Last night he had walked onto the stage in front of a packed audience of twelve hundred, and tonight’s would be no more than three dozen at best. Another musicale. The take wasn’t great, but J.J. scheduled these with as much care as he did the big-hall recitals. People on the in; sassiety, J.J. called such gatherings.

  Pulling out his song sheets to make sure they were in the right order, he tried to picture the probable musicale scene. (Another of her prescriptions.) A number of Strivers Row’s own movers and shakers always adorned the evening’s chosen living room, to be sure, but right in there with them mingled the fairhaired downtowners who came up here on the lure of the music or their own highly honed curiosity or just because it was the thing to do. The Rabiznaz, turnabout of the Zanzibar, he couldn’t help but think of those as: cluster of white folks who stuck out oppositely in Harlem like the dark-skinned habitués in off Clore Street did there in Helena. Which was to say, reverse to the overwhelming color around them, the way faces show odd in the negatives of a photograph. Not that it bothered him—he had been mingling, to call it that, since the day he and his parents entered the pearly kingdom of the Williamsons—and it didn’t visibly bother the Rabiznaz or the Harlemites, but he did find it close quarters compared to dealing with a stage audience. Close and elevated. Women who were said to have diamond-studded garters (not that he had chanced onto such a phenomenon himself yet). Men with books to their names, or handed-down money they hadn’t bothered to count yet. Conversation that circled as mercilessly as the rims of their gin glasses. “Oh, there’s Blanche and Alfred, I’ll bet he’s scouting. . . . Oh, look, the Sitwells are over from London. Did you hear Heywood say, ‘They don’t with me’?” It helped that the Major sometimes was on hand, providing some force of gravity. At the last one of these even his wife was there, looking as if the presence of other people was a strain.

  Couldn’t count on seeing him there tonight, though, it occurred to Monty, given what time of year it was. He thought a moment and rearranged the order of the night’s songs, putting the Medicine Line one last so that he would have some guff about Montana and the Tenth Cavalry and so on to give out with when he had to be on his own to make conversation afterward. He fondled the stack of songs as appreciatively as he had the bankbook. Talk about luck, having these. They couldn’t have squired him along on this any better, them and the Major.

  * * *

  By the time the whirlwind of success on the radio stations out West had carried him all the way to the big job in Chicago, he’d known it was prudent to consult with a higher authority about the step beyond that. The Major gave one of those smiles of his and said, “You need to get together with Phil Sherman.” The heart-hammering trip into New York, the session of the three of them in Phil’s fashionably rundown office in the theater district. There barely had been time for Phil at the upright piano to rack the accompaniment sheets into place and attempt to follow him in a few of the songs, when there came the knock at the door. In walked the slenderest man Monty had ever seen, in a duck-foot strut. His complexion was dark honey and his suit was fashionable
London brown, both accentuated by a carnation of nearly blinding whiteness in his lapel.

  “Philip,” the man greeted Sherman, “tell me you have a theater owner who still knows how to spell vaudeville and would give his left one to book Butterbeans and Susie for, oh, six weeks at scale.”

  Who? still written on Wes’s face and Which? similarly all over Monty’s, they tried not to look like fish out of water as Phil, chuckling, steered the arrivee to them for handshakes. At Wes’s name, the already taut man all but twanged with attention.

  “The Major Williamson, do I gather? Philip here has been holding out on me. First Sergeant Jace Jackson, sir, 369th Infantry.”

  “The Harlem Hellfighters.” Wes looked instantly at ease and shook hands with him a second time. “I never did understand why we wasted you by attaching you to the French. In the thick of it at the Argonne, your bunch?”

  “Us alongside the Senegalese,” that was answered. “A matched set, I presume the thinking was.” J.J. at last zeroed in on Monty, who had a hunch he had deliberately been left for last. “And this is the talented gentleman you think I need to hear, Philip?”

  “The very one. Allow for my piano playing, okey-doke?”

  “Before we start,” J.J. stated. “One thing.” Up stood his index finger, illustrating the imperative. “Could save us all some time.” He sent a warning gaze to each of them in turn. “This isn’t going to be jazz, is it?” Or jass, as J.J. pronounced it with a wince. “Because, no slur on our singing friend here, that is not a field I will have anything to do with. You can tell me as much as you want to that jazz is all the thing. But the ambience, gentlemen, the ambience. Blind men, hopheads, scatty women—how’s a person supposed to do bookings around menageries like that?”

  “Relax, will you. Nobody’s going to accuse this music of being jazz, it’s more . . .” Phil came up short.