Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

“It’s a bit different,” Wes tried to pitch in, “but—”

  “Easiest thing to call it is spirituals,” Monty confined things to.

  Which made J.J. wince even harder. Delicately as a ballet performer he spun to Phil.

  “Philip, if you don’t mind my saying so, this is not up your alley. I can throw a fishline into any congregation between here and Mobile, and come up with a spirituals singer.”

  “Since when are you so overrun with performers you can’t even listen, J.J.?”

  His bluff called, J.J. parked himself across the room. Wes went over by him to complete the audience. Monty stepped to the piano beside Phil, and approximate as the keyboard work was, “Mouthful of Stars” roared to life.

  In the silence after Monty’s last wall-shaking line of song, J.J. appeared perplexed. “I don’t know that one, and I have two uncles who are reverends.”

  “Then you have one more chance,” Phil swiftly set the hook. “Shall we try him on that ‘Jones’ number, do you think, Monty?”

  “Unless you want to save it for that other manager you have in mind,” Wes made up on the spot. Monty could have kissed him.

  Phil getting a bit more hang of it at the piano, “Just Another Praying Jones” went even better than the first song. J.J., all three of them could see, was almost sold.

  “Maybe this is the real deal here,” he weighed what he had heard as if the rest of them were not in the room. “An authentic.” As if reluctantly rousing from that vision, he looked around at them and came to business. “He does have a voice on him, and something about those songs—Montgomery, I can undertake to represent you. I would put you together with Cecil—no offense, Philip, but he’s the best around at churchy piano.” He paused, turned back to Monty, and the index finger was there like an exclamation point again. “But coming from amateur, you need to know what you’re letting yourself in for, back here. You have to nail it in every performance.”

  Nail it? Amateur, at what? Monty resisted asking the man if he had ever been in front of a rodeo bull that wanted his hide. Instead he said, with all the heft he could put into his voice: “Can’t back up and start over on the radio either. You can ask a million or so people all the way from Spokane to the Twin Cities to Chicago—nobody has heard me mess up yet.”

  * * *

  Six full months since then, and that yet still hadn’t even come close to occurring, and Monty was determined it never would. He put aside the song sheets, ready for the musicale. That’s that. All right: it was time. He went over to the table where the newspaper waited.

  He folded the paper back, scanning until he spotted the review. Read it, chewing his lip. Read it again, a lot more slowly. Shaking his head to try to clarify the imprint of the words, even though he knew what they meant, he ripped the piece out of the paper as though it would get loose in the room and do something more to him. Then he caught his breath and sat down to write to Susan.

  * * *

  Downtown, at about where the measuring stick that was Manhattan Island struck fortunes made before the Civil War, Wes was picking out railroads. He’d had a wall rack installed behind his office door with slots for all his passes, now that he was of the gandydancer fraternity, and as perquisites went, this one bemused him more than most. A lifetime ticket or one to bankruptcy, depending. Each elegantly printed pass entitled him to highest privileges—which was to say, a private car—when he traveled on the rails of his fellow moguls. And should any of his ampersand-endowed confreres from the Chesapeake & Ohio or the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul or the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe wish to ride the twenty-two miles of the Two Medicine & Teton, naturally he would be only too happy to reciprocate.

  A rap on the door broke his cross-country train of thought, but still in a prime mood he moved aside and called out, “Open, Sesame, or Hilly, as the case may be.” Hilfiger, his secretary, came in looking as if his Teutonic dignity had something spilled on it. “Major, I cannot at all account for this. But Mister Gardiner is downstairs with some new things.”

  “Now? I don’t understand. You know I’m getting ready to go away.”

  “I somehow overlooked him when I cleared your schedule. Shall I tell him it will have to wait until after Montana?”

  “Use your head, man. Whatever he’s come up with will be gone by then. Send him in, but—” he looked pointedly at the wall clock. “And go ahead and make my arrangements, will you. I’ll be taking the Pennsy to Chicago, and let’s make it the Milwaukee on the next leg.” It went without saying that Wes’s own railcar and red-carpet treatment from the Great Northern Railway, which profited handsomely at the Montana end of things each time a trainload of Williamson cattle was shipped to market, were to be ready for him at the St. Paul depot as usual.

  “Absolutely, Major.”

  “Oh, and Hilly, see if you can ring up— No, never mind,” he canceled that with a wave of the hand that happened to go in the direction of Harlem. Lord knew, he was no expert on the owl-like life of a singer, but Monty very well might be sacked out, resting up for another night of performance. What was there to be said, anyway, welcome to the World? Wes wondered how he was taking that review. He should have picked up the phone to him first thing, but with all the hurry and scurry of putting house and family to rights for the summer . . . Too late now.

  The only sound for a moment was the repentant slipslap of Hilfiger’s soles as he hurriedly pattered down the stairs. The quiet was like a housewide trance, the machinery of mansion life stilled to only the occasional rustle of a distant maid. Making the most of the almost sinful spot of time, Wes virtually tiptoed over to his desk and sank into the lush silence. Funny. The house has the best of it this time of year. We clear out, and the walls get to rest their ears. Since having to bow out of Montana politics, he had spent more of each year here—the vast old pile of a place had been imposed as part of Merrinell’s dowry—and hoped he was not growing too used to its granitic grandeur. Guidebooks to this venerable neighborhood called it “captivating,” and he supposed that was right if a person took it back to Latin: captivus, captive—clarity in the root, as usual. Evidently conceived on the architectural conviction that a man’s home was his Bastille, this ancestral bastion of his in-laws permitted only peeps through high narrow windows to similar slit-eyed neighboring mansions.

  While he waited for Gardiner, Wes busily packed things into his attaché case. By this time tomorrow the place would be like a ship frozen into an ice floe, sheets over all the furniture, inhabitants scattered to different latitudes. Not more than an hour ago Merrinell had left with the girls for her mother’s summer place at Saratoga; time to break them in to that circle of society. Inasmuch as Merrinell’s mother was a living refutation that a female could not be a pope, Wes had sympathy for his daughters in the immersion into parasol sodality ahead of them but nothing of real help. It was all he could do to keep his own head above water in the fathoms of family.

  Gardiner padded in with his portfolio case, its leather as softly sumptuous as his manner. “Major, thank you for working me in.”

  “What’s on offer today, Timothy?”

  “A find, I can safely say. I think you’ll be pleased with it.”

  Wes stayed expressionless, his guard and his hopes both up. This was not like Gardiner. As a rule, the rotund old dealer managed an elegantly diffident approach, as though strays from the orphanages of literature and history somehow simply showed up on his doorstep. Their longstanding arrangement was for Wes to have first look within the range of his interests, and if he didn’t buy, Gardiner had merely to pop over to the Morgan Library. But the item the dealer took out of his portfolio case now and lifted from its wrappings, he was handling as if it had come home to stay. The not very sizable journal he deposited on the desktop looked weathered from time rather than passage from hand to hand. Wes recognized that it was bound in elkskin, not buckram-backed nor standardly done up in cow leather nor even deerskin, and he felt an anticipatory tightness in his throat.
r />   He studied the cataloguing slip. “Joseph Field, Joseph Field. Why do I know that name?”

  Looking wise but saying nothing, Gardiner let it sink in.

  Wes’s head snapped up. He threw away the first rule of haggling, he couldn’t help himself. As if wishing, he asked: “The one with Lewis? In the Two Medicine country?”

  “You anticipate me.”

  Wes wiped his fingertips on the serge insides of his thighs, then drew the journal to himself and opened it ever so carefully. Officerly skepticism still was uppermost in him. With astounding copiousness Lewis and Clark each had kept day-by-day account of the expedition they captained, as did their sergeant, Gass. The enlisted men had been told to do the same, but naturally few did. And those random contributions from the ranks supposedly were all archivally accounted for, long since. Prepared for all manner of disappointment from desultoriness to illegibility, Wes dipped into the age-crisped pages of the journal, and there the words stood startlingly clear. Drewyer and self sent hunting for sage hens. . . . Capt Lewis & Reuben let our horses graize. . . . The visinity was a plesent level plain but for one butte poking high and a lake stinking of alkali. . . .

  Alkali Lake: on the Double W’s Flag Butte pastureland. Wes stared into the crude slants of the ink as though seeing a treasure map suddenly come clear. Joseph Field and his brother Reuben and the hunter-scout Drouillard, he knew as if by rote, were with Meriwether Lewis on the exploration of the Two Medicine country. Just before nightfall at some hitherto unknown site along the river, they encountered a small band of Blackfeet, gave presents, and made wary camp with the Indians. We must wrisk the night with these persons Capt Lewis told us & so we decended to the river in company with them & formed a camp in the bottom where stood 3 solitery trees in a simicircle . . . Holding his breath, Wes turned the page to July 27, 1806. I was on post & laid my gun beside me to reach & wake Reuben when one of the indians—the scoundrel Capt Lewis bestoed a friendship medal on during the night’s parley—slipped behind me and took the gun.

  To Wes the rest unfolded with the familiarity of The Iliad: in the tussle that followed, Reuben Field stabbed one Blackfeet to death and Lewis shot one in the belly. The exploring party famously had to make its escape in a marathon one-day ride to the Missouri River, but the tilt of history was against the Blackfeet and other tribes from then on. Wes now had no doubt that he held in his hands the eyewitness account to the first blood spilled by American soldiers in the long contest for the West’s upper prairie. This had gone missing for nearly one hundred and twenty years. “Gardiner, how did you come by this?”

  “Oh, things sometimes surface, Major.”

  Wes realized he was breaching protocol front, back, and sideways. Collectors at his level necessarily embraced the pretense that provenance was a region of France. “Forget I asked. How much are you going to hold me up for, on this?”

  “I must tell you, Harvard has expressed an interest in it.”

  Wes steepled his hands together, then ever so slowly lowered them until they pointed directly at the dealer. “Speaking of telling, drop a word to Pearson from me”—making it plain that he was letting it bounce here on Gardiner first before it reached the Harvard keeper of collections—“that as a donor I don’t appreciate his bidding up materials he’s eventually going to get anyway, damn it.”

  “I’ll see that your concern is made known,” Gardiner all but trilled. In contrition, he quoted a figure twenty percent too high instead of the usual forty, Wes batted that down to a semi-reasonable asking price, and they reached the deal.

  Gardiner still hovered over the journal with avuncular tenderness after Wes handed him the check. “Timothy? Is there something else?”

  “I understand that you’re pressed for time, but if you could spare a few minutes more—”

  “Given the going rate so far today, I ought to call an immediate curfew.”

  “It’s been on my conscience that I can’t come up with that Cheyne item you asked for some time back. But if you’re interested in that period, I just happen to have a few interesting items with me.”

  “You just happen to.” Wes smiled. He didn’t believe in runs of luck, but fifteen minutes ago he wouldn’t have had any faith in the existence of a vagabond Lewis and Clark Two Medicine journal either. “All right, lay them out.”

  A brief letter to a weekend hostess from Lord Byron, standardly flirtatious. A set of poems in the florid hand of Wasson, the Flemish Romantic. Wes shook his head each time.

  “This is rather nice,” the dealer said. “An original of a verse by Pushkin. He must have copied it out fresh to look it over.”

  Wes knew the military legend—Pushkin’s forebear an Abyssinian prince who became a general for the Czar—better than he knew the poet’s attainments, other than the customary one. “Fool for love, wasn’t he?”

  “Quite, Major. Sufficient to get himself done in, in a duel over it.”

  “Russian isn’t quite Greek enough to me.” Wes scanned the boldly penned couplet in Cyrillic lettering. “How does it read?”

  The dealer checked the accompanying translation.

  Not all of me is dust. Within my song,

  safe from the worm, my spirit will survive.

  Wes sat unmoving. Monty’s singing at that last musicale flooded back to him. That’s what Monty had seemed: within the Medicine Line song. The people there at that musical evening had turned to statues, not even the click of a glass, at his almost holy rendition of his father’s prairie soldiery. Even Merrinell, who kept all her matters of the spirit confined east of the Palisades, remarked afterward how struck she was by it.

  “Damn the poets,” Wes said softly. “They tattoo all the way through. I’ll take this, too.”

  The dealer left, a discreetly happy man, and Wes sat in the quiet company of this day’s collected prizes, his thoughts once again on their way toward the West and Susan.

  * * *

  These pages went a bit lame during my regency in Angus’s schoolroom, and now they threaten to gallop the hand off me to catch up. I find I can barely move the pen fast enough to keep up with the race of thoughts. I wonder what ninny it was who so blithely said a diary must be a servant—

  Thunder sent another casual tremor through the loft room, the arriving storm dimming what should have been the peak of the day, and Susan got up from her desk and with guilty pleasure put on all the lights. After Scotch Heaven life the Helena house still felt unfamiliar and for that matter wastefully voluminous, the size of a factory, but to have electric light again was a treat she practically sprinkled behind her ears. She would not have traded all the gold of Last Chance Gulch for the teaching year she had just put in at the South Fork, nor would the same sum persuade her to do it over again. Her smock crackly with the weather’s contribution to the atmosphere of energy, she sat back down to the pages brightly awaiting her continuance:

  —not a master. Ho ho. As if the habit of summing one’s days into ink could be as lax as whether to dust the top of the cupboard or not. I can no more ignore the need to keep track of life—as much of it as can be made to fit in these pages—than Wes could his confessional booth. And I find that there is the odd benefit that with the passage of time the words hold more than I knew I was putting there. I look back not even a year—she flipped pages; an eyebrow went up and stayed that way—and I find Monty in despair, Monty persevering, Monty exasperating, Monty in magical voice.

  As she composed her thoughts at pen-length, the rain din built second by second. Merciless rods of it determined to puncture the roof, from the sounds of it. “Lord, if ye happen to be of a mind / Send us rain,” Angus’s inevitable appropriate weather couplet rattled in the back of her mind, “And if so be it ye spill some / Send it again.” When the roar on the roof hit such a pitch she could not hear herself think, she gave in and quit the desk again, this time for the gable window and the rare sight of excessive moisture in Montana. Hollyhocks in the yard were rocking madly in the wind, rainwater pudd
ling into small swamps around them. There was a smell of great freshness in the air, and the temperature was vigorously dropping. The only thing feeble about thundershowers this time of year was duration; hoping against hope she checked the sky, and while the stormy section looked like black sheep’s wool, already on both sides of it were patches of bland blue-gray. She watched at the window until the sharp-edged squall rumbled off across town. Then returned to the diary and noted in brackets that not a drop of this worm-drowner would have reached far enough to do the Two Medicine country any good.

  She paged back some more, under the spell of the inked words and their curlicues of memory. Maybe it was the ozone, but everything today seemed sprung out of the usual sense of passage of time. It felt curiously like adapting some foreign custom, this diarying in the middle of the day. Siesta in reverse. The role of woman of leisure did not come naturally to her, but she was working at it. Her hair was down—no pupils today, of course, and none in prospect until she could get the music school resurrected and a number of miffed mothers soothed—and the shawling effect on her shoulders was another sumptuous diversion from usual. As she read back over entry after entry, moments leaping out at her, she twiddled strands of the tresses she had let grow all her time at Scotch Heaven, idly judging their distance from gray. Reaching the point of doing that, was she. Vanity, thy name is human. Automatically she reached down a music sheet and jotted that in the margin in case it could be made to fit into the operetta somewhere.

  Suddenly the pen had a mind of its own again: What odd bits we remember, she found herself resuming on today’s marathon diary catching-up. Monty’s letter mentions Mrs. Gustafson’s fearsome hotcakes—the plop of them hitting the griddle was in itself almost tough enough to chew—and I have thought back time and again to that X on the stage, to flatter it by calling it that, there that first day at Fort Assinniboine. What a nerve I had, chalking that mark and letting on to him that standing right there would solve all stage woes. I recall him looking long and hard at it (and doubtless at the proposition of myself as teacher). When he stood his ground to that barn of an auditorium and my asking of him, I knew we would get somewhere.