Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  No, that almost inaudibly said it; Babel and Bedlam freshly seeded with Radio Corporation of America amplifiers, was more like it. Trying to face one another down across the contested air of the street, a couple of blockfuls of these fresh enterprises chorally dinned out the samples of their wares. The ebonite loudspeaker over the entryway of one radio store blaring out Paul Whiteman’s jazz band at the St. Regis Hotel, the tin glory horn out the transom of the one next door dizzily trumpeting the fanfare of Carmen, the noise emporium across the way countering both with Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink in grave Wagnerian matinee mode at the Metropolitan Opera—her first time through, Susan couldn’t believe her ears, but only a stone-deaf person could doubt this. Turn her head toward New Jersey, and she received the WOR chant of Bernarr Macfadden calisthenics. Incline in the general direction of Brooklyn, and some boy baritone reached forth all the way from the WAHG studio to present her “Roses of Picardy.” As best she could tell, there was an inviolate pact among the stores that none would play the same radio station as any other one, but beyond that anything went—banners, installment plans, money-back guarantees, free aerials, complimentary shrinelike bamboo stands to set your set on. At least once a week she feigned interest in the infinite varieties of radio cabinetry, store window by store window, to walk slowly through the mad glorious gauntlet of confusion and attune herself to how zealously the world was enwrapped in voices. To imagine each time one more soar of sound into the atmospheric mix, from up in Harlem.

  * * *

  “Good as gold but hard to hold—”

  The blues had been trying to get Monty by the ears, and failing.

  The man sounds like that and probably gets paid plenty for it. Me, if I was to do my songs that way, everybody would just say my voice is shot.

  He had been listening offhandedly—all right, enough to scoff—in the dim of the apartment to the program drifting into his cabinet radio from someplace where shoeing mules and tending moonshine stills seemed to be pretty much the constants of life. Harlem and the prairie both beat that, at least. But he sat up, disturbed now, as the Delta growl made wavery by distance found something remembered in him.

  “Flat to stack and round to roll—

  Silver dollar, lift my soul.

  Silver, silver, silver,

  silver dollar blues.”

  That old ditty, he knew every step of the way. The Zanzibar Club on Saturday nights had been as much education of that sort as any one person could stand, hadn’t it?

  “Hard to bend but easy to spend—

  Flat to stack and round to roll—”

  I get the idea. He reached over and snapped off the radio. Blues singers were really something, they could get by with about twenty words and repeating ninety percent of them six times. The ditty out of nowhere had put him up against himself yet again, though. Now that his shoulder was mended and the purple blotch of the blow was gone from the column of his neck, he seemed to be back to what he had been, in any way that he could see. The staves of his legs, the arch of his foot, the slight pink of his heel, all those seemed the same. Hands, fingers, nimble as they ever were. His same darkly durable skin over the same basic arrangement of bones. The workings of his head, he had to hope that even those were not drastically different. But a stranger was living downstairs in his throat.

  He wished Susan was right about coaxing back the voice he’d had. He also wished she was out of reach of the stretch of his imagination.

  * * *

  There is an awful distance to go, summation came to Susan’s pen, before Monty has his music back. But so far neither of us has swerved from that. She folded the diary closed, and in midnight ink began her weekly letter to Wes.

  THE mountains stood taller than ever in the magnifying summer air, but the Scotch Heaven homesteads had gone to their knees.

  The places are folding in on themselves, Susan, as if you and the McCaskills were their last mainstays against gravity. The least he could do, Wes told himself as if it were an order to a subordinate, was to make this reconnoiter of the ways of water and grass and time into a salutation to Susan.

  If you were here you wouldn’t let me get away with calling the separated chapters of your life on the North Fork long arithmetic, would you. But that is the sum of it by any adding up I know. Girl you were, when that father of yours out-stubborned mine for this land, and beloved calamity you’ve been to me these half dozen years, unto who knows when. It has to be said, Susan, it is a length—one I have gone to, haven’t I.

  The creek, subdued by this time of the summer, prattled at the stones of the crossing just enough to be heard at the brow of the benchland where he sat in the buckboard studying the vee of the North Fork. He had been perched there for some minutes now, totting up what lay before him. The creek-twined line of homesteads showed pockets worn through by the past winter. Half the roof of the long sheep shed between the Duff and Erskine homesteads had been brought low by one too many loads of snow. Midway up the creek, the Allan Frew homestead appeared to be without chimney. Nearer at hand—closer to home, you would have me say—off to the side of the Duff house the root cellar had caved in, the dirt of its crater fresh, not grassed over. He calculated back: it was no more than a year since he wheeled in there with the makings of a picnic in the johnnybox of this wagon, and given the quantity of time he was weighing today, he had to think that was not much. The seasons here were even more ruthless than most calendars, though.

  He flicked the reins to start the horses toward the creek crossing. The day already had the hot crinkly feel of August, the peak of haying season, the one month of the ranch year when lack of rain was a blessing. Not until now had he found the right morning to intercept Whit on his way out to boss the stacking crew and let him know he would be gone for the day, over to the North Fork to check on the fencing. Whit, suspicious, told him, “Wes, that fence would hold in elephants,” then corked up at the look he got back.

  As the buckboard trundled decorously down off the benchland, Wes once more went over the genealogy of the double handful of homesteads to make sure he had them straight in his mind. Thinking this out beforehand, he had made the disturbing discovery that he could not put names, let alone faces or memory traces, on more than half the homesteaders of the North Fork. Accordingly he’d had Gustafson take him in to the county courthouse so he could go through old assessor’s records. Then when business next required him in Helena, he went up to the capitol grounds and over to the state office where birth records and death certificates were kept. He topped off the compilation by delving into the proving-up files at the federal land office for naturalization papers and dates when each parcel of homestead land was filed on. With those and a quadrangle map, he had Scotch Heaven on paper now. It’s the margins, where the coffee cups get put down or someone doodles a figure, that require imagination to fill in.

  When the wagon pulled out of the creek, he headed it west past Breed Butte, not bothering to trace along the strands of barbed wire and new cedar posts that now stitched across the valley. He knew he could trust Whit’s word on something like a fence.

  The road along the creek passed in and out of the dapple of stands of cottonwoods and the wheeltracks were firm from the accumulated heat of the summer. The going was not as easy on the eyes. One after another the homesteads met him like a ghost town that had been pulled apart and scattered, the sun-browned boards of a barn or a shed or a picket fence cropping into view at a bend of the creek or an inlet of meadow. The houses as he passed them were a gallery of gaping window casements and empty doorways.

  Susan, I honestly don’t mean to sound like a coroner touring through. But examination is the spine of the three of us, in this. Your intense attention to music. Mine to parcels of earth and those who happen to hold them. Monty frisking himself, with a timely patdown or two from each of us, until he found his voice. Whatever we add up to separately, we at least are linked in that.

  His conversational “Whoa, we’re there” to the gray
s as they pulled into the yard sounded loud in the still air. More lately lived on than the others, the McCaskill place seemed evacuated, walked away from, rather than undermined by age. In front of the house, he levered himself down from the wagon and knotted the horses to a hitching rail which visitors had probably made scant use of over the years, this far up onto the ruggedest edge of country that broke from the prairie in rising waves of ridge and reef. He knew he shouldn’t stay here long, technically this was trespass. Varick McCaskill still had not sold this place, nor would he offer it in the direction of a Williamson if he ever did. But among the compulsions of this day was the need to view the North Fork as had the angular man who dwelled here for thirty-five years in the unashamed harems of his head, half the poems ever written living it up in one corner, calculations of the heart always ongoing in another. What a haunting figure Angus was, even in life, I’ll say along with you, Susan.

  The mountains practically at the back of his neck, Wes perused this pocketed-away homestead at the top of the valley, catch-basin of snow in the winter, gentle swale the color of cured hay at the moment. The silence over everything was as if a spell had been cast, and in a way it had, although it had taken nearly three dozen years to register. The North Fork valley was all as empty as his father ever could have wished it. Which was to say, occupied only by Double W cattle with their heads down in the good grass.

  So there I stood, in the tracks of a man who once told me my father had been such a sonofabitch toward the people of Scotch Heaven it was running out his ears. Angus McCaskill had an everything-included romance with the language, did he not. I know as well as anything that you had a sort of crush on him, from girlhood on, and there is a side of me—opposite the green latitude of jealousy—that commends your taste for that. Given it all to do again, he is a man I would have tried to explore a lot more deeply.

  He gave it his best there in the shadeless blaze of midday. Guilty of trespass perhaps, but for once innocent of motive beyond the quest into another man’s divided soul. About the third time he fanned himself with his hat, the appropriate voice formed in his head: Man, there’s no law against thinking in the shade.

  Smiling to himself, he untied the team and moved the wagon down toward the creek and a grove of cottonwoods. Under their canopy he waited out the heaviest heat, listening to the sentinel rustle of the cottonwoods at the touch of wind, no other sound like it. After a while he unpacked his lunch from the box beneath the wagon seat. The hurry-up sandwiches the insufficiently notified cook had made for him dried in the air faster than he could eat them.

  It was a noon of absent company, Susan. No sooner would I set a place for Angus at the arguing table than some part of me would be in the way between us. Wes counted back: the last half dozen years, no night here would ever have known a neighboring light, not a sign of a larger world beyond the fate-inked dark of this valley. Days, what would have begun as necessary settler solitude would have turned into emptiness, nothing out there past the walls of these buildings to angle away the wind, no prospect except the mountains and ridgelines which simply went up at one end and down at the other, with only the neutrality of nature in between. In short, try as I would to see with his eyes, what stayed with me was the visual evidence that the lines of settlement long ago began to buckle in the gnarled contours of the foothills up in back of Scotch Heaven. And Angus was the westernmost of the people who hurled their lives against those hills.

  He climbed back in the buckboard and began to work his way down the creek, homestead to homestead, for the afternoon. Each time, carefully tying the team to something stout; it would be utterly in the temper of this chafing summer for the horses to run away and leave him afoot over here. Then he prowled, seeing what suggested itself. He knew that out of the volume of lives here he could discern only flecks; but from such glints of memory we try to make out what we were, do we not. The patterns built into everyday homestead life still were there at each place. The barn never more than two lariat lengths from the house, because no sane person wanted to have to follow a rope farther than that to feed the workhorses during a whiteout blizzard. The outhouses always astutely downwind from the living quarters. Colossal runaway molten-orange poppies, tall as he was, marked the flowerbeds the women long ago put in under their kitchen windows.

  He found bachelor thrift at the Tom Mortenson homestead. His kitchen cupboard he built from his leftover flooring, how’s that for being honorary Scotch? Indolence at the Spedderson place. Not even a garden plot, Susan, nor a decent stanchion for the milk cow. Overreaching at the Barclay quarter-section, up on Breed Butte nearest the McCaskill place. This you must have seen with your own girlhood eyes and heard your elders tut-tut about: the spring on the slope under a small brow of land, like a weeping eye, and Rob Barclay chose to build a reservoir there rather than site himself and his sheep along the creek with the rest of you.

  Finally he was brought again to the Duff place and the neighboring Erskine habitation, the earliest two homesteads of Scotch Heaven. He walked the Erskine place first. Donald and Jen they had been. She a thrushlike woman, by report; Wes could not recall ever having seen her. Donald a quiet block of a man, well remembered. The death certificates showed that both had perished right here in the influenza epidemic. It still was unfathomable to Wes that he had been safer in the trenches of 1918 than these homesteaders in their own beds.

  Turning slowly in the yard, he took in the structures fashioned by the hand of Donald Erskine, even yet standing foursquare. You could tell by the way he built: he was not one to run.

  One to go now, just across what was left of the section-line fence that Donald Erskine and Ninian Duff probably had not needed between them except by habit. “They were a pair to draw to,” Wes’s father had said more than once, the saying of it a bitter grudging admiration in itself. With reluctance but knowing he had to, Wes hoisted himself into the wagon, fixed the bolster to his leg one more time, and went onto Ninian’s land.

  As he pulled into it, the Duff place seemed to him the emptiest of all, without Susan’s presence. New York, and her mending of Monty there, was all but unimaginable from here. He half-wished she wouldn’t write him the letters she did. The other half of the time, he yearned to hear from her every mortal day.

  Climbing down into the yard, he at least took a wry pleasure in the house of Ninian Duff having been turned into a music parlor, there at the last.

  Angus McCaskill at the top of the valley, Ninian Duff at the bottom of it. I know both of them better from their proving-up papers than I ever did in life, Susan. But if I were in office I’d have been on the speaker’s stump at the Gros Ventre picnic on the Fourth, extolling the way people such as them historically bent their backs on ground such as this. Without saying anything approaching the full of it: that the particular pair of them make a parenthesis of onset and conclusion, of the sort that clasps around dates in an epitaph. You know how I love the wit of words but am not in favor of irony—indeed, you have swatted at me when I picked up your copy of Forster and said he would be a less rusty writer if he would scrap irony. But even I have to admit to a portion of the ironic in the beginnings and endings enclosed by your father and Angus. Plus a bit. Her own sharply missed residency here at the old Duff place of course was the bit. Wes again felt it come over him, the emptiness that had driven him to undertake this day. Without Susan to go to, he was enduring the summer as a season with the sameness of an uneasily dreamed trek, going from sun to sun, never done. Until today.

  Talk about parentheses. Susan, if you look at it along class lines, these Scotch Heaven families—McCaskill, Mortensen, Spedderson, Frew, a second Frew, Barclay, Findlater, Erskine, Duff; see, I can recite the names from top to bottom now—were bracketed by a significant pair of others in the Two Medicine writ of life, back then. My own stands first and most imposing, I suppose, we Williamsons possessors by nature. And at the other end, one of the almost accidental acquisitions we had picked up in our baronial way, the Rathbun family; ma
n, woman, child, coming to us out of a past a couple of cuts below the life of you here on the homesteads, which was to say not appreciably above the way tumbleweeds existed.

  And here is the “what if,” Susan. What if, when Mose Rathbun, shaped by emancipation (to call it that) to be a soldier, which is to say a follower of orders—what if when Sergeant Mose came hat in hand, my father had put him here among you as a homesteader. Had unobtrusively shepherded him through filing the claim where old Mortenson eventually came and put his name on, let’s say. Had privately counseled, one old cavalryman to another, the now landholding head of the Rathbun family through the proving-up years with necessary patience and perhaps a dab of man-to-man loan. Had provided him some seasonal work, at calving and at roundup. Had created an occasional wage for Angeline, too—Lord knows, the house at the Double W could stand spring cleaning any number of times a year. In short, had neighbored the Rathbun family as ours easily could have afforded to. There would have been ways. True, Scotch Heaven was as whitely Protestant as we were whitely Catholic, but Ninian Duff—I give him this much—cared only about the complexion of a man’s work. The others here, grudgingly or not, would have hewed to his example toward the Rathbun family.

  And that brings us to Monty. Imagine him, as I have been, tuned to the best of his abilities in the school of Angus over here. One great thing Angus knew, and put into you and Samuel and others of any talent, was that chore-sharpened ambition could aim itself upward from the narrow acres here. Think of it, Susan, although your emotions on the matter would be necessarily mixed: a greatly earlier start in life for Monty, a less fettered chance for his voice to find the glory it deserves.