Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  The saloonkeeper himself stared up at us thunderous. If faces could kill, Rob and I would have been never born.

  The two of us stared stunned as he glowered at Rob. At me. At Rob again. Now the saloonkeeper’s back straightened as if an iron rod had been put in his spine, but he kept his forearms deliberately out of sight below the bar. My mind flashed full of Helena tales of bartenders pulling out shotguns to moderate their unruly customers. By the holy, though, could anyone with eyes think Rob and I were anything like unruly right then?

  Finally the saloonkeeper emitted low and fierce to Rob what his face was already raging out: “Are you demented? Who to hell are you anyway, to come spouting that?”

  “Rob!” from Rob the bewildered. “Lucas, man, I know you like myself in the mirror! I’m Rob, your nephew.”

  The saloonkeeper still stared at him, but in a new way.

  Then:

  “By Jesus, you are. Chapter and verse. By Jesus, you’re Vare’s lad Robbie, grown some.”

  The fury was gone from Lucas Barclay’s face, but what passed into its place was no less unsettling. All emotion became unknown there now; right then that face of Lucas Barclay could have taught stoniness to a rock.

  Still as baffled as I was, Rob blurted next: “Lucas, what is the matter here? Aren’t we welcome?”

  At last Lucas let out a breath. As if that had started him living again, he said as calm as cream to Rob: “Of course you’re welcome. It’s pure wonderful that you’re here, lad. You’ve come late, though, to do any handshaking with me.”

  Lucas raised his forearms from beneath the bar and laid on the dark polished wood the two stumps of amputation where his hands had been.

  • • •

  I tell you true, I did not know whether to stare or look away, to stay or turn tail, to weep or to wail. There was no known rightness of behavior, just as there was no rightness about what had happened to Lucas. Like the clubs of bone and flesh he was exhibiting to us, any justice in life seemed ripped, lopped off. To this day the account of Lucas Barclay’s mining accident causes my own hands to open and close, clench their fingernails hard against their palms, thankful they are whole. It happened after the Great Maybe and Helena, when Lucas had moved on to a silver claim called the Fanalulu in the outcropping country between Wolf Creek and Augusta. My partner on that was an old Colorado miner Johnny Dorgan. This day we were going to blast. I was doing the tamping in, Johnny was behind me ready with the fuse. What made this worse was that I had miner’s religion, I always made sure to use a wooden tamp on the powder so there’d be no chance of spark. But this once, the blasting powder somehow did go off. Dorgan had turned to reach for his chewing tobacco in the coat behind him and was knocked sprawling, with quartz splinters up and down his back. He scrambled on all fours to where Lucas had been flung, a burned and bloody mass. The worst was what was left—what was gone—at the ends of Lucas’s arms. Dorgan tied a tourniquet on each, then took Lucas, a wagonload of pain, to the Army post hospital at Fort Shaw. Johnny thought he was delivering a corpse, I suppose. He very near was. The surgeon there saved what he could of Lucas, starting at the wrists. Did I want to die, at first? By Jesus, I wanted worse than that. I wanted the world dead. I hated everything above snake-high. For months, Lucas was tended by the Fort Shaw surgeon. I was his pastime, his pet. He made me learn to handle a fork and a glass with these stubs. He said if a man can do that, he can make himself a life.

  • • •

  There in the Medicine Lodge, Lucas’s maiming on show in front of him, Rob’s case of stupefaction was even worse than mine. He brought his hand back to his side as if burned and stammered, “Lucas . . . I . . . we never—”

  “Put it past, Robbie,” his uncle directed. “Have a look at these to get used to them. Christ knows, I’ve had to.”

  While Rob’s eyes still were out like organ stops, Lucas’s powerful face turned toward me. “And who’s this long one?”

  Would you believe, I stupidly started to put my hand out for a shake, just as Rob had. Catching myself, I swallowed and got out: “Lucas, I’m Angus McCaskill. You knew my father, back—”

  “You’re old Alex’s lad? By Jesus, they must have watered you. You’ve grown and then some.” His gaze was locked with mine. “Is your father still the best wheelsmith in the east of Scotland?”

  “No. He’s, he’s dead.”

  Lucas’s head moved in a small wince of regret. “I’m sorry to hear so. Death is as thorough on the good as the bad.” His arm stumps vanished briefly beneath the bar again and came up delivering a whiskey bottle clutched between. “Down here among the living we’d better drink to health, ay?”

  Lucas turned from us to the line of glasses along the back bar shelf, grasped one between his stumps, set it in place in front of me, turned and did the same with one for Rob, a third time with a glass for himself. Next he clasped the whiskey bottle the same way and poured an exactly even amount in each glass. It was all done as neatly as you or I could.

  “Sedge, Toussaint, you others,” Lucas addressed the rest of the clientele, “line your glasses up here. You’re not to get the wild idea I’m going to make a habit of free drinks. But it’s not just any old day when a Barclay arrives to Gros Ventre.”

  Lucas poured around, lifted a glass of his own as you would if you had to do it only with your wrists, and gave the toast:

  “Broth to the ill, stilts to the lame.”

  • • •

  Our drink to health became two, then Lucas informed Rob and me he was taking us to home and supper and that he may as well show us the town while we were out and about. The half-breed, Toussaint, assured us, “This Gros Ventre, there never was one like it,” and chuckled. The mustached man, called Sedge, stepped behind the bar to preside there, and Lucas led Rob and me out on tour.

  Gros Ventre could be taken in with two quick glimpses, one in each direction along the street, yet it registered on me in a slow woozy way, like a dream of being shown somewhere at the far end of the world. Or maybe a dream of myself dreaming this, reality a phase or two away from where I was. At any rate, my mind was stuck on Lucas and his maiming and he was energetically intent only on showing us Montana’s Athens-to-be. Rob and I did much nodding and tried to mm-hmm properly as Lucas tramped us past such sights as Fain’s blacksmith shop, encircled by odds and ends of scrap iron. Kuuvus’s mercantile, a long, low log building which sagged tiredly in the middle of its roofbeam. A sizable boarding house with a sign above its door proclaiming that it was operated by C.E. Sedgwick—which was to say, the mustachioed Sedge—and his wife Lila. Near the creek in a grove of cottonwoods, a tiny Catholic church with the bell on an iron stanchion out front. (A circuit-riding priest circulated through “every month or so,” Lucas noted favorably.) Dantley’s livery stable where Herbert the freighter had disembarked us. Next to it Gros Ventre’s second saloon, Wingo’s: a twin to the Medicine Lodge except it was fronted with slabs instead of boards. To our surprise—we now knew why Herbert hadn’t materialized at the Medicine Lodge—we were informed in an undervoice by Lucas that the town did have a calico supply, ensconced here in Wingo’s. “Two of them,” Lucas reported with a disapproving shake of his head. “Wingo calls them his nieces.”

  We also became enlightened about the tents and picketed horses.

  “That’s the Floweree outfit, from down on the Sun River,” Lucas told us. “Trailing a herd of steers north. These cattle outfits all come right through on their way up to borrow grass. I tell you, lads, this town is situated—”

  “Borrow?” echoed Rob.

  “From the Indians. Blackfeet. Their reservation is north there”—Lucas gestured beyond the creek with one of his stubs; would I ever get used to the sight of them?—“fifteen miles or so, and it goes all the way to Canada. Cattle everywhere on it, every summer.”

  And how did the municipality of Gros Ventre strike you, Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Barclay? We found the main enterprise to be theft of grass, and our host had no hands.r />
  Be fair, though. The fledgling town was not without graces. It proffered two. First and finest was its trees, cottonwoods like a towering lattice above the little collection of roofs. When their buds became leaf, Gros Ventre would wear a green crown, true enough. And the other distinction stood beside the Sedgwick boarding house: a tall slender flagpole, far and away the most soaring construction in Gros Ventre, with its somewhat faded 41-star American flag energetically flapping at the top. When Rob or I managed to remark on this public-spirited display, Lucas glanced upward and said there was a story to that, all right, but he marched us across to what he plainly considered the centerpiece of Gros Ventre, the building skeleton at the end of the street.

  “Sedge’s hotel,” Lucas identified this assemblage of lumber and air for us. “I’ve put a bit of money into it too, to help him along. The Northern, he’s going to call it.”

  Rob and I must have looked less comprehending than we already were, for Lucas impatiently pointed out that the hotel site was at the north end of town. “You’ll see the difference this hotel will make,” he asserted. “Sedge and Lila will have room for dozens here.”

  Thinking of what it had taken for Rob and me to reach this speck on the map, I did wonder how dozens at once were going to coincide here.

  Lucas faced the pair of us as if he’d heard that. He thrust his stubs into his coat pockets and looked whole and hale again, a bearded prophet of civic tomorrows.

  “Robbie, Angus. I know Gros Ventre must look like a Gypsy camp to you. But by Jesus, you ought’ve seen what a skimpy place it was when I came three years ago. You had to look twice to see whether anybody lived here but jackrabbits. The Sedgwicks and Wingo, Kuuvus and his wife and Fain and his, they’ve all come in since then. And they’re just the start. This’ll be a true town before you know it.”

  Evidently we did not manage to appear convinced. Lucas started anew.

  “Lads, you have eyes in your heads. If you used them at all on your way here, you saw that there’s land and more land and then more of more, just for the taking here in Montana. And by Jesus, people will take it. That’s the history of the race, in so many words. They’ll flock in here, one day, and that day not long from now. The railroad is being built, do you know, up north of the Two Medicine River. That’s what’ll bring them, lads. Steam and steel is the next gospel. And when people come, they’ll need everything a town can furnish them,” concluded the lord of the Medicine Lodge.

  There was a brief silence, reverent on Lucas’s part, dazed on ours. Then he did some more dream-building for us, in a confiding way:

  “My belief is we’ll see a railroad of our own here. After all, they talk of building one to that piddle spot beside the road, called Choteau. A squeak of a place like Choteau gets a railroad, we ought to get a dozen, ay?”

  Lucas gazed out the solitary street to the straight-topped benchland south of us, then past the flagpole to the jagged tumble of mountains along the west. Up came an armstub that thoughtfully smoothed the black-and-gray beard as he contemplated. “This is rare country,” he murmured. “Just give our Gros Ventre a little time and it’ll be a pure grand town.”

  “Whom never a town surpasses,” issued from me, “for honest men and bonny lasses.” I suppose I was thinking out loud. For the long moment Lucas contemplated me, I much wished I’d kept the words in me.

  “Is that old Burns,” he asked at last, “as in the middle of our Robbie’s name?”

  “The same,” I admitted.

  “Angus is a lad of parts,” Rob roused himself to put in, “he can recite the rhyming stuff by the yard. See now, he was pupil teacher for Adam Willox.”

  “I knew Adam,” recalled Lucas. “He had a head on his shoulders.” Lucas eyed me again, as if hoping to see the start of one growing on me, then declared the next of Gros Ventre’s matchless attractions was supper.

  Past the rear of his saloon and across a wide weedy yard he led us toward a two-story frame house. The house needed paint—this entire town needed that—but it sat comfortably between two fat gray cottonwood trees, like a mantel clock between pewter candlesticks. Lucas related to us that the house had come with the Medicine Lodge, he’d bought both from the founder of Gros Ventre, named DeSalis. It seemed DeSalis had decided the begetting of Gros Ventre was not a sufficient source of support in life, and had gone back to Missouri. But we had the luck, Lucas pointed out, that DeSalis first sired five children here and so provided ample guest space for us.

  As we reached the front porch, Lucas stopped as if he had suddenly butted up against a new fact.

  “Now you’ll meet Nancy,” he said.

  “Nancy?” I could see that Rob was buoyed by the sight of the considerable house, and now this news that Lucas at least had been fortunate enough to attain a mate in life. “The Mrs.! And doesn’t that make her my aunt, I ask you? Lucas, man, why didn’t you tell—”

  Lucas’s face underwent another change to stone. “Did you hear me say one goddamned thing about being married? Nancy is my—housekeeper.”

  Rob reddened until he looked like he might ignite. “Lead on, Lucas,” I inserted in a hurry. “We’re anxious to meet Nancy.”

  He manipulated the doorknob with his stubs and led us into the front parlor. “Nancy! We have people here.”

  From the kitchen doorway at the far end of the parlor stepped a young woman. Her dress was ordinary, but that made the only thing. Hair black as a crow’s back. A figure tidily compact yet liberally curvaceous. A squarish face, the nose and cheekbones a bit broad; the upper lip surprisingly rising a bit in the very middle, revealing the first teeth in a way that seemed steadily but calmly questioning. None of this Nancy-the-housekeeper was lovely in any usual way but her each feature was more attractive on second notice, and even more so on a third. Remarkable dark, dark eyes, perhaps black, too. And her skin was brown as a chestnut, several shades darker than that of the half-Indian or whatever he was in the Medicine Lodge, Toussaint.

  Rob was trying not to be frog-eyed, and failing. I suppose I was similar. Lucas now seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Deciding the situation could stand some gallantry, I stepped toward the woman of the inquisitive lip and began, “How do you do, Miss—”

  Lucas snorted a laugh, then called to me: “Buffalo Calf Speaks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Buffalo Calf Speaks,” Lucas repeated, more entertained than ever. “She’s Blackfeet. Her Indian name is Buffalo Calf Speaks. So if you’re going to call her Miss, that’s what Miss she is.”

  “Yes, well.” Strange sensation it is, to want to strangle a grinning handless man. I put myself around to the woman again and tried anew: “Nancy, hello. My name is Angus McCaskill.” I forced a grin of my own. “I’m from a tribe called Scotchmen.”

  “Yes,” she answered, but her eyes rapidly left me to look at Rob, his shining resemblance to Lucas. Lucas told her, “This is my brother’s son. His name is Rob.”

  “Rob?” Her intonation asked how that word could be a name.

  “Like Bob Wingo,” Lucas instructed, “except Scotchmen say it Rob. They never do anything the way ordinary people do, right, lads?”

  “Rob,” Nancy repeated. “From Scot Land.”

  “That’s him, Nancy. Rob and Angus are going to be with us for a while. Now we need supper.” The woman’s dark eyes regarded us a moment more, then Lucas, and she went back through the kitchen doorway.

  So that was Nancy. Or at least the start of her.

  “Don’t stand there like the awkward squad,” Lucas chafed us. “Come sit down and tell me news of Nethermuir. If the old place has managed to have any, that is.”

  • • •

  That supper, and that evening, were like no other.

  I am all too sure that neither Rob nor I managed to learn, at least on the first many tries, how to keep a face under control when a meat platter or a spud dish was passed to it between those bony stubs at the ends of Lucas’s sleeves. What we did learn was th
at a person without hands needed to have his meat cut for him—Nancy sat beside Lucas and did the knifework before ever touching her own plate—but he then could manipulate a fork the way a clever bear might take it between its paws, and he could spoon sugar into his coffee without a spill and stir it efficiently. We learned by Lucas’s telling of it that he could dress himself except for the buttoning; “I’d like to have my knee on the throat of the man who invented buttons.” That he could wind his pocket watch by holding it against his thigh with one stub and rolling the stem with the other. That, what I had wondered most about, he had taught himself to write again by sitting down night after night, a pen between his stubs, and copying out of an old book of epitaphs. “Stone Stories, the title of it was. It fit my mood. I made myself work at a line a night, until I could do it first try. Then two lines a night, and four, on up to a page of them at a time. Not only did I learn writing again, lads, the epitaphs were a bit of entertainment for me. The Lillisleaf steeplejack’s one: Stop, traveler, as you go by/I too once had life and breath/but I fell through life from steeple high/and quickly passed by death. Angus, what would your man Burns think of that one, ay? Or the favorite of mine. In the green bed ’tis a long sleep/Alone with your past, mounded deep. By Jesus, that’s entirely what I was, alone, after the accident to my hands. At least”—he indicated Nancy, buttering bread for him—“I’m over that now.” We learned by Lucas’s ironic telling that he had earned good money from the Fanalulu mine before the accident—“the great secret to silver mining, lads, is to quit in time; otherwise, the saying is that you need a gold mine to keep your silver mine going”—and we inferred from this house and its costly furnishings those were not the last dollars to find their way to Lucas. Where did this man get the sheer strength to wrestle the earth for its silver and then, when that struggle had done its worst to him, to wrestle a pen for the months of learning to write again?

  We learned as much as he could bring himself to tell us about that letter that found its way to us in Helena. “Why did I write it, after these years?” Lucas lifted his coffee cup between his stubs and drank strong. “Matters pile up in a person. They can surprise you, how they want out. I must have wanted to say to old nose-in-the-air Nethermuir that I’m still living a life of my own. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself yet to tell about the accident, about my—condition. How do you say to people, ‘I’m a bit different these days than you remember, my hands are gone’?” Lucas gave us a gaze across the table, and Nancy added her dark one to it. A jury of two, waiting for no answer we could give.