by Ivan Doig
One geographic inspiration I did have. The piece of the planet that stayed with me as no other, the Atlantic. Vivid as this minute, that time of Rob and myself on the Jemmy, down in Steerage Number One, deep there in the hole in the water. The Hahn boys and the three Findlaters and Daniel Rozier and Susan Duff and Davie Erskine also all remembered crossing the ocean to America. I strived to have them make the other pupils understand that feat of crossing, and to hold it in their own minds ever and ever. And got more than I bargained for when Jenny Findlater hesitantly raised her hand and asked if when I was on the ocean, was I scared any?
“Jenny, I was,” I said to Daniel’s smirk and the careful gazes of all the others. “An ocean is dangerous enough to be afraid of. As are the rear hooves of our horses out there, and blizzards, and just a number of things in life. But we try to use our judgment and be afraid only when it’s worth it, don’t we, and then only as much as we have to be. Is that how it was with you, Jenny, when you were on the ocean?” Jenny’s vigorous nod carried me from that trouble.
Thank heaven arithmetic is a neutral country. At least I could put addition and subtraction and multiplication and division into my pupils like nails into a shingle roof, pound pound pound pound. Here was once when old Scotland came back to help me out, for when I had been pupil-teacher under Adam Willox in Nethermuir he made arithmetic my particular topic. They can become literate from me, Angus, and learn to be numerate from you.
So maybe it was numbers alone that kept me, that school year, from ever riding into the Duff homestead and saying “Ninian, start advertising for someone else, this is beyond me.” Instead, day upon day I ransacked my brain for how Adam Willox had done things. Then amended nearly all of that, for Adam never had the situation of the Hahns’ dog Blitzen following them to school and howling by the hour; of keeping track of whose turn it was among the big boys to go to the creek and fill the water bucket; of Einar Peterson’s perpetual tendency toward nosebleed and Jenny Findlater’s toward hiccups; of having to watch for ticks on everyone, including myself.
Of having to deal with Daniel Rozier about the issue of the girls’ outhouse.
A country school such as South Fork was not an individual receptacle of knowledge, it was an educational trinity. You saw all three as you came to where the streambed of the North Fork met that of the South Fork and made the main creek; just upstream within a willow-thick bend, the white schoolhouse and behind it the white twin toilets, girls’ to the left, boys’ to the right. Each waiting to do its duty, they sat there like an attentive hen and two pullets. My problem, or more accurately the girls’ problem, was Daniel Rozier’s fascination with the possibilities of that left-hand outhouse.
It all began with garter snakes. Most of the girls were not normally afraid of them, but go seat yourself appropriately and glance down to find restless green reptiles beside you, and see what you think.
I heard out the girls’ lamentations, and made my threats about what would happen to whomever I caught at snakework. But the Rozier homestead was just down the creek from the school, near enough for Daniel to sneak back before or after the rest of us, and try as I did I never could convict Daniel.
Susan Duff, rather than I, ended the snake episode the recess time when she stormed out of the girls’ toilet grasping a writhing foot-long serpent by the tail, carried it around to the side of the schoolhouse where Daniel Rozier was in a game of ante-I-over, and whapped him across the bridge of the nose with the thing.
Even if she was the avenging figure of justice, Daniel was livid about being hit by a girl.
“SUSAN-DUFF-YOU’RE-WORSE-THAN-SNOT!” he screeched.
“The next snake I find in there I’ll hit you with twice,” she vowed in return.
And so only two of the trinity were standing when I rode into sight of the South Fork the morning after that. The casualty naturally was the girls’ outhouse, flat on its back as a dead beetle. The bad fact now was that even Daniel Rozier at his most indignant wasn’t strong enough to tip over a two-hole outhouse. He’d had help from the other boys. It took Daniel and Davie Erskine and the Hahn brothers, conscript labor all, and me to lift the structure upright.
Two mornings later, the girls’ outhouse was horizontal again.
By then I knew Daniel Rozier was the sort you could punish until he was jelly and he’d still behave the same. Instead, I opened school that day with the observation: “A freak of nature seems to have struck the girls’ outhouse.” Smirk from Daniel to Susan Duff, glower from her to him. “Until it comes along again and puts the toilet back up, chivalry will have to be in force. Who’ll tell me the spelling of chivalry? Daniel, crack at it, please.”
The smirk went and confusion came. “Unngg, ah, is it s-h-o-v-u-l-r-y?”
“Closer than you might think,” I granted. “Susan, enlighten Daniel as to chivalry, please.” Which she did as fast as the letters could prance out her mouth.
“Thank you, Susan. Now the definition, at least in this case. The boys will yield their toilet to the girls.”
Little Freddie Findlater, a lad with a nervous kidney, had his hand up in an instant. “Where will the boys go, then?”
I directed attention to the willow thicket along the creek. “Like Zeus on Mount Olympus, Freddie, all of outdoors is your throne.” Looks were cast toward Daniel Rozier, but the boys sat firm, so to speak, on their outhouse position.
Montana weather being Montana weather, I didn’t have to wait long for the day I needed. Squalls were getting up speed in the mountains as I reached into my cupboard that morning, and by noon hard wind and blasts of sleet shot against the schoolhouse windows.
“My eyes must have been big this morning, I brought more than I can eat,” I confessed during lunchtime. “Daniel, pass those around please,” handing him the big bag of prunes. In groped his paw for the first haul, then the fruit began its fist-diving circle among the other boys.
When the prunes had time for full effect, and boy after boy trooped back in from the bushes as if dragging icicles behind, I decided here was my moment. “I’ve been meaning to ask, how many of you can stay after and put the outhouse back up?”
Where it then held.
• • •
“A coyote can too run faster than a dog, Fritz Hahn.” Jimmy Spedderson’s contention wafted in through an open window as I was at my desk cramming that afternoon’s American history.
“Can’t either. Our dog Blitzen runs after coyotes all the time, see.”
“Your dog can’t catch coyotes! That’s a fat lie. Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
“Didn’t say he catches them.”
“See, then.”
“He’d have to run faster to catch them. What he does is he keeps up with them. So a dog and coyote run the same, see.”
“They don’t, either. After recess we’ll ask McAsker.”
“All right then. McAsker will know.”
McAsker, was I now. It could have been worse.
• • •
For all the daily tussle of schooling, there were distinct times when I wished the rest of the world were made of children as well. I had wondered what some of the community thought of having me as a teacher, and I found out when the first dance of the year was held in the schoolhouse. Just after I had done a schottische with Rob’s Judith, Allan Frew called out to me in a high girly voice: “Angus, aren’t you afraid your petticoat will show when you kick up your heels like that?”
I stepped over within arm’s reach of Allan, which made him blink and think.
“Ask me that outside,” I urged him, “and I’ll answer you by hand.”
That ended that.
Then there was the matter that fists have never been able to settle. Of course it had to be Ninian to bring me word of this, and I give him full due, he looked nowhere near happy to be performing it.
“Angus, this business about the universe being too big to understand and so on. I’m hearing from a few folks that they would like a bit more orthodox
view of things told to their children.”
Of anything to be scanned and poked and sniffed in the making of education, this. So far as I could see I was doing the job of teaching as well as I knew how. Probably better. To have it all snag on a sentence from Carlyle, himself a God-wrestler right in there with the most ardent—it put my blood up.
“Ninian, I can’t get into that. You can say all day long you just want a bit of orthodoxy, but there’s my-doxy, your-doxy, this-doxy, that-doxy. They’re all somebody’s orthodoxy. I don’t notice Willy being here with you. Has he been saying I don’t trot Martin Luther into the classroom often enough? Then there are the Roziers. I can invite the Pope to visit from Rome to please them, too, of course?”
“Angus, I am troubled myself with this. The matter was simpler when we were over across in Scotland.”
“Oh, was it? Then you don’t hold with the fellow who said the history of Scotland is one long riot of righteous against righteous.”
“Now Angus, don’t start.”
“Ninian, you and the others can fill your children with funnels of religion at home, as far as I’m concerned. But I won’t do it for you here at school. If you want a kirk school, then you’d better sack me and find yourself a preacher.”
Ninian by now looked more bleak than I’d ever seen him, which is saying a lot.
“Ay, well. That’s your last word, then?”
“It’s even the one after that.”
“Angus, we will leave this where it was. I have to go and tell them I told you.” The long beard moved on Ninian’s chest as he shook his head at me. “They don’t need to know how hard of hearing you can be.”
• • •
And then there was Rob.
“You know you’re demented to be spending yourself there in the school.” He said it smiling, but I could tell he more than half meant it. “Of course,” he swept on, “that goes without saying, about anyone as redheaded as you are. But—”
“—you’ll be glad to say it for me even so,” I finished for him. “And here I thought you’d be relieved to know there’s a solid mind at the school, what with all the Barclays that seem to be on their way to the place,” I said, Judith being notably along then toward their second child. You had to wonder, with the wives of Scotch Heaven as fruitful as they were, was there a permanent pregnancy that simply circled around among them?
“Solid is one word for it. Thick is another. Angus, man, you’re missing a golden chance by not coming in with Lucas and me on more sheep. With prices down where they are, we can buy enough woollies to cover this country from here to there.”
We. Lucas and thee and his money make three, I thought to myself. But said: “If you and Lucas want to be up to your necks in sheep, that’s your matter. I have all I can handle and still take the school.”
“You’re a contrary man, McAngus, is what you are. Give you bread and roses and I swear you’d eat the petals and go around with the loaf in your buttonhole.” Rob shook his head as if clearing it of vapors caught from me. “You’re missing serious opportunity,” he reiterated, “passing up Lucas’s pocket this way when he has it open. Don’t say I never told you.”
“Rob, I never would.”
“I can only hope you’re saving up your brains to contend with this horse dealer,” Rob switched to with a laugh, and quick as that, the how-many-sheep-are-enough? debate was behind us one more time and he was the other Rob, the sun-bright one. A Saturday, this, and the pair of us were pointing our horses across the divide of Breed Butte and down, north, to Noon Creek. Our mission was a new horse for me, poor old mare Patch no longer having enough step in her for my miles back and forth to the school and out and around our band of sheep when I took them from Rob each weekend—I seemed to use the saddle for a chair anymore. Patch’s plodding pace here beside Rob’s strong roan reinforced my conviction that buying another horse from Dantley’s stable in Gros Ventre would be like throwing the money in the stove, so we were resorting to elsewhere. I say we; Rob was avidly insistent, when I mentioned to him my rehorsing intention, that Patch’s successor be a partnership horse. Angus, man, you’ll be using him on the band of sheep we own together, so it’s only logical I put up half the price of him. He can be the horse of us both, why not. In fine, going in with me on the purchase of the horse was Rob’s roundabout way of helping me to juggle the school along with the homestead and the sheep, without having to say out loud that it was something worth juggling. Maybe the right silences are what keep a friendship green?
Isaac Reese’s horse ranch was as far up Noon Creek as mine was along the North Fork, comfortably near the mountains without having them squat on you. As we approached the place Rob now asked, “Do you know this geezer Reese at all?”
“Only by hearsay.”
Isaac Reese, long-mustached and soft-eyed, had been issued the right face for a horse trader, for he showed no twitch of anticipation when I stepped off the Dantley nag as if I was a plump hen seeking a chopping block. When I told him my purpose, he only asked in some accent my ears were not prepared for: “How much horse?”
I took that to mean how much was I willing to pay for a horse, and began the sad hymn of my finances. But Isaac Reese meant what he said. He studied me, eyeing my long legs, and judged: “You vant about him high,” holding his arm out at a height considerably more lofty than the back of old Patch.
Plainly this was a man who knew horses. What else he knew was as unclear to me then as his version of English, which had Rob covering a smile as he witnessed our conversational free-for-all. By common report, this Isaac Reese was a Dane who alit in America as a penniless teamster—likely about the time of Rob and me ourselves, for he looked to be only a few years older than us—and soon had horse crews of his own at work on the railroad that was being built north of the Two Medicine River. My bet is that he learned his English, to call it that, from someone else who didn’t speak it as an original language. It was Isaac who made famous a Noon Creek winter day when the temperature rose from twenty below to zero by observing, “Der t’ermometer fall up dis morning.”
What Isaac Reese led out for me was a high horse, no question about that. A tall young gelding of a strong brown color odd in a horse, remindful of dark gingerbread. Maybe Rob and I were no great equinists, but at the wheel shop in Nethermuir we had seen enough horses pass through to fill a corner of Asia, and with a quick look at each other we agreed that here was a strikingly handsome animal. Both of us stepped closer to admire the steed and began companionably rubbing his velvet neck while I asked Isaac: “What’s his name?”
“Skorp Yun,” Isaac informed me. That had a pensive homely Scandinavian ring to it, and I was on the verge of asking what it translated to. When it came clear to me, and Rob at the same instant.
Both of us stepping with great promptness back to where we had begun, I gulped for verification: “His name is Scorpion?”
There ensued from Isaac a scrambled-egg explanation that the horse was titled not for his personality but for the brand on his right hip. Rob and I looked: yes, a spidery long-tailed script M brand—. Isaac’s explication of the brand sounded to me as if the horse originated on a ranch which belonged to the Mikado. Later Lucas clarified that the was the mark of the Mankato Cattle Company in North Dakota, and No, Angus, I wouldn’t know either what a Mankato horse is doing six hundred miles from home, nor would I ask into the matter as long as I had a firm bill of sale from Isaac.
There in the Reese corral I cast a glance at Rob. Studying the big brown horse gravely, he told me: “It’s your funeral, McAngus.” But I knew from the way his head was cocked that he would be pleased to own half of this lofty creature.
While I was making up my mind about Scorpion, Isaac Reese was eyeing my colossal saddle on the Dantley nag. He inquired dubiously, “Do you came from Texus?”
“No, not quite that bad. How much do you want for this fanciful horse?”
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flo
w gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream—
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Songtime in the schoolroom each week hinged on whatever Burns was in my mind just then and wherever Susan Duff’s fine clear lilt led us. Neither premise was much my choice. But a thousand hymns had built Susan a voice, even I had to admit, and I’d found it was like pulling teeth to draw song suggestions from my other pupils, even though the schoolyard often rang with one chant or another. Children are their own nation and they hold their anthems to themselves. Ritually, though, I tried to pry music out of them:
“You’re like a school for the mute today. Now who’ll tell, please, what we can sing next?”
“I know one, Mr. McCaskill,” piped Davie Erskine, standing and swallowing a number of times. Here was surprise.