by Ivan Doig
Given the basis that Isaac Reese headed the Noon Creek board as Ninian did ours, I couldn’t let pass the opportunity to declare: “Now there’s the way for a school board to operate.”
Ninian broadly ignored that and stated, “When you find a spare moment, Angus, you would do well to stop by the schoolhouse over across there and offer hello. Our schools are neighbors and it would not hurt us to be.”
“Maybe not severely,” I had to agree, and now Scorpion and I were descending from the divide between our valleys to Noon Creek, a prairie stream twice as twisty as the North Fork ever thought of being. Scorpion was pointed to the country where I bought him—the Noon Creek schoolhouse was within easy eyeshot of Isaac Reese’s horse ranch—and I wondered if he held horse memories of this stretch of territory. “Skorp Yun, lad, what about that?” I inquired of him and patted his rich-brown velvet neck. Scorpion’s ears twitched up and I suppose that was my answer, as much as the horse clan was willing to tell a man.
A quick how-do here and home was my intention. This school-house was much like mine—for that matter, so was its attendant pair of outhouses—except for standing all but naked to the wind, Noon Creek providing only a thin sieve of willows instead of the South Fork’s broadback clumps of cottonwoods. Ask any dozen people passing and thirteen of them would tell you my school site was the obvious superior.
Pleased with that and armored with the thought that, however howlingly formidable Mrs. Battle-Axe Ramsay might try to be, I was the senior teacher hereabout, I tied Scorpion beside the Noon Creek teacher’s horse and strode to the schoolhouse.
“Hello, anyone,” I called in, and followed my words through the doorway.
A woman did look up from the teacher’s desk. A woman whose shoulders drew back nobly and whose breasts came out nobler yet. A woman my age or less. A woman with the blackest of black hair done into a firm glossy braid, and with perfect round cheeks and an exactly proportionate chin and a small neat nose, and with direct blue eyes. A glory of a woman.
She granted me an inquiring half-smile, the rest of her expression as frank as a clock. “Hello,” she enunciated, although what was being said was And What Is Your Business Here, If Any?
I told her me. And made about as much impression as a mosquito alighting on a stone fence.
“I am called Anna Ramsay,” she stated in return, and I was going to need to ask Ninian what he thought a battle-axe talked like. Hers was a liltful voice which may have paused in Canada but only after fully flowering in Scotland.
“I’m the teacher at the South Fork school, over across, Mrs. Ramsay,” I hurried to clarify.
“I am the teacher here,” said she, “and it is Miss Ramsay.”
Rob, Lucas, my unhearing father, my sorrowful mother, all who have ever known me, and generations yet to come: did you feel any of this catchbreath instant together with me, this abrupt realization in the throat that said here was the end to all my waiting, this surprise swale of time while I traced step by step back to the brain of Ninian the Calvinian? Ninian Duff had told me Mrs. Ramsay was an old battle-axe. He had told me the new Noon Creek teacher could stand a cordial look-in. He had never bothered to tell me those two formulations did not add up to the same person.
“Yes, well. Miss Ramsay, now. I, ah, seem to have been misinformed,” I understated. “In any case, I came by to say hello”—her look told me that had been more than amply done by now, and not in ribbon-winning fashion—“and to see if there’s any help I can offer.”
“That’s kind,” she decided. “But I know of none.”
In that case, Miss-not-Mrs. Ramsay, help me and my dazed tongue. What do you think the price of rice in China will reach? And are you the absolute lovely thing you appear to be under the crust?
“I’m trying to place your voice,” I managed, true enough in its way: trying to coax the sound of it into my ears for as long as possible. “Your town in Scotland is—?”
“My town was Brechin.” Brechin! Not all that far from my own Nethermuir, in the same county of Forfar. The magic that life is. She and I must have grown up sharing the same days of sun, the same storms from the sea.
I at once told her of my Nethermuir nativity, which did not noticeably set her afire with interest. “This Montana is different from old Scotland, isn’t it,” I imparted.
She regarded me steadily as ever. “Yes.”
“Although,” I began, and had no idea where to head from there.
“Mr. McCaskill, you’ve just reminded me, there is one matter you may be able to help me with.” Anything, anything. Wheelbar-rowing a mountain from here to there. Putting socks on snakes. “I find I’m in short supply of Montana geography books. Mr. Reese promised me more, but he’s away buying horses.”
“I have loads extra,” I offered as fast as I could say it. Later would be soon enough to calculate whether or not I actually had any. “You’re more than welcome to them.”
Anna Ramsay shook that matchless head of hers, but in general perturbance at men who would see to horses before geography, rather than at my offer. “I’ve had to put the pupils to making their own.”
I was as flummoxed now as a duck in thunder. “You’ve—?”
“Yes, they’re a bit makeshift but better than nothing,” she said, and gestured to the stack of them at the corner of her desk. They were pamphlets of as many colors as a rainbow, bound with yarn, with My Montana Book and each pupil’s name bold on the cover. More than just that, the pamphlets were scissored into the unmistakable shape of the state of Montana, twice as wide as high and the entire left side that curious profile of a face looking down its bent nose at Idaho. I opened the pamphlet proclaiming Dill Egan, grade four, to be its author. Intently—not only was I curious but I was not going to forfeit this opportunity to hover in the near vicinity of Miss Anna Ramsay—as I say, intently as I could manage with so much distraction so close, I started through the pamphlet pages. PRODUCTS OF MONTANA, and Dill Egan’s confident map of where gold, copper, cattle, sheep and sundry grains each predominated. AREA AND POPULATION OF MONTANA, 147,138 square miles and 132,159 persons respectively, and his enstarred map showing Helena, Butte, Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls, Billings, Miles City and the now twenty-four county seats. MOUNTAINS OF MONTANA and another map showing the western throng of ranges, Bitterroot and Cabinet and Garnet and Mission and Flathead and Swan and Tobacco Root and on and on until the Little Rockies and Big Snowys outposted the eastern majority of the state. DRAINAGES OF MONTANA and yet another map of all the rivers and what must have been every respectable creek as well, with the guiding message The Continental Divide separates the Atlantic and the Pacific slopes of America. MINERALS OF MONTANA. RAILROADS OF MONTANA. I had a sudden image of this brisk, beautiful woman beside me as the goddess of geography, fixing the boundaries of this careless world as unerringly as Job’s prosecutor or even the U.S. General Land Office. Anna Ramsay’s ten-year-olds all too evidently knew more about Montana than I did. Every one of them a Crofutt in the bud.
I swallowed hard. I took a look around me. High on the blackboard behind us was chalked the majestically handwritten single word:
Other than it, the blackboard was not only freshly cleaned, it shone black. The best I could scrape together to remark was: “Your chalk keeps talking after school, does it?”
“Yes, that’s tomorrow’s word in the air,” she explained. “I write a different one up there for each day. That way, when the pupils’ eyes go wandering off into air, they at least are looking at how one word of the language is spelled.”
“A sound principle,” I vouched sagely, wishing I’d thought of it the first day I stepped into my South Fork classroom. Contemplate the miracle of chilblain spelling itself, even approximately, into the mind of Daniel Rozier. My eyes moved on from the blackboard. Her schoolroom gleamed like the Queen’s kitchen. This Miss Ramsay seemed to be a stickler about everything.
“You, ah, you were a teacher in Scotland, were you?” I entirely unnecessarily asked.
“In a dame school, back in Brechin.” It seemed to me a magnificent beneficence when she tilted her head ever so slightly and decided to add: “As you say, this is different.”
I wanted to sing out to her, so are you, so are you. I wanted to hang Ninian Duff from a high tree by his beard. I wanted to go back out that schoolhouse door, turn myself around three times, and start this anew. I wanted—instead I managed to draw in enough breath to clear my head and free up my tongue: “I’ll fetch the geographies to you. Tomorrow, I even could. And if there’s anything else whatsoever you need—”
“Mr. Reese will be back from his beloved horses any day. It is his job to see that I have what the school needs.” Again that first half-smile of hers and the simultaneous clocklike frankness, in which I desperately tried to discern a momentworth more of warmth than when I arrived. “Mr. McCaskill, I do appreciate that you came.”
“It’s been my pleasure, Miss Ramsay.”
• • •
Riding home, I was the next thing beyond giddy. Scorpion must have compassed his own route around the west shoulder of Breed Butte and down to my homestead, or he and I would be circling there yet.
Astonishment. That was my word in the air. The coming of dusk was an astonishment, the last of this April day coloring a blue into the gray of the mountains as if sky had entered rock. My homestead was an astonishment, in expectant welcome there beside the North Fork like the front porch to the future. The greening grass, the dabbed yellow of buttercups, the creek rattling mildly over smooth stones, the rhythm of Scorpion’s hooves against the earth, the everrestless air of the Two Medicine country traveling over my skin, the pertinent Burns: my heart was caught/before I thought, astonishments all. For that matter, I was an astonishment to myself, how fertile for love I was. Is this life? Just when you have lived long enough to think you know yourself, behavior such as this crops out?
But the braided marvel that touched alive all these others. Anna Ramsay. Where, really, did I stand with her, after an acquaintance that would have barely boiled an egg? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know how to know. Thunder tumbling out of an absolute clear sky, was the way this had fallen on me. The one certainty I held was that the women I had met in my life so far were no training for this one.
Oh, I tried to tell myself whoa and slow. And by the time I’d cooked supper twice—my first try burned conclusively—I had my self half-believing I was somewhere near to sane again. Steady, Angus, don’t rush in brainless. For that matter, Miss Anna Ramsay did not look anything like a person who tolerated rushing.
But I did go to bed with the thought that tomorrow, nothing known on earth could keep me from delivering those geography books to her.
• • •
“This was kind of you”—she, even more glorious on second inspection. “To make the ride over here so soon again.”
“Not at all”—myself, earnest without even trying. “If one schoolkeeper can’t lend a hand to another schoolkeeper, the world is a poor place.”
Just over Anna’s head as she stood behind her desk was her blackboard word for today, accommodate, which for the first time in my life I noticed contains more than one m.
“Mr. McCaskill, before you go”—I had no thought of that—“I do have something further I wonder if you might advise me about.”
“Miss Ramsay, if I can I will. What?”
“How do you keep the big boys from playing pranks that have to do with”—she never blinked—“the girls’ outhouse?”
With teacup delicacy I outlined to her the curative effects of the boys having to go in the brush. Throughout, she regarded me steadily. Then she swung to the schoolroom window and studied the willow supply along the creek. As I watched her at this it came to me that she was very much a practitioner of the Scottish verdict, Not Proven, this Anna Ramsay. Guilty or Innocent could stand on either side of a matter until their tongues hung out, but she was going to do justice firmly from the middle ground of proof and nowhere else. I also stored away forever the fact that her braid gloriously swung almost all the way down her glorious back.
Evidently she judged the Noon Creek willows ample to their duty, sufficient thatch of them to screen a boy but not enough to thwart the chilly seeking nose of the wind, for she turned around to me and nodded with spirit. “Yes, that should do it. Thank you for that advice, Mr. McCaskill. Well. I have grading—”
“As do I,” I put in, as accommodating as can be imagined. “But now there’s a question I need to put to you. I’ve visited your school, and I’d much like you to visit mine. We’re holding a dance, Saturday next week. Could I see you there?”
She grew as intent as if I’d thrown her a major problem in multiplication. “It’s early to say.” Seeing my hope plummet, she provided me a half-smile to grapple it back up. “But possibly—”
“I could come for you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Oh, no trouble.”
“But it would be.” She was looking at me a bit askance, as if wondering how a grown man could not see that an extra stint on horseback equaled an inconvenience for himself. Anna Ramsay plainly could out-teach me in spelling and geography, but there was at least one variety of arithmetic she didn’t yet understand.
“I’m sure others from Noon Creek will be attending,” she elucidated for me, “and I can come with them.”
Come in a congregation, come by your lovely lone self, come dog-back or come in a purple carriage with wheels of gold, but just come. Aloud, I granted: “A sensible solution. I’ll see you at South Fork then, on the night.”
• • •
When I went to the lambing shed to relieve Rob that evening, he greeted me with: “And how is life among all you schoolkeepers?”
Already. The way news flew in a country with so few tongues to relay it, I never would comprehend.
Stiff as a poker, I retorted to Rob: “You seem to know at least as much about my doings as I do.”
“Angus, Angus. Just because there’s a fresh path worn this deep”—he indicated to his knee—“between the South Fork school-house and the Noon Creek schoolhouse, I thought I might inquire.”
“Well, you’ve done.” But I couldn’t stay miffed where Anna was concerned. “She needed a bit of help on a geography matter.”
“Geography,” Rob mused. “That’s the word for it these days, is it.”
“Rob, aren’t you on your way home to supper?”
“You’re certain sure you know what you’re getting into with all this geography business? From what I hear, Miss Noon Creek is a bit of a snooty one.”
I was outraged. “Speaking of snoots, you can just keep your own damn one out of—”
“All right, all right. If you’re not in a mood to hear wisdom, you’re not.” The words were light enough, although behind them Rob still seemed peeved. But a day in overshoes in the muck of a lambing shed will do that to a man, and he sounded thoroughly himself when he went on: “Probably this is nothing you’ll find near so interesting as geography, but Lucas brought out word today that wool is up to 121/2 cents and lambs are climbing fine, too. This is the year we’ve been looking for, man.” Rob had it right, the world and its price of wool and lambs was not what I wanted to think about, only Anna. However far gone he thought I was down romance’s knee-deep road, he didn’t know half of it. I was Anna dizzy, in an Anna tizzy. These days there seemed to be fresh blood in my veins, brewed by the maker of harem potions. But the relentless fact of Anna always in my mind also startled me constantly, if it can be said that way, and I will admit that it was a bit scaring, too.
At the end here of what I thought was perfectly normal lambing shed conversation, Rob cocked his head and asked: “Are you off your feed this spring, McAngus? You’d better come by and let Judith tuck a few solid suppers into you.”
I said I would, soon, whenever that was, and Rob gave me one last askance glance and departed.
• • •
You could
have counted the next ten days on my face. I went from remorse at how long it would be until I laid eyes on Anna again, to fevers that I wouldn’t be prepared when I did. One morning I was gravely giving arthmetic when Susan Duff pointed out that I already had done so, not an hour before. And I suppose all my South Fork pupils were startled by the onslaught of Montana geography that befell them.
One thing I did know for dead-certain, and this was that my schoolhouse was going to be grandly ready to dance. At the close of class that Friday I prevailed on Davie Erskine to stay after and help me, and we moved the rows of desks along the walls and pushed my desk into a corner. Davie took out the stove ashes while I filled lanterns and trimmed wicks. There never has been a boy enthusiastic about a broom, so I next swept the floor myself in solid Medicine Lodge swamping style and put Davie to wiping the windows with old copies of the Choteau Quill.
“But Mr. McCaskill, it’ll be dark out, why do the windows need to be clean?”
“On account of the moonbeams, Davie. You’ve got to let the moonbeams in on a dance, or people’s feet will stick to the floor. Did you not know moonbeams are slick as soap, Davie?”
Davie gaped at me as if I already was askate on moonbeams, but he did the windows fine. Next I had him wash the blackboard, then fill our bucket with fresh drinking water from the creek. I swept and hummed, dusted and hummed, I even straightened the pictures of George and Abraham and gave them each a hum of joy, they always looked as if they needed cheer.
“Do you know this old tune, Davie?” I asked, for it seemed to me an impossibly dim prospect that anyone should go through this wonderful thing, life, knowing only songs of Texans and horses. “You don’t? That’s odd, for it seems to be addressed to you.”
“Me?”
“Surely. Listen to it.”
Dancing at the rascal fair,
try it, Davie, if you dare,