by Ivan Doig
“We will strive,” she answered.
“It’ll not be easy. Much of the music of the world got used up here tonight.”
“We will dust off any that’s left, you needn’t worry. By now I know you are not a man for standing.”
“There, you see? A mere few hours in my schoolroom and you’ve already learned a thing.” Her parents were waiting at the door, I was drawing heavy looks from that mother of hers.
“Well. Goodnight, Anna,” I finally had to say.
“Yes.” A bit slow from her, too, I noted with hope. “Goodnight, Angus.”
But before she could turn, I blurted: “Anna, I’d like to call on you.”
That direct look of hers. “Then why don’t you?”
• • •
A fly buzzed uselessly against the window of the Ramsay parlor, herald of my audience thus far with Anna’s parents.
“So, Mr. McCaskill, you too are of Forfar,” speaks the main dragon. “That surprises me.”
Margaret Ramsay, mother of Anna, looked as if she could outgeneral Wellington any day of the week. A drawn, bony sort of woman with none of Anna’s adventurous curves, she seemed to have room in herself only for skepticism toward the male race. Beside her sat probably her prime reason for that. Peter Ramsay was a plump, placid man who sat with his hands resting on his belly, the first finger of his right hand gripped in his left, in the manner a cow’s teat would be grasped. Ready to milk one hand with his other and evidently content to spend a lifetime at it. It stretched my imagination several ways beyond usual, as to how these two beings could have made Anna.
I was trying to be extra careful with my tongue, but: “I’d be interested to know, Mrs. Ramsay, in what aspect I look so different from other Forfar folk. My face, is it? I should have put on my other one.”
If vinegar can smile, Margaret Ramsay smiled. “Of course I meant surprised to find someone else from Forfarshire so near at hand here in Montana.” She paused a mighty moment to let me comprehend the utter justice of her viewpoint. Next she needed to know: “You were schooled where?”
“At a Venture school in Nethermuir.”
“I see. Anna and I both matriculated from the dame school in Brechin.”
“So I understand.” I am a famous scholar, see./ Graddy-ated and trickle-ated, me./ I’ve been to Rome in Germany /and seen the snows of Araby. I swallowed that safely away and put forth: “Education is the garment that never wears, they say.”
“And what of your family?”
I looked squarely at her. “Dead,” I said.
Margaret Ramsay regarded me. “I mean, of course, what of them in life.”
My father the ironhand, encased in his deafness; my mother the mill worker; myself the tall alone boy treading the lightless streets of old stone town Nethermuir . . . try sometime to put those into parlor speech. Anna was interested and encouraging—Anna could do me no wrong—but it was uphill all the way, trying to tell of the wheelshop years.
Sun lightened the room a half-minute, cloud darkened it, the day’s weather restlessly coming and going up there on the divide of the continent. This Ramsay place all but touched the mountains. Until humans learned to hang to the side of a crag with one hand and tend livestock with the other, here was as far as settlement could go. I hoped these Ramsays knew what they were in for when winter’s winter, which is to say January and February, howled down off the Rockies onto them. From where I sat I could look right up into the granite face of Jericho Reef through the curtain, the window where the fly was haplessly zizzing.
“You’ve seen the Bell Rock lighthouse,” I thought of abruptly, “off from Arbroath?”
“I passed it close on a schooner once,” spoke Peter Ramsay, his most extensive contribution to that day’s conversation. “Surprising.”
Well, he didn’t know the half of it yet. I began telling of Alexander McCaskill of the Bell Rock. Of his day-by-day fear of his ocean workplace, of his daily conquer of the fact that a boat is a hole in the water. Of he and the other Arbroath stonemen encircling the engineer Stevenson as the first foundation block of the lighthouse was laid and its dedication recited, May the Great Architect of the Universe complete and bless this building. Of the fog-pale day the boat did not come and did not come, the floodtide rising to take the Bell Rock, dry-mouthed Stevenson drinking poolwater like a dog to try to say bravery to his men, the random pilot boat at last. Of the three-year materializing of the round beacon tower there beside the verge of Scotland, a single bold sliver of brightwork in the sea. And if the impression was left that my great-grandfather had been the right hand of the colossal Stevenson throughout that feat of bringing fire to the sea, I didn’t mind.
“Interesting,” granted Margaret Ramsay. “Interesting indeed.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” Anna said when it came my time to go.
Air was never more welcome to me. Whoof. Picklish Meg Ramsay was going to be something to put up with. But Anna was worth all.
As soon as we were out of sight around a corner of the house, I put her hand on the back of mine and urged, “Quick, give me a pinch.”
She lightly did and inquired, “And what was that for?”
“I needed to be sure my skin is still on me.” Anna had to smile. “You did well. Even Mother thought so, I could tell.”
“Well enough to be rewarded by my favorite teacher?”
Anna let me kiss her. Not as boundlessly as I wished, but amply enough for a start. Then she gave my arm a squeeze, and went back to the house.
• • •
A recess soon after that, I stepped from my classroom into the mud room for something from my coat. The outside door had been left open, and in from the girls’ field of play was wafting the clear lilt of Susan Duff.
The wind and the wind and the wind blows high,
the rain comes scattering through the sky.
He is handsome, she is pretty,
boy and girl of the golden city.
I smiled at all that brought back, song of every schoolyard in Scotland. I bent to my coat search and hummed along as Susan sang on.
The wind and the wind and the wind blows high,
the rain comes scattering through the sky.
Anna Ramsay says she’ll die
if her lover says goodbye.
That took care of my humming. What was coming next verse, I could guess all too definitely.
The wind and the wind and the wind blows high,
the rain comes scattering through the sky.
A bottle of wine to tell his name—
Angus McAsker, there’s his fame.
I wondered whether everybody on this cheek of the earth knew the future of Anna and me except the pair of us. Maybe it was time we found out, too.
• • •
Those next honeyed weeks. Anna and I, as spring wove itself around us in leaf and bud and the recess-time sounds of scamper by our unpenned school flocks. In mid-May the dance at her schoolhouse, where it all but took a pardon from the governor for anyone other than myself to be permitted a whirl on the floor with Anna. Evenings, as many as we could possibly find, of kissing and fondling and the talk that was the spring air’s equivalent of those. And before I was even done wishing for it to happen, the momentous gift out of the blue, the departure of those parents of hers. They went north with Isaac Reese and a great aggregation of his workhorses—Anna said it was like seeing a lake decide to move itself, the flow of manes and the slow patterned swirl of the herd—for a summer of building railroad crossings and plowing fireguard strips along the route of the Great Northern Railway. Peter Ramsay, wherever he hid the knack for it, was to be Reese’s horse tender, and Anna’s mother was to cook for the crew of teamsters. The single bit of grit for me in this fine news was that it encompassed Anna. As soon as school was out, she was to go up and join her mother as second cook. “This is our chance to get something ahead at last,” she told me frankly of the rare Ramsay bonanza of three good wages at once. As I was to
do much the similar myself by going into the mountains with my and Rob’s sheep, there was no arguing the case, really. I put aside pangs about a summer apart as best I could and concentrated on gaining every possible moment with Anna until then.
When May granted us its last Saturday night and the end-of-school dance at my schoolhouse, it was a roaring one even for a South Fork event, as if everyone was uplifted by the green year grinning at us. The hour went to late and then rounded midnight into early, and jigged on from there.
When the dance at last called itself done at nearly three in the morning, I was to see Anna home—we were a lovely distance past that essential rung of the courting ladder—as soon as my schoolhouse had been set to rights.
“Swamping is to sweeping what whaling is to fishing,” I was enlightening her as I displayed my broom style.
“And where were you so fortunate as to learn the art of swamping?” she asked from where she was closing and locking the schoolroom windows. Lovely, to see that woman stretch to the window locks, her braid swaying free as a black silk tassel when her head tilted back.
“There’s a standard answer to that among swampers,” I informed her, “which I’ll take refuge in: ‘At my mother’s knee and other low joints.’ ” This in fact wasn’t a time when I particularly wanted to recount Rob and me arriving into the Two Medicine country and my subsequent career in the Medicine Lodge. I had seen again tonight what I’d begun to notice at the other dances, that while Anna plainly prized Lucas for the rare specimen he was, she was impervious to Rob. I knew I was going to have to sort that out at some soon point, but for now it merely seemed to me Rob’s hard luck.
She turned enough from her chore to throw me a bright frank look. “I do have to say, Angus, history has a strange ring to it in your schoolroom.”
Broom and I veered to her, and I leaned down and kissed her quickly but thoroughly.
“Is this part of swamping?” she wanted to know.
“When it’s done right.”
Banter and chores went along that way together as they should, until the South Fork school was tidier than it had ever been and the one task left was to take down the coal-oil lanterns from their ceiling hooks. I stood on a chair to reach each one down to Anna, and finally I was down myself with the last lit one, so we could find our way out to where our horses were tethered.
All night until then I had not bothered to see anything beyond Anna, so the moonbeams at the windows and across the schoolroom floor shone new to me. “Let’s not go out just yet,” I suggested to Anna before we were at the door. “We need to study this.” I turned out the lantern and we were in the night’s own soft silver illumination. In the moonwashed windows of the schoolhouse, the wooded line of the creek loomed like a tapestry of the dark. Above the trees stood the long level rampart of benchland between the North Fork and Noon Creek, and above that firm horizon flew the sky, specked with the fire of stars.
After a minute Anna uttered, “This country can be so beautiful, when it tries a little.”
With my arm around her and the moon’s exhibition in front of us, she seemed in no hurry to go. I was in none myself.
“Anna,” I began, trying to find how to say it the best possible, better than anyone had said the great words before, “I want to marry you. More than I’ve ever wanted anything, I want that. Will—”
Her fingers stopped my lips, as if they had come to trace a kiss there. “Angus, wait. Please. Wait with that—that question.”
“Anna, love, I’ve been making a career of waiting.”
“You’ve certainly waited in a hurry where I’m concerned,” she maintained lightly but seriously. “We’ve only known each other a little more than a month.”
Forty days! I thought indignantly, but let her go on. “What I really mean to say”—rare difficulty for her, making real meaning known—“you don’t know me all that well. The person I’d be for you, I mean, Angus, for the rest of your life.”
“You can let me worry about that.”
“You don’t show any sign of making an effort at it,” she said gently. “You seem to regard me as the first woman you’ve ever seen.”
“That’s more or less the case,” I vouched.
“Angus, we can see at the end of the summer. You know I need to go be with Them”—my term for her mother and father—“for this summer, and you have your own obligations with your sheep, don’t you.”
“Woman,” I said to her as if she truly was the first, the only, of the species, “let’s say to hell with the obligations and go get ourselves married. Right now, this very morning. We’ll point the horses toward Gros Ventre and go roust the minister out of bed. The man’ll need to climb out soon anyway to fluff up his sermon. Anna, what do you say?”
Do you know, for a long moment I almost won her to that. I could feel the halt of all she had been setting forth until now, the stop of her thought as this new proposal opened, enormous as the future, before her.
But after that teetering moment:
“I have to say life isn’t that simple, Angus. It’s a stale way to say it, but there are others we have to think of.”
“Anna, just tell me this. While you’re being dutiful daughter this summer, will you think about what I’m going to ask you the instant you get back?”
“Yes.”
“Yes!” I shouted and the reverberation yes . . . es . . . es filled the darkened school. “Do you hear that, world? Miss Anna Ramsay knows the word yes!”
“You great gowk,” she laughed, and this time laid a single finger across my lips. “They’ll hear you everywhere along the creek.”
I kissed that finger of hers three times and proclaimed: “I hope they hear it down in China. I hope every ear there is knows now that at the end of the summer I have this romantic prospect to cash in—”
“Cash in?” She gave me her half-smile, her straightforward way of teasing. “Is that your idea of the language of romance?”
“—and that this timid maiden—”
“Timid! Angus, you are absolutely—”
“—will have spent her every spare moment rehearsing the word yes! and come to the not illogical conclusion that having said it once in her life, she can say it again. And again and again and again, as many thousand times as I ask her to be mine.”
She was looking at me bright-eyed, half ready to burst into even more laughter, half ready to fondly kiss me or be kissed. We could catch up on the laughter in our old age. I reached her even closer to me.
The darkness, the moonsilver, the night-morning that was both and neither, the two of us a chime of time together and yet about to be separated for an abyss of months; maybe because everything including ourselves was between definitions just then, bodily logic began to happen. Our kisses asked ever more kisses. Our clothing opened itself in significant places. Hands and lips were no longer enough.
I whispered huskily to Anna wait—entire new meaning to the word she had so recently used—and went out to Scorpion and fetched my sheepskin coat that was tied behind the saddle and then the coat was under us, us, on the schoolroom floor. I undid more of her dress while she was slowly and wonderfully busy at my neck and back with her arms, hands, fingers. Wherever I caressed her skin it was white elegance. Except where the bold twin pink nipples and their rose circles now bloomed.
You unforgettably feel the ache, the sweet ache. The deliciousness of thighs finding their way to thighs, the soft discovery of her body’s cave place, the startling silkiness my hand was stroking there at the join of her, the curly tangle and stalk where her hand was searching out my own center. There was no eyes-closed mooniness: we were both watching this.
“Anna,” my voice thick. “If I’m the first, you know this may hurt a bit.”
“It won’t,” she spoke with surprising clarity.
Atop the piled softness of the wool coat we moved as slowly as we could hold ourselves to. Anna knew things. I was not the first. I didn’t care. I was the one now. Her eyes into
mine. Mine into hers. All below, our locket of bodies. Slow was far too wonderful to last, now my straining to touch her as deep inside as love can thrust, her clutching to gather me in, us and the husking cries from our throats mingling.
• • •
After, I felt perfect. It seemed the perfect echo of the delirium we had just been through to murmur in a fond gabble to her beside me on the coat, “They must be wondering in China what’s going on up here with the two of us this morning.”
Anna laughed and perfected it with a gentle poke of me. “You do have to admit, it’s unusual behavior even in a schoolroom of yours.”
“I wish it was absolutely customary,” I said, and kissed between her perfect breasts.
• • •
An evening of middle June, Rob poked his head in on me. “Angus, sharpen your ears. I’ve a proposition for you.”
“It’d be news if you didn’t.”
“Now don’t be that way. I’m here to offer you an excursion, free gratis for nothing, and all you have to provide is your own matchless self for company. What this is, I’ve to go up to the railroad—Judith’s new cream separator came in by train. Ride along with me in the wagon, why not. It’s our last chance for an outing before we turn into shearers and sheepherders.”
Rob was expansive these days because commerce suddenly was. Prices of wool and lambs had sprung back to what they were before all the buckets fell in the well of 1893. With their abundance of wethers to be shorn, Rob and Lucas were looking at a real payday ahead, just as my lamb crop would raise me to comfort; to where I wanted to be for Anna and me to begin our married life.
I said my first thought: “Why don’t you just have the next freight wagon bring the thing?”
“That’d be weeks yet, and I want this to be a surprise for Judith. I’m telling her you and I are going up to talk sheep with the Blackfeet Agency people. Come along, man. You’ve been keeping yourself scarce everywhere but Noon Creek. See some more of the world for a change. This’ll be the ride of your life.” Rob smiled that blame-me-if-you’re-heartless-enough-to smile of his. “Well, maybe not quite. Men,” he pulled his chin into his neck for the croaking tone of the freighter Herbert seven years before, “there’s no hotel like a wagon. Warm nights your room is on the wagon—”