by Ivan Doig
Grant Adair a good high mark, she did about as well as could be done with the situation. “Coachman,” she eventually ventured to Rob with only a minimum tone of embarrassment, “are there any conveniences at all along this route of yours?”
He looked startled and cast hurriedly around for a coulee. There was one about half a mile ahead, which he promised her. “They’re, ah, they’re of an airy construction in this neighborhood.”
When we reached the brow of the coulee and I stepped off to help Adair down from the wagon, I saw her nipping her lower lip against having to ask the next question. That fret at least I could spare her. “No snakes in this grass,” I assured her.
“Except,” I began on Rob the instant Adair had passed down from view, “maybe one major one. Just out of curiosity, Mister Rob, how long have you had this little visit of Adair’s in the works?”
“Not all that long.”
“Not all how long?”
“Not long at all.”
“How long is that?”
“Angus, I don’t carry a calendar around in my hand.”
“No, anyone with your armload of schemes of course couldn’t. Just tell me this: you thought it up back this spring before I met Anna, now didn’t you?”
“Angus, Angus. Which would you rather hear—yes, no or maybe?”
I could have throttled him there on the wagon seat. An instructive scene for Miss Adair Barclay of Old Scotland when she came up out of the coulee, mayhem on the wild prairie. “Your idea was to get Adair over here and marry her off to me, wasn’t it?”
“If it worked out that way, I wouldn’t mind, now would I. Though I do have to say, Angus, your attitude this afternoon is starting to make me have second thoughts about you as a brother-in-law.”
“For God’s sake, man! Do you think you can just take lives and tie them together that way?” Whatever his answer was I didn’t give him a chance to polish it and bring it out. “At least why didn’t you let her know about Anna and me? Why’d you let Adair come, after that? Now here she is, looking at me the way a kitten looks at her first mouse, and there’s nothing in it for her.”
“You and Anna, that did arrive as a surprise after I’d already written to Adair,” he admitted. “But who knew, maybe you’d fall off a horse and come to your senses.” Rob must have seen the incitement that was going to bring down on him, because he quickly put in, “Just joking, Angus. Man, I know how you feel about Anna. It’s written all over you six inches high. But if you’re not the one for Adair, there are other possibilities wearing pants in this world, aren’t there. What harm can it do to bring her here for the summer and let her find out what her prospects are? You and I found our way out of that used-up life over across there. Adair deserves the chance, too, doesn’t she?”
“Damn it, Rob, her chance at life here is one thing. Her chance at me is totally another. You’re going to have to tell her that.”
“And I will, I will. But just let me get the girl home to Breed Butte in peace, can’t you? Is that so much? Whup, here she comes, looking improved. You could stand to, too, do you know.”
The dusk began to catch us as we came down into the broad bottomland beside Badger Creek, and we quickly chose a willow-sheltered bend with the trickle of the creek close by. In the slow sunset of that time of year, the mountains stood out like silver-blue shards of rare stone. The western half of the sky was filled with puffy clouds the same shade as the mountains, but with their bottoms ember-lit by the setting sun.
“Angus and I ordered that up special for you,” Rob was quick to assure Adair.
“You’re a pair of old profligates then,” she retorted, gazing at the emberglow sky and the miles and miles of mountains.
We rapidly made a fire of our own, for Montana has a chill in its night air even in summer.
“You ought to have seen where Angus and I spent last night,” Rob now at suppertime was reporting to Adair, about Toussaint’s household. “The crowd there was enough to make you thankful this prairie is so empty.”
“This isn’t as empty as it looks,” I put in purely out of peeve at Rob. “We’re camped near history here.”
Rob cocked his head and peered into the last of the dusk. “What color is it, Angus, I don’t seem to see it.”
“Actually it ended up red,” I said, “which history seems to have a bad way of doing.”
“You mean the man Lewis that Toussaint was on about?” Meriwether Lewis. Do you know of him, Angus and Rob? He was a bad sign for these Blackfeet. Came up the Marias, looking. Came to the Two Medicine, looking some more. There where Badger Creek runs in, he found something, do you know. These Blackfeet. Eight in a party, horse takers. Lewis and his were four. Lewis smokes the pipe with those Blackfeet, nothing else to do. They all camp together that night near Badger and Two Medicine. “Adair, this one,” Rob inclined his head toward me, “will teach at you day and night if you don’t watch out for him.”
She was watching me with curiosity. “Lewis was the first white man to explore through here,” I tried to explain. If she was here to taste Montana, she had better be aware of its darker flavors. “He and another led a group across this part of the country almost a hundred years ago. Burke? Not quite it. Clark, that was the other with Lewis.” In the night, do you know, the Blackfeet grab guns from Lewis and his three. Everybody fights. These Blackfeet knew how to fight then. But Lewis and another get their guns back. BOOM! One Blackfeet dead. BOOM! One more Blackfeet dead. But they say that one combed Lewis’s hair with a bullet first. The rest of the Blackfeet ran off, go away to think it over a while. Lucky for Lewis they did, or maybe no more Lewis.
“McAngus,” Rob proclaimed, “you’re a great one for yesterdays.”
“They’ve brought us to where we are,” I retorted with an edge to it. Noticing Adair blinking at this session between Rob and me, I toned matters down a bit. “But Rob’s right, you didn’t come across the ocean for a history lesson, did you.”
“No, it’s all interesting,” Adair insisted. “Go on, Angus.” But go on to what. I gave a lame version of Lewis and the Blackfeet struggling in the night, then shrugged. “Toussaint has it more or less right, this reservation we’re on grew out of that and these Indians have had to give way ever since.”
“To the likes of us,” Rob intoned. “Peaceable men of attainment, in pursuit of cream separators.”
A round of laughter for that which I made myself join, promising Rob a time soon when he would have to laugh out the other side of himself. But then Adair said: “So much land here, and”—she sent me an apologizing look—“so empty. It’s hard to think of men killing each other over it.”
“A great mighty struggle,” Rob said solemn as a knell, “with two casualties.”
“I suppose they died as dead as any,” I observed to him. Man at war is maggots’ meat/dished up in his winding sheet. Adair at once sided with me—but then she’d have to, wouldn’t she, I reminded myself—chiding Rob, “What if we were the Indians and they were us? Who’d be joking then?”
“Anyway it wasn’t the Battle of Culloden, now was it, you two,” Rob closed off that direction of conversation. “Angus, have you ever seen anything like this grass up here. If we could ever manage to get sheep onto this, we’d have found the front gate to heaven.” He was not wrong, the grassland of the Blackfeet reservation indeed was a grazier’s dream. Led by Rob, our talk turned now to the Two country’s prospects this bountiful year, our prospects as sheepmen. There but not spoken were also Adair’s prospects as a Montana wife, although I doubted those more and more as I watched her try to keep a brave face to this overwhelming land.
Eventually bedtime, and Rob telling her, “The lodgings are simplicity itself, Adair. Ladies upstairs”—he indicated the wagon, with its bed of robes—“and others downstairs.”
As we settled in for the night, a coyote sent its song to the moon. “We hired music for the occasion, too,” Rob said up through the wagon to Adair.
“Cayus
e,” we heard her try very softly to herself. Then: “Coyote. Rob, Angus,” she raised her voice, “is our serenade coming from a coyote?”
“Nothing else,” we assured her, and then the night went still, as if the song dog had simply come by to test whether Adair could name him.
I had just begun to drowse when Rob’s snoring started. Then came a cascade of giggles overhead, and my own grudging laughing as I was reminded of so many other nights of Rob’s nose music, from the steerage bunks of the Jemmy to now.
I moved where I lay so that my head was out from under the wagon and spoke softly upstairs to Adair, “You ought to have heard him when the pair of us were on the old ocean. He drowned out the whales and all other challengers.”
“Do you remember our tall narrow house, Angus?” I did, although I had not thought of cramped River Street in a long while. “When I was little and sleeping in the gable room, I would wake up and hear Rob sawing the dark below me and know that nothing had carried us off during the night,” she said fondly.
And now he’s carried you off here, under a misapprehension at least as big as any Scottish night. But I said only, reassuringly, “He’s vital here, too. We need him to give singing lessons to our coyotes.”
She giggled again, then went quiet. I was remembering now that first vast black pit of Montana night when Rob and I started for the Two Medicine country with Herbert and his freight wagon, six, no already seven years before. This time of year Adair at least ought to be safe from waking into a snowstorm as Rob and I did, although in Montana you couldn’t be entirely sure ever. I hoped, too, that she would not be too hurt by the disappointment of this “visit,” this bedamned misbegotten matrimonial outing Rob had got her into; I hoped that this Adair would find at the end of the dark the life she wanted, as I had now that Anna was in my life.
To be saying something in that direction without alarming Adair, I brought out: “None of this is exactly Scotland, is it?”
“No. But then I thought that’s why you and Rob are here.”
“Goodnight then, Dair Barclay.”
“Goodnight yourself, Angus.”
• • •
The next day’s miles went back and forth between fleet and slow—the team and wagon urged snappily toward home and Rob’s confession to Adair whenever it was my turn at the reins, lapsing into a determined saunter whenever Rob held them. At whichever pace, our passenger between us in her clothes of Scotland and her larklike smallness looked like someone unexpectedly being carriaged along the banks of the Congo. But true to yesterday Adair still responded avidly to any word I said, on those occasions when Rob managed to gouge one out of me, and that was what led to it.
Rob had the reins when we came south out of the cattle-spotted hills of Double W rangeland to the shallow valley of Noon Creek and that strange bold view of Breed Butte, so gradual but so prominent, ahead on the divide between this valley and Scotch Heaven’s, and Rob would not have been Rob if he hadn’t halted the horses to begin extolling his homestead pinnacle there to Adair. She seemed to be listening to her brother a thousand percent, but suddenly she was pointing west along Noon Creek to where two small white dots and a less small one stood out. This Adair had eyes that could see. “Angus, there. Is that your schoolhouse?” she asked as if already deeply fond of it.
“No,” I answered, not looking toward her, not looking toward Rob. “No, that one is my fiancée’s.”
All but true, that word fiancée. I propped it up with the others I had been wanting to say into the air all of this journey from the depot. “Her name is Anna Ramsay. We met early this spring.” In me, And I love her beyond all the limits, but Adair did not need that added to this necessary revelation. At the tail of my eye I could see her make herself hold steady, make herself keep that defending look she had had when she first saw this land of raw mountains and unpeopled vastness. From beyond Adair I could feel Rob’s hot dismayed—betrayed?—gaze on me. But fair is fair, square is square, Rob. I had waited with it until we were within sight of home, I had held it in despite every doubt about when and how and if and whether you ever were going to say it to Adair yourself.
“Why, Angus,” Adair managed, after a long moment. “I hadn’t heard.” Nothing was ever more true. “Congratulations to you. And her.”
The source of guilty silence beside Adair spoke now in a strained version of Rob’s voice, “Our lad Angus has had a busy spring.”
Past that as if it never existed, Adair queried: “When is the wedding then?”
“We haven’t named the date,” I responded, and explained the circumstances of Anna’s absence. “But at summer’s end.”
“You sound so happy,” spoke Adair. Then again: “Congratulations to you.” Plucky. Every Barclay ever made was that.
Done and done, at least my part of it.
“Rob,” I said innocent as a choir note, “hadn’t we better move on to Gros Ventre? Adair has yet to meet Lucas.”
• • •
Apprehension comes in various sizes, and Rob had his next quantity of it by the time we came down off the benchland to Gros Ventre and could see past the trunks of the cottonwoods the sky-blue sign proclaiming MEdLCINE LOdGE.
“Adair, I’d better tell you,” from him as if this was a hard day in the business of telling, “Lucas is not quite what a person expects an uncle to be.”
Adair gave him a look of what next? “You mean because of his hands? But we at home have known about that for years.”
“No,” answered Rob, “I just mean Lucas.”
• • •
“So now Montana can boast another Barclay!” boomed Lucas when Rob fetched him out of the Medicine Lodge. I swear, Lucas had figured out the situation to the last zero, just by the look on Rob’s face, and for Dair’s sake was being twice as hearty as usual. “Come down here for a proper hug, lass!” and she did, stepping gamely from the wagon into an embrace between Lucas’s arm stubs. “Adair, welcome to Gros Ventre,” he bestowed on her with enough hospitality for several towns this size. “By Jesus—excuse my Latin—you can’t know how pure glad I am to lay eyes on my very own . . . niece!”
If Lucas hadn’t been facing down the street toward Wingo’s; if his last word hadn’t shot out with an unexpected ring as the years of habitual talk about Wingo’s “nieces” chimed in him; if Lucas hadn’t started roaring, I never would have laughed. And Rob wouldn’t have reddened into resemblance to a polished apple if it hadn’t been for the uncontrollably chortling two of us.
Adair blinked in mystification.
“Nothing, nothing, lass,” Lucas assured her. “Just a private joke. Maybe Robbie can explain it to you when he has time, ay, Robbie?”
There ensued a fast stew of family chitchat, ardent questions from Lucas and mettlesome tries at response from Adair and infrequent mutters from Rob, which I carefully stayed out of. If I knew anything by now I knew that the Barclays were going to be the Barclays, and the rest of the race may as well stand back.
“Now you have to come around to the house,” Lucas ultimately reached, “and meet Nancy.”
“Nancy?” responded Adair, further bewildered.
“Sometime, we can,” Rob inserted rapidly. “But we need to head home just now, Angus and I have chores and more chores waiting.”
“No matter.” Lucas waved an arm stub that Adair’s eyes could not help following. “We’ll be out to see you shear next week. It’s past time all of us in the sheep business got a chance to watch something that’ll make us money instead of taking it from us. We can have a Barclay gathering and welcome you proper then, Adair. In the meantime, make this awkward squad treat you right.”
• • •
“And how is Adair taking to Scotch Heaven?” I sweetly asked that famous matchmaking brother of hers a few days later when he and I had to begin readying the sheep shed for shearing.
“Fine, fine,” Rob attested stoutly. “She’s having just a fine time.”
“Getting used to the wind, is she?�
�� I asked with solicitude. The last of our wagon journey home from Gros Ventre after Adair’s niecehood coronation by Lucas had been into a bluster which steadily tried to blow the buttons off the three of us, and at the creek crossing sent Adair’s sunhat sailing. I had gallantly held the team’s reins while Rob waded to retrieve the hat from its port of willows fifty yards downstream.
“She never even notices the old breeze any more,” Rob responded, and impatiently waited for me to lift my end of the next shearing-pen panel to be carried into place.
“I imagine seeing shearing will be a major thrill for her,” I went on, straight as a poker but enjoying myself immoderately, “don’t you think?”
“I’m sure as anything it will,” responded Rob as we grunted and carried. “And that reminds me of a thing,” he galloped to the new topic, “the Leftover Day. I’m going to keep back a bunch of yearling wethers for it, enough to make a real day of shearing. Why don’t you pair with me?”
This startled me twice at once. First, that Rob was asking me to pair-shear, so soon after making myself less than popular with him by unfurling my news of Anna to Adair before he could prepare. But one of the problems of a partnership is the difficulty of staying steadily angry at someone you have to work side by side with, and I supposed Rob’s peeve at me simply had worn out in a hurry. The further unexpectedness, though, was that Rob intended a big event of what was usually merely the do-whatever-is-left-to-be-done final day of shearing. It of course had been Ninian Duff, back when we all entered the sheep business, to discern that if we ourselves did the last odds and ends of shearing—the lambless ewes who hadn’t borne that spring, our bellwether Percy and the handful of less fortunate wethers destined to be mutton on our own tables, the crippled sheep and the lame sheep and the ill sheep and the black sheep, all the “leftovers” there ever are at the fringe of raising sheep—if we ourselves did Leftover Day we saved a full day of paying the hired shearing crew. Too, Leftover Day had come to be not just the finale of shearing but also as much of a bit of a festival as you can make from an occasion such as the undressing of sheep, with four of us taking up the wool shears ourselves, and the rest of Scotch Heaven to wrangle the sheep remnant and provide commentary. But this was new, that some of Rob and Lucas’s fine healthy yearling wethers would be in with the hospitalers and other raggletaggles of Leftover Day.