by Ivan Doig
“Angus, Robert, have you lost your ears?” came the next call from Ninian. “It’s afternoon recess. Time to take a rest halt and sharpen your blades.”
“Work is all the whetstone we need, Ninian,” Rob answered in gulps of breath as he clipped rapidly around his sheep. I saved air and wordlessly labored ahead on my own wether. The Sheffield shear in my hand still felt nearly as sharp and gliding in its clipping as when we’d started.
Here now was the famous card in the hat, the bone for the craw of those Frews. Now we were gambling, Rob and I, that by forfeiting the stop to rest and sharpen we could gain enough sheep to offset George and Allan’s skill and speed. The thought was that by keeping stoplessly at it we might just eke in ahead of them—one sheep, a half a sheep, any portion of a sheep would be pure victory—by the end of the day. The thought was that Barclay and McCaskill were hardy enough specimens to withstand a recessless afternoon. The thought was . . . I tried not to think further about our forfeit of blessed rest.
From beside the skreeking grindstone Allan Frew hooted to us. “You pair had better hope your fingernails are sharp, so you can use them when those shears get dull as cheese.”
“Up a rope, Allan,” Rob gritted out, sulphurous for him, the rest of that phrase involving an unlikely hydraulic feat by Allan.
We sheared like fiends. Meanwhile George and Allan with apparent unconcern went on with their blade-sharpening, interrupting to refresh themselves with swigs of water, which from Allan’s lip-smacking testimonial you would have thought was the king’s brandy.
At recess end, Archie announced the new tally: “Rob and Angus are ahead by three sheep.” I thought I saw Allan’s eyebrows lift a fraction of an inch at that, but immediately he was mauling wool off a sheep and George was, too, and Rob and I set ourselves to be chased.
But across the next hour the Frews not only did not catch us, they gained only a sheep and a half. With one last hour of sheep left, that pace by both pairs of us would make the outcome as narrow as a needle. Rob was shearing valiantly, even-steven with George’s implacable procession of fleeces. I wasn’t faring that well with Allan, or rather my hand wasn’t. Going into this day I thought my hands were hard as rasps, toughened by every kind of homestead work since I took off my winter mittens months before. But shearing is work of another magnitude and I was developing a blister the size of a half dollar where the haft of the Sheffield shears had to be gripped between my thumb and first finger. Between sheep I yanked out my handkerchief and did a quick wrap around my palm to cushion the blistered area—Allan seemed to gain half a dozen swooping strokes on me in just that time—and then flung myself back to shearing.
In the effort of that final hour, I swear even my mustache ached with weariness. My shearing arm grew so heavy that the labor of dragging each fresh sheep from the catch pen was perversely welcome. Even through the wrap of the handkerchief I could still feel the hot blotch of pain that was the blister. And I noticed Rob lurch a little—yes, you can imbibe too much work just as you can too much liquid leisure—in his trips past me to his catch pen. Our salvation was that the Frew cousins were having the blazes worked out of them, too, challenged more mightily this day than they had ever been before.
The afternoon and the supply of sheep drew down together. Our audience beyond the shearing floor had not uttered a word for many minutes. The snick of four sets of blades was the only sound now. I thought maybe Adair would enjoy seeing a real shearing contest. She was seeing, right enough, Rob. Nethermuir eyes were going to get a Montana education this day, if it killed me. Which it just maybe was about to.
Finishing with yet another mammoth sheep, I lurched groggily to my catch pen. The fog of work was so heavy in me that I had an instant of muddle when wool did not meet me everywhere there in the pen. Only one sheep, looking defiant and terrified and indignant and piteous, was there. Rob’s pen next to mine was empty. George’s next to his was empty. Allan’s had one sheep left.
Dear God. This close. This far.
I sucked breath. Grabbed the lone last sheep and dragged.
As I burst out through the woolsack curtain with my sheep, I saw Allan hurl past me to catch his final wether.
I had mine’s head shorn and was working desperately along the top of his back when I heard the coarse slicing sound of Allan’s blade go into action.
“Good, good, Angus,” from Rob with hoarse glee. “You’re almost there, man. Just keep on and you’ve got it made.”
My yearling seemed vast, long as a hog, enough wool on him to clothe an orphanage. Sweat streamed into my eyes. My hand seemed to work the clippers without me.
I turned the sheep for the final side. Only moments later, I heard Allan grunt as he turned his own sheep.
Now I had to do this just so.
Hand, keep your cunning. Do as bid. Slow yourself just enough, while seeming to speed for all you are worth. Work less than you know you can, aching faithful hand, for the first time this day.
As my shearing hand was performing its curtain scene, the tail of my eye caught a movement of Allan’s head—he was throwing a desperate glance to see how much wool was left on my sheep. I met his eye with mine, and did what I could not have resisted for a thousand dollars: I gave Allan the briefest instant of a wink. And then nearly regretted it, for it made him falter in surprise between his mighty strokes with the shears. But hand, you were in on the wink, too, you were ever so little less busy than you made yourself seem, and now, there, cut air instead of wool, now the fleece again, what little is left, drive the blades but not too—
A scrape of steel on steel. No wool between in that noise. Allan’s shout of it, “Done!”
As his word finished in the air, my own blades shaved free the last of my wether’s fleece.
I stood up, as far as my outraged skeleton would let me, and met the face of supreme disappointment that was Rob.
“Angus, Angus,” he shook his head in a mix of consternation and commiseration. “I’d have bet every nickel that lummox wasn’t going to catch you on that last sheep.”
“You’d be on your way to the poorhouse if you had, then,” I managed to provide, trying to look properly downcast. Now that we were being joined by the Duffs and Erskines and Findlaters and Lucas and Nancy and Judith and most of all Adair, I spoke out with what I wanted in all their minds and that last one in particular: “Did you ever see a man shear the way of that Allan? He can’t be beat, I’m here to tell you.” I caught the instant of regret, condolence, in Adair’s gray eyes as I waved widely to my conqueror. “Come over here, man. Let me shake that hand of yours.”
Which I did, blister and all, with the last shred of fortitude in me. Allan by then had convinced himself he hadn’t seen a wink from me, I must have been merely blinking sweat from an eye, and by the time I found an excuse to get away from the throng, much was being made of him, not a little of it by himself.
And so it went later, too, at the dance that put away Leftover Day for another year, where I assiduously romped the floor with Judith, with Flora Duff, with Jen Erskine, with any and everyone other than Adair. Not that I maybe had to be that circumspect, for by then she was being squired to the hilt by Allan.
Dearest Anna—Although they are no competition to a certain lovely product of Brechin, I can tell you that a few thousand ewes and lambs do provide absorbing company. In point of fact, they absorb time from me as if it was water and they were sponges. One minute the band will be grazing on the mountainside as peaceful as picnickers and I think to myself, now here is the way herding is done—the sun mothering the fresh grass, the ewes butting and nuzzling their lambs in an epidemic of affection. Then the next minute, reality intrudes when one of the rearmost sheep is spooked by her own shadow, she bolts in alarm, alarming the next few around her, they race pell-mell into the others, and before I can say an appropriate word or two, the tail-end of the band is wrapped around its lead, a sudden colossal knot of sheep . . .
Dear Angus—Here where we are is
called the High Line, in deference to the Great Northern as the northernmost, “highest,” of railroads. The towns along the railroad have been named out of a gazetteer: Havre, Malta, and such. Considerably eastward there is even a prairie version of Glasgow. . . .
Try as I did to give them their due for scenery and the healthy hermit life, the days of that mountain summer were merely stuffing between the too-short time Anna and I had had together and the rest of our life together that would begin in autumn. In telling her goodbye, I made her pledge that we would write copiously to each other throughout the summer. “A number of times a day,” I stipulated earnestly. “As often as possible,” she concurred, and with one last kiss—remarkable how much more a kiss means when the two of you have done all it promises—we had gone our ways for the vast months of summer.
Dearest Anna—I have been doing my utmost to make this a monumental summer. By now I have built several of them—sheepherder’s monuments, cairns about as tall as I am, to serve as landmarks and boundary points between the area of the mountain where I graze my band and the one where Rob is herding his wethers. So, Miss Noon Creek Schoolkeeper, the topic is history: did old Alexander McCaskill, stone mason of the Bell Rock, ever have the thought that a great-grandson of his would be piling stones into miniature towers in far America? . . .
Dear Angus—It would be gratifying to tell you that I can look out from this cook tent to the distant Rockies and imagine you there at work on your monuments, but the actuality is that the mountains are not within sight from this section of the High Line. All is prairie here. This is quite another Montana from your Scotch Heaven or my Noon Creek, and I wonder how many Montanas there are, in all . . .
Everything of life we ever find or are given ends up in the attic atop our shoulders, it is said. I have no cause to doubt it. During those high summer weeks my head stored away new troves all the time. My final season alone, this. The point at which the trade was to be made, my solitary wonderment at life and where it was taking a person, for becoming half of two. You, I’d say, need the right partner in this old life, Angus. You spoke it first, Lucas, and now it was on its way to happening. Even after the marriage there would be the everlasting astonishment of how Anna and I had coincided, from a handful of miles apart in Scotland, where we had not met and may well never have, to coming together in this far place. And now there would be McCaskills derived of Nethermuir and Brechin. I could imagine waking beside Anna every morning the rest of our lives and gazing at her face and thinking, how did this come to be? And then she would blink awake—
“McAngus, do you let a visitor onto your cloud?”
Rob had ridden so near he could have tossed his hat onto me, that noontime in early August, without my noticing.
“Some of us are intent on our flocks,” I maintained, with a gesture to my band serenely shaded up in a stand of lodgepole pine, “while others of us have nothing better to do than go around sneaking up on people.”
“A choir of geese could sneak up on you these days,” he said with a mighty smile down at me.
I doubted that he had ridden all the way across the mountainside just to test my alertness. No, he admitted, he saw this as an errand of mercy. He had come to see if I wanted to take a turn at camptending. “Man, from the look of you, you’d better go down for air,” Rob urged.
Well, why not. The day’s ride down to Breed Butte and back up with a pack horse laden with our groceries would stir the blood around in me, right enough. When I told Rob I’d do it, he suggested with a straight face that I take along a second pack horse for my High Line mail.
When I rode in to Breed Butte that next day, it didn’t take a bushel of brains to figure out that mine wasn’t the only well-being Rob had in mind when he suggested I come instead of him. Ordinarily Judith wasn’t the kind to get nettled unless she sat in them. But one look at her told me she had been storing up opinions for Rob about his absence from the homestead’s remorseless summer tasks. All she said to me—it somehow sounded like a lot more—was: “How quick will you two be bringing the sheep down?”
“Another three weeks,” I proffered as if it was overnight, and began lugging groceries out of range of her. And almost waltzed over Adair, coming up onto the porch as I was starting to step off it.
“Hello you,” I sang out brightly, and received a lot less than that in exchange. As I went on over to the pack horse, she stood on the porch steps and watched.
“So. How are you liking this country of ours by now?” I asked her across the yard.
“It’s—different,” I heard back.
“Getting acquainted some, are you, with this Scotch Heaven tribe?”
“A bit.” Not exactly bright as a bangle, a report of that sort. I sallied on anyway:
“Seen or heard anything of our champion shearer?”
Those gray eyes of hers sent me a look as direct as a signpost. “Angus,” she said levelly, “you know as well as I do that Allan Frew is stupid as a toad.”
I made my retreat from the Breed Butte garrison of women and headed gratefully back to mountains and sheep. The Barclays. What an ensemble. Rob ought to have his head examined for plopping Adair over here from Nethermuir in the first place. It would be saner all around when she wrote off this visit of hers as one of Rob’s follies and returned to Scotland at summer’s end. Well, I at least had done what I could to pair Adair with a Montana mate, so long as it wasn’t me. I couldn’t help but agree with her about Allan Frew, though.
• • •
The last day of August, down I came from the mountains with fat lambs and plump profit everywhere in front of me, and beyond those the precious prospect that waited for me at Noon Creek. As soon as the sheep were putting their noses to the first bouquets of grass on the slope above my homestead, I aimed Scorpion north as fast as he could trot. On hunch, I went not to the Ramsay place but to the Noon Creek schoolhouse. With the beginning of school so near, I’d have bet hard money, Anna, that you would be readying your classroom. And I’d have won, three times doubly. I patted your sorrel saddlemare rewardfully as I stepped past and toward the schoolhouse door.
“Is this where a person comes to learn?” I called in.
You turned around from the blackboard so quickly your braid swung forward over your shoulder, down onto the top of your breast. “Angus! They said you were still in the mountains, I wasn’t expecting you yet!” I’ll tell you again now, that braid was the rope to my heart.
“Yet?” I answered. “It’s been forever, whatever the calendar says.” I went to you and held you at arm’s length and simply looked, drank you in. Your gaze was steady on mine, then you put your face against my shoulder. “You look as if the mountains agreed with you,” you said warmly. After my summer of not hearing it, your voice was as rich as a field of buttercups.
“They were good enough company, but I desperately need to hear a Brechin voice.”
“You do, do you.”
“I do. And I want it to tell me every minute of itself since I last heard it, back in Napoleon’s time.”
“That’s an extravagant expectation,” you said, giving me the half-smile.
“A mighty word, extravagant. What’s the spelling for it? Write it for me, Miss Noon Creek Schoolkeeper.”
“You are the Angus McCaskill who can read the air, are you? We shall see.” You began tracing lovely maneuvers of alphabet before my eyes.
“An unfair advantage,” I protested. “You can’t expect me to read your old word backwards.” I moved around behind you, peering down over your right shoulder, my cheek against the black silk of your hair, my hands along the twin bone thresholds so near to where your breasts began. “Now then. Write your utmost, Anna Ramsay.”
You stood stock-still. Then, “Angus . . .”
Suddenly what we were saying to each other was with lips, but words were nowhere involved. Our kissing took a wild blind leap. The next thing I knew my lips had followed your neck down, the top of your dress was open and the feminine un
dergear was somehow breached—your breasts were there, bare as babes, and I was kissing the beautiful whiteness and twin budding nipples. Your hand was under my shirt, your fingers spread and moving back and forth on my spine.
I looked up at you and your other hand came to my face, to the corner of my mouth. You looked intent, Anna, ready to say something. My urge was to keep on with the kissing and the divesting of clothing, and yours evidently was, too. But instead, “Angus, we can’t. Not—not here.”
“We can,” I answered gently. “And sooner or later we will. But for now just let me hold you.” Your hands hesitated where they had begun to close the front of your dress; and then they were clutching my back again, the two of us snug together, just being there clasped. We rocked gently against each other or the schoolroom floor was swaying on a gentle tide, we didn’t care which. Out of my spell of sheer happiness I heard myself say: “Talk, we were mentioning. It seems to me a poor second-best to this, but yes, let’s talk some more. I’ll even begin. Anna, marry me now.”
I felt you tighten even more against me. the twin globes of your breasts wonderful in their pressure. You said into my shoulder: “I have to tell you, Angus, you’re not the first to ask.”
“I suppose not. If the male half of the world has any sense at all, it’s been trooping to you in regimental file with that question since you were the age of twelve. But Anna, love, first isn’t what I had in mind—I just want to be the last.”
While I was saying it all you pushed yourself just far enough away to look me in the eye. You didn’t smile, not even the half-smile I loved so. “Isaac has asked me.”
I nearly chuckled and asked how many words of how many different tongues he did it in. But your face stopped me. Lord of mercy, Anna, had you been so overkind as not to tell Isaac Reese outright no?
“Angus,” you said.
“Angus,” you said, “I’ve told Isaac yes.”
• • •
I rode away doomed.
Not around Breed Butte toward home, because I could not face the new everlasting canyon of emptiness waiting for me there. Down the Noon Creek road toward Gros Ventre I reined Scorpion. In ordinary times it was a pleasant straight-as-a-rope route along the benchland, roofs of the Noon Creek cattle ranches below, but this day I wouldn’t have given them a glance if they were the castles of the moon. The tatters that were left of me had all they could do to cling there onto Scorpion’s back, hang in the saddle and be a sack for the disbelief. Angus, Anna saying, there in the schoolhouse and endlessly in my mind, I am fond of you, I enjoy you. You know I find you attractive—the memory of her open dress came into the air between us. You know how we were, Angus, that last night there in your schoolroom. I have to tell you. Isaac and I have been that way together all this summer. The moment of pause as that news pierced every inch of me. Then even worse words. Angus, I’m afraid it’s Isaac I feel actual love for.