by Ivan Doig
Before Rob’s fury found a next tangent, the forest ranger went along us from face to face with his eyes. “But none of what we been saying so far here today goes through the alphabet all the way from A to Why, does it. I’ve told you what the national forest is gonna be, you’ve told me what you think about it. Seems to me we both better take a look at just why I got sent here to make the Two Medicine National Forest.”
I shifted drastically in my chair, not just for the exercise. Was this going to work? Was I several kinds of a fool for abetting Meixell as I had? The night after my visit to Lucas in town, another visit, this one in the lambing shed after supper: Stanley Meixell appearing again where Varick and I first laid eyes on him. Found your note under my door, Angus. I almost hadn’t gone to the Northern and left that message, when I announcedly got up from Lucas and Nancy’s table to go harness the team for our drive home to Scotch Heaven. Yet I did, yet I had to make the effort to give Stanley the words, the thoughts, for fitting this national forest onto the Two Medicine country with as little woe as possible to all concerned. My words to him there in the lantern light of the shed, that the national forest was actually the pattern of homesteading, the weave of land and utility, writ large: lines of logic laid upon the earth, toward the pattern of America. A quiltpiece of mountains and grass and water to join onto our work-won squares of homestead. The next necessary sum in trying to keep humankind’s ledger orderly. Those words of mine, Stanley’s tune of them now to listening Scotch Heaven: “I guess you’re all familiar with the term public domain. It’s the exact same bunch of land you were all able to homestead on . . .” Land, naked earthskin. America. Montana. We can be our own men there, the Rob of then to the me of then. Maybe so, maybe no. What can you have in life, of what you think you want? Who gets to do the portioning? Stanley’s voice going on, low, genuine: “The national forest is a kind of pantry for tomorrow, for your youngsters when they grow up and inherit all this you’ve got started . . .” In the lambing shed as Stanley and I met, our one witness: Varick. Your mother doesn’t need to know about this, son; one more item put into that category, sorry to say. But Rob and Lucas already were more Barclays than any sane man ought to have to contend against, without an Adair salient, too. I hated for Varick to see me sneak. But I wanted him there that night, to absorb whatever he could of the words of the land as Stanley and I knew them.
“My life maybe don’t count up as much in years as some of yours, but I been quite a number of places in it.” No one of us in his audience could doubt that. Stanley definitely had the look of a man with a lot of befores in his life. “Every one of those places,” he went on, “I seen some pretty sad behavior toward the country.” I watched him twice as carefully as I had been. There was none of me in these words, this was undiluted Stanley now. “I used to ask people about that. What was gonna happen when the land wore out. And they always said that when they’d used the country up, they’d just move on. But I don’t know of anything you can just keep on using up and using up and using up, and not run out of. And that’s all the Forest Service is saying with this Two Medicine National Forest. You can use it, but not use it up.”
The schoolroom was quiet. Stanley was finished with that part of the task. But now the next.
I wanted not to be the one to ask it. Yet no one else was. I would have to; Stanley had to have the chance to answer. Before I got my mouth to agree, though, I heard my intended words coming out of Lucas:
“What about cattle? Do your grazing allotments take in the fact that cattle eat grass, too?”
“I guess I know what you got on your mind, Mr. Barclay. Its initials are Double W, ain’t they.” Stanley paused to gather his best for this. “I went and did some riding around in the mountains, taking a look at the ground wherever the snow was off. Trying to figure out for myself just what the country up there can carry. How many sheep. And how many cattle.” There’s one thing you’ve utterly got to do, my last words to him in the shed those nights ago. Somehow prove you’re going to put a rein on Williamson as well as on the rest of us. If you’re going to have people of Scotch Heaven accept the notion of this national forest, prove to them it’s not just going to be another honeypot for the Williamsons of the world. Prove it to me, for that matter. And Stanley easing away then out of the lantern light, saying only, Been a interesting evening. Good night, Angus, and thanks. And to the watching boy not much higher than our waists: My pleasure one more time, Varick. Now I waited with the rest, waited for proof.
“Arithmetic never was my long suit,” Stanley was saying unpromisingly. “But I do savvy that old formula, which I guess all of you know better than I do, that you can run five sheep on the same ground it takes for one cow. Now, each of you in this room has got a band of a thousand sheep, by yourself or in partner with somebody”—here a Stanley glance along the line from me to Rob to Lucas—“or whatever. So, the fairest thing I can think of to do is what I went ahead and did. Let Williamson know I’m allotting him a grazing permit the equal of a band of sheep. Two hundred cows.”
A massive thinking silence filled the schoolroom.
Stanley spoke again. “If it’ll help your own arithmetic along any, I figure he’s been running a couple of thousand cows up there the last summer or so. Fact is, I came across some bald places around springs and salt licks where it looks like he’s been running a couple million.” Came across such places, yes, with my guidance. It would take a man weeks to ride an inspection of those mountains, and Stanley had had only days; I’d cited him chapter and verse, where to see for himself the overuse and erosion from Williamson cramming the land with Double W cattle. “Manure to your shins, and the grass worn away just as deep,” as Stanley was saying it now. “I asked our friend Williamson about behavior like that. He told me any overgrazing up there was done by you sheep guys. I kind of hated to have to point out to him I do know the difference between cowflops and sheepberries when I see them on the ground.”
Ninian now, starkly incredulous—it was worth being here today just for this. “Ay? Am I hearing you right, that you’ve already instructed Williamson you’re cutting him to just two hundred head of cattle in those mountains?”
“Yeah.” Stanley peered out the window toward the mountains, as if for verification.
“And then—?” demanded Ninian.
“Some other stuff got said, is all. Mostly by him.” Stanley still studied the mountains. “As long as I’m the ranger here, though, he ain’t gonna get treated any different than the rest of you.”
Now Stanley Meixell looked out among us.
“None of us needs any more trouble than we already got,” the man at my desk with a face older than himself offered. “For my part, I can always be worked with if you just keep one thing in mind. It’s something they”—the jerk of his head eastward, to the invisible church of the Forest Service in Washington—“claim President Roosevelt himself goes around saying. ‘I hate a man who skins the land.’ ”
Deep silence again. Until Stanley cleared his throat and said: “Just so we all know where we’re coming out at here, can I get a show of hands on how many of you go along with the idea of grazing allotments the way I intend to do them?”
I raised my hand.
No other went up.
Indecision was epidemic in the room. Stanley had said much sense. But the habit of unrestricted summer grass, the gateless mountains, the way life had been for the two decades most of these men had put into their homesteads, those said much, too. Skepticism and anger and maybe worse weren’t gone yet. I could feel Rob’s stiff look against the side of my head. My hand stayed lonely in the air, and was getting more so.
Then, from the other side of Rob:
“Will a slightly used arm do?”
Lucas’s right sleeve, the stub barely showing out its top, slowly rose into the air.
The next assent that went up was that of Ninian Duff. Then Donald Erskine’s hand vaguely climbed. Archie Findlater’s followed, and George Frew’s, and A
llan Frew’s. Until at last Rob’s was the only hand not up.
The expression on Rob was the trapped one of a man being voted into exile. I felt some sorrow for him. The horizon called Montana was narrower for Rob after today.
But you never wanted to be too quick to count Robert Burns Barclay out. As if by volition of all the other assents there in the air, Rob’s hand at last gradually began to rise, too. For better or for worse, in trepidation and on something a bit less than faith, all of Scotch Heaven had taken the Two Medicine National Forest for a neighbor.
• • •
There was not a one of us who stepped out of that South Fork schoolroom into the spring air and put a glance to the mountains of the new Two Medicine National Forest who didn’t think he was looking at a principal change. But those of us that day weren’t even seeing the first wink of what was coming. In the next few years, change showed us what it could do when it learned the multiplication table. Change arrived to the Two Medicine country now not in Stanley Meixell’s mountain realm west of us but onto the prairies everywhere to our east, it arrived wearing thousands of farm boots and farm dresses, and it arrived under the same name we ourselves had come with, homesteaders.
Overnight, it seemed, the town Lucas had always said Gros Ventre was going to be was also arriving. But it was arriving twenty miles away, at a spot on the prairie which had been given the name Valier. A town made from water, so to speak, by a company fueled by water. Irrigation was the word wetting every lip now. The waterflows coursing from the Rockies would be harnessed as if they were clear-colored mares, and made to nurture grainfields. Dam to canal to ditch to head of wheat was going to be the declension. And soon enough it began to be. Scotch Heaven simply watched, because the valley of the North Fork was narrow and slanted to the extent that only a smidgen of hayfield irrigation could be done, or, honestly, needed doing. But a water project such as the one around the townsite called Valier, seventy-five thousand acres of irrigation being achieved and homesteaders pouring off every train, was reason enough to rethink the world and what it was quick becoming.
Yet you have to wonder. If someone among those prairie homesteaders, Illinoisan or Missourian or Belgian or German, if some fareyed soul of 1908-9-10 who had come to plaid himself or herself into this Montana land could have taken an occasional moment to watch Scotch Heaven, would even we up here have seemed as fixed in a rhythm of life as we assumed we were? Riffle through us in those years, and you find Scotch Heaven’s first automobile—Rob’s Model T Ford. See now, McAngus, I haven’t laid eyes on one of these contraptions yet that has a wheel worth the name. But the thing is an amazement, am I right? To be able to go down the road without horses . . . You find a fresh new wire atop the fenceposts beside the road to town, the Forest Service telephone line from the ranger station to the world. You find in my schoolhouse a long-boned boy named Samuel Duff, son of inimitable Ninian and brother of inimitable Susan—Samuel, my first pupil whose dreams and passions are of airplanes and wireless messages that fly between ships at sea.
So, no, even spaces of time that seem becalmed must be riding a considerable tide.
• • •
I knew I was. Season by season, those nearest around me were altering. Varick was ever taller, like a young tree. His quiet beyond-the-schoolbook capabilities grew and grew; he had a capacity for being just what he was and not caring an inch about other directions of life. A capacity that I could notice most in one other figure, when I did my wondering about it. Was it in any way possible that Varick somehow saw the knack he wanted for his own, began to practice it in himself even then, that first time the two of us laid eyes on Stanley Meixell?
My son, then, was steadily becoming some self that only he had the chart of. And as he did, my wife just as surely began glimpsing ahead to the time when Varick would leave us. Several years yet, yes, but Adair saw life the way the zoo creature must see the zoo; simply inexorably there, to be paced in the pattern required. The requirement beyond raising Varick through boyhood was losing him to manhood, was it? That being life’s case, she would go to the only other manner of pacing that she knew. She was preparing herself to be childless again, while I watched with apprehension. Not that Adair was in any way ending, yet, the companionable truce that was our marriage. We had our tiffs, we mended them. We still met each other in bed gladly enough. The polite passions of our life together were persevering. But in the newly watchful gazes she sent to the mountains now, in how the deck of cards occasionally reappeared and she would be absorbed into the silent game of solitaire, I could more than notice that this was beginning to be the Adair of our first winters of marriage again, the Adair of Angus, I don’t want you disappointed in me. The Adair of A person just doesn’t know . . . Or at least this one doesn’t know.
So there were shades of change anywhere I looked in those years—except within me. This person me, permanent in the one way I ought not to have been: in silent love with a woman not my wife, not the mother of my son; seeing her at dances, thinking across the divide of the North Fork and Noon Creek to her. Angus the Hopeless. If I could have changed myself from that, would I? Yes, every time. For it was like having a second simultaneous existence, two sets of moments ticking away in me at once, one creating the Angus who was husband to Adair and father to Varick and partner to Rob in sheep and schoolmaster to my pupils and all other roles to the community, the other the mute Angus who did nothing but love Anna Reese. One existence too many, for the amount of me available. It was cause enough to wonder. Was everyone more than the single face they showed the world? It periodically did seem so. The side of Adair I could not get to. Angles within Rob that could catch me by surprise even after twenty years. And were these divisions in people relentlessly at war with each other, as mine were? Or did I alone go through life in the kind of armistice that my South Fork pupils used as time-out in their games at recess, thrusting up crossed fingers and calling out King’s X?
• • •
Nineteen-ten was our year of fire. A summer that would have made the devil cough. We of Scotch Heaven had seen hot before, we had seen dry before, we had even seen persistent forest fire smoke before. But this. This was unearthly.
What seemed worse than the acrid haze itself was that the great source of it lay far beyond the horizon to the west of us, all the way over in the Bitterroot mountains along the Idaho border, halfway to Seattle. Every splinter of that distant pine forest must have caught aflame, for its smoke seeped east to us day after day as if night was drawing over from the wrong side of the world. Somebody else’s smoke, reaching across great miles to smear the day and infect the air, it rakes the nerves in a way a person has never experienced before.
And next, as if our own mountains were catching the fire fever from the Bitterroot smoke, in mid-August a blaze broke out in the Two Medicine National Forest. From the shoulder of Breed Butte the boil of gray-black cloud could be watched, rising and spreading from the timber gulches north of Jericho Reef. Stanley Meixell rounded up crews and fought that fire for weeks, but it burned and burned. We’d might as well been up there spitting on the sonuvabitch, Angus, for all the goddamn good we ended up doing, Stanley told me after. With the Two Medicine smudge added into the Bitterroot smudge, the sky was saturated with smoke. The day the Northern Hotel caught fire and burned like a tar vat—by a miracle of no wind, not quite managing to ignite the rest of Gros Ventre along with itself—none of us in Scotch Heaven even noticed any smoke beyond usual in the murky direction of town.
On the homestead we went through the days red-eyed, throats and noses raw, nerves worse yet. I felt a disquiet in myself even before the season of smoke honestly arrived. Somehow I had smelled the smoke coming, a full day before the sky began to haze. An odor of char, old and remindful of something I could not quite bring back into mind. No other aroma so silky, acidic. . . . It hung just there at the edge of being remembered, pestering, as each dusklike day dragged past.
By turns, Varick was wide-eyed and fretfu
l—“It can’t burn up all the trees, can it, Dad?”—and entranced by the fire season’s undreamt-of events—“Dad, the chickens! They went back in to roost! They think this is night!”
Adair looked done in. How else could she look, these days of soot, of smoky heat seeming to make the air ache as the lungs took it in?
A suppertime in our second or third week of smoke, she said across the table to me:
“How long can this last?”
At first I thought her words were ritual exasperation, as a person will wonder aloud without really wondering, Isn’t this day ever going to end? But then I saw she was genuinely asking.
“Dair, I’d rather take a beating than tell you this. But a couple or three times since I’ve been in this country, it didn’t rain enough in August to disturb the dust. And it’ll take a whopping rain to kill fires as big as these.” I had delivered that much bad news, I might as well deliver worse. “They might go on burning until first snow in the mountains, Labor Day or so.”
“Really?” This out of Varick, as he tucked away yet another unheard-of prospect. After he went outside to his daily woodpile chore, his mother turned her face to me again. “And yet this is the one place you want to be.”
“Times like this, I could stand to be somewhere else a minute or two.”
“Angus. I don’t want this to sound worse than I mean it. But this country never seems to get any easier.”
And anywhere else in life does, does it? Famous places of ease, Adair, such as Scotland and Nether—
Abruptly I knew the smell, the disquieting connection that had been teasing in my mind these weeks of the forest smoke. Angus, is your sniffer catching what mine is? That unvarying question from Vare Barclay, Adair and Rob’s father, to me there in the Nethermuir wheelshop. It is, I reply. Better see to it, Angus, best to be sure than sorry. Out I go into the woodyard to inspect for fire, the wheelshop’s worst dread. But as ever, the sawyers merely have halved an ash tree. It is the black heart of an ash when it is split, an inky streak the length of the tree, that gives off the smell so much like burning; like a mocking residue of char. And now in the air of Scotch Heaven and much of the rest of Montana, that old odor from Nethermuir. I wondered if Adair, daughter of that wheelshop, somehow was recognizing the freed aroma of the ash’s heartwood, too, in this latest dismay of hers against Montana. I was in no mood to ask.