by Ivan Doig
Instead, levelly as I could:
“Dair, this isn’t a summer you can judge by. I know the country is so damn full of smoke you can cut it with scissors. But this is far out of the ordinary. None of us has ever seen a worse fire season and we’re not likely to.”
“I’m trying not to blame the country for how awful these days are, Angus. I truly am.”
I wonder if you are, ran in my mind. It’d be new of you. But that was smoked nerves squeaking. I made myself respond to her:
“I know. It’s just a hard time. They happen. You’re perfectly entitled to throw your head back and have a conniption fit, if it’ll help.”
“Adair would do that,” she went that mocking distance from herself, from the moment, “if she thought it would help.”
• • •
It helped matters none either that a few days later I had traveling to do. With school to begin in not much more than a week and the flood of pupils from the homestead influx that was upon us, the county superintendent was calling all country-school teachers to a meeting in new Valier.
“I’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” I told Adair. “Any stray rain I see, I’ll bring home with me.”
“Varick and I will do our best not turn into kippers in the meantime,” she gave me in return.
Riding into Gros Ventre just before nightfall—although it was hard to sort dusk from haze any more—I stayed over with Lucas and Nancy, and in the small hours got up and resaddled Scorpion and rode eastward.
The face of the land as dawn began to find it took my breath away. The land I had ridden across so gingerly when Rob and I first came to Gros Ventre, the bald prairie where I had met only the one Seven Block rider in my three days of scouting, now was specked with homestead cabins. Built of lumber, not our Scotch Heaven logs. This was as if towns had been taken apart, somewhere distant, and their houses delivered at random to the empty earth. The rainbow eyes of memory/that reflect the colors of time. My remembering of a hawk hanging on the wind, steering me with his wings to this prairie that was vacant of people then; these people now in these clapboard cabins, would they in twenty years be recalling when their plump farms were just rude homesteads? And the memories-to-come of the next McCaskill: what tints of any of this change in the land were waiting to happen in Varick’s mind? For that matter, if people continued to flock in, if the scheme of earth called Montana grew ever more complicated, where was there going to be room, land, for Varick to root his life and memories into?
With more and more light of the morning, which was tinted gray-green even this far from our smoke-catching mountains, I could see the upsloping canal banks of the irrigation project, and machinery of every kind, and then, not far from the Valier townsite, the whitish gray of several tents near a corral.
As I passed that encampment the many colors of horses grew apparent, muted a bit by the hazy air but still wonderfully hued; big workhorses standing like dozens of gathered statues. Quickly I began to meet and greet men walking in from homesteads to their day’s work of teamstering, another session of moving earth from here to there in the progress of canals.
I rode on trying not to dwell on those tents and the brand on the hips of those workhorses, Isaac Reese’s Long Cross.
At Valier, or what was going to be, a three-story hotel of tan brick sat mightily above the main intersection of almost houseless streets, as though lines had been drawn from the corners of the world to mark where the next civilization was to be built. The other main enterprises so far were lumberyards and saloons. There was something unsettling about coming onto this raw abrupt town sprung from the prairie, so soon after Gros Ventre nestling back there in its cottonwood grove. Valier did not possess a single tree—no, there, one: a whip being watered from a wash tub that a tan-faced woman had just carried out and dumped. I touched my hat brim, the washerwoman gave me a solemn Toussaint-like “Morning,” and we went our ways. Say this for the fledgling town, Valier was only half as smoky as anywhere else I had been in recent history; the other half of its air was an enthusiastic wind. Squinting, I saw through the scatter of buildings to where the schoolhouse sat alone, and directed Scorpion that way.
The rural teachers from nearer were already there and of course the Valier ones, six in total, more than Gros Ventre’s school had. The rounds of hello revealed that four of the Valier contingent were young single women, none so pretty as to make a man break down the door but each unhomely enough that in all likelihood four marriage proposals were around not very distant corners.
If the Valier maiden teachers wanted a lesson in loveliness, she was the next to arrive after me. Anna.
I knew she had been spending the summer here where Isaac’s horsework was. For how many years now had I had ears on my ears and eyes on my eyes with the sole specialty of gathering any news of Anna, and the early-June item in the Gros Ventre Gleaner had shot out of the page of print at me: Anna Reese has joined Isaac at Valier. Isaac’s crew will be the fortunate beneficiaries of her provender the duration of the summer, as they engage in canal construction on the irrigation project and grading streets in the forthcoming metropolis. She was in the cook tent of that corralside assemblage I rode past, she was here in front of me now as the county superintendent solemnly joked, “Mrs. Reese, you and Mr. McCaskill maybe already have made each other’s acquaintance. If not, it is past time you did.” For the benefit of the Valier teachers, he further identified us: “These two have been the pillars of education at Noon Creek and the South Fork ever since the foundations of the earth were laid.”
“Angus, how are you?” Her half-smile, glorious even when she was being most careful with it.
“Hello again, Anna.” And you know how I am. We both know that, Anna.
I but half-heard the morning’s discussions of school wagons to bring children from the nearest homestead farms into Valier, of country schools to be built east and south of town for the more distant pupils, of the high school to be begun here next year. My mind was ahead, on noon.
When that hour came, picnic dinner was outside in the wind because every new Montana town tries to defy its weather. I got myself beside Anna as we went out the door into the first gust.
“Wouldn’t you say we’ve eaten enough wind at our own schools,” I suggested, “without having to swallow this place’s?”
The truth of that brought me a bright glance from her, and then her words: “I could say that even without any prompting.”
We stepped around the corner of the schoolhouse out of the wind and seated ourselves on the fire-door steps there. Promptly a high-collared young man, more than likely a clerk at the hotel or a lumberyard, strolled by with the most comely of the Valier teachers. There went one.
As Anna and I began to eat, we resorted to conversation confined to our schools.
“Three of my pupils this year are children of some of my first pupils,” she noted.
“I have that beginning to happen, too.” And after them will it be these children’s children in our schoolrooms, and the two of us still separate? By all evidence. I stood up abruptly. Seeing her look, I alibied, “Just a cramp in my leg.”
I drew a breath and hoped it had as much resolve in it as it did smoke and dust, then sat down beside Anna Ramsay Reese again. Even from our low set of steps, Valier and the irrigation future could be seen being built, a steam dragline shovel at continuous work in the near distance. It was like a squared-off ship, even to the smoke funnel belching a black plume at its middle. Its tremendous prow, however, was a derrick held out into the air by cables, and from the end of the derrick a giant bucket was lifting dirt, swinging and dropping it along a lengthening dike for the lake that would store irrigation water. Handfuls of earth as when a child makes a mud dam, except that the handfuls were the size of freight wagons.
“People come from miles just to watch it work,” Anna said.
“It does dig like a banker who’s lost a nickel down a gopher hole,” I had to grant. “Turning a prairie into Ho
lland. You need to see it to believe.”
“Yes. A town built from a pattern,” she announced as if storing away the spelling of a fresh word. “They say they are planning for ten thousand people here.”
“They’ve got a ways to go.”
“And you don’t think they’ll get there?” Not disputing me, merely curious to hear so minority an opinion; her instinctive interest in Not Proven.
“Who knows?” Things are famous for not turning out the way I think they will, aren’t they. “Maybe all this time we’ve been living in the Two Medicine grainfield and never realized it.”
I forced my attention back into my plate. It was as much as I could do not to turn to Anna, say Here’s something ten thousand Valierians ought to be here to cheer for, wrap her in my arms and kiss her until her buttons burst.
“Isaac thinks you are right.”
I instantly was staring at her, into those direct eyes.
“To have stayed with sheep as you and the others in Scotch Heaven have and not be tempted off into farming or cattle,” she went on. “He tells our Noon Creek neighbors that if they want to go on being cowboys, they had better buy some sheep so they can afford their hats and boots.”
“Isaac”—my throat couldn’t help but tighten on the name—“has always been the canny one.”
Now Anna’s plate was drawing diligent attention. After a bit she gazed up again and offered, carefully casual: “With Isaac out and around in his work so, we don’t see much of Scotch Heaven anymore. Except at dances, and there’s never any real chance to visit during those. I don’t feel I even much know Adair and Varick.” She paused, then: “How are they this fire summer?”
“They’re as well as can be. Varick gets an inch taller every hour.”
Her voice was fond of the thought. “Lisabeth and Peter, too. They’re regular weeds at that age.” But when she turned her face directly to me to ask this next, I saw she was starkly serious. “And you yourself. You really didn’t answer when I asked this morning. How is Angus?”
“The same.” We looked levelly into each other’s eyes, at least we always were capable of honestly seeing each other. “Always the same, Anna.”
She drew a breath, her breasts lifting gently. Then:
“How much better if we had never met.” What would have been simpering apology in any other woman’s mouth was rueful verdict from hers. “For you, I mean.”
“Anna, tell me a thing. Do you have the life you want?”
She barely hesitated. “Yes. Given that a person can have only one, I have what I most want. But you don’t at all, do you.”
I shook my head. “It’s never as simple as do and don’t. The version I walk around in, there’s nothing to point to and say, ‘this is so far wrong, this can’t be borne.’ Adair and Varick, they’re as good as people generally come. It’s the life I don’t lead that is the hard one.”
I turned to her, that face always as frank as it was glorious. She had hesitated, before answering my question about her life. There was something there, something not even the remorseless honesty of Anna wanted to admit. More than the accumulated firesmell of this summer was in the air around the two of us now. A feel, a tang, of sharpest attention, as if this moment was being devoutly watched to see how it would result.
Anna’s intent stillness told me she was as aware of it as I was. I needed to know. Was I alone in the unled life of all these years? Or not alone, simply one separate half and Anna the other?
“I wonder when I’ll get used to it,” I suddenly was hearing Anna say. But this was not answer, I hadn’t yet asked, she had slipped her eyes away from my gaze, past my shoulder to a chugging noise down the street. “Every automobile still is a surprise,” she continued. If this coming one was any standard, Valier was going to be a clamorsome town. With no patience I waited for the racketing machine to pass by the school.
It didn’t pass. The automobile yanked to a stop and sat there clattering to itself while the driver flung himself out. And with a lift of his goggles became Rob.
“Angus!” he tumbled his words out as he came, “there’s been—you have to come. There was an accident.”
Anna and I were onto our feet without my having known we’d done so, side touching side and her hand now on my arm to help me stand against Rob’s words. He stopped halfway to us, the realization of Anna and me together mingling with what he had to report. Dumbly I stared all the questions to his tense bright face: Adair or Varick, Varick or Adair, how bad, alive or—
“It’s Varick. He was chopping wood. We got him in to Doc Murdoch. You have to come.” He jerked his head almost violently toward the chattering automobile.
“I’m coming.” But to what. I pressed Anna’s hand in gratitude for her touch, in gratitude for her. “Goodbye.”
“One of Isaac’s men will bring your horse home for you,” Anna said before echoing my goodbye. I climbed into one side of the Ford while Rob banged shut the door of the other, and in a roar we hurled away.
• • •
On the rattling ride to Gros Ventre Rob provided me the basic about Varick’s accident, and then we both fell silent. In those miles of fire haze and dust from the Ford’s tires, I seemed already to know the scene at the homestead that morning, before Adair’s words told it to me. I was just ready to bake bread, before the day got too hot. And I heard the sound. An auhhh, a low cry of surprise and pain. Then the awful silence in her ears told her Varick’s chopping at the woodpile had stopped. I ran out, the screen door flying open and crashing shut behind her like a thud of fear. She knew there would be blood somewhere, but she was not ready for the scarlet fact of it on our son’s face, on the edge of the hand he was holding over his left eye as he stood hunched, frozen. Varick, let me see, I’ve got to see, Adair lifting his red wet hand far enough away for the eye to show. Hold still, darling. Perfectly still. The blood was streaming from the outer corner of the tight-shut eye, there was no telling whether the eyeball was whole. The stick of wood, Varick was gasping. It flew up. She carefully put his hand back in place to staunch the flow. Sit. Sit right here on the chopping block, Varick, and don’t touch your eyeball at all while I go—with water and clean rags she tended the bloody mess, then half-led half-carried the boy big as her into the house. Listen to me now. You have to lie here on the bed until I get back. Hold the rag there against the cut, but don’t touch your eye itself. Varick, no matter how it hurts, don’t touch that eye. Varick ice-still as she left him on the bed holding back the red seep, as she went to the barn silently crying and saddled Varick’s mare Brownie and swung herself up and still was silently crying when she halted the horse on Breed Butte in front of Rob. Then the Ford journey to Gros Ventre with Varick, past the fenceline where she and I had found Davie Erskine being dragged by his horse, where she and I first learned of the impossibly unfair way life can turn against its young.
“We’ll just have to wait,” judged Doc Murdoch to Adair and me that night. “To see whether those eye muscles are going to work. I do have to tell you, there’s about an even chance they won’t.” Precisely what we wanted not to hear: flip of the coin, whether Varick would be left with one powerless eye, a staring egg there in its socket. “But the eyeball looks intact,” the doctor tried to relent, “and that’s a piece of luck.”
Luck. Was there any, and if so, where? Had the chunk of wood flown a fraction farther away Varick would have only a nicked cheek or ear, one quick cry and healed in a few days. But a fraction inward and the eyeball would have been speared. The tiny territory between, the stick struck. That must be luck, the territory between.
• • •
In the big guest bed at Lucas’s house, the same bed where Rob and I had spent our first dazed night in Gros Ventre, Varick lay as still as an eleven-year-old boy ever has for a week. Then the doctor lifted the bandage to examine the left eye and its eyelid as Adair and I and Lucas and Nancy wordlessly clustered to watch.
“Blink for us now,” the doctor directed. And
Varick did. “Open wide. Close it now. Excellent. Look this way. Good. The other. Good again. Now bat your eyes, that’s the boy.” All those, too, Varick performed.
“If that eye was any better, my boy,” the doctor eventually stepped back and announced, “you’d be seeing through these walls.”
Varick regarded him, and the others of us, with his two good eyes. This can only be retrospect, but I swear I already was seeing a Varick considerably further in years than the one I left when I rode off to Valier the week before; a boy who knew some of the worst about life now, and who was inserting some distance, some gauging space, between it and him. Because, when all at once Varick was grinning up at the doctor, the smile maybe was as boyish as ever but that left eyelid independently dropped down to half-shut. As it ever did thereafter when something pleased him; my son’s wise wounded squint of amusement and luck.
• • •
“Varick is twice the son you deserve, McAngus,” Rob acclaimed when I went by Breed Butte to tell him and Judith of Varick’s mend. More, he clapped me on the shoulder and walked out with me to the gate where I’d tied Scorpion.
“The fact is, I wish I’d managed to sandwich in a son along with the girls,” Rob went on confidentially when we were far enough from the house not to be heard. He gave a laugh and added in the same low tone: “I still could, of course, but I’d have to do it without Judith, she tells me.”