by Ivan Doig
During all the precautions and debates, the flu kept on killing. Or if it didn’t manage to do the job, the pneumonia that so often followed it did. Not more than ten days after our burial of Donald Erskine, it was being said that more were dying of the flu than of combat on the battlefields in Europe.
• • •
Odd, what a person will miss most. As the flu made people stay away from each other, Adair and I had our end of the North Fork valley to ourselves. Except for my daily ride to the schoolhouse, we were as isolated as if the homestead had become an island. An evening when Adair had fallen silent, but in what seemed a speculating way, I waited to see whether she would offer what was on her mind.
When Adair became aware I was watching her, she smiled a bit and asked: “Worth a halfpenny to you, is it?”
“At least,” I answered, and waited again.
“Angus, I was thinking about our dances. And wondering when there will ever be one again.”
Adair in the spell of the music, light and deft as she glided into a tune. Yes. A sharp absence to her, that the epidemic had made a casualty of the schoolroom dances. I missed them, too, for they meant Anna to me. Seeing her across the floor, gathering her anew each time in the quickest of looks between us, remembering, anticipating.
I looked across the room at Adair. If our senses of loss were different, at least they were shared. I got to my feet.
“We’d better not forget how, had we,” I said to my wife. My best way to carry a tune is in a tub, but I hummed the approximate melody of Dancing at the Rascal Fair and put out my hands to Adair.
“Angus, are you serious?”
“I’m downright solemn,” I said, and hummed another batch.
She gave me a gaze, the Adair gray-eyed glint that I had encountered in the depot at Browning all the years ago. Then she came up into my arms, her head lightly against my shoulder, the soft sound of her humming matching itself to mine, and we began the first of our transits around the room, quiet with each other except for the tune from our throats.
• • •
Less than two weeks after the beginning of school that autumn, every schoolhouse in the county had to close because of the influenza peril. It seemed that the last piece of my life that I could count on to be normal was gone now. At the homestead the next week or so, I went restlessly from chore to chore, rebuilding my damnable west fence that always needed it, patching the sheep shed roof, anything, everything, that could stand to have work done to it.
How Adair was managing to put up with me, I don’t know. It must have been like living with a persistent cyclone, and one whose mood wasn’t improved by how achy and stiff he felt from all his labors.
She persevered with me, though. “There’s just one item on the place you haven’t repaired lately,” she told me one noon, “and that’s you. Let me give you a haircut.”
“What, in the middle of the day? Dair, I’ve got—”
“Right now,” she inserted firmly, “while the light is best. It won’t take time at all. Go get yourself sat, while I find the scissors.”
I grumpily took my place by the south window. The mountains were gray in the thin first-of-October light. The year was waning down toward winter every day now. Toward another season of feeding hay with Rob, ample justification for gloom if I needed any further reason.
Over my head and then up under my chin came a quick cloud of fabric, Adair snugly knotting the dish towel at the back of my neck. “Stop squirming,” she instructed, “or the lariat is next.” From the edge of my eye I could see the dark-brown outline of the barn, and impatiently reminded myself I’d better go repair harness as soon as Adair had trimmed me to her satisfaction.
Her scissorwork and even the touch of her fingers as she handled my hair were an annoyance today. After I flinched a third or fourth time, Adair ruffled my hair with mock gruffness as she used to do to Varick when he was small and misbehaving, and said questioningly, “You’re a touchy one today.”
“It’s not your barbering. I’ve got a bit of a headache, is all.”
The scissors stopped on the back of my neck, the blades so cold against my skin I felt their chill travel all through me. “Angus, you never get headaches.”
“I’m here to tell you, I’ve got a major one now,” I stated with an amount of irritation that surprised me. But it genuinely did feel as if a clamp was squeezing the outer corner of each of my eyes, the halves of my head being made to press hard against each other.
“Dair, let’s finish making me beautiful,” I managed to say somewhat more civilly. “I need to get on with the afternoon work.”
• • •
It wasn’t an hour from then when she found me in the barn, sitting on a nail keg with my head down, trying to catch my breath.
When Adair asked if I was able to walk, I sounded ragged even to myself when I told her of course I could, any distance.
“The house, Angus,” she answered that, her voice strangely brave and frightened at once. “Hold onto me, we’re going to the house.”
• • •
House, the distant echo of the woman’s voice said. But we were in a wagon, weren’t we, at the edge of a cliff. River below. Those Blackfeet, Angus. The Two Medicine. Those Blackfeet put their medicine lodge near. Two times. Wait: the horses didn’t answer to the reins. I yanked back but they were beginning to trot, running now. The cliff. I fell through life . . . The woman beside me clung to my arm. Bodies below. Bigger than sheep, darker. Cows, no, bigger. Buffalo. The buffalo cliff, Angus. It was a good one. The river was so far, so far down. Harness rattling. She clung to me. The cliff. I could see down over the edge, the buffalo were broken, heaped. Fell through life. She clung to me, crying something I couldn’t hear. The horses were going to run forever. Our wagon wheels were inches from the cliff, I had to count the wheelspoke with the white knot of handkerchief one as it went around two count the wheelspin three as the ground flew . . . What. She was crying something. Hooves of the horses, wagon bumping. Hang on, I tell the woman, we’ve got to . . . Count the wheelspoke, start over. One, no, two. Tell the woman, you count. While I . . . what. Helpless. They don’t answer the reins. Quiet now, horses run silently. But so close to the cliff. Two Medicine. Those Blackfeet. Two times. Count, I tell her. Too late. The spoke is coming loose. Rim breaking from the wheel. Can’t, I tell her. A wheel can’t just . . . Wheel breaking apart now, nearest the cliff. Iron circle of the rim peeling off, the spokes flying out of the hub. Hold on, tell the woman. Tipping, falling. I shout into her staring face: Anna! Anna! ANNA!
• • •
The bedroom was silent except for the heaviness of my breathing.
“You decided to wake up, did you.”
Adair’s voice. Her face followed it to the bed and me. The back of her small hand, cool and light, rested on my forehead a long moment, testing. “You’re a bit fevery, but nothing to what you were a few days ago. And if you’re finally well enough to wonder, the doctor says you don’t have any pneumonia.” Adair sat on the side of the bed and regarded me with mock severity. “He says you’re recovering nicely now, but it’ll be a while before you’re up and dancing.”
I felt weak as a snail. “Dair,” I croaked out. “Did I . . . shout . . . something?”
A change flickered through her eyes. And then she was looking at me as steadily as before. “You do know how to make a commotion.” She got up from the bedside and went out of the room.
My head felt big as a bucket, and as empty. It took an effort to lick my lips, an exertion to swallow.
In a minute or several, Adair was back, a bowl of whiteness in her hands.
“You need to eat,” she insisted. “This is just milk toast. You can get it down if you try a bit.”
The spoon looked too heavy to lift, the bowl as big as a pond. I shook my head an enormous inch. “I don’t want—”
“Adair doesn’t care,” stated Adair, “what you don’t want. It’s what you’re going to get.” And began t
o spoonfeed me.
• • •
In a few days I was up from bed in brief stints, feeling as pale as I looked. My body of sticks and knobs was not the only thing vigor had gone out of. It was gravely noticeable how quiet Scotch Heaven seemed. No visiting back and forth, no sounds of neighbors sawing wood for winter.
As my head cleared, thoughts sharp as knives came. Donald Erskine being put into his grave, gone of the same illness I had just journeyed through. Those reports of the epidemic’s efficient carnage in the army camps. Varick. No, Adair would have told me if—yet could she have, deeply ill as I was, wobbly as I still was? She had said nothing about our son, was saying nothing. That was just Adair. Or was it what I could not be told.
“Dair,” I at last had to ask, “this influenza. Who else—?”
The gray eyes of my wife gave me a gauging look. “I’ve been keeping the newspaper for you. Maybe you’re as ready to see it as you’ll ever be. It has the list.”
I pushed the prospect away with a wince. “If it’s so bad they have to have a list, I don’t want to see it.”
Adair gauged me again. Then she went over to the sideboard, reached deep in a drawer and brought me the Gleaner.
VICTIMS OF THE EPIDEMIC
My eyes shot to the bottom of the page.
Munson, Theodore, homesteader. Age 51. Died at his homestead east of Gros Ventre, Oct. 11.
Not anyone I knew; but more M names were stacked above that one. My scan of the list fled upward through them—Morgan . . . Mitulski . . . Mellisant—toward the dreaded Mcs:
McWhirter . . .
McNee . . .
McCorkill . . .
McCallister . . .
And then Kleinsasser . . . Jorgensen . . . Varick was safely absent from this list, among the living. Mercy I sought, mercy I got. I was as thankful as any person had ever been. But while Adair and I still had a son, a name known to me even longer than Varick’s came out of the list at me.
Frew, Allan, soldier of the American Expeditionary Force. Age 45. Died in a field hospital near Montfaucon, Sept. 26.
Allan in the shearing contest I had let him win. Allan dancing with Adair afterward, the two of them the melody of my hope that she would find a husband and a Montana niche for herself, in that far ago summer, while Anna and I—life isn’t something you can catechize into happening the way you intend, is it. I looked up now at Adair, whose marriage could have been with Allan, for better or for worse but surely for different than all she had been through with me. “It’s too bad about Allan,” I offered to her, and she nodded a slight nod which was agreement but also instruction for me to look at the list again.
Erskine, Jennie, widow of Donald, mother of David . . . “Not Jen,” I squeezed out of my constricted throat. “Not old Jen, too, after poor Donald . . .”
“Yes. It’s an awful time, Angus,” Adair answered in a voice as strained as mine.
My thoughts were blurred, numb, as my eyes climbed the rest of the list. Benson . . . Baker . . . Between them would have been Rob’s slot, if Barclays were susceptible to the mere ills of the rest of the world. What would I be feeling now, if his name stood in stark print there? Or he, if mine was in rank back down there in the Mcs? I did not know, you never can except in the circumstance, but I could feel it all regathering, the old arguments, the three angry years apart from Rob after the Two Medicine and the angry time with him since then in this benighted damn sheep partnership—I was too weary, done in, to go where that train of thought led. I fast read the rest of its list to the first of its names, Angutter, Hans, homesteader . . . and put the Gleaner away from me.
“Angus.” I heard Adair draw a breath. The newspaper was back in her hand, thrust to me.
“Dair, what?” I asked wearily. “I read the damn list once, I’m not going to again.”
Then I saw. Beside Adair’s thumb there on the page, was that name at the bottom of the list, Munson, Theodore; but there was also the small print beneath that. List continues on p. 3.
“Angus,” my wife said with a catch in her voice, “you have to.”
No.
No no no.
But I did have to. Did have to know. The newspaper shook in my hands as I opened it to the third page, as I dropped my eyes to the end of the remainder of the list and forced them, the tears already welling, back up to the Rs.
Reese, Anna, wife of Isaac, mother of Lisabeth and Peter. Age 44. At the family ranch on Noon Creek, during the night of Oct. 12.
1919
* * *
Times are as thin in Montana as they can get. No one needs telling that this has been a summer so dry it takes a person three days to work up a whistle. But we urge our homesteading brethren to hold themselves in place on their thirsty acres if they in any way can, and not enlist in the exodus of those who have given up heart and hope. As surely as the weather will change from this driest of times, so shall the business climate.
—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, AUGUST 21, 1919
LET IT tell itself, that season of loss.
By first snowfall, as much of me as could mend was up and out in the tasks of the homestead, of the sheep, of the oncoming winter. Had I been able, I would have filled myself with work twenty-four hours a day, to have something in me where the Anna emptiness always waited. Yet even as I tried to occupy myself with tasks of this, that, and the other, I knew I was contending against the kind of time that has no hours nor minutes to it. Memory’s time. In its calendarless swirl the fact of Anna’s death did not recede, did not alter. Smallest things hurt. A glance north to read the weather, and I was seeing the ridge that divided the North Fork from Noon Creek, the shoulder of geography between my life and hers. A chorus of bleats from the sheep as they grazed the autumn slope of Breed Butte, choir of elegy for the Blackfeet grass and the moment when I recognized Anna at the reins of the arriving wagon. And each dawn when I went out to the first of the chores, the slant of lantern light from the kitchen window a wedge between night and day—each was the dawn of Anna and myself and the colors of morning beginning to come to the Two Medicine country. Each time, each memory, I told myself with determination that it would be the last, that here was the logical point for the past to grow quiet. But no known logic works on that worst of facts, death of someone you loved, does it.
By Armistice Day, when the war pox in Europe finally ended, the influenza epidemic was concluding itself, too. In the Gros Ventre cemetery the mounded soil on the graves of Anna and its dozens of other victims was no longer fresh. When the schools reopened and Ninian came to ask if I was well enough to resume teaching, I told him no, he would need to make a new hire. Whether it was my health or not that lacked the strength, I could not face the South Fork schoolroom just then. Anna dancing in my arms there the first time ever, my voice asking, And we’ll be dancing next at Noon Creek, will we? and hers answering, I’ll not object. Before Ninian could go, I had to know: “What’s being done about the Noon Creek school?” He reported, “Mrs. Reese’s daughter is stepping in for them there.” Lisabeth. In younger replica, the same beautiful face with an expression as frank as a clock, still in place at Noon Creek. But not.
By Christmas week, Rob and I were meeting wordlessly each day at a haystack to pitch a load onto the sled and feed the sheep. Maybe the man knew how to keep a decent silence in the face of a sorrow. Maybe he thought the hush between us added cruel weight to his indictment of me and my hopelessness about Anna. Who knew, and who cared. Whatever I was getting from Rob, cold kindness or mean censure, I at least had mercy from the weather. There was just enough snow to cover the ground, and only a chill in the air instead of deep cold. Day upon day the mountains stood their tallest, clear in every detail, cloud-free, as if storm had forgotten how to find them. Any number of times in those first days of feeding, I saw Rob cock his head up at this open winter and look satisfied.
On New Year’s Day of 1919, Varick came home.
• • •
He was taller, thinner, and an eon
older than the boy-man I had fearfully watched ride the Fort Benton steer. To say the truth, there was a half-moment when I first glanced down from the haystack at the Forest Service horse and the Stetsoned person atop it, that I thought he was Stanley Meixell.
“ ’Lo, Dad,” he called up to me. His gaze shifted to Rob, and in another tone he simply uttered with a nod, “Unk.”
“Varick, lad,” Rob got out. I watched him glance at me, at Varick, confusion all over him. When no thunderbolt hit him from either of us, he decided conversation could be tried. “You’re looking a bit gaunt. How bad was the army life?”
Varick gave him a flat look. “Bad enough.” It was not until the weeks ahead that I heard his story of Camp Lewis. Christamighty, Dad, the flu killed them like flies. Whole barracks of guys in quarantine. You’d see them one day, standing at the window looking out, not even especially sick, and the next day we’d be packing them out of there on stretchers to the base hospital. And a couple of days after that, we’d be burying them. A truckload of coffins at a time. I didn’t figure you and Mother needed to know this, but I was doing the burying. They found out on the rifle range this eye of mine only squints when it takes a notion to, so they decided I wasn’t worth shipping to France to get shot. Instead they put a bunch of us guys who knew which end of a shovel to take hold of onto the graveyard detail. The Doom Platoon, we were called. That was the war I had, Dad. Digging graves for all the ones the flu got. But now, in the first moments of his homecoming, Varick moved his gaze from Rob, not saying anything more to him but somehow making a dismissal known. My breath caught, as I waited for the version I would get from him.