by Ivan Doig
“Christ on a raft, Rob! You don’t remember the years of ’93? Four years in a row, and prices stayed sunk the whole while.”
“That was then, this is now.” When that didn’t brush me away, he gave the next flourish. “I remember that we hung on without selling, and we came out of it with full pockets.”
“We didn’t start off with a summer like this.”
“Will you make yourself look at the dollars of this situation?” he resorted to. “For once in your life, will you do that?” He cocked his head, then resumed: “The first year of these goddamn sheep of Lucas’s, we made decent money. Last year, we only came out even. This year we’re not making a penny on the wool or the lambs, either, and if we sell the ewes at these prices we’re all but giving them away, too. It’d mean we’ve spent three years for no gain, man. And I want a hell of a lot better pay than that, for having to go through this goddamn partnership with you.”
“You can want until you turn green with it and that still doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Rob, for Christ’s sake, listen—”
“Listen yourself,” he shot back. “Prices are bound to come back up. All we’ve got to do is wait until next year and sell the whole outfit, ewes and lambs and all.”
“And what about this winter, with no more hay than we’ve got?”
“We’ve never seen a winter in this country we couldn’t get through. I even got through one under the same roof with you, somehow. If we have to buy a dab of hay, all right, then we’ll trot out and buy it. You’d worry us into the invalids’ home if you had your way.”
I shook my head and took us back around the circle to where this had begun. “Adair and I want to sell now.”
“Want all you please. I’m telling you, I’m not selling. Which means you’re not.”
I had pummeled him down to gruel once, why not pound him again now? And again every day until he agreed to sell the sheep? I was more than half ready to. But the fist didn’t exist that could bring an answer out of Rob that he didn’t want to give. I withheld my urge to bash him and said: “Rob, you’re not right about this. I hope to Christ you’ll think it over before winter gets here.”
“Try holding your breath until I do, why don’t you.” He looked both riled and contemptuous now. “In the meantime, I’m not hearing any more mewling from you about selling the sheep.”
• • •
What walloped me next was Ninian Duff’s decision to leave the North Fork.
“Ay, Angus, I would rather take a beating with a thick stick.” For the first time in all the years I had known this man he seemed embarrassed, as if he was going against a belief. “But I know nothing else to do.” Ninian stared past me at the puddled creek, the scant grass. “Had Samuel not been called by the Lord, I would go on with the sheep and say damn to this summer and the prices and all else. But I am not the man I was.” Age. It is the ill of us all. “So, Flora and I will go to Helena, to be near Susan.”
That early September day when I rode home from the Duffs’ and the news of their leaving, the weather ahead of me was as heavy as my mood. Clouds lay in a long gray front, woolly, caught atop the peaks, while behind the mountains the sky was turning inky. All the way from the South Fork to Jericho Reef, a forming storm that was half a year overdue.
Despite the homestead houses and outbuildings I was passing as I rode, the valley of the North Fork seemed emptier to me just then than on the day I first looked down into it from the knob hill. Tom Mortensen and the Speddersons, gone those years ago. The Erskines taken by the epidemic. The year before last the Findlaters had bought a place on the main creek and moved down there. Allan Frew, gone in the war. And now the Duffs. Except for George Frew, Rob and I now suddenly were the last of Scotch Heaven’s homesteaders; and George, too, was talking of buying on the main creek whenever a chance came.
A person could count on meeting wind at the side road up Breed Butte to Rob’s place, and today it was stiff, snappy. In minutes it brought the first splatting drops of rain. The first real rain in months and months, now that the summer of 1919 had done us all the damage it could.
• • •
Beside me on the wagon seat Adair said, “I wish they had a better day for it.”
I put an arm around her to help shelter her from the wind. Only the start of October, and already the wind was blowing through snow somewhere. Above the mountains the sky looked bruised, resentfully promising storm. It had rained almost daily ever since that first September gullywasher, and today didn’t seem willing to be an exception. Below Adair and me now as our wagon climbed the shoulder of Breed Butte before descending the other slope to Noon Creek, we could see Rob’s reservoir brimming as if it had never tasted drought; a glistening portal of water in the weary autumn land.
By the time we were down from the divide and about to cross Noon Creek, clouds like long rolls of damp cotton were blotting out the summits of the mountains. Weather directly contrary to Adair’s wish. She’d had her original moment of staring startlement, too, about the daughter of Anna Reese being spliced into our family. But as quick as she could, she granted that if Lisabeth was Varick’s choice in life, so be it. I tried to muster cheer for her against the sky’s mood: “If you can remember so far back, the night of this counts for more than the day.”
Her arm came inside my sheepskin coat and around my back, holding me. “Adair remembers,” she declared.
How dreamlike it seemed, when we arrived at the old Ramsay place and stepped into the wedding festivities of Varick and Lisabeth. I had not put foot in that house since my time of courting Anna. In my memory I saw again the vinegar cruet that was Meg Ramsay. So, Mr. McCaskill, you too are of Forfar. That surprises me. Plump Peter Ramsay, silent as a stuffed duck. Not only were they gone now, but so was the one I saw everywhere here: Anna.
She came to the door now on the arm of Varick to greet Adair and me. She was in every line of Lisabeth, Anna was; the lovely round cheeks, the eyes as blue and frank as sky, the lush body, even the perfect white skin hinting down from her throat toward her breastbone. Beauty bestowed upon her full receipt,/vouching her in every way complete.
“Mother, Dad,” Varick greeted us. “You came to see if Beth is going to come to her senses before the knot gets tied, I guess?”
“We came to gain Beth,” Adair said simply and directly. Our daughter-in-law-to-be gave her a gracious enough look, but in an instant those steady blue eyes were gauging me. I got out some remark I hoped wasn’t damaging, then Adair and I were moving on into the house out of the way of the other wedding-comers arriving behind us.
Glad as I was for Varick and Beth, this event of theirs was a gauntlet I had to make myself endure. Over there was Isaac. Despite the efforts of that concealing mustache and the unreadable crinkles around his eyes, the year since Anna’s death was plainly there in the lines of his face. His son Peter was hovering near him, still too young to quite believe marriage was a necessity in life but enough of a man now to have to participate in this family day. Then over here was Rob, with Judith beside. For once he was not as brash as brass, whatever was on his mind. I saw him glance every so often toward Varick and Beth. I hoped he was seeing the past there, too, and I hoped his part of it was gnawing in him. Probably remorse would break its teeth if it even tried to gnaw him, though.
Then through the throng of the wedding crowd I saw with relief that Stanley Meixell had come in. While Adair was occupied accepting congratulations for the union of the McCaskills and the Reeses, I crossed the room to him.
Stanley was at the window that looked west to the mountains, a glass in his hand. Since the inanity called Prohibition, we were reduced to bootleg whiskey; I had to admit, whoever Isaac’s source was, the stuff wasn’t bad.
After we had greeted, I asked Stanley: “What’s this I hear about you aiding and abetting matrimony here today?”
“Yeah, when Mac asked me to be best man I told him I would.” He paused and resumed his window vigil. “Though it’s closer to a pre
acher than I promised myself I’d ever get.”
“Maybe it’s not catching,” I consoled him.
“I’m trying to ward it off with enough vaccine,” Stanley remarked a bit absently with a lift of his glass. The major part of his attention was still gazing outside, away from the hubbub of the room. He said, “Angus, take a look at this, would you.”
I stood beside Stanley at the window and saw what he was keeping vigil on. The mountains by now were entirely concealed under clouds, but along the ragged bottom of the curtain of weather occasional patches of the foothills showed through. Patches of startling white. First snow.
“It’s christly early for that, seems to me,” Stanley mused. “You ever know it to come already this time of year?”
“No,” I had to admit. “Never.”
Stanley watched the heavy veil of weather a long moment more, then shrugged. “Well, I guess if it wants to snow, it will.” He started to lift his glass, then stopped. “Actually, we got something to drink to, don’t we.” He looked across the room toward Varick and Beth, and my eyes followed his. I heard the clink of his glass meeting mine, then Stanley’s quiet toast: “To them and any they get.”
• • •
I was returning around the room to Adair when the picture halted me. Just inside the open door into the bedroom, it hung on the wall in an oval frame the size of a face mirror. I had never seen it, yet I knew the scene instantly. The wedding photo of Anna and Isaac.
I stepped inside the bedroom to see her more closely. A last visit, in a way. She was standing, shoulders back and that lovely head as level as ever, gazing forthrightly into the camera. Into the wedded future, for that matter. I stood rooted in front of the photo, gazing now not only at Anna but at the pair there, Isaac seated beside and below her in the photographic studio’s ornate chair and seeming entertained by the occasion, and I thought of the past that put him in the picture instead of me.
The presence behind me spoke at last. “It’s a good likeness of them, isn’t it,” Beth said.
I faced around to her. My words were out before I knew they were coming.
“Beth, I’m glad about you and Varick.”
She regarded me with direct blue eyes. Her mother’s eyes. Then said: “So am I.”
Operas could be made from all I could have told this young woman, of my helpless love for her mother, of what had and had not happened that morning above the Two Medicine when she registered her mother and then me. Of her mother’s interest in me, of the verdict that was never quite final. But any of it worth telling, this about-to-be Beth McCaskill already knew and had framed her own judgment of. She was thoroughly Anna’s daughter, after all.
By her presence in front of me now, was Beth forgiving me for having loved her mother? No, I think that cannot be said. She would relent toward me for Varick’s sake, but forgive is too major. Probably more than anyone except Anna and myself, Beth knew the lure I was to her mother. The daybreak scene at the Two Medicine would always rule Beth’s attitude toward me.
Hard, but fair enough. For twenty-one years I endured not having Anna as my wife. For however long is left to me, I can face Beth’s opinion of me.
“Beth. I know we don’t have much we can say to each other. But maybe you’ll let me get this in. To have you and Varick in a life together makes up for a lot that I—I missed out on.” I held her gaze with mine. “May you have the best marriage ever.”
She watched me intently for another long moment, as if deciding. Then she gave me most of a familiar half-smile. “I intend to.”
• • •
Beth and Varick said their vows as bride and groom ever do, as if they were the first to utter those words. The ritual round of congratulations then, and while those were still echoing, George Frew was tuning his fiddle, the dancing was about to begin. Adair here on my arm in a minute would be gliding with me, so near, so far, as the music took her into herself. Music and Adair inside the silken motion I would be dancing with, the wife-mask with auburn ringlets on the outside. Well, why not. There was music in me just now as well, the necessary song to be given our son and daughter-in-law, in the echoing hall of my mind.
Dancing at the rascal fair,
Lisabeth Reese, she was there,
the answer to Varick’s prayer,
dancing at the rascal fair.
Varick’s partnered with her there,
giving Beth his life to share,
dancing at the rascal fair.
Devils and angels all were there,
heel and toe, pair by pair,
dancing at the rascal fair.
Winter was with us now. The snow that whitened the foothills the day of Varick and Beth’s wedding repeated within forty-eight hours, this time piling itself shin-deep all across the Two country. We did the last of autumn chores in December circumstances.
That first sizable snowstorm, and for that matter the three or four that followed it by the first week in November, proved to be just the thin edge of the wedge of the winter of 1919. On the fifteenth of November, thirty inches of snow fell on us. Lacelike flakes in a perfect silence dropped on Scotch Heaven that day as if the clouds suddenly were crumbling, every last shred of them tumbling down in a slow thick cascade. From the windows Adair and I watched everything outside change, become absurdly fattened in fresh white outline; our woodpile took on the smooth disguise of a snow-colored haystack. It was equally beautiful and dismaying, that floury tier on everything, for we knew it lay poised, simply waiting for wind the way a handful of dandelion seeds in a boy’s hand awaits the first flying puff from him. That day I did something I had done only a few times in all my years in Scotch Heaven: I tied together lariats and strung them like a rope railing between the house and the barn, to grasp my way along so as not to get lost if a blizzard blinded the distance between while I was out at the chores.
The very next day I needed that rope. Blowing snow shrouded the world, or at least our polar corner of it. The sheep had to be fed, somehow, and so in all the clothes I could pile on I went out to make my way along the line to the barn, harnessed the workhorses Sugar and Duke, and prayed for a lull.
When a lessening of the blizzard finally came, Rob came with it, a plaster man on a plaster horse. He had followed fencelines down from Breed Butte to the North Fork, then guided himself up the creek by its wall of willows and trees. Even now I have to hand it to him. Here he was, blue as a pigeon from the chill of riding in that snow-throwing wind, yet as soon as he could make his mouth operate he was demanding that we plunge out there and provide hay to the sheep.
“Put some of Adair’s coffee in you first,” I stipulated, “then we’ll get at it.”
“I don’t need—” he began croakily.
“Coffee,” I reiterated. “I’m not going to pack you around today like a block of ice.” When Adair had thawed him, back out we went into the white wind, steering the horses and hay sled along the creek the way Rob had done, then we grimly managed to half-fling half-sail a load of hay onto the sled rack, and next battled our way to my sheep shed where the sheep were sheltering themselves. By the time we got there they were awful to hear—a bleated chorus of hunger and fear rending the air. Not until we pitched the hay off to them did they put those fifteen hundred woolly throats to work on something besides telling us their agony.
That alarming day was the sample, the tailor’s swatch, of our new season. The drought of that summer, the snow and wind of that winter: the two great weathers of 1919. Through the rest of November and December, days were either frigid or blowy and too often both. By New Year’s, Rob and I were meeting the mark of that giant winter each day on our route to the sheep’s feedground. At a place where my meadow made a bit of a dip, snow drifted and hardened and drifted some more and hardened again and on and on until there was a mound eight or ten feet deep and broad as a low hill there. “Big as the goddamn bridge across the Firth of Forth,” Rob called it with permissible exaggeration in this case. This and other snow bridg
es built by the furrowing blizzards we could go right over with the horses and hay sled without breaking through, they were so thickly frozen. Here winter plies his craft,/soldering the years with ice. Yes, and history can say the seam between 1919 and 1920 was triple thickness.
Thank heaven, or at least my winning cut of the cards, that we had bought twice as much hay as Rob wanted to, which still was not as much as I wanted to. Even so, every way I could calculate it now—and the worried look on Rob said his sums were coming out the same as mine—we were going to be scratching for hay in a few months if this harsh weather kept up.
• • •
It kept up.
• • •
As the chain of frozen days went on, our task of feeding the sheep seemed to grow heavier, grimmer. There were times now when I would have to stop from pitching hay for half a minute, to let my thudding heart slow a bit. The weariness seemed to be accumulating in me a little more each new time at a haystack; or maybe it was the sight of the hay dwindling and dwindling that fatigued me. In those catchbreath pauses I began to notice that Rob, too, was stopping from his pitchfork work for an occasional long instant, then making the hay fly again, then lapsing quiet for another instant. Behavior of that sort in him I at first couldn’t figure. To look at, he was as healthy as a kettle of broth. No influenza had eroded anything of our Rob. But eventually it came to me what this was. Rob’s pauses were for the sake of his ears. He was listening, in hope of hearing the first midair roar of a chinook.
From then on, my lulls were spent in listening, too. But the chinook, sudden sweet wind of thaw, refused to answer the ears of either of us.
• • •
Maybe I ought to have expected the next. But in all the snip and snap that went on between Rob and me, I never dreamt of this particular ambush from him.
Usually I drove the team and sled to whatever haystack we were feeding from and Rob simply met me there, neither of us wanting to spend any more time than necessary in the company of the other. But this day Rob had to bring me a larger horse collar—Sugar’s was chafing a sore onto his neck, which we couldn’t afford—before the team could be harnessed, and so he arrived into my barn just as I was feeding Scorpion.