by Ivan Doig
The collector of Missing Voices looked hurt.
“Sir, you misunderstand. Gathering people’s own stories is crucial to preserving that chapter of history. It’s a”—hands spun again—“a crime against civilization to let those voices be lost.” I, at least, was impressed.
He paused to muster a new thought. “Let me put it this way. Fort Peck had so many workers—thousands, really—that I can’t possibly know which ones would be the best to interview. But from what I’ve been told over and over, practically everyone there sooner or later was funneled through a certain institution”—he bunched his hands narrowly—“as historians call a social fixture in a community. No, please, don’t try to be modest, Mr. Harry, it’s true. By every reputation, the Blue Eagle saloon was a Fort Peck institution without equal.” He had that spellbound look again as he gazed at Pop. “And naturally that makes you the institutional memory.”
Pop groaned. “How the hell did I get to be the institutional anything all of a sudden?”
“The place in history finds the man,” Del Robertson said sagely.
“Maybe you mean well”—Pop plucked up a fresh towel for bar polishing—“but I’ve got a business to tend to. Even if I wanted to, I can’t go trotting off across the countryside with you trying to find yayhoos who worked at the dam.”
“That’s the lucky part,” the response came as if it couldn’t wait. “They’ll be at Fort Peck, in droves. At the Mudjacks Reunion.”
“That bunch? Getting together like high schoolers? When’s this?”
Wouldn’t you know. The eager-beaver historian named the exact day the papers were to be signed and the sale of the Medicine Lodge would be final. Not to mention the opening-night performance of Mrs. Reinking, carefully coached eyes and all, in The Importance of Being Earnest. There seemed to be only that single red-letter date on the otherwise numberless calendar.
Pop could not hide his relief. “Naw, I couldn’t go with you then even if I wanted to. I’ve got something important to do, it’s all set up. Besides,” he concluded righteously, “I promised the kiddo and his friend I’d take them to the play over in Valier that night. Busy as a one-handed juggler, see?”
“But”—Del Robertson couldn’t believe his day of days wasn’t more sacred than ours—“it’s a historic occasion, you have to be there! It’s a monumental celebration! Twenty-five years almost to the minute,” the earnest explanation of the Mudjacks Reunion was not about to let up, “since the dam fill was begun.”
Something thrummed in me at hearing that. First the thirty-year winter. Now this. The way 1960 kept bringing historic numbers had to add up to something a person would remember into eternity, didn’t it?
“That can’t be ri—” Pop did the Fort Peck arithmetic in his head and frowned. “Okay, so Fort Peckers will be there thick as weeds. There’s your setup. All you need to do is wade in with your recording machine and find the ones who’ll gab to you, no sweat.”
“That’s just it.” The lanky figure shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve been trying for weeks, out on the coast and other places.” The strain in his voice showed the effort. “It’s no use. Every time I track down someone who was at Fort Peck and they start in on their stories, inevitably it leads to something that happened in the Blue Eagle, and when they realize I haven’t talked to you first, they absolutely clam up. The last one told me, ‘You better go see Tom Harry, he knows A to why about any of that.’” He paused, as if tasting such sweet words. “Isn’t that such a great way to describe an institutional memory?” After that wistful moment, he went back to looking doleful but determined. “That’s what I mean about needing you to break the ice, sir.”
“No, you don’t,” Pop said, showing every sign of losing his patience. “Cripes, there were loads of other bartenders at Fort Peck.”
“None like you, everyone says. Mr. Harry, I absolutely cannot get the interviews I need at the Mudjacks Reunion without you.” Pop’s shake of the head hastened the next plea. “Please, sir? It would only take a couple of days.”
“Hey, are you hard of hearing or something? I told you no already.”
“One day.”
“Ever been thrown out of a joint before, Delbert? Because you’re about to—”
“That’s not my name.”
“Then what the hell is?”
“Delano.”
You could have heard a fishhook drop after he said that. Pop jerked a thumb at the poster picture of Roosevelt. “Same as him? How come?”
Delano Robertson, as we now knew him, blushed. “My father lived and breathed the New Deal and President Roosevelt. He was administrative assistant to one of the main members of FDR’s ‘Brain Trust,’ Rexford Tugwell.”
“Lucky you didn’t get named after him,” Pop observed. “Delano, huh? That’s halfway interesting.” He squinted in fresh appraisal of the visitor. “You’re from back there?”
“Washington, D.C., you hit it on the nose.” A boyish smile accompanied the admission. “Born and bred, strict in the District, as the saying is.”
“How about that. You keep up with politics any?”
“Somewhat,” came the cautious answer.
“What do you think of this guy Kennedy’s chances?”
FDR’s namesake was no dummy. With the Kennedy poster looming over Pop’s shoulder, he said in that tone of voice a person uses in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance: “He’s the better man. If sanity prevails, he’ll win.”
“Nixon’s a rat,” Pop growled in confirmation, “you can tell by looking at the ess of a bee.” He was scrubbing back and forth over the same already gleaming spot on the bar wood with his towel, a sign he was thinking hard. “So you get paid for going around and listening to people, if you can manage to get them to talking in the first place? Not a bad racket.” And not too unlike what went on in a certain barroom. “Where’d you learn this oral history stuff? Harvard?” he asked hopefully, knowing Roosevelt and Kennedy had gone there.
“Come again?” The red head tilted a little to one side, as if catching up with what had been said. “Oh. Actually, no. William and Mary.”
“I guess you get a longer diploma that way.” Pop tossed down his towel. “Hey, Delano,” he seemed to enjoy trying out the name, “I can see why you’d like to have me glued to your side at the Fort Peck doings. But even if I wanted to, I’ve got a business deal that same day I positively have to be here for. Right, kiddo?” If he thought I was going to confirm the need to sell the Medicine Lodge, he was going to have a long, long wait; what he said may have been accurate, but that did not make it right. I sullenly kicked the leg of my bar stool until he took the hint and turned back to the other person whose hopes he was dashing. “Anyhow, before you go on your way, better have something to help you pack that name around. On the house. What do they drink at Willy and Mary?”
Delano Robertson smiled bashfully. “The same as any college, I suppose. Kegs of beer.”
“‘On the house’ runs out after one glass,” Pop made clear. While the beer brimmed to a perfect head, he included me in the proceedings by scooting an Orange Crush down the bar to where I was still perched. “This character with his ears hanging out is my son and swamper, Rusty.”
Delano came at me on scissor legs for a handshake, as if we were long-lost brothers. “Twenty-five years,” Pop was muttering to himself and perhaps the Roosevelt poster as he fussed the glass of beer to perfection, “where the hell does the time go?” This prompted me to give Delano a secret look of encouragement, not that he needed much of that. By now he was taking in the barroom, from the stuffed menagerie protruding from the forest-green walls to the pressed-tin ceiling that looked as old as heaven, to the ornately carved breakfront, with its cargo of bottles and glasses and mirrors, as though he couldn’t get enough of it.
“This is priceless”—he plopped down on the bar st
ool next to mine and twirled as if on a merry-go-round—“the way you’ve kept this a classic saloon, Mr. Harry.”
“Yeah, well, it takes some real hard running to stay in the same place these days,” Pop agreed with that. I watched him think hard, his forehead furrowed the way that usually meant a wrestle with his conscience. “Here’s the honest truth, Delano. Keep it under your hat, but I’ve about got a deal to sell the joint and—”
“No!” Delano cried out, whirling on his stool to face Pop. “I mean, that’s totally surprising. The saloon and you, both the best of the kind, and for you to give it up now, at the height of—”
“Would it be too damn much trouble to let me finish what I’m saying, do you suppose?” Pop’s glower sent Delano into retreat behind his beer glass. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t go gallivanting off to Fort Peck with you. There’s a last few things to be worked out on the deal that day, and then we’re going to sign the papers, so I need to be here instead of there, see?”
“The time is out of joint,” Delano brooded as if he were about to cry in his beer, “and the joint is out of time.”
“Run that by me again?”
“Shakespeare, at least the first part.” A tingle went through me, and I waited breathlessly for what Delano would cause next. “It’s just too ironic,” he went on in the same voice of gloom and doom, “that the very day you would be the center of celebration at Fort Peck will be your last as bartender here, Mr. Harry.”
That gave Pop pause, but not for long. “I didn’t bargain for everything piling up on the cockeyed calendar, did I? It’s your tough luck it happens that way.” All too plainly he was ready to drop the topic and the erstwhile young collector of Missing Voices, both. “Anyhow, drink up. You’ll need the nourishment to tackle those mudjacks.”
“Sir,” Delano fashioned a fresh inspiration, helped by some fast gulps of beer, “I heard everything you said against coming along to the reunion, and I respect every word. But at least let me show you the Gab Lab. I have it all ready to go to Fort Peck, you’ll see. It’s parked right across the street. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”
Of course I was off my stool and halfway to the front door by the time he finished saying that, but Pop hesitated before taking his apron off and following him out.
I’ve always thought what awaited Delano Robertson in the main street of Gros Ventre was so unfair. Even yet, I can see it and hear it and almost catch a whiff of it. As he stepped from the sidewalk to eagerly lead us across to a green-and-white Volkswagen van, bearing down on him no more than half a block away was a panicky mob of freshly shorn sheep, peeing and pooping and announcing in other ways how upset they were at being stripped of their fleeces, while in back of them, also supremely agitated, was Canada Dan, cussing the life out of the surprised pedestrian in the path of the flock. Pop and I looked on unsuspectingly at this inhospitable reception for the person who would change our life like night to day.
Our visitor froze in astonishment at the spectacle of a thousand undressed sheep madly advancing on him, which was a mistake on his part. Out front of the others, one ewe that must have lost her lamb as well as her wool and maybe her mind was frantically chasing back and forth, bleating blame at the world and stamping her hooves at anything in the way. She made a maddened run in Delano’s direction. Can a person be buffaloed by a sheep? Whatever the fitting description, he bolted for safety as fast as his legs could carry him.
“They’re just out of the shearing pen across the creek,” Pop informed him as he scrambled ungracefully back to join us in the doorway of the Medicine Lodge. “Makes them a little excited.” We watched the fleeceless animals, their bewildered lambs trailing them, jostle past by the hundreds. Sheep look so naked without their wool, like peeled eggs with legs. Besides that indignity, some of the ewes carried cuts where they had been nicked by the shearers’ power clippers. You see pictures, all the way back to Bethlehem, of peaceful grazing flocks, but this scarred-up, loose-boweled parade would not make anyone envy a sheep’s life. Delano Robertson remained wide-eyed and more than a little nervous about his van with the unsanitary swarm engulfing it. “Does this happen much?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Pop said, as if this was only ordinary traffic. “The Two Medicine country is deep in sheep. Wool and lambs are its bread and butter.”
Eventually the last echelon of skittery ewes passed us by, along with Canada Dan, who spat a brown stream of tobacco juice toward us and groused, “It’s getting so a man can’t even herd sheep through town without a turster in the way, ain’t it?”
Delano’s face lit up. “The negative interrogative! It’s a linguistic pattern that’s dying out in most places.” His hands flew to one of many shirt pockets again for the notebook and pen as he craned a look at the departing figure, still bristling like a porcupine and spitting in our general direction. “Where’s he from?”
“All over,” said Pop, alluding to the job history of the Two Medicine country’s most hired and fired sheepherder.
“Canada,” I said, giving Pop a look.
“I thought so,” Delano nodded wisely, jotting in the notebook. “Linguistic patterns tend to mix along borders, likely French affecting English in him. The Gallic n’est-ce pas must have become ain’t it in his cultural subgroup, don’t you think?”
“Something must have affected the ess of a bee,” Pop said, as if his eye still smarted. “That’s Canada Dan for you.”
Delano paused in his scribbling, puzzled now. “What’s a ‘turster’?”
“Tell you later,” said Pop. “Show us this traveling contraption of yours. Watch where you step.” The street was even more of a mess than usual after sheep had gone through, and Delano pretty much tiptoed as he escorted us to the van. Reaching it, he let out a relieved “Whew!” and flung open the double doors in the middle of the beetle-nosed vehicle. “Here it is, the Gab Lab!”
Pop and I stared into what looked like a camper combined with the guts of a recording studio. The camper part was straightforward enough: a gateleg table, seats and cushions that converted into a bunk, a white-gas stove cleverly hooked onto one of the double doors, and a small sink with a hand pump for water. Curtains on all the windows, a homey touch. But the rest of the interior held racks and racks of tape reels, as recorders used in those days, and two or three of the bulky machines were tucked away wherever they could fit, while headphones dangled from cabinet knobs. A typewriter was lashed to a little shelf all its own.
Pop could not help but observe, “Kind of tight quarters unless you’re a sardine, isn’t it?”
“Everything is within reach,” Delano defended, sounding a trifle crestfallen.
“So how does this Missing Voices deal work?” Pop wondered. “You corner people and get them to gabbing about themselves and then—”
“—after the interview has been conducted, according to professional standards,” Delano said patiently, “I review it and transcribe it onto paper, right here. It’s fresh in my mind that way, and there aren’t those questions later as to what this word or that was.” He leaned toward us confidentially. “Alan Lomax’s transcription typist thought Leadbelly had written an entire song about ‘swimming’ instead of ‘wimmin’ and it took the Library of Congress folklorists days and days to figure that out and fix it.” That same shy smile. “That’s why I came up with the idea for the Gab Lab and was able to convince the powers that be to let me outfit it like this.” He beamed proudly at the chockful camper van. “It’s the only one of its kind.”
Shaking his head, Pop backed away from the van. “Okay, it’s been seen. Good luck.”
Immediately Delano had that pleading expression again, and began, “Mr. Harry, the Mudjacks Reunion is the chance of a lifetime to—”
It only brought him more head shaking from Pop. “Listen, I can tell you think you can’t do this by yourself, but you’d better make
up your mind to. I’m still not gonna be Leadbutt for you and lead you around by the hand to every Fort Pecker who’s got some kind of a story. I gave you my reason and that settles it, right?”
Wrong, if I had anything to do with it. I was trying to come up with whatever would impel him to the reunion instead of signing the death warrant of the Medicine Lodge, when Delano slammed one of the van’s double doors hard enough to show he did have a temper.
“If you’re determined to turn your back on history”—he slammed the other one harder yet—“that’s that.”
Thrusting his hands into side pockets of his bush-jacket shirt and hunching up mournfully, he looked around at the town, mostly at the street with its sheep leavings, some of which he had stepped in. Without much hope, he inquired, “Is there a campground somewhere along the creek?” He was asking me because Pop, still shaking his head, was making a beeline back to the saloon. “Maybe I’d have better luck at fishing,” Delano muttered, scraping his shoe on the curb.
Inspiration sometimes comes from the least likely source. “Fishing?” I repeated loudly. “Gee, I don’t just know where you’d go, the creek has been too roily practically forever.”
Pop stopped short in the middle of the street. He turned his head enough to ask, “You fished much back east?”
“Hmm? Oh, a tad.”
Whatever a tad was, it did it. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Pop mused, as if it were his own sudden discovery. “We could show you the best fishing spot on the face of the earth, couldn’t we, Rusty.”
—
DELEGATING ME to escort Del to the house, where he could park his traveling home and office in the driveway overnight for a nice, early start on catching fish, Pop headed back to the Medicine Lodge in lifted spirits, calling over his shoulder: “You’ll have rainbow trout running out your ears before we’re done with you.”
Delano had brightened measurably by the time he and I climbed into the van, probably at the prospect of a safe haven where marauding sheep could not get at him. Riding in the Gab Lab was an adventure in itself—wait till I told Zoe!—what with the recording gear and highway maps and other clutter its usual occupant had to scoop out of the passenger seat to make room for me. He apologized for his housekeeping and I told him not to worry, it matched ours. “There’s only your father and you?” he asked, and I started in full bore about Pop and my mother splitting the blanket when I was real little, but before I could say more, he sympathized by telling me his parents, too, had divorced when he was a child and now were both dead, which effectively put him way beyond me in orphanhood, so I quit babbling.