English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  Within days after sizing up the railroad situation "the old boy was borrowing money right and left from anybody who’d take his note, to buy horses and more horses"—my father was always a ready source on Isaac, I guess greatly grateful to have had a father-in-law he both admired and got entertainment from—and soon Isaac had his own teams and drivers working on contract for the Great Northern.

  When construction reached the east face of the Rockies, the mountains held Isaac. Why, nobody in the family ever could figure out. Certainly in Denmark he must never have seen anything higher than a barnyard manure pile. And unlike some other parts of Montana, this one had no settlement of Danes. (Though, as my father pointed out, maybe those were Isaac’s reasons.) In any case, while his horses and men worked on west through Marias Pass as the railroad proceeded toward the coast, Isaac stayed and looked around. In a week or so he horsebacked south along the mountains toward Gros Ventre, and out of that journey bought a homestead relinquishment which became the start of the eventual Reese ranch.

  Isaac Reese was either shrewd as hell or lucky as hell. Even at my stage of life I am not entirely clear whether there is any appreciable difference between the two. By whichever guidance he lit here in a region of Montana where a couple of decades of projects were standing in line waiting for a man with a herd of workhorses. The many miles of irrigation canals of the water schemes at Valier and Bynum and Choteau and Fairfield. Ranch reservoirs ("ressavoys” to Isaac). The roadbed when the branch railroad was built north from Choteau to Pendroy. Street grading when Valier was built onto the prairie. All those Glacier Park roads and trails. As each appurtenance was

  put onto the Two country and its neighboring areas, Isaac was on hand to realize money from it.

  “And married a Scotchwoman to hang on to the dollars for him," my father always injected at this point. She was Anna Ramsay, teacher at the Noon Creek school. Her I knew next to nothing about. Just that she died in the influenza epidemic during the war, and that in the wedding picture of her and Isaac that hung in my parents’ bedroom she was the one standing and looking in charge, while Isaac sat beside her with his mustache drooping whimsically. Neither my mother nor my father ever said much about Anna Ramsay Reese; which helped sharpen my present curiosity, thinking about her trundling off to St. Mary in that wagon. Like my McCaskill grandparents she simply was an absent figure back there, cast all the more into shadow by my father’s supply of stories about Isaac.

  In a sense, the first of those Isaac tales was the genesis of our family. The night my father, the young association rider, was going to catch Isaac by ambush and request my mother in marriage, Isaac greeted him at the door and before they were even properly sat down, had launched into a whole evening of horse topics, Clydesdales and Belgians and Morgans and fetlocks and withers and hocks. Never tell me a Scandinavian harbors no sense of humor.

  When my father at last managed to wedge the question in, Isaac tried to look taken aback, eyed him hard and repeated as if he was making sure: "Marriage?" Or as my father said Isaac pronounced it: “Mare itch ?"

  Then Isaac looked at my father harder yet and asked: "Te1l me dis. Do you ever took a drink?"

  My father figured honesty was the best answer in the face of public knowledge. "Now and then, yes, I do."

  Isaac weighed that. Then he got to his feet and loomed over my father. "Ye’ll took one now, den." And with Mason jar moonshine reached down from the cupboard, the pairing that began Alec and me was toasted.

  * * *

  When I considered that I’d done an afternoon’s excavating, physically and mentally, I climbed out and had a look at the progress of my sanitation engineering. By now the pile of dirt and gravel stood high and broad, the darker tone on its top showing today’s fresh shovel work and the drier faded—out stuff the previous days’. With a little imagination I thought I could even discern a gradation, like layers on a cake, of each stint of my shovelfuls of the Two country, Monday’s, Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s, and now today’s light-chocolate top. Damn interesting, the ingredients of this earth.

  More to the immediate point, I was pleased with myself that I’d estimated the work into the right daily dabs. Tomorrow afternoon was going to cost some effort, because I was getting down so deep the soil would need to be bucketed out. But the hole looked definitely finishable. I must have been more giddy with myself than I realized, because when I went over to the chopping block to split wood for the kitchen woodbox, I found myself using the ax in rhythm with a song of Stanley’s about the gal named Lou and what she was able to do with her wingwangwoo.

  When I came into the kitchen with the armload, my mother was looking at me oddly.

  "Since when did you take up singing ?" she inquired.

  "Oh, just feeling good, I guess," I said and dumped my cargo into the woodbox loud enough to try prove it.

  “What was that tune, anyway?"

  “ ‘Pretty Redwing,’ " I hazarded. "I think."

  That brought a further look from her.

  "While I’m at it I might as well fill the water bucket," I proposed, and got out of there.

  * * *

  After supper, lack of anything better to do made me tackle my mother on that long ago wagon trip again. That is, I was doing something but it didn’t exactly strain the brain. Since hearing Stanley tell about having done that winter of hairwork a million years ago in Kansas, I had gotten mildly interested and was braiding myself a horsehair hackamore. I was discovering, though, that in terms of entertainment, braiding is pretty much like chewing gum with your fingers. So:

  "Where’d you sleep?"

  She was going through the Gleaner. "Sleep when?"

  "That time. When you all went up to St. Mary." I kept on with my braiding just as if we’d been having this continuing conversation every evening of our lives.

  She glanced over at me, then said: "Under the wagon."

  “Really? You?" Which drew me more of her attention than I was bargaining for. "Uh, how many nights ?"

  I got quite a little braiding done in the silence that answered that, and when I finally figured I had to glance up, I realized that she was truly studying me. Not just taking apart with a look: studying. Her voice wasn’t at all sharp when she asked: "Jick, what’s got your curiosity bump up?"

  "I’m just interested, is all." Even to me that didn’t sound like an overly profound explanation, so I tried to go on. "When I was with Stanley, those days camptending, he told me a lot about the Two. About when he was the ranger. It got me interested in, uh, old times."

  "What did he say about being ranger?"

  "That he was the one here before Dad. And that he set up the Two as a national forest." It occurred to me to try her on a piece of chronology I had been attempting to work out ever since that night of my cabin binge. "What, was Dad the ranger at Indian Head while Stanley still was the ranger here?"

  “For a while."

  “Is that where I remember Stanley from?"

  "I suppose."

  "Did you and Dad neighbor back and forth with him a lot?"

  "Some. What does any of that have to do with how many nights I slept under a wagon twenty-five years ago ?"

  She had a reasonable enough question there. Yet it somehow seemed to me that a connection did exist, that any history of a Two country person was alloyed with the history of any other Two country person. That some given sum of each life had to be added into every other, to find the total. But none of which sounded sane to say. All I did finally manage was: "I just would like to know something about things then. Like when you were around my age."

  No doubt there was a response she had to bite her tongue to keep from making: that she wasn’t sure she’d ever been this age I seemed to be at just now. Instead came:

  "All right. That wagon trip to St. Mary. What is it you want to know about it?"

  "Well, just—why was it you went?"

  "Mother took the notion. My father had been away, up there, for some weeks. He often was, contr
acting horses somewhere." She rustled the Gleaner as she turned a page. "About like being married to a ranger," she added, but lightly enough to show it was her version of a joke.

  "How long did that trip take then?" Now, in a car, it was a matter of a couple or three hours.

  She had to think about that. After a minute: "Three and a half days. Three nights," she underscored for my benefit, “under the wagon. One at Badger Creek and one on the Hat outside Browning and one at Cut Bank Creek."

  "How come outside Browning? Why not in town?"

  "My mother held the opinion that the prairie was a more civilized place than Browning."

  "What did you do for food?" `

  "We ate out of a chuck box. That old one from chuckwagon days, with all the cattle brands on it. Mother and I cooked up what was necessary, before we left."

  “Were you the only ones on the road?"

  “Pretty much, yes. The mail stage still was running then. Somewhere along the way I guess we met it."

  She could nail questions shut faster than I could think them up. Not deliberately, I see now. That was just the way she was. A person who put no particular importance on having made a prairie trek and seen a stagecoach in the process.

  My mother seemed to realize that this wasn’t exactly flowering into the epic tale I was hoping for. "Jick, that’s all I know about it. We went, and stayed a few days, and came back."

  Went, stayed, came. The facts were there but the feel of them wasn’t. "What about the road camp?" I resorted to next. "What do you remember about that?" The St. Mary area is one of the most beautiful ones, with the mountains of Glacier National Park sheering up beyond the lake. The world looks to be all stone and ice and water there. Even my mother might have noticed some of that glory. Here she found a small smile, one of her surprise sidelong ones. “Just that when we pulled in, Pete began helloing all the horses."

  She saw that didn’t register with me.

  "Calling out hello to the workhorses in the various teams," she explained. "He hadn’t seen them for a while, after all. ‘Hello, Woodrow!’ ‘Hello, Sneezer!’ Moses. Runt. Copenhagen. Mother let him go on with it until he came to a big gray mare called Second Wife. She never thought the name of that one was as funny as Father did."

  There is this about history, you never know which particular ember of it is going to glow to life. As she told this I could all but hear Pete helloing those horses, his dry voice making a chant which sang across that road camp. And the look on my mother told me she could, too.

  Not to be too obvious, I braided a moment more. Then decided to try the other part of that St. Mary scene. "Your own mother. What was she like?"

  “That father of yours has been heard to say I’m a second serving of her."

  Well, this at least informed me that old Isaac Reese hadn’t gotten away with nearly as much in life as I’d originally thought. But now, how to keep this line of talk going—

  “Was she an April Fool too?"

  "No," my mother outright laughed. "No, I seem to be the family’s only one of that variety."

  Probably our best single piece of family lore was that my mother, our unlikeliest candidate for any kind of foolery, was born on the first of April of 1900. "Maybe you could get the calendar changed," I recall that my father joked this particular year, when he and Alec and I were spoofing her a little, careful not to make it too much, about the coincidence of her birthday. “Trade dates with Groundhog Day, maybe." She retorted, “I don’t need the calendar changed, just slowed down." It sobers me to realize that when she made that plaint about the speed of time, she was not yet two thirds of the age I am now.

  —"Why did I What ?" The Gleaner was forgotten in front of her now, her gaze was on me: not her look that could skin a rock, just a highly surprised once-over.

  I swear that what I’d had framed in mind was only further inquiry about my grandparents, how Anna Ramsay and Isaac Reese first happened to meet and when they’d decided to get married and so on.

  But somewhere a cog slipped, and what had fallen out of my mouth instead was “Why’d you marry Dad ?"

  "Well, you know," I now floundered, searching for any possible shore, "what I mean, kids wonder about something like that. How we got here." Another perilous direction, that one. "I don’t mean, uh,

  how, exactly. More like why. Didn’t you ever wonder yourself? Why your own mother and father decided to get married? I mean, how would any of us be here if those people back then hadn’t decided the way they did? And I just thought, since we’re talking about all this anyway, you could fill me in on some of it. Out of your own experience, sort of."

  My mother looked at me for an eternity more, then shook her head.

  "One of them goes head over heels after anything blond, the other one wants to know the history of the world. Alec and you. Where did I get you two?"

  I figured I had nothing further to lose by taking the chance:

  "That’s sort of what I was asking, isn’t it ?"

  "All right." She still looked skeptical of the possibility of common sense in me, but her eyes let up on me a little. "All right, Mr. Inquisitive. You want to know the makings of this family, is that it ?"

  I nodded vigorously.

  She thought. Then: "Jick, a person hardly knows how to start on this. But you know, don’t you, I taught most of that—that one year at the Noon Creek school?"

  I did know this chapter. That when my mother’s mother died in the fiu epidemic of 1918, my mother came back from what was to have been her second year in college and became, in her mother’s stead, the Noon Creek teacher.

  "If it hadn’t been for that, who knows what would have happened," she went on. "But that did bring me back from college, about the same time a redheaded galoot named Varick McCaskill came back from the army. His folks still were in here up the North Fork. Scotch Heaven. So Mac was back in the country and the two of us had known each other, oh, all our lives, really. Though mostly by sight. Our families didn’t always get along. But that’s neither here nor there. That spring when this Mac character was hired as association rider—"

  "Didn’t get along?"

  I ought to have known better. My interruption sharpened her right up again. "That’s another story. There’s such a thing as a one-track mind, but honestly, Jick, you McCaskill men sometimes have no-track minds. Now. Do you want to Hear This, Or—"

  "You were doing just fine. Real good. Dad got to be the association rider and then what ?"

  "All right then. He got to be the association rider and—well, he got to paying attention to me. I suppose it could be said I paid some back."

  Right then I yearned for the impossible. To have watched that double-sided admiration. My mother had turned nineteen the first of April of that teaching year; a little older than Alec was now, though not a whole hell of a lot. Given what a good-looker she was even now, she must have been extra special then. And my father the cowboy—hard to imagine that—would have been in his early twenties, a rangy redhead who’d been out in the world all the way to Camp Lewis, Washington. Varick and Lisabeth, progressing to Mac and Bet. And then to some secret territory of love language that I couldn’t even guess at. They are beyond our knowing, those once young people who become our parents, which to me has always made them that much more fascinating.

  ——"There was a dance, that spring. In my own schoolhouse, so your father ever since has been telling me I have nobody to blame but myself." She again had a glow to her, as when she’d told me about Pete helloing the horses. "Mac was on hand. By then he’d been hired by the Noon Creek ranchers and was around helping them brand calves and so on. That dance"—she shrugged, as if an impossible question had been asked——“that dance I suppose did it, though neither of us knew it right then. I’d been determined I was never going to marry into a ranch life. Let alone to a cow chouser who didn’t own much more than his chaps and hat. And later I found out from your father that he’d vowed never to get interested in a schoolmarm. Too uppity t
o bother with, he always thought. So much for intentions. Anyway, now here he was, in my own schoolroom. I’d never seen a man take so much pleasure in dancing. Most of it with me, need I say. Oh, and there was this. I hadn’t been around him or those other Scotch Heaveners while I was away at college, and I’d lost the knack of listening to that burr of theirs. About the third time that night he said something I couldn’t catch, I asked him: ‘Do you always talk through your nose ?’ And then he put on a real burr and said back, ‘Lass, it saves wearrr and tearrr on my lips. They’rrre in prrrime condition, if you’rrre everrr currrious.’ "

  My father the flirt. Or flirrrt. I must have openly gaped over this, for my mother reddened a bit and stirred in her chair and declared, "Well, you don’t need full details. Now then. Is that enough family

  history?"

  Not really. "You mean, the two of you decided to get married because you liked how Dad danced ?"

  “You would be surprised how large a part something like that plays. But no, there’s more to it than that. Jick, when people fall in love the way we did, it’s—I don’t mean this like it sounds, but it’s like being sick. Sick in a wonderful way, if you can imagine that. The feeling is in you just all the time, is what I mean. It takes you over. No matter what you do, what you try to think about, the other person is there in your head. Or your blood, however you want to say it. It’s"—she shrugged at the impossible again—“there’s no describing it beyond that. And so we knew. A summer of that—a summer when we didn’t even see each other that much, because your father was up in the Two tending the association cattle most of the time—we just knew. That fall, we were married." Here she sprung a slight smile at me. "And I let myself in for all these questions."