by Ivan Doig
Marie’s special three bean salad, the pinnacle of how good beans can taste. My mother’s famous potato salad with little new green onions cut so fine they were like sparks of flavor.
New radishes, sweet and about the size of a marble, first of Marie’s garden vegetables. A dozen and a half deviled eggs arrayed by my mother.
A jar of home-canned pickled beets, a strong point of my mother’s. A companion jar of crabapple pickles, a distinction of Marie’s. A plate of my mother’s corn muffins. A loaf of Marie’s saffron bread. Between the two, a moon of Reese home-churned butter. An angelfood cake by Marie. A chocolate sour cream cake from my mother.
My eyes feasted while the rest of me readied to. My father urged, "Dive in, Toussaint," and the passing of dishes got under way.
"Been a while since breakfast," Pete proclaimed when he had his plate loaded. “I’m so excited to see food again I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat."
“Too bad about you," Marie said in that soft yet take-it-or-leave-it way so like Toussaint’s. And my mother didn’t overlook the chance to put in: "Wait, we’ll sell tickets. People will line up to see Pete Reese not eat."
“Come on now, Bet," came the protest from Pete. "I have never eaten more than I could hold."
As they should do at a picnic, the conversing and the consuming cantered along together in this fashion. I think it was at the start of the second plateload, when we were all letting out dubious hmmms about having another helping of this or that but then going ahead and having it, that Pete asked my father if fire school in Missoula had made him any smarter than he was before.
"Airplanes," my father announced. "Airplanes are the firefighting apparatus of the future, at least according to this one hoosier we heard from over there."
"The hell. How’s that gonna work?"
"I didn’t say it was going to work. I just said what the hoosier told us. They’re going to try parachutists—like these guys at fairs?"
"Say on," urged Toussaint, squinting through a mask of eager puzzlement. Toussaint always was avid to hear developments of this sort, as if they confirmed for him the humorous traits of the human race. "That radio stuff`," he had declared during the worst of the drought and the dust storms, "it monkeys with the air. Dries it out, all that electric up there."
"They’re just now getting ready to test all this out," my father continued his report of latest up-in-the-air science. "Send an airplane with a couple of these parachutists over a mountain smoke and see if they can jump down there and tromp it out before it grows to a real fire. That’s the cheery theory, anyhow."
Pete shook his head. "They couldn’t pay me enough to jump out of one of those."
“Hell, Pete, the jumping would be easy money. The landing is the only drawback." My father readied to plow into another of Toussaint’s trout, but first offered as if in afterthought: "Fact is, I told them I’d volunteer"—my mother’s full skepticism sighted in on him now, waiting to see if there was any color of seriousness in this—“if the parachute was going to be big enough for my saddle horse and packstring too."
The vision of my father and assorted horses drifting down from the sky the way the cottonwood fluffs were floating around us set everybody to laughing like loonies.
Next it was Toussaint’s inning again. The mention of horses reminded him of a long ago Fourth of July in Gros Ventre when everybody caught horse race fever. "How it happened, first they matched every saddle horse against every other saddle horse. Ran out of those by middle of the afternoon. Still plenty of beer and daylight left. Then somebody got the notion. Down to the stable, everybody. Brought out the stagecoach horses. Bridled them, put boys on them bareback. Raced them against each other the length of Main Street." The Toussaint chuckle. "It was hard to know. To bet on the horse, or how high the boy would bounce."
Which tickled us all again. Difficult to eat on account of laughing, and to laugh on account of eating. Give me that dilemma anytime. All this horse talk did remind me about Mouse, and I excused myself to go picket him onto another patch of grass. Truth to tell, getting myself up and into motion also would shake down some of the food in me and make room for more.
* * *
Thinking back on that scene as I wended my way to the edge of the park where Mouse was tethered, I have wished someone among us then had the talent to paint the portrait of that picnic. A group scene I that would have preserved those faces from English Creek and Noon Creek and Gros Ventre and the out-east farming country and, yes, Toussaint’s from the Two Medicine. That would convey every one of those people at once and yet also their separateness. Their selves, I guess the word should be. I don’t mean one of those phony-baloney gilt concoctions such as that one of Custer and all his embattled and doomed troopers there at the Little Bighorn, which hangs in three fourths of the saloons I have ever been in and disgusts me every single time. (To my mind, Custer can be done justice only if shown wearing a tall white dunce cap.) But once I saw in a magazine, Look or Life or one of those old every-week ones, what one painter tried in this respect of showing selves. He first painted little pictures of tropical flowers, in pink and other pastels ; wild roses I guess would be our closest comparison flower here in the Two country. Some several hundred of those, he painted. Then when all these were hung together in the right order on the wall, the Hower colors fit together from picture to picture to create the outline of a tremendously huge snake. In any picture by itself you could not see a hint of that snake. But look at them together and he lay kinked across the entire wall mightier than the mightiest python.
That is the kind of portrait I mean of the creek picnic. Not that very many of those people there in the park could be called the human equivalent of flowers, nor that the sum of them amounted to a colossal civic snake. But just the point that there, that day, they seemed to me all distinctly themselves and yet added up together too. I have inquired, though, and so far as I can find, nobody ever even thought to take a photograph of that day.
* * *
When I came back from re-tethering Mouse, my parents and Pete and Marie were in a four-way conversation about something or other, and Toussaint was spearing himself another trout out of the broiler. His seemed to me the more sensible endeavor, so I dropped down next to him to inflict myself on the chicken supply. I was just beginning to do good work on my favorite piece of white meat, a breastbone, when Toussaint turned his head toward me. The potato salad had come to rest nearest my end of the blanket and I reached toward it, expecting that he was going to ask me to pass it to him. Instead Toussaint stated quietly: “You are a campjack these days."
Probably I went red as an apple. I mean, good Christamighty. Toussaint’s words signaled what I had never dreamt of: moccasin telegraph had the story of my sashay with Stanley. Everything that coursed through me in those moments I would need Methuselah’s years to sort out.
Questions of source and quantity maybe hogged in first. How the hell did Toussaint know? And what exactly did he know? My dimwitted approach to a barbwire fence in an electrical storm? My tussle with Bubbles? My alcoholic evening in the cabin? No, he couldn’t know any of those in detail. Could he?
The unnerving possibility of Toussaint having dropped some mention of that last and biggest matter, my night of imbibing, into the general conversation while I was off tending Mouse made me peer toward my mother.
No real reassurance there. Her mood plainly had declined since the parade of the food onto the blanket, she now was half listening to my father and Pete and half gazing off toward the ripples of English Creek. Whatever was occupying her mind, I could only send up prayers that it wasn’t identical to the topic on mine.
Geography next. How far had the tale of Jick and Stanley spread? Was I traveling on tongues throughout the whole damn Two country? "Hear about that McCaskill kid? Yeah, green as frog feathers, ain’t he? You wonder how they let him out of the house by himself."
And beyond that, philosophy. If I was a Toussaint topic, just what did that consti
tute? The mix of apprehension and surmise was all through me. Plus a flavor of something which seemed surprisingly like pride. Better or worse, part of me now was in Toussaint’s knowledge, his running history of the Two. In there with Phony Nose Gorman and the last buffalo hunt and the first sheep and the winter of ’86 and Lieutenant Black Jack Pershing and the herded Crees and—and what did that mean? Being a part of history, at the age of fourteen years and ten months: why had that responsibility picked me out?
They say when a cat walks over the ground that will be your grave, a shiver goes through you. As I sat there that fine July noon with a breastbone forgotten in my hand, Toussaint again busy eating his trout after leaving the track of those six soft words across my life—"You are a campjack these days"—yes, I shivered.
My father’s voice broke my trance. “If Toussaint and Jick ever would get done eating for winter, we could move along to the delicacy part of the meal. Some fancy handle-turning went into the making of that ice cream, you know. Or at least so I hear by rumor."
My mother was up, declaring she’d bring the cups of coffee if a certain son of hers would see to the dessert. Toussaint chuckled. And put up a restraining hand as I started to clamber to my feet, ready to bolt off to fetch dishes of ice cream, bolt off anywhere to get a minute of thinking space to myself.
"Do you know, Beth," Toussaint began, stopping her and my heart at the same time, "do you know—your potato salad was good."
* * *
A picnic always slides into final contentment on ice cream. All around us as each batch of people finished dessert and coffee, men flopped onto their backs or sides while the women sat up and chatted with one another.
I, though; I wasn’t doing any sliding or flopping, just sitting there bolt upright trying to think things through. My head was as gorged as my stomach, which was saying a lot. .
My father, though, acted as if he didn’t have a thing in the world on his mind. To my surprise, he scootched around until he had room to lie flat, then sank back with his head in my mother’s lap and his hat over his face.
"Pretty close to perfect," he said. "Now if I only had an obedient wife who’d relieve me of these dress shoes."
“If I take them off you," my mother vowed, "you’ll be chasing after them as they float down the creek."
"This is what I have to put up with all the time, Toussaint," came his voice from under the hat. “She’s as independent as the moon." My mother answered that by sticking out a thumb and jabbing it between a couple of his ribs, which brought a whuw! out of him.
Down at creekside, the school superintendent Mr. Vennaman was stepping up into the stump rostrum. Time for the program, evidently. I tried to contain at the back of my mind the cyclone of thoughts about Toussaint and moccasin telegraph and myself.
"—always a day of pleasure," Mr. Vennaman’s voice began to reach those of us at the back of the park. "This is a holiday particularly American. Sometimes, if the person on the stump such as I am at this moment doesn’t watch his enthusiasm, it can become a little too much so. I am always reminded of the mock speech which Mose Skinner, a Will Rogers of his day, proposed for this nation’s one hundredth birthday in 1876: ‘Any person who insinuates in the remotest degree that America isn’t the biggest and best country in the world, and far ahead of every other country in everything, will be filled with gunpowder and touched off."
When the laughing at that died down, Mr. Vennaman went on: "We don’t have to be quite that ardent about it, I think. But this is a day we can simply be thankful to be with our other countrymen. A day for neighbors and friends and family.
"Some of those neighbors, in fact, are here with a gift of song for us." Mr. Vennaman peered over toward the nearest big cottonwood. “Nola, can the music commence ?"
This was interesting. For under that towering tree sat a piano. Who came up with the idea I never did know, but some of the Gros Ventre men had hauled the instrument—of course it was one of those old upright ones—out of Nola Atkins’s front room, and now here it was on the bank of English Creek, and Nola on the piano bench readying to play. I’d like to say Nola looked right at home, but actually she was kept busy shooing cottonwood fluff off the keys and every so often there’d be a plink as she brushed away a particularly stubborn puff.
Nonetheless, Nola bobbed yes, she was set.
I think it has to be said that the singing at events such as this is usually a pretty dubious proposition, and that’s more than likely why some out-of-town group was invited to perform at each of these Fourth picnics. That way, nobody local had anything to live down. This year’s songsters, the Valier Men’s Chorus, now were gathering themselves beside Nola and the piano. Odd to see them up there in that role, farmers and water company men, in white dress shirts and with the pale summits of their foreheads where hats customarily sat.
Their voices proved to be better than you might expect. The program, though, inadvertently hit our funny bones as much as it did our ears, because the chorus’s first selection was "I Cannot Sing the Songs of Long Ago," and then, as if they hadn’t heard their own advice, they wobbled into "Love’s Old Sweet Song." The picnic crowd blossomed with grins over that, and I believe I discerned even a trace of one on Nola Atkins at the piano.
Mr. Vennaman came back up on the stump, thanking the Valierians “for that memorable rendition" and introducing “yet another neighbor, our guest of honor this day." Emil Thorsen, the sheepman and state senator from down at Choteau, rose and declared in a voice that could have been heard all the way downtown that in early times when he was first running for office and it was all one county through here from Fort Benton to Babb instead of being broken up into several as it is now, he’d have happily taken up our time; "but since I can’t whinny any votes out of you folks any more, I’ll just say I’m glad to be here among so many friends, and compliment you on feeding as good as you ever did, and shut myself up and sit down." And did.
Mr. Vennaman popped to his feet again, leading the hand-clapping and then saying: "Our next speaker actually needs no introduction. I’m going to take a lesson from Senator Thorsen and not bother to fashion one." Two traits always marked Mr. Vennaman as an educator: the bow tie he perpetually wore and the way, even saying hello on the street, he seemed to be looking from the front of a classroom at you. Now he peered and even went up on his tiptoes a bit, as if calling on someone in the back row of that classroom, and sang out:
"Beth McCaskill?"
I knew I hadn’t heard that quite right.
Yet here she was, getting up from beside my father and smoothing her dress down and setting off toward the speaker’s stump, with folded sheets of paper clutched in her business hand. No doubt about it, I was the most surprised person in the state of Montana right then. But Pete and Marie were not far behind and even Toussaint’s face was squinched with curiosity.
“What—?" I floundered to my father. "Did you know—?"
“She’s been sitting up nights writing this," he told me with a cream-eating grin. "Your mother, the Eleanor Roosevelt of English Creek."
She was on the stump now, smoothing the papers onto the little stand, being careful the creek breeze didn’t snatch them. She looked like she had an appointment to fight panthers, but her voice began steady and clear.
"My being up here is anybody’s suggestion but my own. It was argued to me that if I did not make this talk, it would not get made. That might have been the better idea.
“But Maxwell Vennaman, not to mention a certain Varick McCaskill, has the art of persuasion. I have been known to tell that husband of mine that he has a memory so long he has to tie knots in it to carry it around with him. We’ll all now see just how much my own remembering is made up of slip knots."
Chuckles among the crowd at that. A couple of hundred people being entertained by my mother: a minute before, I would have bet the world against it.
"But I do say this. I can see yet, as clearly as if he was standing in long outline against one of these c
ottonwoods, the man I have been asked to recall. Ben English. Many others of you were acquainted with Ben and the English family. Sat up to a dinner or supper Mary put on the table in that very house across there." Heads turned, nodded. The English place was directly before us, across the creek from the park. One of the Depression’s countless vacant remnants, with a walked-away look to it. If you were driving north out of Gros Ventre the English place came so quick, set in there just past the highway bridge, that chances were you wouldn’t recognize it as a ranch rather than a part of the town. But from the park, the empty buildings across there seemed to call their facts over to us. The Englishes all dead or moved away. The family after them felled by the Depression. Now the land leased by Wendell Williamson. One more place which had supported people, now populated by Double W cows.
“Or," my mother was continuing, "or dealt with Ben for horses or cattle or barley or hay. But acquaintance doesn’t always etch deep, and so at Max Vennaman’s request I have put together what is known of Ben English.
"His is a history which begins where that of all settlers of the West of America has to: elsewhere. Benson English was born in 1865 at Cobourg, in Ontario in Canada. He liked to tell that as he and his brothers one by one left home, their mother provided each of them with a Bible, a razor, whatever money she could, and some knitted underwear." My mother here looked as if she entirely approved of Ben English’s mother. "Ben English was seventeen when he followed his brother Robert into Montana, to Augusta where Robert had taken up a homestead. Ben found a job driving freight wagon for the Sun River Sheep Company from the supply point at Craig on the Missouri River to their range in the mountains. He put in a year at that, and then, at eighteen, he was able to move up to driving the stage between Craig and Augusta." She lifted a page, went right on as if she’d been giving Fourth of July speeches every day of her life. "Atop there with four horses surging beneath him seemed to be young Ben English’s place in the world. Soon, with his wages of forty dollars a month, he was buying his own horses. With a broke team in the lead and his green ones in the other traces, he nonetheless somehow kept his reputation as a driver you could set your clock by." Here she looked up from her sheets of paper to glance over to Senator Thorsen. "Ben later liked to tell that a bonus of stage driving was its civic opportunities. On election day he was able to vote when the stage made its stop at the Halfway House. Then again when it reached Craig. Then a third time when he got home to Augusta."