English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  When the laughter of that was done, my mother focused back down to her pages. "There was a saying that any man who had been a stagecoach driver was qualified to handle the reins of heaven or hell, either one. But Ben English, as so many of our parents did, made the choice halfway between those two. He homesteaded. In the spring of 1893 he filed his claim southwest of here at the head of what is now called Ben English Coulee. The particulars of the English homestead on Ben’s papers of proof may sound scant, yet many of us here today came from just such beginnings in this country: ‘A dwelling house, stable, corrals, two and a half miles of wire fences, thirty acres of hay cut each season—total value, eight hundred dollars.’

  "Around the time of his homesteading Ben English married Mary Manix of Augusta, and they moved here, to the place across the creek, in 1896. Their only child, Mary, was born there in 1901."

  Here my mother paused, her look fastened over the heads of all of us on the park grass, toward the trunk of one of the big cottonwoods farthest back. As if, in the way she’d said earlier, someone was standing in outline against the gray bark. "A lot of you can remember the look of Ben English. A rangy man, standing well over six feet, and always wearing a black Stetson, always with a middle crimp. He sometimes grew a winter beard, and in his last years he wore a mustache that made him look like the unfoolable horse dealer he was. Across thirty-some years my father, Isaac Reese, and Ben English knew each other and liked each other and tried to best each other. Put the pair of them together, my mother used to say of their visits, and they would examine a horse until there was nothing left of it but a hank of tail hair and a dab of glue. Once when my father bought a horse with an odd stripe in its face, Ben told him he was glad to see a man of his age taking up a new occupation: raising zebras. My father got his turn back when Ben bought a dark bay Clydesdale that stood twenty-one hands high at the shoulder, very likely the hugest horse there ever has been in this valley, and, upon asking what the horse’s name was, discovered it was Benson. Whenever my father saw Ben and the Benson horse together he called out, ‘Benson and Benson, but t’ank Godt vun of t’em vears a hadt.’ "

  Of all the crowd, I am sure my father laughed loudest at this Isaac Reese tale, and Pete was nodding in confirmation of that accent he and my mother had grown up under. Our speaker of the day, though, was sweeping onward. "Anyone who knew Ben English more than passingly will recall his knack for nicknames. For those of you old enough to remember them around town, Glacier Gus Swenson and Three Day Thurlow both were christened that way by Ben English."

  Chuckles of recognition spattered amid the audience. Glacier Gus was an idler so slow that it was said he wore spurs to keep his shadow from treading on his heels. Three Day Thurlow had an everlasting local reputation as a passable worker his first day on a job, a complainer on his second, and gone sometime during his third. “Ben’s nicknaming had no thought of malice behind it, however. He did it for the pleasure it gave his tongue. In any event, in their pauper’s graves Glacier Gus and Three Day each lie buried in a suit given by Ben English."

  She put the page she had just finished beneath the others, and the next page she met with a little bob of her head, as if it was the one she’d been looking for all this time. “So it is a justice of language that a namer himself lives on in an extra name. Originally this flow of water was simply called Gros Ventre Creek, to go with the townsite. But it came to be a saying, as the sheepmen and other travelers would pass through here, that they would stop for noon or the night when they reached English’s Creek. An apostrophe is not the easiest thing in the world to keep track of, and so we know this as English Creek."

  She paused again and I brought my hands up ready to clap, that sounding to me like the probable extent of the Ben English history. But no, she was resuming. Do I never learn? My mother had her own yardstick as to when she was done with a topic.

  "I have a particular memory of Ben English myself. I can see him yet, riding past our ranch on Noon Creek on his way to his cattle range in the mountains, leading a string of cayuse pack horses carrying block salt. On his way back he would ride into our yard and pass the time of day with my father while still sitting in his saddle, but hardly ever would he climb down and come in. His customary explanation was that he had to get home and move the water. He seemed to feel that if he stayed in the saddle, he indeed was on his way to that irrigating task."

  My father had his head cocked in a fashion as if what she was reciting was new to him. I figured that was just his pride in her performance, but yet . . .

  "And that memory leads to the next, of Ben English in his fields across from us here, moving the water. Guiding the water, it might be better said. For Ben English used the water of his namesake creek as a weaver uses wool. With care. With respect. With patience. Persuading it to become a product greater than itself." Once more she smoothed the page she was reading from. "Greater than itself. As Ben English himself became, greater than himself. From the drudgery of a freight wagon to the hell deck of a stagecoach to a dry-land homestead to a ranch of green water-fed meadows that nicely supported a family, that was the Montana path of Ben English. Following his ability, trusting in it to lead him past the blind alleys of life. This is the day to remember a man who did it that way."

  Was I the only one to have the thought brim up in me then? That suddenly, somehow, Alec McCaskill and the Double W had joined Ben English in this speech?

  Whether or not, my mother had returned to the irrigation theme. “Bill Reinking has been kind enough to find for me in the Gleaner files something which says this better than I can. It is a piece that I remembered was published when the first water flowed into the ditches of the Valier irrigation project. Who wrote it is not known. It is signed simply ‘Homesteader.’ Among the hundreds, no, thousands who were homesteading this country then, maybe ‘Homesteader’ isn’t quite as anonymous as ‘Anonymous.’ But awfully close. It is titled ‘The Lord of the Field." She drew a deep breath. "It reads :

  " ‘The irrigator is the lone lord of his field. A shovel is his musket, gumboots are his garb of office, shank’s mare is his steed. To him through the curving laterals the water arrives mysteriously, without sign of origin or destination. But his canvas dam, placed with cunning, causes the flood to hesitate, seek; and with an eager whisper, pour over the ditch bank and onto the grateful land. The man with the shovel hears the parched earth drink. He sees its face of dusty brown gladden to glistening black. He smells the odor of life as the land’s plants take the water in green embrace. He feels like a god, exalted by this power of his hand and brain to create manmade rain-yet humble as even a god must be under the burden of such power.’ "

  I honestly believe the only breath which could be discerned in that crowd after that was the one my mother let out. Now she locked her attention to her written sheets, and the words it gave her next were: "Ben English is gone from us. He died in the summer of 1927, of a strained heart. Died, to say it plainly, of the work he put into this country, as so many have. My own father followed Ben English to the grave within three years. Some say that not a horse in the Two country has had a good looking-over since their passing." Which was one of the more barbed things she could have said to this audience, full as it was of guys who considered themselves pretty fancy horsemen. But she of course said it anyway and sailed on.

  "Ben English is gone, and the English place stands empty across there, except for the echoes of the auctioneer’s hammer." A comment with bigger barbs yet. Ted Muntz, whose First National Bank had foreclosed on the English place from the people Mrs. English sold it to, without doubt was somewhere in this audience. And all out among the picnic crowd I saw people shift restlessly, as if the memory of the foreclosure auctions, the Depression’s hammer sales, was a sudden chafe.

  My father by now was listening so hard he seemed to be frozen, an ice statue wearing the clothing of a man, which confirmed to me that not even he knew how far my mother was headed with this talk.

  "English Creek
is my second home," she was stating now as if someone was arguing the point with her, “for you all know that Noon Creek is where I was born and grew up. Two creeks, two valleys, two claims on my heart. Yet the pair are also day and night to me, as examples of what has happened to this country in my lifetime. Noon Creek now is all but empty of the families I knew there. Yes, there is still the Reese name on a Noon Creek ranch, I am proud as anything to say. And the Egan name, for it would be easier to dislodge the Rocky Mountains than Dill Egan. But the others, all the ranches down Noon Creek but one—all those are a roll call of the gone. The Torrance place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. The Emrich place: foreclosed on, the family gone from here. The Chute place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. Thad Wainwright’s place, Thad one of the first cattlemen anywhere in this country: sold out at a loss, Thad passed away within a year. The Fain place: foreclosed on, the family gone from here. The Eiseley place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. The Nansen place." Here she paused, shook her head a little as if again disavowing Alec’s news that this was where he and Leona would set up a household. “The Nansen place: foreclosed on, Carl dead by his own hand, Sigrid and the children gone from here to her parents in Minnesota."

  What she was achieving was a feat I hadn’t known could be done. While her words were expressing outright the fate of those Noon Creek ranching families, she was telling an equally strong tale with the unsaid. "All the ranches down Noon Creek but one" had been her phrase of indictment. Everybody in this park this day knew what “but one" meant ; knew who ended up holding the land, by outright buy or by lease from the First National Bank of Gros Ventre, after each and every of those sales and foreclosures. A silent echo I suppose sounds like a contradiction in terms, yet I swear this was what my mother was ringing into the air: after every "sold—foreclosed—gone from here," the reverberating unspoken fact of that family ranch swallowed by the Double W.

  “English Creek," she was going on, "thankfully has been spared the Noon Creek history, except once." We knew the next of her litany; it stared us in the face. "The English place. After Ben’s death, sold to the Wyngard family who weren’t able to make a go of it against the Depression. Foreclosed on, the Wyngards gone from here.

  “A little bit ago, Max Vennaman said this is a day for friends and neighbors and families. So it is. And so too we must remember these friends and neighbors and families who are not among us today because they were done in by the times." This said with a skepticism that suggested the times had familiar human faces behind them. “But an auction hammer can shatter only a household, not the gifts of the earth itself. While it may hurt the heart to see such places as the home of Ben English occupied only by time and the wind, English Creek is still the bloodstream of our valley. It flows its honest way"—the least little pause here, just enough to seed the distinction from those who prosper by the auction hammer—"while we try to find ours."

  She looked up now, and out across us, all the islands of people.

  Either she had this last part by heart or was making it up as she went, because never once did she glance down at her sheaf of pages as she said it.

  “There is much wrong with the world, and I suppose I am not known to be especially bashful about my list of those things. But I think it could not be more right that we honor in this valley a man who savvied the land and its livelihood, who honored the earth instead of merely coveting it. It could not be more right that tall Ben English in his black hat amid his green fields, coaxing a head of water to make itself into hay, is the one whose name this creek carries."

  She folded her sheaf of papers once, then again, stuck them in the pocket of her dress and stepped down from the stump.

  Everybody applauded, although a few a lot more lukewarmly than others. Under our tree we were all clapping hard and my father hardest of all, but I also saw him swallow in a large way. And when he realized I was watching him, he canted himself in my direction and murmured so that only I could hear: “That mother of yours."

  Then she was back with us, taking compliments briskly. Pete studied her and said: "Decided to give the big boys some particular hell, didn’t you?" Even Toussaint told her: “That was good, about the irrigating." But of us all, it was only to my father that she said, in what would have been a demand if there hadn’t been the tint of anxiousness in it: "Well? What did you think ?"

  My father reached and with his forefinger traced back into place a banner of her hair that the creek breeze had lifted and lain across her ear.

  "I think," he said, "I think that being married to you is worth all the risk."

  * * *

  I lead the world in respect for picnics, but I do have to say that one was enough to last me for a while.

  Toussaint’s murmur to me, my mother’s speech to the universe. A person’s thought can kite back and forth between those almost forever. It was just lucky I now had specific matters to put myself to, fetching Mouse from where he was tethered and riding through the dispersing picnickers and heading on across the English Creek bridge to the rodeo grounds.

  I was to meet Ray Heaney on the corral alongside the bucking chutes, the best seats in the arena if you didn’t mind perching on a fence pole. Again this year my father drilled home to me his one point of rodeo etiquette. "Just so you stay up on that fence," he stipulated. “I don’t want to see you down in there with the chute society." By which he meant the clump of fifteen or twenty angers-on who always clustered around the gates of the bucking chutes, visiting and gossiping and looking generally important, and who regularly were cleared out of there two or three times every rodeo by rampaging broncs. When that happened, up onto anything climbable they all would scoot to roost, like hens with a weasel in their midst, and a minute or so after the bronc’s passage they’d be right back in front of the chutes, preening and yakking again. I suppose the chute society offended my father’s precept that a horse was nothing to be careless around. In any case, during the housecleanings when a bronc sent them scrambling for the fence it was my father’s habit to cheer loudly for the bronc.

  No Ray yet, at our fence perch. So I stayed atop Mouse and watched the world. In the pens behind the chutes the usual kind of before—rodeo confusion was going on, guys hassling broncs here and calves there, the air full to capacity with dust and bawling and whinnying. Out front, about half the chute society was already planted in place, tag-ends of their conversations mingling. "That SOB is so tight he wouldn’t give ten cents to see Christ ride a bicycle backwards .... Oh hell yes, I’ll take a quarter horse over a Morgan horse any time. Them Morgans are so damn hot-blooded .... With haying coming and one thing and another, I don’t see how I’m ever going to catch up with myself. . ."

  I saw my mother and father and Pete and Marie and Toussaint—and Midge Withrow had joined them, though Dode wasn’t yet in evidence—settling themselves at the far end of the grandstand, farthest from the dust the bucking horses would kick up.

  Other people were streaming by, up into the grandstand or to sit on car fenders or the ground along the outside of the arena fence. I am here to recommend the top of a horse as an advantageous site to view mankind. Everybody below sees mostly the horse, not you. Definitely I was ready for a recess from attention. From trying to judge whether people going by were nudging each other and whispering sideways, “That’s him. That’s the one. Got lit up like a ship in a storm, out there with that Stanley Meixell."

  Keen as I could be, I caught nobody at it, at least for sure, and began to relax somewhat. Oh, I did get a couple of lookings-over. Lila Sedge drifted past in her moony way, spied Mouse and me, and circled us suspiciously a few times. And the priest Father Morrisseau knew me by sight from my stays with the Heaneys. and bestowed me a salutation. But both those I considered routine inspections, so to speak. People kept accumulating, I kept watching. A Gros Ventre rodeo always is slower to get under way than the Second Coming.

  Then I happened to remember. Not only was I royally mounte
d, I also was carrying wealth.

  I nudged Mouse into action, to go do something about that four-bit piece my father had bestowed. Fifty whole cents. Maybe the Depression was on the run.

  The journey wasn’t far, just forty yards or so over to where, since Prohibition went home with Hoover, the Gros Ventre Rotary Club operated its beer booth. I swung down from Mouse and stepped to the plank counter. Behind it, they had several washtubs full of icewater and bottles of Kessler and Great Falls Select stashed down into the slush until only the brown necks were showing. And off to one side a little, my interest at the moment, the tub of soda pop.

  One of the unresolved questions of my life at that age was whether I liked orange soda or grape soda better. It can be more of a dilemma than is generally realized: unlike, say, those picnic options of trout or fried chicken, you can’t just dive in and have both. Anyway, I voted grape and was taking my first gulp when somebody inquired at my shoulder, "Jick, how’s the world treating you ?"

  The inquirer was Dode Withrow, and his condition answered as to why he wasn’t up in the grandstand with Midge and my folks and the others. As the expression goes, Dode had fallen off the wagon and was still bouncing. He was trigged out in a black sateen shirt and nice gray gabardine pants and his dress stockman Stetson, so he looked like a million. But he also had breath like the downwind side of a brewery.

  " ’Lo, Dode. You looking for Midge and the folks? They’re down at the far end."