English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  Mr. Panama Hat hastily left our company, and Stanley’s handling of the incident reminded me to ask something. “How you getting along with Canada Dan these days?"

  "Better," Stanley allowed. "Yeah, just a whole lot better." He paid recognition to his beer bottle again. “Last I heard, Dan was up in Cut Bank. Doing some town herding."

  Cut Bank? Town herding? "What, did the Busby boys can him?"

  "I got them to give Dan a kind of vacation." Then, in afterthought: “Permanent."

  I considered this. Up there in the Two with Stanley those weeks ago, I would not have bet a pin that he was capable of rousing himself to do justice to Canada Dan. Yet he had.

  "Stanley—"

  “I can tell you got something on your mind, Jick. Might as well unload it."

  If I could grapple it into position, that was exactly what I intended. To ask: what was that all about, when we first met you there on the mountain, the skittishness between you and my father? Why, when I ask anyone in this family of mine about Stanley Meixell, is there never a straight answer? Just who are you to us? How did you cross paths with the McCaskills in the past, and why are you back criss-crossing with us again?

  Somebody just beyond Stanley let out a whoop, then started in on a twangy rendition of the song that goes: “I’m a calico dog, I’m a razorback hog, I’m a cowboy on the loose! I can drink towns dry, I can all but fly, I flavor my beam with snoose!" In an instant Tom Harry was there leaning over the bar and categorically informing the songster that he didn’t care if the guy hooted, howled, or for that matter blew smoke rings out his butt, but no singing.

  This, Stanley shook his head over. “What’s the world coming to when a man can’t offer up a tune? They ruin everything these days."

  First Dode, now Stanley. It seemed my mission in life this Fourth of July to steer morose beer drinkers away from even deeper gloom. At least I knew which direction I wanted to point Stanley: back into history.

  “I been trying to figure something out," I undertook honestly enough, one more time. "Stanley, why was it you quit rangering on the Two?"

  Stanley did some more demolition on his beer, then cast a visiting glance around the walls at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the stuffed herd, and eventually had to look at me and ask as if verifying:

  "Me?"

  "Uh huh, you."

  "No special reason."

  “Run it by me anyway."

  “Naw, you’d be bored fast."

  "Whyn’t you let me judge that."

  “You got better use for your ears."

  "Jesus, Stanley—"

  All this while I was attempting to pry sense out of Stanley, the tail of my eye was trying to tell me something again. Someone had come up behind me. Which wasn’t particular news in the Medicine Lodge throng, except this someone evidently had no other site in mind; his presence stayed steadily there, close enough to make me edgy about it, sitting half braced as I was in case this guy too was going to crash in our direction.

  I turned on the bar stool to cope with the interloper and gazed full into the face, not all that many inches away, of Velma Simms. I must tell you, it was like opening a kitchen drawer to reach in for a jelly spoon and finding instead the crown jewels of England. For I had never been close enough, head-on, to Velma to learn that her eyes were gray. Gray! Like mine! Possibly our four were the world’s only. And to garner further that her lipstick, on the very lips that ruled the rodeo whistle, was the beautiful dark-beyond-red of ripe cherries. And that she was wearing tiny pearl earrings, below the chestnut hair, as if her ears could be unbuttoned to further secrets even there. And that while the male population of northern Montana was focusing on the backside of Velma’s renowned slacks, they were missing important announcements up front. Sure, there could be found a few lines at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. But to me right then, they simply seemed to be affidavits of how imaginative a life this lady had led.

  Unbelievable but so. Out of all the crowded flesh in the Medicine Lodge just then, solely onto me was fixed this attention of Velma Simms.

  She just stood there eyeing me while I gaped, until the point of her attention finally prodded through to me.

  “Oh. Oh, hello, Mrs.—uh, Velma. Have I got your seat?" I scrambled off the bar stool as if it was suddenly red-hot.

  "Now that you mention it," she replied, and even just saying that, her words were one promissory note after another. Velma floated past me and snuggled onto the stool. A little extra of that snuggle went in Stanley’s direction.

  "Saw you there at the announcing booth," I reminisced brightly.

  "Did you," said she.

  I may be a slow starter, but eventually I catch up with the situation. My quick gawp around the saloon confirmed what had been trying to dawn on me. This year’s beau in the gabardine suit was nowhere.

  "Yeah, well," I began to extricate myself. "I got to be getting."

  "Don’t feel you need to rush off," said Stanley. As if God’s gift to the male race wasn’t enthroned right there beside him. “The night’s still a pup."

  "Uh huh. That’s true, but—"

  "When you got to go," put in Velma, twirling the empty mixed-drink glass to catch Tom Harry’s attention for a refill, "you got to go."

  "Right," I affirmed. “And like I say, I, uh, got to go."

  What made me add to the total of my footprints already in my mouth I can’t truly account for. Maybe the blockade I had hit again in wanting to ask all the questions of Stanley. In any case, the parting I now blurted out was:

  “You two in a dancing mood tonight? What I mean, see you at the dance, will I?"

  Stanley simply passed that inquiry to Velma with a look. In theory, Velma then spoke her answer to me, although she didn’t unlock her gaze from him at all as she said it: "Stanley and I will have to see whether we have any spare time."

  * * *

  So. One more topic clambering aboard my already bent-over brain. Stanley Meixell and Velma Croake Bogan Sutter Simms.

  * * *

  "Ray? What kind of a summer are you having?"

  We were up in the double window of his bedroom, each of us propped within the sill. A nice breeze came in on us there, the leaves of the big cottonwood in the Heaneys’ front yard seeming to flutter the air our way. Downstairs the radio had just been turned on by Ed Heaney, so it was seven o’clock. The dance wouldn’t get under way for an hour or so yet, and as long as Ray and I were going to be window sitting anyway for the next while, I figured I’d broach to him some of all that was on my mind.

  "Didn’t I tell you? Pilot."

  "No, I don’t mean that. What it is, do things seem to you kind of unsettled?"

  “How?"

  "Well, Christ, I don’t know. Just in general. People behaving like they don’t know whether to include you in or out of things."

  “What kind of things?"

  "Things that went on years ago. Say there was an argument or a fight or something, people fell out over it. Why can’t they just say, here’s what it was about, it’s over and done with? Get it out of their systems?"

  "That’s just grownups. They’re not going to let a kid in on anything, until they figure it’s too late to do him any good."

  "But why is that? What is it that’s so goddamn important back there that they have to keep it to themselves ?"

  “Jick, sometimes—"

  “What?"

  "Sometimes maybe you think too much."

  I thought that over briefly. "What am I supposed to do about that? Christ, Ray, it’s not like poking your finger up your nose in public, some kind of habit you can remind yourself not to do. Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person."

  "Yeah, but you maybe encourage it more than it needs."

  "I what?"

  “See, maybe it’s like this." Ray’s eyes squinched more than ever as he worked on his notion, and the big front teeth nipped his lower lip in concentration. Then: "Maybe, let’s say maybe a though
t comes into your head, it’s only about what you’re going to do next. Saddle up Mouse and take a ride, say. That’s all the thought it really needs. Then put on the saddle and climb on. But the mood you’re in, Jick, you’d stop first and think some more. ‘But if I go for a ride, where am I going to go?’ " Ray here went into one of his radio voices, the words coming clippity-clippity like old Kaltenborn’s. “ ‘What is it I’ll see when I get there? Did anybody else ever see it? And if anybody did, is it going to look the same to me as it did to them? And old Mouse here, is it going to look the same to Mouse as it does to me ?’ "

  Raymond Edmund Heaney von Kaltenborn broke off, and it was just Ray again. "On and on that way, Jick. If you think too much, you make it into a whole dictionary of going for a ride. Instead of just going. See what I’m saying?"

  "Goddamn it now, Ray, what I mean is more important than goddamn riding a horse."

  "It’s the same with anything. It’ll get to you if you think about it too much, Jick."

  "But what I’m telling you is, I don’t have any choice. This stuff I’m talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be."

  Ray took a look at me as if I had some sort of brain fever that might be read in my face. Then in another of his radio voices intoned:

  "Have you tried Vick’s VapoRub? It sooooothes as it wooooorks."

  There it lay. Even Ray had no more idea than the man in the moon about my perplexity. This house where we sat tucked in blue-painted sills, above its broad lawned yard and under its high cottonwoods, this almost second home of mine: it ticked to an entirely different time than the summer that was coursing through me. The Heaney family was in place in the world. Ed was going to go on exiting the door of his lumber yard at six every evening and picking up his supper fork at ten after six and clicking on that Silvertone radio at seven, on into eternity. Genevieve would go on keeping this house shining and discovering new sites for doilies. Mary Ellen would grow up and learn nursing at the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls. Ray would grow up and take a year of business college at Missoula and then join his father in the lumber yard. Life under this roof had the rhythm of the begattings in the Bible. The Heaneys were not the McCaskills, not even anywhere similar, and I lacked the language to talk about any of the difference, even to my closest friend.

  * * *

  "Swing, swing, and swing ’em high!

  Allemande left and allemande age!

  Ingo, bingo, sim penny high!

  Big pig, little pig, root hog or die!"

  The dance was under way, but only just, when Ray and I wandered down there to the Sedgwick House to it. Which is to say the hall—

  I suppose old C. E. Sedgwick or maybe even Lila Sedge conceived of it as a ballroom, but everybody else considered it the dance hall—was crammed to an extent that made the Medicine Lodge look downright lonely across the street, but not all that many people were dancing yet. Visiting, circulating, gathering an eyeful of everybody else, joking, trying to pry out of a neighbor how many bushels an acre his wheat looked like or what his lambs weighed by now, but only one square of actual dancers out there footing it to Jerome Satterlee’s calling. Partly, everybody knew it took Jerome a little while (translate that to a few drinks) to get his tonsils limbered up. And then he could call dances until your shoes fell off your feet.

  “A little thin out here on the floor, it looks to me like," Jerome was now declaring, preparatory to the next dance. “You know what I mean? Let’s get one more square going here, make it look like we mean business. Adam, Sal, step on out here, you can stand around and gab any time. How about all you Busbys, you’re half a square yourselves. Good, good. Come on now, one more couple. Nola plays this piano twice as good when we got two squares on the floor." At the upright, Nola Atkins sat planted as if they’d simply picked up the piano bench from the creek picnic with her on it and set them both down here on the band platform. Beside her, Jeff Swan had his fiddle tucked under his chin and his bow down at his side as if it was a sword he was ready to draw. "One more couple. Do I have to telephone to Valier and ask them to send over four left feet? Whup, here they come now, straight from supper, dancers if I ever saw any. Leona Tracy and Alec McCaskill, step right in there. Alec, you checked your horse and rope at the door, I hope? Now, this is somewhat more like—"

  Stepping in from the Sedgwick House dining room, rodeo prize money in his pocket and free supper under his belt and a grin everywhere on his face there was any space for it, Alec looked like a young king coming home from his crowning ceremony.

  Even so, to notice this glorious brother of mine you had to deliberately steer your eyes past Leona. Talk about an effort of will. Leona took the shine in any crowd, even a dance hall full. The day’s green blouse was missing. I mean, she had changed out of it. Now she wore a white taffeta dress, full and flouncy at the hem. In square dancing a lot of swirling goes on, and Leona was going to be a swirl worth seeing.

  I shot a glance around the dance hall. My parents had missed this grand entry. They’d gone out to J. L. and Nan Hill’s ranch, a couple of miles up English Creek, for supper and to change clothes, and were taking their own sweet time about getting back in. And Pete and Marie were driving Toussaint home to the Two Medicine, so they’d be even later arriving. I was the sole family representative, so to speak, to record the future Mr. and Mrs. Alec McCaskill come swanking in.

  "Ready out there? Sure you are. You’ll get to liking this so much, before the night is out you’ll want to trade your bed for a lantern."

  Jerome, when he got to going good, put a lot of motion into his calling, using both arms to direct the traffic of dancers; kind of like a man constantly hanging things here and there in a closet. His gestures even now said he was entering into the spirit of the night. "All right, sonnies and honeys. Nola, Jeff, let’s make ’em prance. Everybody, here we go:

  "First four forward. Back to your places.

  Second four follow. Shuffle on back.

  Now you’re getting down to cases,

  Swing each other till the floorbeams crack!"

  Here in the time I am now it seems hard to credit that this Fourth of July dance was the first I ever went to on my own. That is, was in company with somebody like Ray instead of being alone as baggage with my parents. Of course, without fully acknowledging it Ray and I also were well on our way to another tremendous night, the one when each of us would step through this dance hall doorway with a person neither parent nor male alongside. But that lay await yet. My point just now is that where I was in life this particular Fourth night, closing in on fifteen years of age, I had been attending dances since the first few months of that total. And Alec, the all-winning rodeo-shirted sashayer out there on the floor right now, the same before me. Each a McCaskill baby bundled in blankets and cradled in chairs beside the dance floor. Imbibe music along with mother’s milk: that was the experience of a lot of us of Two country upbringing. Successors to Alec’s and my floorside infancy were here in the Sedgwick House hall this very night: Charity Frew’s half-year-old daughter, and another new Helwig baby, and a couple of other fresh ones belonging to farm folks east of town, a swaddled quartet with chairs fenced around them in the farthest corner of the dance hall.

  "Salute your ladies, all together.

  Ladies, to the gents do the same.

  Hit the lumber with your leather.

  Balance all, and swing your dame! "

  It might be said that the McCaskill dancing history was such that it was the portion of lineage that came purest into Alec and me. Definitely into Alec. Out there now with that white taffeta back and forth to him like a wave of the sea, he looked like he could romp on forever. What little I knew of my father’s father, the first McCaskill to caper on America’s soil instead of Scotland’s, included the information that he could dance down the house. Schottisches and Scotch reels in particular, but he also adopted any Western square dances. In his twinkling steps, so to speak, followed my mother and father. Dances held in ranch ho
uses, my mother-to-be arriving on horseback with her party dress tied on behind the saddle, my father-to-be performing the Scotch Heaven ritual of scattering a little oatmeal on the floor for better gliding. Schoolhouse dances. In the face of the Depression even a hard times dance, the women costumed in gunnysack dresses and the men in tattered work clothes. And now Alec the latest McCaskill dancer, and me beginning to realize I was on my way.

  “Bunch the ladies, there in the middle.

  Circle, you gents, and dosie doe.

  Pay attention to old Jefs fiddle.

  Swing her around and away you go!"

  Can it be that all kinds of music speak to one another? For what I always end up thinking of in this dancing respect is a hymn. To me it is the one hymn that has ever seemed to make much sense:

  "Dance, dance, wherever you may be,

  I am the Lord of the dance," said he,

  "And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

  And I ’ll lead you all in the dance," said he.

  I almost wish I had never come across those words and their tune, for they make one of those chants that slip into your mind every time you meet up with the circumstances they suggest. It was so then, even as Ray nudged me to point out the Busby brothers going through a fancy twirl with each other instead of with their wives and I joined Ray and everybody else in laughing, and it is so now. Within all else those musical words, a kind of beautiful haunting. But I suppose that is what musical words, and for that matter dances and dancers, are for.