English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  That one I figured was going to be bingo. After all, anybody who has grown up in Montana has seen Scotch lawsuits get under way for a lot less commentary than that. At dances the situation was common enough almost to be a regular feature. One guy with a few too many drinks in him calls some other guy a name none too fond, and that party responds with a fist. Of course the commotion was generally harsher than the combat, but black eyes and bent noses could result.

  "Earl, you jugheaded—" Leona was responding, but to my considerable disappointment Alec interrupted her by simply telling Earl,

  "Stash it, sparrowhead. Come on, Leona, we got business elsewhere."

  “I bet you got business all right," Earl adventured on. "Leona business. Snatch a kiss, kiss a snatch, all the same to you, McCaskill, ain’t it?"

  I can’t truly say I saw it happen. Not in any way of following a sequence: this and then this and then this. No, the event simply arrived into my mind, complete, intact, engraved before its realization could make itself felt. Versions of anything of this sort are naturally suspect, of course. Like that time Dempsey fought Gibbons up at Shelby for the heavyweight championship. About ten thousand people were there, and afterward about a quarter million could provide you an eyewitness account. But I will relate just as much of this Earl and Alec episode as I can vouch for. One instant Earl was standing there, admiring the manufacture of his last comment, and then in the next instant was bent in half, giving a nasty tossing-up noise, auheughhh, that made my own stomach turn over.

  What can have inspired Alec, given that the time-honored McCaskill procedure after loss of temper was to resort to a roundhouse right, to deliver Earl that short straight jab to the solar plexus? That economical punch of Alec’s produced plenty, though. Every bit of this I can see as if it were happening over again right now. Earl now in full light, doubled down as he was, Alec stepping around him to collect Leona, and the supper crowd in its long file out of the Sedgwick House stopping and gawking.

  "GOD DAMN!" exploded between Ray and me, Arlee pushing through and combining his oath with the start of a haymaker targeted on Alec’s passing jaw.

  Targeted but undelivered. On the far side of Arlee’s girth from me Ray reached up, almost casually it seemed, and latched onto Arlee’s wrist. The intended swing went nowhere after that, Ray hanging on to the would-be swingster as if he’d just caught him with that hand in the cookie jar, and by the time Arlee squared around and managed to begin to tussle in earnest with Ray—thank heaven for the clomping quality of the Zane brain—I had awarded Arlee a bit of a shove to worry him from my side.

  Where the ruckus would have progressed beyond that I have ever been curious about. In hindsight, that is. For if Arlee had managed to shake out of Ray’s grip, he was elephant enough to provide us both some pounding.

  But by now my father was on hand, and Pete and two or three other men soldiered out of the crowd to help sort us into order, and somebody was fetching Tollie Zane out of the Medicine Lodge on Earl’s behalf.

  “Jick, that’s enough," my father instructed. “Turn him loose, Ray. It’s over."

  This too I am clear about. Those sentences to Ray and me were the full sum of what was said by any McCaskill here in this aftermath. What traveled to Alec from my father was a stare, a studying one there in the frame of hotel light as if my father was trying to be sure this was the person he thought it was.

  And got back from Alec one of the identical caliber.

  Then Leona was in the grasp of my brother, and my mother stepped out alongside my father, and each couple turned and went.

  * * *

  "Ray?"

  "What?"

  We were side by side in bed, in the dark of his room. Outside the open twin windows a breeze could be heard teasing its way through the leaves of the giant cottonwood.

  "You helped a lot, there at the dance."

  "That’s okay."

  "You’ll want to watch out Arlee doesn’t try get it back on you."

  "Yeah."

  There was silence then, and the dark, until Ray startled me with something between a giggle and a laugh. What the hell now? I couldn’t see what he was doing, but as soon as words started issuing from him, I knew. He was pinching his nose closed.

  "He wants to watch out around me" came droning out in exact imitation of Tollie’s rodeo announcing, "or I’ll cut his heart out and drink his blood."

  That got me into the act. With a good grasp on my nose, I proposed in the same tinny tone:

  “Yank off his arm and make him shake hands with it."

  Ray giggled and offered:

  "Grab him by the epiglommis until his eyes pooch out."

  "Sharpen the point on his head"—I paused for my own giggles—"and pound him in like a post."

  "Kick enough crap out of him to daub a log barn," Ray envisioned. “Goddamn booger eater him anyhow."

  With each atrocity on Arlee our laughing multiplied, until the bed was shaking and we tried to tone things down before Ray’s folks woke up and wondered just what was going on.

  But every time we got ourselves nearly under control, one or the other of us erupted again—"thump old Arlee as far into hell"—on and on, laughing anew, snorting it out in spite of ourselves—"as a bird can fly in a lifetime"—sides shaking and throats rollicking until we were almost sick, and then of course we had to laugh at the ridiculousness of that.

  Nor, when Ray finally did play out and conked off to sleep, did that fever of humor entirely leave me. I would doze for a while and then be aware I was grinning open-eyed into the darkness about one or another moment of that immense day, that never-can-be-forgotten Fourth. Here I rest, world, as happy as if I had good sense and the patent on remembrance. My mother on the park stump giving her Ben English speech and Dode at the top of that leap by Coffee Nerves and my father calling out the Dude and Belle to the dancing crowd and my brother one-punching Earl Zane and Ray pitching in on Arlee and, you bet, Stanley Meixell collecting Velma Simms. Scene by scene they fell into place in me, smooth as kidskin and exact as chapter and verse, every one a perfect piece of that day and now of the night; a set of hours worth the price of the rest of the life.

  THREE

  The sun shines, hay is being made. All along English Creek and Noon Creek, mowing and raking and stacking are the order of the day. As to how this year’s cutting compares with those of recent years—have you seen any rancher lately who wasn’t grinning like a Christian holding four aces?

  —GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, JULY 20

  "HA N D M E a half-inch, would you, Jick."

  "Here you go." I passed the open-end wrench of that size to Pete beneath the power buckrake. There was a grunt of exertion, a flash of metal as the wrench flew and clattered of the chassis, and the news from Pete:

  "Sonofabitch must be a three-eighths."

  I had been here before. “Did you hit your knuckles?"

  "Sure did."

  "Did you round the head off the bolt?"

  "Sure did."

  "Are you sure you want to put up hay again this year?"

  "Guess what, nephew. The next rusted-up sonofabitch of a bolt under here has got your name on it."

  At noon of that first day of preparing Pete’s haying machinery, when he and I came in to wash up for dinner Marie took one look at the barked knuckles and skin scrapes and blood blisters on the both of us and inquired: "Did you two count your fingers before you started all this?"

  * * *

  Despite what it took out of a person’s hide I still look back on that as topnotch employment, my job of haying for Pete.

  The Reese ranch was a beauty for hay. Pete inherited not only my grandfather Isaac Reese’s acreage there along Noon Creek but old Isaac’s realization that nurturing more than one source of income is as good an idea as you can have in Montana. Pete was continuing with the sheep Isaac had turned to after the crash of cattle prices and also was improving the ranch’s hayfields, running ditches into the bottomland meadows of wild
hay to irrigate them from Noon Creek. Even in the Depression’s driest years, Pete always had hay to sell during the winter. This year it looked as if he would have a world of the stuff. Those wild meadows of timothy and wiregrass lay one after another along the creek like green pouches on a thong. Then there was the big field atop the Noon Creek—English Creek divide which grew dry-land alfalfa. In a wet year like this one, the alfalfa was soaring up more than knee high and that wide benchland field looked as green as they say the Amazon is.

  Those first days after the Fourth of July, the hay was very nearly ready for us and I was more than ready for it. Ready to have the McCaskill family situation off my mind for the main part of each day, at least. It did not take a great deal of original thinking to realize that the deadlock between my parents and Alec now was stouter than it had been before. If Alec ever needed any confirming in his rooting tooting cowboy notion of himself, his rodeo day calf-roping and pugilistic triumph had more than done so.

  Both of those and Leona too. Alec’s feet might not even touch the ground until about August. Anyway, I had spent so much thought on the Alec matter already that summer that my mind was looking around for a new direction. My father, my mother, my brother: let them do the sorting out of Alec’s future. I now had an imminent one—haying at Noon Creek—all my own.

  I might have known. “The summer when," I have said my mother ever after called this one. For me, the summer when not even haying turned out as expected. The summer when I began to wonder if anything ever does.

  * * *

  To be quite honest, on a task like those first few days of readying the equipment for haying I provided Pete more company than help. I mean, I can fix machinery when I have to but I’d rather be doing anything else. My point of view is that I would be more enthusiastic about the machine era if the stuff healed itself instead of requiring all the damn repair it does. And Pete was much the same as me where wrench work was involved.

  But I still maintain, companionship is no small thing to create. Amid all that damn bolting, unbolting, rebolting, bushing, shimming, washering, greasing, oiling, banging, sharpening, straightening, wouldn’t you welcome a little conversation? And the farther removed from the mechanical chore at hand the better? At least my uncle and I thought so. I recall Pete, just right out of the blue, telling me about the Noon Creek Kee-Kee bird. "You never heard of the Kee-Kee bird we got around here? Jick, I am surprised at you. The Kee-Kee bird shows up the first real day of winter every year. Lands on top of the lambing shed over there and takes a look all around. Then he says, ‘Kee-Kee-Keerist All Mighty, this is c-c-cold c-c-country!’ and heads for California." I in return favored Pete with a few of the songs from Stanley’s repertoire, starting with the one about the lady who was wild and wooly and full of fleas and never had been curried above her knees. He looked a little surprised at my musical knowledge, but was

  interested enough.

  This sticks with me, too: how startling it was to hear, from a face so reminiscent of my mother’s, the kind of language Pete unloosed on the haying equipment during those repair days. It also was kind of refreshing.

  All in all, then, Pete and I got along like hand and glove. And I have already recited Marie’s glories, back there at the Fourth of July picnic. If anybody in the Two country could cook in the same league as my mother, it was Marie. So my ears and the rest of me both were well nourished, that couple of days as Pete and I by main strength and awkwardness got the haying gear into running order. It never occurred to me at the time, but I suppose Pete welcomed having me around—and Alec in the earlier summers when he was in the raking job—because he and Marie were childless. Their son died at birth, and Marie very nearly died with him. Her health in fact had never been strong since. So for a limited time, at least, someone my age was a privileged character with the Reeses.

  Even so, I held off until Pete and I were finishing up the last piece of equipment, replacing broken guards on the mowing machine, before I tried him on this:

  "Pete, you know Stanley Meixell, don’t you ?"

  “Used to. Why?"

  "I’m just sort of curious. My folks don’t say much about him."

  “He’s been a long time gone from this country. Old history."

  "Were you around him when he was the English Creek ranger?"

  “Some. When anybody on Noon Creek who could spell K-O-W was running cattle up there on the forest. During the war and just after, that was."

  "How was he as a ranger ?"

  "How was he ?"

  "Well, yeah. I mean, did Stanley go about things pretty much the way Dad does? Fuss over the forest like he was its mother hen, sort of?"

  "Stanley always struck me as more of a rooster than a mother hen."

  That, I didn’t get. Stanley hadn’t seemed to me particularly strutty in the way he went about life. "But I will say this," Pete went on. "Stanley Meixell and your father know these mountains of the Two better than anybody else alive. They’re a pair of a kind, on that."

  "They are?" That the bunged-up whiskey-sloshing camptender I had squired around up there in the Two was as much a master of the mountains as my father—all due respect to Pete, but I couldn’t credit it.

  Figuring maybe Pete’s specific knowledge of Stanley was better than his general, I asked: "Well, after he was the English Creek ranger, where was his ticket to ?"

  "His ticket ?"

  “That’s the saying Forest Service guys have about being transferred. After here, where’d Stanley get transferred to?"

  “The Forest Service isn’t my ball of string, Jick. How do you feel about sharpening some mower sickles? There’s a couple against the wall of the shop somewhere."

  * * *

  "How’s she going, Jick "

  The third morning I rode over to Pete and Marie’s,the mower man Bud Dolson greeted me there at breakfast. Pete had gone into Gros Ventre to fetch him the night before, Bud having come up on the bus all the way from Anaconda. Ordinarily he was on the bull gang at the smelter there, a kind of roustabout’s job as I understood it. "Good to get out in the real air for a change," Bud claimed was his reason for coming to mow hay for Pete summer after summer. Smelter fumes would be sufficient propulsion to anywhere, yes. But I have a sneaking hunch that the job as mower man, a month of being out here by him self with just a team of horses and a mowing machine and the waiting hay, meant a lot in itself to somebody as quiet as Bud.

  The first genuine scorching day of summer arrived with Bud, and by about nine o’clock the dew was off the hay and he was cutting the first swath of the nearest of the Noon Creek meadows, a path of fallen green beside the standing green.

  * * *

  "How do, Jick."

  While I was saddling Pony to go home to English Creek at the end of that afternoon, Perry Fox came riding in from Gros Ventre. You still could find Perry’s species in a lot of Montana towns then, old Texas punchers who rode north on a trail drive somewhere before the turn of the century and for this reason or that never found their way back to Texas. Much of the time when I was growing up, Gros Ventre had as many as three of them: Andy Cratt, Deaf Smith Mitchell, and Perry Fox. They had all been hands for the old Seven Block ranch when it was the cattle kingdom of this part of Montana, then afterward hung on by helping out the various small ranchers at branding time and when the calves were shipped, and in between, breaking a horse for somebody now and again. Perry Fox was the last of them alive yet. Into his seventies, I guess he had to be, for Toussaint Rennie told my father he could remember seeing both Perry and Deaf Smith Mitchell in the roundup of 1882, skinny youngsters aboard big Texican saddles. Now too stove-up for a regular ranch job, Perry spent his winters in Dale Quigg’s saddle store helping out with harness-mending and other leather work and his summer job was on the dump rake for Pete.

  As I responded to Perry’s nod and drawl of greeting and watched him undo his bedroll and warbag from behind his saddle—like Bud, Perry, would put up in the bunkhouse here at Pete’s now unti
l haying was done—I couldn’t help but notice that he had a short piece of rope stretched snug beneath his horse’s belly and knotted into each stirrup. This was a new one on me, stirrups tied like that. That night I asked my father about it.

  "Come to that, has he," my father said. “Riding with hobbled stirrups."

  I still didn’t savvy.

  "At his age Perry can’t afford to get thrown any more," my father spelled it out for me. "He’s too brittle to mend. So with the stirrups tied down that way, he can keep himself clamped into them if his horse starts to buck."

  "Maybe he just ought to quit riding horseback," I said, without thinking it through.

  My father set me straight on that, too. "Guys like Perry, if they can’t ride you might as well take them out and shoot them. Perry has never learned to drive a car. The minute he can’t climb onto a horse and keep himself there, he’s done for."

  The fourth morning, Pete had me harness up my team of horses and take my rake to the mowed field to help Perry get the dump-raking under way.

  Truth be told, that day I was the one who did the majority of the dump-raking—scooping the hay into windrows, that was—while Perry tinkered and tinkered with his rake teeth and his dump lever and his horses’ harness and so on. Right then I fully subscribed to what Pete said about his custom of hiring Perry haying after haying:

  "He’s slow as the wrath of Christ, but he is steady." I suppose if my behind was as aged and bony as Perry’s, I wouldn’t have been in any hurry either to apply it to a rake seat for the coming four or five weeks. At the end of that day of windrowing, when Perry and I had unhitched our teams and Pete was helping us look them over for any harness sores, up the road to the ranch buildings came the Forest Service pickup and in it my father and my mother as well. They’d been to Great Falls on a headquarters trip my father had to make and before starting home they swung by First Avenue South to chauffeur the last of the haying crew to Pete.