English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  He tumbled out of the back of the pickup now. The stackman, Wisdom Johnson.

  "Hey, Pete !" cried Wisdom. Even after the two-hour ride from Great Falls in the open breezes Wisdom was not what could be called even approximately sober. On the other hand he wasn’t so swacked he had fallen out of the pickup on the way to the job, which was the hiring standard that counted. "Hey, Perry !" the greeting process went on. “Hey, Jick!" If the entire population of Montana had been there in the Reese yard, Wisdom would have greeted every one of them identically. Wisdom Johnson’s mind may not have been one of the world’s broadest, but it liked to practice whatever it knew.

  "As I savvy it, Wisdom," acknowledged Pete, "that’s what you’re here for all right. Hay."

  "Pete, I’m ready for it," Wisdom testified earnestly. "If you want to start stacking right now, I am ready. You bet I am. How about it, ready to go ?" Wisdom squinted around like Lewis and Clark must have. "Where’s the field ?"

  "Wisdom, it’s suppertime," Pete pointed out. “Morning will be soon enough to start stacking. You feel like having some grub?"

  Wisdom considered. "No. No, I don’t." He swallowed to get rid of the idea of food. "What I need to do is sort of sit down for a while."

  Perry stepped forward. "I’ll herd him to the bunkhouse. Right this way, Wisdom. Where’d you winter?"

  "Out on the coast," reported Wisdom as he unsteadily accompanied Perry. "Logging camp, up north of Grays Harbor. Rain! Perry, do you know it’d sometimes rain a week steady? I just did not know it could rain that much."

  Chin in hand and elbow propped on the doorframe, my mother skeptically watched all this out the rolled-down window of the pickup. Now she opened the door and stepped out. Not surprisingly, she looked about two-thirds riled. I don’t know of any Montana woman who has never gritted her teeth, one time or another, over that process of prying men off bar stools and getting them launched toward whatever they’re supposed to be doing in life. "I’ll go in and visit Marie," she announced, which my father and Pete and I all were glad enough to have happen.

  Pete made sure my mother was out of earshot, then inquired: "He in Sheba’s place, was he?"

  "No, in the Mint, though he did have Bouncing Betty with him. She wasn’t about to turn loose of him as long as he had a nickel to his name." Upon study, my father looked somewhat peevish, too. Wisdom Johnson must have taken considerable persuading to part with Bouncing Betty. "So at least I didn’t have to shake him directly out of a whore’s bed. But that’s about the best I can say for your caliber of employee, brother-in-law."

  Pete broke a grin at my father and razzed: "I wouldn’t be so damn hard up for crew if you’d paid attention to the example of Good Help Hebner and raised anything besides an occasional scatter raker." Somehow Pete had known what the moment needed. Pete’s kidding had within it the fact that the other of the rake-driving McCaskill brothers had been Alec, and he was not a topic my father particularly cared to hear about these days. Yet here it came, the half wink of my father’s left eye and the answer to Pete’s crack: "Scatter rakers were as good as I could do. Whatever that says about my caliber."

  * * *

  The fifth day, we made hay.

  The windrows that Perry and I had raked formed a pattern I have always liked. A meadow with ribs of hay, evenly spaced. Now Perry was dump-raking the next field down the creek and Bud was mowing the one beyond that.

  Those of us in the stacking crew began our end of the matter. We sited the overshot stacker toward the high edge of the meadow, so the haystack would be up out of the deepest winter snowdrifts along Noon Creek. With the power buckrake, Pete shoved several loads of hay into place behind the stacker. Then Wisdom maneuvered and smoothed that accumulation with his pitchfork until he had the base of his stack made the way he wanted it. An island of hay almost but not quite square—eight paces wide, ten paces long——and about chest high.

  "You said last night you’re ready, Wisdom," called Pete. "Here it comes." And he bucked the first load of hay onto the fork of the stacker. “Send it to heaven, Clayton."

  The final man, or I should say member, of our haying crew was the stacker team driver, twelve-year-old Clayton Hebner. Pete always hired whichever Hebner boy was in the twelve-to-fourteen-year range for that stacker team job and they were pretty much interchangeable, a skinny kid with a forelock and nothing to say for himself; apparently the volume knob for that whole family was on Good Help Hebner. All that was really noticeable about Clayton was his Hebner way of always eyeing you, as if you were the latest link in evolution and he didn’t want to miss the moment when you sprouted wings or fins. At Pete’s words Clayton now started into motion his team of horses hitched to the cable which, through a tripod-and-pulley rig within the stacker, lifts the twin arms of the stacker and the hay-loaded fork, and the hay went up and up until—

  It occurs to me: does everybody these days think that hay naturally comes in bales? That God ordained that livestock shall eat from loaves of hay tied up in twine by thirteen-thousand-dollar machinery? If so, maybe I had better describe the notion of haying as it used to be. All in the world it amounted to was gathering hay into stacks about the size of an adobe house; a well-built haystack even looks as solid and straightforward as an adobe structure, though of course stands higher and has a rounded-off top. But try it yourself sometime, this gathering of ten or twelve tons of hay into one stack, and you will see where all the equipment comes in. Various kinds of stackers were used in various areas of the West, beaver slides, Mormon derricks, two-poles, jayhawks, but Pete’s preference was an overshot. An overshot stacker worked as its name suggests, tossing a load of hay up over a high wide framework which served as a sort of scaffolding for the front of the haystack. If, say, you hold your arms straight out in front of you, with your hands clutching each end of a basket with hay piled in it: now bring your arms and the basket straight up over your head with a little speed and you are tossing the hay exactly as an overshot does. In short, a kind of catapult principle is involved. But a calculated one, for it is the responsibility of the stacker team driver to pace his horses so that the overshot’s arms and fork fling the hay onto whichever part of the stack the stackman wants it. Other than being in charge of the speed of the team, though, driving the stacker team is a hell of a dull job, walking back and forth behind the horses as they run the overshot up and down, all damn day long, and that’s why a kid like Clayton usually got put on the task.

  So hay was being sent up, and as this first haystack and the day’s temperature both began to rise, Wisdom Johnson suffered. This too was part of the start of haying: Wisdom sweating the commerce of Great Falls saloons out of himself. Soaking himself sober, lathering into the summer’s labor. We all knew by heart what the scene would be this initial morning, Wisdom lurching around up there atop the mound of hay as if he had a log chained to each leg. It was a little painful to watch, especially now that my camptending sojourn with Stanley Meixell had taught me what a hangover truly is.

  Yet agonized as Wisdom looked, the stack was progressing prettily, as we also knew it would. The stackman, he was maestro of the haying crew. When the rest of us had done our mowing or raking or bucking or whatever, the final result of it all was the haystacks the stackman built. And Wisdom Johnson could build them, as he put it, “high and tall and straight." No question about it, Wisdom was as big and brawny as the ideal stackman ought to be; nine of him would have made a dozen. And he also just looked as if he belonged atop a hay-stack, for he was swarthy enough to be able to pitch hay all day up there without his shirt on, which I envied much. If I tried that I’d have burned and blistered to a pulp. Wisdom simply darkened and darkened, his suntan a litmus each summer of how far along our haying season was. As July heated up into August, more than once it occurred to me that with the sweat bathing Wisdom as he worked up there next to the sun, and his arm muscles bulging as he shoved the hay around, and that dark leathering of his skin, he was getting to look like the heavyweight fight
er Joe Louis. But of course that wasn’t something you said to a white person back then.

  This was the second summer of Wisdom being known as Wisdom instead of his true name, Cyrus Johnson. The nickname came about because he had put up hay a number of seasons in the Big Hole Basin down in the southwestern part of the state, and according to him the Big Hole was the front parlor of heaven. The hay there was the best possible, the workhorses all but put their harnesses on themselves each morning, the pies of Big Hole ranch cooks nearly floated off into the air from the swads of meringue atop them. The list of glories ran on and on. Inasmuch as the Big Hole had a great reputation for hay even without the testimony of Cyrus Johnson, the rest of us at the Reese table tended to nod and say nothing. But then came one supper-time, early in the first summer I hayed for Pete, when Cyrus started in on a fresh Big Hole glory. “You take that Wisdom, now. There’s my idea of a town. It’s the friendliest, drinkingest, prettiest place—"

  "Wisdom? That burg?" Ordinarily Bud Dolson was silence himself. But Anaconda where he was from was not all that far from the Big Hole town of Wisdom and Bud had been there. As Cyrus now had the misfortune of asking him.

  "I think so," replied Bud. "I blinked. I might’ve missed most of it."

  Cyrus looked hurt. "Now what do you mean by that ?"

  "Cy, I mean that the town of Wisdom makes the town of Gros Ventre look like London, England."

  “Aw, come on, Bud. Wisdom is a hell of a nice town."

  Bud shook his head in pity. "If you say so, Wisdom." And ever since, the big stackman was Wisdom Johnson to us.

  * * *

  This first stack was well underway, Pete having buckraked several windrows in to the stacker. Now began my contribution to the haying process. I went over and climbed onto my scatter rake.

  If you happen never to have seen one, a scatter rake simply resembles a long axle—mine was a ten-foot type—between a set of iron wheels, high spoked ones about as big around as those you think of a stage-coach having, but not nearly so thick and heavy. The "axle," actually the chassis of the rake, carries a row of long thin curved teeth, set about a hand’s width apart from each other, and it is this regiment of teeth that rakes along the ground and scrapes together any stray hay lying there. As if the hayfield was a head of hair and the scatter rake a big iron comb going over it, so to speak. Midway between the wheels a seat stuck up for the rake driver—me—to ride on, and a wooden tongue extended forward for a team of horses to be hitched to.

  My team was in harness and waiting. Blanche and Fisheye. As work-horses go, they weren’t too bad a pair; a light team, as you didn’t need the biggest horses in the world just to pull a scatter rake, but more on the steady side than frisky. That Blanche and Fisheye were civilized at all was a relief to me, because you never know what you might get in a team of horses. One of them maybe can pull like a Percheron but is dumb, and the other one clever enough to teach geometry but so lazy he constantly lays back in the traces. Or one horse may be a kicker, and his mate so mild you could pass a porcupine under him without response. So except for Fisheye staring sideways at you in a fishy way as you harnessed him, and Blanche looking like she needed a nap all the time, this team of mine was better than the horse law of averages might suggest.

  I believe I am right in saying Pete was the first rancher in the Two country to use a power buckrake: an old automobile chassis and engine with a fork mounted on it to buck the hay in from the field to the stack. Wisdom Johnson a few summers before had brought word of the invention of the power buckrake in the Big Hole: "I tell you, Pete, they got them all over that country. They move hay faster than you can see." That proved to be not quite the case, but the contraption could bring in hay as fast as two buckrakes propelled by horses.

  Thus the internal combustion engine roared into the Reese hayfields and speeded matters up, but it also left dabs of hay behind it, scatterings which had either blown off the buckrake fork or which it simply missed. The scatter raker was the gatherer of that leftover hay, which otherwise would be wasted. In place on my rake seat, I now clucked to Blanche and Fisheye, reined them toward the part of the meadow Pete had been bucking in loads from, and my second summer of scatter raking was begun.

  I suppose I have to admit, anybody who could handle a team of workhorses could run a scatter rake. But not necessarily run it as it ought to be done. The trick was to stay on the move but at an easy pace. Keep the horses in mild motion and the rake teeth down there gathering leftover hay, instead of racing around here and yon. Roam and glean, by going freestyle over a field as a fancy skater swoops around on ice. Well, really not quite that free and fancy, for you do have to tend to business enough to dump your scatterings in some good place for the buckrake to get it, and not in a boggy spot or on top of a badger mound. But still I say, the more you could let yourself go and just follow the flow of the hayfield, so to speak—keep swooping back and forth where the power buckrake had recently been, even if there wasn’t much spilled hay there—the better off you were as a scatter raker. A mind as loose as mine was about right for scatter raking.

  * * *

  "How did it go ?" my mother asked, that first night of full haying. We were waiting supper for my father, who was somewhere up the North Fork inspecting the progress of a CCC trail crew there.

  “A stack and a half," I reported offhandedly as if I had been a hayhand for centuries. "About usual, for first day."

  "How did you get along with Blanche and Fisheye ?"

  "They’re kind of a logy pair of sonsa—" I remembered in time to mend my mouth; the vocabulary I’d been using around Pete and the crew was a quick ticket to trouble here at home—“of so and sos. But they’re okay."

  She appraised me from where she was leaning against the kitchen sink, arms folded across her chest. Then surprised me with her smile and: “It’s quiet around here, without you."

  I chose to take that as a compliment. More than that, I risked ribbing her in return, a little. "Well, I guess I could call you up on the telephone every noon from Pete and Marie’s, and sing you a song or tell you a joke."

  "Never mind, Mister Imagination," she declined. "I’ll adjust."

  * * *

  I didn’t pay it sufficient mind at the time, but in truth my mother did have to adjust. Alec in exile. Me rationed between English Creek and the Noon Creek hayfields. My father beginning to be gone more and more as fire danger increased in the forest. The reverse of her usual situation of a houseful of male McCaskills, a genuine scarcity of us. There is another topic which occupies my mind these days. The way life sorts us into men and women, not on any basis of capability that I have ever been able to see. High on the list of questions I wish I’d had the good sense to ask, throughout that immense summer, is the one to my mother. Her view about being born as a woman into a region which featured male livelihoods.

  * * *

  "You finally starved out, did you," she now greeted my father’s late arrival. "Wash up and sit up, you two; supper will be just a minute now."

  “How’d it go today?" my father asked me, and I repeated my report of Reese haying. Through that and other supper conversation he nodded and said uh huh a lot, which signaled that he was only half listening. The symptom was annual. At this point of the summer, and hot as this one suddenly had turned, fire was forever on the mind of a forest ranger. The joke was told that when the preacher at a funeral asked if anyone wanted to memorialize the deceased, a ranger was the first one onto his feet and began: "Old Tom wasn’t the worst fellow I ever knew. Now I’d like to add a few words about fire prevention."

  When you think about it, my father’s yearly deep mood about fire was understandable enough. He was responsible for an entire horizon. The skyline made up of peaks and reefs and timbered slopes and high grasslands: that conglomeration of nature was designated his district of the Two Medicine National Forest, and every blessed inch of it was prey to lightning storms and careless campfires and flipped cigarettes. His line of defense was a
light thread of men across that mass of mountain and forest; the lookouts in the tall towers, and at this time of year, the fire guards and other smokechasers he would start hiring and stationing for quick combat against lightning strikes or smolders of any sort. My father entirely subscribed to the theory that the time to fight a forest fire was before it got going. True, the timber of the Two here on the east face of the Rockies was not as big and dense and incendiary as the forests farther west in Montana and Idaho. "But that doesn’t mean they’re made of goddamn asbestos either" ran the complaint of east-side rangers on the Two, the Lewis and Clark, the Custer and the Helena, against what they saw as a westward tilt in the thinking and the fire budget of Region One head-quarters. It was a fact that the legendary fires occurred over there west of the Continental Divide. The Bitterroot blaze of 1910 was an absolute hurricane of flame. Into smoke went three million acres of standing trees, a lot of it the finest white pine in the world. And about half the town of Wallace, Idaho, burned. And this too: the Bitterroot fire killed eighty-five persons, eighty-four of them done in directly by the flames and the other one walked off a little from a hotshot crew on Setzer Creek and put a pistol to himself. The Forest Service, which was only a few years old at the time, was bloodied badly by the Bitterroot fire. And as recently as 1934 there had been the fiascoof the Selway fires along the Idaho-Montana line. That August, the Selway National Forest became the Alamo of Region One. Into those back-country fires the regional forester, Major Kelley, and his headquarters staff poured fifty-four hundred men, and they never did get the flames under control. The Pete King Creek fire and the McLendon Butte fire and about fifteen smaller ones all were roaring at once. The worst afternoon, ten square miles of the Selway forest were bursting into flame every hour. And when the fire at Fish Butte blew up, a couple of hundred CCC guys had to run like jackrabbits. Five fire camps eventually went up in smoke, both the Pete King and Lochsa ranger stations damn near did. Nothing the Forest Service tried on the Selway worked. Nothing could work, really. An inferno has no thermostat. The rains of late September finally slowed the Selway fires, and only weeks after that Major Kelley killed off the Selway National Forest, parceled out its land to the neighboring forests and scattered its staff like the tribes of Israel. The Selway summer sobered everybody working in Region One—that total defeat by fire and the Major’s obliteration of a National Forest unit—and for damn sure no ranger wanted any similar nightmare erupting in his own district. I stop to recount all this because of what happened now, as my father finished supper and thumbed open the day’s one piece of mail, an official Forest Service envelope.