English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  The other event occurred at noon, and this one went by the name of Toussaint Rennie.

  He arrived in the pickup with Marie and the chuckbox of lunch. "I came to make sure," Toussaint announced, his tan gullied face solemn as Solomon. "Whether you men build haystacks right side up."

  Actually the case was that Toussaint had finished ditch-riding for a while, with everybody harvesting now instead of irrigating, and Marie had driven up to the Two Medicine to fetch him for company for the day. What conversations went on between those two blood- and soulmates I’ve always wished I could have overheard.

  The gab between the hay crew and Toussaint was pretty general, though, until we were done eating. Pete then retired to his nap spot, and Perry and Bud and eventually Wisdom lit up their smokes, and so on. A little time passed, then Toussaint leaned from where he was sitting and laid his hand on the chuckbox. "Perry," he called over to Perry Fox. “We ate out of this, a time before."

  “That we did," agreed Perry. "But Marie’s style of grub is a whole helluva lot better."

  Toussaint put his finger to the large F burnt into the end of the chuckbox. “Dan Floweree."

  The finger moved to the 911 brand on the box’s side. "Louis Robare." To the TL beside it: "Billy Ulm."

  Then to the lid, where the space had been used to burn in a big D-S. "This one you know best, Perry."

  I straightened up. It had come to me: where Perry and Toussaint would have first eaten out of this chuckbox. When those cattle brands were first seared into its wood. The famous roundup of 1882, from the elbow of the Teton River to the Canadian line; the one Toussaint told my father about, the one he said was the biggest ever in this part of Montana. Nearly three hundred men, the ranchers and their cowhands and horse wranglers and night herders and cooks; forty tents it took to hold them all. Each morning the riders fanned out in half circles of about a dozen miles’ ride and rounded in the cattle for sorting.

  Each afternoon the branding fires of the several outfits sent smoke above the prairie as the irons wrote ownership onto living cowhide. When the big sweep was over, coulees and creek bottoms searched out over an area bigger than some Eastern states, it was said a hundred thousand head of cattle were accounted for.

  "Davis-Hauser-Stuart," Perry was saying of the brand on the chuckbox lid. "My outfit at the time. DHS, the Damn Hard Sittin’."

  Wisdom Johnson was beginning to catch up with the conversation.

  “Where was this you’re talking about?"

  "All in through here," Perry indicated with a slow swing of his head from shoulder to shoulder. "Roundin’ up cattle."

  “Cattle ?" Wisdom cast a look around the benchland, as if a herd might be pawing out there this very moment. “Around here?" It did seem a lot to believe, that this alfalfa field and the farmland on the horizon east of us once was a grass heaven for cows.

  "Everywhere from the Teton to Canada, those old outfits had cattle," Perry confirmed. "If you could find the buggers."

  Bud Dolson spoke up. "When’d all this take place ?"

  Toussaint told him: "A time ago. ’82."

  "Eighteen eighty-two?" queried Wisdom. "Perry, how ungodly old are you?"

  Perry pointed a thumb at Toussaint. "Younger’n him."

  Toussaint chuckled. "Everybody is."

  * * *

  How can pieces of time leap in and out of each other the way they do? There I sat, that noontime, listening to Toussaint and Perry speak of eating from a chuckwagon box all those years ago; and hearing myself question my mother about how she and her mother and Pete were provisioned from the same chuckbox on their St. Mary wagon trip a quarter of a century ago; and gazing on Pete, snoozing there in the shade of the pickup, simultaneously my admired uncle and the boy who helloed the horses at St. Mary.

  * * *

  Toussaint and the history that went everywhere with him set me to thinking. Life and people were a kind of flood around me this summer, yet for all my efforts I still was high and dry where one point of the past was concerned.

  When Toussaint climbed to his feet to visit the far side of the alfalfa stack, I decided. Hell, he himself was the one who brought the topic up, back at the creek picnic on the Fourth. You are a campjack these days. And an outhouse engineer and a dawn rider and a hay equipment mechanic and a scatter raker, and an inquisitive almost-fifteen-year-old. I got up and followed Toussaint around the haystack.

  "Jick," he acknowledged me. "You are getting tall. Mac and Beth will need a stepladder to talk to you."

  "Yeah, I guess," I contributed, but my altitude was not what I wanted discussed. As Toussaint tended to his irrigation and I to mine, I asked: “Toussaint, what can you tell me about Stanley Meixell? I mean, I don’t know him real well. That time up in the Two, I was only lending him a hand with his camptending, is all."

  "Stanley Meixell," Toussaint intoned. "Stanley was the ranger. When the national forest was put in."

  "Yeah, I know that. But more what I was wondering—did he and my folks have a run-in, sometime? I can’t quite figure out what they think of Stanley."

  "But you," said Toussaint. “You do thinking, too, Jick. What is it you think of Stanley?"

  He had me there. "I don’t just know. I’ve never come up against anybody like him."

  Toussaint nodded. "That is Stanley," he affirmed. "You know more than you think you do."

  * * *

  Well, there I was as usual. No more enlightened than when I started. The chronic condition of Jick McCaskill, age fourteen and eleven twelfths years, prospects for a cure debatable.

  * * *

  At least the solace of scatter-raking remained to me. Or so I thought. As I say, this day I have just told about was the one that finished off the benchland alfalfa. A last stint of haying, back down on the Noon Creek meadows, awaited. Even yet I go over and over in my mind the happenings which that last spell of haying was holding in store. Talk about a chain of events. You could raise and lower the anchor of an ocean liner on the string of links that began to happen now.

  * * *

  Our new venue for haying was the old Ramsay homestead. The "upper place," my mother and Pete both called it by habit, because it was the part of the Reese ranch farthest up Noon Creek, farthest in toward the mountains. The meadows there were small but plentiful, tucked into the willow bends of Noon Creek the way pieces of a jigsaw puzzle clasp into one another. Pete always left the Ramsay hay until last because its twisty little fields were so hard to buckrake. In some cases he had to drive out of sight around two or three bends of the creek to brink in enough hay for a respectable stack. "You spend all your damn time here going instead of doing" was his unfond sentiment. For me on the scatter rake, though, the upper place was just fine. Almost any direction I sent Blanche and Fisheye prancing toward, there stood Breed Butte or the mountains for me to lean my eyes on. In this close to them, the Rockies took up more than half the edge of the earth, which seemed only their fair proportion. And knowing the reefs and peaks as I did I could judge where each sheep allotment was, there along the mountain wall of my father’s forest. Walter Kyle atop Roman Reef with his sheep and his telescope. Andy Gustafson with one of the Busby hands, under the middle of the reef where I had camp-tended him; farther south, Sanford Hebner in escape from his family name and situation. Closer toward Flume Gulch and the North Fork, whatever human improvement had replaced Canada Dan as herder of the third Busby band. Lower down, in the mix of timber and grass slopes, Pat Hoy and the Withrow sheep; and the counting vee where my father and I talked and laughed with Dode. Already it was like going back to another time, to think about that first day of the counting trip.

  The upper place, the old Ramsay place, always presented me new prospects of thought besides its horizons, though. For it was here that I was born. Alec and I both, in the Ramsay homestead house that still stands there today, although abandoned ever since my father quit as the Noon Creek association rider and embarked us into the Forest Service life. I couldn’t have been bu
t a year or so old when we moved away, yet I felt some regard for this site. An allegiance, even, for a bond of that sort will happen when you have been the last to live at a place. Or so I think. Gratitude that it offered a roof over your head for as long as it did, this may be, and remorse that only emptiness is your successor there.

  Alec and I, September children, native Noon Creekers. And my mother’s birthplace down the creek at the Reese ranch house itself. Odd to think that of the four of us at the English Creek ranger station all those years, the place that answered to the word “home" in each of us, only my father originated on English Creek, he alone was our link to Scotch Heaven and the Montana origins of the McCaskills. We Americans scatter fast.

  And something odder yet. In a physical sense, here at the upper place I was more distant from Alec than I had been all summer. The Double W lay half the length of Noon Creek from where my rake now wheeled and glided. Mentally, though, this advent to our mutual native ground was a kind of reunion with my brother. Or at least with thoughts of him. While I held the reins of Blanche and Fisheye as they clopped along, I wondered what saddle horse Alec might be riding. When we moved the stacker from one site to the next, I thought of Alec on the move too, likely patrolling Double W fences this time of year, performing his quick mending on any barbwire or post that needed it. By this stage of haying Wisdom Johnson a time or two a day could be heard remembering the charms of Bouncing Betty, on First Avenue South in Great Falls. I wondered how many times a week Alec was managing to ride into Gros Ventre and see Leona. Leona. I wondered—well, just say I wondered.

  With all this new musing to be done, the first day of haying the Ramsay meadows went calmly enough. A Monday, that was, a mild day following what had been a cool and cloudy Sunday. Wisdom Johnson, I remember, claimed we now were haying so far up into the polar regions that he might have to put his shirt on. Anyway, a Monday, a getting-under-way day.

  The morning of the second Ramsay day, though, began unordinary. I started to see so as soon as Pony and I were coming down off the benchland to the Reese ranch buildings. My mind as usual at that point was on sour milk soda biscuits and fried eggs and venison sausage and other breakfast splendors as furnished by Marie, but I couldn’t help watching the other rider who always approached the Reeses’ at about the time I did. This of course was Clayton Hebner, for as I’d be descending from my benchland route Clayton would be riding in from the Hebner place on the North Fork, having come around the opposite end of Breed Butte from me. Always Clayton was on that same weary bay mare my father and I had seen the two smaller Hebner jockeys trying to urge into motion, at the outset of our counting trip, and always he came plodding in at the same pace and maybe even in the same hooftracks as the morning before. The first few mornings of haying I had waved to Clayton, but received no response. And I didn’t deserve any. I ought to have known Hebners didn’t go in for waving. But etiquette of greeting was not what now had my attention. This particular morning, Clayton across the usual distance between us looked larger. Looked slouchy, as if he might have nodded off in the saddle. Looked somehow—well, the word that comes to mind is dormant.

  I had unsaddled Pony and was turning her into the pasture beside Pete’s barn when it became evident why Clayton Hebner didn’t seem himself this morning. He wasn’t.

  "Hello there, Jick!" came the bray of Good Help Hebner. "Unchristly hour of the day to be out and about, ain’t it?"

  * * *

  "Clayton buggered his ankle up," Good Help was explaining in a fast yelp. Even before the sire of the Hebner clan managed to unload himself from the swaybacked mare, Pete had appeared in the yard with an expression that told me ranch house walls did nothing to dim the identification of Good Help Hebner. "Sprained the goshdamn thing when him and Melvin was grab-assing around after supper last night," Good Help sped on to the two of us. "I tell you, Pete, I just don’t know—"

  ——what’s got into kids these days, I finished for Good Help in my mind before he blared it out.

  Yet just about the time you think you can recite every forthcoming point of conversation from a Good Help Hebner, that’s when he’ll throw you for a loop. As now, when Good Help delivered himself of this:

  "Ought not to leave a neighbor in the lurch, though, Pete. So I’ll take the stacker-driving for you a couple days till Clayton mends up."

  Pete looked as though he’d just been offered something nasty on the end of a stick.

  But there just was no way around the situation. Someone to drive the stacker team was needed, and given that twelve-year-old Clayton had been performing the job, maybe an outside chance existed that Good Help could, too. Maybe.

  "Dandy," uttered Pete without meaning a letter of it. "Come on in and sit up for breakfast, Garland. Then Jick can sort you out on the horses Clayton’s been using."

  * * *

  "Kind of a racehorsey pair of bastards, ain’t they?" Good Help evaluated Jocko and Pep, the stacker team.

  "These? Huh uh," I reassured him. "They’re the oldest tamest team on the place, Garland. That’s why Pete uses them on the stacker."

  "Horses," proclaimed Good Help as if he had just been invited to address Congress on the topic. "You just never can tell about horses. They can look logey as a preacher after a chicken dinner and the next thing you know they turn themselves into goshdamn mustangs. One time I—"

  “Garland, these two old grandmas could pull the stacker cable in their sleep. And just about do. Come on, I’ll help you get them harnessed. Then we got to go make hay."

  * * *

  The next development in our making of hay didn’t dawn on me for quite some time.

  That is, I noticed only that Wisdom Johnson today had no cause to complain of coolness. This was an August day with its furnace door open. Almost as soon as all of us got to the hayfield at the upper place, Wisdom was stripping off his shirt and gurgling a drink of water.

  How Wisdom Johnson did it I’ll never know, but he drank water oftener than the rest of us on the hay crew all together and yet never got heatsick from doing so. I mean, an ordinary person had to be careful about putting cool water inside a sweating body. Pete and Perry and Clayton and I rationed our visits to the burlap-wrapped water jug that was kept in the shade of the haystack. But Wisdom had his own waterbag, hung on the stacker frame up there where he could reach it anytime he wanted. A hot day like this seemed to stoke both Wisdom’s stacking and his liquid consumption. He’d swig, spit out the stream to rinse hay dust from his mouth. Swig again, several Adam’s apple swallows this time. Then, refreshed, yell down to Pete on the buckrake: “More hay! Bring ’er on!"

  Possibly, then, it was the lack of usual exhortation from Wisdom that first tickled my attention. I had been going about my scatter raking as usual, my mind here and there and the other, and only eventually did I notice the unusual silence of the hayfield. Above the brushy bend of the creek between me and the stack, though, I could see the stacker arms and fork taking load after load up, and Wisdom was there pitching hay energetically, and all seemed in order. The contrary didn’t seep through to me until I felt the need for a drink of water and reined Blanche and Fisheye around the bend to go in to the stack and get it.

  This haystack was distinct from any other we had put up all summer.

  This one was hunched forward, leaning like a big hay-colored snowdrift against the frame of the stacker. More like a sidehill than a stack. In fact, this one so little resembled Wisdom’s straight high style of haystack that I whoaed my team and sat to watch the procedure that was producing this leaning tower of Pisa.

  The stacker fork with its next cargo of hay rose slowly, slowly, Good Help pacing at leisure behind the stacker team. When the arms and the fork neared the frame, he idly called, “Whoap," eased Jocko and Pep to a stop, and the hay gently plooped onto the very front of the stack, adding to the forward-leaning crest.

  Wisdom gestured vigorously toward the back of the stack. You did not have to know pantomime to decipher that he wante
d hay flung into that neighborhood. Then Wisdom’s pitchfork flashed and he began to shove hay down from the crest, desperately parceling it toward the lower slope back there. He had made a heroic transferral of several huge pitchforkfuls when the next stacker load hovered up and plooped exactly where the prior one had.

  Entrancing as Wisdoni’s struggle was, I stirred myself and went on in for my slug of water. Not up to me to regulate Good Help Hebner. Although it was with difficulty that I didn’t make some crack when Good Help yiped to me: "Yessir, Jick, we’re haying now, ain’t we?"

  From there on Wisdom’s sidehill battle was a lost cause. When that haystack was done, or at least Wisdom called quits on it, and it was time to move the stacker to the next site, even Perry stopped dump-raking in the field next door and for once came over to help. The day by now was without a wisp of moving air, a hot stillness growing hotter. Yet here was a haystack that gave every appearance of leaning into a ninety-mile-an-hour wind. Poles and props were going to be necessary to keep this stack upright until winter, let alone into winter.

  Wisdom glistened so wet with sweat, he might have just come out of swimming. Side by side Perry and I wordlessly appraised the cattywampus haystack, a little like mourners to the fact that our raking efforts had come to such a result. Pete had climbed off the buckrake and gained his first full view and now looked like he might be coming down with a toothache.

  “Pete," Wisdom started in, "I got to talk to you."

  "Somehow that doesn’t surprise me," said Pete. "Let’s get the stacker moved, then we’ll gab."

  * * *

  After the stacker was in place at the new site and Pete bucked in some loads as the base of the next stack, he shut down the buckrake and called Wisdom over. They had a session, with considerable head-shaking and arm-waving by Wisdom. Then Pete went over to Good Help, and much more discussion and gesturing ensued. Finally Good Help shook his head, nodded, spat, squinted, scratched, and nodded again.