English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  Pete settled for this and climbed on the buckrake.

  For the next little while of stacking hay there was slightly more snap to Good Help’s teamstering. He now had Jocko and Pep moving as if they were only half asleep instead of sleepwalking. Wisdom managed to get his back corners of the stack built good and high, and it began to look as if we were haying semi-respectably again.

  Something told me to keep informed as I did my scatter-raking, though, and gradually the story of this new stack became clear. Once more, hay was creeping up and up in a slope against the frame of the stacker. But that was not the only slope. Due to Wisdom’s determined efforts to build up the back corners, the rear also stood high. Prominent behind, low in the middle, and loftiest at the front where Good Help again was dropping the loads softly, softly. Something new again in the history of hay, a stack shaped like a gigantic saddle. Wisdom Johnson now looked like a man standing in a coulee and trying to shovel both sidehills down level.

  My own shirt was sopping, just from sitting on the rake. Wisdom surely was pouring sweat by the glassful. I watched as he grabbed his waterbag off the frame and took a desperate swig. It persuaded me that I needed to come in and visit the water jug again.

  I disembarked from my rake just as Wisdom floundered to the exact middle of the swayback stack and jabbed his pitchfork in as if planting a battle flag.

  "Drop the next frigging load right on that fork!" he shouted down to Good Help. So saying, he stalked up to the back of the haystack, folded his arms, and glowered down toward the pitchfork-target he had established for the next volley of hay.

  This I had to watch. The water jug could wait. I planted myself just far enough from the stack to take in the whole drama. Good Help squinted, scratched, spat, etcetera, which seemed to be his formula of acknowledgment. Then he twirled the ends of the reins and whapped the rumps of Jocko and Pep.

  I suppose the comparison to make is this: how would you react if you had spent the past hours peacefully dozing and somebody jabbed a thumb between your ribs?

  I believe even Good Help was more than a little surprised at the flying start his leather message produced from Jocko and Pep. Away the pair of horses jogged at a arness-rattling pace. Holding their reins, Good Help toddled after the team a lot more rapidly than I ever imagined he was capable of. The cable whirred snakelike through the pulleys of the stacker. And the load of hay was going up as if it was being fired from one of those Roman catapults.

  I spun and ran. If the arms of the stacker hit the frame at that runaway velocity, there was going to be stacker timber flying throughout the vicinity.

  Over my shoulder, though, I saw it all.

  Through some combination of stumble, lurch, and skid, Good Help at last managed to rare back on the reins with all his weight and yanked the horses to a stop.

  Simultaneously the stacker arms and fork popped to a halt just inches short of the frame, the whole apparatus quivering up there in the sky like a giant tuning fork.

  The hay. The hay was airborne. And Wisdom was so busy glowering he didn’t realize this load was arriving to him as if lobbed by Paul Bunyan. I yelled, but anything took time to sink in to Wisdom. His first hint of doom was as the hay, instead of cascading down over the pitchfork Good Help was supposed to be sighting on, kept coming and coming and coming. A quarter of a ton of timothy on a trajectory to the top of Wisdom’s head.

  Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Wisdom ought to have humped up and accepted the avalanche. He’d have had to splutter hay the next several minutes, but a guy as sturdy as he was wouldn’t have been hurt by the big loose wad.

  But I suppose to look up and see a meteorite of hay dropping on you is enough to startle a person. Wisdom in his surprise took a couple of wading steps backward from the falling mass. And had forgotten how far back he already was on the stack. That second step carried Wisdom to the edge, at the same moment that the hayload spilled itself onto the stack. Just enough of that hay flowed against Wisdom to teeter him. The teetering slipped him over the brink. "Oh, hell," I heard him say as he started to slide.

  Every stackman knows the danger of falling from the heights of his work. In Wisdom’s situation, earth lay in wait for him twenty feet below. This lent him incentive. Powerful as he was, the desperately grunting Wisdom clawed his arms into the back of the haystack as he slid. Like a man trying to swim up a waterfall even as the water sluices him down.

  "Goshdamn!" Good Help marveled somewhere behind me. "Will you look at that!"

  Wisdom’s armwork did slow his descent, and meanwhile a sizable cloud of hay was pulling loose from the stack and coming down with him—, considerably cushioning his landing. As it turned out, except for scratched and chafed arms and chest and a faceful of hay Wisdom met the ground intact. He also arrived to earth with a full head of steam, all of which he now intended to vent on Good Help Hebner.

  "You satchel-ass old son of a frigging goddamn”—Wisdom’s was a rendition I have always wished I’d had time to commit to memory. An entire opera of cussing, as he emerged out of the saddleback stack. But more than Wisdom’s mouth was in action, he was trying to lay hands on Good Help. Good Help was prudently keeping the team of horses between him and the stackman. Across the horses’ wide backs they eyed one another, Wisdom feinting one way and Good Help going the other, then the reverse. Since the stacker arms and fork still were in the sky, held there only by the cable hitched to the team, I moved in and grabbed the halters of Jocko and Pep so they would stand steady. By now Pete had arrived on the buckrake, to find his stacking crew in this shambles.

  "Hold everything !" he shouted, which indeed was what the situation needed.

  Pete got over and talked Wisdom away from one side of the team of horses, Good Help pussyfooted away from their opposite side, and I backed Jocko and Pep toward the stack to let down the arms and fork.

  Diplomacy of major proportions now was demanded of Pete. His dilemma was this: if he didn’t prune Good Help from the hay crew, Wisdom Johnson was going to depart soonest. Yet Pete needed to stay on somewhat civil terms with Good Help, for the sake of hanging on to Clayton and the oncoming lineage of Hebner boys as a ready source of labor. Besides all that, it was simply sane general policy not to get crosswise with a neighbor such as Good Help, for he could just as readily substitute your livestock for those poached deer hanging in his jackpines.

  Wisdom had stalked away to try to towel some of the chaff off himself with his shirt. I hung around Pete and Good Help. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

  "Garland, we seem to have a problem here," Pete began with sizable understatement. "You and Wisdom. He doesn’t quite agree with the way you drive stacker team."

  “Pete, I have stacked more hay than that guy has ever even seen."

  By which Good Help must have meant in several previous incarnations, as none of us who knew him in this lifetime had ever viewed a pitchfork in his hands. “He don’t know a favor when it’s done to him. If he’d let me place the loads the way they ought to be, he could do the stacking while setting in a goshdamn rocking chair up there."

  "He doesn’t quite see it that way."

  "He don’t see doodly-squat about putting up hay, that fellow. I sure don’t envy you all his haystacks that are gonna tip assy-turvy before winter, Pete."

  "Garland, something’s got to give. Wisdom won’t stack if you’re going to drive."

  The hint flew past Good Help by a Texas mile. “Kind of a stubborn bozo, ain’t he?" he commiserated with Pete. "I was you, I’d of sent him down the road long since."

  Pete gazed at Good Help as if a monumental idea had just been presented. As, indeed, one had.

  "I guess you’re right. I’d better go ahead and can him," Pete judiciously agreed with Good Help. I gaped at Pete. But he was going right on: “I do need to have somebody on the stack who knows what he’s doing, though. Lucky as hell you’re on hand, Garland. Nobody else on this crew is veteran to the stacking job like you are. What we’ll do, I�
��ll put you up on the stack and we’ll make some hay around here for a change, huh?"

  Good Help went as still as Lot’s wife, and I swear he even turned about as white.

  “Ordinarily, now"—I didn’t get to hear all of the ensuing catalogue of excuse, because I had to saunter away to keep my giggles in, but—"this goshblamed back of mine"—I heard more than enough—"if it’ll help you out with that stubborn bozo I can just head on home, Pete"—to know that it constituted Good Help’s adieu to haying.

  * * *

  That night at English Creek my father and mother laughed and laughed at my retelling of the saga of Wisdom and Good Help. "A pair of dandies, they are," my father ajudged. Recently he seemed to take particular pleasure in any evidence that jugheaded behavior wasn’t a monopoly of the Forest Service.

  But then a further point occurred to him, and he glanced at my mother. She looked soberly back at him. It had occurred to her, too. She in fact was the one who now asked it: “Then who’s going to drive the stacker team?"

  "Actually," I confessed, “I am."

  * * *

  So that was how I went from haying’s ideal job to its goddamn dullest.

  Back and forth with that stacker team. All of haying until then I had idly glanced at those little towpaths worn into the meadow, out from the side of each stack we put up, identical routes the exact length of the stacker cable. Now it registered on me how many footsteps, horse and human, it took to trudge those patterns into creation. The scenery meanwhile constant: the rear ends of Jocko and Pep looming ahead of me like a pair of circus fat ladies bending over to tie their shoelaces. Too promptly I discovered a charm of Pep’s, which was to hoist his tail and take a dump as soon as we were hitched up at a new stack site, so that I had to remember to watch my step or find myself shin deep in fresh horse apples.

  Nor did it help my mood that Clayton with his tender ankle was able to sit on the seat of the scatter rake and do that job. My scatter rake. The first long hours of driving the stacker team I spent brooding about the presence of the Hebner tribe in this world.

  I will say, the stacker team job shortly cured me of too much thinking. The first time I daydreamed a bit and was slow about starting the load up onto the stack, Wisdom Johnson brought me out of it by shouting down: "Hey, Jick! Whistle or sing, or show your thing!" I was tempted to part Wisdom’s hair with that particular load of hay, but I forebore.

  * * *

  Maybe my stacker team mood was contagious. Suppertime of the second day, when I got back to English Creek I found my mother frowning over the week’s Gleaner.

  "What’s up ?" I asked her.

  “Nothing," she said and didn’t convince me. When she went to the stove to wrestle with supper and I had washed up, I zeroed in on the article she’d been making a mouth at. It was one on the Random page:

  PHANTOM WOMAN:

  WHEN FIRE RAN ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Editor’s note: The fire season is once again upon us, and lightning needs no help from the carelessness of man. It is just 10 years ago that the Phantom Woman Mountain conflagration provided an example of what happens when fire gets loose in a big way. We reprint the story as a reminder. When in the woods, break your matches after blowing them out, crush cigarette butts, and douse all campfires.

  Forest Service crews are throwing everything in the book at the fire on Phantom Woman Mountain, but so far, the roaring blaze has thrown it all back. The inferno is raging in up-and-down country near the headwaters of the North Fork of English Creek, about 20 miles west of Gros Ventre. Reports from Valier and Conrad say the column of smoke can be seen from those communities. How many acres of forest have been consumed is not known. It is certain the loss is the worst in the Two Medicine National Forest since the record fire season of 1910.

  One eyewitness said the crews seemed to be bringing the fire under control until late yesterday afternoon. Then the upper flank of the fire broke loose “and started going across that mountain as fast as a man can run."

  H. T. Gisborne, fire research specialist for the U.S. Forest Service at Missoula, explained the “blowup" phenomenon: “Ordinarily the front of a forest fire advances like troops in skirmish formation, pushing ahead faster here, slower there, according to the timber type and fuels, but maintaining a practically unbroken front. Even when topography, fuels, and weather result in a crown fire, the sheet of flames leaps from one tree crown to the next at a relatively slow rate, from one-half to one mile an hour. But when such ‘runs’ throw spots of fire ahead of the advancing front, the spots burn back to swell the main front and add to the momentum of the rising mass of heat. Literally, a ‘blowup’ of the front of the fire may then happen."

  No word has been received of casualties in the Phantom Woman fire, although reports are that some crews had to flee for their lives when the "blowup” occurred.

  * * *

  When my father came in for supper, my mother liberated the Gleaner from me and handed it to him, saying: "Mac, you might as well see this." Meaning, you might as well see it before our son the asker starts in on you about it.

  The headline stopped him. Bill Reinking always got in touch with him about any story having to do with the Two Medicine National Forest. "Why’s this in the paper?" my father now demanded of the world at large.

  "It’s been ten years, Mac," my mother told him. "Ten years ago this week."

  He read it through. His eyes were intent, his jaw was out, as if stubborn against the notion that fire could happen in the Two Medicine National Forest. When he tossed the Gleaner aside, though, he said only: "Doesn’t time fly."

  * * *

  The next day, two developments.

  I took some guilty pleasure at the first of these. Not long before noon, Clayton dropped one wheel of the scatter rake into a ditch that was closer than he’d noticed, and the impact broke one of the brackets that attaches the dumping mechanism to the rake frame. Clayton himself looked considerably jarred, although I don’t know whether mostly by the jolt of the accident or the dread that Pete would fire him for it.

  But Pete being Pete, he instead said: "These things happen, Clayton. We’ll cobble it with wire until we can get a weld done on it." And once I got over my secret satisfaction about the superiority of my scatter-raking to Clayton’s, I was glad Pete didn’t come down hard on the boy. Being a son of Good Help Hebner seemed to me punishment enough for anybody.

  Then at the end of the workday, as Pony and I came down the benchland to the ford of English Creek, I saw a second Forest Service pickup parked beside my father’s outside the ranger station. I figured the visitor might be Cliff Bowen, the young ranger from the Indian Head district just south of us, and it was. When I stepped in to say hello, I learned Cliff had been to headquarters in Great Falls and had come by with some fire gear for my father. And with some rangerly gripes he was sharing as well. Normally Cliff Bowen was mild as milk, but his headquarters visit left him pretty well steamed.

  "Mac, Sipe asked me how things are going." Sipe was Ken Sipe, the superintendent of the Two Medicine National Forest. “I told him, about as good as could be expected, but we’re going to need more smoke-chasers." July and now August had stayed so hot and dangerous that east-of-the-Divide rangers had been permitted to hire some fire manpower, but only enough, as my father had said, "to give us a taste."

  “How’d that go over with him ?" my father wondered.

  "About like a fart in church. He told me it’s Missoula policy. Hold down on the hiring, on these east-side forests. Goddamn it, Mac, I don’t know what the Major’s thinking of. This forest is as dry as paper. We get one good lightning storm in the mountains and we’ll have fires the whole sonofabitching length of the Two."

  "Maybe the Major’s got it all arranged with upstairs so there isn’t going to be any lightning the rest of the summer, Cliff."

  "Yeah, maybe. But if any does get loose, I hope to Christ it aims for the rivets on the Major’s hip pocket."

  My father couldn’t help b
ut laugh. "You think snag strikes are trouble. Figure how long the Major’d smolder."

  Two developments, I said back there. Amend that to three. As I led Pony to her pasture for the night, the heat brought out sweat on me, just from that little walk. When I reached the house the thermometer in our kitchen window was catching the western sun. Ninety-two degrees, it read. The hot heavy weather was back. The kind of weather that invites lightning storms.

  * * *

  But all we got that night was a shower, a dab of drizzle. When I climbed out of bed in the morning I debated whether Pete’s hay would be too wet to stack today. So that I wouldn’t make my ride for nothing, I telephoned the Reese ranch.

  “Pete thinks it’ll be dry enough by middle of the morning," Marie’s voice told me. "Come on for breakfast. I have sourdough hotcakes."

  It turned out that the sourdough hotcakes were the only real gain of the morning for our hay crew. We took our time at the breakfast table and then did a leisurely harnessing-up of our teams and made no hurry of getting to the Ramsay place’s hayfields, and still Perry and Bud and Wisdom had a lot of smoke time while Pete felt of the hay and gandered at the sky. Finally Pete said, "Hell, let’s try it." We would do okay for a while, put up a dozen or so loads, then here would come a sun shower. Just enough moisture to shut us down. Then we’d hay a little more, and another sun shower would happen. For a rancher trying to put up hay, that is the most aggravating kind of day there can be. Or as Pete put it during one of these sprinkly interruptions:

  “Goddamn it, if you’re gonna rain, rain."

  By about two o’clock and the fourth or fifth start-and-stop of our stacking, he had had enough. "The hell with it. Let’s head for home."

  I naturally anticipated an early return to English Creek, and started thinking about where I might go fishing for the rest of the afternoon. My theory is, the more rotten the weather, the better the fishing. But as I was unharnessing Jocko and Pep, Pete came out of the house and asked: