English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  "Take of English earth as much

  As either hand may rightly clutch.

  In the taking of it breathe

  Prayer for all who lie beneath."

  Then Meredice Williamson dipped her fork and tried a dainty bite of tomato smush.

  All around the table, though, every other fork had stopped. Even mine. I don’t know, maybe Kipling out of the blue would have that effect on any group of diners, not just hay hands. But in any case, there was a mulling silence as Wendell contemplated Meredice and the rest of us contemplated the Double W boss and his wife. Not even a "nuhhuh" out of Wendell.

  Finally Cal Petrie turned toward me and asked, "How’s that power buckrake of Pete’s working out?"

  "Real good," I said. "Would somebody pass the liver, please ?" And that pretty much was the story of supper at the great Double W. Alec walked with me to the barn to help harness Blanche and Fisheye. He still wasn’t saying much. Nor for that matter was I. I’d had about enough Double W and brooding brother, and was looking forward to getting to town.

  Something, though—something kept at me as we started harnessing. It had been circling in the back of my mind ever since the hay crew clomped into the bunkhouse that afternoon. Alec came in with them. Cal Petrie and the riders who had been fixing fence made their appearance a few minutes after that.

  I may be slow, but I usually get there. "Alec ?" I asked across the horses’ backs. "Alec, what have they got you doing?"

  On the far side of Blanche, the sound of harnessing stopped for an instant. Then resumed.

  “I said, what have they—"

  “I heard you," came my brother’s voice. “I’m helping out with the haying."

  "I figured that. Which job "

  Silence.

  “I said, which—"

  “Raking."

  You cannot know with what struggle I resisted popping out the next logical question: "Dump or scatter?" Yet I already knew the answer. I did indeed. The old slouchy guy in the khaki shirt and the one eyed one, they were plodding dump rakers if I had ever seen the species. And that left just one hayfield job unaccounted for. My brother the calf-roping caballero was doing the exact same thing in life I was. Riding a scatter rake.

  I did some more buckling and adjusting on Fisheye. Debating with myself. After all, Alec was my brother. If I couldn’t talk straight from the shoulder with him, who could I?

  "Alec, this maybe isn’t any of my business, but—"

  "Jick, when did that detail ever stop you? What’s on your mind, besides your hat?"

  "Are you sure you want to stay on here? More than this summer, I mean? This place doesn’t seem to me anything so special."

  “So you’re lining up with Mom and Dad, are you." Alec didn’t sound surprised, as if the rank of opinion against him was like one of the sides in choosing up to play softball. He also didn’t sound as if any of us were going to alter his thinking. "What, is there a law that says somewhere that I’ve got to go to college ?"

  "No, it’s just that you’d be good at it, and—"

  “Everybody seems awful damn sure about that. Jick, I’m already doing something I’m good at, if I do say so my own self. I’m as good a hand with cattle as Thurl or Joe or anybody else they ever had here. So why doesn’t that count for anything? Huh? Answer me that. Why can’t I stay on here in the Two country and do a decent job of what I want to, instead of traipsing off to goddamn college ?"

  For the first time since he stepped into the bunkhouse and caught sight of me, Alec came alive. He stood now in front of Blanche, holding her haltered head. But looking squarely at me, as I stood in front of Fisheye. The tall and blue-eyed and flame-haired Alec of our English Creek years, the Alec who faced life as if it was always going to deal him aces.

  I tried again, maybe to see if I was understanding my brother’s words. "Christamighty, though, Alec. They haven’t even got you doing what you want to do here. You hired on as a rider. Why’re you going to let goddamn Wendell do whatever he wants with you?"

  Alec shook his head. "You do sound like the folks would."

  "I’m trying to sound like myself, is all. What is it about the damn life here that you think is so great?"

  My brother held his look on me. Not angry, not even stubborn. And none of that abstracted glaze of earlier in the summer, as though only half seeing me. This was Alec to the full, the one who answered me now: “That it’s my own."

  "Well, yeah, I guess it is" was all I could manage to respond. For it finally had struck me. This answer that had popped out of Alec as naturally as a multiplication sum, this was the future. So much did my brother want to be on his own in life, he would put up with a bad choice of his own making—endure whatever the Double W heaped on him, if it came to that—rather than give in to somebody else’s better plan for him. Ever since the night of the supper argument our parents thought they were contending with Alec’s cowboy phase or with Leona or the combination of the two. I now knew otherwise. What they were up against was the basic Alec.

  "Jick," he was saying to me, "do me a favor about all this, okay ?"

  “What is it?"

  "Don’t say anything to the folks. About me not riding, just now."

  He somewhere found a grin, although a puny one. "About me following in your footsteps as a scatter raker. They have a low enough opinion of me recently." He held the grin so determinedly it began to hurt me.

  "So will you do that for me?"

  "Yeah. I will."

  "Okay." Alec let out a lot of breath. "We better get you hooked up and on your way, or you’ll have to roll Grady out of bed to do the welding."

  One more thing I had to find out, though. As I got up on the seat of the scatter rake, the reins to Blanche and Fisheye ready in my hand, I asked as casually as I could:

  “How’s Leona ?"

  The Alec of the Fourth of July would have cracked “Fine as frog hair" or “Dandy as a field of dandelions" or some such. This Alec just said: "She’s okay." Then goodbyed me with: "See you around, Jicker."

  * * *

  “Ray? Does it ever seem like you can just look at a person and know something that’s going to happen to them?"

  "No. Why?"

  "I don’t mean look at them and know everything. Just something. Some one thing."

  “Like what?"

  "Well, like—" I gazed across the lawn at the Heaney house, high and pale white in the dark. Ed and Genevieve and Mary Ellen had gone to bed, but Ray and I won permission to sprawl on the grass under the giant cottonwood until Ray’s bedroom cooled down a bit from the sultry day. The thunderstorm had missed Gros Ventre, only left it its wake of heat and charged air. "Promise not to laugh at this?"

  "You couldn’t pay me to."

  "All right. Like when I was talking to Alec out there at the Double W after supper. I don’t know, I just felt like I could tell. By the look of him."

  “Tell about what?"

  “That he and Leona aren’t going to get married."

  Ray weighed this. "You said you could tell something that’s going to happen. That’s something that’s not going to happen."

  "Same thing."

  "Going to happen and not going to happen are the same thing? Jick, sometimes—"

  “Never mind." I stretched an arm in back of my head, to rub a knuckle against the cottonwood. So wrinkled and gullied was its trunk that it was as if rivulets of rain had been running down it ever since the deluge floated Noah. I drifted in thought past the day’s storm along Noon Creek, past the Double W and Alec, past the hayfields of the Ramsay place, past to where I had it tucked away to tell Ray:

  “Saw Marcella a while back. From a distance."

  "Yeah?" Ray responded, with what I believe is called elaborate indifference.

  * * *

  The next morning I returned with the rake to the Reese place, confirmed with Pete that the hay was too wet for us to try, retrieved Pony, and by noon was home at English Creek in time for Sunday dinner. During whi
ch I related to my parents my visit to the Double W. My father, the fire season always on his mind now, grimaced and said: “Lightning. You’d think the world could operate without the damn stuff." Then he asked: "Did you see your brother?" When I said I had, he only nodded.

  Given how much my mother had been on her high horse against the Double W all summer, I was set to tell her of the latest cook and the tomato smush and the weakling gravy. But before I could get started she fixed me with a thoughtful look and asked: “Is there anything new with Alec?"

  "No," came flying out of me from some nest of brotherly allegiance I hadn’t been aware of. Lord, what a wilderness is the thicket of family.

  “No, he’s just riding around."

  * * *

  This is what I meant, earlier, about the chain of events of that last spate of haying. If Clayton Hebner had not grab-assed himself into a twisted ankle, I would not now have been the sole depository of the news of Alec’s Double W situation.

  * * *

  The second Saturday in August, one exact month since we started haying, we sited the stacker in the last meadow along Noon Creek. Before climbing on the power buckrake Pete cast a long gaze over the windrows, estimating. Then said what didn’t surprise anybody who’d ever been in a haying crew before: "Let’s see if we can get it all up in one, instead of moving the stacker another damn time."

  "If you can get it up here," vowed Wisdom, “we’ll find someplace to put it."

  So that final haystack began to climb. Bud Dolson, now that mowing was over, was on top helping Wisdom with the stacking. Perry too was done with his part of haying, no more windrows to be made. He tied his team in some shade by the creek and in his creaky way was dabbing around the stack with a pitchfork, carrying scraps of hay to the stacker fork. Clayton, I am happy to report, had mended enough to drive the stacker team again and I had regained my scatter rake. Of course, it was too much hay for one stack. But on a last one, that never stops a hay crew. I raked and re-raked behind Pete’s swoops with his buckrake. The stack towered. The final loads wouldn’t come off the stacker fork by themselves, Wisdom and Bud pulled up the hay pitchforkful by pitchforkful to the round summit of the stack. At last every stem of hay was in that stack.

  "How the hell do we get off this thing?" called down Bud from the island in the air, only half joking.

  "Along about January I’ll feed from this stack," Pete sent back up to him. "I’ll bring out a ladder and get you then."

  In actuality, the descent of Wisdom and Bud was provided by Clayton running the stacker fork up to them, so they could grab hold of the fork teeth while they climbed down onto the frame.

  Marie had driven up from the main ranch to see this topping-off of the summer’s haying, and brought with her cold tea and fresh-baked oatmeal cookies. We stood and looked and sipped and chewed, a crew about to scatter. Perry to head back into Gros Ventre and a winter of leather work at the saddle shop. Bud tonight onto a bus to Anaconda and his smelter job. Wisdom proclaimed he was heading straight for the redwood logging country down in California, and Pete and Bud had worked on him until they got Wisdom to agree that he would ride the bus with Bud as far as Great Falls, at least getting him and his wages past the Medicine Lodge saloon. Clayton, over the English Creek—Noon Creek divide to the North Fork and Hebner life again. Pete and Marie, to fencing the haystacks and then shipping the lambs and then trailing the Reese sheep home from the reservation, and all too soon feeding out the hay we had put up. Me, to again become a daytime dweller at English Creek instead of a nightly visitor.

  * * *

  "Either this weather is Out Of Control," declared my mother, "or I’m Getting Old."

  It can be guessed which of those she thought was the case. This summer did not seem to be aware that with haying done, it was supposed to be thinking about departure. The wickedest weather yet settled in, a real siege of swelter. The first three days I was home at English Creek after finishing at Pete’s the temperature hit the nineties and the rest of the next couple of weeks wasn’t a whole lot better. Too hot. Putting up with heat while you drive a scatter rake or work some other job is one thing. But having the temperature try to toast you while you’re just hanging around and existing, that somehow seems a personal insult.

  Nor, for all her lament about August’s runaway warmth, was my mother helping the situation any. The contrary. She was canning. And canning and canning. It started each June with rhubarb, and then would come a spurt of cooking homemade sausage and layering it in crocks with the fat over it, and next would be the first of the garden vegetables, peas, and after them beets to pickle, and then the various pickings of beans, all the while interspersed with making berry jams, and at last in late August the arrival to Helwig’s merc in Gros Ventre of the fiat boxes of canning peaches and pears. We ate all winter on what my mother put up, but the price of it was that during a lot of the hottest days of summer the kitchen range also was blazing away. So whenever canning was the agenda I steered clear of the house as much as I could. It was that or melt.

  * * *

  In the ranger station as well, life sometimes got too warm for comfort, although not just because of the temperature reading. "How’s it look?" my father asked his dispatcher Chet Barnouw first thing each morning. This time of year, this sizzling August, Chet’s reports were never good. "Extreme danger" was the fire rating on the Two Medicine National Forest now, day after day. There already were fires, big ones, on forests west of the Continental Divide; the Bad Rock Canyon fire in the Flathead National Forest was just across the mountains from us.

  Poor Chet. His reward for reporting all this was to have my father say, "Is that the best news you can come up with?" My father put it lightly, or tried to, but both Chet and the assistant ranger Paul Eliason knew it was the start of another touchy day. Chet and Paul were young and in their first summer on the Two, and I know my father suffered inwardly about their lack of local knowledge. Except for being wet behind the ears, they weren’t a bad pair. But in a fire summer like this, that was a big except. As dispatcher Chet was in charge of the telephone setup that linked the lookout towers and the guard cabins to the ranger station, and he kept in touch with headquarters in Great Falls by the regular phone system. His main site of operation, thus, was the switchboard behind a partition at one side of my father’s office. I think my mother was the one who gave that cubby-hole the name of "the belfry," from all the phone signals that chimed in there. The belfry took some getting used to, for anybody, but Chet was an unhurryable type best fitted for the job of dispatcher.

  Of the two, Paul Eliason gave my father more grief than Chet did. Paul did a lot of moping. You’d have thought he was born looking glum about it. Actually the case was that the previous winter, just before he was transferred to the English Creek district as my father’s assistant ranger, Paul and his wife had gotten a divorce and she’d gone home to her mother in Seattle. According to what my father heard from Paul it was one of those things. She tried for a year to put up with being a Forest Service wife, but Paul at the time was bossing CCC crews who were building trail on the Olympic National Forest out in the state of Washington, and the living quarters for the Eliasons was a backcountry one-room cabin which featured pack rats and a cook-stove as temperamental as it was ancient. Perfect circumstances to make an assistant ranger-city wife marriage go flooey if it ever was going to.

  "He’s starting to heal up," my father assessed Paul at this point of the summer. "Lord knows, I’ve tried to keep him busy enough he doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself."

  If I rationed myself and didn’t get in the way of business, my father didn’t mind that I hung around in the ranger station. But there was a limit on how much I wanted to do that, too. Whenever something was happening—the lookouts up there along the skyline of the Two calling in their reports to Chet in the belfry, my father tracing his finger over and over the map showing the pocket fires his smokechasers already had dealt with—the station was a lively enough place to
be. But in between those times, rangering was not much of a spectator sport.

  * * *

  Each day is a room of time, it is said. In that long hot remainder of August I knew nothing to do but go from one span of sun to the next with as little of rubbing against my parents as possible. My summer’s work was done, they were at the zenith of theirs.

  Consequently a good deal of my leisure or at least time-killing was spent along the creek. I called it fishing, although it didn’t really amount to that. Fish are not dumb; they don’t exert themselves to swallow a hook during the hot part of the day. So until the trout showed any signs of biting I would shade up under a cottonwood, pull an old magazine from my hip pocket, and read.

  A couple of times each week I would saddle Pony and ride up to Breed Butte to check on Walter Kyle’s place, then fish the North Fork beaver dams on my way home. Walter’s place was a brief hermitage for me on those visits. The way it worked was this. We and Walter were in the habit of swapping magazines, and after I had chosen several to take from the pile on his shelf, I would sit at his kitchen table and think matters over for a while before heading down to the beaver dams.

  That low old ranch house of Walter Kyle’s was as private a place as could be asked for. To sit there at the table looking out the window to the south, down the slope of Breed Butte to the willow thickets of the North Fork and beyond to Grizzly Reef’s crooked cliffs and the line of peaks into the Teton River country, was to see the earth empty of people. Just out of sight down the North Fork was our ranger station and only over the brow of Breed Butte the other direction was the old McCaskill homestead, now Hebnerized. But all else of this long North Fork coulee was vacancy. Not wilderness, of course. Scotch Heaven left traces of itself, homestead houses still standing or at least not quite fallen down, fencelines whose prime use now was for hawks to perch on. But any other breathing soul than me, no. The sense of emptiness all around made me ponder the isolation those early people, my father’s parents among them, landed themselves into here. Even when the car arrived into this corner of the Two Medicine country, mud and rutted roads made going anywhere no easy task. To say nothing of what winter could do. Some years the snow here drifted up and up until it covered the fenceposts and left you guessing its depth beyond that. No, those homesteaders of Scotch Heaven did not know what they were getting into. But once in, how many cherished this land as their own, whatever its conditions? It is one of those matters hard to balance out. Distance and isolation create a freedom of sorts. The space to move in according to your own whims and bents. Yet it was exactly this freedom, this fact that a person was a speck on the earth sea, that must have been too much for some of the settlers. From my father’s stories and Toussaint Rennie’s, I knew of Scotch Heaveners who retreated into the dimness of their homestead cabins, and the worse darkness of their own minds. Others who simply got out, walked away from the years of homestead effort. Still others who carried it with them into successful ranching. Then there were the least lucky who took their dilemma, a freedom of space and a toll of mind and muscle, to the grave with them.