by Ivan Doig
It was Alec who had me thinking along these heavy lines. Alec and his insistence on an independent life. Was it worth the toll he was paying? I could not give an absolute affidavit either way. What I did know for sure was that Alec’s situation now had me in my own kind of bind. For if my parents could learn what a fizzle Alec’s Double W job was, it might give them fresh determination to persuade him out of it. At very least, it might soften the frozen mood, put them and him on speaking terms again. But I had told Alec I’d say nothing to them about his situation. And his asking of that was the one true brother-to-brother moment between us since he left English Creek.
* * *
That’s next thing to hopeless, to spend your time wishing you weren’t in the fix you are. And so I fished like an apostle, and read and read, and hung around the ranger station betweentimes, and eventually even came up with something else I wanted to do with myself. The magazines must have seeded the notion in me. In any case it was during those hot drifting last of August days that I proposed to my mother that I paper my porch bedroom.
She still was canning. Pole beans by now, I think. She tucked a wisp of hair back from where it had stuck to her damp forehead and informed me: “Wallpaper costs money." I never did understand why parents seem to think this is such startling news, that something a kid wants costs money. Based on my own experience as a youngster, the real news would have been if the object of desire was for free.
But this once, I was primed for that response from my mother. "I’ll use magazine pages," I suggested. “Out of those old Posts and Collier’s. There’s a ton of pictures in them, Mom."
That I had thought the matter through to this extent told her this meant something to me. She quit canning and faced me. "Even so, it would mean buying the paste. But I suppose—"
I still had my ducks in a row. "No, it won’t. The Heaneys have got some left over. I heard Genevieve say." Ray’s mother had climaxed her spring cleaning that year by redoing the Heaney front hall.
"All right," my mother surrendered. “It’s too hot to argue. The next time anybody makes a trip to town, we’ll pick up your paste."
* * *
I can be fastidious when it’s worth being so. The magazine accumulation began to get a real going—over from me for illustrations worthy of gracing my sleep parlor.
I’d much like to have had Western scenes, but do you know, I could not find any that were worth a damn. A story called “Bitter Creek" showed a guy riding with a rifle across the pommel of his saddle and some pack horses behind him. The pack horses were all over the scenery instead of strung together by rope, and there was every chance that the guy would blast his leg off by not carrying that rifle in a scabbard. So much for Bitter Creek. Then there was a story which showed a couple on horseback, which drew me because the pair made me think of Alec and Leona. It turned out, though, that the setting was a dude ranch, and the line under the illustration read: "One Dude Ranch is a Good Deal Like Another. You Ride Horseback and You Overeat and You Lie in the Sun and You Fish and You Play Poker and You Have Picnics." All of which may be true enough, but I didn’t think it interesting enough to deserve wall space.
No, the first piece of art I really liked was a color illustration in Collier’s of a tramp freighter at anchor. And then I found a Post piece showing a guy leaning on the railing of another merchant vessel and looking across the water to a beautiful sailing ship. "As the ‘Inchcliffe Castle’ Crawled Along the Coast of Spain, Through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Engineer Was Prey to a Profound Preoccupation."
This was more like it. A nautical decor, just what the room could use. I went ahead and snipped out whatever sea story illustrations I could find in the stack of magazines. I could see that there wasn’t going to be enough of a fleet to cover the whole wall, but I came across a Mr. Moto detective series that went on practically forever and so I filled in along the top of the wall with action scenes from that, as a kind of contrasting border.
When I was well launched into my paperhanging, Mr. Moto and various villans up top there and the sea theme beginning to fill in under, I called in my mother to see my progress.
"It does change the look of the place," she granted.
* * *
The evening of the twenty-fifth of August, a Friday, an electrical storm struck across western Montana and then moved to our side of the Continental Divide. It threw firebolts beyond number. At Great Falls, radio station KFBB was knocked off the air and power lines blew out. I would like to be able to say that I awoke in the big storm, so keen a weather wizard that I sat up in bed sniffing the ozone or harking to the first distant avalanche of thunder. The fact is, I snoozed through that electrical night like Sleeping Beauty.
The next morning, more than two hundred new lightning fires were reported in the national forests of Region One.
Six were my father’s. One near the head of the South Fork of English Creek. One at the base of Billygoat Peak. Two in the old Phantom Woman burn, probably snags alight. One in northwest behind Jericho Reef. And one up the North Fork at Flume Gulch. The McCaskill household was in gear before daybreak.
"Fire school never told us they come half a dozen at a time," muttered my father and went out to establish himself in the ranger station.
I stoked away the rest of my breakfast and got up to follow him. My mother half advised and half instructed, "Don’t wear out your welcome." But she knew as well as anything that it would take logchains and padlocks to keep me out of the station with all this going on.
As soon as I stepped in I saw that Chet and Paul looked braced. As if they were sinners and this was the morning after, when they had to stand accountable to a tall red-haired Scotch preacher.
My father on the other hand was less snorty than he’d been in weeks. Waiting for the bad to happen was always harder for him than trying to deal with it once it did.
"All right," was all my father said to the pair of them, "let’s get the guys to chasing these smokes." Chet started his switchboard work and the log of who was sent where at what time, Paul began assessing where he ought to pitch in in person.
The day was not August’s hottest, but hot enough. It was vital that all six plumes of smoke be gotten to as quickly as possible, before midday heat encouraged these smudges to become genuine fires. The job of smokechaser always seemed to me a hellish one, shuffling along a mountainside with a big pack on your back and then, when you finally sighted or sniffed out the pocket of fire, using a shovel or a pulaski to smother it to death. All the while, dry trees standing around waiting to catch any embers and go off like Roman candles.
No, where firefighting of any sort was concerned I considered myself strictly a distant witness. Alec had done some, a couple of Augusts ago on the fireline against the Biscuit Creek blaze down on Murray Tomlin’s ranger district at the south end of the Two, and as with everything else he showed a knack for it. But I did not take after my brother in that flame-eating regard.
It was mostly good news I was able to repeat to my mother when I visited the house for gingersnaps just past mid-morning. In those years the official Forest Service notion for fighting forest fires was what was called the ten A.M. policy: gain control of a fire by ten the morning after it’s reported; if it’s still out of hand by then, aim for ten the next morning, and so on. Chet had reported to headquarters in Great Falls, "We’ve got ten A.M. control on four of ours"—the South Fork, Billygoat, and the two Phantom Woman situations. All four were snag strikes, lightning gashing into a dead tree trunk and leaving it slowly burning, and the nearest fire guard had been able to put out the South Fork smolder, the lookout man and the smokechaser stationed on Billygoat Peak combined to whip theirs, while the Phantom Woman pair of smokes were close enough together that the smoke-chaser who’d been dispatched up there managed to handle both. So those four now were history. Jericho Reef and Flume Gulch were actual blazes; small ones, but still alive and trying. A fire guard named Andy Ames and a smokechaser named Emil Kratka were on the Flume G
ulch blaze. Both were new to that area of the Two, but my father thought well of them. "They’ll stomp it if anybody can." Jericho Reef, so much farther back in the mountains, seemed more like trouble. Nobody wanted a back-country fire getting under way in weather like this. Paul had nibbled on the inside of his lips for a while, then suggested that he collect the CCC crew that was repairing trail on the North Fork and go on up to the Jericho Reef situation. My father told him that sounded right, and Paul charged off up there.
“Fire season in the Forest Service," said my mother. “There is nothing like it, except maybe St. Vitus’ dance."
* * *
Ours was the only comparatively good news in the Two Medicine National Forest that Saturday. At Blacktail Gulch down by Sun River, Murray Tomlin was still scooting his smokechasers here and there to tackle a dozen snag strikes. The worst of the electrical storm must have dragged through Murray’s district on its way to Great Falls. And on his Indian Head district south of us Cliff Bowen had a fire away to hell and gone up in the mountains, under the Chinese Wall. He’d had to ask headquarters for a bunch of EFFS, which were emergency firefighters the Forest Service scraped together and signed up in a real pinch, from the bars and flophouses of Clore Street in Helena and Trent Avenue in Spokane and First Avenue South in Great Falls and similar fragrant neighborhoods where casual labor hung out. It was going to take Cliff most of the day just to hike his EFFs up to his fire. "Gives me a nosebleed to think about fighting one up there," my father commiserated.
* * *
“Sunday, the day of rest" was the mutter from my father as he headed to the ranger station the next morning.
Had he known, he would have uttered something stronger. It turned out to be a snake of a day. By the middle of the morning, Chet was telling Great Falls about ten A.M. control on one of our two blazes—but not the one he and my father expected. Jericho Reef was whipped; Paul and his CCs found only a quarter-acre ground fire there and promptly managed to mop it up. "Paul should have taken marshmallows," my father was moved to joke to Chet. Flume Gulch, though, had grown into something full-fledged. All day Saturday, Kratka and Ames had worked themselves blue against the patch of flame, and by nightfall they thought they had it contained. But during the night a remnant of flame crawled along an area of rock coated with pine needles. Sunday morning it surfaced, touched off a tree opposite from where Kratka and Ames were keeping an eye on matters, and the fire then took off down a slant of the gulch into a thick stand of timber. In a hurry my father yanked Paul and his CCs back from Jericho Reef to Flume Gulch, and I was killing time in the ranger station, late that morning, when Chet passed along the report Paul was phoning in from the guard cabin nearest Flume Gulch.
Thus I was on hand for those words of Paul’s that became fabled in our family.
“Mac," Chet recited them, "Paul says the fire doesn’t look that bad. It just keeps burning, is all."
“Is that a fact," said my father carefully, too carefully. Then it all came. “Kindly tell Mr. goddamn Eliason from me that it’s his goddamn job to see to it that the goddamn fire DOESN,T keep burning, and that I—no, never mind."
My father got back his breath, and most of his temper. “Just tell Paul to keep at it, keep trying to pinch it off against a rock formation. Keep it corraled."
* * *
Monday made Sunday look good. Paul and his CC crew still could not find the handle on the Flume Gulch fire. They would get a fireline almost built, then a blazing fir tree would crash over and come sledding down the gulch, igniting the next jungle of brush and windfall and tinder-dry timber. Or sparks would shoot up from the slope, find enough air current to waft to the other steep side of the gulch, and set off a spot fire there. Ten A.M. came and went, with Paul’s report substantially the same as his ones from the day before: not that much fire, but no sight of control.
My father prowled the ranger station until he about had the floor worn out. When he said something unpolite to Chet for the third time and started casting around for a fresh target, I cleared out of there. The day was another scorcher. I went to the spring house for some cold milk, then in to the kitchen for a doughnut to accompany the milk down. And here my father was again, being poured a cup of coffee by my mother. As if he needed any more prowl fuel today.
My father mimicked Paul’s voice: " ‘Mac, the fire doesn’t look that bad. It just keeps burning, is all.’ Jesus. How am I supposed to get through a fire season with help like that, I ask you."
"The same way you do every summer," suggested my mother.
"I don’t have a pair of green peas as assistant and dispatcher, every summer."
"No, only about every other summer. As soon as you get them trained, Sipe or the Major moves them on and hands you the next fresh ones."
"Yeah, well. At least these two aren’t as green as they were a month ago. For whatever that’s worth." He was drinking that coffee as if it was going to get away from him. It seemed to be priming him to think out loud. "I don’t like it that the fire outjumped Kratka and Ames. They’re a real pair of smokehounds, those guys. It takes something nasty to be too much for them. And I don’t like it that Paul’s CCs haven’t got matters in hand up there yet either." My father looked at my mother as if she had the answer to what he was saying. "I don’t like any of what I’m hearing from Flume Gulch."
"I gathered that," she said. "Do you want me to put you up a lunch ?"
"I haven’t said yet I’m going up there."
"You’re giving a good imitation of it."
"Am I." He carried his empty coffee cup to the sink and put it in the dishpan. "Well, Lisabeth McCaskill, you are famous the world over for your lunches. I’d be crazy to pass one up, wouldn’t I."
"All right then." But before starting to make his sandwiches, my mother turned to him one more time. “Mac, are you sure Paul can’t handle this?" Which meant: are you sure you shouldn’t let Paul handle this fire?
"Bet, there’s nothing I’d like more. But I don’t get the feeling it’s being handled. Paul’s been lucky on his other fires this summer, they both turned out to be weinie roasts. But this one isn’t giving up." He prowled over to the window where Roman Reef and Rooster Mountain and Phantom Woman peak could be seen. "No, I’d better go up there and have a look."
* * *
I didn’t even bother to ask to go along. A counting trip or something else routine, that was one thing. But the Forest Service didn’t want anybody out of the ordinary around a fire. Particularly if his sum of life hadn’t yet quite made it to fifteen years.
* * *
"Mom? I was wondering—" Supper was in the two of us. She had washed the dishes and I had dried. I could just as well have abandoned the heat of the house for an evening of fishing. But I had to rid myself of at least part of what had been on my mind the past weeks. “I was wondering—well, about Leona."
Here was an attention-getter. My mother lofted a look and held it on me. "And what is it you’ve been wondering about Leona ?"
"Her and Alec, I mean."
"All right. What about them?"
I decided to go for broke., “I don’t think they’re going to get married. What do you think?"
"I think I have a son in this kitchen who’s hard to keep up with. Why are Alec and Leona tonight’s topic?"
“It’s not just tonight’s," I defended. "This whole summer has been different. Ever since the pair of them walked out of here, that suppertime."
"I can’t argue with you on that. But where do you get the idea the marriage is off?"
I thought about how to put it. "You remember that story Dode tells about Dad? About the first time you and Dad started, uh, going together? Dad was riding over to call on you, and Dode met up with him on the road and saw Dad’s clean shirt and shined boots and the big grin on him, and instead of ‘Hello’ Dode just asked him, ‘Who is she?’ "
"Yes," she said firmly. "I know that story."
“Well, Alec doesn’t look that way. He did earlier in the su
mmer. But when I saw him at the Double W that time, he looked like somebody had knocked the blossom oft him. Like Leona had."
My mother was unduly slow in responding. I had been so busy deciding how much I could say, without going against my promise to Alec not to tell what a botch his Double W job was, that I hadn’t realized she too was doing some deciding. Eventually her thoughts came aloud:
"You may have it right. About Leona. We’re waiting to see."
She saw that I damn well wanted a definition of "we."
"Leona’s parents and I. I saw Thelma Tracy the last time I was in town. She said Leona’s mind still isn’t made up, which way to choose."
“Choose ?" I took umbrage on Alec’s behalf. “What, has she been seeing some other guy, too?"
"No. To choose between marrying Alec and going on with her last year of high school is what she’s deciding. Thelma thinks school is gaining fast." She reminded me, as if I needed any: "It starts in a little over a week."