English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  The brow of the slope, between its rocky top and the grass expanse stretching down to the North Fork, by now resembled a reflection of the devastation in Flume Gulch opposite it. All morning until about ten o’clock, when the day began to get too hot for safe backfiring, my father’s men little by little had blackened that area. First they trenched the control line along the ridgetop, then the careful, careful burning began. Four or five feet wide at a time, a strip of grass was ignited and let to burn back uphill into the bare control line. When it had burned itself out, the next strip below it was lit. Down and down, the barrier of scorch was built that way, the dark burn scar at last inflicted across the entire upper part of the slope. And even yet at the edge of the forest atop the skyline, crews were cutting down any trees which stood too close behind the backfired fireline, other teams were hauling the combustible foliage a safe distance into the rocks and timber. My father’s men were doing their utmost up there to deny the Flume Gulch fire anything to catch hold and burn when it came. If it came.

  Even Stanley now and again peered through the binoculars to the fireline preparation. He wasn’t saying anything, though, except his appraisal when we climbed onto the sun—cooked rock: "Hotter than dollar chili, ain’t it?"

  * * *

  The event, as my father called it. Can you believe: it took me by total surprise. After all that waiting. All that watching, anticipating. The human being is the world’s most forecasting damn creature. Yes, my imagination had the scene ready as if it were a dream I’d had twenty nights in a row, how the fire at last would cross from Flume Gulch and pull itself up out of the gorge of the North Fork onto the slope, vagrant ribbons of flame at first and then bigger fringes and at last a great ragged orange length climbing toward the fireline where my father’s men waited to battle it in any way they could.

  Instead, just this. Nothing seemed imminent yet, the smoke still disclosed the fire as only approaching the creek gorge. Maybe just brinking down onto the height between the gulch and the gorge, would have been my guess. I deemed that the next little while would start to show whether the fire preferred the gorge or Stanley’s slope. So I did not even have the binoculars to my eyes, instead was sleeving the sweat off my forehead. When Stanley simply said: "There."

  From both the gorge and the bottom of the slope the fire was throwing up smoke like the chimneys of hell. So much smudge and smear, whirling, thickening, that the slope vanished behind the billowing cloud. It scared me half to death, this smoke eclipse.

  The suck of fear that went through me, the sweat popping out on the backs of my hands as I tried to see through smoke with binoculars. I can never—I want never—to forget what went through me then, as I realized what would be happening to my father and his fire crew if they had been in the gorge as the avalanche of fire swooped into it. The air itself must be cooked, down in there.

  Then this. The smoke, all of it, rose as if a windowblind was being lifted. Sixty, eighty feet, I don’t know. But the whole mass of smoke lifted that much. Stanley and I could look right into the flames, abruptly they were as bright and outlined as the blaze in a fireplace. The fire already had swarmed across the gorge and was stoking itself with the grass of the lower slope. Just as clear as anything, that aggregation of flame with the smoke curtained so obligingly above it, as much fire as a person could imagine seeing at once. And then, it awes me to even remember it, the fire crazily began to double, triple-multiply impossibly. I was told later by Wisdom Johnson: "Jick, this is the God’s truth, a cool wind blew over us right then, down into that fire." A wedge of air, it must have been, hurling itself under that furiously hot smoke and flame. And that air and those flames meeting. The fire spewed up across the slope in an exploding wave, a tide. The crisp tan grass of the slope, going to orange and black. In but a minute or two, gone.

  The smoke closed down again, boiled some more in a gray heavy way. But then there began to be clefts in the swirl, thinnings, actual gaps. The binoculars now brought me glimpses of men spaced along the backfired fireline and the rock summit of the slope, stomping and swatting and shoveling dirt onto flame wherever it tried to find fuel enough to catch. But more and more, sentrylike watching instead of fire combat. Watching the flamestorm flash into collision with the backfired barrier or the rock comb of Rooster Mountain, and then dwindle.

  * * *

  These years later, I wish I could have those next minutes back to makings. Could see again that slope battle, and our fire camp that the sacrifice of the slope had saved. Could know again the rise of realization, the brimming news of my eyes, that the Flume Gulch fire steadily was quenching itself against my father’s fireline, Stanley Meixell’s fireline,

  I couldn’t speak. For some time after, even. My mouth and throat were as dry as if parched by the fire. But finally I managed:

  "You knew the slope would go like that."

  “I had the idea it might" was as much as Stanley would admit. "Superheated the way it was, from both the fire and the sun."

  He looked drained but satisfied. I may have, too.

  "So," Stanley said next. "We better go get to work on goddamn supper."

  * * *

  Dusk. Supper now behind us, only the dishes to finish. My father came and propped himself against the work table where Stanley and I were dishwashing. "It went the way you said it would," he said to Stanley, with a nod. Which passed for thanks in the complicated system of behavior between these two men. Then my father cleared his throat, and after a bit asked Stanley if he could stand one more day of cooking while the fire crew policed smoking snags and smolder spots tomorrow, and Stanley replied yeah, cooking wasn’t all that much worse anyway than dealing with sheepherders.

  I broke in:

  “Tell me the argument."

  Nothing, from either of these two.

  I cited to my father from when he directed Stanley and me to clear out of the fire camp: "The last argument you and Stanley had, whenever the hell it was." I had searched all summer for this. "What was that about?"

  My father tried to head me off. "Old history now, Jick."

  "If it’s that old, then why can’t I hear it? You two—I need to know. I’ve been in the dark all damn summer, not knowing who did what to who, when, where, any of it. One time you send me off with Stanley, but then we show up here and you look at him like he’s got you spooked. Damn it all to hell anyway"—I tell you, when I do get worked up there is not much limit—"what’s it all about?"

  Stanley over his dishwater asked my father: "You never told him, huh?" My father shrugged and didn’t answer. Stanley gazed toward me. "Your folks never enlightened you on the topic of me?"

  "I just told . . . No. No, they sure as hell haven’t."

  “McCaskills," Stanley said with a shake of his head, as if the name was a medical diagnosis. "I might of known you and Bet’d have padlocks on your tongues, Mac."

  “Stanley," my father tried, "there’s no need for you to go into all that."

  "Yeah, I think there is." I was in Stanley’s gaze again. “Phantom Woman," he began. "I let that fire get away from me. Or at least it got away. Comes to the same. A fire is the fire boss’s responsibility, and I was him." Stanley turned his head to my father. Then to me again. "Your dad had come up from his Indian Head district to be a lireline foreman for me. So he was on hand when it happened. When Phantom Woman blew up across that mountainside." Stanley saw my question. "Naw, I can’t really say it was the same as happened on that slope today. Timber instead of grass, different this and that. Every goddamn fire I ever been around is different from every other goddamn fire. But anyhow, up she blew, Phantom Woman. Flames everywhere, all the crew at my flank of the fireline had to run out of there like singed cats. Run for their lives. It was just a mess. And then that fire went and went and went." Stanley’s throat made a dry swallow. "Burned for three weeks. So that’s the history of it, Jick. The blowup happened at my flank of the fireline. It was over that that your dad and I had our"—Stanley faced my father—"
disagreement."

  My father looked back at Stanley until it began to be a stare. Then asked: "That’s it? That’s what you call the history of it?"

  Stanley’s turn to shrug.

  My father shook his head. Then uttered:

  "Jick, I turned Stanley in. For the Phantom Woman fire."

  "Turned him in? How? To who?"

  "To headquarters in Great Falls. Missoula. The Major. Anybody I could think of, wouldn’t you say, Stanley?"

  Stanley considered. "Just about. But Mac, you don’t—"

  "What," I persisted, "just for the fire getting away from him?"

  "For that and—" My father stopped.

  "The booze," Stanley completed. "As long as we’re telling, tell him the whole of it, Mac."

  "Jick," my father set out, "this goes back a long way. Longer than you know about. I’ve been around Stanley since I was, what? sixteen? seventeen?"

  "Somewhere there," Stanley confirmed.

  "There were a couple of years in there," my father was going on, "when I—well, when I wasn’t around home much. I just up and pulled out for a while, and Stanley—"

  "Why was that?" This seemed to be my main chance to see into the McCaskill past, and I wanted all the view I could get. “How come you pulled out?"

  My father paused. "It’s a hell of a thing to have to say, after all this with Alec. But my father and I, your grandfather—we were on the outs. Not for anything like the same reason. He did something I couldn’t agree with, and it was just easier all around, for me to stay clear of the homestead and Scotch Heaven for a while. Eventually he got over it and I got over it, and that’s all that needs to be said about that episode." A pause. This one, I knew, sealed whatever that distant McCaskill father-son ruckus had been. "Anyway, Stanley took me on. Started me here on the Two, giving me any seasonal job he could come up with. I spent a couple of years that way, until we went into the war. And then after, when I was the association rider and your mother and I had Alec, and then you came along—Stanley suggested I take the ranger test."

  I wanted to hear history, did I. A headful was now available. Stanley had been the forest arranger, the one who set up the Two Medicine National Forest. Stanley had stood in when my father was on the outs with his father. Stanley it had been who urged this father of mine into the Forest Service. And it was Stanley whom my father had-

  "It never was any secret Stanley liked to take a drink," I was hearing the elaboration now. “But when I started as ranger at Indian Head and he still was the ranger at English Creek, I started to realize the situation was getting beyond that. There were more and more days when Stanley couldn’t operate without a bottle at his side. He still knew more about the Two than anybody, and in the normal course of events I could kind of keep a watch on things up here and catch any problem that got past Stanley. We went along that way for a few years. Nobody higher up noticed, or at least minded. But it’s one thing to function day by day, and another to have to do it during a big fire."

  "And Phantom Woman was big enough," Stanley quietly dropped into my father’s telling of it all.

  Something was adding up in a way I didn’t want it to. “After Phantom Woman. What happened after Phantom Woman ?"

  Stanley took his turn first. "Major Kelley tied a can to me. ‘Your employment with the U.S. Forest Service is severed,’ I believe is how it was put. And I been rattling around ever since, I guess." He glanced at my father as if he had just thought of something further to tell him.

  "You remember the couple times I tried the cure, Mac. I tried it a couple more, since. It never took."

  “But you got by okay here," I protested. "You haven’t had a real drink all the time we’ve been cooking."

  "But I’ll have one the first minute I get back to the Busbys’," Stanley forecast. "And then a couple to wash that one down. Naw, Jick. I know myself. I ought to, I been around myself long enough." As if to be sure I accepted the sum of him, Stanley gave it flatly: "In a pinch I can go dry for as long as I did here. But ordinarily, no. I got a built-in thirst."

  Now my father. “I never expected they’d come down on Stanley that hard. A transfer, some rocking-chair job where the drinking wouldn’t matter that much. Something to get him off the English Creek district. I couldn’t just stand by and see both him and the Two country go to hell." The expression on my father: I suppose here was my first inkling that a person could do what he thought was right and yet be never comfortable about it. He shook his head over what had to be said next, erasing the inquiry that had been building in me.

  “You know how the Major is. Put up or shut up. When he bounced Stanley, he handed me English Creek. I wanted it run right, did I? Up to me to do it." My father cast a look around the fire camp, into the night where no brightness marked either Flume Gulch or the slope.

  “And here I still am, trying to."

  * * *

  Again that night I was too stirred up for sleep. Turning and turning in the sleeping bag; the question beyond reach of questioner; the two similar figures crowding my mind, they and my new knowledge of them as awake as the night.

  Up against a decision, my father had chosen the Two country over his friend, his mentor, Stanley.

  Up against a decision, my brother had chosen independence over my father.

  Rewrite my life into one of those other McCaskill versions and what would I have done in my father’s place, or my brother’s? Even yet I don’t know. I do not know. It may be that there is no knowing until a person is in so hard a place.

  * * *

  All that next morning my father had Kratka’s crew felling suspicious snags in the burnt-over gulch and creek bottom, and Ames’s men on the slope to patrol for any sign of spark or smudge amid that char which had been grass. Mop-up work was all this amounted to—a couple of days of it needed to be done after a fire this size, just to be on the safe side—and at lunch my father said he was thinking about letting half of the EFFS go back to Great Falls tonight. He predicted, “The thanks I’ll get is that headquarters will want to know why in holy hell I didn’t get them off the payroll last night."

  Stanley and I recuperated from the lunch preparation and gradually started on supper, neither of us saying anything worthwhile. When the hot part of the afternoon had passed without trouble, even my father was satisfied that the Flume Gulch fire was not going to leap from its black grave.

  He came into camp early with the EFFs who were being let go. "Paul, the show is all yours," he delegated. "I’m going to head into Gros Ventre with one load of these guys, and Tony"—the timekeeper —"can haul the rest. Have Chet tell Great Falls to send a truck up and get them from there, would you. And Paul"—my father checked his assistant as Paul started off to phone the order to Chet—"Paul, it was a good camp."

  I was next on my father’s mental list. “Jick, you might as well come in with me. Stanley can leave Pony off on his ride home."

  Plainly my father wanted my company, or at least my presence.

  "Okay," I said. “Let me tell Stanley."

  My father nodded. "I’ll go round up Wisdom. He’s somewhere over there bragging up Bouncing Betty to the CCs. Meet us down at the pickups."

  * * *

  The ride to town, my father driving and Wisdom and I beside him in the cab of one pickup and the other pickup load of EFFs behind us, was mostly nickel-and-dime gab. Our route was the Noon Creek one, a handier drive from the fire camp than backtracking over to English Creek. Reminiscent exclamations from Wisdom when we passed the haystacks of the Reese place. Already the stacks were turning from green to tan. Then my father eyeing around the horizon and thinking out loud that August sure as hell ought to be done with heat and lightning by now. More than that, I have no memory of. The fact may even be that I lulled off a little, in the motion of that pickup cab. When we had goodbyed Wisdom and the other EFFS, my father and I grabbed a quick supper in the Lunchery. Oyster stew never tasted better, which is saying a lot. Before we could head home, though, my father
said he had to stop by the Gleaner office. "Bill is going to want all the dope about the fire. It may take a little while. You want me to pick you up at Ray’s after I’m done?" I did.

  * * *

  St. Ignatius St. was quiet, in the calm of suppertime and just after, except for one series of periodic whirrs. Which proved to be Ray pushing the lawn mower around and around the Heaney front yard. Behind him, Mary Ellen was collecting the cut grass with a lawn rake bigger than she was.

  I stepped into the yard and propped myself against the giant cottonwood, in its shadowed side. Busy as Ray and Mary Ellen were, neither saw me. Myself, I was as tired as I have ever been, yet my mind was going like a million.

  After a minute I called across the lawn to Ray: "A little faster if you can stand it."

  His grin broke out, and from the far corner of the yard he came pushing the lawn mower diagonally across to me, somehow making in the back of his throat the clackaclackaclackaclacka sound of a horse-drawn haymower.

  "Ray-AY !" protested Mary Ellen at his untidy shortcut across the lawn. But then here she came raking up after him.

  "What do you think?" Ray asked when he reached the tree and me. — "Had I better bring this out to Pete’s next summer and make hay with you?"

  “Sounds good to me," I said. "But that’s next summer. I want to know where this one went to." The light in the Heaney kitchen dimmed out, another one came on in the living room, then the murmur of Ed’s radio. Seven P.M., you could bank on it. I thought back to my last visit to this household you could set your clock by, when I pulled in from the Double W and the session with Alec that first Saturday night of the month. "It’s been a real quick August."

  “Quicker than you know," advised Ray. “Today is September. School’s almost here."