Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  Which set me to thinking. Family tree is nothing it ever occurred to me to shinny up very far, but with time to spend anyhow, why shouldn’t I? Maybe that was the way: see what our past looked like in an official place such as this, instead of letting it ambush me barehanded as it kept doing. Of course, not even try to trace back more than the couple of generations to the other side of the Atlantic, that risky hidden territory of distant ancestors; just see what I could find of the Montana McCaskills and my mother’s side of the family, the Reeses, by the time Mariah and Riley ever decided to show up.

  I stepped over to the librarian, and in gentlemanly fashion he gave me what must have been his patented short course in ancestor-seeking, which card catalogue to use when looking for what, and so on.

  “Any luck?” the library man asked on his next errand past me.

  None. I told him I guessed I wasn’t really surprised, as we’re not particularly a famous family. Actually it is somewhat spooky to learn that so far as the world at large knows, your people are nonexistent.

  “You might try over here.” He ushered me to what he called the Small Collections shelf. “To be honest with you, this category is holdings we don’t quite know what else to do with. Reminiscences people have written for their grandkids, and short batches of letters, and so on.”

  It makes you wonder, whether you really want to find anything about your family in the stray stuff. But I plucked out the thick name index binder labeled Ma through Me and took a look. The volume listed a world of Mcs, but no McCaskills. Which again didn’t overly surprise me. As far as I knew, the only real skein of writing either of my parents did was my father’s forest ranger diary, and a lot of that I did for him, when I rode with him as a boy on our sheep-counting trips into the mountains of his Two Medicine National Forest. Now that would have been something: nose around here in search of the past and find my own words coming out at me.

  R had a binder all its own and half a dozen Reeses had pages in it, all right, but none of them my mother’s parents Isaac and Anna. So much for—

  Then it came to me. The old family story of the immigration officer who decided to do some instant Americanizing on my Danish grandfather when he stepped off the boat.

  I thumbed a little deeper into the Rs and just past Rigsby, would you believe, there was my mother’s father in his original form, Riis, Isak.

  “Noon Creek, Montana, rancher and horse dealer,” the entry stated. “Letters to his sister in Denmark, Karen Riis Jorgensen, 1886–1930. Originals at the Danish Folklore Archives, Copenhagen; translation by Centennial Ethnicity Study Project, with funding from Montana Committee for the Humanities. 27 items.”

  And so. When the library man brought out the long thin box of them to me, the letters were the farthest thing from what I had expected.

  Kœreste Søster Karen—

  Amerika og Montana er altid en spœndende Oplevelse . . . The handwriting on the photocopied pages was slanting but smooth, no hesitation to it. Isaac’s penmanship in Danish, though, was not the real surprise. The typed translation. The man of these words was the only one of my grandparents I held any memory of, him sitting gray-mustached and bent but still looking thoroughly entertained by life, there at the head of our table some long ago Sunday dinner when I could barely peek over that table. Old Isaac’s family fame was for chewing his way through English as if it was gristle. My father always told of the time Isaac was asked which of his roan saddle horses was for sale, the one out in the pasture with a herd of other ponies or the one alone in the corral, and the old boy answered, “De vun in a bunch by hisself.”

  But the Isaac of these letters my eyes listened to in amazement, if it can be said that way.

  8 November 1889

  Dearest sister Karen—

  America and Montana are ever an adventure. Today I journeyed into the community of Gros Ventre for provisions and found there a proud new municipal adornment; beside the dirt of the village’s main and only street, a flagpole of peeled pine with a fresh American flag bucking in the wind. Pole and flag were but hours old, as was the news that Montana has advanced from a type of colonial governance to become a fully equal state of the United States. In all truth, the celebratory merriment of Gros Ventre this day was so infectious it could not be resisted; but your Montanian brother nonetheless was truly moved by this fledging of his adopted land. DV, Montana and we in it shall ride the future as staunchly as that flag in the wind. . . .

  12 June 1892

  . . . The time is not far, my Karen, when I will have crews of teamsters at earnful labor throughout this Two Medicine country, and DV, I shall be able to stand about with my hands on my back, looking on like a baron. Streets, roads, reservoirs, all are to be built here in young Montana and the demand for my workhorses is constant. . . .

  I carried these first few of the translated letters over to show the librarian. “This DV he sticks in every so often—do you happen to know where that comes from?”

  “Deo volente, that’d be,” he provided at once.

  My high school Latin was quite a ways behind me. Oh, sure, like anybody I could dope out Deo as meaning God, deity, all that. But the other word . . .

  “ ‘God willing,’ it means,” the librarian rescued me. “You find it a lot in letters of people who had some education back then.”

  Huh. Another surprise out of my horsetrading grandfather: I hadn’t known there was an ounce of religion anywhere in our family line.

  I went back to the table and resumed reading.

  30 September 1897

  . . . No doubt, dearest sister, you will notice a shine in the ink of these words, for I write to you as a freshly married man. Before she took mine, her name was Anna Ramsay—a lovely, lively woman, Scotland-born, who arrived here last spring as the new teacher at our Noon Creek school. . . .

  After that sunburst of marriage Isaac’s pages breathed to life our much wished for child, Lisabeth—my mother, born in 1900 on the first of April, and although we kidded her about it nobody was ever less of an April fool—and a few years later her brother Peter, a fine squalling boy who seems determined to visit the neighbors all along Noon Creek with his voice. The early ups and downs of the ranch I now owned were traced here. The doings of neighbors were everlastingly colored in ink. The steady pen brought the familiar snow of Two Medicine winter, and transformed it into the green of spring. Letter after letter I read as if old Isaac, strangulated by spoken language but soliloquizing with the best of them here on paper, somehow had singled me out for these relived times.

  25 June 1914

  . . . I write you this from amid scenery that would put Switzerland in the shade. Our work camp this summer is at St. Mary Lake while my teamsters are building roads of the new Glacier National Park. Towering over us are mountains like castles of gray and blue, as if kings had come down from the sky to live even more royally at the top of the earth. Quite to my surprise, I was visited here this past week by Anna and the children; she took the impulse to come by wagon even though it is a tedious three-day journey from Noon Creek. Ever her own pilot through life, is my Anna. . . .

  You want not to count on history staying pleasant or even civil, though.

  I have been so numb with grief, dearest Karen, that not until now have I had the heart to write about . . . Anna. About her death, ten days before, in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and swallowed hard to go on from that aching message of the loss of a wife. Isaac’s Anna. My Marcella. The longest epidemic of all, loss.

  Isaac too now seemed to falter, the letters foreshortened after that, even the one the next year telling of the wedding of my mother and father there at the Noon Creek ranch. Nor were there any more invocations of DV.

  I was thumbing through the final little batch of translated pages, about to admit that Isaac and I both seemed to be out of steam for this correspondence, when my eye caught on the McC at the start of a name.

  In the valley next over
from this one, Lisabeth’s father-in-law Angus McCaskill has died. The report is that he was fixing a fence after supper when his heart gave out. Such a passing I find less than surprising, for Angus was a man whose hands were full of work from daylight to last light. Still, although we know that all things find their end, it is sobering to me that he has gone from life at an age very like my own, neither a young man nor an old.

  His leaving of life has brought various matters to the front of my mind. At the funeral of Angus, when I went to speak consolation to his wife and now widow Adair, I was much startled to learn that she is removing herself to Scotland. “To visit, you surely mean.” “No, to stay,” she had me know. She will wait to see Varick and Lisabeth’s child, soon due, into the world. But after greeting that grandchild with her eyes, then she will go. I was, and am, deeply baffled that a person would take such a step. You know that Denmark will never leave my tongue, but this has become the land of my heart. Not so, however, for Adair McCaskill. She has a singular fashion of referring to herself by name, and thus her requiem for the life she is choosing to depart from was spoken as: “Adair and Montana have never fitted together.”

  Those two paragraphs held me. I reread and re-reread. My rightful name is John Angus McCaskill. Christened so for this other grandfather who abruptly was appearing out of the pen of my grandfather Isaac. My father’s father, so long gone, I had never really given any thought to. A shadow in other time. My main information on him was the remark one or the other of my parents made every so often when Mariah was growing up, that her rich head of hair came from her great-grandfather Angus, of the deep shade the Scotch claim is the color of their fighting blood. Yet here in ink Angus McCaskill suddenly was, right out of nowhere, or at least the portion of him that echoes in my own birth certificate. And with him, but evidently on her own terms, was my grandmother I knew even less of. So scant was any mention of Adair McCaskill by my parents that I sensed she and my mother had been in-laws at odds, but that was all. I’d always assumed the North Fork homestead claimed her as it did Angus. Willing reversal to Scotland was new lore to me.

  I read on.

  Until now I have forborne from any mention of Angus McCaskill to you in my letters, dearest sister, because I believed the time would come when I would need to tell you the all. You will see that while my pen was quiet about Angus my mind rarely was, for his life made a crossroad with my own almost from the first of our days here in the Two Medicine country, some 35 years ago. He too was but young, new and green to this America, this Montana, when I sold him the first substantial horse he ever owned, a fine tall gelding of dark brown with the lively name of Scorpion. In the years that came, Angus cut an admired figure in the community, not only as an industrious homesteader and sheepman but also as teacher at the South Fork school. A man with poetry on his tongue and decent intentions in his heart, was Angus. The word “neighbor” has no better definition than the life he led. To me, however, Angus was more than simply a neighbor, more than a familiar face atop a strong horse which I had provided him. Greatly more, for the matter is, Angus was in love with my Anna all the years of our marriage.

  He manfully tried not to show his ardor for my wife, and never did I have cause to believe anything improper took place between the two of them. But his glances from across the room at her during our schoolhouse dances and other gatherings (how many glances that adds up to in 21 years!) told me louder than words that he loved her from afar in a helpless way. What must have been even worse a burden on the heart of Angus was that he won Anna’s affections before I did, or so he had every cause to believe. He was the first to ask her to marry; Anna being Anna, she delayed answer until after the ensuing summer; and that was the summer of 1897 when I hired her to cook for my crew during the plowing of fireguards along the Great Northern railway and her life and mine were joined. After we were married that autumn, I tried never to show Angus that I knew of Anna’s spurning of him, believing that when she chose me over him the bargain was struck and we all three could but live by it. Yet, even after his own marriage, I could not help but feel pity for Angus, unable to have Anna in his life.

  Yet again—only now, dearest sister, and only to you on this unjudging paper, can I bring myself to say this—I know with all that is in me that if Anna had lived, she would have left me for Angus McCaskill. I could see it coming in her. She had a nature all her own, did my Anna; as measured as a judge in making her mind up, but passionate in her decision once she had done so. And so the moment merely waited, somewhere ahead in time, when Anna would have decided that she and I had had all of life together we could, and then she would have turned to Angus. I believe she was nearing that moment just before she died. Lisabeth was grown by then, Peter nearly so; consequences of ending our marriage no longer would fall directly on our children. I have spent endless nights wondering what would have ensued. Surely, if her mother had gone with Angus, Lisabeth would not then have married a McCaskill; strong-minded as she is, she would have spoken her vow to the Devil first. From that it follows that Lisabeth and Varick’s little boy Alec, and the other child on the way, those existences come undone, do they not? As the saying is, all the wool in the world can be raveled sooner than the skein of a single life.

  As for myself, my debate in the hours of night is whether it is more bearable to have become a widower than a rejected husband. It is a question, I am discovering, that does not want to answer itself.

  By the time I was done reading this the first time, the backs of my hands were pouring sweat. Jesus H. Christ, what we don’t know about how things were before they got to us.

  Over and over I read that letter, but the meaning did not change in any way, the words would not budge from Isaac Reese’s unsparing rendering of them. My father’s father had been in love with my mother’s mother. And she more or less with him. In love but married to others.

  And not just that. August 12, 1924, the date on this letter in which Isaac told all; the other child on the way, less than a month from being born, the one whose existence would have been erased if Anna Reese had not died before she could take her future to waiting Angus McCaskill. That child was precisely me.

  As if that child was suddenly six years old and yearning for the teacher to call rest period so that he could put his head down on his school desk into the privacy of closed eyes, I right then laid forward into my arms on the library table and cradled my head. I did not know the tears were coming until I felt the seep of them at my eyelids, the wet paths being traced over my cheekbones.

  That quiet crying: who did I weep for? For Anna Reese? Did that woman have to die for me to happen? Become in death my grandmother, as she never would have in life? Alec and I, and by way of me, Mariah and Lexa; we were freed into life when the epidemic took her, were we? Or were my tears Isaac’s, for his having lost a wife? Or for Angus McCaskill for twice having lost love; once at the altar and once at the grave? Or for Adair McCaskill, second-choice wife in a land, too, that was never her own? Or was this again my grief for Marcella, my tears the tide of her passing into the past with the rest of these?

  I wept for them all, us all.

  A hand cupped my shoulder. “Sir? Are you all right?” The library man was squatting down beside me, trying to peer in through my pillow of arms.

  I lifted my head and wiped my eyes with both hands. Gaggles of genealogists around the room had put aside their volumes to watch me. “Uhm. I forgot . . . forgot where I was.” Blew my nose. Tried to clear my throat. “Some things kind of got pent up in me. The stuff in these. . .” I indicated Isaac’s letters.

  “At least they mean something to you,” the librarian said gently.

  “Yeah. Yeah, they do.”

  • • •

  The librarian having assured me he’d tell my daughter and any tall yayhoo with her that I’d meet them outside, I snuffled my way out into the sunshine. Into noon hour for the state workers, for across the street from the Historical Society the capitol’s copper dome was like a h
ive for busy humanity below, men and women in groups and pairs as they hurried off to restaurants or chose shaded spots on the capitol lawn for bag lunch on the ground.

  I plugged along slowly through the blanketing heat toward the Bago, trying not to look like a guy who had just made a public spectacle of himself. Talk about self-pandemonium. This trip was doing it to me something fierce. How the hell to ward it off, though? The past has a mind of its own, I was finding out. Maybe my weepy spell was over but I still felt flooded with those torrents of Isaac’s ink.

  “Hi, did you manage to keep yourself entertained this morning?” Mariah’s voice caught up with me from behind. Before I could manage a response to that, she was alongside me with her arm hooked with mine and already was skipping on to “Ready for lunch, do I even need to ask?”

  “Where’s your partner in crime?” I inquired, glancing around for Riley.

  “He’s calling the BB to make sure our geezer piece got there okay. I missed a bet when we divorced. I should have sued the telephone for alienation of affection.”

  She, at least, seemed in an improved mood, which I verified by asking her how the red-light real estate piece was coming. “I think it’s going to work,” she conceded. “You never quite know with Riley when he reaches into that pantry of a brain of his. But his idea this time looks real zammo.” Nor could you predict this newspaper pair. Less than twenty-four hours ago they could barely tolerate each other and here all of a sudden they were on their best productive behavior.

  At the motorhome Mariah and I flung open all the doors and windows to let the heat out, but sultry as the weather was maybe a hotter amount flowed in. We moved off into the shade of a tree on the capitol lawn while waiting for Riley. Right next to us was a big oblong flowerbed in a blossom pattern forming the word CENTENNIAL; my God, they were even spelling it out in marigolds now.

  The sky, though, had turned milky, soiled-looking. “What the hell’s happened to our day?” I asked Mariah.