by Ivan Doig
“Including you, from the sound of it.”
“That is true.” Unexpectedly the poisoned truth was rising out of me in flood, to Riley of all people. “I was only a shavetail kid at the time, trying to be on everybody’s side and nobody’s. But Alec and I somehow got crosswise with each other before that summer was over. It sure as hell wasn’t anything I intended, and I think him neither. But it happened. So our last words ever to each other were an argument. By goddamn telephone, no less. The war came, off Alec went, then I did too. And then—” I indicated the tombstone and had to swallow hard to finish. “I have always hated how this turned out. Us ending as brothers with bad feelings between. Over somebody . . . something that didn’t amount to all that much.”
I could still feel Riley silently watching me. I cleared my throat and looked off to the sharp outline of the mountains against the dusk sky. “Getting dark. You got the epitaphs you wanted?”
Riley glanced at the remainder of unread headstones, then at me. “Enough,” he said.
• • •
The Bago rumbled across the plank bridge of English Creek and I steered off the county road to head up the North Fork, past the distinctive knob overlooking that smaller valley.
In front of me now stood Breed Butte, whose slow arc of rise divides the watersheds of English Creek and Noon Creek beyond. I concentrated on creeping the motorhome along the rough road track, all the while watching and watching the grassy shoulders of Breed Butte and other hillsides for any sign of the North Fork’s current residents, my sheep. I can probably never justify it in dollars, but midway through the ungodly dry summer of ’85 I bought this North Fork land so as not to overgraze the short grass crop of my Noon Creek pastureland. As the drought hung on, every year perilous until finally this good green one, the North Fork became my ranch’s summer salvation. This handful of valley with its twining line of creek had its moment during the homesteading era, when the North Fork was known as Scotch Heaven because of all the families—McCaskills, Barclays, Duffs, Frews, Findlaters, others—who alit in here like thistledrift from the old country, but the land had lain all but empty since. Empty but echoing. As I knew now from those letters in Helena, one of these Scotch Heaven homesteads harbored a silent struggle within it—the matter is, Angus was in love with my Anna all the years of our marriage. My grandfather Angus and the loved Anna he never attained. My grandmother Adair, in exile from Scotland and her own marriage as well. The first McCaskill battleground of the heart.
No sheep either. The only telltale splotch of light color was the herder’s canvas-roofed sheepwagon high on the nearest shoulder of Breed Butte and so I veered the Bago from the creekside route to the sidetrack leading up to there, really no more than twin lines of ruts made long ago. Geared down, the Bago steadily growled its way up the slope, the dark timbered summit of the butte above to the west. The sheepwagon stood amid the buildings, what was left of them now that roofs had caved in and century-old corners were rotting out, of Walter Kyle’s old place. I guess more truly the Rob Barclay place, as my father had always called it, for the original homesteader here—a nephew or some such of the Lucas Barclay with the grandly proclaiming tombstone. This Barclay must have been a stubborn cuss, to cocklebur himself so high and alone on Breed Butte for the sake of its lordly view. Like him, though, my current herder preferred to have the wagon up here even though it meant hauling water from the North Fork; a dusty reservoir about a quarter of a mile west of the falling-down buildings testified that there’d once been a spring there but it long since had dried up. I unloaded the groceries in the wagon and climbed back into the Winnebago to resume the search for the sheep and their keeper.
On impulse I drove to the brow of the slope above the buildings instead of back down to the creek road immediately. As a rancher trying to make a living from this country I subscribe to the reminder that view is particularly hard to get a fork into. Yet I somehow didn’t want to pass up this divideline chance to sightsee. Onward east from where I was parked on Breed Butte now, a kind of veranda of land runs parallel between English Creek and Noon Creek, a low square-edged plateau keeping their valleys apart until they at last flow into the Two Medicine River. In boyhood Julys, I rode horseback across that benchland at dawn to help with the haying on Noon Creek. When the sun rose out of the Sweetgrass Hills and caught my horse and me, our combined shadow shot a couple of hundred feet across the grassland, a stretched version of us as if the earth and life had instantly wildly expanded.
But for once my main attention was ahead instead of back. Between the benchlands of the Blackfeet Reservation in the distance and my vantage point there on Breed Butte the broad valley of Noon Creek could be seen, the willowed stream winding through hay meadows and past swales of pasture, a majority of it the Double W’s holdings. Of that entire north face of the Two Medicine country I was zeroed in on the corner of land directly below toward the mountains, my ranch. The old Reese house that was now the cookhouse. The new house, all possible windows to the west and the mountains, that Marcella and I had built. The line of Lombardy poplars marking our driveway in from the Noon Creek road. The lambing shed. Even the upstream bend of hayfield where Kenny and Darleen were baling. Every bit of it could be enumerated from here.
Enumerating is one thing and making it all add up is a hell of another. Oh, I had tried. I’d even had the ranch put through a computer earlier this year. A Bozeman outfit in the land analysis business programmed it all for me and what printed out was that, no, the place couldn’t be converted into a dude ranch because with the existing Choteau dudity colonies in one direction and Glacier National Park in the other, Noon Creek was not “destination-specific” enough to compete; that maybe a little money could be made by selling hay from the ranch’s irrigated meadows, if the drought cycle continued and if I wanted to try to live on other people’s misfortune; that, yes, when you came right down to it, this land and locale were best fitted to support Animal Units, economic lingo for cattle or the band of sheep I already had on the place (wherever the hell they were at the moment). In short, the wisdom of the microchips amounted to pretty much the local knowledge I already possessed. That to make a go of the ranch, you had to hard-learn its daily elements. Pace your body through one piece of work after another, paying heed always to the living components—the sheep, the grass, the hay—but the gravitational wear and tear on fences and sheds and roads and equipment also somehow attended to, so that you are able to reliably tell yourself at nightfall, that was as much of a day as I can do. Then get up and do it again 364 tomorrows in a row. Sitting there seeing the ranch in its every detail, knowing every ounce of work it required, Jesus but how I right then wished for fifteen years off my age. I’d have settled for five. Yet truth knows every way to nag. Even if I had seen that many fewer calendars, would it do any good in terms of the ranch ultimately? Maybe people from now on are going to exist on bean sprouts and wear polyester all over themselves, and lamb and wool belong behind glass in a museum. Maybe what I have known how to do in life, which is ranching, simply does not register any more.
• • •
It took considerable driving and squinting, back down to the creek road and on up the North Fork toward the opposite shoulder of Breed Butte, before I spotted the sheep fluffed out across a slope. Against the skyline on the ridge above them was the thin, almost gaunt figure of my herder, patchwork black and white dog alongside.
The sight of the sheep sent my spirits up and up as I drove nearer. In a nice scatter along the saddleback ridge between Breed Butte and the foothills, their noses down in the business of grazing, the ewes were a thousand daubs of soft gray against the tan grass and beside them their lambs were their smaller disorderly shadows. As much as ever I looked forward to moseying over and slowly sifting through the band, estimating the lambs’ gain and listening to the clonking sound of the bellwether’s bell, always pleasure. But the iron etiquette between camptender and sheepherder dictated that I must go visit with the herder first.
I climbed out of the Bago and started up the slope to her.
Helen Ramplinger was my herder this summer and the past two. Tall for a woman, gawky really; somewhere well into her thirties, with not a bad face but strands of her long hair constantly blowing across it like random lines of a web. I was somewhat bothered about having so skinny a sheepherder, for fear people would blame it on the way I fed. But I honestly did provide Helen whatever groceries she ordered—it was just that she was a strict vegetarian. She had come into the Two country to join up with some back-to-the-earth health-foody types, granolas as they were locally known, out of a background of drugs and who knew what else. I admit, it stopped me in my tracks when Helen learned I needed a herder and came and asked for the job. Marcella, too; as she said, she figured that as Dode Withrow’s daughter she’d listened to every issue involving sheepherders that was possible but now here was gender. It ended up that Marce and I agreed that although Helen’s past of drugs had turned her into a bit of a space case, she seemed an earnest soul and maybe was only just drifty enough to be in tune with the sheep. So it had proved out, and I was feeling retroactively clever now as I drew near enough to begin conversation with her.
“Jick, I’m quitting,” Helen greeted me.
I blanched, inside as well as out. Across the years I had been met with that pronouncement from sheepherders frequently and a significant proportion of the time they meant it. If they burned supper or got a pebble in their shoe or the sky wasn’t blue enough to suit them, by sheepherder logic it was automatically the boss’s fault, and I as boss had tried to talk sweetness to sour herders on more occasions than I cared to count. Here and now, I most definitely did not want to lose this one. With herders scarcer than hen’s teeth these days and Kenny and Darleen tied up in haying and me kiting around the state with Mariah and Riley, what in the name of Christ was I going to do with this band of sheep if Helen walked off the job?
“Aw, hell, Helen. You don’t want to do that. Let’s talk this over, what do you say.” I made myself swallow away the usual alphabet of sheep-herder negotiation—fancier food, a pair of binoculars, a new dog—and go directly to Z: “If it’s a matter of wages, times are awful tough right now, but I guess maybe I could—”
“Hey, I didn’t mean now.” Helen gave me an offended look. “I mean next summer. I’ve had some time”—she gestured vaguely around us, as if the minutes and hours of her thinking season were here in a herd like the sheep—“to get my head straight, and I’ve decided I’m not going to be a herder any more. I’ll miss it, though,” she assured me.
Momentarily relieved but still apprehensive, I asked: “What is it you’re going to do, then?”
“Work with rocks.”
“Huh?”
“Sure, you know. Rocks. These.” She reached down between the bunchgrass and picked up a speckled specimen the size of a grapefruit. The dog looked on with interest. “Don’t you ever wonder what’s in them, Jick? Their colors and stuff? You can polish them up and really have something, you know.” Helen peered at me through flying threads of her hair. “Gemology,” she stated. “That’s what I want to do. Get a job as a rock person, polishing them up and fitting them into rings and belt buckles and bolo ties. I heard about a business out in Oregon where they do that. So I’m gonna go there. Not until after we ship the lambs this fall, though.”
Helen gently put the young boulder down on the ground between the inquisitive dog and me, straightened to her full height, then gazed around in wistful fashion, down into the valley of the North Fork, and north toward Noon Creek, and up toward the dark-timbered climb of Breed Butte between the two drainages, and at last around to me again. “This is real good country for rocks, Jick,” she said hopefully.
It was my turn to gesture grandly. “Helen, any rocks in my possession”—and on the land we stood on I had millions of them—“you are absolutely welcome to.”
• • •
My sheepherder’s change of career to rocks had not left my mind by that evening, but it did have to stand in line with everything else.
Kenny and Darleen and I were just done with supper when something about the size of a red breadbox buzzed into the yard and parked in the shadow of the Bago. Some dry-fly fisherman wanting to see how Noon Creek trout react to pieces of fuzz on the end of a line, was our unanimous guess, but huh uh. Doors of the squarish little red toy opened and out of it unfolded Mariah and Riley.
“It’s a Yugo,” Mariah informed us before I could even open my trap to ask, once she’d pecked me a kiss and said hi to Kenny and Darleen and they’d had the dubious pleasure of meeting Riley. “As close as the Montanian’s budget will ever come to Riley’s dream of renting a Buick convertible.”
“She just has no concept of what an expense account is for,” Riley confided to Kenny and Darleen as if they were his lifelong co-conspirators. “I could have done arithmetic camouflage on that Buick so easy.”
“Oh, sure, I can see it now—‘pencils and paper, $97.50 a day,’” Mariah mocked him right back but with most of a grin. “Send the BB a signed confession while you’re at it, why don’t you.”
Well, well, well. Positively sunny, were they both, after their Helena delving. That was one thing about Mariah—putting herself to work always improved her mood. Apparently the same was true of goddamn Riley. They seemed to have found their writing and picture-taking legs. Until one of them next delivered the other a kick with a frozen overshoe again, anyway.
“Darleen, don’t you think travel agrees with him?” my newly zippy daughter turned her commentary onto me. “Except for his facial grooming.” It was something, how Mariah could be bossy and persuasive at the same time. Yet I didn’t even bristle at that, appreciably, because I was too busy noticing how much she looked in her element here. In this kitchen, this house—this ranch—where she had grown up. She moved as if the air recognized her and sped her into grooves it had been saving for her, as she crossed the kitchen and planted her fanny against the sink counter in the perfect comfortable lean to be found there, reaching without needing to look into the silverware drawer for forks for Riley and her when Darleen tried to negotiate supper into them and they compromised with her on monstrous pieces of rhubarb pie. Every motion, as smooth as if she knew it blindfolded. Then it struck me. Mariah was the element here. The grin as she kept kidding with Darleen and Kenny and Riley was her mother’s grin, Marcella’s quick wit glinting in this kitchen once again. The erectness, the well-defined collarbones that stated that life was about to be firmly breasted through—those were my mother’s, definitive Beth McCaskill who had been born on this ranch as a Reese. Born of Anna Ramsay Reese, ever her own pilot through life, is my Anna. And on the Scotch Heaven side, the McCaskill side, Adair odd in her ways but persevering for as long as there was anything to persevere for. Mariah: as daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, the time-spun sum of them all? Yet her own distinct version as well. The lanky grace that begins right there in her face and flows down the longish but accomplished geometries of her body, the turn of mind that takes her into the cave of her camera, those are her own, Mariah rara.
And couple Riley with her, the set of shoulders that had shrugged off my offer of this ranch. Right now he was as electric as that commotion of hair of his, regaling Kenny and Darleen with the time he’d written in his column that some of the Governor’s notions are vast and some are half-vast and the BB didn’t get it until the Guv’s press secretary angrily called and suggested he try reading it out loud. I had to grant, there was a mind clicking behind that wiseacre face. There were a lot of places in the world where they would license Riley’s head as a dangerous weapon. I eyed him relentlessly while the general chitchat was going on, wanting to see some sign of regret or other bother show up in him here on the ranch he had rejected, here across the kitchen from the woman he could have made that future with. I might as well have wished for him to register earthquakes in China.
“I gotta see what’s under the hood of that Hugo,” K
enny soon exclaimed, squirming up out of his chair. “You want to come take a look, Darleen?”
“Thanks just the same,” demurred Darleen placidly. “Don’t look too long, hon. We’ve got to get to Choteau. My folks’ anniversary,” she explained to the rest of us. “We hate like anything to miss the centennial shindig in town tonight, but you can tell us all about it in the morning, Jick.”
This caused me to ponder Darleen and whether there was some kind of secret sisterhood by which she had become an ally of Althea Frew, but I ultimately dismissed the suspicion. Darleen isn’t your ally type. Anyway I now had to tell Mariah what my centennial involvement was all about—Riley had his ears hanging out too—and transmit the request for her to take some commemorative pictures for Gros Ventre posterity. She rolled her eyes at the mention of Althea, but concluded as I did that we might as well go in tonight and get it over with.