by Ivan Doig
“Mind if I tag along?” Riley asked in a supersweet way.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “But I imagine you will anyway, huh?”
“No problem,” he asserted, which had become a major part of his vocabulary since we met up with the Baloney Expressers. “I’ll be next thing to invisible.”
• • •
The sun was flattening down behind Roman Reef for the night as the three of us left for town. Behind us the peaks and crags of the Rocky Mountain Front were standing their tallest there at the deepening of evening, while the Two Medicine country around us rested in soft shadows unrolling under that sunset outline of the mountains. This may be my own private theory about such summer evenings but it has always seemed to me that lulls of this sort are how a person heals from the other weather of this land, for the light calmly going takes with it the grievances that the Two is a country where the wind wears away at you on a daily basis, where drought is never far from happening, where the valley bottoms now in the perfect shirtsleeve climate of summer dusk were thirty-five degrees below zero in the nights of February.
The Bago kept pace with that pretty time between day and night as the road swung up onto the benchland between Noon Creek and English Creek. Until, of course, Riley set things off. Maybe a genealogist could trace whether his talent for aggravation ran in the family for hundreds of generations or whether the knack was a spontaneous cosmic outbreak with him like, say, sunspots. Either way, there on the road into town he apparently did not even need to try, to succeed in ruffling my feathers. Merely gawked ahead at the strategic moment and declared, “I’ll be damned. Ye Olde Wild West comes to Noon Creek, hmm?”
“Aw, that bastardly thing,” I murmured in disgust. “If they want something weird hung, they ought to hang themselves up by their—”
But he’d roused Mariah and her camera. In the passenger seat she suddenly spoke up. “No, wait, Riley’s right.” Since when? The next was inevitable. “Pull over,” she directed, “and let me get some shots of that against those clouds.”
The summer sky, with a couple of hours of evening light yet to be eked out, was streaked with high goldenish strands, the decorative dehydrated kind called mare’s tail. Clouds are one matter and what’s under them is another. Beside us where I had reluctantly halted the motorhome stood the main gate into the Double W. A high frame made of a crosspiece supported by posts big as telephone poles and almost as tall, it had loomed in the middle of that benchland for as long as I could remember. Until not so many years ago the sign hanging from the crosspiece had proclaimed the Williamsons as owners of everything that was being looked at. Now it read:
WW RANCH
INCORPORATED
More than that, though. Just under the sign, a steer skull swung in the breeze where it was hung on a cable between the gateposts. Weather-bleached white as mica, short curved Hereford horns pointing, eye sockets endlessly staring.
That skull locket against the Double W sky was the idea of one of the managers who’d been sent out before Shaun Finletter was installed in the job a year or so ago. Goddamn such people. I drove past that dangling skull whenever I went to or from town and it got my goat every single time. That skull, I knew, was from a boneyard in a coulee near my east fenceline with the Double W, where there were the carcasses of hundreds of head of Double W cattle that piled up and died in the blizzard of 1979. Even the Williamsons, who always had more cattle than they had country for and took winter die-offs as part of their way of business, never used the skulls as trinkets.
“Guess what, I need somebody in the foreground for scale,” Mariah called over from where she was absorbedly sighting through her camera. “Somebody real western. Jick, how about if you and your Stetson come stand there under the—”
“I will not.”
The flat snap of refusal, in my tone of voice as much as my words—hell, in me—startled her. She whirled around to me, her hair swinging, with an odd guilty look.
“Sorry,” Mariah offered, rare enough for her, too. “But it’s a shot I ought to take. The way it looms there over everything, it makes a statement.”
“I know what it makes.”
In my mind’s eye I saw how I would like to do the deed. Wait until dark. Nothing but blackness on either side of this benchland road until the Double W gateframe comes into the headlights. I flip onto bright, for all possible illumination for this, and stop the Bago about seventy-five feet from the gateway, its sign and the skull under swaying slightly in the night breeze that coasts down along Noon Creek. I reach to the passenger seat where the shotgun is riding, step out of the motorhome and go in front of the headlights to load both barrels of the weapon. Bringing the butt of the shotgun to my shoulder I sight upward. Do I imagine, or does the steer skull seem to sway less, quiet itself in the breeze, as I aim? I fire both barrels at once, shards and chunks of the skull spraying away into the night. One eye socket and horn dangle from the wire. Close enough. I climb back in the Bago and head toward a particularly remote sinkhole I know of to dispose of the shotgun.
I brought myself back from that wishdream, to Mariah, to what we were saying to each other. “Take a picture of the goddamn thing if you think you have to,” I finished to her, “but it’s going to be without me in it.”
All was as silent as the suspended clouds for a long moment. Then Riley came climbing over the gearbox hump of the Bago past me and out the passenger door. Without a word he strode across the road and centered himself in the gateway for my daughter.
• • •
One whole hell of a promising evening, then, by the time we hit Gros Ventre and were heading into the Medicine Lodge Bar. Bar and Cafe, I’d better get used to saying, for the enterprise took on a split personality when Fred Musgreave bought it a few years ago. The vital part, the bar, was pretty much the same as ever, a dark oaken span polished to a sacred shine by generations of elbows, its long mirror and shelves of bottles and glasses a reflective backdrop for contemplation. But the other half of the wide old wooden building, where there likely were poker tables in the early days and in more recent memory a lineup of maroon booths which were rarely patronized, Fred had closed off with a divider and turned that outlying portion into an eatery. (“Can’t hurt,” his economic reasoning ran. “Could help.”) By this time of evening, though, tourists sped on through to Glacier Park for the night and anybody local who was going to eat supper out would have done so a couple of hours ago, and thus Fred didn’t mind providing the Medicine Lodge’s dining side as the meeting place on centennial committee nights.
He must have had his moments of wishing these were paying customers, however. Through the cafe window we could see the place was pretty well jammed. Ranchers and farmers in there jawing at each other about crops and livestock prices, all trademarked with summer-tanned faces and pale foreheads as if bearing instructions fit hat on at this line. Of the women, a dressy few were in oldfangled centennial raiment, but most had restrained themselves. Beside me as we headed in I heard Mariah already grappling camera gear out of her Appaloosa bag.
The three of us stopped instantly inside the cafe door. We had to. Our feet were in a tangle of power cords, as if we’d gotten ensnared in some kind of ankle-high electrification project.
“Aw, crud,” Riley uttered, grimacing up from the mess we’d stepped in to its source just inside the entryway. “Tonsil Vapor Purvis.”
“There goes the neighborhood,” agreed Mariah grimly.
Actually the television camera and tripod and lights and other gear were being marshaled by a pair of guys, but I did not have to be much of a guesser to pick out the one Riley and Mariah were moaning about. An expensive head of hair that was trying to be brown and red at the same time—Riley ultimately identified the shade for me as Koppeltone—atop not nearly that boyish a face atop a robin’s egg blue sport jacket; below the torso portion that fit on a television screen, bluejeans and jogging shoes.
“Well!” the figure let out in a whinnying way that turned
the word into weh-heh-heh-hell! “Rileyboy!”
“And you managed to say that without a cue card,” Riley answered in mock admiration. Tonsil Vapor Purvis didn’t seem to know Mariah or even to care to, but his cameraman and her exchanged frosty nods.
“I haven’t noticed you at any of the official centennial events,” Tonsil Vapor informed Riley in a voice that rolled out on ball bearings. “Where are you keeping yourself?”
“Working,” Riley stated as if that was a neighborhood the televisioneer naturally wouldn’t be anywhere around.
“Isn’t this centennial fantastic though?” declared Tonsil Vapor. “Have you had a chance to watch my Countdown 100 series?” When Riley shook his head, Tonsil Vapor rotated toward me. When I shook my head, he turned toward Mariah but she already had slid away and was taking pictures of people, cajoling and kidding with them as you can only when you’ve known them all your life.
“One hundred nightly segments on the centennial,” Tonsil Vapor enunciated to the remaining captive pair of us to make sure we grasped the arithmetic.
“No kidding,” Riley responded, gazing at Tonsil Vapor with extreme attention as if the centennial was the newest of news and then jotting something down. When he turned the notepad so I could see it, it read: A $25 haircut on a 25¢ head.
“Builders of Montana, this week,” the TVster was spelling out for us next. “We”—the royal We from the sound of it; the cameraman was showing no proprietary interest whatsoever—“are interviewing people about their occupational contribution to our great state. It occurred to me that an occasion like this, with oldtimers on hand,” he sent me a bright smile, damn his blow-dried soul, “would turn up a fascinating livelihood of some kind.”
“I don’t have a paying occupation,” I hastened to head off any interest in me as a specimen, “I’m a rancher.”
“What do these epics of yours run, a minute forty?” asked Riley drily.
“No, no, the station is going all out on this. I’m doing two-and-a-half-minute segments, would you believe.”
Riley let out a little cluck as if that was pretty unbelievable, all right, then sardonically excused himself to go get to work lest television leave him even farther back in the dust. Still leery of being a candidate for oldtimer of the night, I closely tagged off after Riley. We left Tonsil Vapor Purvis fussing to his cameraman, “This doesn’t make it for my opening stand-up. Let’s set up over there instead.”
“Fucking human gumball machine,” Riley was muttering as we rounded the partition between the cafe counter and the dining area in back. “Fucking television has the attention span of a—”
He halted so abruptly I smacked into his back. Riley, though, never even seemed to notice, in the stock-still way he was staring toward the rear of the cafe.
“WHAT is that?” his eventual question piped out in a three-note tune.
Golden as the light of the dawn sun, the cloth creation emblazoned the entire back wall of the cafe and then some. That is, the roomwide cascade of fabric flowed down from where it was tacked on lath along the top of the wall and surged up like a cresting molten wave at the worktables and quilting frames where stitchery was being performed on it, then spilled forward onto the floor in flaxen pools of yet to be sewn material.
Add in all the people bent over sewing machines or plucking away with needles or just hovering around admiring and gabbing, and I suppose you could think, as Riley obviously did, that the town of Gros Ventre had gone on a binge and decided to tent itself over.
“Just what it looks like,” I enlightened the scribbler. “Our centennial flag.”
Mariah whizzed past us.
“Looks like they’re getting ready to declare independence, doesn’t it,” she appraised the room-swallowing flag and kept right on going to zero in on the sewing battalion.
Riley still stood there gawking like a moron trying to read an eye-chart, although the flag didn’t seem to me all that tough to decipher. Plain as anything, the line of designs spaced across its top like a border pattern was livestock:
And down the sides the motifs were homestead cabins and ranch houses:
And although the sewing brigade had a way to go to get there, it only took the least imagination to see that the bottom border needed to be forest and stream:
In extenuation of Riley, it was true that the flag’s full effect would not register until all the other elements were in place on it. The project the Heart Butte schoolkids were doing, for instance, of a Blackfeet chief’s headdress in black and white cloth to resemble eagle feathers—rampant, as is said in flag lingo. And the combined contribution of the English Creek and Noon Creek ranch families, one entire cloth panel—the flag was so big it was being done in lengthwise sections, which were then quilted together—which was going to be a sawtooth pattern of purple-blue embroidery all the way across, signifying the mountains across the Two country’s western skyline. Then at the hem of the mountains would come a cluster of buildings, being sewn away at by several townspeople even as Riley and I watched, to represent Gros Ventre: the spiked helmet outline of the Sedgwick House hotel, the sharp church steeples, the oldstyle square front of the Medicine Lodge itself, and so on. Finally, to top it all off, so to speak, for actually this constituted the very center of the whole flag scheme: the sun. Atop a dark seam of horizon the molten arc of it, spiffily done in reddish orange fabric that even looked hot, just beginning to claim the sky for the day. And over, under, and around the sun, in mighty letters of black, the message:
THE TWO MEDICINE COUNTRY
1889 1989
GREETS THE DAWN OF MONTANA
Riley at last managed to show some vital signs. He wondered out loud, plenty loud:
“Who thought up this sucker?”
That particular question I was not keen to deal with because, when you traced right back to it, the party who brought up the flag idea in the first place was more or less me. History’s jukebox, John Angus McCaskill. It had been last fall when our steering committee was flummoxing around for some event worthy of marking Montana’s centennial with, when Althea Frew pined what a shame it was that we didn’t know what had gone on in Gros Ventre that epic day of statehood a hundred years ago. All the cue needed, of course, for me to spout off what I’d so long ago heard from Toussaint Rennie, that the 1889 citizenry of Gros Ventre, such as there was of it back then, took it into their collective head to be the very first to fly the revised American flag when Montana came onto it as the forty-first star and so got up early enough to do that municipal flag-hoisting at the exact crack of day. Which inspired some other member of our committee to suggest that we simply emulate our forebears by raising a forty-one-starred flag at dawn on Centennial Day. But that was objected to as a backward step, nine of them in fact, in stars-and-stripes history. Okay, somebody else proposed, then let’s put up a present-day American flag but a monumentally big one. But somebody yet again made the point that there were already in existence flags damn near as big as America itself—weren’t we seeing Bush practically camped out in front of a whopper of a one during the presidential election campaign?—and we didn’t have a prayer of competing in size. You might know it would be Althea who hatched the plan of making our own flag. Contrive our version as big as we could without smothering ourselves in it, sure, but most of all, design and fabricate the whole thing ourselves and hoist the Two Medicine country and Gros Ventre’s own heralding banner at dawn on the centennial.
“It just kind of occurred,” I summarized in answer to Riley and moved on into the needlery scene, tagged after by him. Primarily the women were getting things accomplished there at the sewing machines and worktables while the men mostly were standing around looking wise, both sets being duly chronicled by Mariah and her camera. Being greeted by the dozens and greeting back in equal number, I wound my way through the assemblage until I reached the quilting frame which held the panel our English Creek–Noon Creek mountain panorama was being embroidered on.
Lifelong famil
iar outlines met me there. Roman Reef’s great bow of rimrock. The tall slopes of Phantom Woman Mountain. The Flume Gulch canyonline where Noon Creek has its source, and opposite that the comblike outcropping of Rooster Mountain. Really quite beautiful, how all the high skyline of the Two Medicine was transposed there onto the flag in heaviest darning yarn. All, that is, except the finale. The northmost mountain form, Jericho Reef’s unmistakable wall-like silhouette, was sketched in pencil on the golden cloth for the next seamstress to follow.
Seamer, rather, for on the Jericho sketch was a pink paper stick-on with Althea’s loopy but firm handwriting, which read:
Jick McCaskill—please stitch here!
So if Jericho was going to get sewn it was up to me, and there was no time like the present. “Got any socks you want darned, you should have brought them,” I notified Riley and seated myself to perform fancywork.
“You know how to do that?” he asked skeptically as I plucked up the waiting needle and started trying to match the kind of stitches on the other thread mountains.
“Close enough,” I said. “I’ve sewed shut more woolsacks than you can count.”
Whether it was my example of industry or not, Riley suddenly snapped out of his tourist mode. “This night might actually turn into something. Hold the fort, Jick, I’m going out to the Bago for my listening gear.”
Nature never likes a vacuum. No sooner was I shed of Riley than Howard Stonesifer happened by and stopped to spectate my labors. Which probably was good for my stitching because it lent a little feeling of scrutiny by posterity, Howard being the undertaker.
“Where you been keeping yourself?” Howard asked.