Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  There was a moment of threefold silence then, the two of them regarding each other past me as I perched there stewing.

  “So?” Riley at last inquired. He gawked at the floor ostentatiously enough to draw the cafe owner’s attention. “Do I have to get down on one knee? I kind of hate to, given Gyp’s housekeeping.”

  “No,” Mariah answered tightly. “I heard it all right from where you are.” She put her hand on my arm as if to say wait, don’t go, as though I was the one invited off to the land of quakes and flakes instead of her. Then she went around me and gave Riley a kiss that would have fused furnace metal.

  • • •

  The Bago by now could almost guide itself in the groove it had worn into this part of the universe, to Missoula and from Missoula, and the next day I drove rather absently, letting the motorhome and the freeway hum away the miles together while everything else was on my mind.

  In the passenger seat Mariah too seemed to be on automatic, watching the weather—more rain; the spigot this year seemed to be stuck open instead of closed—and the country as we headed east, past Drummond, past Garrison, the twin paths of the freeway swinging south through the tan Deer Lodge valley and then reverting east again, halving Butte into its old hillside mining section and the shopping malls on the flats below, all the route until then a running start up to the Continental Divide; and quickly across and down to the headwaters of the Missouri, past Three Forks, and onward through the fine fields of the Gallatin Valley, past Bozeman, past the Bridger Mountains. I noticed that all the while her camera stayed inactive.

  Those road hours Riley spent at writing something—not a Montanian piece, because he and Mariah hadn’t talked one over—the pucka pucka rhythm of his laptop as intermittent as the mileposts rolling past.

  . . . In the seasons before the chinook, hunting magpies with our .22s my brother and I played at being Lewis and Clark along the swift small river they named for one of the enlisted men of their expedition. A captaincy apiece, we insisted on—neither of us ever bothering to imagine back into 1806 to be a startled and proud Private Shields putting his footprints beside water that still carries his name—for boys settle for momentary glory. . . .

  Not until just beyond Livingston, when he let me know “It’s this exit” and I swung the Bago north onto the suddenly thinner route of Highway 89 up the Shields River, did Riley put aside his wordbox and join the other two of us in watching the land.

  The Shields River country was a new Montana to me. Accustomed as I was to the Two country’s concentrated force of the Rocky Mountain Front along a single skyline, here I was surprised by piles of mountain ranges in all directions: the Absarokas to the south, the Castle range to the north, both the Bridger and the Big Belt ranges to the west and northwest, and to the east, over Riley’s home ground, the high and solitary range called the Crazy Mountains.

  My pair of passengers stayed as mute as the ranges of stone. Neither Riley nor Mariah looked forward to this chore, as I could readily understand. I was not, however, what could be called sympathetic. This reunification notion they had mutually lapsed into still seemed to me as crazy as those mountains up there. My one ray of hope was that the two of them at least hadn’t hotfooted it off from Gyp’s lunch counter yesterday to the marriage license bureau. “If we’re going to go through with this California business,” Mariah had managed to stipulate when the kissing let up, “let’s do it all new down there. Get married there, I mean.”

  Riley pretended to count the weeks to Globhood on his fingers, then consented. “I guess I can stand that. Maybe a change of preachers is a good idea anyway.”

  There in Missoula when the love doves eventually had to find their way back to the matter of the centennial series, something did develop that made me perk up.

  After a final swig from his beer bottle and futile reconnaissance for any more french fries, Riley popped out with: “I dread to, but you know what I better do? Swing by the home place on our way east and break the news there.”

  Mariah gave her head a little toss and regarded him with extreme steadiness. “Break the news? You make it sound like a car accident.”

  “Joke, J-O-Q-U-E, joke!” Riley protested, but I had my doubts and quite possibly Mariah did too. However, there in Gyp’s she let him get away with the explanation that he’d of course meant the news of the California job, the kind of thing that took a little getting used to for parents, sorry to say, with an ever so innocent glance in my direction.

  Now Riley had me turn east off 89 at Clyde Park and head dead-on for the Crazies. The Shields River valley must have been a kind of geographical basket of good ground, because there was farming right up to the base of the mountains. Nice tidy ranches, of the cattle variety, were regular along the road.

  The Wright family’s ranch was up on a last ledge of fields before the Crazy Mountains stood like vast long tents of white. The place could be read at a glance as prosperous; the original clapboard house with a pleasant porch all the way across its front, the newer lower domicile where Riley’s brother’s family lived, the white-painted cattle sheds and pens, the nice grass of the tightly fenced pastures beyond. Country this orderly, you did wonder how it produced a guy like Riley.

  Who, as we approached the driveway, cleared his throat and suggested to Mariah, “It might be best if you let me break the—tell about us.”

  She said with forced brightness, “Okay, sure, words are your department, aren’t they.”

  I became aware of a heavy stare from Riley. “Who, me? I wouldn’t even dream of depriving you of the chance to make the same wedding announcement twice in the same lifetime,” I reassured him. “Besides, it ought to be highly interesting to hear.”

  • • •

  A yappity pup careened across the yard to challenge the Bago. I braked just in time to keep him from becoming a pup pancake.

  The canine commotion brought a woman out onto the porch of the older house. Plentiful without being plump, in blue jeans ageworn to maximum comfort and a red-checked shirt with a yoke of blue piping in emphasis across the chest, she still was wearing her hair in a summer hank—it sheened whiter than gray, grayer than white—more abbreviated than a ponytail, to keep it off her neck in back. Somewhat leathered and weathered, she nonetheless had a well-preserved appearance; time simply paid its respects to a face like that. She stood deliberating at the motorhome while the kiyi chorus of the pup reached new crescendos, until Riley slid back the sidewindow and yelled out, “Call off your dogpack, Mother, we’re relatively peaceful.”

  “Here, Manslaughter,” she spoke to the barking guardian and patted a denim thigh for him to come to her. By now the woman had recognized Mariah’s red hair as well as Riley’s vocal presence and she came down off the porch striding quickly, in a kind of aimed glide, toward the Winnebago as if she had something vital to deliver. But when the Montanian duo stepped out of the motorhome, followed by me, Riley’s mother halted a good distance away and somehow managed to gaze from one to the other of them and both of them at once while saying diagnostically, “I saw by your performances in the paper that you two are tangled together again.”

  Riley, trust him, cupped a hand to his ear and asked, “Did I hear a ‘hello’ or was that thunder?” Then he brassed on over as if doing a major favor by delivering a kiss to his matriarch.

  “It would help, Riley, it really would, if you’d keep me informed as to when you’re on speaking terms with her,” his mother gazed indicatively straight at Mariah, “so I can stay in step. Couldn’t you have it announced on the radio or something?”

  A watcher of this didn’t have to be rocket-swift to pretty speedily realize that Riley’s mother had as much peeve built up at Mariah as I did at Riley and for the one and same reason, the crash of their marriage. Why this surprised me any I don’t know—just one more case of an in-law flopped into an outlaw—but it did.

  Mariah looked like she’d rather be juggling hot coals, but she said to the silver-haired woman, “We m
aybe both better get in practice on our terms, how about.”

  Riley’s mother eyed my daughter skeptically. Then perhaps registering the echo of McCaskill boneline in Mariah’s form and my own over Mariah’s shoulder, she cast her first full look at me. A moment was required to decipher me under the beard and then her eyes went wide.

  “Jick!” she let out with her blaze of smile. “Hello again.”

  “ ’Lo, Leona.”

  Half a century it had been, since I first said that. Since Leona Tracy, as she was then, all but married my brother Alec.

  • • •

  I cannot say that oldest storm from the past swept through me again, as I stood now in the yard of Leona Wright’s ranch, because the memory of that summer of 1939 has never really been out of me. The June evening it began, when just at suppertime at our English Creek ranger station Alec and Leona rode in, I can recall to the very sound of the quick extra stick of firewood being rattled into the stove by my mother as she set at generating an already-cooked meal for three into ample for five. Looking up from the Forest Service paperwork he’d been trying to contend with, my father watched through the window as my brother and the goldhaired girl, the fondest of arms around each other as they ambled, crossed the yard from their saddle horses. “Glued together at the hip, those two,” he reported.

  “Safer that way than face to face,” my mother stated.

  He looked around at her, startled. She always could surprise him more than he cared to admit. Then Alec and Leona arrived, more like alit, into the kitchen with the other three of us, and the summer of war began. For it was during that suppertime, well before the butterscotch meringue pie that I’d been dreamily counting on for dessert, when Alec announced that he and she intended to be married, that the college years and engineering career my parents had foreseen for him were nowhere in his picture, that he was staying on as a wage hand at the Double W until he and Leona could afford a preacher and a bed that fall. Nineteen years old, him, and seventeen, her, and they believed they had all the answers to my father’s increasingly biting questions, to my mother’s clamped silence which was worse than her saying something. Admittedly, that was not the first blowup ever to occur within our family, but the one that happened that night with the TNT of Leona added in knocked the absolute socks off us all. In my not quite fifteen years of life until then, there had been what I assumed was the natural McCaskill order of behavior; occasional eruption under our roof but always followed by a cooling down, a way found to overlook or bypass or amend, to go on in each other’s company, which seemed to me the root definition of a family. But then and there, with lightning suddenness my brother had gone into bitter exile. And never lived long enough, due to war, to retrace his way from it.

  The preamble to all that was Leona. I suppose her beauty simply ran away with itself, spun beyond the control of the teen girl she was. That spring of 1939 she’d dropped Earl Zane—not that I can fault anyone for choosing a McCaskill over a Zane any day of the week—and her romance with Alec got hot and heavy in a hurry. Maybe he was overly taken with the, what can they be called, natural resources of a seventeen-year-old beauty. But there was always this about it: Leona could have switched Alec onto simmer merely by telling him she wanted to finish high school that next year, that they’d do well to see how their passion stood up across a couple of seasons. She did not say such, or at least did not say it until late in the summer—too late—after Alec had declared independence from our family and could not bring himself to retreat. Shape it as fairly as I can and it still comes out that my brother got hit coming and going by Leona Tracy, first bowled over by her and then left flat in the dust of her change of mind.

  • • •

  Leona Wright, as she faced me now. It costs nothing to be civil and I had managed to be so the time or two I’d crossed paths with her in our grown lives, at Gros Ventre’s town centennial where Mariah and Riley first veered to each other, then at their eventual wedding, and did again here, to the best of my power, as she said how sorry she’d been to hear about Marcella’s death. That over, I drew into the background—Riley and Mariah were all but tooting with impatience—but couldn’t help studying the once girl of gold who had gone silver. As the younger onlooker during Alec’s courtship, I’d regarded the Leona of then as the bearer of the eighth and ninth wonders of the world. Now she was stouter with the years, weatherlines at her eyes and mouth, but still a highly noticeable woman.

  And still a formidable smiler. Her face stayed wreathed in what seemed utmost pleasure even as she swiftly got down to basics with her visitational son. “What’s the occasion? Have you used up all the rest of Montana in what you’ve been writing?”

  The pup was running himself dizzy in circles around us. For his part, Riley looked like he was being rushed to his own hanging. Nor did confession seem to be good for the soul in this case, for he didn’t appear any less uncomfortable after his recital of: “Mother, I’m switching jobs. They’re giving me a column.”

  Leona lifted one silver eyebrow. “I thought you already have a column.”

  “This one’s located in California.”

  Had the mother of Riley deigned to glance in the direction of her ex-daughter-in-law just then, the expression on Mariah would have told the rest of it, somewhat to the tune of And if you think that’s something to swallow, chomp on the news that your son and I are going to get married again, you old bat. But Leona only gazed at Riley and switched to another smile, a measure of sadness in this one, before saying:

  “In California? Riley, is that supposed to be an advancement?”

  An evening such as this, with the peaks and fields of the Shields River country as fetching as Switzerland, a person did have to be more than a little screwloose to talk about living anywhere else. Riley drew in a mighty breath and performed his explanation to Leona that at the Globe he’d have twice as many readers as the entire population of Montana, that the salary there made the Montanian look like the two-bit outfit it was—I waited for him to get to the part about California being a better Petri dish of the world than Montana is, but he never did.

  Mariah most notably was waiting too, for her rebetrothed to find his way around to that other announcement. Her earrings, sizable silver hoops, swung constantly, as if sieving the air, while she intently followed Riley’s words and Leona’s if-a-mother-won’t-be-kind-about-this-who-will? mode of listening.

  The declaimant still was on California and not yet even in the remote vicinity of matrimony, however, when ecstatic yips from the Manslaughter pooch directed attention to a heftier version of Riley making his way across the yard from the new house to our powwow.

  “Hey there, Morg, you’re just in time for the family reunion,” Riley greeted him in what was at least distraction if not relief.

  Giving Mariah a nod of surprised recognition and me a more general one, the other responded in a tone that eerily echoed Riley’s voice, “What’s going on, Riler?”

  I could see Riley barely resisting some crack such as Don’t beat around the bush that way, Morg, just come right out and ask. He somehow forbore and resorted to manners instead. “Jick, you ever meet my brother Morgan? This is none other.”

  Morgan Wright and I shook hands and mutually murmured, “How you doing?” As soon as that was accomplished, Riley repeated his bulletin about going to the job in sunfunland.

  Morgan stood spraddled, thumbs alone showing from the weather-worn hands parked in his front pockets, as though it might take all the time in the universe to hear this matter out. Then he asked Riley with concern, “Has California voted on this statewide yet?” which proved to me they were full-blooded brothers.

  With a merry growl the pup at this point attacked a cuff of Mariah’s bluejeans in a spontaneous tug of war. Standing on the besieged leg as methodically as a heron, Mariah lifted her other foot behind her and gave Manslaughter a firm crosskick in his furry little ribs. The pup let out a surprised wuh! and backed off to regard her with abrupt respect.<
br />
  The Wright family conclave didn’t even notice, what with Riley giving Morgan the whys and wherefores of California while Leona took it all in again with the same regretful smile. Suddenly she turned toward Mariah and me as if utmost revelation had hit home. Mariah tensed defiantly, and I confess even I braced a little in genetic sympathy, before Leona said urgently:

  “Have you had supper?”

  For whatever reason, Leona addressed that straight to me, as though the two of us were still responsible for the care and feeding of these giant tykes, her Riley and my Mariah.

  “Naw, but that’s okay, we’ll nuke us up some frozen dinners in the Bago, it’ll only take—”

  “You will not, John Angus McCaskill,” she said in the distinctive Leona voice. “You’ll come in the house and have something decent.”

  I do have to say, the venison steaks and new potatoes with milk gravy and fresh biscuits with honey and garden-pea salad with tiny dices of cheese that Leona served up to us will never be equaled by anything under tinfoil.

  During food, which I have always liked to believe is inspirational, I finally figured out Riley’s case of topical lockjaw. The expression on him, which I can only liken to the look of the proverbial man in such crisis he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, I knew I had seen before, but when? Twice, actually. Most recently, there in the Medicine Lodge at the centennial committee meeting when he realized I’d sprung Good Help Hebner on him. But more vitally, that day of spring three years ago, when Riley palely delivered himself to the sheepshed beside Noon Creek to tell me he and Mariah had broken up.

  Could it be, though? Such a garden-variety emotion behind Riley’s evidently extreme quandary? A diagnosis can be simple yet complete. No, I now knew: more than anything, more than fear, fire, flood or blood, Riley Wright hated to look like a sap.

  Hoo hoo hoo. Because that condition inevitably awaited him here whichever guise he chose to put on. Trotting around with an ex-wife, as though he couldn’t get away from the situation Mariah represented, plainly stood out to Leona as highly sappy. But the instant he tried explaining that Mariah and he now saw the error of their divorce, Leona naturally enough would want to know why they wadded up their marriage in the first place then—and what answer was there to that but sappiness?