by Ivan Doig
And the morning after we shipped the lambs, Helen departed from her herding years with me, riding beside me in the rental car as far as the Amtrak station in Shelby where she gave me a last remembering look through the blowing web of her hair and boarded the train for Oregon and gemology.
• • •
Back at Glasgow, at my earliest chance I innocently asked Mariah how everybody had gotten along in my absence.
She retorted with her camera, saying as she snapped me for the kabillionth time on the trip: “Riley would be easier to remarry if he were an orphan, I’ll say that much.”
• • •
Toward me, Leona behaved as if we’d never been at loggerheads at all, asking how my lambs had weighed out and how the grass prospect looked in the Two Medicine country now that some rain finally had found Montana, ranch talk that was our equivalent of church Latin. Yeah, well, sure, I told myself, she’d had lifelong practice at sailing smoothly on, hadn’t she. Yet I was surprised to find that my snit at her kept cooling off and off, I suppose because I didn’t have time to maintain a mad; there was the hour-by-hour matter of the centennial trip and getting done what we were supposed to, all four. What a size life was these days. A person had to get up twice in the morning to begin to fill it. Across county after county I put on the miles, Leona put on the meals, and Mariah and Riley kept on scouring that upper righthand corner of the state. All navigation was straight on those roads, one dead-ahead run after another. The gray grain elevators of town after town we passed—Culbertson, Froid, Scobey, Flaxville—with the high plains all around farmed in brown plowed strips next to straw-colored fallow ones. Sometimes the yield of our miles would be a picture of Mariah’s—the water tower of the town of Frazer hanging just above the planetary rim of the plains like a tiny balloon on a string. Sometimes what worked was a scene Riley and his tape recorder found in someone.
“We had to pack up and pull out of here in ’32,” the woman remembers while revisiting Plentywood for the centennial celebration. “Just walked away from our place, that summer, and never came back. It was so dry the corn didn’t sprout, the potatoes barely came up, the pasture was awful short. My dad and older brother had gone on ahead out to the Coast, to Everett, Washington, where we had relatives and tried to get any work they could there. Then while my mother went around the countryside until she finally found somebody to trade our farm machinery to for a secondhand Model T Ford, my younger brother and I—I was thirteen at the time—we got on our horses and started moving our handful of cattle to the stockyard here in Plentywood. It was an overnight trip, Millard and I slept on the ground, then the next morning the cattle were anxious for water because they hadn’t had any since noon the day before. But Big Muddy Creek here was so low there was deep mud and Millard said, ‘Mary, we’ve got to push them on past that water or they’ll bog down in there and we’ll be in trouble.’ I was almost in tears to leave our cows so thirsty, but Millard was right.
“When we got home to the farm we loaded the Model T—Mother, Millard and I, and a yellow cat—and started for the Coast. We lost the cat on the way but the rest of us made it.
“Our horses we just left there on the range.”
Miles City. By now we had roved into October. Mapwise, we were back south out of the farmed plains into cattlegrowing country again and Miles, as the pleasant brick-faced little city was called by ranchers who described their places as “forty miles from Miles,” came as a kind of oasis to us all, the big cottonwoods at the Roche Jaune RV Park greeting the Bago like a home grove every time we drove in from one of Mariah and Riley’s daily delvings.
This day, though, Leona and I had set them off afoot downtown—the Montanian pair had come up with the bright idea of studying what Riley called “bucklelaureate ceremonies” and so they were at a western-wear store seeing just what belt buckles, cowboy boots, rangerider big hats and other regalia walked out of the store in the course of a business day—and she and I headed on toward what she’d spied in a Miles City Star ad, a horse auction at the CMR Livestock Auction Yard. Myself, I could take or leave horses, but I knew Leona’s interest in them—did I ever—and so I figured, well, hell, what’s a few hours of horseflesh to put up with.
The auction sale ring was actually a half-circle, a tier of seats for those of us in the audience arcing around it, with the auctioneer’s pulpit centered there against the wall where the livestock was hazed in through one gate, had its moment of being bid on, and hazed out the other gate back into the stockyard. FRIDAY—FEEDER CALVES SATURDAY—SLAUGHTER ANIMALS announced a large red sign above the auctioneer but a person pretty much knew by nose the livestock traffic through here: the mingled smell of cattle and horses was heavier, less pungent than the iodine-and-lanolin fragrance of sheep that I was used to.
Regular buyers had front row moviehouselike seats with their nameplates on them, but Leona and I tucked ourselves onto an ordinary bench high at the back of the arena. As usual I looked the crowd over for anybody I might know but the only such spotting this time was by Leona.
“I see Ozzie Breckenridge is here,” she pointed out a long-drink-of-water guy about our age perched at the far end of the arena arc. “He runs a dude ranch, down by Absarokee. Herb and I used to deal horses with him a little.” The dude herder noticed Leona too, traded her a nod and obviously wondered who the Methuselah in a Stetson next to her was.
“And ready and we go,” the auctioneer chanted and the hazers brought the horses on, one at a time. Roans, pintos, piebalds, Appaloosas, bays, duns, you name it, the equine parade went on for a couple of hours. It seemed to me there was a serious oversupply of horses in the Miles City country and the bidding reflected that too, the auctioneer about having to work himself into a lather to get each animal sold off. In fact, the auction wound down to the point where the regular buyers had got up and left and the rest of the crowd was thinning rapidly too. Throughout it all, though, Leona was rapt.
As we still had chores to do around town, grocery shopping and so on, I finally suggested we stir. But Leona said, “Let’s just watch this one last one, Jick. That’s not a badlooking horse.”
Neither was it a goodlooking horse. At best the thing was only about okaylooking, a sorrel gelding no more than fourteen hands high, shaggy and a little swaybacked, with the scar of a bad barbwire cut across its chest; the one pleasant distinction was a nice blaze of white on its face. Obviously Leona saw more in the animal than I could, and I sat back to learn.
“All right, folks,” the auctioneer began as the blazeface trotted a tight circle in the sale ring, “we’re here to sell. Who’ll give me six fifty to start it off? Six hundred fifty, fifty, fifty, anybody six fifty? Six hundred then, anybody six, six, six, who’ll say six, horsehorsehorse helluvahorse swell-uvahorse horsehorse gottasellthishorse, six hundred, anybody?”
“It’s a crime,” Leona said softly to me, referring to the fact that the horse would be cut back into the cannery slaughter herd, which meant his destiny was to become dogfood, if nobody bid on him. “He’s no canner. Look how he handles himself in all this commotion.” True enough; the sorrel seemed alert to its weird confinement without getting panicky. Leona went on in the same soft tone: “That old fool Ozzie could use him in his dude string, if he just would.”
Thinking of horses I had known, particularly an assassin packhorse named Bubbles, I started to nod in agreement that this one by comparison might be a decent equine citizen, but caught myself just in time. The auctioneer was spieling so desperately that I figured if I so much as twitched, I’d have bought myself a steed.
“Folks, remember, you’re getting the whole horse here,” the auctioneer admonished, “so isn’t that worth at least five hundred fifty dollars? You can barely buy a big dog for that. Five fifty will start it off, five hundred fifty, fifty, fifty, ponyponypony onlypony nothingphonypony ponypony ownthepony, five hundred then, five, five, anybody, five? Where’s the money, folks, where’s the money? Will anybody bid five hundred dollars for t
his animal?”
Nobody would. The auctioneer’s microphone voice took on a sweet fresh reasonableness. “All right, where do you want to start it then?”
Silence ensued. The only motion in the auction house was the blazeface slowly moving his head in wariness of the audience.
“Just one donor of green blood, that’s all we need,” the auctioneer sounded desperate again. “How about four fifty? Anybody, body, body, any bid, bid, bid?”
Leona had been fingering the top button of her blouse as if to make sure it was secure. Now she tapped the button with her index finger, just obviously enough that it was not missed by the auctioneer.
Oh, swell. Just what every motorhome household needs, an auxiliary horse.
But if Leona’s signal alarmed me, it translated immediate new life into the auctioneer.
“Four fifty, I see bid! All right, it’s more than I had. Now who’ll say four hundred seventy-five, seventy-five, seventy-five, five, five, five—I have four seventy-five!”
More by osmosis than anything I could actually discern, I somehow knew that competing bid had come from Ozzie Breckenridge. He seemed to be casually eyeing in our direction, but I was pretty damn sure those gimlet eyes had taken in Leona’s bidding method.
“Five now,” the auctioneer raced on, “anybody, five hund-”—Leona tapped her button—“I have five hundred!”
Expensive as those taps were getting to be, I figured I’d better alert her to oculatory Ozzie. “Uh, Leona, that other guy can see you bid.”
“I know,” she said, finger delicately on button. “I want him to.”
“Five fifty? Five fifty?” The auctioneer was putting it to Breckenridge, who was rubbing the back of his neck uneasily while he studied the sorrel from withers to nethers. “Five fifty? It’s only double nickels. Five fifty?” Breckenridge continued to inspect the horse as if it was some hitherto unknown species. “It’s a nifty for five fifty. Damn near a gifty. Why not bid a thrifty five fif—I have five fifty!”
Breckenridge’s movement had looked to me more like a squirm than a bid, but maybe it was both.
“I have five fifty, now seventy-five, sev—I have five seventy-five!” Again Leona had wasted no time with her fingertap.
“Now six hundred, anybody six, six, six, who’s say six?” I saw Breckenridge sneak a look at Leona to make sure she still was eagerly fingering that blouse button. By now he had the appearance of a man who’d sooner give up several of his teeth, but at last he made whatever indication it took and bid the six hundred dollars.
Instantly the auctioneer launched his spiel anew, but Leona just as promptly had dropped her finger from the button and was shaking her head no, with a little smile. Within seconds the auctioneer banged his hammer down whammo, declared “It’s all done, it’s a sold one!” and the considerably startled Oz Breckenridge was in possession of a horse.
• • •
Riley, though. I had to admit he was more immune to his mother than I’d hoped.
Try as I did to find signs that life with Leona was making him unravel, he seemed pretty much the selfsame goddamn specimen. Take the very next morning, when I innocently pulled into a gas station to feed the Bago on our way out of Miles City. Mariah and Riley were in a mutual work trance, finishing up their westernwear piece to transmit into the Montanian, and Leona had retreated into earset Russian, so I climbed out to do the gassing up by myself. I was topping up the air in the tires when Riley stuck his head out the side door of the Bago, to clear his so-called brain I guess, peering over me and the airhose while he did.
“Shit oh dear!” he let out in an old maidy voice. “Everybody knows that’s only the half of it! Two elements short is a lot even for Montana. Those old Greeks would be ashamed to death of us, Jick buddy.”
From where I was kneeling at the front tire I glanced up and down the main street of Miles City for anybody who looked approximately Greek. “What the hell are you yakking about now?” I addressed Riley, but he had pulled back into the motorhome, where I could hear him asking Mariah for something.
Next thing, he bounced out and past me, and I was happy to have him out of my hair while I finished tending to the tires.
Not until I went to hang the airhose back onto its stanchion at one side of the service station did I discover that where the sign there read
AIR & WATER
Riley had just finished block-lettering beneath with Mariah’s biggest blackest grease pencil:
EARTH & FIRE
“Jesus H.—Riley, you want to get us all thrown in the clink?” I wildly checked around for the service station owner.
“Hmm?” Riley stepped back to admire his handwork. “Naw, we’re doing this guy a favor. See, now all he has to do is hang up a new logo under his gas sign: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY WHILE YOU FILL.”
“If they hang anything around here it’s liable to be us, because of you, goddamn it. Come on, climb in the Bago and let’s get the hell out of here.”
A hundred coal cars on a railroad siding, today’s resource wagontrain from the prairie to elsewhere. . . .
As early as Plentywood, it had become a common sight for us to see oil pumps working away in the farmed fields. The rocking-beam kind, that were like washerwomen dipping and rising as they scrubbed clothes on a washboard. But when Leona had cited them to Mariah and Riley once and wondered if they were ever going to do a piece about the energy business in this end of the state, the two of them simply shook their heads and chorused: “Colstrip.”
The gigantic draglines skin the soil away to get at the coal. Longnecked, mammoth, lumbering, they are oddly technological mirages of the dinosaurs who earlier roamed these plains. . . .
Even the weather was getting to me, on that drive from Miles City down to Colstrip. Warmish and heavy, considerably too much so for this time of year. About the time you think you have seen everything this climate can possibly do, some new wrinkle comes along. Snow for the Fourth of July, or April hailstones big enough to knock out chickens. And now a sultry day in the middle of October, when the year ought to be gearing down toward winter.
“Must be getting into the banana belt,” I commented.
“Tropical southern Montana, sure, you bet,” Mariah more or less automatically responded from her watchful gaze out at the passing countryside.
Leona came in late on the conversation, just having shed her headset. “Isn’t this nice-looking grassland, though?” she appraised the broad swales we’d been driving through for most of an hour.
“Now you’ve done it, Mother,” Riley quit tapping at his laptop and pointed into the sky ahead.
Mariah had seen it too and already had her camera up.
Riley went on in his Movietone voice: “See there—the Power God heard that and is throwing thunderbolts at us.”
The aircraft warning strobe lights on the smokestacks of the Colstrip power plants did seem like steady blinks of lightning in our direction. Even before I’d seen anything of this coal-stripping enterprise, I didn’t like what I was seeing.
There is no muss to the town of Colstrip. Everything looks laid out according to plan, all the neighborhoods new, the downtown area that was installed with the power plants sprigged up with trees and lawn and other landscaping.
Talk about landscape work, though. Just out from Colstrip, the strip-mining takes hundreds of acres at a time and sorts that ground into towering heaps, the grayish overburden of soil and stone clawed aside from the pits in dunelike processions and the black pile of coal so high that a bulldozer atop it looks the size of a hornet. The extracted coal is carried for miles by a huge pipeline-like conveyor to the power plants in town, where electricity is generated and then goes into the transmission lines to VCRs, Jacuzzis, neon signs, all the rest. The smokestacks here above the mined prairie are the tailpipes of our electrical luxury.
A day of contemplating coal-stripping put all four of us ready for a drink before supper, you can bet. On Riley’s insistence that the places on the edge of town
are always more interesting, we pulled in at the Rosebud Bar just off the highway before Colstrip. “We get in on the indigenous this way, too, gang,” he maintained as we trooped up to the door of the enterprise, by which I guess he meant that Rosebud Creek was just about within shouting distance.
Inside, the decor was relentlessly roses. Color photos of them beaded with dew. Vasefuls of red fabric versions on every table. A blimp shot of a stadium, which it didn’t take me too long to figure out as the Rose Bowl. A very nearly life-size picture of Gypsy Rose Lee stripping for action, so to speak. Standing in a corner was a kid’s sled with a you-know-what decal on it.
“Who do you suppose got hold of this place,” Mariah wondered, “Gertrude Stein?”
“All right, tell me,” Riley implored, stopping just inside the doorway with his back to it and covering his eyes with a hand. “There’s a varnished plaque over the door that says Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, isn’t there.”
The other three of us turned and gawked up. Sure enough, there it posed: in fancy script with painted roses twining out the ends of each y, no less.
See what I mean about goddamn Riley—he could even floor his own mother. While Mariah whooped and gave him a vigorous tickle in the ribs, Leona perplexedly looked back and forth from the quotation to her son and asked, “How’d you ever know that?”