English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Likely, though, the mother of Alec McCaskill would not have agreed just then that life has its own simple average. For by the time my mother washed the supper dishes and I was drying them, I began to realize she wasn’t merely in a maternal snit. She was thinking hard about something. And if I may give myself credit, it occurred to me that her thinking deserved my absence. Any new idea anybody in the McCaskill family could come up with deserved all encouragement.

  “Need me any more?” I asked as I hung the dish towel. “I thought I might ride up to check on Walter’s and fish my way home till toward dark.” The year’s longest day was just past; twilight would go on for a couple or three hours yet.

  “No. No, go ahead.” Her cook’s instinct roused her to add: “Your father will be home tomorrow, so catch us a big mess.” In those times a person could; the legal limit was twenty-five fish a day.

  And then she was back into the thinking.

  • • •

  Nothing was amiss at Walter Kyle’s place. As I closed the door on that tidy sparse room, I wondered if Walter didn’t have the right idea. Live alone and let everybody else knock bruises on one another.

  The fishing was as close to a cinch as fishing can ever be. Since I was using an honest-to-God pole and reel and it was a feeding time of evening, the trout in those North Fork beaver dams all but volunteered. Do I even need to say out loud that I limited? One more time I didn’t owe my father a theoretical milkshake, and there still was evening left when the gill of that twenty-fifth trout was threaded onto my willow stringer and I went to collect Pony from the tall meadow grass where she was grazing.

  My mother still was in her big think when I came back into the ranger station toward the last of dusk. I reported that the mess of cleaned fish was in a pan of water in the spring house, then stretched myself in an obvious sort of way, kissed her goodnight, and headed for the north porch and my bed. I honestly didn’t want to be around any more heavy cogitation that day.

  The north porch, a screened-in affair, had been built to take advantage of the summer shade on that side of the English Creek ranger station house, but in late spring Alec and I always moved out there to use it as our bedroom. Now that he was bunking at the Double W, I of course had the room to myself, and I have to testify here that gaining a private bedroom goes far toward alleviating the absence of a brother.

  Not just the privacy did I treasure, though. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that a person could not ask for a better site than that one for day’s end. The north porch made a sort of copperwire bubble into the night world. Moths would bat and bat against the screening, especially if I’d brought a coal oil lamp out with me. Mosquitoes, in the couple of weeks in early June when they are fiercest, would alight out there and try to needle their way in, and there’s a real reward to lying there knowing that those little whining bastards can’t get at you. Occasional scutterings and whishes in the grass brought news of an owl or skunk working on the field mouse population, out there beyond the lampshine. Many an evening, though, I would not even light the lamp, just use the moon when I went out to bed. Any bright night filled the width of that porch with the shaggy wall of English Creek’s cottonwoods and aspen, and atop them like a parapet the blunt black line of the benchland on the other side of the water. Out the west end of the porch a swatch of the mountains stood: Roman Reef, and the peaks of Rooster Mountain and Phantom Woman behind it. With Alec’s cot folded away I had room to move mine longways into the east end of the room, so that I could lie looking at the mountains, and enjoy the bonus too that, with my head there below the east sill, the sunrise would overshoot me instead of beaming into my face.

  I recall that this was a lampless night, that I was flopping into bed without even any thought of reading for a while, more tired from the day than I’d realized, when I heard my mother at the telephone starting a call.

  “Max? This is Beth McCaskill. Can’t you think of anybody better to do that?” A short space of silence, then she announced: “All right then. I’ll do it. I still think your common sense has dried up and blown away. But I’ll Do It.” And whanged down the receiver as if her words might sneak back out of the telephone wire.

  What that was about I had no clue. Max? The only Max I could conjure up was Max Devlin, the assistant supervisor at the Two Medicine forest headquarters down in Great Falls, and why she would be calling him up this time of night just to doubt his common sense I couldn’t figure. But maybe the go-round with Alec had put her into her mood to deliver the Forest Service a little of what she considered it generally deserved. I definitely was not going back out there to inquire. Sleep was safer.

  • • •

  My father arrived home from Missoula full of sass and vinegar. He always came away from a Region headquarters session avid to get back to the real planet again.

  Even the fact that it was Saturday and he had a blank week of diary entries to catch up on didn’t dent his spirits. “Easy enough after one of these Mazoola schools. Let’s see: Monday, snored. Tuesday, tossed and turned. Wednesday, another restless day of sleep. . . .”

  As for my handiwork out back, he was duly impressed. “The entire Fort Peck dam crew couldn’t have dug better.”

  • • •

  What ought I to tell about the days between then and the Fourth of July? The outhouse got moved in good order, fitting over my pit like a hen onto a fresh nest, and I put in another shovel day of tossing the dirt into the old hole. My father combed the Two up, down, and sideways, checking on the fire lookouts and patrolling the allotments to see how the range was looking and siccing Paul Eliason and the CCC crews onto trail and road work and any other improvements that could be thought up. Shearing time came and went; I helped wrangle Dode Withrow’s sheep in the pens the shearers set up at the foot of the South Fork trail to handle the Withrow and Hahn and Kyle bands, then Pete came and took me up to the Blackfeet Reservation for a couple more days’ wrangling when his were sheared out there on the open prairie north of the Two Medicine River. Nothing more was seen of Alec at English Creek. My mother no doubt posted my father about the going-over she had given Alec when he came by for the shirt, although a reaming like that has to be seen and heard to be entirely appreciated.

  Beyond that, I suppose the main news by the morning of the Fourth when the three of us began to ready to go to town for the holiday was that we were going. For my father didn’t always get the Fourth of July off; it depended on fire danger in the forest. I in fact was getting a little nervous about this year. The cool summer turned itself around in the last week of June. Each day, a little hotter and stickier. Down in Great Falls they had first a dust storm—people trying to drive in from Helena reported hundreds of tumbleweeds rolling across the highway on Gore Hill—and after that about fifteen minutes of thunderstorm with rain coming down as if from faucets. But then, the Falls receives a lot of bastardly weather we don’t. Particularly in summer, its site out there on the plains gives storms a chance to build and build before they strike the city. The mountain weather was our concern, and so much of May and June had been cool and damp that even this hot start of July wasn’t really a threat, yet.

  Final persuasion came from the holiday itself. That Fourth morning arrived as a good moderate one, promising a day warm enough to be comfortable but nowhere near sweltering, and my father said his decision as we sat down to breakfast. It came complete with a sizable grin, and the words of it were: “Watch out, Gros Ventre. Here we come.”

  I had a particular stake in a trouble-free Fourth and parental good humor. By dint of recent clean living and some careful asking, and I suppose the example of son-in-rebellion provided to my parents by Alec, I had won permission to make a horseback sojourn into town in order to stay overnight with my best friend from school, Ray Heaney.

  As I cagily pointed out, “Then the morning after the Fourth, I can just ride back out here and save you a trip into town to get me.”

  “Strange I didn’t see the logic of all thi
s before,” commented my mother. “You’ll be saving us a trip we wouldn’t have to make if you didn’t stay in there in the first place, am I right?” But it turned out that was just her keeping in practice.

  Of course, receiving permission from your parents is not the same as being able to hang on to it, and I was stepping pretty lightly that morning to keep from inspiring any second thoughts on their part. In particular, as much as possible I was avoiding the kitchen and my mother’s culinary orbit. Which was sound Fourth of July policy in any case. A reasoning person would have thought she was getting ready to lay siege to Gros Ventre, instead of only going in there on a picnic.

  My father ventured through for a cup of coffee and I overheard my mother say “Why I said I’d do this I’ll never know” and him respond “Uh huh, you’re certainly downright famous for bashfulness” and then her response in turn, but with a little laugh, “And you’re notorious for sympathy.”

  As I was trying to dope that out—my mother bashful about a creek picnic?—my father poked his head into where I was and asked: “How about tracking down the ice creamer and putting it in the pickup?”

  I did so, meanwhile trying to calculate how soon I could decently propose that I start my ride to town. I didn’t want to seem antsy about it. On the other hand I sure desired to get the Fourth of July under way.

  But here came my father out and over to me at the pickup. Then commemorated himself with me forever by saying, “Here. Better carry some weight in your pocket so you don’t blow away.” With which I was handed a half dollar.

  I must have looked my startlement. Other Fourth of Julys, if there was any spending money bestowed on Alec and me it was more on the order of ten cents. If there was any.

  “Call it shovel wages.” My father stuck his hands in his hip pockets and studied the road to town as if he’d never noticed it before. “You might as well head on in. We’ll see you there at the park.” Then, as if in afterthought: “Why don’t you ride Mouse, he can stand the exercise.”

  When you are fourteen you take a step up in life whenever you can find it and meanwhile try to keep a mien somewhere between “At last!” and “Do you really mean that?” I stayed adult and stately until I was behind the barn and into the horse pasture; then gave in to a grin the dimension of a jack-o-lantern’s. A by God full-scale horse, mine for the holiday. In the corner of the pasture where Pony was grazing she lifted her head to watch me but I called out, “Forget it, midget,” and went on over and bridled Mouse.

  • • •

  Mouse and I scooted right along that road toward Gros Ventre. He was a fast walker, besides elevating me and my spirits more than I’d been used to on Pony. The morning—mid-morning and past, by now—was full of sun, but enough breeze was following along English Creek for a person to ride in pure comfort. The country still looked just glorious. All the valley of English Creek was fresh with hay. Nobody was mowing quite yet, except for the one damp green swath around Ed Van Bebber’s lower field where he had tried it a week too early as he did every year.

  I was more than ready for the Fourth. A lot seemed to have happened since that evening back at the start of June when I looked up and saw Alec and Leona parading down the rise to join us for a family supper. One whole hell of a lot. No longer was I even sure that we four McCaskills quite were a family. It was time we all had something else on our minds besides ruckus. Alec plainly already did, the way he intended to trig up on behalf of Leona and a calf. And given how my mother was whaling into the picnic preparation and my father was grinning like a Chessy cat about getting the day off from rangering and I was strutting atop this tall horse with coinage heavy in my pocket, the Fourth was promising to do the job for the other three of us.

  It is no new thought to say that life goes on. Yet that’s where it does go.

  • • •

  In maybe an hour and a half, better time than I would have thought possible for that ride in from the English Creek station, Mouse and I were topping the little rise near the turnoff to Charlie Finletter’s place, the last ranch before town.

  From there a mile or so outside, Gros Ventre looked like a green cloudbank: cottonwood trees billowing so thick that it took some inspection to find traces of houses among them. Gros Ventre’s neighborhoods were planted double with cottonwoods, a line of trees along the front yards and another between sidewalk and street. Then the same colonnade again on the other side of the street. All of this of course had been done fifty or more years before, a period of time that grows you a hell of a big cottonwood. Together with the original groves that already rose old and tall along English Creek before Gros Ventre was ever thought of, the streetside plantation produced almost a roof over the town. This cottonwood canopy was particularly wonderful just before a rain, when the leaves began to shiver, rattle in their papery way. The whole town seemed to tingle then, and the sound picked up when a gust of wind from the west ushered in the rain, and next the air was filled with the seethe of water onto all that foliage. In Gros Ventre even a dust-settler sounded like a real weather event.

  The English Creek road entered town past the high school, one of those tan-brick two-story crates that seemed to be the only way they knew how to build high schools in those days, and I nudged Mouse into an even quicker pace so as not to dwell on that topic any longer than necessary. We were aiming ourselves across town, to the northeast end where the Heaneys’ house stood.

  Mouse and I met Main Street at the bank corner, alongside the First National, and here I can’t help but pause for a look around Gros Ventre of that Fourth of July day, just as I did then before reining Mouse north along the street.

  Helwig’s grocery and merc, with its old-style wooden square front and the Eddy’s bread sign in its window.

  The Toggery clothing store, terra cotta along its top like cake frosting.

  Musgreave’s drugstore, with the mirror behind the soda fountain so that a person could sit there over a milkshake—assuming a person had the price of a milkshake, not always the case in those times—and keep track of the town traffic.

  Grady Tilton’s garage.

  Dale Quint’s saddlery and leather repair shop. Maybe a decent description of Gros Ventre of that time was that it still had a leather man but not yet a dentist. A person went to Conrad for tooth work.

  Saloons, the Pastime and Spenger’s, although Dolph Spenger was a dozen or more years dead.

  The Odeon movie theater, the one place in town with its name in neon script. The other modern touch lent by the Odeon was its recent policy of showing the movie twice on Saturday night; first at seven-thirty, then the “owl show” at nine.

  The post office, the only new building in Gros Ventre since I was old enough to remember. A New Deal project, this had been, complete with a mural of the Lewis and Clark expedition portaging around the Great Falls of the Missouri River in 1805. Lewis and Clark maybe were not news to postal customers of the Two country, but York, Clark’s Negro slave standing out amid the portagers like a black panther in a snowfield, definitely was.

  The little stucco-sided Carnegie library, with its flight of steps and ornamented portico as if a temple had been intended but the money gave out.

  Across from the library the town’s smallest storefront, where Gene Ladurie had his tailor shop until his eyes went bad; now the WPA sewing room was situated there.

  The Lunchery, run by Mae Sennett. The occasional times when I would be with my father when he was on Forest Service meal money, the Lunchery was our place and oyster stew our order. It of course came from a can, but I see that bowl yet, the milk yellowing from the blob of butter melting in the middle of it, and if Mae Sennett was doing the serving herself she always warned, “Watch out for any oysterberries,” by which she meant those tiny pearls that sometimes show up. I have to say, I still am not truly comfortable eating in any establishment that doesn’t have that tired ivory look to its walls that the Lunchery did. A proof that the place has been in business longer than overnight and at lea
st has sold decent enough food that people keep coming back.

  Doc Spence’s office. Across the empty lot from Doc’s, the office of the lawyer, Eli Kinder. Who, strange to say, was a regular figure in the sheep traffic through this street, when the bands flowed through town on their way to the summer grass of the Blackfeet Reservation. Eli was a before-dawn riser and often would arrive downtown just as a band of sheep did. It was odd to see him, in his suit and tie, helping those woollies along Main Street, but Eli had been raised on a ranch down in the Highwood Mountains and knew what he was doing.

  The sidestreet businesses, Tracy’s creamery and Ed Heaney’s lumber yard and hardware and Adam Kerz’s coal and trucking enterprise.

  The set of bank buildings, marking what might be called the down of downtown: the First National Bank of Gros Ventre in tan brick, and cattycorner from it the red brick of what had been the English Creek Valley Stockmen’s Bank. The Valley Stockmen’s went under in the early 1920s when half of all the banks in Montana failed, and the site now was inhabited, if not exactly occupied, by Sandy Staub’s one-chair barber shop. The style in banks in those times was to have a fancy doorway set into the corner nearest the street intersection—Gros Ventre’s pair of bank buildings stared down each other’s throats in exactly this fashion—and when Sandy took over the Valley Stockmen’s building he simply painted barber-pole stripes on one of the fat granite pillars supporting the doorway.

  What have I missed? Of course; also there on the Valley Stockmen’s block the newspaper office, proclaiming on a plate-glass window in the same typeface as its masthead: GLEANER. Next to that a more recent enterprise, Pauline Shaw’s Moderne Beauty Shoppe. The story was that when Bill Reinking first saw his new neighboring sign, he stuck his head in the shop to ask Pauline if she was sure she hadn’t left an “e” off Beauty.