by Ivan Doig
“Pretty close to perfect,” he said. “Now if I only had an obedient wife who’d relieve me of these dress shoes.”
“If I take them off you,” my mother vowed, “you’ll be chasing after them as they float down the creek.”
“This is what I have to put up with all the time, Toussaint,” came his voice from under the hat. “She’s as independent as the moon.” My mother answered that by sticking out a thumb and jabbing it between a couple of his ribs, which brought a whuw! out of him.
Down at creekside, the school superintendent Mr. Vennaman was stepping up into the stump rostrum. Time for the program, evidently. I tried to contain at the back of my mind the cyclone of thoughts about Toussaint and moccasin telegraph and myself.
“—always a day of pleasure,” Mr. Vennaman’s voice began to reach those of us at the back of the park. “This is a holiday particularly American. Sometimes, if the person on the stump such as I am at this moment doesn’t watch his enthusiasm, it can become a little too much so. I am always reminded of the mock speech which Mose Skinner, a Will Rogers of his day, proposed for this nation’s one hundredth birthday in 1876: ‘Any person who insinuates in the remotest degree that America isn’t the biggest and best country in the world, and far ahead of every other country in everything, will be filled with gunpowder and touched off.’ ”
When the laughing at that died down, Mr. Vennaman went on: “We don’t have to be quite that ardent about it, I think. But this is a day we can simply be thankful to be with our other countrymen. A day for neighbors and friends and family.
“Some of those neighbors, in fact, are here with a gift of song for us.” Mr. Vennaman peered over toward the nearest big cottonwood. “Nola, can the music commence?”
This was interesting. For under that towering tree sat a piano. Who came up with the idea I never did know, but some of the Gros Ventre men had hauled the instrument—of course it was one of those old upright ones—out of Nola Atkins’s front room, and now here it was on the bank of English Creek, and Nola on the piano bench readying to play. I’d like to say Nola looked right at home, but actually she was kept busy shooing cottonwood fluff off the keys and every so often there’d be a plink as she brushed away a particularly stubborn puff.
Nonetheless, Nola bobbed yes, she was set.
I think it has to be said that the singing at events such as this is usually a pretty dubious proposition, and that’s more than likely why some out-of-town group was invited to perform at each of these Fourth picnics. That way, nobody local had anything to live down. This year’s songsters, the Valier Men’s Chorus, now were gathering themselves beside Nola and the piano. Odd to see them up there in that role, farmers and water company men, in white dress shirts and with the pale summits of their foreheads where hats customarily sat.
Their voices proved to be better than you might expect. The program, though, inadvertently hit our funny bones as much as it did our ears, because the chorus’s first selection was “I Cannot Sing the Songs of Long Ago,” and then, as if they hadn’t heard their own advice, they wobbled into “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” The picnic crowd blossomed with grins over that, and I believe I discerned even a trace of one on Nola Atkins at the piano.
Mr. Vennaman came back up on the stump, thanking the Valierians “for that memorable rendition” and introducing “yet another neighbor, our guest of honor this day.” Emil Thorsen, the sheepman and state senator from down at Choteau, rose and declared in a voice that could have been heard all the way downtown that in early times when he was first running for office and it was all one county through here from Fort Benton to Babb instead of being broken up into several as it is now, he’d have happily taken up our time; “but since I can’t whinny any votes out of you folks any more, I’ll just say I’m glad to be here among so many friends, and compliment you on feeding as good as you ever did, and shut myself up and sit down.” And did.
Mr. Vennaman popped to his feet again, leading the hand-clapping and then saying: “Our next speaker actually needs no introduction. I’m going to take a lesson from Senator Thorsen and not bother to fashion one.” Two traits always marked Mr. Vennaman as an educator: the bow tie he perpetually wore and the way, even saying hello on the street, he seemed to be looking from the front of a classroom at you. Now he peered and even went up on his tiptoes a bit, as if calling on someone in the back row of that classroom, and sang out: “Beth McCaskill?”
I knew I hadn’t heard that quite right.
Yet here she was, getting up from beside my father and smoothing her dress down and setting off toward the speaker’s stump, with folded sheets of paper clutched in her business hand. No doubt about it, I was the most surprised person in the state of Montana right then. But Pete and Marie were not far behind and even Toussaint’s face was squinched with curiosity.
“What—?” I floundered to my father. “Did you know—?”
“She’s been sitting up nights writing this,” he told me with a cream-eating grin. “Your mother, the Eleanor Roosevelt of English Creek.”
She was on the stump now, smoothing the papers onto the little stand, being careful the creek breeze didn’t snatch them. She looked like she had an appointment to fight panthers, but her voice began steady and clear.
“My being up here is anybody’s suggestion but my own. It was argued to me that if I did not make this talk, it would not get made. That might have been the better idea.
“But Maxwell Vennaman, not to mention a certain Varick McCaskill, has the art of persuasion. I have been known to tell that husband of mine that he has a memory so long he has to tie knots in it to carry it around with him. We’ll all now see just how much my own remembering is made up of slip knots.”
Chuckles among the crowd at that. A couple of hundred people being entertained by my mother: a minute before, I would have bet the world against it.
“But I do say this. I can see yet, as clearly as if he was standing in long outline against one of these cottonwoods, the man I have been asked to recall. Ben English. Many others of you were acquainted with Ben and the English family. Sat up to a dinner or supper Mary put on the table in that very house across there.” Heads turned, nodded. The English place was directly before us, across the creek from the park. One of the Depression’s countless vacant remnants, with a walked-away look to it. If you were driving north out of Gros Ventre the English place came so quick, set in there just past the highway bridge, that chances were you wouldn’t recognize it as a ranch rather than a part of the town. But from the park, the empty buildings across there seemed to call their facts over to us. The Englishes all dead or moved away. The family after them felled by the Depression. Now the land leased by Wendell Williamson. One more place which had supported people, now populated by Double W cows.
“Or,” my mother was continuing, “or dealt with Ben for horses or cattle or barley or hay. But acquaintance doesn’t always etch deep, and so at Max Vennaman’s request I have put together what is known of Ben English.
“His is a history which begins where that of all settlers of the West of America has to: elsewhere. Benson English was born in 1865 at Cobourg, in Ontario in Canada. He liked to tell that as he and his brothers one by one left home, their mother provided each of them with a Bible, a razor, whatever money she could, and some knitted underwear.” My mother here looked as if she entirely approved of Ben English’s mother. “Ben English was seventeen when he followed his brother Robert into Montana, to Augusta where Robert had taken up a homestead. Ben found a job driving freight wagon for the Sun River Sheep Company from the supply point at Craig on the Missouri River to their range in the mountains. He put in a year at that, and then, at eighteen, he was able to move up to driving the stage between Craig and Augusta.” She lifted a page, went right on as if she’d been giving Fourth of July speeches every day of her life. “Atop there with four horses surging beneath him seemed to be young Ben English’s place in the world. Soon, with his wages of forty dollars a month, he wa
s buying his own horses. With a broke team in the lead and his green ones in the other traces, he nonetheless somehow kept his reputation as a driver you could set your clock by.” Here she looked up from her sheets of paper to glance over to Senator Thorsen. “Ben later liked to tell that a bonus of stage driving was its civic opportunities. On election day he was able to vote when the stage made its stop at the Halfway House. Then again when it reached Craig. Then a third time when he got home to Augusta.”
When the laughter of that was done, my mother focused back down to her pages. “There was a saying that any man who had been a stagecoach driver was qualified to handle the reins of heaven or hell, either one. But Ben English, as so many of our parents did, made the choice halfway between those two. He homesteaded. In the spring of 1893 he filed his claim southwest of here at the head of what is now called Ben English Coulee. The particulars of the English homestead on Ben’s papers of proof may sound scant, yet many of us here today came from just such beginnings in this country: ‘A dwelling house, stable, corrals, two and a half miles of wire fences, thirty acres of hay cut each season—total value, eight hundred dollars.’
“Around the time of his homesteading Ben English married Mary Manix of Augusta, and they moved here, to the place across the creek, in 1896. Their only child, Mary, was born there in 1901.”
Here my mother paused, her look fastened over the heads of all of us on the park grass, toward the trunk of one of the big cottonwoods farthest back. As if, in the way she’d said earlier, someone was standing in outline against the gray bark. “A lot of you can remember the look of Ben English. A rangy man, standing well over six feet, and always wearing a black Stetson, always with a middle crimp. He sometimes grew a winter beard, and in his last years he wore a mustache that made him look like the unfoolable horse dealer he was. Across thirty-some years my father, Isaac Reese, and Ben English knew each other and liked each other and tried to best each other. Put the pair of them together, my mother used to say of their visits, and they would examine a horse until there was nothing left of it but a hank of tail hair and a dab of glue. Once when my father bought a horse with an odd stripe in its face, Ben told him he was glad to see a man of his age taking up a new occupation: raising zebras. My father got his turn back when Ben bought a dark bay Clydesdale that stood twenty-one hands high at the shoulder, very likely the hugest horse there ever has been in this valley, and, upon asking what the horse’s name was, discovered it was Benson. Whenever my father saw Ben and the Benson horse together he called out, ‘Benson andt Benson, but t’ank Godt vun of t’em vears a hadt.’ ”
Of all the crowd, I am sure my father laughed loudest at this Isaac Reese tale, and Pete was nodding in confirmation of that accent he and my mother had grown up under. Our speaker of the day, though, was sweeping onward. “Anyone who knew Ben English more than passingly will recall his knack for nicknames. For those of you old enough to remember them around town, Glacier Gus Swenson and Three Day Thurlow both were christened that way by Ben English.” Chuckles of recognition spattered amid the audience. Glacier Gus was an idler so slow that it was said he wore spurs to keep his shadow from treading on his heels. Three Day Thurlow had an everlasting local reputation as a passable worker his first day on a job, a complainer on his second, and gone sometime during his third. “Ben’s nicknaming had no thought of malice behind it, however. He did it for the pleasure it gave his tongue. In any event, in their pauper’s graves Glacier Gus and Three Day each lie buried in a suit given by Ben English.”
She put the page she had just finished beneath the others, and the next page she met with a little bob of her head, as if it was the one she’d been looking for all this time. “So it is a justice of language that a namer himself lives on in an extra name. Originally this flow of water was simply called Gros Ventre Creek, to go with the townsite. But it came to be a saying, as the sheepmen and other travelers would pass through here, that they would stop for noon or the night when they reached English’s Creek. An apostrophe is not the easiest thing in the world to keep track of, and so we know this as English Creek.”
She paused again and I brought my hands up ready to clap, that sounding to me like the probable extent of the Ben English history. But no, she was resuming. Do I never learn? My mother had her own yardstick as to when she was done with a topic.
“I have a particular memory of Ben English myself. I can see him yet, riding past our ranch on Noon Creek on his way to his cattle range in the mountains, leading a string of cayuse pack horses carrying block salt. On his way back he would ride into our yard and pass the time of day with my father while still sitting in his saddle, but hardly ever would he climb down and come in. His customary explanation was that he had to get home and move the water. He seemed to feel that if he stayed in the saddle, he indeed was on his way to that irrigating task.”
My father had his head cocked in a fashion as if what she was reciting was new to him. I figured that was just his pride in her performance, but yet . . .
“And that memory leads to the next, of Ben English in his fields across from us here, moving the water. Guiding the water, it might be better said. For Ben English used the water of his namesake creek as a weaver uses wool. With care. With respect. With patience. Persuading it to become a product greater than itself.” Once more she smoothed the page she was reading from. “Greater than itself. As Ben English himself became, greater than himself. From the drudgery of a freight wagon to the hell deck of a stagecoach to a dry-land homestead to a ranch of green water-fed meadows that nicely supported a family, that was the Montana path of Ben English. Following his ability, trusting in it to lead him past the blind alleys of life. This is the day to remember a man who did it that way.”
Was I the only one to have the thought brim up in me then? That suddenly, somehow, Alec McCaskill and the Double W had joined Ben English in this speech?
Whether or not, my mother had returned to the irrigation theme.
“Bill Reinking has been kind enough to find for me in the Gleaner files something which says this better than I can. It is a piece that I remembered was published when the first water flowed into the ditches of the Valier irrigation project. Who wrote it is not known. It is signed simply ‘Homesteader.’ Among the hundreds, no, thousands who were homesteading this country then, maybe ‘Homesteader’ isn’t quite as anonymous as ‘Anonymous.’ But awfully close. It is titled ‘The Lord of the Field.’ ” She drew a deep breath. “It reads:
“ ‘The irrigator is the lone lord of his field. A shovel is his musket, gumboots are his garb of office, shank’s mare is his steed. To him through the curving laterals the water arrives mysteriously, without sign of origin or destination. But his canvas dam, placed with cunning, causes the flood to hesitate, seek; and with an eager whisper, pour over the ditch bank and onto the grateful land. The man with the shovel hears the parched earth drink. He sees its face of dusty brown gladden to glistening black. He smells the odor of life as the land’s plants take the water in green embrace. He feels like a god, exalted by this power of his hand and brain to create manmade rain—yet humble as even a god must be under the burden of such power.’ ”
I honestly believe the only breath which could be discerned in that crowd after that was the one my mother let out. Now she locked her attention to her written sheets, and the words it gave her next were:
“Ben English is gone from us. He died in the summer of 1927, of a strained heart. Died, to say it plainly, of the work he put into this country, as so many have. My own father followed Ben English to the grave within three years. Some say that not a horse in the Two country has had a good looking-over since their passing.” Which was one of the more barbed things she could have said to this audience, full as it was of guys who considered themselves pretty fancy horsemen. But she of course said it anyway and sailed on.
“Ben English is gone, and the English place stands empty across there, except for the echoes of the auctioneer’s hammer.” A comment with bigge
r barbs yet. Ted Muntz, whose First National Bank had foreclosed on the English place from the people Mrs. English sold it to, without doubt was somewhere in this audience. And all out among the picnic crowd I saw people shift restlessly, as if the memory of the foreclosure auctions, the Depression’s hammer sales, was a sudden chafe.
My father by now was listening so hard he seemed to be frozen, an ice statue wearing the clothing of a man, which confirmed to me that not even he knew how far my mother was headed with this talk.
“English Creek is my second home,” she was stating now as if someone was arguing the point with her, “for you all know that Noon Creek is where I was born and grew up. Two creeks, two valleys, two claims on my heart. Yet the pair are also day and night to me, as examples of what has happened to this country in my lifetime. Noon Creek now is all but empty of the families I knew there. Yes, there is still the Reese name on a Noon Creek ranch, I am proud as anything to say. And the Egan name, for it would be easier to dislodge the Rocky Mountains than Dill Egan. But the others, all the ranches down Noon Creek but one—all those are a roll call of the gone. The Torrance place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. The Emrich place: foreclosed on, the family gone from here. The Chute place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. Thad Wainwright’s place, Thad one of the first cattlemen anywhere in this country: sold out at a loss, Thad passed away within a year. The Fain place: foreclosed on, the family gone from here. The Eiseley place: sold out at a loss, the family gone from here. The Nansen place.” Here she paused, shook her head a little as if again disavowing Alec’s news that this was where he and Leona would set up a household. “The Nansen place: foreclosed on, Carl dead by his own hand, Sigrid and the children gone from here to her parents in Minnesota.”