English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “The powerrr of Scotch prrayerrr,” he rumbled back at her in his preacher voice. Then with his biggest grin in weeks: “Also known as the law of averages. Tough it out long enough in this country and a snowstorm will eventually happen when you actually want it to.”

  • • •

  As I say, putting up Pete’s hay always took about a month, given some days of being rained out or broke down. This proved to be a summer when we were reasonably lucky about both moisture and breakage. So steadily that none of us on the crew said anything about it for fear of changing our luck, day on day along Noon Creek our new stacks appeared, like fresh green loaves.

  My scatter-raking became automatic with me. Of course, whenever my mind doesn’t have to be on what I am doing, it damn well for sure is going to be on some other matter. Actually, though, for once in my life I did a respectable job of combining my task at hand and my wayfaring thoughts. For if I had a single favorite daydream of those hayfield hours, it was to wonder why a person couldn’t be a roving scatter-raker in the way that sheep shearers and harvest hands moved with their seasons. I mean, why not? The principle seems to me the same: a nomad profession. I could see myself traveling through Montana from hay country to hay country—although preferably with better steppers than Blanche and Fisheye if there was much distance involved—and hiring on, team and rake and all, at the best-looking ranch of each locale. Maybe spend a week, ten days, at the peak of haying at each. Less if the grub was mediocre, longer if a real pie maker was in the kitchen. Dwell in the bunkhouse so as to get to know everybody on a crew, for somehow every crew, every hay hand, was discernibly a little different from any other. Then once I had learned enough about that particular country and earned from the boss the invite “Be with us again next year, won’t you?” on I would go, rolling on, the iron wheels and line of tines of my scatter rake like some odd over-wide chariot rumbling down the road.

  An abrupt case of wanderlust, this may sound like, but then it took very little to infect me at that age. Can this be believed? Except for once when all of us at the South Fork school were taken to Helena to visit the capitol, a once-in-a-while trip with my father when he had to go to forest headquarters in Great Falls was the farthest I had ever been out of the Two country. Ninety miles; not much of a grand tour. There were places of Montana I could barely even imagine. Butte. All I knew definitely of Butte was that when you met anyone from there, even somebody as mild as Ray Heaney’s father Ed, he would announce “I’m from Butte” and his chin would shoot out a couple of inches on that up-sound of yewt. In the midst of all this wide Montana landscape a city where shifts of men tunneled like gophers. Butte, the copper kingdom. Butte, the dark mineral pocket. Or the other thing that was always said: “Butte’s a hole in the ground and so’s a grave.” That, I heard any number of times in the Two country. I think the truth may have been that parts of Montana like ours were apprehensive, actually a little scared, of Butte. There seemed to be something spooky about a place that lived by eating its own guts, which is the way mining sounded to us. Butte I would surely have to see someday. And the Big Hole Basin. As Wisdom Johnson told it, as haying season approached in the Big Hole the hay hands—they called them hay-diggers down there, which I also liked—began to gather about a week ahead of time. They sifted in, “jungled up” in the creekside willows at the edge of town, and visited and gossiped and just lay around until haying started. I savored the notion of that, the gathering, the waiting. Definitely the Big Hole would be on my hay rake route. And the dry Ingomar country down there in the southeastern part of the state, where Walter Kyle had done his hotel style of sheep ranching. The town water supply was a tank car, left off on the railroad siding each week. Walter told of coming back to town from sheep camp one late fall day and seeing flags of celebration flying. His immediate thought was that somebody had struck water, “but it turned out to be just the armistice ending the war.” Havre and the High Line country. Fork Peck dam. Miles City. Billings, Lewistown. White Sulphur Springs. Red Lodge. Bozeman and the green Gallatin Valley. For that matter, Missoula. Montana seemed to be out there waiting for me, if I only could become old enough to get there.

  But. There’s always a “but” when you think about going everywhere and doing everything. But how old was that, when I would be advanced enough to sample Montana to the full?

  North of the ears strange things will happen. Do you know who kept coming to mind, as I thought my way hither and thither from those Noon Creek hay meadows? Stanley Meixell. Stanley who had gone cowboying in Kansas when he was a hell of a lot younger than I was. Stanley who there in the cabin during our camptending journey told me of his wanders, down to Colorado and Wyoming and over into the Dakotas, in and out of jobs. Stanley who evidently so much preferred the wandering life that he gave up being a forest ranger, to pursue it. Stanley who could plop himself on a bar stool on the Fourth of July and be found by Velma Simms. But Stanley who also looked worn down, played out and overboozed, by the footloose way of life. The example of Stanley bothered me no little bit. If the wanderer’s way was as alluring as it seemed from my seat on the scatter rake, how then did I account for the eroded look around Stanley Meixell’s eyes?

  • • •

  Almost before I knew it the first few weeks of haying were behind us and we were moving the equipment onto the benchland for the ten days or so of putting up the big meadow of dry-land alfalfa there. “The alfaloofee field,” as Perry Fox called it. This was another turn of the summer I looked forward to with interest, for this alfalfa haying was far enough from the Reese ranch house that we no longer went in at noon for dinner. Now began field lunches.

  My stomach aside, why did I look forward to this little season of field lunches? I think the answer must be that the field lunches on the bench constituted a kind of ritual that appealed to me. Not that I would want to eat every meal of my life in the stubble of a hayfield. But for ten days or so it was like camping out or being on an expedition; possibly even a little like “jungling up” the way the Big Hole hay hands started off. Whatever, the alfaloofee field lunch routine went like this. A few minutes before noon, here came Marie in the pickup. She had with her the chuckbox, the old Reese family wooden one with cattle brands burned everywhere on its sides, and when a couple of us slid it back to the tailgate and lifted it down and opened it, in there waited two or three kinds of sandwiches wrapped in dish towels, and a bowl of potato or macaroni salad, and a gallon jar of cold tea or lemonade, and bread and butter and jam, and pickles, and radishes and new garden carrots, and a pie or cake. Each of us chose a dab of shade around the power buckrake or the pickup; my preference was to sit on the running board of the pickup, somehow it seemed more like a real meal when I sat up to eat; and then we ploughed into the lunch. Afterward, which is to say the rest of the noon hour, Pete was a napper, with his hat down over his eyes. I never was; I was afraid I might miss something. Clayton too was open-eyed, in that silent sentry way all the Hebner kids had. Perry and Bud smoked, each rolling himself a handmade. This was the cue for Wisdom to pull out his own sack of Bull Durham, pat his shirt pocket, then say to Perry or Bud, “You got a Bible on you?” One or the other would loan him the packet of cigarette papers and he’d roll himself one. Strange how he could always have tobacco but perpetually be out of papers, which were the half of smoking that cost almost nothing. But that was Wisdom for you.

  The womanly presence of Marie, slim and dark, sitting in the shade of the pickup beside the chuckbox and the dozing Pete, posed the need for another ritual. As tea and lemonade caught up with kidneys, we males one after another would rise, carefully casual, and saunter around to the far side of the haystack and do our deed. Then saunter back, trying to look like we’d never been away and Marie showing no least sign that we had.

  Eventually Pete would rouse himself. He not only could nap at the drop of an eyelid, he woke up just as readily. “I don’t suppose you characters finished this field while I was resting my eyes, did you?” Then he was
on his feet, saying the rest of the back-to-work message: “Until they invent hay that puts itself up, I guess we got to.”

  • • •

  Our last day of haying the benchland alfalfa brought two occurrences out of the ordinary.

  The first came at once, when I headed Blanche and Fisheye to the southwest corner of the field to start the morning by raking there awhile. Maybe a quarter of a mile farther from where I was lay a nice grassy coulee, at the base of that slope of Breed Butte. The ground there was part of Walter Kyle’s place, and with Walter summering in the mountains with his sheep, Dode Withrow always put up the hay of this coulee for him on shares. The Withrow stacking crew had pulled in and set up the afternoon before; I could pick out Dode over there, still with a cast on his leg, and I could all but hear him on the topic of trying to run a haying crew with his leg set in cement. If I hadn’t been so content with haying for Pete, Dode would have been my choice of somebody to work for.

  Maybe scatter rakers are all born with similar patterns of behavior in them, but in any case, at this same time I was working the corner of our field the Withrow rake driver was doing the nearest corner of theirs. Naturally I studied how he was going about matters, and a minute or so of that showed me that he wasn’t a he, but Marcella Withrow.

  I had no idea what the odds must be against a coincidence like that: Marcella and me having been the only ones in our class those eight years of grade school at South Fork, and now the only English Creek ones in our particular high school class in Gros Ventre, and this moment both doing the same job, in the same hay neighborhood. It made me grin. It also caused me to peek around with care, to make sure that I wouldn’t be liable for any later razzing from our crew, and when the coast looked clear I waved to Marcella. She did the same, maybe even to checking over her shoulder against the razzing possibility, and we rattled past one another and raked our separate meadows. Some news to tell Ray Heaney the next time I got to town, anyway.

  The other event occurred at noon, and this one went by the name of Toussaint Rennie.

  He arrived in the pickup with Marie and the chuckbox of lunch. “I came to make sure,” Toussaint announced, his tan gullied face solemn as Solomon. “Whether you men build haystacks right side up.”

  Actually the case was that Toussaint had finished ditch-riding for a while, with everybody harvesting now instead of irrigating, and Marie had driven up to the Two Medicine to fetch him for company for the day. What conversations went on between those two blood- and soulmates I’ve always wished I could have overheard.

  The gab between the hay crew and Toussaint was pretty general, though, until we were done eating. Pete then retired to his nap spot, and Perry and Bud and eventually Wisdom lit up their smokes, and so on. A little time passed, then Toussaint leaned from where he was sitting and laid his hand on the chuckbox. “Perry,” he called over to Perry Fox. “We ate out of this, a time before.”

  “That we did,” agreed Perry. “But Marie’s style of grub is a whole helluva lot better.”

  Toussaint put his finger to the large F burnt into the end of the chuckbox. “Dan Floweree.”

  The finger moved to the 9R brand on the box’s side. “Louis Robare.” To the TL beside it: “Billy Ulm.”

  Then to the lid, where the space had been used to burn in a big D-S. “This one you know best, Perry.”

  I straightened up. It had come to me: where Perry and Toussaint would have first eaten out of this chuckbox. When those cattle brands were first seared into its wood. The famous roundup of 1882, from the elbow of the Teton River to the Canadian line; the one Toussaint told my father about, the one he said was the biggest ever in this part of Montana. Nearly three hundred men, the ranchers and their cowhands and horse wranglers and night herders and cooks; forty tents it took to hold them all. Each morning the riders fanned out in half circles of about a dozen miles’ ride and rounded in the cattle for sorting. Each afternoon the branding fires of the several outfits sent smoke above the prairie as the irons wrote ownership onto living cowhide. When the big sweep was over, coulees and creek bottoms searched out over an area bigger than some Eastern states, it was said a hundred thousand head of cattle were accounted for.

  “Davis-Hauser-Stuart,” Perry was saying of the brand on the chuckbox lid. “My outfit at the time. DHS, the Damn Hard Sittin’.”

  Wisdom Johnson was beginning to catch up with the conversation. “Where was this you’re talking about?”

  “All in through here,” Perry indicated with a slow swing of his head from shoulder to shoulder. “Roundin’ up cattle.”

  “Cattle?” Wisdom cast a look around the benchland, as if a herd might be pawing out there this very moment. “Around here?” It did seem a lot to believe, that this alfalfa field and the farmland on the horizon east of us once was a grass heaven for cows.

  “Everywhere from the Teton to Canada, those old outfits had cattle,” Perry confirmed. “If you could find the buggers.”

  Bud Dolson spoke up. “When’d all this take place?”

  Toussaint told him: “A time ago. ’82.”

  “Eighteen eighty-two?” queried Wisdom. “Perry, how ungodly old are you?”

  Perry pointed a thumb at Toussaint. “Younger’n him.”

  Toussaint chuckled. “Everybody is.”

  • • •

  How can pieces of time leap in and out of each other the way they do? There I sat, that noontime, listening to Toussaint and Perry speak of eating from a chuckwagon box all those years ago; and hearing myself question my mother about how she and her mother and Pete were provisioned from the same chuckbox on their St. Mary wagon trip a quarter of a century ago; and gazing on Pete, snoozing there in the shade of the pickup, simultaneously my admired uncle and the boy who helloed the horses at St. Mary.

  • • •

  Toussaint and the history that went everywhere with him set me to thinking. Life and people were a kind of flood around me this summer, yet for all my efforts I still was high and dry where one point of the past was concerned.

  When Toussaint climbed to his feet to visit the far side of the alfalfa stack, I decided. Hell, he himself was the one who brought the topic up, back at the creek picnic on the Fourth. You are a campjack these days. And an outhouse engineer and a dawn rider and a hay equipment mechanic and a scatter raker, and an inquisitive almost-fifteen-year-old. I got up and followed Toussaint around the haystack.

  “Jick,” he acknowledged me. “You are getting tall. Mac and Beth will need a stepladder to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I contributed, but my altitude was not what I wanted discussed. As Toussaint tended to his irrigation and I to mine, I asked: “Toussaint, what can you tell me about Stanley Meixell? I mean, I don’t know him real well. That time up in the Two, I was only lending him a hand with his camptending, is all.”

  “Stanley Meixell,” Toussaint intoned. “Stanley was the ranger. When the national forest was put in.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But more what I was wondering—did he and my folks have a run-in, sometime? I can’t quite figure out what they think of Stanley.”

  “But you,” said Toussaint. “You do thinking, too, Jick. What is it you think of Stanley?”

  He had me there. “I don’t just know. I’ve never come up against anybody like him.”

  Toussaint nodded. “That is Stanley,” he affirmed. “You know more than you think you do.”

  • • •

  Well, there I was as usual. No more enlightened than when I started. The chronic condition of Jick McCaskill, age fourteen and eleven twelfths years, prospects for a cure debatable.

  • • •

  At least the solace of scatter-raking remained to me. Or so I thought. As I say, this day I have just told about was the one that finished off the benchland alfalfa. A last stint of haying, back down on the Noon Creek meadows, awaited. Even yet I go over and over in my mind the happenings which that last spell of haying was holding in store. Talk about a chain of events.
You could raise and lower the anchor of an ocean liner on the string of links that began to happen now.

  • • •

  Our new venue for haying was the old Ramsay homestead. The “upper place,” my mother and Pete both called it by habit, because it was the part of the Reese ranch farthest up Noon Creek, farthest in toward the mountains. The meadows there were small but plentiful, tucked into the willow bends of Noon Creek the way pieces of a jigsaw puzzle clasp into one another. Pete always left the Ramsay hay until last because its twisty little fields were so hard to buckrake. In some cases he had to drive out of sight around two or three bends of the creek to brink in enough hay for a respectable stack. “You spend all your damn time here going instead of doing” was his unfond sentiment.

  For me on the scatter rake, though, the upper place was just fine. Almost any direction I sent Blanche and Fisheye prancing toward, there stood Breed Butte or the mountains for me to lean my eyes on. In this close to them, the Rockies took up more than half the edge of the earth, which seemed only their fair proportion. And knowing the reefs and peaks as I did I could judge where each sheep allotment was, there along the mountain wall of my father’s forest. Walter Kyle atop Roman Reef with his sheep and his telescope. Andy Gustafson with one of the Busby hands, under the middle of the reef where I had camptended him: farther south, Sanford Hebner in escape from his family name and situation. Closer toward Flume Gulch and the North Fork, whatever human improvement had replaced Canada Dan as herder of the third Busby band. Lower down, in the mix of timber and grass slopes, Pat Hoy and the Withrow sheep; and the counting vee where my father and I talked and laughed with Dode. Already it was like going back to another time, to think about that first day of the counting trip.

  The upper place, the old Ramsay place, always presented me new prospects of thought besides its horizons, though. For it was here that I was born. Alec and I both, in the Ramsay homestead house that still stands there today, although abandoned ever since my father quit as the Noon Creek association rider and embarked us into the Forest Service life. I couldn’t have been but a year or so old when we moved away, yet I felt some regard for this site. An allegiance, even, for a bond of that sort will happen when you have been the last to live at a place. Or so I think. Gratitude that it offered a roof over your head for as long as it did, this may be, and remorse that only emptiness is your successor there.