English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  We squeaked through. Which left me with only one more anxious act to do. To close the gate, for there were cattle in this field. Even if they were the cattle of the damn Double W, even if it mattered nothing to me that they got out and scattered to Tibet; if you have been brought up in Montana, you close a gate behind you.

  So I ran back and did the reverse of the wrestling that’d opened the gate. Still scared spitless about touching that wire. Yet maybe not quite as scared as when I’d first done it, for I was able to say to myself all the while, What in the hell have I done to deserve this dose of predicament?

  Again on the rake, I broke all records of driving that Double W approach road, down from the benchland to where the ranch buildings were clustered on the north side of Noon Creek. Across the plank bridge the rake rumbled, my thunder against the storm’s thunder, and I sighted refuge. The Double W barn.

  In minutes I had my team unhitched—leaving the scatter rake out by a collection of old machinery, so that lightning at least would have to do some sorting to find it—and was ensconcing them in barn stalls. They were lathered enough that I unharnessed them and rubbed them dry with a gunnysack. In fact, I looked around for the granary, went over there, and brought back a hatful of Double W oats apiece to Blanche and Fisheye as their reward.

  Now I could draw a breath and look around for my own benefit.

  The Double W had buildings and more buildings. This barn was huge and the two-story white Williamson house across the yard could have housed the governor of Montana. You would think this was ranch enough for anybody, yet Wendell Williamson actually owned another one at least as big as this. The Deuce W—its cattle brand was 2W—down in the Highwood Mountains between Great Falls and Lewistown, a hundred or more miles from here. More distance than I’d been in my whole life, and Wendell goddamn Williamson possessed both ends of it.

  Be that as it may, the Double W was now my port in the storm, and I had better make my presence known.

  No one was in sight. It would take a little while for the rain to bring in Alec and the other riders and the hay crew from the range and the hayfield. But somebody was bound to be in the house, and I hurried over to there before I had to do it during the storm.

  I knocked at the front door.

  The door opened and Meredice Williamson was standing there smiling and saying: “Yes?”

  “ ’Lo, Mrs. Williamson. I put Blanche and Fisheye in your barn.”

  That seemed to be double Dutch to her. But she smiled on and commended: “That was good of you. I’m sure Wendell will be pleased.”

  I sought to correct her impression that a delivery of Blanche and Fisheye was involved here. “Well, no, they’ll only be there until it clears up. I mean, what it is, I was driving my scatter rake to town and the storm started coming and I had to head in here on account of lightning, so I unhitched my team and put them in the barn there, I hope that’s all right?”

  “I’m sure it must be,” she acceded, pretty plainly because she had no idea what else to say. Meredice Williamson was a city woman—a lawyer’s widow, it was said—whom Wendell met and married in California a few winters before. The unkind view of her was that she’d had too much sun on the brain down there. But I believe the case honestly was that because Meredice Williamson only came north to spend summers at the Double W, she never got clued in to the Two country; never quite caught up with its rhythms of season and livelihood and lore. At least, standing there within the weathered doorway in her yellow sun frock and with her graying hair in perfect marcelled waves, she looked much like a visitor to her own ranch house.

  Yet maybe Meredice Williamson was not as vague as the general estimate of her, for she now pondered my face a moment more and then asked: “Are you Beth McCaskill’s other boy?”

  Which wasn’t exactly my most preferred phrasing of it. But she did have genealogical fact on her side. So I bobbed yes and contributed: “Jick. Alec’s brother.”

  “Wendell thinks highly of Alec,” she confided, as if I gave a hoot in hell about Mr. Double W’s opinion. So far as I could see Wendell Williamson was a main contributor to Alec’s mental delinquency, encouraging him in his damn cowboy notions. The summer’s sunder of my family followed a faultline which led to this doorstep. Fair is fair, though, and I couldn’t really blame Meredice Williamson for Wendell’s doings. Innocent as a bluebird on a manure pile, this lady seemed to be. Thus I only said back:

  “Yeah. So I savvy.”

  Just then the leading edge of rain hit, splatting drops the size of quarters on the flagstones of the walk. Meredice Williamson peered past me in surprise at the blackening sky. “It looks like a shower,” she mustered. “Wouldn’t you like to step inside?”

  I was half tempted. On the other hand, I figured she wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of what to do with me once I was in there. Furnish me tea and ladyfingers? Ask me if I would care for a game of Chinese checkers?

  “No, that’s okay,” I replied. “I’ll wait in the bunkhouse. Alec likely will show up there pretty quick. I’ll shoot the hooey with him until the rain’s over and then head on to town.” Here Meredice Williamson’s expression showed that she was unsure what hooey was or why we would shoot it. In a hurry I concluded: “Anyway, thanks for the borrow of your barn.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Jake,” she was saying as I turned and sprinted across the yard. The rain was beginning to pelt in plentiful drops now, pocking the dust. Flashes of light at the south edge of the storm and the immediate rumbles made me thankful again that I was in off the rake, even if the haven was the Double W.

  • • •

  Strange, to be in a bunkhouse when its residents are out on the job. Like one of those sea tales of stepping aboard a ship where everything is intact, sails set and a meal waiting on the galley stove, but the crew has vanished.

  Any bunkhouse exists only to shelter a crew. There is no feel of it as a home for anybody, although even as I say that I realize many ranch hands spent their lives in a bunkhouse. Alec himself was a full-timer here, and would be until he and Leona tied their knot. Even so, a bunkhouse to me seems a place you can put up with for a season but that would be enough.

  If you are unaccustomed to a bunkhouse, the roomful of beds is a medley of odors. Of tobacco in three incarnations: hand-rolled cigarettes, snoose, and chewing tobacco. The last two, in fact, had a permanent existence in the spit cans beside about half the bunks. These I took special note of, not wanting to kick one of them over. Of too many bodies and not enough baths; yet I wonder why it is that we now think we have to deodorize the smell of humanness out of existence. Of ashes and creosote; the presence of an elderly stove and stovepipe. All in all, the scent of men and what it takes them to lead the ranch hands’ life.

  I glanced around to try and figure out which bunk was Alec’s. An easy enough mystery. The corner bunk with the snapshot of Leona on the wall above the pillow.

  Naturally the picture deserved a closer look.

  It showed Leona on a horse in a show ring—that would be Tollie Zane’s during one of his horse sales—and wearing a lady Stetson and leather chaps. And a smile that probably fused the camera. But I managed to get past the top of Leona, to where something else was tugging my eyes. Down the length of her chaps, something was spelled out in tooled letters with silver spangles between. I moved in for a closer look yet, my nose almost onto the snapshot, and I was able to make out:

  M

  *

  O

  *

  N

  *

  T

  *

  A

  *

  N

  *

  A

  Well, that wasn’t the message that ordinarily would come to mind from looking along Leona’s leg. But it was interesting.

  I could hear voices, and men began trooping in. The hay crew. And at the tail end of them Alec, who looked flabbergasted to see me sitting on his bunk.

  “Jicker, what in blazes—” he started as h
e strode over to me. I related to him my scatter rake situation and he listened keenly, although he didn’t look perceptibly happier with my presence. “As soon as the rain lets up, I’ll head on to town,” I assured him.

  “Yeah, well. Make yourself at home, I guess.” Now, to my surprise, my brother seemed short of anything more to say. He was saved from having to, by the arrival of the Double W foreman Cal Petrie and the other two riders, older guys named Thurl Everson and Joe Henty. Both had leather gloves and fencing pliers, so I imagined they were glad to be in away from barbwire for a while, too.

  Cal Petrie spotted me perched on the bunk aside Alec, nodded hello, and steered over to ask: “Looking for a job?” He knew full well I wasn’t, but as foreman it was his responsibility to find out just what brought me here.

  Again I explained the scatter rake–lightning situation, and Cal nodded once more. “A stroke of that could light you up like a Christmas tree, all right. Make yourself to home. Alec can introduce you around.” Then Cal announced generally: “After supper I got to go to town for some sickle heads for the mowers, and I can take two of you jaspers in with me in the pickup. I’ll only be in there an hour or so, and you got to be ready to come home when I say. No staying in there to drink the town dry, in other words. So cut cards or Indian rassle or compare dicks or however you want to choose, but only two of you are going.” And he went off into the room he had to himself at the far end of the bunkhouse.

  In a hay crew such as the Double W’s there were ten or a dozen guys, putting up two stacks at once, and what struck me as Alec made me known to them was that three of the crew were named Mike. A gangly one called Long Mike, and a mower man naturally called Mike the Mower, and then one who lacked either of those distinctions and so was called Plain Mike. The riders who had come in with Cal Petrie I already knew, Thurl and Joe. Likewise the choreboy, old Dolph Kuhn, one of those codgers who get to be as much a part of a ranch as its ground and grass. So I felt acquainted enough even before somebody chimed out:

  “What, are you another one of the famous fist-fighting McCaskills?” Alec’s flooring of Earl Zane at the Fourth of July dance was of course the natural father of that remark.

  “No, I’m the cut-and-shoot type,” I cracked back. “When the trouble starts, I cut through the alley and shoot for home.”

  You just never know. That joke had gray whiskers and leaned on a cane, but it drew a big laugh from the Double W yayhoos even so.

  There followed some more comment, probably for the fortieth time, about how Alec had whopped Earl, and innumerable similar exploits performed in the past by various of this crew. You’d have thought the history of boxing had taken place in that bunkhouse. But I was careful not to contribute anything further. The main rule when you join a crew, even if it’s only for the duration of a rainstorm, is to listen more than you talk.

  Alec still didn’t look overjoyed that I was on hand, but I couldn’t help that. I didn’t order up the damn electrical storm, which still was rumbling and crashing around out there.

  “So,” I offered as an opener, “what do you know for sure?”

  “Enough to get by on,” Alec allowed.

  “Been doing any calf-roping?”

  “No.”

  That seemed to take care of the topic of calf-roping. Some silence, then Alec hazarded: “How’s the haying going at Pete’s?”

  “We’ve pretty close to got it. A few more days left. How’re they doing here?”

  “More like a couple of weeks left, I guess.”

  And there went the topic of haying. Alec and I just sat back and listened for a little to where the discussion had now turned, the pair of slots for town. Some grumping was going on about Cal Petrie’s edict that only two of the crew were going to get to see the glories of Gros Ventre on a Saturday night. This was standard bunkhouse grouse, though. If Cal had said the whole shebang of them could go to town with him there’d have been grumbling that he hadn’t offered to buy them the first round of drinks as well. No, the true issue was just beginning to come out: more than half the hay crew, six or so guys, considered themselves the logical town candidates. The variety of reasoning—the awful need for a haircut, a bet to be collected from a guy who was going to be in the Medicine Lodge only this very night, even a potential toothache that necessitated preventive remedies from the drugstore—was remarkably well rehearsed. This Double W bunch was the kind of crew, as the saying went, who began on Thursday to get ready on Friday to go to town on Saturday to spend Sunday.

  Long Mike and Plain Mike and a sort of a gorilla of a guy who I figured must be one of the two stackmen of this gang were among the yearners for town. Plain Mike surprised me by being the one to propose that a game of cards settle the matter. But then, you just never know who in a crew will turn out to be the tiger rider.

  The proposal itself eliminated the big stackman. “Hell with it, I ain’t lost nothing in that burg anyway.” At the time I thought his sporting blood was awfully anemic. It has since dawned on me that he could not read; could not tell the cards apart.

  Inasmuch as Plain Mike had efficiently whittled off one contender, the other four felt more or less obliged to go along with a card game.

  “We need an honest banker,” Plain Mike solicited.

  “You’re talking contradictions,” somebody called out.

  “Damn, I am at that. Honest enough that we can’t catch him, will do. Hey there, Alec’s brother! How about you being the bank for us?”

  “Well, I don’t know. What are you going to play?”

  “Pitch,” stipulated Plain Mike. “What else is there?”

  That drew me. Pitch is the most perfect of card games. It excels poker in that there can be more than one winner during each hand, and cribbage in that it doesn’t take an eternity to play, and rummy and hearts in that judgment is more important than the cards you are dealt, and stuff like canasta and pinochle can’t even be mentioned in the same breath with pitch.

  “I guess I could,” I assented. “Until the rain lets up.” It still was raining like bath time on Noah’s ark.

  “Pull up a stump,” invited Plain Mike, nodding toward a spare chair beside the stove. “We’ll show you pitch as she is meant to be played.”

  Uh huh, at least you will, I thought to myself as I added my presence to the circle of card players. But I will say this for the Double W yayhoos, they played pitch the classic way: high, low, game, jack, jick, joker. It would just surprise you, how many people go through life under the delusion that pitch ought to be played without a joker in the deck, which is a skimpy damned way of doing it, and how many others are just as dim in wanting to play with two jokers, which is excessive and confusing.

  My job of banker didn’t amount to all that much. Just being in charge of the box of Diamond wooden matches and paying out to each player as many matches as he’d made points, or taking matches back if he went set. Truth be told, I could have kept score more efficiently with a pencil and sheet of paper, and Alec simply could have done it in his head. But these Double W highrollers wanted to be able to squint around the table and count for themselves how much score everybody else had.

  From the very first hand, when the other players were tuning up with complaints like “Is this the best you can deal, a mess like this?” and Plain Mike simply bid three, “in them things called spades,” and led with the queen, it was worth a baccalaureate degree in the game of pitch to watch Plain Mike. He bid only when he had one sure point, ace for high or deuce for low, with some other point probable among his cards, so that when he did bid it was as good as made. But during a hand when anybody else had the bid, he managed to run with some point, jack or jick or joker, for himself, or at least—this, a real art of pitch—he managed to sluff the point to somebody besides the bidder. I banked and admired. While the other cardsters’ scores gyrated up and down, with every hand Plain Mike added a wooden match or two to his total.

  Around us the rest of the crew was carrying on conversation. If you c
an call it that. There is no place like a bunkhouse for random yatter. One guy will grouch about how the eggs were cooked for breakfast and another will be reminded of a plate of beans he ate in Pocatello in 1922. Harness the gab gas of the average bunkhouse and you’d have an inexhaustible fuel.

  I was taking it all in, eyes and mind pretty much on the card game and ears shopping around in the crew conversation, when one of the pitch players popped out with:

  “Aw hell, there goes Jick.”

  I blinked and sat up at that. Anybody would, wouldn’t he? All right, so my attention was a bit divided: so what the hell business was it of some stranger to announce it to the world? But then I saw that the guy hadn’t meant me, he was just bemoaning because he’d tried to run the jick past Plain Mike and Plain Mike had nabbed it with his jack of trump.

  The only one to notice my peeved reaction was Plain Mike himself, who I would say did not miss many tricks in life as well as in cards. “A jick and a Jick we got here, huh?” he said now. “Who hung that nickname on you, that battling brother of yours?”

  Actually my best guess was that it’d been Dode Withrow who suggested I looked like the jick of the McCaskills, but my parents were vague about the circumstance. I mean, a person wants to know his own history insofar as possible, but if you can’t, you can’t. So instead of trying to go into all that before this Double W crowd I just responded: “Somebody with an imagination, I guess.”

  “Lucky thing he didn’t imagine you resembled the queen of hearts,” observed Plain Mike and turned his attention back to the pitch game.

  By now Alec, looking restless and overhearing all this name stuff, had come over and joined me in watching the card game. This was certainly a more silent brother than I’d ever been around before. Maybe it had something to do with his surroundings, this hay crew he and the other riders now had to share the bunkhouse with. Between checking out the window on the progress of the rain and banking the pitch game, I started mulling what it would be like to work in this hay crew instead of Pete’s. If, say, ranches were swapped under Alec and me, him up the creek at the Reese place as he’d been at my age and me here at the Gobble Gobble You. Some direct comparison of companions was possible. Wisdom Johnson was an obvious choice over the gorilla of a guy who was one of the Double W stackmen, and a rangy man called Swede who more than likely was the other one. A possible advantage I could see to the gorilla was what he might have inflicted on Good Help Hebner for trying to drown him in hay, but that was wishful thinking. Over on the conversation side of the room, Mike the Mower looked somewhat more interesting than Bud Dolson. He was paying just enough attention to the pair of stories not to seem standoffish. His bunk was the most neatly made, likely showing he had been in the army. All in all, though, Mike the Mower showed more similarity to Bud than difference. Mower men were their own nationality.