English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  From how they had been razzing one another about quantities of hay moved, three of the five pitch players—Plain Mike and Long Mike and a heavy-shouldered guy—were the horse buck-rakers. I was pretty sure how they shaped up on the job. The heavy-shouldered guy, who looked like a horseman, was the best buckraker. Long Mike was the slowest. And Plain Mike did just enough more work than Long Mike to look better.

  A couple of younger guys, around Alec’s age but who looked about a fraction as bright, likely were the stacker team drivers in this outfit. Then a slouchy elderly guy in a khaki shirt, and a one-eyed one; I suppose it doesn’t say much for my own haying status that I was working down through this Double W crew, getting to the bunchrakers and whoever the scatter raker was, when the telephone jangled at the far end of the room.

  The ring of that phone impressed me more than anything else about the Double W had yet. I mean, there was no stipulated reason why there couldn’t be a telephone in a bunkhouse. But at the time it seemed a fairly swanky idea.

  Cal Petrie stepped out of his room to answer it. When he had listened a bit and yupped an answer, he hung up and looked over toward where Alec and I were on the rim of the card game.

  “Come on up for supper with us,” the foreman directed at me. “Give the mud a little more chance to dry out, that way.”

  Cal declaimed this as if it was his own idea, but I would have bet any money as to who was on the other end of that phone line. Meredice Williamson.

  • • •

  Not long after, the supper bell sounded the end of the card game. The heavy-shouldered guy had the highest score, and yes, Plain Mike had the next. Now that they were the town-bound pair they received a number of imaginative suggestions of entertainment they might seek in there, as the crowd of us sloshed over to the kitchen door of the house. While everybody scraped mud off his feet and trooped on in I hung back with Alec, to see what the table lineup was going to be.

  “Jick,” he began, but didn’t go on with whatever he had in mind. Instead, “See you after supper,” he said, and stepped into the house, with me following.

  The meal was in the summer room, a kind of windowed porch along the side of the house, long enough to hold a table for a crew this size. I of course did know that even at a place like the Double W, family and crew ate together. If the king of England had owned Noon Creek benchland instead of Scottish moors, probably even he would have had to go along with the ranch custom of everybody sitting down to refuel together. So I wasn’t surprised to see Wendell Williamson sitting at the head of the table. Meredice sat at his right, and the old choreboy Dolph Kuhn next to her. At Wendell’s left was a vacancy which I knew would be the cook’s place, and next to that Cal Petrie seated himself. All five of them had chairs, then backless benches filled the rest of both sides of the table, which was about twenty feet long.

  I felt vaguely let down. It was a setup about like any other ranch’s, only bigger. I suppose I expected the Double W to have something special, like a throne for Wendell Williamson instead of a straightback kitchen chair.

  Alec and Joe and Thurl, as ranch regulars, took their places next to the head-of-the-table elite, and the hay crew began filling in the rest of the table to the far end. In fact, at the far end there was a kitchen stool improvised as a seat, and Meredice Williamson’s smile and nod told me it was my place.

  This I had not dreamt of. Facing Wendell Williamson down the length of the Double W supper table. He now acknowledged me by saying: “Company. Nuhhuh. Quite a way to come for a free meal, young fellow.”

  Before thinking I said back: “Everybody says there’s no cooking like the Double W’s.”

  That caused a lot of facial expressions along the table, and I saw Alec peer at me rather firmly. But Wendell merely said “Nuhhuh” again—that “nuhhuh” of his was a habit I would think anybody with sufficient money would pay to have broken—and took a taste of his cup of coffee.

  To me, Wendell Williamson always looked as if he’d been made by the sackful. Sacks of what, I won’t go into. But just everything about him, girth, shoulders, arms, even his fingers, somehow seemed fuller than was natural; as if he always was slightly swollen. Wendell’s head particularly stood out in this way, because his hair had retreated about halfway back and left all that face to loom out. And the other odd thing up there was, what remained of Wendell’s hair was thick and curly and coal-black. A real stand of hair there at the rear of that big moonhead, like a sailor might wear a watchcap pushed way back.

  The cook came in from the kitchen with a bowl of gray gravy and handed it to Wendell. She was a gaunt woman, sharp cheekbones, beak of a nose. Her physiognomy was a matter of interest and apprehension to me. The general theory is that a thin cook is a poor idea.

  Plain Mike was sitting at my left, and at my right was a scowling guy who’d been one of the losers in the pitch game. As I have always liked to keep abreast of things culinary, I now asked Plain Mike in an undertone: “Is this the cook from Havre?”

  “No, hell, she’s long gone. This one’s from up at Lethbridge.”

  What my mother would have commented danced to mind: “So Wendell Williamson has to import them from Canada now, does he? I’m Not Surprised.”

  I kept that to myself, but the scowler on my right had overheard my question and muttered: “She ain’t Canadian though, kid. She’s a Hungrarian.”

  “She is?” To me, the cook didn’t look conspicuously foreign.

  “You bet. She leaves you hungrier than when you came to the table.”

  I made a polite “heh-heh-heh” to that, and decided I’d better focus on the meal.

  The first bowl to reach me contained a concoction I’ve never known the actual name of but in my own mind I always dub tomato smush. Canned tomatoes heated up, with little dices of bread dropped in. You sometimes get this as a side dish in cafes when the cook has run out of all other ideas about vegetables. Probably the Lunchery in Gros Ventre served it four days a week. In any case, tomato smush is a remarkable recipe, in that it manages to wreck both the tomatoes and the bread.

  Out of chivalry I spooned a dab onto my plate. And next loaded up with mashed potatoes. Hard for any cook to do something drastic to mashed potatoes. The gravy, though, lacked salt and soul.

  Then along came a platter of fried liver. This suited me fine, as I can dine on liver even when it is overcooked and tough, as this was. But I have observed in life that there is no middle ground about liver. When I passed the platter to the guy on my right, he mumbled something about “Lethbridge leather again,” and his proved to be the majority view at the table.

  There was some conversation at the head of the table, mostly between Wendell and the foreman Cal about the unfairness of being rained out at this stage of haying. In light of what followed, I see now that the rainstorm was largely responsible for Wendell’s mood. Not that Wendell Williamson ever needed a specific excuse to be grumpy, so far as I could tell, but this suppertime he was smarting around his wallet. If the rain had started before noon and washed out the haying, he’d have had to pay all this hay crew for only half a day. But since the rain came in the afternoon he was laying out a full day’s wages for not a full day’s work. I tell you, there can be no one more morose than a rancher having to pay a hay crew to watch rain come down.

  Anyway, the bleak gaze of Wendell Williamson eventually found its way down the length of the table to me. To my surprise, since I didn’t think anybody’s welfare mattered to him but his own, Wendell asked me: “How’s your folks?”

  “Real good.”

  “Nuhhuh.” Wendell took a mouthful of coffee, casting a look at the cook as he set down his cup. Then his attention was back on me:

  “I hear your mother gave quite a talk, the day of the Fourth.”

  Well, what the hell. If Wendell goddamn Williamson wanted to tap his toe to that tune, I was game to partner him. The McCaskills of this world maybe don’t own mills and mines and all the land in sight, as some Williamson back in histo
ry had managed to grab, but we were born with tongues.

  “She’s sure had a lot of good comments on it,” I declared with enthusiasm. Alec was stirring in his seat, trying to follow all this, but he’d missed Mom’s speech by being busy with his roping horse. No, this field of engagement was mine alone. “People tell her it brought back the old days, when there were all those other ranches around here. The days of Ben English and those.”

  “Nuhhuh.” What Wendell would have responded beyond that I will never know, for Meredice Williamson smiled down the table in my direction and then said to Wendell: “Ben English. What an interesting name, I have always thought.” Mr. Double W didn’t conspicuously seem to think so. But Meredice sallied right on. “Was he, do you think?”

  “Was he what?” retorted Wendell.

  “English. Do you suppose Mr. English was of English extraction?”

  “Meredice, how in hell—” Wendell stopped himself and swigged some more sour coffee. “He might’ve been Swedish, for all I know.”

  “It would be more fitting if he were English,” she persisted.

  “Fitting? Fit what?”

  “It would be more fitting to the memory of the man and his times.” She smiled toward me again. “To those old days.” Now she looked somewhere over my head, and Plain Mike’s, and the heads of all of us at our end of the table, and she recited:

  “Take of English earth as much

  As either hand may rightly clutch.

  In the taking of it breathe

  Prayer for all who lie beneath.”

  Then Meredice Williamson dipped her fork and tried a dainty bite of tomato smush.

  All around the table, though, every other fork had stopped. Even mine. I don’t know, maybe Kipling out of the blue would have that effect on any group of diners, not just hay hands. But in any case, there was a mulling silence as Wendell contemplated Meredice and the rest of us contemplated the Double W boss and his wife. Not even a “nuhhuh” out of Wendell.

  Finally Cal Petrie turned toward me and asked, “How’s that power buckrake of Pete’s working out?”

  “Real good,” I said. “Would somebody pass the liver, please?” And that pretty much was the story of supper at the great Double W.

  • • •

  Alec walked with me to the barn to help harness Blanche and Fisheye. He still wasn’t saying much. Nor for that matter was I. I’d had about enough Double W and brooding brother, and was looking forward to getting to town.

  Something, though—something kept at me as we started harnessing. It had been circling in the back of my mind ever since the hay crew clomped into the bunkhouse that afternoon. Alec came in with them. Cal Petrie and the riders who had been fixing fence made their appearance a few minutes after that.

  I may be slow, but I usually get there. “Alec?” I asked across the horses’ backs. “Alec, what have they got you doing?”

  On the far side of Blanche, the sound of harnessing stopped for an instant. Then resumed.

  “I said, what have they—”

  “I heard you,” came my brother’s voice. “I’m helping out with the haying.”

  “I figured that. Which job?”

  Silence.

  “I said, which—”

  “Raking.”

  You cannot know with what struggle I resisted popping out the next logical question: “Dump or scatter?” Yet I already knew the answer. I did indeed. The old slouchy guy in the khaki shirt and the one-eyed one, they were plodding dump rakers if I had ever seen the species. And that left just one hayfield job unaccounted for. My brother the calf-roping caballero was doing the exact same thing in life I was. Riding a scatter rake.

  I did some more buckling and adjusting on Fisheye. Debating with myself. After all, Alec was my brother. If I couldn’t talk straight from the shoulder with him, who could I?

  “Alec, this maybe isn’t any of my business, but—”

  “Jick, when did that detail ever stop you? What’s on your mind, besides your hat?”

  “Are you sure you want to stay on here? More than this summer, I mean? This place doesn’t seem to me anything so special.”

  “So you’re lining up with Mom and Dad, are you.” Alec didn’t sound surprised, as if the rank of opinion against him was like one of the sides in choosing up to play softball. He also didn’t sound as if any of us were going to alter his thinking. “What, is there a law that says somewhere that I’ve got to go to college?”

  “No, it’s just that you’d be good at it, and—”

  “Everybody seems awful damn sure about that. Jick, I’m already doing something I’m good at, if I do say so my own self. I’m as good a hand with cattle as Thurl or Joe or anybody else they ever had here. So why doesn’t that count for anything? Huh? Answer me that. Why can’t I stay on here in the Two country and do a decent job of what I want to, instead of traipsing off to goddamn college?”

  For the first time since he stepped into the bunkhouse and caught sight of me, Alec came alive. He stood now in front of Blanche, holding her haltered head. But looking squarely at me, as I stood in front of Fisheye. The tall and blue-eyed and flame-haired Alec of our English Creek years, the Alec who faced life as if it was always going to deal him aces.

  I tried again, maybe to see if I was understanding my brother’s words. “Christamighty, though, Alec. They haven’t even got you doing what you want to do here. You hired on as a rider. Why’re you going to let goddamn Wendell do whatever he wants with you?”

  Alec shook his head. “You do sound like the folks would.”

  “I’m trying to sound like myself, is all. What is it about the damn life here that you think is so great?”

  My brother held his look on me. Not angry, not even stubborn. And none of that abstracted glaze of earlier in the summer, as though only half seeing me. This was Alec to the full, the one who answered me now:

  “That it’s my own.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess it is” was all I could manage to respond. For it finally had struck me. This answer that had popped out of Alec as naturally as a multiplication sum, this was the future. So much did my brother want to be on his own in life, he would put up with a bad choice of his own making—endure whatever the Double W heaped on him, if it came to that—rather than give in to somebody else’s better plan for him. Ever since the night of the supper argument our parents thought they were contending with Alec’s cowboy phase or with Leona or the combination of the two. I now knew otherwise. What they were up against was the basic Alec.

  “Jick,” he was saying to me, “do me a favor about all this, okay?”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t say anything to the folks. About me not riding, just now.” He somewhere found a grin, although a puny one. “About me following in your footsteps as a scatter raker. They have a low enough opinion of me recently.” He held the grin so determinedly it began to hurt me. “So will you do that for me?”

  “Yeah. I will.”

  “Okay.” Alec let out a lot of breath. “We better get you hooked up and on your way, or you’ll have to roll Grady out of bed to do the welding.”

  One more thing I had to find out, though. As I got up on the seat of the scatter rake, the reins to Blanche and Fisheye ready in my hand, I asked as casually as I could:

  “How’s Leona?”

  The Alec of the Fourth of July would have cracked “Fine as frog hair” or “Dandy as a field of dandelions” or some such. This Alec just said: “She’s okay.” Then goodbyed me with: “See you around, Jicker.”

  • • •

  “Ray? Does it ever seem like you can just look at a person and know something that’s going to happen to them?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I don’t mean look at them and know everything. Just something. Some one thing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like—” I gazed across the lawn at the Heaney house, high and pale white in the dark. Ed and Genevieve and Mary Ellen had gone to bed
, but Ray and I won permission to sprawl on the grass under the giant cottonwood until Ray’s bedroom cooled down a bit from the sultry day. The thunderstorm had missed Gros Ventre, only left it its wake of heat and charged air. “Promise not to laugh at this?”

  “You couldn’t pay me to.”

  “All right. Like when I was talking to Alec out there at the Double W after supper. I don’t know, I just felt like I could tell. By the look of him.”

  “Tell about what?”

  “That he and Leona aren’t going to get married.”

  Ray weighed this. “You said you could tell something that’s going to happen. That’s something that’s not going to happen.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Going to happen and not going to happen are the same thing? Jick, sometimes—”

  “Never mind.” I stretched an arm in back of my head, to rub a knuckle against the cottonwood. So wrinkled and gullied was its trunk that it was as if rivulets of rain had been running down it ever since the deluge floated Noah. I drifted in thought past the day’s storm along Noon Creek, past the Double W and Alec, past the hayfields of the Ramsay place, past to where I had it tucked away to tell Ray: