English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “I had the idea it might” was as much as Stanley would admit. “Superheated the way it was, from both the fire and the sun.”

  He looked drained but satisfied. I may have, too.

  “So,” Stanley said next. “We better go get to work on goddamn supper.”

  • • •

  Dusk. Supper now behind us, only the dishes to finish. My father came and propped himself against the work table where Stanley and I were dishwashing. “It went the way you said it would,” he said to Stanley, with a nod. Which passed for thanks in the complicated system of behavior between these two men. Then my father cleared his throat, and after a bit asked Stanley if he could stand one more day of cooking while the fire crew policed smoking snags and smolder spots tomorrow, and Stanley replied yeah, cooking wasn’t all that much worse anyway than dealing with sheepherders.

  I broke in:

  “Tell me the argument.”

  Nothing, from either of these two.

  I cited to my father from when he directed Stanley and me to clear out of the fire camp: “The last argument you and Stanley had, whenever the hell it was.” I had searched all summer for this. “What was that about?”

  My father tried to head me off. “Old history now, Jick.”

  “If it’s that old, then why can’t I hear it? You two—I need to know. I’ve been in the dark all damn summer, not knowing who did what to who, when, where, any of it. One time you send me off with Stanley, but then we show up here and you look at him like he’s got you spooked. Damn it all to hell anyway”—I tell you, when I do get worked up there is not much limit—“what’s it all about?”

  Stanley over his dishwater asked my father: “You never told him, huh?” My father shrugged and didn’t answer. Stanley gazed toward me. “Your folks never enlightened you on the topic of me?”

  “I just told . . . No. No, they sure as hell haven’t.”

  “McCaskills,” Stanley said with a shake of his head, as if the name was a medical diagnosis. “I might of known you and Bet’d have padlocks on your tongues, Mac.”

  “Stanley,” my father tried, “there’s no need for you to go into all that.”

  “Yeah, I think there is.” I was in Stanley’s gaze again. “Phantom Woman,” he began. “I let that fire get away from me. Or at least it got away. Comes to the same. A fire is the fire boss’s responsibility, and I was him.” Stanley turned his head to my father. Then to me again. “Your dad had come up from his Indian Head district to be a fireline foreman for me. So he was on hand when it happened. When Phantom Woman blew up across that mountainside.” Stanley saw my question. “Naw, I can’t really say it was the same as happened on that slope today. Timber instead of grass, different this and that. Every goddamn fire. But anyhow, up she blew, Phantom Woman. Flames everywhere, all the crew at my flank of the fireline had to run out of there like singed cats. Run for their lives. It was just a mess. And then that fire went and went and went.” Stanley’s throat made a dry swallow. “Burned for three weeks. So that’s the history of it, Jick. The blowup happened at my flank of the fireline. It was over that that your dad and I had our”—Stanley faced my father—“disagreement.”

  My father looked back at Stanley until it began to be a stare. Then asked: “That’s it? That’s what you call the history of it?”

  Stanley’s turn to shrug.

  My father shook his head. Then uttered:

  “Jick, I turned Stanley in. For the Phantom Woman fire.”

  “Turned him in? How? To who?”

  “To headquarters in Great Falls. Missoula. The Major. Anybody I could think of, wouldn’t you say, Stanley?”

  Stanley considered. “Just about. But Mac, you don’t—”

  “What,” I persisted, “just for the fire getting away from him?”

  “For that and—” My father stopped.

  “The booze,” Stanley completed. “As long as we’re telling, tell him the whole of it, Mac.”

  “Jick,” my father set out, “this goes back a long way. Longer than you know about. I’ve been around Stanley since I was, what? sixteen? seventeen?”

  “Somewhere there,” Stanley confirmed.

  “There were a couple of years in there,” my father was going on, “when I—well, when I wasn’t around home much. I just up and pulled out for a while, and Stanley—”

  “Why was that?” This seemed to be my main chance to see into the McCaskill past, and I wanted all the view I could get. “How come you pulled out?”

  My father paused. “It’s a hell of a thing to have to say, after all this with Alec. But my father and I, your grandfather—we were on the outs. Not for anything like the same reason. He did something I couldn’t agree with, and it was just easier all around, for me to stay clear of the homestead and Scotch Heaven for a while. Eventually he got over it and I got over it, and that’s all that needs to be said about that episode.” A pause. This one, I knew, sealed whatever that distant McCaskill father-son ruckus had been. “Anyway, Stanley took me on. Started me here on the Two, giving me any seasonal job he could come up with. I spent a couple of years that way, until we went into the war. And then after, when I was the association rider and your mother and I had Alec, and then you came along—Stanley suggested I take the ranger test.”

  I wanted to hear history, did I. A headful was now available. Stanley had been the forest arranger, the one who set up the Two Medicine National Forest. Stanley had stood in when my father was on the outs with his father. Stanley it had been who urged this father of mine into the Forest Service. And it was Stanley whom my father had—

  “It never was any secret Stanley liked to take a drink,” I was hearing the elaboration now. “But when I started as ranger at Indian Head and he still was the ranger at English Creek, I started to realize the situation was getting beyond that. There were more and more days when Stanley couldn’t operate without a bottle at his side. He still knew more about the Two than anybody, and in the normal course of events I could kind of keep a watch on things up here and catch any problem that got past Stanley. We went along that way for a few years. Nobody higher up noticed, or at least minded. But it’s one thing to function day by day, and another to have to do it during a big fire.”

  “And Phantom Woman was big enough,” Stanley quietly dropped into my father’s telling of it all.

  Something was adding up in a way I didn’t want it to. “After Phantom Woman. What happened after Phantom Woman?”

  Stanley took his turn first. “Major Kelley tied a can to me. ‘Your employment with the U.S. Forest Service is severed,’ I believe is how it was put. And I been rattling around ever since, I guess.” He glanced at my father as if he had just thought of something further to tell him. “You remember the couple times I tried the cure, Mac. I tried it a couple more, since. It never took.”

  “But you got by okay here,” I protested. “You haven’t had a real drink all the time we’ve been cooking.”

  “But I’ll have one the first minute I get back to the Busbys’,” Stanley forecast. “And then a couple to wash that one down. Naw, Jick. I know myself. I ought to, I been around myself long enough.” As if to be sure I accepted the sum of him, Stanley gave it flatly: “In a pinch I can go dry for as long as I did here. But ordinarily, no. I got a built-in thirst.”

  Now my father. “I never expected they’d come down on Stanley that hard. A transfer, some rocking-chair job where the drinking wouldn’t matter that much. Something to get him off the English Creek district. I couldn’t just stand by and see both him and the Two country go to hell.” The expression on my father: I suppose here was my first inkling that a person could do what he thought was right and yet be never comfortable about it. He shook his head over what had to be said next, erasing the inquiry that had been building in me. “You know how the Major is. Put up or shut up. When he bounced Stanley, he handed me English Creek. I wanted it run right, did I? Up to me to do it.” My father cast a look around the fire camp, into the night wher
e no brightness marked either Flume Gulch or the slope. “And here I still am, trying to.”

  • • •

  Again that night I was too stirred up for sleep. Turning and turning in the sleeping bag; the question beyond reach of questioner; the two similar figures crowding my mind, they and my new knowledge of them as awake as the night.

  Up against a decision, my father had chosen the Two country over his friend, his mentor, Stanley.

  Up against a decision, my brother had chosen independence over my father.

  Rewrite my life into one of those other McCaskill versions and what would I have done in my father’s place, or my brother’s? Even yet I don’t know. I do not know. It may be that there is no knowing until a person is in so hard a place.

  • • •

  All that next morning my father had Kratka’s crew felling suspicious snags in the burnt-over gulch and creek bottom, and Ames’s men on the slope to patrol for any sign of spark or smudge amid that char which had been grass. Mop-up work was all this amounted to—a couple of days of it needed to be done after a fire this size, just to be on the safe side—and at lunch my father said he was thinking about letting half of the EFFs go back to Great Falls tonight. He predicted, “The thanks I’ll get is that headquarters will want to know why in holy hell I didn’t get them off the payroll last night.”

  Stanley and I recuperated from the lunch preparation and gradually started on supper, neither of us saying anything worthwhile.

  When the hot part of the afternoon had passed without trouble, even my father was satisfied that the Flume Gulch fire was not going to leap from its black grave.

  He came into camp early with the EFFs who were being let go. “Paul, the show is all yours,” he delegated. “I’m going to head into Gros Ventre with one load of these guys, and Tony”—the timekeeper—“can haul the rest. Have Chet tell Great Falls to send a truck up and get them from there, would you. And Paul”—my father checked his assistant as Paul started off to phone the order to Chet—“Paul, it was a good camp.”

  I was next on my father’s mental list. “Jick, you might as well come in with me. Stanley can leave Pony off on his ride home.”

  Plainly my father wanted my company, or at least my presence.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me tell Stanley.”

  My father nodded. “I’ll go round up Wisdom. He’s somewhere over there bragging up Bouncing Betty to the CCs. Meet us down at the pickups.”

  • • •

  The ride to town, my father driving and Wisdom and I beside him in the cab of one pickup and the other pickup load of EFFs behind us, was mostly nickel-and-dime gab. Our route was the Noon Creek one, a handier drive from the fire camp than backtracking over to English Creek. Reminiscent exclamations from Wisdom when we passed the haystacks of the Reese place. Already the stacks were turning from green to tan. Then my father eyeing around the horizon and thinking out loud that August sure as hell ought to be done with heat and lightning by now. More than that, I have no memory of. The fact may even be that I lulled off a little, in the motion of that pickup cab.

  When we had goodbyed Wisdom and the other EFFs, my father and I grabbed a quick supper in the Lunchery. Oyster stew never tasted better, which is saying a lot. Before we could head home, though, my father said he had to stop by the Gleaner office. “Bill is going to want all the dope about the fire. It may take a little while. You want me to pick you up at Ray’s after I’m done?” I did.

  • • •

  St. Ignatius St. was quiet, in the calm of suppertime and just after, except for one series of periodic whirrs. Which proved to be Ray pushing the lawn mower around and around the Heaney front yard. Behind him, Mary Ellen was collecting the cut grass with a lawn rake bigger than she was.

  I stepped into the yard and propped myself against the giant cottonwood, in its shadowed side. Busy as Ray and Mary Ellen were, neither saw me. Myself, I was as tired as I have ever been, yet my mind was going like a million.

  After a minute I called across the lawn to Ray: “A little faster if you can stand it.”

  His grin broke out, and from the far corner of the yard he came pushing the lawn mower diagonally across to me, somehow making in the back of his throat the clackaclackaclackaclacka sound of a horse-drawn haymower.

  “Ray-AY!” protested Mary Ellen at his untidy shortcut across the lawn. But then here she came raking up after him.

  “What do you think?” Ray asked when he reached the tree and me. “Had I better bring this out to Pete’s next summer and make hay with you?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “But that’s next summer. I want to know where this one went to.” The light in the Heaney kitchen dimmed out, another one came on in the living room, then the murmur of Ed’s radio. Seven P.M., you could bank on it. I thought back to my last visit to this household you could set your clock by, when I pulled in from the Double W and the session with Alec that first Saturday night of the month. “It’s been a real quick August.”

  “Quicker than you know,” advised Ray. “Today is September. School’s almost here.”

  “The hell. I guess I lost some days somewhere.” Three more days and I would be fifteen years old. Four more days and Ray and Mary Ellen and I would be back in school. It didn’t seem possible. Time is the trickiest damn commodity. The sound of Ed Heaney’s radio in there should have been what I was hearing the night of the Fourth of July, not almost to Labor Day. Haying and supper at the Double W and the phone call to Alec and the forest fire and the revelations from Stanley and my father, all seemed as if they should be yet to happen. But they were the past now, in my mind like all that history in Toussaint’s and Stanley’s.

  “Can we feed you something, Jick?” Ray asked in concern. “You look kind of hard-used.”

  “Dad and I ate uptown,” I said. “And he’ll be here any minute. But I suppose I could manage to—”

  Just then the front porch screen door opened and Ed Heaney was standing there. We all three looked at him in curiosity because with the screen door open that way he was letting in moths, which was major disorderly conduct for him. I will always see Ed Heaney in that doorway of light, motionless there as if he had been pushed out in front of a crowd and was trying to think of what to say. At last he did manage to bring out words, and they were these:

  “Ray, Mary Ellen, you better come in the house now. They’ve started another war in Europe.”

  FOUR

  “We’ll be in it inside of six months,” was one school of thought when Europe went to war in September of 1939, and the other refrain ran, “It’s their own scrap over there, we can just keep our nose out this time.” But as ever, history has had its own say and in a way not foretold—at Pearl Harbor last Sunday, in the flaming message of the Jap bombs.

  —GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, DECEMBER 11, 1941

  ALL THE PEOPLE OF that English Creek summer of 1939—they stay on in me even though so many of them are gone from life. You know how when you open a new book for the first time, its pages linger against each other, pull apart with a reluctant little separating sound. They never quite do that again, the linger or the tiny sound. Maybe it can be said that for me, that fifteenth summer of my existence was the new book and its fresh pages. My memories of those people and times and what became of them, those are the lasting lines within the book, there to be looked on again and again.

  • • •

  My mother was the earliest of us to get word of Pearl Harbor on that first Sunday of December, 1941. The telephone rang, she answered it, and upon learning that the call was from Two Medicine National Forest headquarters in Great Falls she began to set them straight on the day of the week. When told the news from Hawaii she went silent and held the receiver out for my father to take.

  In a sense Alec already had gone to the war by then. At least he was gone, with the war as a kind of excuse. For when the fighting started in Europe and the prospect for beef prices skyrocketed, Wendell Williamson loaded up on catt
le. Wendell asked Alec to switch to the Deuce W, his ranch down in the Highwood Mountains, as a top hand there during this buildup of the herd. Just after shipping time, mid-September of 1939, Alec went. It may come as no vast surprise that he and Leona had unraveled by then. She had chosen to start her last year of high school, Alec was smarting over her decision to go that way instead of to the altar, and my belief is that he grabbed the Deuce W job as a way to put distance between him and that disappointment.

  • • •

  I saw Leona the day of the Gros Ventre centennial, several years ago now. She is married to a man named Wright and they run a purebred Hereford ranch down in the Crazy Mountains country. The beauty still shines out of Leona. Ranch work and the riding she does have kept her in shape, I couldn’t help noticing. But one thing did startle me. Leona’s hair now is silvery as frost.

  She smiled at my surprise and said: “Gold to silver, Jick. You’ve seen time cut my value.”

  • • •

  Left to my own devices, I would not tell any further about Alec. Yet my brother, his decisions, the consequences life dealt him, always are under that summer and its aftermath like the paper on which a calendar is printed.

  Before he enlisted in the army the week after Pearl Harbor, Alec did come back to Gros Ventre to see our parents. Whether reconciliation is the right amount of word for that visit I don’t really know, for I was on a basketball trip to Browning and a ground blizzard kept those of us of the Gros Ventre team there overnight. So by the time I got back, Alec had been and gone. And that last departure of his from English Creek led to a desert in Tunisia. How stark it sounds; yet it is as much as we ever knew. A Stuka finding that bivouac at dusk, swooping in and splattering twenty-millimeter shells. Of the cluster of soldiers who were around a jerry can drawing their water rations, only one man lived through the strafing. He was not Alec.

  So. My last words with my brother were those on the telephone when I tried to talk him into going to the Flume Gulch fire. I do have a hard time forgiving life for that.