Almost the end. Twenty-five miles to Cut Bank, and then the fence that began the Blackfeet Indian reservation. Then the Rockies. This was it. Jerry got off in Shelby, thinking he might get located there. Then he thought, I choose to go on. He felt the verifying trickle of fear as he stepped back on the train and went on to Cut Bank, to the very edge of the available plains.
Shelby had looked too provisional and unlit. The previous evening, a large fire had started in the outhouse behind a barbershop and spread to the warehouse and mercantile of one James A. Johnson. Johnson’s store was destroyed, though the contents were saved. It would have been worse, far worse, without a snappy bucket brigade and the beginnings of a soaking rain. As it was, Johnson lost thousands.
Smoke mingled with drizzle in the flat afternoon light, giving little Shelby the look of a kicked-out campfire.
It did not look like a place that would be famous throughout the entire country in thirteen years. And James A. Johnson, resilient and flamboyant as he was, even then, did not seem like the kind of man who would be on the front page of the New York Times.
These are some of the names they would give their twelve-by-sixteen-foot shacks and their quarter sections or half sections of land: Kubla Khan, Scenic Heights Farm, Peace Valley Ranch, Dulce Comun, Experimental Farm. The publisher of the Cut Bank Pioneer Press asked them to name their new homes and send the names to the paper for the record. Clonmel Ranch, Meadowbrook Heights, Boomers Retreat, they would write.
Only a few seemed to guess what might be coming: Grasshopper Ranch, Locust Hill, Bluff Arcade.
The shacks had tar-paper roofs, most of them, and you could buy the pieces precut at the lumberyard in Cut Bank—homestead prefabs for all those young people, men and women, married and single, who didn’t know the first thing about building a building, farming a farm. Most of them had never set plow to earth at all, much less earth that had never been turned.
How was it possible for them to look around at where they were—treeless wind-strafed prairie—and call a shack Kubla Khan? Maybe they were wittier than we give them credit for.
The walls of the shacks were papered with newspapers. You could read your walls for recent news. The Unitarian Church Quartet, seventy-five miles to the south in Great Falls, had performed “In a Persian Garden” by Liza Lehmann. A man who claimed to be a dentist from Bozeman had been arrested for joyriding. Peruna was the medicine of the day for puny girls, Clemo for arthritis, Electric Bitters for female troubles, and Dr. King’s New Life Pills for those times when a lazy liver and sluggish bowels made a man so despondent he wanted to die.
In San Francisco, Jack Johnson, the Negro with gold teeth and a scarlet racing car and white women, trained for his Independence Day prizefight with James Jeffries. Poor Jeffries had been coaxed out of retirement to pummel his three-hundred-pound body into something white that could silence the yappity cuckolding black man, but it wouldn’t work. He would lie bruised and bleeding at the end, and his fans would race out all over the country to redress the insult by spilling blood.
In Colorado, a fifteen-year-old white brawler named William Harrison Dempsey was bathing his face and hands in a secret putrid brine, making them into leather for the days ahead. This wasn’t in the newspapers.
When Jerry stepped off the huffing train at Cut Bank, the first person he spoke to was Vivian McQuarry, the woman he would live with for forty-one years.
She stood near a tall democrat wagon, the locator’s wagon, in a white shirtwaist and long slim skirt. Her chocolate-colored hair was in a puffy chignon, and she had a flat straw hat perched atop it. The clouds had lifted and scattered. Vivian held her hat against a stiff little breeze. A slim-shouldered man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles bent with her over a map.
“Are you here to be located?” Jerry asked them. They looked up. The man nodded. The woman gave a happy ironic smile. “I’d give a lot to be located,” she said. She had rosy skin, a wide smile, grave black eyebrows.
They laughed together at the strange new word, made introductions all around. Vivian McQuarry and her brother George, from Cleveland. Jerry Malone from the outskirts of Saint Paul.
The locator was a rabbity man with a big official plat book. He wore a suit and gumbo-crusted work boots. He collected their twenty dollars, made pencil notations, explained that tomorrow’s trip would be north of town. Prime country.
A decade later, during the bad time between them, Jerry and Vivian would wonder if they would have been so instantly alert to each other had they not been new people in a new place.
They would think that they had, perhaps, been predisposed to be exhilarated by each other because they were travelers then and were seeing everything with the seizing eyes of adventurers.
Jerry became, the moment Vivian saw him, as enchanted and familiar to her as her engraved dream of her long-dead father, which was actually just two impeccable images: one of him lifting her laughing aproned mother a few inches off the floor; the other of his strong young hand on a straight razor, drawing the edge along his stretched jawline.
Vivian struck Jerry—as she stood with one hand on her hat, the other on the wagon that would take her to her own land—as the very antithesis of the ordinary; a ravishingly odd woman who could keep him surprised the rest of his life.
It would occur to both of them later that the secret to the kind of love that beats the heart is to somehow keep yourself, in your mind, a traveler. That way, you don’t make the mistake of wishing for an earlier version of a husband or wife, when what you really want is yourself when you were in motion.
In creaking voices, homesteaders tell their stories to earnest young people with tape recorders. Sometimes you will hear in the background, as they pause to pick their words, the restless whine of someone down a carpetless hall.
Will they tell you what the countryside looked like, or the train station, or how many people were at the train station, or what the weather was? No. That is for us to imagine. They will tell you instead about the smell of a neighbor woman’s perfume at a country dance, about a Gros Ventre man in braids and a city hat at the Havre station, or the smell of burning cow chips on a fall day. They will remember the glowing newness of a neighbor’s hand pump, the pretty pink gums of their young dog, a hamper filled with the bread they had baked in Minnesota. And a hot plate wrapped in woolen underwear for a father’s rheumatism, the way a cook spit on a restaurant stove to test it, oil of cloves on a wound, strung cranberries on a Christmas bush, thousands of tiny red bugs in a pail of reservoir water, the taste of a rabbit pie.
They would write in their diaries: Planted twenty acres of flax with help of Johnson boys. Or, Copper wash kettle arrived today. But a woman might recall, most vividly of all, the way a neighbor kissed her before he went back East to retrieve a young wife. A man might remember digging a well and going so deep that stars appeared in the tiny circle of sky above.
The sound of a wolf. The uncanny greenish color of oncoming hail. The smells: raw lumber, tar paper, cut flax, the exhaust of the store owner’s automobile. The wet warmth of a chinook emerging from an arch of dark clouds.
For Vivian and Jerry, it was bare ground that finally stood still, a wide vault of sky, some small new buildings with large spaces between them, the smell of raw lumber, and a cartoonishly high wagon with two long wobbly benches.
The locator pointed north toward the line that separated vast ground from vast sky.
“I’m here to locate you,” he promised.
The locator’s horse nudged Jerry hard in the back as they all huddled over a map and knocked him against Vivian and George. Jostled them all for a minute. The map crackled. Jerry smiled and gently pushed the horse’s head back. “Beasts,” he said gallantly. “Brain the size of a gopher’s.”
They ate at the Beanery, a long raw building near the station. Long-cooked stringy beef, mashed potatoes, beets from jars, bread, pie. Jerry and George bent their heads over the maps again. George’s face was flushed with excitement.
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They all took rooms at the new and boxy Metropolitan Hotel, where they put all their luggage and crates, and then in the morning the three of them met the locator at his high-seated wagon with its wheels that were almost as tall as they were and its two long seats, placed high for the long view.
The cart lurched and moved, and the horses quickly fell into a brisk walk that kept everything bobbing and moving. They headed north, leaving the scramble of Cut Bank’s buildings behind. North and north in the bleached light for six miles. They kept to the grass along rutted wagon tracks. Occasionally they passed or caught sight of a shack out there on the grass. Occasionally they passed a field of blue flax. But mostly they saw prairie, prairie, tinged green, moving blankly in the breeze.
They stopped and the locator affixed some stakes to the ground and made a notation in his book. And they moved farther east and he affixed some more. One half section for Vivian. One half for George. One half for Jerry. They looked at each other and burst into full laughs.
Jerry had brought bread and cheese and dried beef, and they had dinner in the growing dark in the grass. The wind had stopped, a moon would be out, there were lanterns for the wagon, there seemed no huge hurry. They were located.
They traveled in the silver-lined dark toward the tiny winking gaslights of town. Not a dense line of them. Just there, there, there.
The homes of their childhood had been planted and close. Old brick and painted wood. Shade trees. Canaries in draped cages.
Here, the moon rode the sky, the stars shivered, Halley’s leaped across the horizon. The wind rippled the grass; the clouds moved in small, liquid herds, breaking and re-forming. Small animals flickered. All of it was light and silver and moving.
They trapped rainwater and bought more in Cut Bank for fifty cents a barrel. George hauled it out once a week in a wagon. It was straight from the Cut Bank River and the color of pale rust by midsummer. A Russian thistle grew by the back door of Vivian’s shack. She thought it was handsome, so she drew a cupful of her precious water every day and watered it—the tall spiky purple-topped thistle that would make all the farmers so miserable in another few years.
Looking back, Vivian would see that she had been a fool about a simple weed. But at the time, the thistle was a discovery. Bending to trickle copper-colored water over it, she thought to herself, I shall make the prairie bloom!
George got a typesetting job at the Pioneer Press and spent weeknights in town at the Metropolitan. He brought Vivian a cat she named Manx. Manx had begun his life as a cat named Cotton. A year earlier, Cotton’s nine-year-old mistress had cut off the cat’s tail with her mother’s butcher knife. Not all at once either. In inches. He left the house shortly after that and hung around the Beanery, where they fed him, and then he went to live with Vivian in her little ship on the grass.
She strained her fifty-cent water, boiled it, boiled her clothes and rinsed them and blued them and wrung them and hung them to dry. The boards of her shack began to shrink, and she stuffed the cracks with catalogues and rags against the winter. She cut up the rabbits George brought her, cooked them, canned them. She made soap in the early mornings when it was still cool.
She helped Azalia Newcombe, three miles north, thrash her crop of navy beans. They stood on the roof of the chicken coop, two women in their twenties, and poured the beans into a tub on the ground below so the wind could comb the chaff away.
She named her homestead Flax View because Jerry Malone had planted a field of flax and she liked to watch it waving blue in the sun.
They didn’t know anything then—had no idea what the soil and the weather and the fates had in store for them. They lived in their shacks on the edges of great patches of soft-blue flax, a shade of blue that would always be, for Vivian and for many others, the color of possibility.
On the last weekend in August, George and Vivian McQuarry, Jerry Malone, and scores of other homesteaders and townspeople drove their buckboards and wagons to Round Lake, north of Cut Bank, for a big picnic. The lake was the only substantial body of water for many miles in any direction. It was perfectly round without a bush or tree on its banks. It glimmered blankly, naked and prehistoric.
These were the kinds of people who looked at such blankness and saw something green, planted, producing. There was talk of building a pavilion for shade, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that pavilion on a summer night not so many years thence, when the sky would be the color of lilacs and the band would be playing and the sound would carry through air made windless and soft for the occasion. They would have earned something like that: music on a soft summer night.
The air held the smoke of burning pine trees a hundred, two hundred miles west in the mountains, and of the grass fires in the eastern part of the state. The fires would burn themselves out, out of sight somewhere. No one was panicked. Today was a picnic. It had been a good summer, and the crowd was buoyant.
Look at them. How young they are! How rosy and cheerful. The men still have their city slouches. They wear the suits they wore on the train west. They don’t know how to handle their horses or their farm equipment. Everything is still an experiment. Some of them politely scan the crowd for possible wives; for someone’s sister who may have come out on the train. Everyone, man and woman, wears a hat.
Ten miles to the west, a fence runs along the Blackfeet reservation. The Indians have been put behind it somewhere.
A few children duck between the adults, ice cream smeared on their faces. A six-piece band sets itself up. Blankets are spread on the slick grass, the corners anchored with hampers and rocks. The women carry parasols. Their hands are still smooth.
Roderick Adams has brought a couple of cases of his homemade beer, and some of the men are drinking it. One of them climbs onto a buckboard and offers a toast to the first summer in God’s country. Beers and hats and parasols lift skyward.
The band is a little rusty at first, but smooths out. It’s the first music most of the crowd has heard in months. They play all the familiar tunes.
When they start “Red Wing,” a few people raise their heads quizzically, trying to think why it makes them pause. Then someone mentions the boy on the train and his infernal harmonica, and a small cry goes up. Stop! they plead with the band, laughing. We’ve heard enough “Red Wing” to last us the rest of our earthly lives. The sun is red.
Jerry Malone stands with two other men, smoking. Vivian watches him. He lifts his head to watch her too, and they wait a few moments to turn their heads away.
They look around at the crowd and all the space stretching beyond them, the wind-ruffled lake and the children wading at its edge. They keep their eyes away from the sun, which looks like a wound through the smoke, and concentrate on the people around them. On how happy everyone is.
4
THE REVEREND Franklin Malone died in the spring of 1912 after he cut himself with a dirty penknife while repairing a hinge on the cellar door. The poison set in, and he was gone in four days. When he realized he would not continue to live, he had an attack of pure panic and had to be tied for a few hours to the bedstead before he found acceptance.
For a man of the cloth, he held surprisingly substantial savings. His three children—Carlton, Daisy Lou, and Jerry—each got $2,000, and Mattie, his wife, got $3,000. Carlton sent Jerry’s share to him out in Montana and gave Mattie’s to her, but he appropriated Daisy Lou’s to invest in stocks and bonds, at first with her blessing and later without.
For two years, she had been making plans to move to New York and embark on her musical career—her old friend Lelia had even offered her a cot in her small apartment until Daisy could find a room of her own—but she did not want to go, to face all those auditions, until she had a repertoire of four arias and six recital songs and a better grasp of French and Italian.
Then her father’s unexpected death and her mother’s need of her made a definite departure date impossible to fix. Also, Carlton would not hand over her inheritance, so there she was, stuck in
a sleepy tree-canopied town on the edge of Saint Paul.
Carlton, at twenty-six, was a businessman, a drinker, and a gambler. He had a wife and two young children, but spent many of his evenings with a Minneapolis actress who had a taste for clothes and travel.
There is a photograph dated August 4, 1913, about a year after Franklin Malone’s death. The names are written on the back in Daisy Lou’s looping hand. The people in it—there are seven—appear to be propped up by the starches and trussings of their clothes. You could faint and your clothes would keep you upright. It looks that way, doesn’t it?
Taking a photograph was such a formal and lengthy undertaking that the subjects felt called upon to present a self that was not frivolous or ephemeral. And so they did, and that is what is touching. That they felt it was possible to do that. It’s in their faces. They believe, absolutely, that there is something of them that outlasts the moment, runs under it like a river.
Mattie Malone feels a deep heaviness in her chest as she holds herself unblinking for the camera’s shocking flash. The absence of her husband makes her heart ache badly on family occasions like this. Without him, she has difficulty identifying the version of herself that belongs to posterity. What we get is a short, round, dark-haired lady with a mouth that is set and petulant. Her plump hands grasp a dark folded fan.
Since her husband’s death, Mattie has suffered from vague and frequent seizures of the heart and stomach. She is having one at the moment, in fact, and will go to her high-pillowed bed immediately after the photographer is finished.
There are cousins in the photograph. An uncle too, and an aunt. And Carlton, large and vested, and Daisy Lou, her eyes focused theatrically on something distant and off to the side. Jerry is not there. He came home for his father’s funeral, then left again.
Daisy Lou still looks like the girl who went to New York three years earlier to see the comet. The only difference is a faint new line of tension between her eyes, barely discernible in the photo, which stems from her mother’s attacks of heart and stomach and from her own artist’s nerves. Also from the absence of her father, who doted on her and whose death sometimes feels to her as if a supporting hand has been removed from the small of her back.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 4