Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  In mid-swipe at the next offending floorboard she froze. Motion and furriness where none should be, in the open doorway.

  She jerked her head up as the ragged ball of gray settled into cat pose, at ease on its haunches, ready to be waited on.

  “You’re prompt,” Susan addressed it, “wherever you’ve been mooching previous to now.”

  The cat licked its chops remindfully.

  “Shoo. Scoot now. There’s not a drop of milk, canned or by the squirt, on the premises yet. Later.” She dipped her fingers in the bucket and flicked washwater at the cat, which flinched, thought matters over, and stalked out.

  The vagrant cat dispatched, she made herself simmer down and take stock of what all else needed doing to make the place livable. Except for the want of a door, the house was still in one piece, at least. Windows were filthy, the years of grime and fly life on them, but they would feel washwater before the day was out. The roof seemed sound, although she knew the test of that would arrive with the first cloudburst down out of the Rockies. Other necessities for her stay here—the pump at the well outside that gaping doorway, the cookstove and stovepipe, the outhouse—she had found to be cranky with age but in working order. By nightfall, assuming that Whit Williamson’s roustabouts didn’t tip over in a coulee with her truckload of promised furniture on the rutted road into here, she would be installed in a reasonably presentable household or keel over in the attempt.

  So, about to be all in, one way or another, here she was, intrigued with this familiar old stranger of a place one minute and very nearly terminally exasperated with it the next. It served her right, she knew she would need to admit to the diary, if this interminable day ever produced a night to sit down in.

  “Why me, though?” she had tackled Wes after the day at the Gates of the Mountains. “Male music teachers exist, scads of them.”

  Always one for fine points, Wes could be seen honing his reply before he offered it. “You have edge, and I mean that as a compliment. If Monty is going to be serious about this singing, it’ll do him good to see how you bear down on things.”

  “I can apply ‘edge,’ as you more or less nicely put it, as well here in Helena as on the North Fork, Wes.”

  “Helena has its distractions. I don’t want Monty’s head bothered by anything except toeing the line for you.”

  She fathomed that there was more to it than that: discretion, for Wes’s sake one more weary time, and her own if that mattered anymore, and poor dark Montgomery Rathbun’s as well. Everything of Wes’s, said and unsaid, could be truer than true and for her this still was a flit out the coop door that happened to have peeped open. The well-furnished solitude of the weeks ahead she could not bring herself to pass up. A chance to catch up and reflect, and, with enough piano time and lined paper, to woo her operetta to completion at last. After all, she pointed out to herself with a rueful twitch of her lips, music is the only lust you can do justice by yourself.

  And all the while obligated only to one pupil, the likes of which she had never had in all her teaching, instead of the ceaseless succession of Helena muffets and their impresario mothers. But the pupil it is? An academy of music here just for him? Never mind the impenetrable head of Wes, have I gone out of mine? Every kind of doubt applied, despite her best efforts to send them on their way. Absconded to New York meanwhile, Wes had, to spend time in the shallow bosom of his marriage. Susan allowed herself a vixen smile over that, but her mood returned as she had to stoke up the reluctant old stove to heat a bucket of rinse water.

  Before the next bout of scrubbing, she stepped outside and took her leisure at the perimeter of the yard, idly whacking cockleburrs and nettles out of her way with a stick. Nearby, the creek ducked past behind its stand of diamond willows, plump at their ends with bud-break. A well-behaved school of white clouds coasted over the highest peaks to the west. Door or no door, Susan conceded, she at least had lucked into the picture-perfect time of the North Fork valley, with wild hay surging in the bottomland along the creek and fresh grass on the buttes and foothills that tilted the valley to the spring sun. On a day such as this when the clear air was a delicate shellac on every detail of each gray-blue pillaring cliff, the mountains castled up even closer than she had remembered over the Duff homestead and the dozen other deserted ones of Scotch Heaven.

  Green-stained stick in her hand, Susan stood stock-still for a minute and listened with all her might.

  The silence. Eloquent of the space, of the reach of country here along the footings of the Rockies, the cathedral-rise of the continent into the blue stillness of sky, the prairie unrolling from the other horizon like Bedouin tarpaulin.

  Her ears took in the solitude while her mind stayed busy with the comings and goings of the dead and the momentarily absent. This place’s traffic of presences, of one shade or another. Not that she at all believed in the specter world, but right now she rather wished she was capable of it. Ghosts ought to be interesting company, she reasoned, particularly here. Not gauzy visitors who popped out of walls and gabbed when least expected; she could do without those. But why shouldn’t leftover spirits, to call them that, constitute a kind of echo of the soul, lingering tunelike in the air after life was gone? A nocturne, she wouldn’t be surprised: ruminative, tending toward melancholy—after all, the poor things are no longer the freshest notes in the musical arrangement, are they—yet with a serenade melody that would not leave the mind. Chopin, she decided, pensive a moment herself; Chopin surely would be the court musician of eternity’s nightsingers. She wished her piano were here; the opening passage of her favorite of his pieces had found its way into her fingers and wanted out right then.

  It took no real prompting to remind herself that she currently had enough concerns dealing with the living. To name the closest to mind—she lopped the head off a thistle with opinionated vigor—Whit Williamson, mastermind of trespassing cows. But bright and early tomorrow the matter would become Montgomery Rathbun, showing up here expecting to trade a chauffeur’s polishing rag for the velvet stage curtains of Carnegie Hall. For better or worse, Scotch Heaven would have the human voice back in it tomorrow.

  She listened again, as if her life depended on it.

  Again, nothing met her ear but the cockleshell ring of silence. Instead, memory hinted behind her eyes everywhere her glance lit. Her mother, plump as a hen, forever there in the front room used for gatherings, trilling one of the songs of the old country with Donald and Jen Erskine or grandly matching installments of poetry with Angus McCaskill. Her father, whiskers down his chest, striding off up the slope to the scattered band of woolies with the fatalistic tread of that first keeper of sheep who ever came to grief, Abel. And Samuel. Oh God of my father, where in the tune of things is there any explanation of Samuel?

  She squared her shoulders and went back in to where the scrub brush waited.

  * * *

  The sparkplugs lay in two rows on a clean gunnysack rag spread along the runningboard of the Duesenberg, like soldiers formed up on a tan field for the changing of the guard.

  Monty fingered the new ones with respect, intrigued as he always was by the notion of bits of fire igniting gasoline in the cylinder heads. He twirled each fresh sparkplug into its place in the rank atop the engine, tightening down just so with a socket wrench. Try as he would, though, to confine himself to what his hands were doing, his mind insisted on going like sixty. You are stark crazy, a man your age, ran one line of self-argument about this notion of trying to turn himself into a singer at this stage of life. The other camp just as vigorously pointed out that a man gets in a rut, and the next thing you know, that rut is six feet deep and there’s an epitaph over it.

  So, try high or lay low. Things seemed to be going his way so far, quite the deal if he did say so himself. Hadn’t the music teacher agreed to take him on? Wasn’t the Major peeling off the money to cover it? But in each case, he had to wonder exactly why they were giving him a hand up like this. As he’d heard said in the Zanzibar
, you could never be sure whether what white folks were passing you was pepper or fly grunt.

  Overly picky, his mother would have called that sort of thinking. He extracted the last grimy sparkplug and spun a fresh one in. There. Firing on all cylinders. That’s where I better get myself to. His engine work finished, he washed up and then applied Bag Balm to his hands to keep them nice, wishing he had something similar for his voice and for that matter the rest of the inside of his head. Tomorrow already he had to start lessons from the woman. Rubbing the balm in and in, he stood there beside the long yellow car for some minutes, looking off to the prairie he had been born to, and around at the Double W ranch buildings that were such home as he had ever had. The air had that spring freshness to it, winter shaken out and packed away in last snowdrifts far up in the Rockies; the mountains this day were blue, as if lightly tinted with clean pine smoke. He loved the Two Medicine country. The question was whether it loved him back. Except when he and Dolph were doing chores together or he and the Major went on a car trip, a lot of his life here was alone, dead-dog alone. Wouldn’t get an echo back if he hollered, sometimes.

  And the opposite wasn’t a whole lot better, as far as he had found. When he was in the company of others—which, short of those rare Saturday nights when he could get to Helena, always meant white others—there were times when he still was as lone as the word could mean. Around whites, in town and so on, he had long since given up furious bewilderment for something like an exasperated wariness. Yet even that wasn’t foolproof. He always had to remember that time when he had been in at the Gros Ventre mercantile, treating himself to new leather gloves. Rodeoing had looked like it would pan out then, people coming and going in the store kidded him about the bulls giving him a day off. While he was in the back trying on gloves, the little girl of a Belgian homestead family was skipping around, cutest kid imaginable. No one but him was paying any attention when she came prancing down the store aisle to where he stood, one hand splayed in a glove and the other not. He’d had to freeze in place when she put a tiny finger to the back of his bare hand, rubbed there, and looked to see if the color had come off.

  He rubbed that spot now himself, trying to mock away the memory of that breathless moment of hell. Ten or so years ago, that must have been. And here he still was. If he knew anything by now, it was that he’d be here in the Two Medicine country forever, marooned in his own skin, if he flubbed this chance.

  Then you might as well get up on your hind legs and sing, Monty-tan-a.

  It gave him the jitters all over again, how much his mother’s sayings flew in and out of him today. And the jitters kept bumping into his other feelings. All right, he had better admit it: what it came down to was that he was a little afraid at whatever lay ahead starting tomorrow. But then, hadn’t he always needed to be a little afraid? This schooling of his voice that the woman was going to do might be a way out of that. And wouldn’t that be something.

  He petted the Duesenberg for luck.

  * * *

  “There’s a holy sight I never thought I’d see again,” the voice lilted in from the doorway, “a Duff down on knees.”

  Susan shot to her feet and raced to him, wet hands grasping him just above his elbows.

  “Angus! Hello, you!”

  More than a bit surprised to be in her grip, the angular man leaned his head back in order to thoroughly review her. Delight danced in his every feature as he did so. Angus McCaskill had always been as easy to read as a weather vane, even when she had been no more than elbow-high to him.

  “Look at you, your eyes out like organ stops,” she said fondly.

  “It’s been ages, Susan Duff.”

  “ ‘Ocean’s ebb, and ocean’s flow / Round and round the seasons go.’ There. In Mother’s name, I’ve beat you to the rhyming stuff.”

  “No fair,” Angus protested, his craggy face full of indignant amusement. “I was standing here struck dumb, and you took advantage. Besides, that wasn’t Burns, so it only counts when said on Sundays.”

  Laughing, she released him and drew him into the house with a gesture at the same time. “I was going to come up later. I knew you were still holding school.”

  “You ought to have stepped in and done a twirl. Let my not-so-model scholars lay eyes on my best pupil ever.”

  “On a spinster teacher starting to go long in the tooth, you mean.”

  “Don’t. What does that make me?” It was comically said, but she caught a glint of rue. His mustache, which came and went according to private seasons in this otherwise open man during all the time she had been one of his schoolgirls, had turned drastically gray and looked permanent now, and in the lines around his eyes she could read with clarity every one of his decades of fending here. The world and its whirls had shaken this valley empty of all the others, but he was still on the land at the top of the creek as sheepman and as teacher over at the South Fork school, the last burr clinging to the swatch of homesteads called Scotch Heaven. “You couldn’t quench Angus McCaskill with the Atlantic Ocean,” her father had often said of the nimble spirit of this man, not entirely admiration from a Calvinist.

  “And your better half?” Susan inquired, a trifle late with it. “How is Adair?”

  “Dair is gallivanting,” he responded cheerfully enough. “Varick fetched her down to Indian Head to spoil Alec for a while and keep Beth on her toes. Nothing like a grandson to draw her. And another McCaskill is on the way there, toward the end of summer.” He gave out this news the surprised way men do. “We’re becoming downright prolific.”

  Angus stopped. Family talk was a one-way conversation with Susan, the realization caught up with him. “I’m not much of a caretaker for you here, am I,” he cast a glance around, away from her. “By now I’ve worn the legs off three canine generations, dogging Double W cows out of the North Fork, and still they sneak in.” Then, giving the rectangle of sunlight where the house stood open to such creatures his consideration: “Mind you, I haven’t been asked the whereabouts of your door. But there’s one remarkably like it at Rob Barclay’s old place.”

  “Do you suppose it could find its way back here by nightfall?”

  Angus gave a grin. “I’ll see that it does. You have your work cut out for you, it looks like. I shouldn’t be keeping you from it.”

  “You’ll have coffee and a bite if I have to poke it into you,” she had him know. “My pantry is the Lizzie, at the moment. I’ll be back in two shakes.”

  He watched her go out to the automobile, striding in the scissor gait of Ninian Duff but bearing herself as if marching to drums strictly her own. The Model T which had caused pandemonium among his pupils that morning when it putt-putted past the schoolhouse, immersed itself up to its runningboard in the creek crossing, and at last crawled up the little-used North Fork road, sat now, black and pert, amid the sun-browned dilapidation of the homestead buildings. Angus shook his head, frowning, then searched for someplace to sit and settled for leaning against a tilted cupboard.

  In no time Susan swooped back into the house bearing an apple box of kitchen basics. “The bite is going to be graham crackers, it appears.” She further fished out a blue enamel coffeepot and a pair of tin sheepherder cups. Fussing with the coffee, she asked over her shoulder: “By the way, are you absent a cat?”

  “Ah, that would be Fiddle Strings,” came Angus’s answer, “Dair’s footloose mouser. He lives at all the old places, up and down the creek, except our own. If you can hold his affections you’re more than welcome to him.”

  “He’ll be company, I suppose, although his manners can stand some—”

  “Susan?” He startled her with the gravity of his voice, as if calling on her in school. “You didn’t come back to Scotch Heaven to gain a cat.”

  She looked around at him. “Would you believe, I’m here to teach singing.”

  “I did hear something of the sort. And to whom.”

  Susan could not help but give an amused snort. This had not changed. Try to do
anything on the sly in the Two Medicine country and Angus McCaskill knew it by nightfall.

  “You heard right,” she sorted her way through these words, “Wes . . . Wesley Williamson is giving him this chance.”

  “That’s a modest wonder to me,” Angus said with equal care. “Generosity from a Williamson.”

  She tended to the boiling coffee, clattered cups onto the cupboard sideboard between him and her, and set down the box of brown crackers with some force before answering. “You know and I know that Whit would kick a blind orphan out of his way. But the Major seems to have Monty Rathbun’s interests at heart, don’t ask me why. Angus, I’ve given myself a good talking-to about this, any number of times since I heard the man sing. This all may seem daffy”—she swept a gesture around at the dilapidated room, farthest thing from a proper music parlor—“but the thing worse is not to see what can be done when a voice you’d gladly give your own for comes along. There’s something there, when this Monty person stands looking like a hopeless cow chouser and then out pours the majority of a choir.”

  Angus’s expression granted all she had said, but there still was a furrow of concern on him. “Say you brush him up and push him out of where he’s always been nestled. Leading where, if you don’t mind my asking?”