Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Monty sensed something arduous ahead. But when he stepped in to where she had taken up her station, the only thing new was that her windup Victrola had been moved to front and center, its morning-glory horn expectantly aimed their way.

  “Today I have something I want you to hear, Mister Rathbun—do you suppose it would be all right if I call you Monty? It would save some on the world’s supply of breath that I’m eternally after you about.”

  His short-measure nod. He still was trying to come up with an educated guess as to what this was about. Stand around and listen today, after standing around chasing through the scale those other days? Am I ever going to get to just sing?

  Vigorously she cranked the phonograph and set the needle onto the record. Out poured a profound bass sound as if the foundations of Heaven were shifting; Chaliapin in Boris Godunov. Monty appeared ready to take to the hills.

  “Whoops, not that one,” Susan said with a chuckle. She grabbed the intended record from the imposing stack on the sideboard. More whirls of the phonograph handle, and a voice soared high and clear:

  “Let us break bread together on our knees,

  Let us break bread together on our knees.

  When I fall down on my knees

  With my face to the rising sun,

  Oh Lord, have mercy on me.”

  She cut the song off there with a practiced pass of her hand over the Victrola and looked at Monty to judge his reaction. He felt dry-mouthed as he managed to say, “It’s nice.” He hoped to everything that it was Roland Hayes. If there was more than one spiritual singer like that in the world, he had might as well go back to polishing car fenders right now.

  She divulged that the voice was Hayes’s as if it should be obvious even to the snoozing cat over there, and talked on a bit about the fullness of that voice, the technical polish on a natural purple tone. “Now we’re going to pick up the trick from him.”

  Another spirited winding of the Victrola, but this time she hovered over it, putting her finger lightly against the edge of the turntable as it spun. Slowed down that way, the voice on the record became a stately warble.

  “There,” Susan said cagily, Monty still listening with the desperation of a man trying to decipher pig Latin. “Hear what he’s doing, inside the words? I’ll play it again. Here, this part.”

  This time he could catch it all:

  “Leht uss brayke brehd toogehthur . . .”

  “Our Mister Hayes e-nun-ci-ates,” he could hear every pore of every letter the way she said it, “doesn’t he. He’s shaping the words, there in the vowels for instance—each word carries into the next and brings the melody right along with it. Now then. I’d like you to copy him at it until you catch the knack.” Wind wind wind, went her hand on the Victrola handle.

  “Sing along with that machine while you make it logey, that’s what you want done?”

  “Only if you’re not shy to be around a voice that knows what it’s doing.”

  She had him by his pride now. Keyed up, he stepped over there and put his voice over Hayes’s as she slowed the record. They tried it again and again and again. It was a lot harder than a person would think. He could keep in tandem with Hayes for a line or two, enunciating for all he was worth, but his air would not hold through the whole verse. Finally Susan looked over at the clock and although it was not yet time for the tea-and-honey break, she declared it to be. She covered her concern—What is there to try next?—with kitchen clatter and determined conversation, Monty pitching in a word here and there when utterly necessary.

  Turnabout came when they were down to their last sips. Out of nowhere, Monty inquired: “Miss Susan, excuse my asking, but you’re on your own, aren’t you? Far as family goes, I mean?”

  “A raft of shirttail relatives over toward Glasgow, but we don’t keep in touch. I don’t have anyone left other than that, why?”

  He was slow to answer. “It fits with the sort of thing I been thinking about, is all.”

  “And what’s that when it’s at home?”

  He settled his cup into its saucer. “Been wondering if it does something to us. People who are in their own company pretty much, I mean. We get to trying things to keep ourselves busy, nobody around to say us nay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a quality I wouldn’t trade and probably you neither. But maybe sometimes it makes us bite off more than we can chew, you think?”

  Susan studied him before answering. He was quick-witted, she had caught on to, although he stood around in front of that capacity until he absolutely had to let it show. Today’s Victrola venture hadn’t been a cure for the internal shortcomings of his vocal ability, and he was right to be skeptical of it. As she was right to be persistent.

  “I think it’s better to bite big than to be bitten,” she stated, rising out of her chair. “Let’s get back at it.”

  The rest of the morning they slogged on, Susan applying rudiments as if they were poultices and Monty the leery patient. At last, weary of working at getting air into the man, Susan went to the piano. “All right, we can both stand a change. Let’s try ‘Moses’ once with accompaniment and see what happens.”

  He hung back to the other side of the room.

  She took her hands off the keys. “What is it now?”

  “I haven’t ever sang with a piana.”

  She made sure her expression gave nothing away, but the mental list had unscrolled. Good grief, in so many ways he still was at the level of her elementary pupils.

  “Surely you’re not afraid of a musical instrument.”

  “Afraid, who said that? But . . . how do I go about it?”

  The piano music startled Dolph where he was puttying the weathered sash of a kitchen window. Monty’s voice thundered out sometimes atop the notes and sometimes not, the song lifting uncertainly over the valley.

  A LETTER for you, Mister Williamson.”

  Here? “Popular, am I. Thank you, Jenkins.” Wes plucked the envelope from the deskman’s hand and went on in past the oil portraits of one titan of learning after another, their own expressions carefully fixed in the obligation unto eternity to present the face of Harvard to heathen New York. Not until he reached the quiet library, deepest recess of the club, did he hurriedly slit open the envelope with his penknife.

  Her handwriting leapt to him, from love letters now consigned to ashes.

  Dear Wes—

  I thought you were due some accounting of our pupil, and it seemed best to send it to your lunch lair.

  You will be pleased to hear we have made some strides, or rather, I have pushed and Monty has progressed in some steps. Some, I emphasize; less so in others. His vocal range is improving, although of course not yet as much as it ultimately must. His tone remains his strongest point. In presentation, he no longer stands as if he were made of warped barrel staves. All in all, after these first weeks, I can say Monty is in better possession of his voice. But his voice is not yet in possession of him, which is the breakthrough for a true singer.

  You are missing quite the contest. He is a striver. Amenable, to a point, and stubborn as a stump beyond that. (He will not hear of using a music stand, insisting it flusters him to have that in his face. Besides, he indignantly tells me, his memory is good enough for a few songs.) Unfortunately he seems invincibly convinced that the lungs installed in him at birth are adequate, but I am determined to build him up, there in the solar plexus and below. The flag of this expedition you have set us upon, Wes, reads not “Excelsior!” but “Exercises!”

  I must talk to you when you venture to our neck of the woods again. I presume that may be soon? It is the buzz of the countryside (I’m told) that you have bought the Two Medicine & Teton Railroad. The TM&T added to the Double W—at this rate, you will possess the entire lower end of the alphabet.

  I will leave you with a scene of how our days go, Monty’s and mine. Yesterday when I demonstrated a note in the uppermost range that I wanted him to practice, he balked.

  “Can’t reach that high one,�
� says he.

  “Monty, lacking proof that you can’t, assume that you can,” say I.

  “Just can’t,” he is adamant. “Sorry.”

  Such a look as I gave him. Then sprang to my feet and dragged a straightbacked chair in from the kitchen and climbed up on it. “This,” I intoned down to him, “is a high note.” I then sang a perfectly normal lower C. “All others are within reach without a chair.”

  It has been a lovely spring here in the Two, but is now turning dry.

  Sincerely, Susan

  Wes assessed the unexpected flow of words from her. Soon, yes, but not soon enough he would be back out there, over Merrinell’s fretful protest and the plaints of his daughters, who had their incipient debutante hearts set on a European summer. Some more rounds of pacifying, another spate of promising, and he would be able to head west in relatively clear conscience.

  He checked the clock ticking discreetly in the corner of the library. He was late for his lunch with Phil Sherman, but Phil was always late himself, entangled one sinuous way or another. He winced, catching himself being envious of his oldest friend. A bachelor who was also a theatrical producer evidently had innumerable affairs to tend to, some more fair-haired than others. “Surely you remember your Mendeleyev from chem, Wes,” Phil had said after Wes spotted him at the latest war orphans’ benefit with a chorus girl as leggy as a racehorse. “Chorine is the element I’ve added to the Periodic Table.”

  That would do for some people, Wes supposed. Unfolding Susan’s letter again, he ran his eyes down it as if it were a balance sheet. The lowdown on Monty’s vocal status could be more heartening and could be less. It was her remark about buying his way through the alphabet that nettled him. Susan, Susan, you don’t have to pour it on. She was supposing that he had set his sights on the TM&T—“the Empty,” he knew people called it, not that he cared—only because it ran from Valier, the Double W’s handiest shipping point these days, to the mainline at Conrad; another cattle baron grab, another annex to the House of Williamson. True as far as it went, but motives seldom know pure boundaries. What if I were to tell you, Susan, that this is more like an old military maneuver—shaking the blanket to get rid of the cooties.

  He rubbed his temples with a shielding hand, trying to rid his head of the tensions of last night. In the ever-flowering wilderness of progress, a person now did not even have to leave his favorite chair to visit the battleground of politics. (Election years were always going to be the hardest, he knew. When a spell like last night’s came, he missed participation in politics as if a basic sense had been ripped from him, touch or smell or speech.) He had sat up until the bitter end listening to radio voices describe the Democratic nominating convention tying itself in knots over the Klan. The Smith and McAdoo factions would go back to endless balloting again today, deadlocked over a simple resolution against the bigotry which everyone knew went under the initials KKK. The Republicans hadn’t really been any better, standing by that mute fool Coolidge, successor to that incoherent fool Harding. Very much, Wes wished he had Susan in front of him instead of her all too representative letter. She could joke all she wanted, but in times like these he was the one who had to face what the Two Medicine & Teton was likely to carry other than cattle. Word had it that railway workers were the web on which the Klan was spreading itself through Montana, the skunkholes called Klaverns by all reports in forty counties by now. The sneaking bastards. He wasn’t having that in the Two Medicine country. He would need to clean and gut the little railroad, fire every one of them, and have the sheriff kick them to the county line if that’s what it took.

  Like the mills of the gods, the drivewheels of faith sometimes could grind exceeding fine, and Wes took what satisfaction there was in that. He tucked the letter away. Wouldn’t Phil Sherman relish this railway venture, a homely little set of tracks as an excursion for exquisite banter. “But this is perfect for a Galahad like you, Wes,” he could all but recite the conversation to come at lunch, “a chance to operate a railroad as something other than organized robbery of the public.” “Yes, Phil, and I’ll maintain it by passing the hat here in the club.” (But he thought he would not make the case, even to Phil, about the railroad as necessary angle-iron against the Ku Kluxers; as a Catholic cautiously let in to Phil’s natural Gold Coast set at Harvard, Wes had learned considerably more than was in the curriculum.) The two of them would spar from there—the East tended to be a sparring match; the West always was a wrestle—and he knew it was time, past time, to go on up now for asparagus and epigrams.

  Yet he still could not bring himself to move from the spot in the library, pinned there by too much memory. He did not often let himself be like this, but the mood had come today as sudden and inescapable as the flip of a card out of the deck. The jack of spades, another of Susan’s teasing tags for him whenever she caught him trying to see around himself to both sides of his life; but at moments like this, he figured he amounted to nothing more than the jack of clubs. A little over four years ago, the evening in Helena, at the Montana Club. He had sat in a deep leather chair very much like this one, gazing in perplexity at the man from the other wing of the party, a bald timeserver known for doing exceptionally little in the legislature except carrying out the mining cartel’s bidding. “Pull out? You can count on precisely the opposite. When I’m governor I’ll make this state so hot for you, you and the copper boys will need to go around in furnace pants.”

  “Wes, Wes,” the politico chided. He put down beside Wes’s brandy glass a newspaper clipping.

  Miss Susan Duff, Helena’s renowned alto, will give a recital this evening at the Missoula Atheneum for the benefit of the Over There memorial in France, where so many of Montana’s men at arms lie. . . .

  That was followed with the receipt for the Missoula hotel room where she joined him for the night. Under Wes’s staring eyes, the man crumpled the two pieces of paper and flipped them into the fireplace. “Naturally, there’s more where that came from.”

  Most of a continent and a career away from that now, Wes smiled wanly to himself. At himself. That damned henchman had spoken more truth than he knew. There still was a multiplicity, written down and not, where that came from.

  OVER THERE

  · 1919 ·

  “HALLO, AMIS!” The not combative how-do-you-do had wafted across the few hundred yards of battered ground between the Germans’ trench and his men as they were digging in. “Woher kommt Ihr?”

  “Aus Montana, Fritz,” a buck private fresh off a potato farm in the Gallatin Valley cupped his hands and shouted back. “Wir sind Rocky Mountain buckaroos.”

  “Aus dem wilden Westen? Habt Ihr ‘six-shooters’ wie Old Shatterhand und Winnetou?”

  “Nein, nein! Fur Euch Hunnen genügt ein!”

  At the time Wes laughed helplessly. If only the conduct of war did match up with Karl May’s dashing pages of prairie shoot-’em-ups as imagined from the woods along the Rhine, and if only one bullet per Hun were enough.

  The enemy’s attentiveness to newcomers in the stale flat-footed killing match that was the Western Front was understandable: Montanans were the mould for reinvented soldiers, American Expeditionary Force–style—hunters from the time they were boys on ranches and homesteads, well acquainted with shovel calluses and dirty chores and rough quarters. Most of all, not worn down as the Europeans and British were by the routine of trench life, which was mud and rats and boredom interspersed by the warning whizzes of every caliber of weapon known to man. Wes remembered thinking that Company C handled better that day, their first in the frontlines, than they ever did on the grumblesome troopship or in the poker-wild disembarkation camp, and that sort of thought had told him he was thoroughly an officer once more. At the time, of course, only newly commissioned as an old captain, not yet a young major; but back in command comfortably enough. “Sergeant, instruct Private Imhoff to limit his conversations with the other side,” he had issued the order to keep matters rolling his way, before jauntily setting off
to inspect the remainder of the position. Not twenty minutes later, a salvo screamed in on the Montana battalion. He and Lieutenant Olsen had to make themselves thin together behind a shared snag of a tree, shrapnel whining sharp as a singing saw.

  * * *

  A year and a half ago? Was that really all?

  To keep warm, Wes paced back and forth on the fresh wood of the parapet the French government had installed for visitors to the battlefield, of whom he was privileged to be the first. Luck of the draw, if you count mortality tables as any kind of luck. Forcing that thought back into its den, he made himself concentrate on the now quiet spectacle in front of him, the vast empty butcherworks that had been his second war in one lifetime. Cuba, the fabled rough riding there, had been just that—a short dangerous jilt-jolt canter and over with—compared to the herd gait of death here. From habit he traced the lineaments of even this dread landscape with the care of a geographer. Somehow still lethal now that they were ghostly, the trenches gashed for miles in both directions through the once rustic valley like vicious whims of an earthquake; somehow worse because they were man-made.

  Perhaps because it was the one piece of contested earth anywhere around that vaguely held its original shape, Wes made it known he would like to go up onto the hill. The French military attaché was solicitous about whether Monsieur Williamson would wish to walk that far, which meant whether he could. Wes glanced at the officer’s own mark of the war, a monocle worn derisively over an unseeing left eye—glass the fitting companion for glass, n’est-ce pas?—and said he would be all right. Then he set off up Dead Man’s Hill with the Frenchman.

  Actually he was surprised that the only thing he could not manage so far, this first time back, was the weather. November, peeled raw by the wind. Naturally the French had wanted this to coincide with the anniversary of the Armistice. No reason for the weather not to be coldly seasonal too, and toward Verdun he could see clouds building from the ground up. Gauzy gray heaps common to low country, nothing like the flat-bottomed floes shaved white by coming over the Rockies. Wes had a moment of wondering what Karl May did about prairie sky.