Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  At last they shook hands, and the American commander was bustled around to the speaking stand. John J. Pershing exhibited a marching stride even in mounting the steps. Standing at exact mid-stage, he threw a salute to all of France and recalled the famous AEF slogan of 1917, “Lafayette, we are here”; no one had expected him to do other. A few minutes of crisp tribute, and the storied general was gone in a flurry of aides, on to the more elaborate ceremony at Verdun.

  Clergy took their turn at the podium, Susan not listening now, lost in herself until the minute the mayor sprang onto the speaking stand and held up a hand, turning all eyes to the town clock.

  Within a matter of moments, up in its mechanism some venerable laborious sledge struck a sounding iron repeatedly, one short of a dozen. Once again, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the guns had stopped.

  After a minute of silence, a single bell pealed and then doves were released, tornado of peace into the autumn sky of gray. Anyone not already crying dissolved under the band’s first notes of the Marseillaise.

  When it was over, the crowd had trouble making itself leave. Handshakes, embraces, kisses upon cheeks. Promises to keep in touch. Wes shouldered his way along the dignitary row past the awe and clinging congratulations. Now or never. He caught up with her at the archway. “You’re staying a few days, Averill tells me.”

  Eye to eye they were about the same height and so this was risky, but Susan could not resist the almost imperceptible downward glance learned from her years of reading musical scores without seeming to. His lapel, though, showed only its finely stitched self. Why on earth had he already taken the medal off? “Don’t worry, Major, I promise not to take advantage of your absence and drive the ghost of poor old Saint-Gaudens any farther into the ground. I’ll be at sessions having to do with the archive.”

  “Actually, I’m staying too. There’s a reporter from the Paris Herald who wants to do a walk-through of the battlefield with me. I merely thought—should we have dinner together?”

  “Thank you very much, no. Funny tummy,” she evaded with not the greatest grace and resented having to do so. “You and Mrs. Williamson will have to excuse me.”

  “My wife is never—she’s not well enough to travel.”

  Susan pinned a look on him that should have squashed him but didn’t appear to in the least. “This doesn’t seem right, is all,” he was saying as if working at a puzzle. “I said dinner because I thought you might want to talk.”

  “Whatever about?”

  Now he faced her with an expression so radically mixed she blinked trying to take it in. “You don’t know, then.” It came out quizzical, but what else was she hearing in his words, something as callow as relief or as profound as absolution? “Sam was my runner.”

  SAND MAP

  · 1924 ·

  A SATURDAY, whistling day for Dolph, who had a night in town ahead of him, and just another spent set of music-drill hours for Monty, the pair of them were riding back to the ranch when a dozen cows came out of the North Fork brush at a trot, and behind them an angular rider and a thoroughly employed stockdog.

  Dolph’s puckered rendition of “Pretty Redwing” evaporated. Monty knew the approaching man only to nod to; the broad rise of land between the Double W’s Noon Creek watershed and the forks of English Creek was a divide in more ways than one.

  “The very lads I’m looking for,” Angus sang out. “I have some well-traveled livestock for you.” He whistled low to the dog. “Heel them, Bobby.”

  With the border collie industriously coursing behind them as close as the tassels of their tails, the cattle raced past the paused pair of riders.

  “Helping the wayfarers on their way a bit,” Angus informed Dolph and Monty, pulling up his horse next to theirs. Keeping watch judiciously on the cows’ galloping exodus, he called the dog off. “No charge, though, for setting them into motion for you,” he told the two in a tone of extreme generosity.

  Dolph unhappily studied the jangled bunch of cattle hightailing off up the ridge in the exact opposite direction from the town of Gros Ventre and his night’s recreation. “We ain’t exactly riding for cows just now, are we, Monty.”

  “But you are drawing wages from the Double W, and the brand on these specimens looks very much like one W followed by another,” Angus’s voice had shoulder in it now. “Either you take them, or I sic Bob here”—the short-tailed dog keenly looked up when his name was mentioned—“onto them until they’re halfway to Canada.”

  Dolph rubbed his saddlehorn with the palm of his hand as if wishing for a sudden change of luck, then sent a sigh toward Monty. “I guess we better throw them in the west pasture at the wood gate.”

  “Suits me.”

  Before they could spur their horses forward, Angus had the rest of his say. “And tell the Williamsons for me my mysteriously frail north fence is about to have new posts and nice fresh barbwire. They’ll be wasting their time encouraging their bastardly cows in that direction.”

  “Mister, they don’t want to hear that sort of thing from me,” Dolph protested.

  Monty was decidedly staying out of this.

  “Maybe it doesn’t hurt to have it generally heard, then,” Angus said, keeping his gaze on the veteran Double W cowhand. “You’re lucky it’s me who caught up with you and not the incarnation of Ninian Duff.”

  “That old scissorbill.” Dolph saw the expression this brought on Angus and amended: “Excuse my French. But he was always putting the jump on me whensoever I’d ride anywhere close to the North Fork. Acted like he had this whole country in his pocket.”

  “Man, he did. The one Warren Williamson was always trying to pick.”

  “Have it your way,” Dolph muttered. “C’mon, Monty, those cows are making miles on us.”

  Angus inched his horse closer to Monty’s. “A minute of your time?”

  Now what? One bossy teacher isn’t enough for one day? But sure as the world, if he didn’t bend an ear to whatever this unbudging man had on his mind, there would be some later price to pay. “I’ll catch right up,” he told Dolph. The wizened rider looked even more put upon, but trotted off alone.

  “I don’t mean to detain you,” Angus said, doing precisely that so far as Monty could see. Elongated as he was even sitting in the saddle, the graying teacher seemed to study Monty’s face from way, way up. “How’s the songster life agreeing with you by now?”

  “Sort of seesaw, one time to the next.” Monty resented having to hedge, to someone who happened to pop out of the brush and glom on to him. What am I all of a sudden, everybody’s flypaper?

  “Brave of you, to undergo tonsil exercises when you wouldn’t have to.”

  Monty continued to meet Angus’s gaze, although it was not easy. Those agate eyes were too wise for comfort. He knew what they were taking in, a scuffed-up colored cowboy who had arrived at the middle of life but nowhere near its center. He felt the old weariness of having to deal with what he was when every face around him was pearl-handled. Why prolong the malady?

  “Tell you the truth, I’m about to bunch it. It’s just not working out.”

  “Are you not getting along with Susan Duff?”

  “It’s not that, so much.”

  Angus waited him out.

  “I’m maybe not cut out for this,” Monty finally said.

  The two men tested the taste of that for a moment. Surprise to Monty, Angus shook his head as if he wasn’t having any whatsoever. “If she says you have the goods, she’s not wrong. Monty, if I may call you that”—people had always called him whatever the hell they pleased—“when it comes to the human voice, Susan knows more in her little finger than you and I and Wesley Williamson combined. If she’s had at you this long and is still giving you a chance, man, you’re daft not to hang on to it for dear life.”

  Monty absorbed this, staying wary.

  Angus looked off up the creek. “She’s been a while gone from here.” He turned to Monty again. “I wouldn�
�t want to see her come back only to be disappointed.” Preparatory to going, he snapped his fingers above the dog, which crouched and sprang high against the leather of his chaps, and was scooped to its nestling place between lap and saddlehorn for the ride home.

  “Mister?” Monty did the detaining now. “ ‘Curious’ is a habit I never been able to break.”

  “Say on.”

  “You make it pretty plain there’s some things you don’t like about the way the Williamsons operate.”

  “Just everything about them.”

  “I take their dollar, same as Dolph there does.” Monty trailed an indicative hand down to the WW brand on the pinto flank of his horse, Angus eyeing the dark set of fingers against the snowy patch of horsehair. “And, can I put it this way, you don’t know me from a coal bucket.”

  “But I’ve known Susan Duff since she was watch-pocket high,” Angus replied. “If she’s for you, I’m never against you. Tuck that away in case it’s needed, all right?” He rode back into the cloaking brush of the North Fork, and Monty spurred away up the slope of the benchland.

  Atop, he pitched in with Dolph to round up the last of the spooked cows. When they had the cattle under control and headed for the west pasture, Dolph beelined over and let his horse fall into step with Monty’s.

  “What was that about? You going back to kiddygarden, next?”

  “He’s known Miss Susan forever. Felt he had to put me through the wringer a little on her account.”

  “Probably stuck on her himself. Scared we’ll beat his time with her.” When that didn’t bring a rise out of Monty, Dolph cleared his throat. “She’s not so bad a looker.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I bet. What would you do, though, if you was to git the chance?”

  “Do?”

  “Don’t dummy up on me here, I’m real interested,” Dolph pressed on despite the sharp glance from Monty. “Say she sort of gave you the eye. Answer me that now, just what would you do?”

  In no way did Monty like this territory of talk. Dolph and the other Double W hands could trot into Gros Ventre any Saturday night and have their needs taken care of by a bottle-blonde whore upstairs at Wingo’s speakeasy, while that was out of the question for him. Clore Street or nothing, for him, and that sort of trip to Helena wasn’t anywhere in the picture until the Major had enough of New York, and why did Dolph have to start yapping about this anyway?

  “Dolph, the woman is teaching me singing, is all. That’s as far as it can go.”

  “Aw, I was only trying to be sociable, Snowball. Excuse me all to hell if I tromped on your toes.”

  I DON’T quite know what to make of this, Susan resorted to the diary immediately after supper a few nights later, but somehow we got off onto Wes today. It was mainly Monty’s instigation, and it threw me for a loop. We had reached our daily stage of tea and honey—I administer it as a kind of soothing syrup when we hit a certain level of frustration—when he looked at me over the lip of his cup and asked:

  “If the Major ever gets back here, you think he’ll figure he’s getting his money’s worth on me?”

  I answered to the effect that Major Williamson can afford any price we could ever cost him. Monty’s expression told me he was not remotely satisfied with that, so I added that really, he needn’t worry, the Major had no shortage of either funds or hope for this musical endeavor of ours.

  He wagged his head as if considering that and after a moment said:

  “Well, he is a praying man, even if he can’t get down on his prayer bones anymore.”

  His skeptical tone surprised me, given his mother’s life of gospel. (“Angel Momma” is long dead but still ticking, from the way he cites her.) Without thinking I said:

  “For him it seems to have worked.”

  He wanted to know how I meant. Monty is more than bright enough to realize that Wes and I did not find each other in baskets in the bulrushes, and so I went so far as to say:

  “The Major once told me he felt the cupped hand of God around him, in the war.”

  By now Monty has seen, any number of times, Samuel’s picture on my makeshift desk. I may be imagining, but I think sometimes I catch him studying it. This time, he did me the cold kindness of not looking in that direction when he said: “I guess maybe in any sort of situation, there’s soldiers and then there’s officers.”

  THAT woman was going to drive him to desperation.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe. You would think she was a lifeguard pumping away on a drowner.

  Monty eased the Duesenberg across the cattle guard at the main gate of the Double W, grimacing as the bumps made the elegant car bounce and groan. The county road on in from the ranch was no bargain either, with ruts fried into it by the abrupt turnaround of weather. He wished the Major would go back in the legislature long enough to do something about these christly awful roads that he was always having to baby the car along on.

  Even this day off from her tasted bad, thanks to her. “Breath capacity, I hate to keep bringing it up,” she had brought it up, last thing yesterday. “Yours is lazy. That’s not your fault, it comes with chasing around the countryside with the Major and otherwise never exercising.”

  “I’m exercising now, seems like,” he had pointed out.

  “It doesn’t come out in your singing yet. You must keep at it and at it.”

  Her and her at-it-tude. All he wanted was to sing. No, that wasn’t quite all. He wanted to sing as free and easy as Angel Momma had, and have the world sit up and listen, and make enough money at it that one wrong turn of a card or stray shimmy of the dice wouldn’t leave him flat busted, and for that matter not have to shine up another man’s car and then right away be called on to drive it over these dustbaths called Montana roads. (It went without saying that he was always going to have a general desire for a Leticia Number Two, which he had not had much time to have on his mind lately until damn Dolph touched it off the other day.) Granted, turning yourself into something took work: he knew that in every fiber of his being, he had put himself through plenty back there in rodeo clowning. But these dipsy-doodle nose and gut exercises she kept after him about—it was like she was trying to turn him into one of those carnival freaks who could tie parts of themselves in knots. “ ‘Smell the rose, blow the bugle,’ ” he mimicked.

  Even the way he talked, she had started giving a going-over. The other day when she was soft-soaping another exercise prescription by claiming it had probably let her hang on an extra year in New York back when she was trying to make it as a singer there, he had chimed in without thinking: “I been there myself, one time with the rodeo, and that New York ain’t to be sneezed at, for tough.”

  “ ‘Have been,’ ” she instantly repaired that, “and ‘isn’t’ wouldn’t hurt, either. Any good habit like that will help with your singing, I guarantee.”

  She had laid that on him mildly enough, for her, but it produced a spat. He huffed up and let her know that the Noon Creek schoolhouse was not shabby and that his last couple of years there, the seventh and eighth grades, were under Mrs. Reese, a stickler for words if there ever was one. “Then you had better get back to stickling,” she came out with next. “It doesn’t take that much.”

  “I do that, I’ll hear about it from the boys in the bunkhouse.”

  “So? Your singing has to count for more than your hearing.”

  That was like her, to have the first word and the last and the majority in between. Yet there she was, still persevering on him when she any number of times could have said “That’s it” and folded the whole deal.

  He frowned, then had to half laugh, at all this arguing with himself. It hardly even did a person any use to get a good mad on against her. Last thing she had said to him in yesterday’s go-round was: “If it makes you happy to be cranky, you go right ahead.”

  * * *

  He was Johnny-on-the-spot at the Valier depot. Swaying under its pushing finger of smoke, the locomotive of the Two Medicine & Teton
Railway teetered across a final coulee on a trestle that had seen better days and came laboring across the last mile or so of prairie into the scant town. Monty was as ready as he could be when the private coach drew to a halt exactly even with the waiting car. “How you doing, Major?”

  “I expected you to set that to music.”

  “Not just yet.” Monty contrived not to notice that the train porter wanted him to take the Major’s luggage off his hands, instead holding the trunk of the car open for the man to heft suitcases in. Enough bags that it looked as if the Major was here to stay for a while, so at least there might be some stretches of driving when he wouldn’t have to be huffing and puffing trying to please the unpleasable over there on the North Fork. Seeking some topic of conversation other than that, Monty asked: “How do you like your railroad?”

  “At least it’s wide enough.”

  Monty shook his head as if that was a good one. When he tenderly shut the trunk of the Duesenberg, he turned around to find the Major still standing there looking him over.

  “You can’t keep me in suspense, you know,” Wes prompted as if the report was considerably overdue. “How are you and Miss Duff coming on your musical education?”

  “Scuffling along. She probably can fill you in on me better than I can.” Monty ducked into the driver’s seat, and after a moment, Wes climbed into the rear seat. But before starting the car, Monty mustered the request he had worked on all the way from the ranch. “Major? On that. Ask you a favor, can I?”

  “It depends on the caliber of the favor, doesn’t it.”