Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  “It’s only an old ditty.”

  “It didn’t sound so, in Edinburgh.”

  His words came out lightly enough, but Susan froze, locking a look onto him over her tilted wineglass.

  WES. I don’t know, this may be something run-of-the-mill to you. But I have it bad.”

  “Catching, isn’t it.”

  Restraint had gone out the mullioned windows of one French hotel after another, then Amsterdam’s, that of Brussels, one or two in London, and now the casements of the misnamed sleeper train to Edinburgh. Something in the water in St. Mihiel, they naturally joked; how else account for such a sudden onset of the malady of love? After the first curious but cautious dinner together, then a second and third as if they were plenipotentiaries returning to a truce table, it had them. Now here they were, two weeks into a romance as full of sway and pulsation as this galloping train compartment. She was a woman grown, whose heart had been lent more than once before and retrieved with no great fuss. He had the world, what need had he of an elongated spinster lover? Ridiculous for the two of them to be bumping around Europe in a fog of love. And proving irresistible.

  “How much longer can you fib by cable?”

  He said nothing, then caressed her cheek with an odd shy stroke. They still were getting used to touching each other. When he managed to speak, his words were soft with regret. “Until Monday. I have to be aboard the Aquitania or they’ll be sending a search party for me.”

  She knew nothing to do about that except acknowledge it, brisk as a whisk broom. “At least we have somewhere that a weekend amounts to about three days, a Scottish Sunday is so slow.”

  At the railway station they raced to a black taxi with Mackay primly lettered on its door in gold, and were trundled up the hill to the Royal Mile. Restless with the thrill of their affair, both of them wanted to walk and walk, go arm-in-arm through this sky island of stony grace, stroll unafflicted under the exclamatory church steeples jabbing home their points to the clouds over the city. They gawked at sites thick with the soot of history, lunched, kissed behind a kiosk, sampled bookdealers’ wares, took tea, and at last worked their way up to the Castle, various in its stone textures—all dark, but subtly different, like some natural palimpsest of the centuries. Susan felt as if she had stepped into someone else’s life. But at last she had to admit: “My feet are about worn off. Where are we putting up?”

  With the sorcerer’s aplomb she had come to know, Wes gently pulled her into the doorway of the building just outside the Castle gate. “Here.”

  They bumped and laughed their way up the corkscrew wind of the stairs, to the top-floor flat. “The agent said it should be”—he triumphantly plucked a key from the top of the doorjamb—“here!” In they went, breathless. Every window threw them a view of another essence of Edinburgh. Down in the Princes Street Gardens, the flower clock told time in autumn blossoms of heather. Regularities of roofline chimney pots thrust up as if each street was a soberly engineered steamship. On the Castle side of things, the room offered a pert ironwork balcony which looked onto the stone-laid parade ground.

  “It’s an enchantment, Wes. We had better treat it as such.” She went to him and they ardently invented each other all over again, starting at the lips.

  After, they lay in bed facing each other, lazy and replete, not needing to say anything. They burst out laughing together when a whistle shrilled and bagpipes began to drone under the window as if mocking their dormant state. Hiiiyuhhh! came a rouseful shout from practically beneath their bedsprings. “That’ll be a sergeant-major, sounding the tattoo,” Wes identified as if by rote. “Come on, let’s get ourselves decent and see this.”

  By the time they reached the balcony, the Castle parade ground had been turned into a vast drumskin, the slow-step of the kilted marching contingent seeming to be echoed in the bass thuds and staccato rustles of the drum corps. “I suppose you ordered this up, too,” Susan put to Wes as she hooked her elbow in his in reckless dance-like fashion, maybe some innate Lowlander defense against ferocious Highlands music. “That would take tall ordering,” Wes answered in a voice husky enough that it caused her to peer at him. “They’re from the Black Watch. ‘The Ladies from Hell,’ the Germans called them. They were two or three down the line from us, when we took St. Mihiel.” Now, with the pump of a dozen elbows at once, the piper corps resumed its determination to make the wind work, earn its supper by inhuman humming. Flaunting their plaids to gray rational Edinburgh, the Black Watch honor guard marched confidently to music like no other.

  Wes held Susan close as life itself while they watched the spectacle. He could not help but wonder what accompanied the skirl of tunes through her mind. His own thoughts spiraled, but back and back to the same place to ponder from. If Susan had not been avid to know all she could of Samuel’s service unto death, and if he himself had not been equally conscience-bound to make her know that only the war’s worst havoc, in the form of the desperate barrage with which the Germans tried to head off the St. Mihiel assault, had been able to kill Private Sam Duff, the two of them would not be on this balcony with arms twined around one another. How in God’s name—and it was a question Wes was addressing to the higher order of things more than nightly—could love be sired by war this way? He kept feeling that some eternal apology was owed to Samuel Duff. Men by the hundreds in the Montana battalion, enough for almost any soldier to be anonymous to any officer if fate would let him keep his head down: but not that one. While Wes stood seemingly entranced by the ceremonial soldiers below the balcony, the trench scene populous with his own men kept insisting its way back into him.

  “You’re in for it now, Sammy.”

  “Whooey, listen to them over there—‘Mein Gott, Mein Gott!’ ”

  “Too good a shot, old kid!”

  Not liking the way that hullabaloo sounded, he had come out of the HQ dugout to tend to the matter himself. The sergeant spun around to him and reported:

  “It’s Bucky, sir. Sam Duff bagged him. He dropped out of that tree over there like a ton of bricks.”

  By then the battalion had made something like a mascot of the camouflaged German sniper possessed of buck fever, or instructions to merely pester the Amis but not make them mad, or perhaps some personal indisposition to chalk up kills of time-serving trench inhabitants no more careless than himself. More than a week before, the men had assured Wes the sniper they had inherited with this sector couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a shovel. Wes had taken time to make sure, but the bee buzz that flew harmlessly high over helmets maybe half a dozen times a day backed up their assessment. In one of the infinite manipulations that constituted the conduct of war, Captain-soon-to-be-Major Williamson accepted this ineffectual sniper as a token from his German counterpart across the way. Oblique considerations of this sort had invisibly grown in these armies mired together in years of blood and mud. The shouting back and forth, the enlisted men’s common language of jocular calumny. Patrols that didn’t go out of their way to pick a fight. Reluctance by either commander to call in salvoes, with shells that fell short, shells that were overshot. It sporadically tore apart into savagery and blind killing during the offensives—Wes knew more than his share about that, too—but there existed a morbid mutual etiquette of the trenches.

  Heart sinking, he singled out the big-boned young soldier in the mob crowded on the duckboards. “Duff, come with me,” he said with enough bite in it for the others to take notice and led the way into the HQ dugout, Samuel ducking his head to follow through the doorway. Wes waved off the lieutenant and went on into the backmost area, where there was an actual scavenged door. “In here, Private.”

  This was going to take a while. Wes dropped into one of the prized chairs that had found their way here from some wrecked French farmhouse. Alone there, difference in rank notwithstanding, the two men looked each other over with utter frankness. They were a long way from the Two Medicine country. They were a long way from anything as simple as rangeland feuds.
r />   “Oh, at ease, Sam, before you solidify.”

  The young soldier shifted his weight enough to comply. Wes studied the lean ungiving face, wondering what blade of fate had created the Duff family line. As much curiosity as rank in his tone, he couched the reprimand:

  “I thought I passed word for everybody to lay off that miserable sniper.”

  “I didn’t hear the straight skinny on that, sir.” That last word obviously came hard to him. “I just this morning got back from the field hospital.”

  “You’re a wicked shot, Private Duff.”

  “That’s the way I was brought up, on the homestead. Sir.”

  Samuel’s gaze gave nothing. Wes knew better than to try to wait him out, the young man’s version of soldiering—which was to say his springsteel approach to life—would never be amended by anything either of them could say. Sitting there, Wes felt the weight of command push at him from another of those oblique vectors. Trained as he was to both politics and war, there were times when he could sense the force of the future moving over him like wind-kited clouds; here standing opposite him, he could tell, was a certainty on the casualty list that would arrive to his desk after the next patrol or the one after that. Soldier Samuel Duff was too fearless for his own good. Then and there, compelled by something he did not want to put a name to, Wes had called in the lieutenant and ordered that Private Duff be taken off combat duty and assigned as HQ runner.

  And put him in the eventual path of a barrage? Or granted Samuel a few more vital days or weeks before the slaughter market herded him in?

  Wes became aware he was gripping the wrought-iron railing hard enough to cramp his hand. There on the balcony, the long figure of Susan lithe and warm against his side, he retreated again from the past. He had told her everything he could bring back about Samuel, except the sniper episode and its aftermath, consequence, call it whatever. How do you tot up the incalculable? The parade ground was drawing a curfew for him, he was glad to see. The pipers were winding down, the drums muffled, as the honor guard slow-marched away in the dusk toward a portal of the Castle. Gratefully renewing his clasp on Susan, Wes realized she had been deep in her own drift of mind. To help bring her out, he pinched his nose closed and made a try at the drone of Edinburgh accent they had been hearing all day: “And where ha’ ye been, Miss Duff, while the laddies were makin’ their march?”

  “You asked. My father marched here.”

  Wes nearly fell off the balcony in surprise.

  “He never did! Ninian Duff, on parade at Edinburgh Castle?!”

  Susan failed to see amusement in it. “Wes, you’re a famous soldier. But you’re not the only soldier there ever was.”

  “No, no, not that.” Wes covered as best he could: “All I meant was—kilts on your father?”

  She had to laugh at that.

  But Wes could not leave it alone. As they went inside, he said as if it was merely curiosity getting the best of him: “Humor an old soldier on this, can you? Outfits like the Black Watch, regulars probably since Waterloo, ordinarily have the honor of marching here. What on earth deposited your father onto this parade ground?”

  “Some shire regiments’ whoop-te-do, I don’t know any more. He and the others from Fife carried the day, you may be sure.” Susan paused. When she looked around at him, her assessment came with that alarming Duff frankness. “Now one for you. Why does every man who has meant most to me have to be a soldier?”

  Wes would not go near that.

  Interruption saved him, footsteps on the stairs bringing victuals enough—Wes never was one to underdo—to suffocate all their appetites but one. Back to the basics of laughing and love, they rollicked through that evening as though it might be the only one they would ever have. Before long they revisited the bed, where kissing led to teasing—she had to disprove his speculation that her exuberant new floor-length French nightdress copied the dimensions of a Breton woolsack; he in turn had to abandon brocaded pajamas that she claimed made him look like a misplaced bullfighter. By the time proper night had found Edinburgh, they were drenched in each other.

  Eventually the fireplace had to be fed. Susan said it was her turn and Wes lay watching and making her laugh with his preaching of admiration for her, high and low. “The shins of the father are not visited upon the daughter.”

  “You.” She returned to bed with a flounce, but there was something serious to be asked. “How soon will you be in Helena?”

  “It’ll have to be after New Year’s.”

  “That’s a scandalous length of time.” No sooner was that out than she regretted her choice of word.

  “The best I can do. Susan, you have to know—there’s going to be a lot of that.”

  “I didn’t exactly think I had title to you all of a sudden.”

  I . . . you . . . sudden. All this was a field of thought that his imagination at its most wild could not have led him to, back when he had been safely loveless, with only a war to worry about. But here Susan Duff indisputably was, next to him in their mutual state of altogether. A woman a man could make love to six directions from true north and she would slyly keep track of the compass for next time. And each time, after lovemaking, he knew that everything outside of that was stacked against them. An incurably married man (doubly wedded, actually, given what could only be called his inbred necessity for a faith; he regarded the church much as he had the army, cumbersome but the only thing on the particular job), politically on the rise, fortune’s palmlines clear as a map on him—and this woman who stood out a mile, as Duffs always did. Again now he traced tentative loving fingertips over the features of her face up to that distinctively Scotch high forehead, vault for a canny brain; her expression told him she knew the odds as fully as he did, and he despaired. Throughout these past two weeks he had tried to break through rationality—it was surprisingly like the coldness of combat bravery, a pane in him that covered as if with frost and that he could not see beyond—and make himself give up everything for her. Pull a Robert Louis Stevenson, flee off with her to the South Seas, why not. And vegetate happily ever after; that was why not. Grasping this, knowing it in himself as deep as the fissure in the heart where the soul pools up, he even so could not let go of the anguished wish to be otherwise than he was. He hated being incapable in any capacity, especially the one—call it flight—needed to leave behind all the others in his life. Now the mustered words came out of him haltingly:

  “I’m not much at this, you know.”

  By now Susan had learned that like all heroes, Wes had a side to him that didn’t always come into daylight. She could have told anyone interested that he liked to fool people by going around as if he were the pluperfect example of a stuffed shirt; until the shirt came off him.

  “No, I didn’t know that at all,” she issued back to him. “Here I was hoping for a cross between Sergeant York and a sultan who knows his way around a harem. Why, Major, you’re blushing. All over, I do believe.”

  “You’re a handful.”

  “What, me? ‘Jaunty as a feather, faithful as the heather.’ ” There was another of those cloud-bringing words, faith.

  Wes shifted his lower part carefully on the bed. To preserve the night, he said:

  “The martial music about did me in. Could I talk you into singing something for the occasion? Us, that is?”

  “Ah. All this is a plot to coax me, is it.” Susan gave him a mock discerning look, like an abbess who knew very well what Chaucer was up to. Then laid a solemn finger on his lips, as if marking her place, and was up and searching for her nightdress. More or less sufficiently attired, she strode back, performance already perking in her, came to the foot of the bed and folded her hands in professional ease on the bedstead there. She gathered herself, with the slight lift of her chest that drew breath in, and softly delivered:

  “The evening brings all home, ’tis said

  Those who stray, and those who roam,

  The evening brings all home.

  In the res
tless light of day,

  We abandon ourselves to quest.

  When the blushing sun kisses the west,

  We awake and find our way.

  The evening brings all home, ’tis said

  From islands far, and Heaven’s dome.

  The evening, the evening,

  The evening brings all home.”

  THERE on the picnic tarp, Wes immediate and intent across from her, Susan knew better than to remember a golden blush over that time. The two of them had been no perfect fit, from the start they had known which parts were ill-suited for the other. It can grow musty in the loft of the mind; Wes, when he wasn’t activated by politics, tended toward an attic-headed collecting habit: rare books, manuscripts, scraps of language that pleased him, property. Herself, she had constantly had to wonder, another possession in among those? In turn, Wes understood of her that she was of brusque blood, given to directness when that wasn’t the route that had come to be expected, as a Roman road will fly like a spear from the past through the modern swerving muddle. Not a match, a Williamson and a Duff, that either of them would ever have dreamed of. Yet they had coupled as naturally as wild creatures, until they were found out.

  “Susan? Something?”

  “Yes. We should be getting back.”

  CATCHING BREATH

  · 1924 ·

  THE SUNDAY MORNING of the Helena trip, Wes walked the few blocks home from early Mass at the cathedral pondering how he had ever thought he was in any way fit to govern half a million people, given his record lately on a number he could count on his thumbs. He tried to put the mood away, box it in the admission that the lives of others are not something you can catechize. But no sooner was he into the house than Mrs. Gustafson came swooping on behalf of his breakfast with a glint of intrigue that would have done credit to a stiletto, and it was only a matter of time. After her third hovering pass with the coffeepot, he told her: “All right, tell him I want to see him.”