by Ivan Doig
I was surprised, to say the least. What could I say but, “Be my guest.” Looking very determined he took his position in the middle of the room, studied off into nowhere—the next habit I need to cure him of—then clapped his hands a couple of times and out it came. I render it here on the page in as close a manner as possible to the way he sang it, for the lines were distributed in the air like poetry:
“Does the hawk know its shadow?
Does the stone roll alone?
Does the eye of the rainbow
Ever weep like our own?
I am vexed,
I am hexed,
I kneel at all Your thrones.
One of so many
Just another praying Jones.”
That was the first verse of several confounding ones. The song sounded as old as the hills and yet unknown as the next heartbeat. Monty’s is a propitious voice for such a song. In his new bottom range, he can put such resonance into the “ohs” of “stone,” “own,” “alone,” “thrones,” and that ending-line surpriser “Jones” that it makes one wonder, How could one throat hold that?
When he had finished I remember that I rested my chin on my fist until I could trust my words. Finally I managed: “I know most gospel songs. Why have I never heard the likes of that?”
Monty shrugged as if to say my musical education, or lack of, was no doing of his. “Just a spirit song I learned when I was little.”
When he saw that the phrase threw me, he said: “What I always heard songs like that called. The spirit moves a person, I guess you’d have to say, and next thing they know, these words show up out of them.”
“Why did you sing it now?”
He puzzled at that a moment himself. “It runs through my head sometimes, and this once I wanted to try out my new air on it, is all.”
I hardly dared ask. “Are there more where that one came from?”
“Oh, some.”
“Then let’s have them.” I at once got out music sheets, Monty as surprised as if I had produced a rabbit from a hat. By then Dolph was stomping around out in the yard, both their horses saddled and waiting, but I didn’t care. I took down several—“Mouthful of Stars,” “End of the Road,” “The Moon Followed You Home,” “Unless I Be Made To,” all of them music up from the bones—as fast as I could write while Monty chanted or half-sang them, before I could stand it no longer: “How did you come by these songs, exactly?”
He looked as discomfited as if I had asked him where the wind keeps its nest. “You won’t laugh?”
“Of course not.”
“Promise not to think it’s loco?”
“Monty, I will not think anything, I will not laugh”—at this point I probably could have been heard a mile up and down the creek—“but I will take the broom to you in about half a minute if you don’t tell me where on earth such songs came from.”
He said, word for word:
“Angel Momma and the holy rollers.”
SPIRIT
· 1892 ·
THE CONGREGATION was short on ecstasy, and Jones was having to bide time by dinning Deuteronomy into them.
“Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak! And hear, O earth, the words of my mouth!”
Sister Satterlie, usually the first to quiver with the possession of the spirit, was barely even swaying. Jones himself was trying his bottom-dollar best to will the outbreak, but you could never hurry the Lord. The jolt of exaltation would happen when it happened, that was the weekly history of it all the way back to their knotholed church in the mountains beyond Gatlinburg. Their Appalachian faces hung out from under Stetsons and catalogue bonnets these Sundays, but they kept to their strenuous religion here in the foothills of the Rockies, where the whole passel of them had been shipped in as tie-cutters for the Great Northern Railway. Third- and fourth-generation sawyers back in the Smokies, the men were proud to call themselves timber beasts and the women had long practice in making do at gulch logging camps such as the one up Noon Creek from here. They were God’s patch pocket on this land where the ways of the world had sent them. Looking out over the small assembly, Jones as their lay preacher duly cherished every one of them, but he did wish somebody would feel the call and start thrashing or declaiming in tongues; he didn’t have all Sunday up here at the portable pulpit.
“My doctrine shall drop as the rain! My speech shall distill as the dew, and the small rain upon the tender herb, and the showers upon the—who’s out there?”
Every head in the room turned. “I feel the presence beyond the door,” Jones boomed. He had seen movement through the window. “Who comes calling at this holy house?”
The door peeped open, then swung wide to reveal a Negro woman, lank as a carpet-beater. Down where her dress billowed, a wide-eyed seven-year-old clasped on to her. When Jones peered at the boy, the dirtiest face in the world was looking back at him. Jones was prepared to take umbrage on behalf of the Sabbath, but realized the smears on the small dark face came from exuberant eating of berries. If childish joy didn’t qualify as wearing your Sunday best, Jones didn’t know what did.
The woman gestured apologetically. “I don’t want to bother, in no way. We been chokecherrying,” she indicated the lard can half full of wine-colored berries the boy was shyly holding. “But I couldn’t help but hear. Voices like your ones—I don’t know what got into me.”
“We’re having church,” Jones hardly had to point out.
“People I work for,” the woman hurried the words, “I heard them say folks like you fought on the side of the North like they did.”
“The sunrise side of Tennessee did not follow Jeff Davis to perdition,” Jones stated with pride. No one in this room was ever going to forget the Confederate Army’s clamp on their small-holding plantation-scorning corner of the South. The oldest of the congregation, Brother Cruikshank, had fought in blue at the battle of Stone’s River and had the scar of a wound to prove it.
“My husband,” the high-tan woman was saying, “he was a soldier, out here.”
“That so? Auntie, who do you be?”
Angeline Rathbun identified herself while the boy peeked around at all the hawknosed faces. He wanted to tell the people about picking the chokecherries and where all he and Angel Momma had been along the creek, but it wasn’t nice to interrupt grownups.
“Service in the uniform of our country, that’s all well and good,” the lay preacher allowed. “But if you’d excuse us now, we have the Lord’s business to tend to yet.”
“Mister? Couldn’t I sing with you? Just sing? I could”—she swallowed—“wait outside between songs, if you’d want.”
Jones gave her fresh regard. The congregation had visibly perked up. The spirit making itself known, was this? Jones waited on his own words, wetting his lips. Then heard himself poke the question out: “Just what sort of singing do you know?”
“By your leave?” Angeline moved a step farther into the room. She clapped her hands a few times to set a beat for herself, then began to carol in a voice dexterous as fine fiddling:
“Take a mouthful of stars,
Set your ladder ’gainst a cloud.
Go hammer up Heaven,
Oh hammer up Heaven,
Fixin’ up Heaven,
Slickin’ up Heaven,
Silver nails of Heaven,
Driven nails of Heaven,
Heaven, strong roof of my soul!”
Jones took a fresh grip on the pulpit. “We make our own singing, but this’s a new one on us. Yours sounds like our spirit music,” he mulled, “yet it don’t quite, either. Am I right, brethren?” The congregation murmured affirmation. Jones felt a tingle. “Where’d you ever pick that up from, Mrs. Rathbun?”
“Slave days, when I was a bit of a thing like him here. In the war times. Every day before sun-up, what we called in Kentucky ‘cain see’—”
“We call it that to this day,” Jones could not help but put in. “ ‘Cain see’ to ‘cain’t see,’ that’s our working day in th
e woods.”
“—my momma and me had to take the mistress’s white saddlehorse up in the woods and mind him there.”
“Nothing goes over the Devil’s back that don’t buckle under his belly,” Jones chanted in contrary praise of those forced to shoulder the work of the world.
“The mistress was afraid the War Department was gonna see that horse and take him for the army,” Angeline ventured on. “My momma, she’d pass the time remembering songs, maybe make some up. Got me to doing it with her. Then when night come, she and me led that horse home in the dark—”
“In the dark,” Jones crooned experimentally, “Satan’s satin dark.”
“Yes sir. And the mistress would go out and ride that white horse with a black blanket over him. And Momma and me still had to wait, to all hours. So then we’d sing those songs we put together. Play we was a whole church, like your one here.”
“Why are you not singing them this Sabbath, somewhere with your own people?”
“Mister, we’re it,” Angeline Rathbun smiled forlornly down at her fidgety son. “No other colored, not in all this county.”
Jones brooded there in front of everybody, the congregants as still as the prayer-worn benches under them.
“She brings mighty fine singing, brothers and sisters,” he felt moved to put the matter to the general will. “What say you?”
“She been sent!” Sister Satterlie shouted, with a lurch that gladdened Jones’s heart. “The Lord ever is mysterious in His ways!”
Brother Cruikshank climbed to his feet and testified: “I for one see no reason our congregation cain’t have a colored auxiliary.”
Jones turned back to Angeline. “You may stay,” he spoke for them all. “We will together sing the songs of one tongue, Our Maker’s. But there’s another consideration.” He pointed a not unkind finger.
“The boy here, he’ll be fine,” Angeline vouched. “He has a voice, too. Don’t you, Montgomery.”
SUMMER NIGHTS
· 1924 ·
“OL’ SNOWBALL, he thinks the world’s wagging its tail at him.”
Dolph’s elbow slipped off the edge of the table for the second time in as many minutes. Irritably he anchored it there again, determined not to let go of his Saturday night spree just when the whiskey was getting good.
“They’re that way,” the man across the table from him ground out. He topped up Dolph’s glass again and then his own, and sat back. The two of them were by themselves in the back corner of the speakeasy, their conversation oiled by the bottle of prime stuff bootlegged in from Canada that the man sorely needed some company on.
“Monty ain’t a bad sort, far as that goes.” Dolph wanted this made clear. “But he’s latching on to too much of a good thing, if you was to ask me.”
“He actually goes back to her at night? What manner of woman is she?”
Didn’t Dolph wish he knew. Perpetually parched for women, cowboys tended to believe there must be winks of ecstasy waiting for them somewhere, if only the circumstances ever would line up right. But tonight’s perfunctory prostitute whom he had sprawled himself on in one of the rooms overhead was more like a blink. And the Duff woman, she seemed blind to her own kind. Dolph had to shake his head. Whenever a man met confusion in this life, it almost always wore a dress. How was it in any way fair for Monty to be the object of her eye?
“Like I was telling you, I suspicioned that something more than do-re-mi was going on. So I sort of checked up on it.” The day he caught the string of fish, he came whistling back up to the house to find the two of them looking like they were ready to jump out of their skins. That evening he had sauntered over from the bunkhouse to Monty’s room to try to find out what was what; no Monty. “Middle of the night, here he comes scooting back.” Dolph walked his fingers along the table to show so. He fought through the haze in his head to see again the pinto saddlehorse coming down the benchland from the North Fork, pale hide in the moonlight. “Puts his horse away real quiet. Goes to bed.” Dolph widened his eyes in wonder. “Second time that night, I guess.”
“And during these . . . music lessons?”
“I’m right there, ain’t I? They can’t git up to anything then, me around keeping my eye on them.”
The man clucked one last time at the goings-on Dolph was forced to put up with and said he had to call it a night. He clapped Dolph on the shoulder. “See you in the funny papers.”
The town of Gros Ventre, nippy even on a midsummer night such as this, lay tucked under its double blankets of darkness and leaf canopy. The man walked home with great care, taking to the deserted street rather than trust himself on the undulations of the board sidewalks forced up by the roots of the big cottonwoods. It had been a night’s work, lubricating that mutt of a cowboy. But even a common cowhand knew an abomination when he saw one, give him credit for that.
He tromped on through the dark, filled with a consuming urge to shout to the whole town about the Williamsons and what they spawned. But that wouldn’t do. Late as it was, and quiet, he confined himself to humming fiercely the hymn of him and his kind:
“Klansman, Klansman, of the Ku Klux Klan,
Protestant, gentile, native-born man,
Hooded, knighted, robed, and true,
Royal sons of the Red, White, and Blue.”
NIGHTFALL wrote itself across the hills of Helena, the rowdy downtown gulch as ever the first to be shadowed and street-lit, then the slow summer darkness gently inking out the superior slope-sitting neighborhoods around their punctuations of lamplight. Throughout the evening Wes glanced out now and then as if to compare the progress of the dark to his own. His desk was a ranch in the making—the Deuce W, incipient in the piles of title abstracts and livestock tallies and crop records and tax rolls of three counties its clusters of acreage would dapple like a prairie archipelago. A separate stack of paperwork high enough to be teetery held foreclosed mortgages, walked away from in the dusty exodus of the landed settlers these past half dozen years and lately bought from the banks by the Williamson agents for pennies on the dollar. Wes was sifting it all as if he were a monk among Alexandrine scrolls. Dyed into the documents, beneath the legalistic curlicues where it took a kind of second sight to go, rested actions of the past that changed everything caught in their path. The shaping hand of a senator on the generous contours of the Fort Assinniboine military reserve, there in the act of congressional appropriation that had created the great and needless fort. The decisive signatures of a handful of sodbusters, who had thrown in together to buy more tractor than buffalo grass could withstand. Receipts that remorselessly followed the decline in rainfall, depositions that attested to the economic laws of gravity even in virgin land as flat and beckoning as a trampoline. If you were trained for this, and he by nature and imperative was, it was all discernible, under the ink. He paused a long while over a contested bill of sale for a pitiful herd of workhorses, depleted by half by the blizzard of 1906, which was signed by his own father.
Hallway noises roused him out of the watermark whispers of the papers.
“Busy, I tell you.”
“Only take a minute, Mrs. Gus, don’t get yourself in an uproar.” The predictable barely restrained knock on the door.
“If it’s who I think it is,” Wes emitted like the warning blast of a foghorn, “come in and have your story ready.”
It took a few moments for the doorknob to turn. Then Monty stepped in, ranch clothes on him but Saturday-night readiness in his expression. “Major, bother you just one minute, can I?”
“How did you get to town?”
“Bummed a ride with the brand inspector. This way, see, I can take the driving off Gus’s hands when you head back to the ranch.”
Wes’s ire stalled momentarily in the face of this tactic. It was perfect fact that Gustafson took the wheel of an automobile with the glumness of a lumberjack unfairly sentenced to pushing a baby buggy. “Wasn’t that thoughtful of you,” he at last responded to the all-too-ready volu
nteer sticking close to the shelter of the door. “And other than that, what’s on your mind this hour of night?”
As if he doesn’t know? Going to be like that, is it. Monty might have been philosophical about this if he had time. But this was never any too much fun, dealing with a boss who wasn’t in a mood to be dealt with, and he drew himself up some to stand his ground. “Mister Whit didn’t have his checkbook on him, there at the stockyards. Say, he told me to tell you—let me get it exactly: he hopes your writing hand is in good shape come Monday, because there’s one hell of a bunch of new cows going to need a ranch under them.”
Wes let his brother’s words pass without comment. Monty’s next ones he waited for as if ready to lay down the law.
“I know it pesters you, something like this,” Monty came out with it. “But tonight being what it is, I need to go out for a little while.”
“Can’t you ever—”
“Don’t even have to draw a whole month’s pay,” Monty hastened this in, “but just about.”
“—steer clear of that?” With difficulty Wes kept control of his face, but his voice sharpened to a stab. “Monty, you have to think about these things now. What is it going to take, some drunken gandydancer beating your brains out in an alley? Hear me on at least this, can’t you? Clore Street isn’t the best place to be, anymore.”
Monty rammed his hands into his back pockets to hide his clench of dismay. As if he hadn’t turned himself inside out thinking about this. As if someone who could take that district of paper there on his desk and Monday morning turn it into a ranch that stretched out of sight over the bend of the earth, as if anybody that mighty knew anything about the tight corners of a colored Saturday night in Helena. Three months ago, as Monty too well understood about himself, in this situation he would have turned turtle, pulled his neck back in and stood planted there allowing as how the Major no doubt knew best. But the Major and her, wasn’t that what they were supposed to be at in all this, to help him shore himself up into something more substantial than a choreboy standing on one foot and then the other? Change his chances in this life, from squat to sky-high? And that took some doing like tonight’s, if he could only zip across town and get it done. There was no way around it. He couldn’t hope for the Major to give him his blessing on anything like this, but a bit of room to operate, out on his own, ought not be too much to ask by now. For about the hundredth time in one day, he assessed his chances with the man on the far side of that big desk. If things had really changed, his best hold with the Major was man-to-man.