Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  As her car trundled into the yard, she did away with the headlights to begin to accustom her eyes to the dark between the Lizzie’s usual spot and the house. The thin clouds actually helped, sharing out what the moon had to offer without stark shadowpatches of black, and as she went humming her way up the brief path she could even dimly make out that someone had hung a sack on her door. More than likely the latest unsought generosity sent over by Wes, a gunnysack of the past week’s newspapers and, who knew, another helping of picnic makings?

  She would have to remember to tease him about his Williamson bag of surprises, she was telling herself as she stepped to the gray shelter of the doorway and reached her hand to the hanging shape, and touched not burlap but cat fur.

  The realization struck her like a hot spatter. Jerking her hand away from the blood and hair, by instinct she stifled outcry with a gagging swallow, not giving whoever might be out there the satisfaction of hearing her scream. She backed away one step, then reached around for the doorknob from the side of the doorway and waited to a count of ten. Breathing with greatest care now, she pushed open the door with the cat nailed to it, and hurriedly stepped over its puddle of blood on the threshhold.

  She sensed, as much as saw, that the kitchen had been disrupted. In moments she managed to feel her way to the silverware drawer and had the butcher knife in her hand. Every ounce of her knew she had to get back to Angus and Adair’s at once, but she also had a furious need to know how much had been done here. She felt along the wall by the stove to the matchbox holder. In the flare of the first match, she saw that the kitchen table had been kicked over. Carefully lighting another, she sighted in on the spare lamp on the sideboard and brought it to flaring life. Corners; the kitchen suddenly seemed to have many. No one but shadows there, though, and she was drawn, lamp high and knife clutched as tight as her fist could go, to the doorway to the next room.

  Then she saw the white paint across the music room wall, using the worst words about her and Monty.

  * * *

  His door erupted open, bringing him blinking out of a jumble of bedclothes and dreams. He swung his feet onto the cold floor, meaner chill whiffing in from the doorway but, further confusing him, a flicker of flames candled somewhere out there above and behind the figure bulking over him. Then his hearing picked up the gunfire, quite a way off, the kind when a hunting party gets into a herd of something.

  “Stay put.” The Major wasn’t there much longer than his words. “The men are around the place.”

  As if in a trance Monty shed his nightshirt and put his clothes on, his eyes never leaving the window looking south where the distant flames branded a cross onto the night.

  * * *

  “Reynolds didn’t sound in any hot hurry to get here, when I telephoned him,” Whit conferred with Wes as soon as they had the ranch crew deployed in a fireline on the ridge. They would wait for daylight before going to see what the toll in cattle was from all the shooting the nightriders did in the vicinity of the east pasture.

  “So, on top of it we have to shop for a new sheriff.”

  “Looks like. Firebug bastards,” Whit let out, one more in a litany, whapping a patch of smoldering grass with a wet gunnysack. “They could’ve set the whole country going, dry as it is.”

  “We’re lucky they only had guts enough to play with matches around us, this time.” The moon was fully out now, too late; Wes slid his rifle under the seat of the buckboard, then climbed in and took up the reins. But before turning the grays toward the house, he scanned again the terrain that made it so easy for the Ku Kluxers to sneak onto the Double W and then race off east to wherever they hid in their everyday lives. In whatever crevices of themselves; in whatever hideous kinks of the soul that caused people like them to despise him and his simply for the church they were born to, Monty simply for the complexion he was born to, Susan simply for the habit of adherence she was born to. A cold poise took Wes over as he considered the nightscape of earth out there and the dips of life where such creatures might go to cover. Then, like a man coming to, he brought himself back to the trace of themselves the Klan had left behind. He sat fixed into attention a few moments more, staring down at the pattern of char and embers where the sizable wooden timbers had fallen. As much to himself as to his ash-smudged brother, he murmured: “What are they thinking of? They burn it, the cross.”

  “I wouldn’t say they’re absolute bundles of brains,” Whit responded. “What we have to worry about is what kind of push they put on us next.”

  “If I have to fill Hell with them, Whit, I will.”

  “Suits me. But there’s our musical auxiliary they’re after, too.”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “I never would, Wes.”

  * * *

  “I’m not supposed to let nobody by.”

  “Would you care to tell that to either or both of the almighty Williamsons, with whose blessing I’m here?”

  “If I get my ass chewed—”

  “—it will grow back, plumper than ever. Man, will you look out over that field for incendiary lunatics and let me be about my business?”

  Listening so intensely he could about hear the angry disturbance of the air as the visitor tromped past the cowboy sentry, Monty was ready for the call at his door. “Hello in there,” Angus’s voice sounded as if he had trooped here from one of the ends of the earth. “Can you stand a boarder, for whatever’s left of the night?”

  As quick as Angus was in and the door held their words in the room, Monty feverishly put the question “They’re at her, too?”

  “Trying, in their miserable way.”

  “She all right?”

  Even in the murk of the lampless room, Angus could discern the anguish of the man. “So mad she can’t spit, but other than that, I’d say Susan is in working order. Don’t worry your head on that score, she and my better half are up here at the house, probably in a canopy bed.”

  Wearily Angus told the rest of it, the Model T flying back into their yard after he and Adair had gone to sleep, Susan with a butcher knife on the seat beside her, then the ungodly drive cross-country over the benchland. “Susan at the wheel gives no quarter to badger holes,” Angus reflected, rubbing the base of his spine. He squinted around in the gloom hoping for accommodations to be offered, but the perfectly still figure across the room kept on staring out the window toward the bluff where the last glow of the fire was vanishing under the stomp of Double W boots.

  Angus sidled across the room toward him, bumping furniture as he came. When he gauged that he was near enough, he reached with one hand and gripped Monty’s forearm to ensure full attention.

  “Monty. Odds are that the commotion is over for now. To get at any of us those dunces would have to come through the Major, on his own ground, and I don’t think anybody who hides under a sheet wants to do that.”

  Monty swore with a force that jarred Angus. Then swung away from the window so they were face-to-face, his words so heated that the taller man flinched backward an inch or two and let his hand drop. “How the hell come they’re out after her and me? It was nothing but singing lessons!”

  In response Angus’s burr was measured but carried everything he had. “Why are there maggots like that in the world, you’re asking? It’s been a long time since I thought I was bright enough to figure that out. But I do know we’ve all lived through the night, and that gives us another start against the likes of them.”

  “People who could have been left off the face of the earth,” Monty gave vent to. Like a shot he broke past Angus and halfway across the room, but then spun around toward him again. “Can’t even give the sonsabitches what for,” his voice was low and seething. “I have me a thirty-ought-six and used up my last shells on a coyote yesterday, can you beat that?” He made a furious swipe with his hand as if to bat away the door and get at the sentry on the other side of it. “Tony won’t give me any, either. Major’s orders, he says.”

  Angus already had his own i
ndictment in on the Major this night. Once Adair and Susan were headed upstairs to whatever refuge a Williamson bedroom constituted, he had steered the Major aside for a few words. “If you let anything happen to Susan or Monty out of this, I’ll deliver you to Hell personally.”

  “I know the way by myself,” the damn man had answered as if that was another thing they taught at Harvard.

  But importing that to Monty’s presence wouldn’t help the situation any. Instead Angus suggested: “Let’s let some daylight on the issue and see how this stacks up then, all right?”

  Sounding a great deal more distant than he was, Monty spoke back: “You putting up here till morning—you don’t have to, you know.”

  Angus sighed. “If I have to snuggle with a Williamson or with you, it might as well be you. Probably you at least can carry a tune when you snore.”

  It came to Monty then that setting foot on this ranch had put this man behind enemy lines. Ordinarily, Angus McCaskill would rather have eaten dirt than come to the Double W for anything. And all the Major or Whit or their father before them ever wanted to see of a North Fork homesteader was the back of him, quitting the country. The Klan couldn’t have kicked everybody more cockeyed tonight if it had tried. And her, why’d they have to get after her? How’d they even know to? Not that there was any sorting this out, but he reluctantly gave in to the fact that daylight was a better time to try. The man here was right, all you could do was stand the gaff and see who else ended up with you. “All right then,” he told Angus heavily, “let’s get you installed. I’m gonna make a light. Just as soon catch a bullet as live like a mole.”

  “It’s at least a philosophy,” Angus concurred, “but I’m going to be a rude guest and bring down the shade.”

  With the green blind firmly down, he turned as Monty lit a bedside reading lamp. Everything that could be done with the sparse room had been, he saw; cloth ceiling carpet-tacked to the rafters, beaverboard put over the walls and painted a resounding aqua green. There was far too much furniture, belongings of all kinds, for the size of the room but not, Angus realized, for a man’s full life lived in its confines. Picture calendars, the freest art there is, rioted on every wall. Across the exact center of the ceiling stretched a wire where a cloth curtain could be drawn to divide the room in half; on one side of that was a mussed bed and on the other was one neatly made up with a quilt of many colors atop.

  Monty went across and untucked the covers, then made an awkward take-it gesture. He said gruffly, “My mother’s bed.”

  “I’m honored.”

  As played out as he had ever felt, Angus deposited himself on the edge of the bed and took his shoes off. Then looked up; Monty still stood at the curtain line, hesitating.

  “Mister Angus?” he finally brought out. “I’ve always done my level damnedest to watch my step, here on the place and out in town. But tonight tells me there’s people who think I’ve stuck my foot in it and I’m not even sure what it is. Can’t even be in the same room with a white lady, while there’s Dolph riding herd on us right outside? I better get myself woke up about where all this comes from.” He eyed the graying temples of the man seated on the bed. “You been in the Two country practically forever, haven’t you, about like me? Both of us, longer than Montana itself has been around?”

  “A dead heat, in my case,” Angus reflected back. “I lit in Helena the day of statehood. But you’re pretty much right, I was on the North Fork by the spring of ninety, why? And if you don’t pull up a chair, I’m going to keel over from exhaustion watching you.”

  Monty sat, but like a coiled spring. “These hoodoos, tonight, what brought them on? Butte and places like that, I know they have trouble with them, but I’m pretty low to the ground from a couple of hundred miles off, aren’t I? All I even know about the bastards is what my mother would tell me when I’d complain about some half-ass thing some white person did to her or me. ‘This is a flea bite, compared,’ she’d always say. Then she’d get going on how the Klan clucks would light their cross on fire to get themselves stirred up, hang some colored person if they happened to feel like it, cut down the tree and paint the stump red as a reminder. She saw all that, when she was only a bit of a girl. But that was back in the South, all those years ago. And now here’s this.” He wiped his temple with the palm of his hand as if trying to move elements of this around in there. “You hit here in early ninety, you said? You must have just missed my old man, wherever the hell he took himself off to.”

  Angus stirred. “When was that?”

  “What I remember is”—Monty scanned his mother’s side of the room as though it might help—“we didn’t make it to the statehood celebration in town. I was all excited that my mother was gonna sing for the people, Mister Warren had arrangements already made—the Rathbuns were gonna strut their stuff every which way that day. But right before, there went my father.”

  “Come here to me, Monty. Momma is sorry as anything we can’t be going to town, but I’d just cry in front of everybody if we did. They’ll need to put Montana on the map without us.”

  “What I’m driving at,” Monty persisted, “things don’t always reach ears like ours then. Yours maybe are a better shade for that.” Monty jerked his head toward the window that had framed the cross as it blazed. “Was there anything like these”—he spat the bitter word—“around here then?”

  Angus took his time putting an answer together. When he had the past assembled as best he could, he set in. “I was fresh from the old country, and Two Medicine life all was a startlement at the time, mind you. Sit in town there trying to have a restful drink and you’d probably have to dodge a traveling fistfight over whether aces chase faces or vice versa. There was a shooting or two in Gros Ventre before I came, cowboy life as it is in the books, but things had already tamed down from that. And that was the extent of it, I’m sure as anything. These ninnies weren’t kiyiing around here then, Monty, if that’s any help.”

  “Maybe not just like this.” To Angus, Monty looked as bleak as any human could. “Story’s always been, my old man pulled out on my mother and me. Now I’m wondering.”

  * * *

  Life marched in long review in Adair’s nights, and thanks to Susan Duff, this was one of the more restless processions of thoughts her mind had ever set out on.

  Not all that many hours ago the familiar dark of her bedroom wall had been lit with a pale frieze of shadowvines, the climbing rose at the window sketched into motion by the headlamps of the approaching automobile; only trouble took to the road at that time of night, and with held breath she had watched the trellis design grow and grow into the room before she undertook to shake Angus out of sleep. And now here in a Williamson guest bed as large as a barge, she lay open-eyed nearest the wall while the deep sleeper in the lump of covers at the outside of the bed was Susan.

  It had astounded Adair these thirty years how life reacted to Susan. She was like a hot poker into cider. A savor came from her which, whether it was to your exact taste or not, boilingly changed the flavor of a situation. Adair lay there bringing back that most distant day when she and Angus were wed and all at once a great unforgettable goose of a schoolgirl with the majestic neck she had not yet grown into and those sinewy Duff shoulders stood up tall and in the finest voice gave the one gift that, even then, Adair knew would last:

  “Adair Barclay, she was there,

  Gathering a lad with red hair . . .

  Angus McCaskill, he was there,

  Paired with a lass named Adair . . .

  Feel love’s music everywhere,

  Fill your heart, fill the air,

  Dancing at the rascal fair.”

  She tensed now as Susan stirred, hoping she had not unwittingly hummed her awake. But Susan simply gave a bit of a dreamer’s groan. Angus so often did the same. Down through the years sleeplessness had given Adair more than enough experience at sorting sounds in the dark. Sentrylike she lay there, her thoughts obstinately marching back over how it was that
here they were, Susan and poor wishbone Monty, Angus and herself, under Williamson roofs while outside one or another of those high-and-mighties—she was pretty sure it must be the Major—every so often could be heard making the rounds of the guards put in place against those who tormented the night.

  * * *

  The morning came haggard, with waterless clouds in the way of the sun, and the burnt patch on the slope above the Double W ranch house emerging to Wes on his dawn round of inspection as incontrovertible as a tender new scar. By the time he was an hour into this day, he had kowtowed to the McCaskills with the loan of a buckboard to go home in and accompanying apologies for the night in harm’s way, held Whit back from several precipitant actions, had it out on the telephone with the nonfunctioning sheriff, and now was faced with Susan.

  “I don’t think I heard that,” she was telling him with the type of enunciation he wished she would save for waist-high pupils. “Call it quits?” Her gaze cut back and forth from one burly Williamson brother to the other, Wes the office master untanned as fine stationery, Whit on the permanent brink of sunburn. At the moment the pair were anvils for her words to strike blue sparks from. “Nothing of the sort. You’re surely not going to let Klan imbeciles make mincemeat of all our work, what’s the good of that?”

  “She can’t be back over there on the North Fork by herself,” Whit spoke as if she were not in the room. “Monty can’t be scooting over there for any more lessons anyway. Some loony up a coulee with a thirty-ought-six—” He stopped, at the expression on Wes.

  Susan gave up on Whit with a glance that told him so, and set out to surround Wes. “This is new of you, Major. Since when do Monty and I have no say in this?”