Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  He reluctantly resigned himself to a climate only rattlesnakes could prosper in. His eyes joined the others in trying to take in the mass of deserted habitations over these arid acres. Ranked across from the ramshackle barrracks and seeming to squint toward them in disgusted inspection stood prim old house after house of officers’ quarters with randomly broken windows and shutters half gone. And down the middle the wind blew, the parade ground its permanent right-of-way.

  Bailey gestured to the barracks building closest to them as though shooing it out of their way. He murmured, “My fellows picked this one for theirselves, because of,” indicating upward. A three-story tower, its parapet crowned with castle-style battlements, buttressed the near end of the building. Susan, Monty, Wes, all three goggled at this. Rapunzel could have let down her golden hair perfectly in character with the odd medieval aspect, except for the mat of buffalo grass beneath. Bailey whistled through his teeth, and a lookout carrying a rifle peered down at them through one of the battlement notches. “That’s Ned,” said Bailey, and left it at that.

  Susan drew in her breath, as if she had stepped by mistake onto the stage of some fantastic opera.

  Wes fell into logistical conversation with Bailey while the four of them trooped off toward further batches of buildings. Monty thus far had no sense of recaptured past such as the visit during the dust storm had whirled up for him here, his mood too heavy for memory to make any headway. Behind the backs of the other two, Susan and he exchanged a look as castaways might have. They had compared, and in the session of argument each of them had with the Major against being made to hole up here, the Major could not have been more highly reassuring: “You’re just going to the other ranch.” Some ranch; you could lose track of cows for a week just in the jumble of these buildings. Although right now, both of them saw, a couple of the hands were down at the road putting up the set of gateposts where the freshly done Deuce W sign would hang. The Williamsons never wasted any time in putting their brand on anything.

  A wrangling corral, holding a restless new saddle string of mares and geldings, loomed into their path now, and beyond it, a tumbledown blacksmith shop for horseshoeing and enough stables for a major racetrack. Susan was impatient to scoot on past these, but the men were not.

  “Barns aren’t in any too bad a shape,” Monty at length was moved to remark to the Major, one connoisseur to another.

  “That was the cavalry for you,” Wes assessed, “the horses lived better than the troopers.”

  Susan was not growing any more patient. “Wes, you said a fort.” Directly ahead there was another tower, and doubtless another Ned, in a further contingent of barracks and other buildings beyond the stables. “This is like a military city.”

  “They went at it a bit strong,” he could only agree. “Maybe the War Department thought it was making up for lost time. Custer would be cleaning spittoons at West Point right now, if all this had been wangled in here before the Little Big Horn.”

  “But what were they thinking of, building all this that late?” Susan persisted as if the prairie deserved an explanation for all this intrusion on it. She ran a hand through her hair, which the wind was fashioning into knots. “I was only little at the time, but even as early as we lit in this country, my father said the Indians long since had no more fight left in them than a dog’s breakfast.”

  “Your father would,” Wes said, lightly enough to take any sting out of it. “But he more or less had the right of it. The tribes here were already on the reservation,” he gestured off to their route here where they had passed any number of small Indian ranches that looked as if they were all corral. “I hate to say so, but this wasn’t the most popular post that ever existed. It had more than its share of deserters. The saying was, you could always count on one thing on the menu at Fort Assinniboine: ‘Desert.’ So,” Wes summed, “fetching back their own troops, and there’d have been some chasing of Blackfeet horse raiders once in a blue moon, and of course handing runaway Crees back over to Canada”—he glanced in Monty’s direction—“in between parading. Garrison duty was the only way this was put to use, really.”

  Monty had been listening thoughtfully. The Major seemed to know a remarkable lot about the soldiering that went on here. What did they call that, osmosis?

  “Wes, Monty,” Susan called over from where she was peering into a higher-standing boxy building a little apart in this next cluster of structures. “Look at this, will you.”

  They joined her at the doorway, Bailey trailing. Inside was a shambles, but it perceptibly had been an auditorium. The quite sizable stage, complete with bandmaster’s podium, lay under a snowlike coating of dust from fallen plaster. The seating area was full of trash and broken seats. Up in the backstage rafters a community of pigeons lifted off in panic. The men protected their hats with their hands as the flock exited over them.

  “You’re not seeing it,” Susan pointed the matter up for them. “Here’s just what we want.”

  Her version of exactitude brought a wince from Monty—he was putting his neck on the line for this?—and a considerable scan from Wes to make sure she was serious, before he dubiously turned back to the maze of awry seats and general mess. “Susan, it’s pretty badly out of commission.”

  “What it is is a stage,” she overrode that, “with an actual proscenium, and there can’t not be acoustics.” She sailed on into the audience section as though dilapidated auditoriums were her first love. “We need a few of these seats in working order, is all. Here . . . over here . . . and back there. The rest can be, well, imaginary audience.”

  The three men edged in after her, twenty years or so of seeping dust and the droppings of those pigeons meeting them. Wrinkling his nose, Wes estimated: “This would take days on end to kick into shape.”

  “By tomorrow will do fine,” Susan answered absently. “My, how the regimental band must have lifted the roof off in here.” She put her head back and sang out as a test: “A capital ship for an ocean trip / was the Walloping Window-Blind.” When the sound of the downward-tripping range of that seemed to satisfy her, she tried its higher end: “No wind that blew dismayed her crew / nor troubled the captain’s mind.” The return on that too met her standards. “Quite nice. Monty, see there, even a balcony. We’ll have you projecting your voice like Caruso before you know it.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” he managed to give that.

  Wes backed out of the squalor in surrender. “Oh, very well, have your auditorium. As quick as they have the trucks unloaded, I’ll put everyone at this. Bailey?”

  “Mine won’t like it, but I’ll have the ones who aren’t on watch pitch in.”

  They moved off back toward the housing. Susan stopped by where things were being unfreighted off the trucks and made sure that the radio set offered by Wes would go to Monty’s quarters—he would need whatever company he could get, here—and she would take the Victrola. Then she girded for the face-off with Mrs. Gustafson over territorial rights within the commandant’s quarters. Similarly trying to square himself up against whatever was to come, Monty went with Wes over to the Duesenberg to get his suitcase and bedroll out. Once his things were on the ground, he looked around as if trying to remember which way to head in the multitude of ghost-buildings. Over there stood the empty-windowed post hospital and the laundry-works tucked behind it, but he could pick out nothing of the tyke, him, who had the run of the place. Gone downhill since I was three, that’s some life.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Wes was saying to him, already occupied elsewhere from the sound of it. “Gus is driving me back to the Double W.” Seeing the expression that drew, he tacked on: “Don’t be that way. You’re in another calling now.”

  “That better be the case,” Monty muttered, spit-rubbing a dab of dust off the door panel of the automobile.

  “Oh, and these.” Wes reached into the backseat and presented him a plump bundle wrapped in butcher paper and twine.

  “What’s this then?”

 
“Tailoring,” Wes spoke as if the brown-paper bundle could not be anything else. “Susan’s orders. You didn’t think you were going to make your Fort Assinniboine debut dressed like a ranch hand, did you?”

  * * *

  The clock finally having to confess to the appointed hour, Monty hustled out of his quarters dressed in concert gear, drawing deep practice breaths as he went. The mid-morning light here where there was nothing any higher than those stunted cottonwoods to break it was already hard on the eyes as he gingerly navigated his way to the auditorium. He felt more than medium ridiculous at having to try to keep the cheatgrass out of these silk socks, but he had decided that if any of Bailey’s bruisers snickered, they were welcome to do so until they choked on it. He wasn’t the one sitting on his tail day and night up in the drafty second stories of Fort Skin-and-Bone guarding them.

  When he stepped into the capacious horseshoe-shaped room, which was cleaner than it was yesterday but still not clean, naturally she was already up there in possession of the stage. Ensconced at the piano, she was writing furiously on a sheaf of paper held in her lap. Looking things over, he did have to grant that the piano, by whatever method it had been manhandled into here, added surprising serenity to the scene of harum-scarum seats and lath walls with bare ribs showing. But everything else within the confines of the gaping performance space seemed in what barely passed for working order, and he had a growing feeling this included him.

  Susan halted her scribbling to herself to take in his appearance. The tie was not quite flying level beneath his chin but at least it was proportionately tied, and the tails of the tuxedo draped as suavely as any ambassador’s. His boilerplate white shirt would have wakened the blind, and from the way he held his wrists out from him as if they were newly precious, she would have bet that Wes had thrown in a pair of those mother-of-pearl cufflinks he so favored.

  “My. If clothes make the man, you’ve certainly been overhauled.”

  “Miss Susan, I feel like I have doilies plastered all over me, all right? Now do you suppose we could get going?”

  Acting to himself as if this amounted to just another chore, he went up on the stage, which creaked as he came. To his surprise, she did not launch into whatever point of a lesson that happened to be at the front of her mind, and instead patted a weathered chair next to her piano bench. He scraped it back—every sound in here seemed to live on and on—and sat, on edge in more senses than one.

  “Monty.” He could tell she had deliberated this, and his attention sharpened accordingly. “Do you know why I nagged so for this next dose of lessons?”

  He could not help but grin this off, all they had been through beyond any other summary. “So you could have the pleasure of hearing me breathe like a tea kettle?”

  “There’s that,” she laughed the way she only rarely did during lessons, low and earthy, the kind of laugh that he happened to like to hear from a woman. “When we started at this, I had no intention whatsoever of taking things this far,” he heard out of her now. “Tune you up, so to speak, and that would be that.” She delivered him a look as if he was solely at fault for this next. “Then you had to go and get worthwhile. Don’t bother to puff up, there are still any number of kinks to be worked out of your hide. But the way your voice has come along would knock over any teacher, and I’d be a traitor to the profession if I didn’t give you whatever seasoning I can for actual performing. That’s why I wanted us to practice, even here, in full getup from now on.” No wonder she seemed so primped and pressed, he realized; she had on an aqua-green gown long enough to pass muster at a fancy ball. Now that he looked, she was even in womanly war paint; face powder, touch of rouge, something done to the lips. Her hair fixed a way he hadn’t seen it before. If the imaginary audience grew tired of his performing rig, it could feast attention on the accompanist.

  Those cobwebs of thought she swept right through. “What we’re going to do are called runthroughs. Done right”—she gave every appearance of being in charge of that nationwide—“these will help to put you at ease no matter what happens when you’re actually performing.”

  Help put him at ease, none of her I guarantee? And what was no matter what? Monty discovered a longing for the old days when she only drilled the daylights out of him about breathing.

  Shifting on the chair, he sounded out his doubts: “Something like that really have to be in the cards, here? I guess I figured I’d pick those kinds of things up when I have to stand out there and behave myself in front of a bunch of people.”

  “You’re going to need a flying start.” From her warning tone, any sugar for the day was over. “In your, you know what I mean, situation, you must be better than good from day one. Knock their ears back from the moment you open your mouth, you absolutely must. And you start at that”—before he knew it, she had him upright and being steered toward the back of the stage—“by knowing every pore of the theater.”

  For what seemed an hour, she trooped him back and forth through the whole enterprise, the considerably mystifying workings of backstage, the angles of getting on and off the stage without becoming encumbered in the curtain, the exact unarguable line of sight necessary between accompanist and singer, the carefully considered plank of the stage that should be his mark to sing from and that she chalked an unmissable X on, protocol after protocol that he tucked into so many corners of his head that he began to wonder if he would run out of space. Each time he thought they were done, Susan would rattle off some more. This auditorium turned her into something like a schoolma’am administering a spelling bee, it seemed to him, but with all the words as tricky to remember as those French ones in the newspapers during the war: Ypres, Passchendaele, Douaumont, so on and so on.

  Eventually she swung around to him, the edge of her gown flipping just short of his ankles, and informed him, “Then when you’ve instilled all that in yourself, you can relax and let your performance take its course.” She stood out there at centerstage—on the exact plank she had chalked for him, he noticed, without ever so much as having glanced down—looking lit from within. With all the reassurance in the world in her voice, she confided: “There are only two rules of being onstage, doubtless since Shakespeare: remember your lines, and don’t bump into the furniture.” He managed a laugh, which echoed back at him from the wing of the stage as if from a big empty rainbarrel.

  Susan straightened his tie, then went over and fluffed herself into place at the piano. “Let’s give it a try. Don’t worry, I’ll provide the audience when needed as we go along. Today let’s just hear how you sound in a room this size. ‘Mouthful of Stars,’ first? It has nice range to it.”

  Toeing the mark there at centerstage, Monty fought the flutters that had accompanied him all morning. Try as he had, the thoughts dogged him at every step toward this mournful relic of an auditorium, then in every square foot she checker-moved him through. In the feel of this fort, its blind grip into the prairie, he sensed how it was that the Rathbun family began to flake apart, back there in his first years. The spectral rubble of this place somehow held them yet, maybe invisible to see but outlined as if by firelight in his imagination: Sergeant Mose Rathbun, rough-hided veteran of the Tenth Cavalry, sent trotting here to fight Indians who no longer needed fighting; Angel Momma, imported to do the linens. And in here would have been the one gathering place outside of duty, back when this fort was manned. The regimental band—Miss Susan had said as much—would have held forth in here, every-so-often concerts of rowdy-dow marches. But that was the kind of tumpty-tump his mother had hated—“They might as well beat it out with a spoon on a washtub, parade theirselves to that.” This must have been where what Sunday services there were got held, too. His father the absconder, sitting here listening to hymns of faith? Somehow he could not picture that either—“Your daddy wasn’t ever what might be called churched.” Even here, desperate temple of music it was supposed to be, he saw how those lives sundered. Other imaginings rose to him like fever vapors from a swamp. The lord
ly white officers, probably not a one of them a patch on the Major or they wouldn’t have been shelved out here, they’d have filled the front rows like a streak of calcimine, wouldn’t they. And in back of them, the uncomfortably unhorsed cavalry troopers in Chinese-checker rows where every marble was black. All of them, swept west like so much dust, to this fort which constituted a military wild goose chase, it and everything it came in touch with an epidemic of failing, failing—

  “I said,” Susan’s voice notified him this was time two and that was about enough, “we’ll start again. Ready now?”

  Monty jerked a glance to her that would have to do for an apology, and made himself concentrate on getting his breath ready. After a few moments he nodded, and the start of the low croon of “Mouthful of Stars” issued from the piano.

  But the auditorium would not let him issue sound of his own. He stood there as if in the grip of a slow strangler. He could not account for it but he could not break out of it either: the gaunt wooden canyon out there, empty yet not, simply swallowed him, held him in dazed suspension like some Jonah on the verge of going down in a great gulp. In turn, nothing of any more substance than a gasp showed any sign of ever making its way up out of his own throat. It was worse than when he had gone blank up there in front of the Zanzibar denizens.

  “No, I am not ready this time either,” he choked out an answer to her question before it came. “Just give me a minute and I’ll try to get that way.” He retreated to the side of the stage, feeling her eyes on him. He dropped onto the chair there, his arms onto his knees and his head out past his toes. If he was going to throw up, he didn’t want it to be on these clothes. The prompter’s chair, she had said this was, when she was showing him it all. Then how about some promptitude with these songs, any damn one of them, that he had supposedly known ever since ears were fastened on his head?

  Good grief, is even an audience that isn’t there going to bother him? He isn’t afraid of his shadow in any other way, why this? Susan clasped her hands in her lap to keep from flinging something at the musical fates. “I’ll tell you what,” she brightly offered, to give him a cloak of time to reassemble himself if he possibly could, “let me play a piece. Just to put some music into this room—it hasn’t had any for a good long while.”