Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Monty sat back, passed a hand over his face, and made an effort to look like someone who belonged in the vicinity of an auditorium. Then, just like that, music filled the place, solid to the roof. The fancy brand of melody, for sure—her fingers racing all over the piano keys—but everything new that kept coming into it tiptoed back to meet the main tune. Then off a wonderful trickle of music would go again, eventually to shy back to the melody. It had its melancholy side, but the piece stayed full of exalted tricks like that, and as many of them as his ear could catch, Monty followed with stone-still attentiveness. He couldn’t not. This was music that savvied the way into the darkness of mood he had come down with, but lulled it into thinking better of itself. Showed the mood how to console itself, so to speak. Curative music, all the way. Mesmerized, he watched her fingers in their minute acrobatics along the keyboard, forth and back, as the Major would have said. How did she know to pull off a stunt like this?

  When the last elegant notes had faded up into the rafters like setting stars, he shook his head to indicate he couldn’t come up with what such music deserved. “What’s something like that called?”

  “Chopin. Nocturne in F sharp.” She was tingling from the playing. It had been a long time between auditoriums. Abruptly she announced, “Here’s mine,” and began fondling from the keys the opening bars of Prairie Tide.

  This music too rose and rose, finding its way as if riding a breeze, then taking delicate steps back down, raindrops would they be? A beat, a beat, another beat, and the piece took on storm next. But glided at the end into harmony so perfectly lovely it seemed to settle the air of the room.

  He was thunderstruck. When she had finished, the best he could do was whisper, “You’re up there with him,” meaning Chopin.

  Susan frowned, hiding pleasure. “Nowhere close. That’s the overture, then it gallops off to be sung to, like so.” She demonstrated, the music bounding out of the piano now, but still as sure of itself as anything he had ever heard.

  The clatter of a chair going over backward cut that off.

  Monty was up, but leaden on his feet. “And you’re putting in all this work on me? What for?! Holy God, woman—Miss Susan, I mean. You’ve got yourself to try and pitch to the top of the heap!”

  This had turned around more than she intended. “Monty, no. There’s every difference. As the old fiddler of Ecclefechan said when he heard a Stradivarius being played, ‘Ay, mon, there’s knackiness and then there’s geniusness.’ ” But she saw he would not be joked off from this. With all the firmness she could muster she told him: “I had my run at it. Yours now.”

  And if yours played out, where does that leave mine? He stayed planted there studying her with something between revelation and despair.

  A Bailey agent had popped in through the doorway from his post outside. “Everything hunky-dory?”

  “Rehearsals are like this,” Susan took care of him, and after he backed on out, she lost no time in turning teacher.

  “Now then. This matter, Monty, of you here”—she was briskly over by him, and with a twirl like a top, aimed herself around to the audience area—“and those out there. They will try your air.”

  Monty lost the meaning of the saying in the fierce roll of r’s. Susan indicated out to the farthest reaches of the auditorium as though it was full of something besides howling emptiness. “They’ll snatch the breath right out of you, they’ll wreck your concentration, and even if they’re sitting out there sucking cough drops with the best will in the world, they can stop you cold if you let them. And every audience is different. One night there will be little dibdabs of applause,” she patted two fingers into the palm of her hand, an exaggerated prissy expression on her. “And the next, they will beat their mitts until they hurt,” she clapped her hands above her head like an overwrought aficionado at a bullfight. Her tone softened substantially. “It’s odd. A singer needs people to come hear, and they seem to need the music. But they’re a—I don’t want to say a threat, but they’re a force to be reckoned with.”

  Monty hugged his sides as he listened. He could not quite feel the horn scar through the fancy coat and shirt, but he knew vividly its exact place beneath his palming hand. It about got me killed, remember, his response simmered just under the surface, trying to reckon with people that way at the rodeo.

  He found he had to tell her all of it. “The time that horn went in me. Not just everybody in the crowd was bothered to see a colored person get it that way. I heard some things while I was laying there.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about,” she instantly flipped that on its side. “That’s why you have to get as good as there is at what you do.” She rammed past him, gown crackling like a comet’s tail, and swooshed down onto the piano bench. As fast as she could make them go, her hands wove the ravishing music of the nocturne again. It took only a matter of seconds to transform the auditorium into a glorious chamber of sound once more, and she broke off to peer pointedly over the top of the piano at Monty. “Chopin was one of the silliest men in Europe in person,” she told him as if there was going to be a test on this. “But nobody called him a moonstruck Polack after music like that.”

  Maybe that works okay for Chopin. But . . . Soberly he swung his head, in an indicating scan of the auditorium’s populace of seats, as though an invisible multitude were out there crouched and waiting. “It still sort of shuts me down, sometimes.”

  Susan fixed him with a stare that ignored that and told him he had better declare war along with her. “If you don’t dominate the audience, the audience will dominate you. You have to overcome them,” the words drumming out of her like separate sentences.

  He realized she was not even remotely talking rodeo, on this. The stumble that sent him under the horns, she didn’t put that up there anywhere close with letting himself be crippled in his throat. So she knew even when she didn’t know firsthand. She had might as well have been in the Zanzibar that night when every word left him, when those faces all at once focusing hungrily up at him had dried the voicebox right out of him. Still bunched to himself by his arms the way he had been, he stood looking down at the X chalked on the stage, the spot where something all too similar happened here.

  All Susan could do was to hope he would not turn away.

  Finally he gave one of his quick waterdipper nods and brought out:

  “There is this about it—I could stand to have songs written out and on one of those, those music stands. Even the spirit ones I know by heart. Just sort of in case.”

  “A sound idea. I’ll tend to that, and then we’ll get started, all right?”

  * * *

  The bottle of good Canadian whiskey stood right there handy on the desk, but if the Klan chieftain was not going to reach for it another time, his second-in-command certainly wasn’t. He already was nervous about this nighthawk session, just the pair of them here, not the entire Klavern. Funny kind of way to operate, it still seemed to him. He had to accept his superior’s reasoning that it was up to the high ones like them to single out nighthawks, recruits who if they proved themselves could be inducted as Knights, but somehow it was a lot easier to go through with things when you had the hood and robe on. This wasn’t the secret meeting place, either; sure, it was after hours, but even so, he flinched at sitting around smack in the middle of town like this. No telling who might—

  He jumped some when his leader spoke up. “You fellows played hell with cows easily enough. Too bad you missed the woman that night.”

  “Would have been best of all if we could’ve caught both her and the licorice at her place,” the other said as if cheated. “We’d have dragged the pair of them behind the horses together until you couldn’t tell one from the other, you can damn well bet.”

  “It didn’t turn out quite that way, did it. The Big Horn County boys are one up on us now, you know.” They both knew, all right. Across the state at Crow Agency the other night, the sole Negro in town had been killed and his cabin set afire wit
h his body in it.

  “Not our fault the sneaking pair of them quit the country.”

  “I don’t grant that they have. Our lookouts who work the trains at Havre and the Falls haven’t seen them. Even trying it by car, he’d stick out. They’re tucked somewhere, I’d say.” He studied his fellow Klansman as if wishing for better material. “How do we stand—do we have anybody on the ranch?”

  “This Williamson bunch is no cinch,” the other man complained. “They cut loose the couple of boys out there I had in mind.”

  The leader resorted to the whiskey bottle now, pouring them each a strong splash. “One of them kind of a runty sort, gimps a little when he walks?”

  “No, that don’t fit any of our likelies.”

  “All right then,” the leader said in relief. “Spread the word to the Klavern that we’re going to lay low for now. Let me see if I can nighthawk us a certain somebody when he gets enough of this”—he flicked a finger against the bottle—“in him on Saturday night.”

  * * *

  Monty popped awake. By reflex his near hand reached out and made sure the rifle was there. Every bedtime he propped the 30.06 against the apple-box bedstand. And every morning he got up and slid it and the couple of boxes of ammunition—thoughtful parting gift slipped to him by Angus McCaskill—out of sight behind the woodbox, as nicely hidden as when he’d brought them here in his bedroll. The Major maybe didn’t want him doing anything crazy against the Klan, but it wasn’t the Major’s skin that was on the line with those maniacs, either. Just now he’d been dreaming about them again. One of those jumbled dreams, there was a rodeo arena in it, and Dolph standing up on top of the saddle showing off while his horse moseyed around and he himself was the announcer but could never find the megaphone and so had to keep cupping his hands and shouting to the crowd at the top of his lungs, and while he was trying to do that the clump of white hoods and sheets down around chute number one kept opening and closing the chute gate, like they were getting ready for an event. He touched the cold metal of the rifle barrel again for reassurance and rolled over to drift back to sleep, dream or no dream. Dreams were one thing and a loaded 30.06 was another; if any of the hoodoo bunch came after him—her, too—here at the fort, he would show those nightriding bastards this wasn’t eeny meeny miney mo.

  * * *

  In Susan’s room, a light still burned and the nocturne repeated softly on the Victrola.

  * * *

  Wes noticed nights now, more than at any time since those he had spent with Susan.

  Ordinarily, dark amounted to a change of clothes. Dressing up, in New York, because with Merrinell’s situation it seemed proper to meet her for the evening meal looking as lustrous as possible. Out here, fashion ran the other direction, downward with the sun; even alone here at the ranch, as now, he did not feel right until the day’s tailored suit was hung away. After supper both he and Whit liked to be in fresh comfortable britches and old corduroy shirts soft as chamois. It was a habit caught from their father, and as he dressed into it this evening, Wes wondered as he sometimes did whether he and Whit would end up like their father and Teddy Roosevelt, chesty men with years and weight piling up under the fronts of their shirts as they sat back talking ranching, on into the prairie night.

  If, Wes amended the thought, they don’t burn down us and this house first.

  They. He took those phantoms downstairs with him now, much as he once shared room in his mind with the German officer who commanded opposite him in the trenches. The adversary always held a certain fascination, particularly with the polish of darkness. Still thinking on this, he steered himself toward the office off the kitchen.

  With the office door shut behind him, he paused as if taking a reckoning on the familiar old room of maroon ledgers and manly furniture, as steeped in itself as a cigar humidor. At some point tonight he had to make himself settle there at the desk for a good long while. His lips twitched at the thought that while he may have avoided his father’s exact footsteps in life, the familiar indentations of the seat of the pants awaited significantly as ever in the aged leather cushion of the desk chair. Warren Williamson after each day of roaring around the ranch at a pace where you could have played cards on his shirttail—Whit had taken naturally enough to that headlong role, thank God—had then settled in here nightly at the constant arithmetical puzzle of adding acres to cattle and vice versa. Too bad the old boy didn’t have these nights to occupy him. Wes well knew that the legerdemain that now needed to be performed at that desk was beyond anything his father had ever tried to conjure. The WW Cattle and Land Company had more than its fair share of money, and Wes himself had married another substantial helping, but doubling the ranch holdings the way he and Whit and the eventual Wendell were attempting would have put a dent in Midas. Coming in here tonight, Wes felt oddly like an officer reporting for duty after a furlough—particularly odd to think of the grapple with the Ku Klux Klan as amounting to that—once again. Assembling the Deuce W was turning out to be like fitting together jigsaw puzzle pieces made of layers of paper, and the next of those layers had to be currency. We’ll tap a duke or a lord, his father airily said in the early years when overseas investors had faith that cattle on the endless open range of America were a bonanza. Those days were gone, and now it was banks, banks, banks. There were rounds of nameplated loansmen to be made, and before then financial figures to be put in trim like a troupe of acrobats.

  Not yet ready to nest at the desk, Wes crossed to the outsize mahogany breakfront which Whit, like their father before him, regarded as the height of furniture manufacture. There he poured himself a decent but not overwhelming amount of brandy and, still following the motion of his mind, circled on over by the big west window. It had never bothered him to nip at people’s heels, so he had no glimmer of doubt that the thoroughly notified ranch foreman had men on watch every minute since the nightriders slung up that cross and brazenly set it and half a pasture ablaze. In any event, damned if Major Wesley Williamson, possessor of enough combat medals to clank when he walked, was ever going to hesitate to stand at his own window, whatever white-sheeted pack might be skulking out there.

  He knew he wouldn’t be playing to an audience of himself and imaginary Klansmen like this if Whit were around. But Whit was in Great Falls for a cattle auction, although about now he would be with a woman in one of the upstairs rooms along First Avenue South. Wes felt more alone at the thought of that. Maybe he who owns the land owns all the way up to the sky, but that didn’t increase the companionability of a night such as this. “If I’m going to be alone in life, it might as well be with myself.” That’s a strong prescription, Susan.

  He did justice to the brandy and sent a chiding look around this room that had known nothing but males for all these years. Not that the rest of the ranch house was any better—something like a hunting lodge with a stockmen’s club thrown in. Antlers penetrated from every wall, any furniture that conceivably could be enveloped in cowhide was. Whit’s one concession to decoration in here was a Charlie Russell painting of riders with a square butte in the background while the foreground was, of course, all cattle. Unfortunately, Wes mused, the female half of the human race did not seem to share his father and Whit’s opinion that decor ought to begin on the hoof. His brother’s young wife from Memphis had lasted here barely a year. Merrinell had been here a total of once. Not for the first time, Wes pondered whether the place was a deliberate no-woman’s-land that the Williamson men had strewn in self-defense, like concertina rolls of barbed wire between the Western Front trenches, or whether women of a certain social cut simply couldn’t be bothered to try and civilize the Double W.

  Well, one had had her say here lately. He thought again of Susan holding forth with that ferocity of hers, that night last week. “Wes, you’re going to be the ruin of us all,” she’d let out in exasperation when he suggested she break off Monty’s lessons. (It had not helped that Whit for an instant looked as if he sided with her in that general sentim
ent.) He glanced around obliquely as though her presence might have somehow lingered in a corner of the room. He would have given considerable to know what magic she worked on Monty, in here. Enough that they now were all on war footing, surplus fort included, with the damnable Klan.

  Knowing he had to get at the work waiting on the desk, Wes even so stayed a while more at the window and the questions out there in the dark it framed. The adversary, the unknown, the other side of the spinning coin of fate. What faces fit onto the Klansmen? Who was the main push behind them? Because he was all too sure it was somebody sharp. Some one man or at most two, spurring the others—the usual bigots and misfits powered by hate—into this. Someone who had been sent in, perhaps. On that possibility, Bailey was giving the railroad workforce another scouring, but Wes would be surprised if that turned up the answer. This doesn’t have the marks of some out-of-sorts gandydancer. Beyond that avenue, there was town after town to sift and the Two Medicine country abounded in distances. It all took time. What most bothered Wes in the meanwhile was that these Klansmen were not surfacing. Elsewhere they were showing off in the open, a couple of hundred gathering on Gore Hill at Great Falls the other night to burn a cross. Those “peaceable assemblies” provided a chance for the Baileys of the world to ferret out identities, and when the time was right, those Klan members would get a rude cure. But these. Crucify a cat, kill off some cows, hurl a dead skunk onto the hood of the Duesenberg as someone had done the other night—the Two Medicine brand of Klan picked away just nastily enough to worry a person. So that he had to notice the night, even a quiet one such as this. It reminded him of the too innocent stillness before a barrage.