Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  THIS was the morning Monty was able to give the auditorium what for, showing it no mercy, the free and easy force of his voice all but making its walls bend outward, each syllable-scrap of song plucked up off the music stand, no trouble, and sent with perfect dispatch to the farthest seat of the balcony where Mrs. Gustafson stoically sat.

  He was putting his voice around a triumphant chorus when, with a yawn like a box canyon, Mrs. Gustafson rose to her feet and walked out, bumping every seat as she withdrew.

  Thrown by this, Monty stared out from the stage. “Where’s she going? We aren’t but half done with the runthrough yet.”

  Susan sent him over that look that said the spelling-bee was in session.

  “You put her up to that,” he sputtered.

  “Of course I did. Mrs. Gustafson has just played the part of the audience you weren’t holding with ‘Unless I Be Made To.’ Now then, what do you do? We went over this only yesterday.” She pattered the toes of her shoes against the hard floor of the stage to suggest the sound of a stampede toward the exits. “Quick, quick. The audience isn’t getting any—”

  “—less restless, I know, I know.” He still was peering huffily at the balcony doorway where Mrs. Gustafson had steamed out of sight, but Susan was pleased to see him get hold of himself and begin to grapple. “Fit in ‘Praying Jones’ next,” he calculated promptly enough. “It’s livelier.”

  “Good.” She still sat there with her hands in her lap instead of on the piano keys. “And?”

  “Cue-the-poor-confused-accompanist-of-a-change-in-the-program,” he recited as if at gunpoint. He cleared his throat and all but trilled the code phrase, “We shift now to a different hue of the musical rainbow,” then dumped in the new song title and barely had time to think Rodeos were nothing compared to trying to keep up with her before Susan’s fingers came down on the keys.

  * * *

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know where they got them hid out. The Major is a bearcat on something like this, he wasn’t a big officer in the war for nothing. Off he goes, somewhere, sure—but the rest of us on the place don’t know zero.”

  Trying not to sound exasperated, the man across the back table repeated what he had been saying the two previous Saturday nights. “We can’t take you into the Order just like that, not until you prove out. Can’t you find some way to give us some help on this?”

  Dolph preparatorily rubbed across his lips with the back of his hand. “Speaking of proof.”

  The man tipped the bottle of 80-proof whiskey once more toward the waiting glass.

  * * *

  Another day in a diary page, another session of music made (well, hammered at) in this old flat Gibraltar. Here we sit in confinement, Monty and I, and for that matter Mr. and Mrs. Gus and Bailey and his no-names, while the Klan chameleons can openly go about their daylight lives.

  I lay awake on such things: is he one, I think back over someone I once saw be so terribly mean to a horse; or the slyboots woman in town we always called “the common carrier” because of her chronic gossip, would she press the sheets for her husband to wear and pat him out the door to hunt us down? Whoever they are, I live for the moment when Wes can get his foot on the throat of this bunch.

  She whapped the diary shut with good-night finality, but held on to her pen as if she never went unarmed. Her clock had been banished beneath clothing in the deepest drawer until bedtime—she agreed with Monty that the tick-tock here was crazily more loud than elsewhere—so she leaned sideways far enough toward the window to check the progress of the moon. High in the sky; if this long night had a meridian, the moonlight should be close to shining down on the morning side of it by now. And she still was not one bit sleepy. She sighed, and chuckled at herself because she knew she was not much the sighing type. “Get a grip of yourself, lass,” she mocked in the burr that had been burnished by her Scotch Heaven stay. Drawing out a sheet of stationery, oddly fresh in this barn of a room where gloom hung in the corners, and an envelope, she put ink right back to work.

  Angus and Adair, hello you two—

  I am promised this will reach you by favor of Major Williamson. How odd to be resorting to this method, as if we were all back in the era of passing billets doux (or as Samuel expressed it when he would have to collect his trenchmates’ love letters and deliver them to the continually shocked censoring officer, billets coo) from hand to hand. But the Major has cautioned us against trusting our whereabouts even to the post offices.

  We are biding as well as can be expected. Our surroundings are the opposite of plush, but Monty and I have been afforded all the accoutrements needed to continue with his lessons. Adair, I can hear Angus now: “The caliber of money the Williamsons have, they ought to be aiming high.” Ought or not, the Major seems set as can be on providing Monty the polish he needs to stand forth as a singer, and I am oddly flattered to be the applying utensil. A voice such as his comes along about as often as the dawn of time.

  Refining that voice, confining it to the magic spot on the stage where someone gifted takes sudden root as a true singer—that is another story, which the two of us work on until we are sick of the sight of each other. Not really. Since that dreadful night it has hit me like a slap, what Monty is up against in life. I thought I knew—no, I imagined I knew, if that will pass your classroom inspection, Angus—what it must be like to be in his situation. Something akin to the unwanted singling-out a woman is sometimes subjected to when men have the full run of things, that was my imagining. But that notion was stupidly pale, in all senses. What Monty is doomed to if Klan thinking (to flatter it with that) has its way is a kind of imprisonment forever painted right on him. His only key out of that, so far as I can see, is his voice.

  But this is overmuch for a note that was merely meant to say I miss you like mad. Who knew, when the rules (?) of chance deposited me back into Scotch Heaven, that you two would so take me into your lives that I now regard myself as an honorary McCaskill.

  With all the affection there is, Susan

  Susan, rascal you—

  Adair and I were heart glad to hear from you. Wherever you be, take every care. The hooded ones no doubt will eventually trip over their own monstrous trappings, but until then—

  Scotch Heaven of course is lame and wheezy without you. I see to your place, and will batten it for winter if it comes to that. Beyond the whistle of the days going past, we have little news. The summer tutorials I am giving as ever lack toot. Varick and Beth are still awaiting their addition, any moon now. The hay is at last up, the sheep will soon come down.

  I must break off—Petey Hahn has forgotten the head of the discourse and is leading his report on the episode of the Trojan Horse off into the personality of his own pony, Bloater. Do tell Monty for us that we listen with cocked ear for when he will make a gladsome noise in the world.

  Fondness from Adair, too. Angus

  MONTY did his running on the worn wagontrack around the parade ground, in the cool of the evenings. Loping there, on the long oval that moved him counterclockwise past the troopers’ barracks, then the married men’s quarters, then the hospital and its washhouse again, he circled to the slapping of his footsteps like thinnest echoes of the cavalry paradings that had coursed across here. He waited until after a good enough session in the auditorium and they were on their way across the blowy parade ground for lunch, to try her on this. “Know what? I miss being on a horse, any.”

  Susan stopped short, the better to weigh the dimensions of the oblong field—untrotted on for so many years—hemming around the two of them. “It would be about like being on a merry-go-round, but let’s see.”

  When she went to Bailey, he instantaneously said: “I’ll need to ride with you.”

  “Whatever for? We know you’d all hemorrhage if we set a hoof outside the fort. We just want to canter around the parade ground.”

  “So my men don’t see you and him alone together any more than they already do.”

  “What a remark
ably hateful line of work you are in.”

  “Miss Duff, my business right now is to try and save your skin. Not to mention his skin.”

  The next day when the worst of the noon heat was past, Monty whistled as he saddled up for the three of them. Once they were on the parade ground, Bailey rode between Monty and Susan like an extra shadow of one of their horses, until she spoke up.

  “Mr. Bailey, as much as we appreciate your company, there are matters I must talk to my client about in confidence. Secrets of the singing trade, shall we say. It would be worth it to us to put you in for a bonus with the Major.”

  “Miss Duff, I go deaf when I have to. If you have things to say to each other that you don’t want the light of day on, I can ride ahead a ways and you can talk soft.” He spurred to a short distance in front of them as if his horse was too frisky for theirs.

  Susan and Monty kept their voices at a murmur.

  “You worked that pretty slick.”

  “Loyal to the last dollar, our Mr. Bailey. Well? There was something out here you wanted to go over with me, you said.”

  “Promise not to think I’m ready for the bughouse?”

  “Monty, please don’t start that. I’m already putting up with riding circles in a weedpatch.”

  “All right then. You know how sometimes a person pretends? I’m at that, an awful lot.”

  “Would I know a case of it if I saw one?”

  “Not if I have brains enough to grease a skillet with. The bruisers already think I’m the oddest thing going.” She watched as he tugged his hat down to a sharper angle, for more shade against the sun or the speculating eyes of Bailey’s men. Barely moving his lips, he went on: “I don’t mean pretending like an actor or some such would do. Just in my head. Trying to figure out how things were to my people here.”

  Susan encouraged him by not trying to herd him with questions. Monty rode alongside her in the easy slouching way a cowboy could go all day, hands resting on the saddlehorn and the reins idly held, but he wasted no time in indicating toward the old hospital and the washhouse in back of it.

  “You take, over there. Put my mind to it and I can about tell you how any of Angel Momma’s days went. From the night before, actually—she’d butcherknife some pine shavings off, leave them on the oven door so they’d be dry and nice to start the fire in the morning. Did that all her life.” He squinted in concentration, as if to see this next more clearly. “Quick as breakfast was off the stove, on went her irons. Then had to carry her own water, for the washing. She was swimming in laundry and ironing here, and me to handle, besides. And all the time having to prop her clotheslines”—the memory was one of those that stood out like a tinted picture in an album, of himself darting around beneath the poles she used as though he was loose at a circus—“so the wind didn’t take them to Wyoming. All that, she must have been one hard-put woman, wouldn’t you say?”

  “ ‘Man’s work is from sun to sun / Woman’s work is never done,’ ” Susan responded rat-a-tat-tat. She patted under her horse’s mane to steady the animal as a charge of hot wind came from nowhere and a tumbleweed skittered by. What Monty had depicted sent her thoughts in a loop, out across this prairie to the ruts into homestead after homestead, the suffrage campaign’s flivvers quivering to a halt in front of yet another shanty where the blue-gray scab of ground in what passed for a yard told of washings done with water hard as liquefied mica. “I’d say your mother was very much of her time, out here, in being worked to death, yes. Go on.”

  Monty took a minute in piecing together the next. “Then there’s my father, here,” his words rushed when they came, almost as if he and she were riding up on Sergeant Mose Rathbun in horseback prance ahead of them instead of the blue-serge back of Bailey. “He was away soldiering so much of the time, it’s harder to put myself in his place than hers back then. But I’ve been having a pretty good go at it.” He slid his eyes her direction to gauge her attention, and she nodded, a single keen echo of his own usual manner of acknowledgment, for him to keep on. Glancing away toward the gapped wall of long barracks along this side of the parade ground, he began in a low ripple of voice:

  “The Tenth Cavalry most of its time was never anywhere but down in the desert, Arizona, New Mexico some. They fought Comanches and Apaches and whatnot—I pestered this out of the Major once. Then all this gets built, some outfit is needed to man it, and the Tenth lights in here, four or five years before my mother does. Middle of a blizzard, naturally. Summer here isn’t any too wonderful either, is it.” The hot wind found them again, making them duck their heads to fend it off with the slant of their hats. Monty checked from under his hand clasping his hatbrim: no dust storm riding this wind, at least. As soon as the elements would not whisk his words away, he went on with his spoken thoughts.

  “So there had to have been hard going for my father, too.” Susan watching, the handclasp on the saddlehorn was a fan of fingers lifted one by one now as he named off. “No way up, sergeant was as high as somebody like him could ever go. No war to really fight. No other colored anywhere around, except his troopers.” He laughed softly. “Angel Momma always told that she was barely off the steamboat at Fort Benton before here’s this Sergeant Mose Rathbun making eyes at her. But that’s after he’s already been at Fort Skin-and-Bone those years. And that’s kind of interesting to me.”

  “You had better spell that out for me.”

  “All kinds of reasons to skip off out of here, and he never did,” came the reply. “Didn’t desert. Upped and re-upped. When the last enlistment they’d let him have was over with he had a good discharge—my mother hung on to that one piece of paper of his, that and the bugle. So, something here held him, even before my mother and me came along.” Anxiously: “Miss Susan? You still with me?”

  He was badly aware how far beyond common sense he was venturing. But he had no one to go to with this but her. If they were bound together in this godforsaken place like a pair of people in a three-legged race, what better time to take this on? You’re good and smart, he put across mutely but he hoped legibly; either those eyes that doled it out only as she pleased were registering every line of him or expertly hiding how well they kept their distance, he couldn’t tell which. You had a soldier in your family, too. Music aside this once, can’t you give me some help on me and mine?

  “I’m here listening, aren’t I,” Susan provided and no more.

  Spurring his horse lightly on the near side, Monty made the mount shy around in a well-reined pirouette. Startled, Susan watched man and horse turn into a tableau that needed only the sound of bugles behind it.

  Bailey glanced back at the brief fusillade of hooves, then away again.

  With the horse under perfect control but edgy about the sudden authority on its back, Monty held the high-headed parademaster pose just enough to be sure it registered on Susan. He sidled the horse back toward hers, his voice coming lower and quicker than before.

  “Maybe it was something like this parade ground. Could be this was his auditorium, you think? It took something to run soldiers—we know that from the Major and his decorations, don’t we. I can pretty much see my father out here, bossy as you can imagine”—this drew him a deep look from Susan—“to make his troops look sharp. I don’t have much memory of it, but from what I do, the Tenth liked to put on a show. I’d bet anything their inspections and parades were pure spit-and-polish. And he had to have been front and center at all that.”

  She did not say While a white officer stood right over the top of him on everything he did? Nor its corollary Until he had to go out on his own and leaked away into the landscape at the first opportunity? Monty’s family pangs peeled her heart. But they also worried her sick. It didn’t matter one spark to her what was behind his father’s evaporation unless it ran in the family, and she had natural resistance to that prospect. Or unless—worse yet—Monty let himself be eaten away at by example: that whenever a man of the color passed down to him by Mose Rathbun stepped across a certai
n line, the world was always going to be too much for him.

  “So here he is,” Monty said in a near-whisper as if the conjured sergeant again was about to gallop up and inspect the shine on their buttons. “Parading when he can, hanging tough when he can’t, and in either case he never cuts and runs from here. But over at the Double W, he didn’t last hardly any time at all. Doesn’t that sound sort of funny to you?” Susan knew a question that did not need answering when she heard one.

  The fingers on the saddlehorn already were enumerating again. “A better wage and all; whole lot easier place for Angel Momma and likely him too; rider all his life with a chance to shine at a riding job—and he couldn’t hack it? Why was that?”

  Monty paused to consider. “Angel Momma didn’t give him the benefit of any doubt,” he at last said in an outbreath. “Got himself in some kind of scrape, she’d always tell me, and that was enough for her. Nobody else at the Double W would ever say scat about him, because of her, I suppose. But when you think about it, here’s a man fought Indians all his life—what’s it take to spook him out of the Two Medicine country, if that’s what happened? I can’t see the Williamsons catching him at something either, and kicking him out and hiding it from Angel Momma. No,” he shook his head decisively, “old Mister Warren would have given him one hell of a talking-to, excuse me, and fobbed him into some job in Helena, packed us off along with him so breaking up the family wouldn’t be on the Double W’s conscience, that’s more their way.” He pondered off to the perimeter of prairie beyond the far end of the parade ground. “Lately I had to wonder if something like this Klan bunch got him. But Mister Angus would have picked up on anything like that, if it’d happened. If anybody would ever level with me, he would.”

  Susan knew it was her turn to try. “Just hearing all this, I would have to line up with your mother. Some kind of scrape.”

  “Which puts him back to being a quitter.”

  “Monty, this can be argued flat as well as round. I don’t see why he couldn’t have been a worthwhile trooper—”