Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  “Striper. He was an old-hand sergeant, that’s what the Major says they were called.”

  “That, then. I don’t see why a man can’t serve as a good soldier,” this did not come out of her easily, Samuel’s stubbed-off service life to be gotten past, “and be whatever else he is, besides. What your father was faced with here, obviously a lot—if it makes you think better of him, I find nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t say it necessarily wipes out your mother’s rendition of him after that. People are the full alphabet, none of us is just the ink teardrop on the i.” She watched for any accepting of this in him, but he had gone to that expression where you couldn’t tell much. “You did want my opinion.”

  “Knew I’d get it, too. How about we race Bailey to the stables?”

  * * *

  Against the evidence, Wes hoped Whit had only had a bad night’s sleep. Chances of that diminished with every step as Whit came hotfooting for the house. By now he had all but flown across the yard from the Double W foreman’s quarters, and Wes with alert dread turned from the office window to await him.

  “They hit us again last night, more dead cows,” Whit came in saying, breathing heavily. “Somebody got into them up in the Marias pasture and cut the throats of fifteen.” He looked at his brother as if pointing out arithmetic on a blackboard to him. “That took a pretty fair number of men, to work over that many cows. Wes, this isn’t pattycake with this Klan bunch. And don’t tell me the war wasn’t either.”

  “I never would, Whit.” Wes whipped his coat on. “I’m going to the fort to see what Bailey has come up with.”

  * * *

  “Godamighty, Mrs. Gus, you ever hear of an invention called the cough drop?!”

  Mrs. Gustafson’s phlegm spasm ceased and she beamed triumphantly up at him from front row center.

  “I see the picture,” Monty said with resignation. He turned and faced the music, Susan sitting expectantly at the piano and wearing her surely-you-can-spell-Passchendaele expression. “Sorry I let it throw me off. I know, don’t let anything short of Kingdom Come take my mind off the music.”

  “Once again, this is the place to get mistakes out of your system.”

  “I’d like to run out of those, at some soon point.”

  “Oho! The first perfect singer there ever was?”

  He quit gripping the music stand as if he wanted to shake it and walked over to her, holding the sheaf of songs as a pretext. In a businesslike murmur that would not carry clearly out to the seats, he said: “Need to ask you about something. Just us if we could.”

  Susan eyed him. She had been expecting this, but that did not make it the least bit welcome.

  “Mrs. Gus,” she reluctantly called out, “thank you the world. That will be all until I give you a holler.” When the broad stern of Mrs. Gustafson receded up the aisle and out the door and the curiously depopulated auditorium was theirs, Susan sighted back onto Monty. “It doesn’t look like music on your mind.”

  He shook his head, meaning she was right. They both knew it was going to be that kind of discussion. “I’m still not getting any younger at this,” Monty set out. He surprised her with a commiserating smile, as if sympathizing that she didn’t have a twelve-year-old prodigy here beside the piano to put her stamp on. “Look at that another way,” he went on, “if I’m finally old enough to have some sense I better ask myself if we haven’t given this our best shot. We plug along on these runthroughs, some of them aren’t that bad, and others we wouldn’t either one of us wish on anybody, would we. And maybe this’s about the way it’s going to be. Maybe this’s as good as there is in me, you think?” He watched her long enough to see how she was taking this, then looked off as if something beyond the walls had caught his attention. “Besides, I don’t know how much more I can take of Fort Skin-and-Bone.”

  That makes two of us. Aloud, Susan armored herself with the teacher’s creed. “You’re nearly there. True, there were some times this morning that we could have done without. That’s part of the profession, though, learning to take the rough with the smooth.” But then she halted, up against the actuality of what their time together on this old trouper of a stage amounted to for her. Monty saw her grasping for words, a shortage he had never expected she would come down with.

  “Pretend you’re not hearing me say this,” she managed, “but I’d give anything if you could see yourself from in me. This auditorium has been the making of you. I’ve sat here putting you through a dozen predicaments a day, Monty, and while you still stew over them a bit much—we’ll work on that—you’ve come miles in your performance.” Still grappling, Susan husked out as if it were a stage direction: “It has been a wonder to see. Bear that in mind, but not enough to pop your hatband, all right? Now then. We’ll run through the rest of the morning without the aid of Mrs. Gus, what do you say.”

  “Christmas come early, that sounds like to me.” All at once under the scrapes on his patience and the wear on his equilibrium, he had the oddest damned feeling he was someday going to miss all this, the time on this monster of a stage with her.

  “Ready then?” Susan fixed a gaze on him that told him he had better be, and down came her fingers on the accustomed keys white and black.

  * * *

  Fort Assinniboine shimmered in the noon heat, as if the brick buildings were bake ovens, when the Duesenberg nosed onto the long approach road. What next, Wes mulled as he began to come out of the fitful waking doze the miles had induced, Beau Geste on the ramparts in a kepi?

  But when the car at last drew to a halt beside the Saharan expanse of the parade ground, on watch in the nearest tower per usual was a sunburned-looking agent, and coming out the door of the guardhouse Bailey himself, looking as spruce as a man in a dark suit could in such heat.

  Telling Gus to go and reacquaint with the Mrs., Wes stepped over into the shade for the civilities with Bailey.

  “No luck at the railroad,” the investigator met him with. “But we’re working on—” Wes’s sharply raised hand cut him off. The two men stood motionless, listening. From across the fort, the soar of a voice lingered in the air like a long lovely alpine call, then followed the faint steps of a piano down, down, down to poignant silence. Throughout this, Bailey watched Wes with care, wishing he could know everything under that expression. Finally he said, “They’ll be at it a while yet. Major, I—”

  “BOSS!” Thunder from an open sky, the sentry’s roar clapped down on them. “I see something!”

  Bailey ran hell-bent for the tower. Grabbing from the car the Zeiss field glasses that were a prize of war, Wes went lurching after him. The interior of the tower was like the tight twist inside a lighthouse, a narrow iron spiral staircase winding and winding to the portal of blue above. The binoculars thumping against his chest, Wes pulled himself up the clammy guardrailings by his hands two lunging steps at a time.

  “Over by that coulee.” The sentry pointed south to a distant break in the tan sameness of prairie. “Some kind of white shapes, hard to make out.”

  Bailey had his own binoculars on the forms. “What the hell—? Major, can yours pull that in?”

  “Yes.” He let the field glasses drop on the strap around his neck. “Antelope rumps.”

  Neither Wes nor Bailey said anything during their clanking descent.

  At the base of the tower, Bailey glanced around and put this in a low voice: “Miss Duff and Rathbun—I think you ought to know. They have plenty to say to each other. Just to each other, sir.”

  “I imagine.” Wes looked impatiently at the shorter man. Bailey shrugged. “Now that we know we’re not going to be attacked by antelope,” Wes rapped out, “let’s talk over our chances against the Ku Klux Klan.”

  * * *

  “Are you crazy? Why’d you come in here?”

  “Can’t I have business, like anybody else? You ought to be gladder than that to have me show up.”

  “In broad daylight? Step over here where the whole world can’t see you, at least.”r />
  “Figured you’d want to know, I come across a way to git the goods. On Snowball and her both. Hadn’t ought to take too long now.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Well?”

  “Thing is, I’m tired of this nighthawk stuff. I want to be in for real.”

  “I’ve told you and told you, we can’t induct you until—”

  “Who’s all this ‘we,’ anyhow? Seems to me you pretty much run things.”

  “If you really can find out where the pair of them are, I can stretch matters and make you a provisional. Wait until Saturday night and I’ll bring your—”

  “ ‘Wait’ ain’t generally the way to git anywhere.”

  “All right, all right. You have your dues on you?”

  A happy nod from the little cowhand.

  “Then show up at my place at noon. Come around the back. And for heaven’s sake, make yourself scarce around here.”

  * * *

  Feeling spent to dime size after that morning’s runthrough of music and her as well, Monty came into his room ready to plop down on his bed. It was inhabited.

  “Major. Didn’t expect to bump into you until chow time.”

  “I thought I’d come see how performance is with you,” came the reply from the figure sitting as if carved to fit the edge of an army bed. “Mind if I take the load off like this?”

  Monty proffered the premises with a gesture and seized a rickety chair from by the table, straddling it so he could rest the top part of him on the chairback. With the Major, you never knew how long a siege you were in for.

  Wes examined the room as though he had been thrust back through military history to, say, the interior of the Trojan Horse, but was smiling a little. “How do you like the accommodations?”

  Truth to tell, the big high-ceilinged room that Monty had chosen because it faced out onto the full sweep of the parade ground practically whistled when the wind blew. But then, all of Fort Assinniboine seemed to be drafty. “This’ll do.”

  The smile Wes could not keep off his face was oddly sly by now. “You’re in officers’ quarters, you know. Quicker than any of my promotions.”

  Monty gave that a dry laugh. “Ought to be some reward in this singing business, don’t you think?”

  “Speaking of. How’s the auditorium working out for you?”

  Monty skewed his head as if considering. Where to even start, on that? “I’d have thought I knew how to walk out on a stage, but she’s—Miss Susan’s been showing me tricks of the trade. I’ll tell you, she’s got them.”

  Wes perched in wait, but that seemed to be all that was forthcoming. Monty showing some independence probably was all to the good. Still, he needed a sounding on morale here, how long he and Bailey had. “Those loonies in their bedsheets—are they still making you nervous, with Bailey’s bunch on the job?”

  “I was born nervous, in that respect.”

  Wes started to say more, then swiveled one way and then the other in mystification. “I keep hearing something.”

  Monty leaned toward the woodbox, found a chunk he could heft nicely in one hand, and tossed it against the base of the far wall. “Mice eating the wallpaper paste.” The smorgasbord of gnawing stopped. “You were telling me about the bedsheeters.”

  “Monty, we’re working on them.”

  “Figured you were.” Monty looked off out the window toward the barracks across the way, where every empty room was a hiding place for a cluck with a rifle. Working on them, the man says. How fast, though? A bullet wins any kind of a race. This next had been forming in his mind since that night of the burning cross, but even so he took extra time now to frame it just so. “Major? Do I savvy it right, that they don’t have any love lost for you either?”

  “A mackerel snapper like me?”

  Shock showed in Monty’s eyes. Since when did a Williamson use those kinds of words about himself?

  Not looking up, Wes industriously kneaded his knee. “I’ve been after them,” he said as if it was a satisfying memory, “back when I was in politics.” His voice took a sudden turn that Monty was not familiar with. “The damned mongrels. Who do they think they are,” it shot out of him in bursts, “to tell me what church I dare kneel in? Or to take after you like a pack of bloodhounds just because they feel like it? Wholesale haters, is all they are. Scum who need to take out their own shortcomings on others. They’re going to catch it for this, Monty. We’re going to get a handle on them, don’t worry.”

  The tone of the words, however, did not undo what had been on Monty’s mind.

  Onto his feet now, a passage in one motion from soldier to landholder, Wes was back to sounding merely brisk. “I’m going to have to eat and run, although that’s not easy after Mrs. Gus’s food, is it. Coming?”

  “You go ahead, I need to change out of this rig and wash up.”

  Shedding the little tie and then the tailored coat, Monty watched out the window as the Major went down Officers’ Row in that gait that wouldn’t admit to being a limp but carried a wound. From this angle Monty couldn’t quite see to the verandah of the commandant’s house, but he knew Susan would be out there, keeping a safe distance from Mrs. Gus’s kitchen. He hoped she would light into the Major about why the pair of them at Fort Assinniboine kept hearing the Klan was being worked on when what they’d like to hear was some heads rolling, out from under those hoods.

  Stripped down enough to scrub up, Monty still was in a storm of thought as he stepped over to the washbasin. The water he dippered from the galvanized bucket was tepid when he wished it was bracingly cold, but he doused himself with it like a man diving deep. That the Major had old tangles with the Kluxers was not exactly news, but the blood-boiling contempt was. He had been like a man suddenly off his rocker when he got going on the Klan that way. And he doesn’t even have a skin reason. But was contempt enough to do the trick? Why wasn’t the man tooth-and-nail into some session with Bailey about wiping out the sonofabitching Klan? Church was something strong, no question, but strong enough to stir up the clucks and the Williamsons like bobcats in a gunnysack? And me—and her—just being used as catnip for the Klan?

  That couldn’t be right. Monty looked the question to his dripping face in the mirror. Could it? If this was about church, it was going to be beyond him. Even Angel Momma, praying woman that she was, had joined in with the holy rollers for singing’s sake, you couldn’t say she caught the religion. The one time, as a boy, he had tried some hopping around when the rollers started their bodily commotions, as soon as he and Angel Momma were home at the washhouse she spanked the daylights out of him. “Those folks can let fly if that’s what they feel, but you aren’t going to, just to be doing it,” she had whaled the lesson into him. In his life since he hadn’t seen any reason to church himself to any one or the other: whatever was in charge of things of this world—more or less in charge, he had come to think—that’s what the spirituals and her spirit songs represented to him. But Catholics, Protestants—could those kinds of people in this part of the country where you could ride half a day without seeing a steeple, could they go at each other like his father and the Indians whenever they got the chance? Had the Major, maybe the Williamsons back to time immemorial, had to wait this ungodly long for a crack at the other side? Toweling his face furiously, he wished again he had Angus McCaskill around to talk to, he was strong on the past.

  FENCELINE in decline waits for no man. The pair of dun workhorses switched their tails in idle resignation as Angus wrapped the reins around a wagonbrace, barely taut so he could talk the team ahead from the ground, and climbed down to his work.

  He took another squint at the mountains as if hoping the sun was going to fool him and go down early for a change, but nothing doing. This time of year, there would be a good couple of hours yet for him to finish off this damnable fencing. The only thing working after supper had to say for itself was that it was out of the worst heat of the day. “What’s this old weather going to do?” Adair had asked, quite on schedule w
ith the question, as they sat up to the table. Drought having been written across the forehead of every day since sometime last spring, he hadn’t known what to say except, “Blaze on, I suppose.”

  Tools of the earthgouging trade arrayed in the back of the wagonbed like a crusader’s cudgels, he readied, if that was the word, to take on his rocky north line one more time. The dog Bob, with the older wisdom of his species, scooched in under the wagon and took a position there with his head pillowed atop his crossed paws.

  “Have the decency not to snore,” Angus admonished the snug dog.

  He honestly could have stood more company out of Bob, particularly this day-end. Susan’s leaving was like air going out of a lamp chamber, a leak of life he and Adair felt with each visitorless dusk. Not only that, but the valley somehow seemed voluminously empty without Monty and that odd bodkin Dolph riding in of a morning. Scotch Heaven truly was on thin times, he reflected, when the only caller to be looked forward to was the paradoxical postman Wesley Williamson.

  Taking his time about putting his barbwire-scarred gloves on and assigning his reluctant thoughts, Angus contemplated boundaries and their needs. He had fought this ground countless times, a shale shoulder of Breed Butte that repulsed fenceposts, heaving them out with frost and pinching off their strands of wire with contemptuous rust. All summer he had pecked away at repair up here, choring on this stubborn sidehill an afternoon or evening at a time when not haying or shearing or otherwise carrying the homestead on his back, and to say the truth, he found it supremely tempting to let this last sagging stretch go until next spring. But the jog of fence here was where his land butted against the range of the Double W, and while he had never grasped how, the Williamsons and their invasive cattle could always sense any tingle of opportunity at a fenceline, much like that monitoring that occurred from the verges of a spiderweb.

  Angus puckered in exasperation at this situation of perpetually losing ground by holding on to ground. He had to say for the old grabber Warren Williamson that Scotch Heaven at least had known where it stood with him; and Whit had pretty much filled his shoes since they came empty. Major Wesley Williamson, though—a piece of work of another sort he was proving to be, that dazzler.