Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Susan fidgeted the pen, rolling it contemplatively between the fingers of her writing hand, while she worked back to the page of that first day of scouring traces of cows out of the homestead house, the one about Scotch Heaven not amounting to much as a site but unbeatable as a sight. She tried to think back with exactness. Had she meant for those words to carry a whiff of epitaph for Scotch Heaven even then? They would have had to be astral as comets to predict the final human sum of the old valley: Adair Barclay McCaskill and Susan Duff its last residents. And Adair only until she had Christmased with Varick’s family. At the new year she had gone to Scotland on a visit that showed no sign of ending. Susan had spent the full winter—fortunately an open one; only for a few nights had she put up at the Hahns’, nearest family to the schoolhouse—and the swift spring in a Scotch Heaven that was as much apparition of its homestead decades as it was creek and valley. Varick had not decided yet on the disposition of the McCaskill homestead, ghostly indeed now without Angus and the sheep. For that matter, she still was making up her own mind what to do with the lower end of the valley. Ninian’s land. With more than grass and hay attached to it.

  That decision would keep for now. She read back over what she had written so far today. It constituted singing the scales, warming up one’s voice. With a considerable intake of air, she commenced to the next:

  Wes and I are like flighty children playing with matches. One of us ignites . . . and the other in scaredy-cat fashion stamps it out. Then the turns are reversed.

  She wrote in that vein until her hand began to play out.

  Well, at least there was one of them who had life’s ground solidly under him at the moment. She plucked up the review Monty had sent, for the sheer savor of reading it over, every blessed word:

  Fate lent a hand, or in this case an appreciative ear, to the inspired program of “spirit” songs performed by Montgomery Rathbun at Aeolian Hall last evening. To this hearer, and an audience unanimous in clapping and stamping for encore after encore, the setting was as apt as if by divination: in Mr. Rathbun’s wondrous presentation it is as if hitherto hidden songs have always existed just beyond us, tingling in the air, and through him they sing forth like windtunes through some great Aeolian harp.

  This he achieves in a voice of dimensions that are hard to measure. His is not the welling bass-baritone of Paul Robeson, deep as the keel of a slave ship, but a built-from-the-bottom-up tone that casts long shadows and etches the ground of life under the travels of his restless songs, qualities that can perhaps be traced to his background as a man of the prairie. That repertory, be it said, is fresh, no mean feat in this heaven-sent-by-way-of-Harlem season of resurging spirituals, when almost weekly new arrangements of timeless field songs can sometimes resemble musical chairs.

  The songs he brings are only an added gift, however. Montgomery Rathbun could sing the pages of the telephone directory and lift your soul. His is the latest and perhaps most phenomenal troubadour’s role in the renaissance of “sorrow songs” heralded in the pre-war recitals of Harry T. Burleigh, enhanced when Roland Hayes added spirituals to his classical presentations, furthered by the innovative scorings of the piano-and-tenor duo of J. Rosamond Johnson and Taylor Gordon, and burnished to a luster now that the profoundly gifted Paul Robeson has turned from dramatic roles to musicianship. At the onset of an earlier generous artistic flourishing, Ralph Waldo Emerson proffered to Walt Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere.” Harlem’s chorus of spiritual-singing virtuosos must similarly now pay their respects to Montgomery Rathbun, who stands forth as their latest compatriot and rival.

  All that and the reviewer did not even have an inkling of how rocky that bottom had been. Reading back, finding the diary days when some bit of coaching or coaxing had worked and both of them felt another breathworth of soar in his song, Susan was starved all over again for that experience of the lessons with Monty. Don’t I wish there were another one where he came from. Leading the South Fork schoolchildren in “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” in preparation for the program all the parents were invited to, there had been times when she thought she would break off into a maddened howl. Very well then, face up and admit it, she had been spoiled by the particularities of Monty’s voice. At least she was not totally bereft of it. One more time she picked up the letter the review had come with. I did not pay the man to write this, honest. The handwriting, in pencil, was welcomely familiar from the greetings he sent from wherever he sang; they amounted to postcards mailed in envelopes, safe from small-town post office eyes. She could picture the jackknife-sharpened stub, the earnest crouch over the stationery—somehow the words even stood slow and careful on the paper—and found it that much more rewardful that he thought she was worth the diligence. This letter was almost warm to the touch. Something, isn’t it? To think that the spirit songs are having a heyday? And that the foreground, they call it, was the old wagontrack where you about made me run my legs off? She smiled a moment at his growing penchant for question marks—he seemed determined to make punctuation count as much as it could, too—and skipped to the bottommost sentence: I hope the old town is ready for me? He was coming to Helena on his concert tour through the West. She circled the day on her calendar. Ahead of it by a week was the X’ed-over set of days she was to spend with Wes in the Two Medicine country.

  UNDER the highstanding sun the cattle were mothering up. Their mode of reacquaintance was repeating itself a couple of thousand times at once, every cow moaning anxiously and making sure with thorough sniffs that the calf trying to raid milk from her udder was entitled to it.

  Next to Wes in the shade of the boss tent, Susan speculatively watched the bawling scene along the lakeshore. Hers was not the only appraisal of what was being done to a calm noon at Lower Two Medicine Lake: around the reflecting rim of water, sphinxlike mountains with manes of timber seemed to draw in closer to frown down over the intrusion.

  She glanced at Wes, still busy checking his tallybook before he and whoever was sent out from the Blackfeet Indian Agency counted the cattle onto this reservation allotment, its rugged foothills practically in the lap of Glacier National Park. Simply by eye the massed cattle seemed to Susan an excess of livestock for any summer range. But mob of feeders though this might be, she knew it was only a portion of the Williamsons’ growing Deuce W herd. Thousands more were out in the coulees of Fort Assinniboine and the other outposts of the new ranch. Greater thousands than that were spread as usual on the home range of the Double W. The tallybook in Wes’s hands had him knitted in study, flipping from one page to the next, back, further pages on into the black-and-white arithmetic of herds and necessary grass; it must be like trying to stay ahead of locusts, she thought. Next to everything the Bible had to say, the one saying she had grown up hearing was that the Williamsons always had more cattle than country. Wes, she was seeing for herself on this cattle drive, dealt not only in ranchland and beef on the hoof but the attic space of geography; nooks and crannies of pasture like this under the planet’s eaves.

  A series of whoops and orders being shouted above the mooing drew her attention back to the trail herd. Perhaps stuffing this many cattle this high into the timbered foothills of the Rockies went against the human ear and common sense, but she couldn’t deny that it made quite a picture. Several day-herders now slaunched in their saddles at strategic points around the milling herd while the main file of riders headed in, their roans and sorrels and pintos mirrored in the bowl of lake like rich dabs of color on a clear blue palette. As they dismounted around the chuck tent for the midday meal, the bearded cook directed the traffic of Stetsons and batwing chaps with an imperial ladle. Susan tickled behind Wes’s ear to make him look up and take in the scene. “Even I admit it’s like a Russell, except nobody is bucking a bronc through the pork and beans.”

  Wes gave an appreciative wisp of smile. “Charlie apparently never met a horse that wasn’t snorty at chow time.”

>   “He portrays schoolmarms as a pernicious influence, too.”

  “While I think they are nature’s highest achievement.”

  “Do you really? I’m afraid we have loftier rivals, right around here.” She took in again the glacier-scarved mountains, augmented at this time of day by puffy clouds with flat, gray bases as if they had been sponged against the earth on that side. “Doesn’t it remind you of that time in the Alps?”

  He swung around to look at her, losing his place in the tallybook. “We were never in the Alps together.”

  “Just testing how well you keep track. And your ability to tell me from a Heidi. And how many yodels you’ve never yodeled.”

  “Not to mention your capacity to tease the life out of me.”

  “I hoped I was teasing it into you, Wes.”

  “All right.” He laughed as if to demonstrate he hadn’t forgotten how. “Guilty as charged. I’m more wrapped up in the travels of cows than I want to be. Whit has always been trail boss.” At the moment Whit was in California, sorting out Wendell after some scrape frowned on by the college authorities. Getting the bearer of the Williamson family escutcheon through Stanford was requiring increasingly strong doses of fathering. “I’ll make amends,” Wes promised while he reached and took Susan’s wrist as though he were a penitent who just happened to have a glint of another sort in his eye. “What would you say to a basket supper and sunset at the upper lake, when I’m done with the agency people? Whit would never spoil you like that, but if he hears about it and takes my job away, so much the better.”

  Susan had to smile back at him over that. She was no expert on trail drives, but she knew Whit also would never have shoved a couple of thousand head of cattle miles out of the way, as Wes had done the day before yesterday, to keep them from trampling the vicinity of the site of the Lewis party’s fight with the Blackfeet, and then spent all afternoon bumping over that prairie in the Duesenberg, navigating from one landmark to the next in the Field journal with her in wonderment at his side and Gustafson peering over the steering wheel for badger holes. When at last the ill-used automobile nosed along a particularly precipitous brink of white-clay bluff, Wes let out the shout, “There!” Directly below, in the colossal rupture of the prairie where the Two Medicine River twisted through, stood the three huge old solitary cottonwood trees, like ancient attendants minding the campsite. With wild roses on the face of the bluff blowing in the wind, Wes and she had sat there gazing down into the century before, retrieved by a single witnessing pen. She had a diarist’s feel for the quirks of opportunity it must have taken to set the Lewis and Clark explorations down onto pages at all, but an unearthed journal fresh from midtown New York still seemed to her as randomly propitious as lightning illuminating a safari map. She had tried to wheedle out of Wes the cost of such a piece of historical luminescence, but he wouldn’t tell. “Beyond price,” was all he would say. “Like you.”

  “Supper that way sounds grand,” she responded now, along with a return squeeze of his arm. “This is rude of a guest, but will you clear something up for me? Why are you putting cows and calves onto rough country like this, and for that matter why isn’t Whit throwing a fit about it? These cattle will have to work uphill for every spear of grass. Not to mention that the timber up here is full of blowdowns, and probably bear.”

  If her line of inquiry hit home, squarely in the tallybook, he didn’t show it. “The Deuce W needs shaping up before we run the full number of stock on it,” he said almost idly. “Some windmill watering holes, fencing to be done, that sort of thing.”

  “Short grass again, you mean.”

  “Your father’s daughter.” That drew him enough of a look that he hastily tacked on: “When it comes to grass. What was I thinking, trying that on you.” Suddenly serious as could be, he folded his arms on his chest and contemplated the herd already starting to munch its way up a slope that turned to timber just ahead of them. “If we ever have anything but a dry summer, we can quit being cow conductors. For now, these bossies are going to have to pretend they’re mountain goats.”

  He paused, then returned to her question. “Whit will just have to put up with the fact that I no longer can buy acres as fast as he can buy cows. You’re right that we’ll be nicked on a lease like this. A considerable number of head will end up inside grizzlies or at the bottom of gulches with broken legs. Probably more will end up in stewpots—we have to see that as a tithe.” He gave a slight shrug.

  Susan was surprised he could be that casual at the prospect of losing cows to enterprising Blackfeet. Rustling was rustling, wouldn’t you think? Particularly if you were a Williamson?

  “Speaking of fathers,” she got in, still trying to follow his thinking, “let me be more rude yet while I’m at it. What would yours think of paying good money for land this time of year and then having to walk away from it in the fall?”

  That turned Wes dramatically philosophical. “Why do you even ask?” He tossed a hand of futility in the air. “He would think Whit and I have taken screaming leave of our senses, as the old always think about the young. As Whit and I think about our own offspring.”

  “Oho. Old now, are we.”

  “It’s only a masculine trait. Women grow more fascinating.”

  “Especially in a cow camp,” she whittled that down. “Your riders look at me as if I have two heads.” She mimicked a cowboy gape. “But you, oh no, you don’t get that from them even when you chase off across the prairie in the Doozy after Lewis and Clark. I hope, my dear Major Williamson, that doesn’t mean they’re used to seeing you with a woman who isn’t your wife.”

  At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then as though it were a duty to report this sort of thing he told her: “They seem to expect something of the sort of me, actually.”

  “Really?” Susan’s tone was as if she were taking a scientific sounding. “It has come to that? Where there’s a rich man, there positively has to be a mistress tagging along?”

  “For God’s sake, Susan. You know there’s more than that to it, with us.”

  “No, this interests me. Shouldn’t I see myself as a kind of collectible, like that journal you can barely stand to put down? And you as the connoisseur of sufficient means I’ve been lucky enough to be plucked up by? Privilege has its rank, we both recognize that. If you were one of your cow chousers squatting around the bean pot over there, we never would have had the least chance at one another, now would we.”

  Wes studied her thoughtfully, then stepped over and kissed her for as long as it took.

  Susan brought up a hand and ever so lightly ran a finger back and forth along the side of where their lips met, as if saving it to taste. Eventually she stroked free and drew a breath. “I suppose you think that’s a way of ending an argument. It’s not bad.”

  “High praise. I can hardly wait until we outright fight. Add that to supper, can we?”

  The words were no sooner out of his mouth than she gave him a soft biff to the collarbone, as if to announce her readiness to trade love taps any time he wanted. Wes chortled, and stepped away to collect his tallybook. “I hate to cease hostilities. But I’d better go down and run through things with Petrie”—his foreman—“so we’ll be ready when the agency people show up.”

  “Wes. There’s something on my mind—surprise, surprise, right?”

  Reluctantly he pivoted to her and stood as if braced for the worst. Only to hear her say:

  “How would it be if I let you have my piece of the North Fork?”

  His face lit up, but she had anticipated that. Only in his eyes did she catch the flicker of the chain lightning of his mind.

  “On lease, I mean,” she stipulated. “This year, and we could see about next.”

  She could see the calculations flying in him, cows into acres, acres into cows, the capacity of the North Fork as an ever-running watering hole, the tonnage of its hay—“Susan, it would help on the Double W herd. In a big way.”

  “I want y
ou to put a fencing crew in there first. I won’t stand for cows mooching onto the McCaskill place from mine, I don’t care if Whit has to sit out there himself shooing them away.”

  “I’ll see that the fences are so tight not even a wee sleekit cowering tim’rous beastie could get through.” Wes took an eager step toward her, although he knew better than to kiss her this time. Sticking to business if that was where she wanted to be, he vouched: “Of course we’ll pay you top dollar.”

  “You’d better.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I can bring the papers with when I come in for Monty’s concert.”

  That wasn’t her preference, but she held to the mood: “Two occasions for the price of one, why not?”

  “On that. I’d like us as much together there as we can—you’ll see, he’s gotten astounding.” Susan waited, knowing what was coming. Managing this was the one thing that seemed to throw him, and he was no better at it than ever when he awkwardly asked: “You’ll be able to come in the warm company of Mrs. Gus, won’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t miss the chance for anything, even Mrs. Gus.”

  Looking buoyed, Wes went off to muster the cattle for counting. This time Susan did not watch the panorama of herd and riders and wary mountains. She sat in the tent, distractedly leafing through the valuable journal Wes had given prideful place on his portable desk. Beyond price. Like you. Such woo from a Wes with infinite cattle on his mind. I’ll see that the fences are so tight not even a wee sleekit cowering tim’rous beastie could get through. Passable Robert Burns from the man who ordinarily fumbled the Scottish tongue, no less. Where did he summon that from, even given his knack to perform up to what nearly any circumstance asked? She should know something about gauging that capacity in him, and it bothered her that she did not. Rehearsals were her field, but run those clinching sentences of Wes’s over and over in her mind as she would, she could not decide whether he had rehearsed those lines.