Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  The hospital was a nightmare. Miraculously few were injured by the quake, but there were hysterics, and it took some doing to make it understood that we had a man out in the car who had been beaten with a club. Wes prevailed, of course, and a doctor and stretcher crew went out for Monty.

  In the hallway of the hospital after the patient had been installed in a room and was being examined, J.J. came over to Wes to make the matter clear. “Just as soon as he can be moved we’ll be taking him back to New York, Major. Had enough hospitality out here.”

  “My railcar is in the yards over there. It’s yours.”

  “That would help.”

  Nightmare does not begin to say it, about this. People wake from nightmares eventually. Monty may never, even though his eyes came open when I last saw him, being carried from the hospital. That creature from out of the dark could not have hit him in a more severe place if he had sighted in with a rifle. I—

  Susan stopped writing. Downstairs, the snick of a key in a lock, the sound of the front door opening and then quietly shut.

  She knew it would be Wes.

  * * *

  The train howled out steam, white whistle blast beneath the plume of locomotive smoke, at the latest cattle that had broken through the right-of-way fence. Cecil took such shrieking personally. “Can’t they train those cows to keep off the railroad, like dogs are housebroke?”

  J.J. trimmed him to silence with a single glance. To him too this prairie seemed to go on forever, and heifers or whatever they were roamed in shocking freedom. But in his considerable experience grumbling had never been known to make a train go faster.

  Cecil vamoosed to the front of the Pullman to read his breviary. J.J. went back to the paneled-off sleeping compartment to look in on Monty again, not that looking helped much either. The doctor whom the Williamsons had sent with them, Walker, told him at the start: “The collarbone, that’s nothing. I’ve set hundreds of them on rodeo riders and ranch hands. But that business with the throat—all I can do is keep him quiet and turn him over to somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  Monty and the doctor both were dozing, the one in the bunk half mummified with the cast across the upper part of him, the other in a chair with his head propped by an arm in a way doubtless learned by waiting for babies to come. J.J. had stepped in here steeled, but the sight of sleep as the only reliable truce that life let anybody have made him wilt as much as it had during the shooting war in Europe. The catch in his throat he recognized as the fear he had carried through the Argonne forest of hell: of a living death, the kind of wound that took away eyes or testicles or a leg or an arm. He hadn’t even thought of the voice.

  Feeling the train slow a notch and then another and another, he backed out of the sleeping compartment to watch what happened at this stop.

  It had started at Harlem, the Montana depot version of it. Some railroad magnate went goofy, J.J. had noticed on the way out, and slapped names on the stops along the tracks the same as real places of the world—Malta, Zurich, you’d think you were on a royal tour instead of some toot-toot prairie train. He and Cecil had razzed Monty about that particular little burg, asking why he’d figured he had to go all the way to 135th Street when here was a Harlem in Mon-tan-i-o, just look, it even had a skyscraper: the grain elevator taller than the main street was long, the two of them had thought that was funnier than anything. This time when the train made its quick stop at the tiny town, there by the telegrapher’s office waited an overalled man nearly as dark as the shadowed area he was standing back in: the depot swamper, pushbroom in hand, in respectful attendance. A couple of hours farther on at the depot at Glasgow, the same ceremony of witness by a colored church congregation of ten or a dozen; there was no mistaking the preacher with the dignified wool under his homburg. J.J. realized that stop must be a division point on the railroad, to account for such a number, and from that he figured it out in a hurry. The trainmen. The yassuh telegraph, silent polite ebony-faced servers of railroad food and dark distant caboose-riding brakemen who some mysterious way were spreading the word ahead.

  Wolf Point, the weather-scarred sign on this town less than royally said, and J.J. saw that this time it was a colored family, probably the only one in a place so small, presenting itself on the depot platform, the father pointing past the Great Northern coaches to the Two Medicine & Teton railcar and saying something to his children in a tone obviously hushed.

  Back at Glasgow the first newspaperman had been waiting, too, and J.J. knew there would be packs of them at the big-city depots ahead. That was the only good thing about this, he thought grimly, and set to work on his statement about the one more form of lynching that would be on the conscience of this country if Montgomery Rathbun was never able to sing again.

  * * *

  Why didn’t that sonofabitch just kill me and get it over with?

  Somewhere around Minot, Monty came more or less awake again. He felt as if something terribly heavy was sitting on his windpipe, with its claws dug in. Not to mention his collarbone hurting like fury all the way out to the point of his shoulder, and the skin under the cast starting to itch.

  The bastard had to really hate hard, ride out an earthquake to get at me. Godamighty, is there just no end to—

  “Here,” the gruff voice was back. “Just try some.”

  Hovering over him the same as the last time he had opened his eyes was Doc Walker, after him to take some soup down. Monty started to shake his head, and found out what a bad idea that was.

  “Goddamnit,” the doctor reasoned, “if you don’t want to eat for your own sake, do it for mine. How’s it going to look if a patient of mine starves to death?”

  To get Doc Walker’s spoon out of his face, he opened wide enough for a sip of the soup. It hurt all the way down.

  ALL lyrics seemed leaden to Susan, in the days after, and she hastily abbreviated the rendition of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” that the redheaded girl had been proudly prompted into by her mother.

  “I can take it on faith that you kept her voice up, Mrs. Quinton,” Susan pasted on her best expression again. “Very well then, we will resume Lily’s lessons. I regret that I had to go away for that while, but Lily is so much more mature now that we’ll make up for that bit of interruption in no time.” One version or another of this she had recited five times already today, and she was almost prayerfully grateful for the rescuing knock on the front door.

  But when she answered it, what the threshold held was Wes. Keyless? And if so, why? her eyes interrogated before a rustle of impatience at the side of him manifested itself as Whit.

  “Sorry to intrude, we thought you would be done by this time of day,” Wes put forth a politeness that carried like cologne toward Mrs. Quinton and her daughter. “Really, our business matter can wait if—”

  “Not at all,” Susan interjected, her eyes still working him over and delivering a few swipes at Whit as well. “We were just finishing off ours. Come in out of the summer.”

  Mrs. Quinton simpered past the man who would have been governor and his cattle king brother, Lily managed to look everywhere except at the gauntlet of grownups, and off down Highland Street they vanished, leaving Susan with her next tableau.

  “My, the brothers Williamson. Thinking of becoming a duet, are you?”

  “I’m needed to co-sign,” Whit for once kept himself to the minimum.

  She studied him as though wondering whether he was fit for such a task. When she had him sufficiently unnerved, she turned toward Wes. “And Monty? Any fresh word?”

  Wes hesitated. The side of his face could feel the press of Whit watching him at this. “He’s out of Presbyterian Hospital back there,” he kept it to. “J.J. has him in his apartment, a nurse with him. The medicoes can’t tell about his voice yet.”

  Susan would rather have taken a beating than do the arithmetic of yet. A week after the drunken roper at Havre had done her such damage at her neck, her voice had begun to respond. It had been te
n days now since Monty’s clubbing. Equivocation by the doctors at this point was worst news, she knew.

  Wes ached to go to her. Which only would have postponed the next hard part. “I—we don’t like to bother you with this, honestly. But another dry summer— Whit tells me tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon to start watering cattle on the North Fork.”

  “Yesterday,” Whit husked as if his own throat was parched.

  Susan stood there uncommonly pale, as if keeping a moment of silence for Scotch Heaven. After some seconds, she murmured: “Then let’s get it over with.”

  The signing of the papers didn’t take time at all, it seemed to Susan. Whit had capped the pen and handed it back to her with awkward gallantry when she became aware that Wes was studying her speculatively. “Now that we’re past that,” she caught up to what he was saying, “this came just as we were leaving the house.” He handed her a telegram.

  MUST REACH MISS DUFF. PLEASE.

  —JACE JACKSON

  DOWNTOWN AND UP

  · 1925 ·

  WHY GIVE THEM another run at me?

  The pencil point nearly pierced the paper as Monty jabbed the question mark onto that. Behind the angry fuse of line was explosiveness tamped tight by ax handle. What else was he supposed to do with the fundamental fact of life that some loony would pop out of nowhere swinging a club or worse and leave him like this, beaten halfway to hamburger and rooked out of his singing career just when he had it made, no matter how he watched his step. And it was always going to be that way, because that’s the way it had always been. He turned the tablet around and shoved it across the table to her as if they were trading turns in a furious grudge match of tic-tac-toe.

  Susan leaned to the table again, trying not to let her apprehension show as she took in the writing. The tablet traveled on the veneer with a sandpapery whisper each time Monty whipped it over to her. She held back for a few moments, as if waiting for the paper to quit rasping, before she spoke. “You can’t just let them wreck you. You certainly don’t have to worry about another run at you from that cretin with the ax handle—the Williamsons will see to it he’ll be in the penitentiary until he comes out in his coffin.” Monty was grabbing the tablet back to himself, pencil at the ready. “I know,” she tried to head off the agitated scribble, “that doesn’t put you back to what you were. But he’s going to be out of commission from now on and there’s every chance that you’re only out of commission until you heal up.”

  The tablet scooted back toward her as if of its own accord. You don’t savvy, it read, it hurts to even breathe deep. Before she could respond, he swung the paper again and jotted: & I sound like death warmed over, you heard that yourself.

  There, she would have had to admit under oath, he had chisel-hard truth. Her ears still were trying to recover from when she stepped into this stuffy apartment with Jace Jackson and heard like a croak from the crypt: “Why’d they have to bring you back here?”

  “Such a greeting,” she had forced out, for once in her life certifiably scared. “Are you supposed to use your voice yet? I don’t think you should.” In disgusted answer he brandished the writing paper. She had stood rooted there, trying not to stare at the purple splotch of bruise that was the side of his throat, and below that the turtleshell of plaster cast showing through his dressing robe. A sleeve of the robe hung empty, that arm sling-fixed in front of him to immobilize the shattered collarbone. By then J.J. was fleeing to the kitchen with the excuse that he had to tend to business by phone.

  “Monty,” she tried again now, “all I am saying is that when the doctors decide it’s all right for you to try your voice, we can see how it handles music. I helped with that once, I may as well again.” The pencil was twitching in his fingers as if he couldn’t wait to stab at that. Whatever the medical prognosis turned out to be, the mood she was seeing across the table showed the opposite of hope. “You have every right to be down on life,” she felt she had to resort to, “but what happened back there was a chain of bad luck. If we hadn’t all been shaken out of our boots, Bailey and his men would have been able to keep that creature off you. That’s behind, now, and when we have you so you can sing again and audiences flock to hear the man who withstood the idiots of the world, life will even out again.”

  He shook his head, slight movements that still looked as if they hurt like fury. He held up his hand as if to say wait a minute, then set to work on his next message.

  She sat there trying to dab her wrists and brow into some semblance of dry, but perspiration popped back on her within seconds after each swipe of her handkerchief. The living room of the apartment—rented furnished, she could tell; Monty would not likely have smothered the couch and every stuffed chair with matching magenta antimacassars, nor invited in the retired-looking piano that took up more space than anything else in the room—was close and dense as a chick hatchery on a day like this. She remembered these kinds of summers from her first time around in New York, with a heatwave haze over the city for days on end, a gauzy coverlet on top of the blanket of humidity. She felt doped with the heat, and rocky yet from the three-day train ride that had deposited her at Pennsylvania Station that morning. “Could we have a bit of air, do you think?”

  Monty lifted his pencil long enough to gesture impatiently that he did not care one way or the other, although the upper part of him must have been sweltering under that cast.

  She shoved the window up as high as she could. The air of Harlem felt only marginally less hot than the incubating apartment. Nonetheless she pushed aside the lace curtains and stood at the window trying to will the atmosphere into some cooling motion. What she got was commotion. Iron-wheeled clatter of a knife-grinder’s cart going by, along with a chant she could not understand a word of. Peppering in and out of that was the rackety putt-putt of an ice truck. Background to both was the pervasive locust hum of automobile traffic over on the avenues and main cross-streets. The steady clamor it took a mammoth city to produce, and she was fifteen years out of date at coping with its energies and mystifications.

  When she turned around to Monty, bracing herself for the treatise, he was sitting back as if spent. Slowly he sent the tablet her way.

  Miss Susan—I am taking your name in vain, but I need to make the point as strong as I can—I know you think you can fix anything but the break of day. But this isn’t anything a music stand or running to keep my breath up or anything else will help. The man who beat me is only one of who knows how many, and that’s what there is no cure for. You know and I know that I didn’t pick out my skin, like it was the one suit of clothes I’d ever get. Yet that’s how it is. The singing does not work out for someone like me, we have to face up to that. I’ll maybe end up back milking cows, but at least I will be in one piece. Believe me, I hate to say this, it goes against everything the both of us have tried to do. But I wish we had never started.

  Susan read it over, then motioned for the pencil. “To save both of us hearing me say this over and over like a cuckoo clock, I may as well write it down where it’ll be handy.” She flipped to a fresh tablet sheet, jotted briefly, then tore the page out. “I’ll put this over here and simply point to it every time it’s needed, all right?”

  He saw she had written: I categorically disagree.

  * * *

  “Mr. Jackson, something bothers me.” Striding beside her through Strivers Row and its inventive margin of enterprises, carrying the same small black case that he had met her at the el with, Jace Jackson looked for all the world like one more snappily dressed postulant of success out on his professional rounds. Which, Susan reflected, he in a way was, if escorting an outlandishly white woman in and out of Harlem counted as a professional endeavor. It was nearly noon and as far as she was concerned the heat had turned the streets into block-long griddles, but people were flashing by as if they were ice-skating. Obviously a midday flurry of people heading home from visiting or shopping, the sidewalk traffic every step of the way was overwhelmingly female and except f
or Susan, unanimously dark in complexion. The whole sashaying caravan of them, as far as she could see, in frocks of colors that seemed to have come from heaven’s candy jars. When a particularly well put together woman, dusky as Nefertiti and suggestively rhythmic as the Song of Solomon, sailed past her like a luscious vision in peppermint, Susan felt like a pillar of chalk. Yet all the passersby’s glances that slid off Jace Jackson and stuck to her pale self seemed not to convey hostility or racial grievance, but something more like cold hard clinical curiosity. Distracted at being constantly gone over as if she were an eye-chart, it took her a number of strides before she managed to find her way back to what she had been wanting to ask. “As I understand it, if I were to come up here at night with other whites and party until dawn, that would cause no stir. But you say I hadn’t better show up alone in broad daylight.”

  “I do not make the rules for the game of skin, Miss Duff.”

  “Then tell me this. Why is it all right for you to walk in and out of here with me?”

  J.J. sighed. “Second time I’ve been asked that today—my wife claims she is married to a crazy man all of a sudden.”

  “Well, then?” she pressed him. They were only a block or so now from where the elevated railway stood like a steel-legged aquaduct into Harlem, and an arriving throng was pouring down from the platform to refill the street, every eye of them, naturally, on her.

  J.J.’s low response was drowned out by the departing train. She waited, watching as the train cars caused the shadow-and-light pattern beneath the elevated track to flicker like giant piano keys being madly played, until the rumble passed them by. “I’m sorry. What?”

  He gestured at the teeming street and said only loud enough for her to hear: “People think you’re a doctor.”