Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Wes gave the Duff homestead one last looking at and turned away.

  Well, that is my letter back to you from what was Scotch Heaven and now is leased cow pasture, Susan. Or it would be if I ever dared to put the words down on paper, let alone mail it.

  It was growing late, but he stayed on at the lip of the valley, as if to experience the full of the day he was seeing back into. The gleaning flights of swifts over the homestead remnants traced the change of air coming with evening. The high enfolding land to the west was starting to take the color of dusk. He watched in particular the shift of light on the business part of the continental rise; the grassy ridges under the rockfaces, the precious green skirts of the mountains. Two Medicine National Forest land, it was now, but back at the beginnings of Scotch Heaven it had been a last beckoning rumple of open range—free grass—in behind the North Fork. At this time of day, Wes knew as surely as the Bible passage that Ninian Duff would have quoted as justification of Scotch Heaven, the homesteaders would have lifted up their eyes unto those hills where their livestock grazed. Cattle, at first, those would have been, with Duff and Erskine brands on them; he had checked the old tax assessments to be doubly sure of that fact, even though he knew it almost by the rules of drama. The Double W and its most durable adversaries started off with at least that much in common.

  As he watched, the shadows grew down off the cliffs of the Rockies, and then came spear-pointed out of the timbered bottom slopes, and at last put a curtain of definition—evening’s unarguable edge—down from the grassy ridges to him, as though something old as these hills had been concluded.

  WE HAVE an announcement, J.J., hold on to your hat.” Susan had saved this to spring on him as soon as he delivered her into the apartment today. “Don’t we, Monty.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be any way around it.” He sounded on guard, but not about to challenge.

  “We’re ready to start on songs,” she gave J.J. the big news. “Actual music, no more oo ee ah ah.” She swept over to the reclusive piano. “Ta-da!” Pinging a finger down onto a key to underscore that, she elicited a broad flat brang as keys either side of that one stuck to it.

  “I’ll get a tuner in here,” J.J. said hastily, “first thing in the morning. I’m slipping, I should have cottoned that you were about to creep up on the real singing. Montgomery, this lady will have you top-billed at the Aeolian again in no time.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask how we’re going to work this,” Susan broached. “I’ll tend to all the voice matters, but accustoming to the music will take piano playing. Shouldn’t his usual accompanist—?”

  “No can do.” J.J. seemed less concerned than she would have thought. “Cecil’s up at New Haven, filling in on the organ at Yale. He’s in choirboy heaven. You did the piano work the time before, didn’t you? That’ll serve.”

  “I get the pudding beat out of me,” Monty husked, “and Cecil gets to go to Yale. I hope you don’t have any more good news.”

  “Actually, I do. I copped the follow-sheets from him before he left.”

  “There, see?” Susan didn’t know why she felt so celebratory, when all they had to work with was a raspy voicebox and a rickety piano, both in sore need of tuning; but she did.

  As soon as J.J. took leave of them, Monty turned her way. With a bit of panic she remembered that first time at the North Fork house, his second thoughts adding up faster then than she could subtract them; from the look of him, the arithmetic of this could go the same way. But he merely said, “All right, Susan. How do we start at it this time?”

  “By changing clothes.”

  His eyebrows questioned everything about that, but she thought she saw a slight expression of yearning make a quick visit on him. “Performance getup, you mean.”

  “The whole kit and caboodle,” she said as though she told men to put on tuxedoes at ten in the morning every day of her life. “It’ll spiff up the session, start us off right.”

  “One thing about it,” he more or less assented, “if I sound like I think I’m going to, I can go over to the Bronx Zoo and live with the penguins.” He disappeared into the bedroom to change while Susan attacked pieces of furniture, clearing space enough for singer, music stand, roving vocal coach—she was wrestling a chintz chair when J.J. popped his head back in the door, casting around for Monty.

  “He’s dressing up,” she explained. “We’re going to try it in full rig.”

  “Never too soon. Pass this along to him, would you? He gets sore at me when I forget to give it to him.”

  The pregnant trio of numbers on the unfolded slip of paper he handed her, a fatly printed three and an ought and a six, caught her eye. “J.J., humor me a second. Is this what I think it is?”

  “We all do it,” he sounded surprised as could be at having to defend the numbers game in its own fertile habitat. “Like whites are with racetracks, is all it is. He’s careful with it, he only lays two bits a day on it now.”

  Next she startled him with a sharp laugh. “I don’t care about that, Monty is free to make whatever bets he wants. I just hadn’t seen one of these before.”

  “Seen one of his, you’ve seen them all,” J.J. shook his head. “I keep telling him he ought to try to spread his luck around some, but he plays that same dumb number all the time.”

  Abruptly Susan felt so singled out it went through her like a fever tremor. Of the endless thousands in Harlem, of the millions in all of New York, she was the one person who understood a man playing a number commemorating as close as he could the 30.06 rifle that escorted him to the sanctuary of the Medicine Line.

  * * *

  “Too bad he didn’t beat me deaf, too. I hear what I sound like.”

  “Your voice is somewhat different, a bit clouded, but—”

  “Nowhere near the same, is what you mean.”

  “With work, maybe we can get past that, I still say.”

  “No sign of it yet.”

  He had a point and she knew it. They had just tried “Praying Jones” for what seemed like hours on end and the song not once showed any of the magic-lamp burnish of old. She crossly plucked up the follow-sheet and re-creased it, as if the trouble lay there in the music on paper. For the first time she considered surrendering. These weeks of runthroughs, every song in the bunch tested and circled back to and all but sung into the ground, were not getting them anywhere except on each other’s nerves.

  Monty sagged out of singing posture and leaned against the end of the piano, torn. Susan sat there two feet away from him oblivious to anything but the direction of her thought. She was one of those people you could see the wheels go around in. Fascinating as he found that, he was determined it was time—probably past time—to put it at the inevitable distance. Maybe, he thought wistfully, they could go on writing to each other when she was back West.

  “It’d be a mercy to the songs,” he delivered in a soft tone, “if we just let them drop. The whole thing. I hate to, as much as you do. But I’m doing my best and you’re doing more than that, and they still come out sounding like—”

  “Madame Schumann-Heink.”

  Put off, he folded his arms as sternly as she’d handled the music sheet and waited for her to make sense.

  “Her voice famously changed because of the war,” she was thinking out loud, enthusiasm starting to dig its spurs in. “It just now hit me. Monty! Before, she sang every opera as a contralto. But now, and I’ve heard this with my own ears if I was only bright enough to know what I was hearing, her tone goes in a direction where she could nearly do tenor parts. There we go! If—”

  “How do you mean, ‘because of the war’?”

  “She had sons in the thick of it on both sides.” Monty watched her struggle past the war words. “And lost two of them.” She gathered breath and hurried on: “What she went through came out in her voice. To the benefit of her music, don’t you see?”

  “Susan, I know you mean this the best in the world,” he had sympathy for all this, who wo
uldn’t, “but I am no Madame Hank. Broken heart, it sounds like in her case, but on me it was a busted voicebox, and those two just aren’t—”

  “I apologize to you up, down, and sideways,” she broke in earnestly. “You’ve been in the hands of an impostor. An imbecile. An incompetent. An—”

  “A little hard to deal with, now and then,” he readily granted, “but—”

  “No, no. I call myself a voice teacher, and here I’ve been going about this like a deaf woman. Clouded, I’ve been saying. Shaded! We need to work with the shadings in your voice now. The catch, the bee in the bottle, whatever we can find in there.”

  This, from the person who had drilled him the length and breadth of the North Fork and Fort Assinniboine on enunciation and rounded tone? What about all those Scotch vowels? Mustering all the calm he could put in his speaking voice, he asked:

  “Susan, excuse me, but since when is that any way to be a singer?”

  “Since jazz. Since the blues.”

  He blew up. “Take a look at me, will you? What I mean, really look. I’m a choreboy, a cowboy, a Fort Skin-and-Bone little colored boy—there’s no way you can sic me on jazz or blues and have me be anything but a freak from in off the prairie. I don’t have any feel for any of that kind of jive, it’s all I can do to keep up with one old lame piana. Besides,” he whapped a hand downward as if flinging, “J.J. would drop me like a hot horseshoe. And if I know anything by now, it’s that it’s hard to pick yourself back up in this business.”

  She waited to see if he was done.

  “Who said we’re going to graft jazz or blues onto you?” she started in. “We’ll keep doing your songs, of course we will. But a bit differently . . .” She fingered the piano in a lower key than usual, then a higher, already on the search. “We’ll bend the music, no matter, we’ll know the right accompaniment for this when we hear it. The main thing is to bring the songs to your voice, not the other way around like we’ve been. If how you sound happens to have”—he watched her to see just how she was going to describe a voice that had been beaten lopsided; she caught his look, steeled herself against all the angry evidence in it, and managed to continue—“some woe in it, let’s make full use of it.”

  Monty shook his head, started to say something, then stood there working on what she had said. He chewed at the inside of his mouth long enough that she hoped he wasn’t doing himself damage. At last he provided:

  “You think?”

  “Give me a few minutes with the follow-sheets. Can you scare up some tea and honey while I’m at that?”

  They clattered sustenance into themselves and started the day over. She coached him on letting the edges of his voice work on the words like pumice, roughening then smoothing. They tried “Praying Jones” again.

  The song still was uneven, but vexed had a haunted grandeur to it now. And hexed matched it like the second word of a dark secret. The phrasings shaded uncannily into one another.

  They looked at each other as if afraid to say it out loud. They were beginning to get somewhere.

  DELIVERY for Miss Duff.”

  Somehow she knew that voice. She opened the door of her cubbyhole office and was met with a tower of hatboxes. They descended onto her desk, and the most dapper deliveryman on the North American continent emerged from behind them.

  “J.J.,” Susan threatened him, “you had better not be teasing.” She tore into the string of the top box and snatched the lid off. Letters, packets and packets of them, all with the American Expeditionary Force postmarks that she could have recognized in the dimness of a coalmine. Amid them here and there like agate outcroppings, the spines of diaries.

  Dazzled, she murmured as if afraid to break the spell: “I’ve shaken a whole state by the ankles for the past six years and never come close to this. How—who—”

  “Couple of the boys from the regiment look after things in the neighborhood for Tammany, and I had them put out the word,” J.J. said with becoming managerial modesty. “The stuff is probably ragtag and bobtail, but there it is.” He hesitated, then finally produced another packet from inside his suitcoat. “Here, before I lose my nerve. Love letters to my wife, the ones the censors let pass.”

  “I wouldn’t really say I can tell, J.J., but I suspect you’re blushing.”

  THE days sailed, now that they were unmoored from any fixed notion of the songs. Line by line, alphabet curlicue by curlicue, note by note, the two of them finicked with each piece of music, her jotting, him resonating. A day, a week, whatever it took, tune and lyrics were coaxed around to the shadings of his voice. The development of each song, as Susan later thought to put in her diary, was like snapshot upon snapshot, in more ways than one: they worked upward from negatives. So Monty’s voice could no longer prance through “Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air”? They let the line waft, drift in on the listener unexpectedly like a sun-caught mote of memory. Nor could he echo, any more, his mother’s ascending carol of “Mouthful of Stars.” They brought it down to the horizon, its drumbeat line-endings of “Heaven” searching off to the corners of this world.

  Then came the morning when “End of the Road” resisted everything they tried, until Susan looked at him and said thoughtfully: “I think you need punctuation.”

  Blank with the effort he had been putting into the song, Monty could only murmur: “Better run that by me again.”

  “Let’s see, let’s try”—she scrabbled among his lyric sheets—“here, and here. Let it break, a beat, maybe two, where I’ve dabbed in commas, all right? And Monty, make me hear those commas. Like this.” As he tilted his head to make sure he was taking all this in, she demonstrated amply:

  “You know how you get, at the end of the road.

  Trying to stand up, under—”

  “No, wait,” she corrected herself in mid-lilt, “right there we want—oh, never mind what it’s called, just—”

  “No, put a name to it for me,” he said firmly.

  “Arioso, then, it’s what opera singers do in arias when they phrase to a certain word, not necessarily the one you’d expect.” Excitement lit up her voice. “Here, sneak it in like this, a word early:

  “Trying to stand, up under life’s load.”

  Monty caught on like a house afire. She was barely done with that line before he was over by her, plucking up the sheet of music and producing on first try:

  “Done in, and done up, and down, to a speck.”

  And knew, before she could say anything, to let the last line flow uncomma’ed out of the pent-up confidences of those first three:

  “That’s when the right word will lighten your trek.”

  Susan couldn’t help herself. She clapped, once but resoundingly, whirled to the keyboard, and pounded out the opening bar of an ode to joy, da-de-dum-de-da-da-dee. For his part, Monty crossed the room as if dreamwalking and collapsed in an easy chair, arms flung in wonder.

  “We’re there!” Susan was the first to recover enough to speak. “You have your whole set of songs now. I’ll bet anything this will be a stronger program than the way you sang them before.” With that, she settled her hands in her lap, reaching that point every teacher does where the tools of instruction reluctantly need to be put away. She smiled gamely. “We can let J.J. know he won’t have to ride herd on me anymore. Oh, a brush-up session every few weeks until you’re back performing all the time wouldn’t hurt, but beyond that—”

  “I could probably stand once a week,” he surprised her with.

  “Very well. If J.J. will go along with that, next Friday I’ll put you through the paces until your tongue hangs out, how’s that?”

  “Susan? You know how I’d like to celebrate?” The request came out shy but determined. “You play something.”

  “Mental telepathy. I hoped you would ask.”

  With a flourish she turned around to the piano again, and sitting very straight, she caressed the keys as if reminding them to trust her touch. The music at once rose in suggestion, a sudde
n glide of reprise of what she had played for him in the Fort Assinniboine auditorium, then the tune soared, turned in flight, soared again. It fit. That was Monty’s first thought: this piece found its way gloriously to the opening part of her music, as if time was cutting its own circle on itself and the past was hooking on to something lovingly recalled. He listened with all his might, so glad for her he could feel his heart run itself up.

  When she had finished, he let the eloquence of silence match the echoing memory of the notes. Then, to make sure: “That what I think it is?”

  “Mmm hmm. The ending of Prairie Tide, which I was always afraid would end me first. It even has words, but I’ll spare you those.” Now she turned full around to him on the piano bench and gestured as if the music flew in from hiding places unknown. She was as aglow, he registered, as whatever the most valuable white gem was. “The operetta bunch I told you about kept after me, I had to write and write in self-defense. And working the way we did here—it must have been catching.”

  “It’s a beauty. Makes me homesick, if that was home.”

  “High praise, I think.” She laughed a little. He didn’t.

  “That brings up something,” he said huskily. “The day we’re done, rehearsals or whatever, you’re off back to Helena, aren’t you.”

  “Not just that quick,” she did what she could to sugarcoat the inevitable, “you make me sound like I have one foot on the train. But soon enough after, I’d better. The house is there waiting, the mothers with my pupils dribbling after them. And that ‘consultation’ you sprang on me back at the Broadwater will be better than money in the bank. ‘Montgomery Rathbun himself asked her for musical advice’—they’ll tell that story forever in Helena.” Monty’s brows were drawn down. The ability to start a frown with his forehead was a marvelous stage attribute, but not one she wanted to see at the moment. Why didn’t I stick to business and not set things off by playing around on the piano, today of all days? She ran out of pretense. “I’m set in my ways—that’s hardly news, is it,” she resumed unevenly. “But you and your music have been good for me.”