Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
Now the surprise was hers. “To christen the monuments?” she asked lightly.
“I’m talking serious here. You can ride the wagon with Davie, or have a turn on Scorpion whenever you feel like. But just come, why don’t you. See all that country again.” With me who is your husband, even if the country and I are not what you came expecting. With our son of this country and its namesake Two Medicine River. Come and make us the complete three, the McCaskills of Montana, America.
She watched me as if sympathetic to what I was saying, but then shook her head. “I suppose I think I saw the country as much as I am able to that first time, Angus. No, I’d better stay.” She lifted her head in the self-mocking way and pronounced: “Adair will take care of here while you and Varick have to be there.”
“Well, I tried. But if you can’t be budged without a crowbar—” Surprising again, how strong my pang that she wouldn’t be sharing this Two Medicine journey with me. “Goodbye, Dair.”
This wife of mine came up on tiptoes and kissed me memorably. “Goodbye yourself, Angus McCaskill.”
• • •
The bell of the lead wether, the latest Percy, led us all. A thousand ewes and their thousand lambs, and Varick and Davie and I and two sheepdogs to propel them across forty miles to the northern grass. By all known rules of good sense there was much that I ought to have been apprehensive about. Weather first and last. The very morning we started, the mountains looked windy, rain-brewing; one of those restless days of the Rockies when a storm seems to be issuing out of every canyon, too many to ever possibly miss us. Well, we of Scotch Heaven had seen weather before. The under-the-sky perils that sheep invite on themselves were another matter. Fatal patches of death camas or lupine could be hiding ahead amid these grass miles that neither Davie nor I had local knowledge of. Alkali bogs that lambs could wander into, which would be their last wander. Of course, coyotes. Cayuse . . . Coyote. Rob, Angus, is our serenade coming from a coyote? Badger Creek two days ahead, and Birch Creek a day before that, creeks usually lazily fordable but if spring runoff was still brimming them . . . Things left, right and sideways all could go wrong, but they were going to have to do it over the top of me. I had never in my life felt so troubleproof. This I know the tune of, conviction sang in me from the first minute of that sheep drive. This band of sheep was Varick’s future, his foothold into Two Medicine life when he would need it. For his sake, if it ended up that I had to carry each and every last wonderful woolly fool of a sheep on my back these forty miles, this I know the tune of.
As the first hard drops of rain swept onto us we were shoving the sheep across the short bridge over Noon Creek. In less time than it takes to tell, Varick and Davie and I in our slickers were wet yellow creatures, the ewes and lambs were gray wet ones, as we pressed across creek water through storm water. But the rain was traveling through so swiftly that the lambs did not stay chilled and begin to stiffen too much to walk, and there was the first woe we hadn’t met.
This I know the tune of. All of life seemed fresh, sharp, to me as we spread the sheep into a quick grazing pace. The mountains from an angle different than the one I had known every day for more than twenty years were somehow an encouraging chorus up there, news that the world is more than the everyday route of our eyes. I could even look west to the Reese ranch nestled in the farthest willow bends of Noon Creek and not crush down under the weight of what my life and Anna’s could have been, much. After a last glance west I swallowed away the thought of her, at least away as far as it would ever go, and dogged my wing of the band of sheep into quicker steps, and pointed us north.
Now the rise of the long hills beyond the Double W, their pancake summits the high flat edge of the Birch Creek country ahead. I called out to Davie, and to Adair in my imagination, that these bare ridgelines were in dire need of our sheepherder monuments. But there are monuments not just of stone, aren’t there. When the sheep were topping that first great ridge north of where the buildings of the Double W lay white and sprawling, there on that divide I climbed off Scorpion, unbuttoned my slicker, and pissed down in the direction of Wampus Cat Williamson.
Overnight at Birch Creek, and then across the ford of the creek at dawn and through the gate of the reservation fence and into the first of the Blackfeet reservation and a land immediately different. Drier, more prairielike, the benchlands flatter and more isolated. Here toward the northern heart of the Two country, every distance seemed to increase, as if giving space to the Blackfeet grassland. The mountains no longer were head-on and near, but marching off northwestward toward the peak called the Chief, which stood out separate as if reviewing them. Benchlands here were bigger and higher and more separate than we were used to, so that cattle and horses looked surprisingly small in the Indian pastures we passed, and when I rode ahead a mile or so to be sure of water for noon, our band of sheep was hard to spot at all.
This I know the tune of. But did I. At the end of that day, bridgeless Badger Creek. Bridgeless and brim full. Time to turn sheep into fish. I had Varick lead Percy across, the wether uneasy about the creek water up to his belly but going through with his leadership role. His followers were none. For an endless hour there on the brink of dark, we relearned that making sheep wade water is a task that would cause a convent to curse in chorus. At last by main strength Varick and I half-led half-hurled enough sheep into the water to give the others the idea, and the community swim began. There was a last mob of lambs, frantic about not being across with their mamas but also frantic about the rushing water. Varick and Davie and the dogs and I fought them into the creek, lambs splashing, thrashing, blatting, and when there were no more kinds of panic to invent, swimming. This I know the tune of.
From dawn of the next day, with not a stormcloud in the Blackfeet sky and a fine solid bridge ahead of us at the Two Medicine River, I could feel our great journey as if it already had happened, as if now we, Varick and I and our poor bent Davie, we incomparable three had only to walk steadily in its tracks. Hour on hour, life sang out to me. Any moment that my eyes were not on the sheep and the land, they were on Varick. More and more he was growing to resemble me. The long frame, the face that was a mustacheless version of mine, probably of all McCaskills back to old Alexander hewing the Bell Rock lighthouse into the sea. The job was there . . . it was to be done. We still were living resemblances of old Alexander McCaskill in that, too, this son of mine born attuned to this country’s work and I who had spent every effort I knew to learn it. Time upon time that day, I stood in my stirrups and gazed for the sheer pleasure of gazing. The land rolled north with grassy promise in every ridge. The pothole lakes we were passing, with clouds of ducks indignantly rising at the sight of us, seemed a wondrous advent. Even old Scorpion under me seemed more interested in being a horse. By the holy, I was right. Right to have brought these sheep, for Varick’s sake. Right, even, to have married Adair and persisted through our strange distanced life together if this strong son was our result.
We came to the Two Medicine River in sunny mid-afternoon and were met by gusts of west wind that shimmered the strong new green of the cottonwood and aspen groves into the lighter tint of the leaves’ bottom sides, so that tree after tree seemed to be trying to turn itself inside out. In the moving air as we and the sheep went down the high bluff, a crow lifted off straight up and lofted backwards, letting the gale loop him upward. I called to Varick my theory that maybe wind and not water had bored this colossal open tunnel the Two Medicine flowed through. And then we bedded the sheep, under the tall trees beside the river.
When morning came, I was sorry this was about to be over. All the green miles of May that we had come, the saddle hours in company with Varick, the hand-to-hand contest with the sheep to impel them across brimming Badger Creek, yesterday’s sight of the Two Medicine and its buffalo cliffs like the edge of an older and more patient planet. Every minute of it I keenly would have lived over and over again. This I knew the tune of.
The sheep crossed the bridge of th
On the lovely grass that once fed the buffalo, the sheep spread themselves into a calm cloud-colored scatter and began to graze, that first day of June of 1914.
TWO MEDICINE
* * *
With water projects abounding from the Sun River in the south to the Two Medicine River in the north, it is evident that the current creed of our region of Montana is “we’ll dam every coulee, we’ll irrigate every mountain.” But the betterment of nature goes on apace in other ways as well. Anna Reese and children Lisabeth and Peter visited Isaac Reese at St. Mary Lake for three days last week, where Isaac is providing the workhorses for the task of building the roadbed from St. Mary to Babb. Isaac sends word through Anna that the summer’s work on this and other Glacier National Park roads and trails is progressing satisfactorily.
—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, JULY 2, 1914
“PRRRRR PRRRRR. Right along, Percy, that’s the way, into the chute, earn a brown cracker. Prrrrr prrrrr. Bring them for their haircut, Percy. Prrrrr.”
It stays with me like a verse known by heart, that first ever Two Medicine day of shearing and all it brought. Our site of pens and tents atop the arching grass ridge above the river was like being on the bald brow of the earth, with the sunning features of the summer face of the land everywhere below. Three weeks before, Varick and I had left Davie here with his browsing cloud of sheep; when I returned with its shearing crew, the reservation grass had crisped from green to tan, the pothole lakes now were wearing sober collars of dried shore, the bannerlike flow of the Two Medicine River had drawn down to orderly instead of headlong. Even the weather was taking a spell of mildness, a day of bright blue positively innocent of any intention to bring cold rain pouncing onto newly naked and shelterless sheep, and with that off my mind I could work at the cutting gate with an eye to other horizons than the storm foundry of those mountains to the west. A long prairie swooped from our shearing summit several miles north to Browning and its line of railroad, iron thread to cities and oceans. The chasm of the Two Medicine River burrowed eastward to graft itself into the next channel of flow, the Marias, and next after that the twinned forces of water set forth together to the Missouri. Every view from up here was mighty.
Not that any scenery short of heaven’s was ever going to ease the hard first hours of shearing. The crew of shearers laboriously re-learning the patterns of the work from the year before. The sheep alarmed and anarchic. But I could grin at all that and more. The roubleproof mood I brought here to the Two Medicine when Varick and Davie and I trailed the sheep was still in command of me, still the frame of all I saw and thought as the swirling commotion of a thousand ewes was being turned into the ritual of wool. Life and I still were hand in hand, weren’t we, life.
Past noon, whenever I found chance to gaze up from my cutting gate, it was south, the direction of Scotch Heaven and home, that needed my watching. Up from the great trench of the Two Medicine River the Gros Ventre-to-Browning road wove itself in a narrow braid of wheel tracks worn into the ground, but Rob still had not appeared on that road as promised. First thing after breakfast that first day, Angus, I’ve got a ’steader to take out to see his claim. But I’ll drive up in the Lizzie the minute after that’s done. You can get the shearers under way and then I’ll be there by afternoon to pitch in. You and the sheep can gimp along without me for that long, can’t you? Aye, yes and yea, Rob. We could do that and were. It was plain as noonday that these Two Medicine sheep were nowhere near Rob’s central enthusiasm this summer, but I didn’t mind. In the eventual, these sheep were not for his benefit anyway nor for mine, but for Varick’s. I thought of my son, man of employment now at the ripe age of fifteen, somewhere beside Stanley Meixell there on distant Phantom Woman Mountain or Roman Reef or other venue of the Two Medicine National Forest, hard at the tasks of summer. He’ll have misfortunes great and small/He’ll be a credit to us all. In summers to come, if Adair and I could make our financial intention come true, Varick could have his own sheep in those mountains, could be as much a master of flocks as Rob or I ever were. So it was befitting that I was here amid earnful sheep, seeing across the miles from the Two Medicine to Varick’s future.
What I still was not seeing any clue of was Rob. This was unlike Rob Barclay, to not be where he said he would. As time kept passing, it more than once brought the thought, Rob, is that automobile of yours on its side in a gully somewhere and you under it? I would give him until suppertime, and then serious searching would need to commence.
“Prrrrr, Percy, bring them, that’s the lad. Follow Percy, ladies. Time to get out of those winter coats. Prrrrr.”
As the end of the afternoon neared I at last saw a wagon begin to climb the road from the river toward our shearing operation. This now was possibly Rob, resorting to hoof and wheel if his automobile had disgraced itself in some way, and so I kept watch between my chute duties. Before long, though, I could make out that there were three people on the wagon seat. Most likely a family of Blackfeet going in to Sherburne’s trading post at Browning. I dismissed my attention from the ascending wagon and went back to sluicing sheep into the shearers’ catch pens.
When I happened to glance down the ridge again, the wagon was less than a quarter of a mile away and it was no Blackfeet rig, not with that pair of matched sorrels and the freshly painted yellow wheelspokes. A gaping moment before I could let myself admit it, the shoulders-back erectness of the driver made me know definitely.
Anna at the reins. Her daughter and son on either side of her.
• • •
She brought the wagon to a stop near the shearing pen. I went over to her flabbergasted.
“Anna!” I greeted with more than I wanted to show in front of Lisabeth and Peter, but couldn’t help. They were just going to have to take my warm tone as surprised hospitality; in their lack of years, how could they know it as anything more? I made myself speed on to: “You’re no small distance from Noon Creek.”
“Angus, hello again.” Anna provided me her life-giving half-smile. “That husband of mine is even farther,” she divulged. “Isaac is building roads in the national park. He’ll be away most of the summer, so we’re going up to St. Mary to spend some days with him.” Except for the light veil of time that had put a few small wrinkles into her forehead and at the edges of those forthright eyes, she could have been the glorious young woman gazing back at me that first instant I stepped into her schoolhouse. Except for whatever propriety that had managed to find me now that I was a husband and a father, I still was the surprised smitten caller who was perfectly ready to rub my nose off kissing her shadow on that schoolroom wall.
Our eyes held. Was I imagining, or were we both watching this moment with greatest care?
“Angus”—how many thousands and thousands of times, across the past seventeen years, had I missed her saying my name—“how far is it into Browning for the night?”
Eight or ten miles, and I of course put it at ten. This sudden wild chance thumped in me as I said what civility would say but with greatly more behind it: “That’s a lot of wagonwork yet, before dark. You’re welcome to stay here, do I even need to say.” I indicated the shearing camp, our impromptu little tent town, oasis amid the grassy miles if she would just see it that way. “Mrs. Veitch is cooking for the crew. You could share the cook tent with her and have proper company for the night, why not.”
“Mother, let’s!” from the boy Peter, craning his neck toward the hubbub of the wrangling corral and the rhythmic motions of the shearers at work.
Anna cast her look north across the expanse of prairie to Browning, the girl Lisabeth so much like her in face and bearing as she gauged the miles to Browning, too.
Anna, stay. That same desperate chant in me from the day when Adair and I w
When Anna stated, “It is a distance—I suppose we had better stay here for the night,” Lisabeth nodded firmly, a separate but concurring decision. I breathed a thanks to Montana’s geography for its helpful surplus of miles. Young Peter yipped his pleasure and asked to go watch the shearing, could he please, and was away.
I helped Lisabeth down from the wagon, then her mother, aware as deep as sensation can go that I was touching the person who might have been my daughter and then the person who might have been my wife.
“We’ll of course lend Mrs. Veitch a hand with supper,” Anna was detailing to Lisabeth now, “but I don’t feel we should impose on her for the night. Under the wagon served us perfectly fine last night and there’s no reason why it won’t again.” Anna sent her gaze around the shearing camp, her eyes eventually coming back across my face and lingering a bit there. Or was I imagining? “Beth,” she spoke to her daughter, “why don’t you go see the shearing with Peter, before we pay our respects to the cook tent. Mr. McCaskill can help me with our things from the wagon.”
The girl’s eyes, the same direct sky-source blue as her mother’s, examined the bedrolls and other travel gear in the back of the wagon, then Anna and myself as if weighing the capability of adults in such matters. Evidently satisfied that the tasks were not beyond us, she gave that decisive nod again and went to join Peter at the shearing pen. I watched her go in a gait of grace that was more than a girl’s. Lisabeth was, what, fourteen now, and womanhood had its next priestess arriving.
As I lifted out the Reese traveling larder, a venerable chuckbox with cattle brands singed into every side of it, I said to Anna, “She resembles you so much it must be like meeting yourself in the mirror.”