Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
I swallowed as much fear as I could and made myself start to wade.
The reservoir embankment was ungodly steep. My first step and a half, I abruptly was in the cold filthy water up to my waist. Eight feet out from me, no, ten, the splashing fight raged on, Scorpion for all his effort unable to right himself with Rob’s weight slung all on one side of him, Rob not able to pull free from the thrashing bulk of the horse angled above him.
“ROB! TRY PULL HIM THIS WAY! I CAN’T REACH—”
I was in the shocking cold of the water to my breastbone now. Down in the hole in the water. Chips of ice big as platters bumped my shoulders. Frantically I pushed them away. The horse and man still were six feet from me. If I could manage another step toward the struggle, if Rob would let go his death grip around Scorpion’s neck and reach toward me —”ROB! THIS WAY! REACH TOWARD—” More sudden than it can be said, they went over, Scorpion atop Rob.
The water-darkened brown of the horse’s hip as it vanished. The brand glistening wet there.
Now only the agitated water, the splintered ice.
The reservoir’s surface burst again, Scorpion’s head emerging, eyes white and wild, nostrils streaming muddy water, ears laid back. I could not see Rob, the horse was between us, I was reaching as far as I could but the water was at my collarbone. I arched my head as high out of the clutching water as I could, struggling to keep my feet planted on the reservoir bottom. If I slid, out there under under them, the water—Scorpion’s splashes filled my eyes and mouth. Through that wet new fear I managed to splutter, “Reach around him to me, Rob, you’ve got to!” Scorpion still could not find footing, could not get upright to swim, could not—abruptly the horse went under again.
The hammering in my chest filled me as I waited desperately for Scorpion to come up.
Neck deep, I waited, waited. The water was not so agitated now. The ice shards bobbed gently.
For as long as I could, I refused the realization that Scorpion was not coming up. Then I made myself suck in breath, and thrust my head under the water.
Murk. Nothing but murk, the mud and roil of the struggle between trapped Rob and burdened Scorpion.
My head broke the surface of the reservoir again and I spewed the awful water. Adair’s voice from the embankment was there in the air.
“Angus! You can’t! They’re gone, you can’t—”
I lurched myself backward toward the sound of her, fighting the clawing panic of the water pulling down on me, the skid of my footing on the slant of the reservoir bottom.
Then somehow I was on my side, mud of the reservoir bank under me, the water only at my knees. Adair was holding me with her body, clutching me there to the safety of the embankment. Gasping, shuddering with cold, I still stared out at the broken place in the ice, the silent pool it made.
• • •
Seven days now, since Rob’s drowning.
More thaw has come. I saw in my ride up to Breed Butte yesterday to check on the sheep that the reservoir has only a pale edge of ice here and there. Today will shrink those, too. From here in the kitchen I have been watching the first of morning arrive to the white-patterned mountains, young sunlight of spring that will be honestly warm by noon.
A week. Yet it seems not much more than moments ago. Stanley Meixell galloping off to summon men from the main creek and the South Fork and Noon Creek, while Adair and I headed on from the ranger station to town with the ugly news for Judith. Then while Adair stayed with her, I returned to the reservoir and the men gathering there. It was Varick who plunged and plunged until he managed, just before dusk, to secure the hook-and-cable around Scorpion’s hind leg. Isaac Reese’s biggest team of horses, struggling on the muddy footing of the dam to draw their hidden load out of the reservoir. At last the burden broke up through the water and onto the bank, Scorpion’s body bringing the other with it. Rob’s overshoed foot was jammed through the stirrup so tightly we had to cut the stirrup leather from the saddle. I was the one who put my hat over Rob’s face, after closing his eyes forever, while we worked at freeing him.
A person has to sit perfectly still to hear it, but the sound of the North Fork’s water rattling softly over stones is in the air these mornings. The creek’s lid of ice has fallen through in sufficient places to let the sound out. After so much winter, the constant evidence of spring is a surprise. Grass creeps its green into the slopes and valley bottom of Scotch Heaven noticeably more each day. And the first lambs were born the night before last. The sheep we have left I can handle by myself this lambing time, with a bit of help now and then from Varick. Judith made her decision while still in widow black there at Rob’s funeral, asking me to run the sheep until they have lambed and then sell them all for whatever we can get. It was there at the graveside, too, that Judith asked me to write the Gleaner remembrance about Rob.
So, here at dawn, the shining mountains up there are the high windows of memory. My night thoughts were a stopless procession, thirty years returning across their bridge of time, to here and now. I was told once I am a great one for yesterdays, and I said back that they have brought us to where we are. In a blue Irish harbor the bumboat women leap away like cats over the side of the steamship, and the rest of us bring our hopes to America. At a nowhere town with the name of Gros Ventre, a saloonkeeper with a remembered face and voice puts on the bar his arms with no hands. Below a stonecliff skyline, a rider with feedbag whiskers looms as the sentry of a calm green valley. A wedding band goes onto an unintended finger. On the trail to the Two Medicine River a thousand lambs go down on their knees to suckle from their thousand mothers, the prayerful noon of the sheep kingdom. A son stands baffled and resentful in a blazing day. Out of all the hiding places in the head, they return.
And so I have thought through the past and words ought to come now, oughtn’t they. But which ones. The word is never quite the deed./How can I write what you can read? Whichever words will make all the truth, of course. But there is so much of that, starting so far back. The dock at Greenock, where one far figure turns to another with the words Are we both for it? and that other makes himself say Both. What began there has not ended yet. This autumn, luck willing, there will be Varick and Beth’s child. Luck willing, maybe other McCaskills in other autumns. And there will be Adair and me, here where we are. This morning as I began to get up in the dim start of dawn, she reached across the bed and stopped me. I had not been the only one with night thoughts processioning through. Adair’s grief for Rob was deep but quick; after all, she is a Barclay, and life hasn’t yet found how to make them buckle. Now she has put this winter away. As Adair held me she told me she will stay in Scotch Heaven as long as I do—which I suppose is the same as saying as long as I have breath in me. It makes everything ahead less hard, hearing that decision from her. How long before the sheep business and the Two Medicine country and for that matter Montana recuperate from the drought and winter of 1919, there is just no telling. What is certain is that I will be buying another band of the woollies at the earliest chance. And the teaching job at the South Fork school this autumn is mine for the asking, Fritz Hahn of the school board has informed me. I will ask. It seems that the McCaskills will get by. We start at the next of life in another minute: “Adair will come right out and cook you her famous sidepork for breakfast, old Angus McCaskill,” she has just advised me from the bedroom. I am glad she will find this crystal day, the mountains now glistening and near, when she comes.
Lad, at least Montana is the prettiest place in the world to work yourself to death, ay? You were right more often than not, Lucas, handless Lucas who touched my life time upon time.
Angus, you are one who wants to see how many ways life can rhyme. Anna. The divide between our lives, twenty years of divide. It is permanent at last, our being apart, but you were the rhythm in my life I could do nothing about. You still are.
See now, McAngus, it’s time you had a talking-to. Rob. My friend who was my enemy. Equally ardent at both, weren’t you, bless you, da
Hard ever to know, whether time is truly letting us see from the pattern of ourselves into those next to us. Rob’s is my remembrance that will appear in the clear ink of the Gleaner this coming week. But where are the boundaries, the exact threadlines in the weave, between his life and ours? Tell me, tell me that, whoever can.
Acknowledgments
* * *
This novel continues the blend I began in English Creek—a fictional population inhabiting the actual area along the Rocky Mountain Front near Dupuyer Creek, Montana, the cherished country of my growing-up years. In general I’ve retained nearby existing places such as Valier, Choteau, Conrad, Heart Butte and so on, but anything within what I’ve stretched geography to call “the Two Medicine country,” I have felt free to change or invent.
For the Scottish background of this book, I’m much indebted to: the Watt Library in Greenock; the St. Andrews University Library and Robert N. Smart, Keeper of Manuscripts and University Muniments; the Mitchell Library in Glasgow; the National Library of Scotland; the General Register Office for Scotland; the Edinburgh Central Library; the Crail Museum; the Angus Folk Museum at Glamis; the Fife Folk Museum at Ceres; the Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther; and the Signal Tower Museum at Arbroath. My particular thanks for their generous help go to Mrs. Couperwhite of the Watt Library, Morag M. Fowler of the St. Andrews University library, and D.L. McCallum of the Mitchell Library’s Social Sciences Department.
My version of the Montana period of this novel, 1889-1919, was greatly aided by the historical troves at: the Great Falls Public Library; the Montana Historical Society at Helena; the Mansfield Library of the University of Montana at Missoula; and the Renne Library of Montana State University at Bozeman. I’m indebted to skilled members of all those staffs: Sister Marita Bartholome, Ellie Arguimbau, Dale Johnson, Ilah Shriver, Bob Clark, Richard Gercken, Dave Walter, Howard Morris, Laurie Mercier, Susan Storey, Marianne Keddington, Lory Morrow, Jane Smilie, Kathy Schaefer and Rick Newby.
Other institutions and their members were also vitally helpful: the University of Washington Library at Seattle; the Forest History Society; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Shoreline Community College Library at Seattle; and Glenda Pearson, Pat Kelley, Mary Beth Johnson, John Backes, Pete Steen, Carla Rickerson, Melvylei Johnson, Kathy and Ron Fahl, Susan Cunningham, John James, Bob Bjoring, and definitely not least, Jean Roden.
I’m deeply indebted to those who told me, in interview or letter, the everyday details of their lives as youngsters during the Montana homestead boom in the first decades of this century: Florence and Tom Friedt, Dene Reber, Irene Olson, Cecelia Waltman, Georgia Farrington, Eva Farrington, Mary Gwendolyn Dawson, Fern Moore Gregg, Howard Gribble, Margaret Saylor, and Fern Eggers.
It’s been of immense benefit to me to be able to draw on the work, encouragement and friendship of Montana’s corps of professional historians: Bill Farr, Paula Petrik, Harry Fritz, Duane Hampton, Bill Lang, Merrill Burlingame, Mike Malone, Rich Roeder—and the late Stan Davison, a fellow Montana kid, who I’m sorry did not live to see this book of the era he was born into. Malone and Roeder’s Montana: A History of Two Centuries has been my guide as I’ve tried to make the lives of my characters respond to what might be called the laws of historical gravity; and Rich Roeder deserves full due for his homestead research reflecting the fact that more land was homesteaded in Montana than any other state, and that the peak of the Montana homestead boom was remarkably late in “frontier” history, 1914–1918.
As usual in the long birth of a book, a considerable community of friends and acquaintances provided me encouragement, hospitality, information, advice, or other aid. My appreciation to John Roden, Tom Chadwick, Abigail Thomas, Kathy Malone, Orville Lanham, Howard Vogel, the Lang family of Clancy, blacksmith Richard Connolly, Marilyn Ridge, Richard Maxwell Brown, Gail Steen, Nancy Meiselas, Edith Brekke, the Arnst-Bonnet-Hallingstad-Payton clan of Great Falls, Clyde Milner, Burt Weston, Mick Hager, Kathlene Mirgon, Bob Roripaugh, Solomon Katz, George Engler, Rodney Chapple, Dick Nelson, Sue Mathews, Chris Partman, Marshall Nelson, Ted and Jean Schwinden, Merlyn Talbot, Patti Talmadge, Lois and Jim Welch, Annick Smith, Juliette Crump, Bill Bevis, Joy and Brad Hamlett, Walker Wyman, Mark Wyman, Art Watson, Eric Ford, Bill Kittredge, Caroline and Ron Manheimer, William W. Krippaehne Jr., Mary Farrington, Ken Weydert, Ann Nelson, and Rae-Ellen Hamilton.
My wife, Carol, and her camera captured the Two country and the town of Gros Ventre in the research for English Creek, and for this book she added the Scottish backdrop from the Bell Rock to Greenock. For her pictures of what I am trying to say, for her insights into this manuscript during my three years of work on it, and for all else, I can’t thank her enough.
Once again, Liz Darhansoff, Tom Stewart, and Jon Rantala in their distinctive inspiriting ways have been entirely essential to bringing this book to life.
“The stillness, the dancing”: this book and I have benefited immeasurably from the keen poetic eye of Linda Bierds.
Another sharp-sighted professional who made this a better book than it otherwise would have been: copy editor Elaine Robbins.
The dedication of this book speaks a general thanks to Vernon Carstensen for the past twenty years of knowing him; but I also owe him specific gratitude for so generously sharing his insights into the history of the American West, any time I’ve ever asked.
Patricia Armstrong, peerless researcher, not only aided me with material about the influenza epidemic but provided me a helpful reading of this novel’s opening chapter. Similarly, Ann McCartney’s reading of the first three chapters helped me see things I hadn’t. For those and for the depth of their friendship with me, thanks one more time to Pat and Ann.
A few words about derivations and inspirations. Scholars of Robert Burns may be mystified by a number of the lines mentally quoted by Angus McCaskill herein. Some of Angus’s remembered verse is indeed Burns; some is Burns and Doig; and some is, alas, merely Doig. In all instances, I’ve used words in their form more readily recognized on this side of the Atlantic—“you” instead of “ye,” “old” instead of “auld,” for instance. The quote in chapter three from the “Choteau Quill,” “You can fight armies or disease or trespass, but the settler never,” the Quill and I owe to John Clay, My Life on the Range. Details of wheelwrighting came from George Sturt’s fascinating memoir, The Wheelwright’s Shop. Whenever I needed to know how the sheep business was doing in any particular year, I had only to resort to Alexander Campbell McGregor’s meticulous account of his family’s history in the business, Counting Sheep. The Crofuttian advice early in chapter one to emigrate “with no divided heart” I fashioned from a similar paragraph in The Emigrants’ Guide, 1883 edition; the rest of Crofutt I made up.
Finally, I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its grant of a fiction fellowship, and the members of that 1985 selection panel: Alice Adams, David Bradley, Stanley Elkin, Ivy Goodman, Tim O’Brien, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Tallent, and Geoffrey Wolff.
St. Andrews-Glasgow-Edinburgh
Helena-Dupuyer-Seattle, 1983-86
A SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION READING GROUP GUIDE
* * *
DANCING AT THE RASCAL FAIR
From its opening on the quays of a Scottish port in 1889 to its close on a windswept Montana homestead three decades later, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is a passionate and authentic chronicle of the American experience. When we meet the emigrants Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay—“both of us nineteen and green as the cheese of the moon and trying our double-damnedest not to show it”—they are setting off for a new life in a new land, in America, in Montana, “those words with their ends open.” We follow their fortunes in the Two Medicine country at the base of the Rocky Mountains: the building of homes and the raising of families, making a living and making a life.
Here is the tale of the uncertainties of friend
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. At the start of the book, Angus thinks back on his and Rob’s decision to emigrate from Scotland and wonders what Rob’s “deep reasons” were. What do you think? And how does Lucas serve as a symbol of the West’s promise and perils?
2. The novel takes place over thirty years and spans several generations. How does Doig convincingly allow so much time to pass and yet focus on specific events, moments, and exchanges between characters with precision and effect? What narrative methods does he use to create a sweeping saga that is also a nuanced portrait of people and place?
3. The numerous historical events woven into this fictional tale include the influenza epidemic, the establishment of America’s national forests, and the First World War. Can fiction bring a milieu alive more vividly than history?
4. Ivan Doig has described the way his characters speak as “a poetry of the vernacular” and has said that he strives to craft the “poetry under the prose.” Find examples of how Doig creates dialogue to show how Angus and Rob become more Americanized over the years.