Dancing at the Rascal Fair Read online

  “Lucas”—I sought how to say enough without saying too much—“a welcome ought not be worn out, is all.”

  Lucas stopped wiping the bar and gazed at me. Abruptly his face had the same look of thunder as when Rob first stepped up to him asking for a handshake. What a thorough fool I was. Why had I said words with my real meaning behind them?

  Lucas moved not at all, staring at me. Then with great care to say it soft, he said:

  “I don’t consider it’s been worn out. Do you?”

  “No, no, nothing of the sort. I just think I’d better be on my way before—it might.”

  At last Lucas unlocked his gaze from me. “I ought to have seen. I ought to have, ay.”

  He stared down at his stubs on the bar towel, grimacing to the roots of his teeth as he did, and I knew I was watching as much pain as I ever would. Hell itself would try to douse such agony. I reached across the bar and gripped Lucas halfway up each forearm, holding him solid while he strained against the invisible fire inside his sleeves.

  Gradually Lucas’s breath expelled in a slow half-grunt. At last he swallowed deep and managed: “Any sense I ever had must’ve gone with my hands.”

  I let go my grasp of the stubbed arms. “Lucas, listen to me. There’s nothing happened yet, I swear it. I—”

  He shook his head, swallowed trouble one more time, and began randomly swiping the bar with the relentless towel again even though each motion made him wince. “Not with you, no. You I can believe, Angus. You’re in here telling me, and that’s a truth in itself.”

  So I had said all, and he had heard all, without the names of Rob and Nancy ever being spoken. More than ever, now, I felt the need to be gone from Gros Ventre. I wished I already was, and far.

  Lucas swabbed like a man possessed until he reached the two glasses of buttermilk, glowered at them and tossed their contents into the swill pail. In an instant he had replaced them with glasses of whisky and shunted mine along the bar to me with his forearm.

  “Here’s to a better time than this,” he snapped out, and we drank needfully.

  Still abrupt, he queried: “Have you told our Robbie you’re leaving?”

  “Not yet, but I’m about to, when he comes off work.”

  “Hold back until tonight, why not.” Lucas gazed out across the empty Medicine Lodge as if daring it to tell him why not. “I’ll get Sedge to take the saloon for a while and the three of us at least can have a final supper together. We may as well hold peace in the family until then, don’t you think?”

  I thought, peace is nowhere in the outlook I see among the Barclays. But aloud I agreed.

  • • •

  When Lucas and Rob and I went around to the house that evening, supper already waited on the table, covered with dish towels. Three places were set, with the plates turned down.

  “We’re on our own for a bit,” Lucas announced. “Nancy has gone home with Toussaint, up to the reservation to visit her aunt. So tonight, lads, it’s a cold bite but plenty of it.” He sat down regally, reached his right stub to the far edge of his plate and nudged the dish toward him until it lipped over the edge of the table; that lip he grasped with both stubs and flipped the plate over exactly in place. “Turn up your plates and let’s begin/Eat the meat and spit the skin,” he recited tunefully. “Most likely not old Burns, ay, Angus?”

  Dismay and concern and suspicion had flashed across Rob’s face rapidly as a shuffle of cards and now he was back to customary confidence again. I could see him wanting to ask how long an absence “a bit” amounted to, but he held that in and said instead, “Angus and I can be bachelors with the best of them. We’ve been practicing at it all our lives. Here, I can do the carving,” and he reached over to cut Lucas’s cold beef for him.

  My meal might as well have been still on the cow, I had so little enthusiasm for it. Rob jabbed and chewed with remarkable concentration. Lucas fed himself some bites in his bearlike way. Then he began out of nowhere:

  “I’ve been thinking how to keep you two out of mischief.”

  My heart climbed up my throat, for I thought he meant what the two on my mind, Rob and Nancy, were heading headlong into. This would teach me to keep my long tongue at home.

  But Lucas sailed on: “When you lads take up your land, I mean.”

  I gave him an idiot’s stare. Had he forgotten every word I said in the Medicine Lodge this afternoon?

  “It can be a hard go at first, homesteading,” Lucas imparted as if from God’s mountaintop. I caught a didn’t-I-say-so glance from Rob, but we both stayed quiet, to find out whatever this was on Lucas’s mind. “Hard,” repeated Lucas as if teaching us the notion. “Nobody ever has enough money to start with, and there’s work to be done in all directions at once, and then there’s the deciding of what to raise. The North Fork there, that’s sinfully fine country but it’d be too high to grow much of anything but hay, do you think?”

  I recited yes, that was what I thought. Rob offered nothing.

  “So the ticket up there will need to be livestock, ay?” Ay and amen, Lucas. “Cattle, though, you’re late to start with this year, with calving already done. You’d be paying for both the cows and their calves and that’s a pure dear price. And horses, this country is swimming in horses, the Indians have them and Dantley deals in them and there’s this new man Reese with them on Noon Creek. No sense in horses. But I’ll tell you lads what may be the thing, and that’s sheep. This Two Medicine country maybe was made for sheep. As sure as the pair of you are sitting here with your faces hanging out, sheep are worth some thinking about. Say you had some yearling ewes right now. You’d have the wool money this summer, and both lambs and wool next year. Two revenues are better than one,” he informed us. “It’s more than interesting, Angus, Ninian Duff saying to you that he’s thinking of selling his cattle for sheep. Ninian is a man with an eye for a dollar.” Tell us too, Lucas, does a fish swim and will a rock sink and can a bird fly? Why be trotting out this parade of homestead wisdom, when Rob wants none and I’ve already told you I’m leaving?

  Sermon done, we finished eating, or in my case gave up on the task. Lucas swung his head to me and requested: “Angus, would you mind? My chimney.”

  I fetched his clay pipe, tobaccoed it, and held it to him as he took it with his mouth. After I lit it and he puffed sufficiently, he used a forearm to push it to the accustomed corner of his mouth, then quizzed: “What do you lads think of the sheep notion?”

  Rob looked at me but I determinedly kept my mouth clamped. He was the one bending the future to awkward angles, let him be the one to describe its design to Lucas.

  Instead, Rob bought himself another minute by jesting, “Sheep sound like the exact thing to have. Now if we only had sheep.”

  Lucas deployed a pipe cloud at us, and with it said:

  “I’ll go with you on them.”

  Neither Rob nor I took his meaning.

  “The sheep!” Lucas spelled out impatiently. “I’ll partner the two of you in getting sheep. A band of yearling ewes, to start you off with.”

  Rob sat straight up. Probably I rose some myself. Lucas puffed some more and went right on: “I can back you a bit on the homestead expenses, too. Not endlessly, mind you; don’t get the wild idea I’m made of money. But to help you get underway. You pair are going to need to dive right to work, Montana winters come before you know it. I’d say tomorrow isn’t too soon for starting. But spend the rest of spring and summer up there at it, and the North Fork will have to make room for you two.”

  “Lucas, man,” Rob burst out, “that’s beyond generous.” Hesitation was gone from him. This again was the Rob I had come from Nethermuir and Helena with.

  “You’re for it, Robbie, are you?” Lucas made sure.

  “Who wouldn’t be? A chance like this?” Somewhere in his mind Rob had to adjust about Nancy. But with her absent to Toussaint’s household and Lucas’s offer laying like money to be picked up, you could all but hear Rob click with adjustment.

>   I knew Lucas had one more piece to put into place, and it came, it came.

  “There’s still one constituency to be heard from,” he dispatched benignly around his pipe to me. “What do you say to the idea, Angus? Can I count on you both?”

  Lucas Barclay, rascal that you knew how to be even without hands. Your bearded face and Rob’s bare bright one waited across that supper table. Waited while my mind buzzed like a hive. This isn’t old Scotland, lads. Waited for the one answer yet to come, the last answer of that evening and of the time that has ensued from it. Life goes differently here. The answer, Lucas, that you and I knew I could not now avoid saying, didn’t we?

  And say it I did.

  “Both.”

  SCOTCH HEAVEN

  * * *

  Prophetic indeed was the man who uttered, “You can fight armies or disease or trespass, but the settler never.” Word comes of yet another settlement of homesteaders in this burgeoning province of ours. Who can ever doubt, with the influx which is peopling a childless land and planting schools by the side of sheep sheds and cattle corrals, that Choteau County is destined to be the most populous in Montana? Of this latest colony, situated into the foothills a dozen or so miles west of Gros Ventre, it is said so many of the arrivees originated in the land of the kilt and the bagpipe that Gros Ventrians call the elevated new neighborhood Scotch Heaven.

  —CHOTEAU QUILL, JULY 3, 1890

  “HOTTER’N NOT, said the Hottentot.”

  “And what else do you expect, man. Montana is up so high it’s next door to the sun.”

  “Speaking of high, your lifting muscles are ready, are they?”

  “As ready as they’ll ever be.” We each grasped an end of the next log.

  “Then here it comes, house. Up she goes. Tenderly, now. Up a bit with your end. Up up up, that’s the direction. A hair more. Almost there. There. Ready to drop?”

  “Let’s do.”

  With a sound like a big box lid closing, the log fell into place, its notched ends clasping into those of the cabin’s side walls.

  “Well?” demanded Rob the log hewer. “Does your end fit?”

  I squinted dramatically at the wink of space between the log we had just placed and the one below. “Snug enough. You’ll barely be able to toss your cat through the crack.”

  That brought him in a rush. He eyed along the crevice—which would vanish easily enough when chinked—and lamented, “A tolerant tolerance, my father and Lucas would have called that in the wheelshop. See now, these Montana trees have more knots in them than a sailor’s fingers.”

  “Lucky thing we’re just practicing on this house of yours,” I philosophized for him. “By the time we build mine, now—”

  “Lucky thing for you I’m so much a saint I didn’t hear that.”

  • • •

  God proctored poor dim old Job about how the measures of the earth were laid. Had Job but been a homesteader, he could have readily answered that the government of the United States of America did it.

  The vast public domain westward of the Mississippi River, as Crofutt put the matter for us when Rob and I were somewhere back there on his oceanic border from emigration to immigration, where the stalwart homesteader may obtain legal title to his land-claim by five years of living upon it and improving it with his building and husbandry labors, has been summed in an idea as simple as it is powerful: the land has been made into arithmetic. This is to say, surveyors have established governing lineations across the earth, the ones extending north and south known as principal meridians and those east-to-west as base lines. Having thus cast the main lines of the net of numeration across half a continent, so to speak, they further divided the area into an ever smaller mesh, first of Ranges measured westward from the meridians and then of townships measured from the base lines. Each township is six miles square, thus totaling thirty-six square miles, and—attend closely for just a few moments more—it is these townships, wherein the individual homesteader takes up his landholding, that the American penchant for systemization fully flowers. Each square mile, called a section, is numbered, in identical fashion throughout all townships, thusly:

  As can be seen, the continuousness of the numeration is reminiscent of the boustrophedon pattern a farmer makes as he plows back and forth the furrows of his field—or, indeed, of the alternate directions in which earliest Greek is written! Thus does the originality of the American experiment, the ready granting of land to those industrious enough to seek it, emulate old efficacious patterns!

  Rob’s remark at the time was that Crofutt himself verged to Greek here. But upon the land itself, there on the great earthen table of the American experiment, the survey system’s lines of logic wrote themselves out so clearly they took your breath away. Why wasn’t the rest of humankind’s ledger this orderly? Filing our homestead claims of 160 acres apiece, the allowable amount one person could choose out of a square-mile section of 640 acres, amounted merely to finding section-line markers—Ninian Duff could stride blindfolded to every one of them in the North Fork valley—and making the journey to the land office at Lewistown and putting a finger on the registrar’s map and saying, this quarter-section is the patch of earth that will be mine. The land has been made into arithmetic indeed. On the Declaration of Applicant there in front of me my land’s numbers were registered as SW 1/4 Sec. 31, Tp. 28 N, Rge. 8 W, on Rob’s they were NE 1/4 Sec. 32, Tp. 28 N, Rge. 8 W, and with our grins at each other we agreed that ink had never said anything better.

  • • •

  Here then is land. Just that, land, naked earthskin. And now the due sum: from this minute on, the next five years of your life, please, invested entirely into this chosen square of earth of yours.

  Put upon it house, outbuildings, fences, garden, a well, livestock, haystacks, performing every bit of this at once and irrespective of weather and wallet and whether you have ever laid hand to any of these tasks before. Build before you can plan, build in your sleep and through your mealtimes, but build, pilgrim, build, claimant of the earth, build, build, build. You are permitted to begin in the kind delusion that your utensils of homestead-making at least are the straightforward ones—axe, hammer, adze, pick, shovel, pitchfork. But your true tools are other. The nearest names that can be put to them are hope, muscle and time.

  • • •

  “Ay, Robert, you will eat your fill of wind up here,” Ninian Duff brought along as a verdict one forenoon when he rode up to inspect our house progress.

  Rob’s choice of land was lofty. His homestead claim lay high as it could across the south slope of Breed Butte itself, like a saddle blanket down a horse’s side. Those early summer days when we were building his house—we bet the matter of whose to build first on which of a pair of magpies would leave their snag perch sooner, and would you not know, Rob’s flew at once—those summer-starting days, all of the valley of the North Fork sat sunlit below Rob’s site; and if you strolled a few hundred yards to the brow of the butte each dawn, as I did, you even saw the sun emerge out of the eastward expanse of plains all the way beyond the distant dunelike Sweetgrass Hills.

  Rob found Ninian’s decree worth a laugh. “Is there somewhere in this country that a man wouldn’t have wind in his teeth?”

  Even while we three stood gazing, the tall grass of the valley bottom was being ruffled. A dance of green down there, and the might of the mountains above, and the aprons of timber and grazing land between; this would always be a view to climb to, you had to give Rob that. Even Ninian looked softened by it all, his prophetic beard gently breeze-blown against his chest. I was struck enough to announce impromptu: “You did some real choosing when you found us the North Fork, Ninian.”

  The beard moved back and forth across the chest. “None of us has bragging rights to this country yet.”

  After Ninian had ridden away and Rob and I climbed up to resume with raftering, there still was some peeve in Rob. He aimed his chin down at the Duff and Erskine homesteads, one-two there beside the
creek at the mouth of the valley. “By damn, I didn’t come all the miles from one River Street to live down there on another.”

  “You can see almost into tomorrow from up here, I will say that,” saying it against my own inclination in the matter. For, unlike me as it was to be in the same pulpit with Ninian, to my way of thinking, too, this scenery of Rob’s had high cost. By choosing so far up onto the butte he was forfeiting the meadow of wild hay that meandered beside the North Fork the full length of the valley, hay that seemed to leap from the ground and play racing games with the wind as we went back to hammering together Rob’s roof. And more serious than that, to my mind, he was spurning the creek itself, source for watering livestock. True, at the corner of his land nearest to mine a spring lay under a small brow of butte, like a weeping eye, and Rob gave me to know that I would see the day when he built a reservoir there. But we live in the meantime rather than the sometime and to me a nearness to the creek was the way to begin the world at the right end, in a land as dry as this Montana. Which was why my own homestead selection, southwest from Rob’s and just out of view behind the dropping shoulder of Breed Butte, was down into the last of the North Fork valley before foothills and mountains took command of the geography. There at my homestead meadows of wild hay stood fat and green along both sides of the creek, and the bottomland was flat enough beside the clear little stream to work on my house-to-be and its outbuildings in level comfort; for all the open glory of Rob’s site, you always were trudging up or down slope here.

  But try telling any of this, as I had, to Rob, who assured me in that Barclay future-owning style: “In the eventual, a dab of hay or water more or less won’t make the difference. What counts, see now, is that no one can build to the west of me here,” and the timbered crest and long rocky shoulder of Breed Butte indeed made that an unlikelihood. “Angus, this butte will be the high road into all the pasture there ever was and I’ll be right here on it, am I right?”