English Creek Page 27

  To make sure their smooth terms could stand his absence, my father looked the question at my mother, and she told him by a nod that he ought to go do the call. She even added, “Why don’t you do the Dude and Belle? This time of night, everybody can stand some perking up.”

  He climbed onto the band platform. “ ’Lo, Nola, Jeff. This isn’t any idea of mine, understand.”

  “Been saving you the best strings of this fiddle, Mac,” Jeff answered. “When you’re ready.”

  Nola nodded, echoed: “When you’re ready.”

  “All right, then. Try to make me look like I know what I’m doing.” My father tipped his left shoulder down, pumped a rhythm with his heel a number of times to get a feel of the platform. Then made a loud hollow clap with his hands which brought everybody’s attention, and called out over the hall: “Jerome is taking a minute to recuperate. He said he hates to turn things over to anybody with a Scotch notion of music, but saw no choice. So you’re in for it.”

  “What one we gonna do, Mac, the Two Medicine two-step?” some wit yelled out.

  “No sir. I’ve got orders to send you to midnight supper in style. Time to do the Dude and Belle. And let’s really do it, six squares’ worth.” My father was thinking big. Six squares of dancers in this hall would swash from wall to wall and end to end, and onlookers already were moving themselves into the doorway or alongside the band platform to grant space. “All right. You all know how it starts. Join hands and circle left.”

  Even yet I am surprised that I propelled myself into doing it. I stepped away from Ray, soldiered myself in front of my mother, and said:

  “Mrs. McCaskill, I don’t talk through my nose as pretty as the guy you usually gallivant around with. But suppose I could have this dance with you anyway?”

  Her face underwent that rinse of surprise that my father sometimes showed about her. She cast a look toward the top of my head as if just realizing my height. Then came her sidelong smile, and her announcement:

  “I never could resist you McCaskill galoots.”

  Arm in arm, my mother and I took a place in the nearest square. People were marshalling everywhere in the hall, it looked like a major parade forming up. Another thunderclap from my father’s hands, Nola and Jim opened up with the music, and my father chanted us into action.

  “First gent, swing the lady so fair.

  Now the one right over there.

  Now the one with the sorrel hair.

  Now the belle of the ballroom.

  Swirl and twirl And promenade all.

  Second gent, swing the lady first-rate.”

  Besides my mother and me, our square was Bob and Arleta Busby, and the Musgreaves who ran the drugstore, and luck of luck, Pete and Marie, back from returning Toussaint to the Two Medicine and dancing hard the past hour or so to make up for time lost. All of them but me probably had done the Dude and Belle five hundred times in their lives, but it’s a basic enough dance that I knew the ropes. You begin with everybody joining hands—my mother’s firm feel at the end of one of my arms, Arleta’s small cool hand at my other extreme—and circling left, a wheel of eight of us spinning to the music. Now to my father’s call of “You’ve done the track, now circle back” the round chain of us goes into reverse, prancing back to where we started. Swing your partner, my mother’s cornflower frock a blue whirlwind around the pair of us. Now the lady on the left, which in my instance meant hooking arms with Arleta, another first in my life. Now return to partner, all couples do some sashaying right and left, and the “gent” of this round steps forth and begins swinging the ladies in turn until he’s back to his own partner. And with all gusto, swings her as the Belle of the Ballroom.

  “Third gent, swing the lady in blue.”

  What I would give to have seen all this through my father’s eyes. Presiding up there on the platform, pumping rhythm with his heel and feeling it multiplied back to him by the forty-eight feet traveling the dance floor. Probably if you climbed the helmet spike of the Sedgwick House, the rhythm of those six squares of dancers would have come quivering up to you like spasms through a tuning fork. Figure within figure within figure, from my father’s outlook over us, the kaleidoscope of six simultaneous dance patterns and inside each the hinged couple of the instant and comprising those couples friends, neighbors, sons, wife with flashing throat. The lord of the dance, leading us all.

  “Fourth gent, swing the lady so sweet.”

  The fourth gent was me. I stepped to the center of our square, again made the fit of arms with Arleta Busby, and swung her.

  “Now the one who looks so neat.”

  Marie glided forth, solemnly winked at me, and spun about me light as a ghost.

  “Now the one with dainty feet.”

  Grace Musgreave, plump as a partridge, didn’t exactly fit the prescription, but again I managed, sending her puffing out of our fast swirl.

  “Now the belle of the ballroom.”

  The blue beauty, my mother. “Swirl and twirl.” Didn’t we though. “Now promenade all.” Around we went, all the couples, and now it was the women’s turn to court their dudes.

  “First lady, swing the gent who’s got sore toes.

  Now the one with the great big nose.

  Now the one who wears store clothes.

  Now the dude of the ballroom.

  Second lady, swing the gent in size thirteens.

  Now the one that ate the beans.

  Now the one in brand new jeans.

  Now the dude of the ballroom.

  Third lady, swing the gent with the lantern jaw.

  Now the one from Arkansas.

  Now the one that yells, ‘Ah, hah!’

  Now the dude of the ballroom.”

  So it went. In succession I was the one in store clothes, the one full of beans, and the lantern-jawed one—thankful there not to be the one who yells “Ah hah!” which Pete performed for our square with a dandy of a whoop.

  “Fourth lady, swing the gent whose nose is blue.”

  My mother and Bob Busby, two of the very best dancers in the whole hall.

  “Now the one that spilled the glue.”

  Reese reflections dancing with each other, my mother and Pete.

  “Now the one who’s stuck on you.”

  My mother and sallow Hugh Musgreave.

  “Now the dude of the ballroom.”

  She came for me, eyes on mine. I was the proxy of all that had begun at another dance, at the Noon Creek schoolhouse twenty years before. My father’s voice: “Swirl him and twirl him.” My moment of dudehood was an almighty whirl, as if my mother had been getting up the momentum all night.

  “All join hands and circle to the left,

  Before the fiddler starts to swear.

  Dudes and belles, you’ve done your best.

  Now promenade, to you know where.”

  “Didn’t know you were a lightfoot,” Ray greeted me at the edge of the throng heading through the doorway to supper hour.

  “Me neither,” I responded, blowing a little. My mother was with Pete and Marie right behind me; we all would have to wait for my father to make his way from the band platform. “Let’s let them catch up with us outside. I can use some air.”

  Ray and I squirmed along between the crowd and the lobby wall, weaseling our way until we popped out the front entry of the Sedgwick House.

  I was about to say here that the next historic event of this Fourth of July, Gros Ventre category, was under way as the two of us emerged into the night, well ahead of my parents and the Reeses. But given that midnight had just happened I’d better call this the first occurrence of July 5.

  The person most immediately obvious of course was Leona, white and gold in the frame of light cast onto the street by the Sedgwick House’s big lobby window. And then Arlee Zane, also there on that raft of light; Arlee, ignorance shining from every pore.

  Beyond them, a bigger two with the reflected light cutting a line across their chests; face to face in the dimness ab
ove that, as if they were carrying on the nicest of private chats. Except that the beam-frame build of one and the chokecherry shirt of the other showed them to be Earl Zane and Alec and therefore they were not chatting.

  “Surprised to see you without a skim milk calf on the end of a string,” Earl was offering up as Ray and I sidled over beside Leona and Arlee so as not to miss anything. Inspiring Arlee to laugh big as if Earl’s remark deserved it.

  “What, are you out here in the night looking for that cinnamon pony?” I give Alec credit for the easy way he said this, tossing it out as a joke. “He went thataway, Earl.”

  Earl proved not to be in the market for humor just now, however.

  “I suppose you could have forked him any better?” You could all but hear the thick gears move in Earl’s head to produce the next remark. “You likely had a lot of riding practice recently.”

  “Earl, you lardbrain,” this drew from Leona.

  But Alec chose to cash Earl’s remark at face value. “Some of us do get paid to stay on horses instead of bailing off of them. Come on, Leona, let’s go refuel before the dancing starts again.”

  Earl now had another brain movement. “Surprised you can dance at all these days, what with marriage on your mind.” He leaned a little toward Alec to deliver the final part: “Tell me this, McCaskill. Has it ever climbed out the top of your pants yet?”

  That one I figured was going to be bingo. After all, anybody who has grown up in Montana has seen Scotch lawsuits get under way for a lot less commentary than that. At dances the situation was common enough almost to be a regular feature. One guy with a few too many drinks in him calls some other guy a name none too fond, and that party responds with a fist. Of course the commotion was generally harsher than the combat, but black eyes and bent noses could result.

  “Earl, you jugheaded—” Leona was responding, but to my considerable disappointment Alec interrupted her by simply telling Earl, “Stash it, sparrowhead. Come on, Leona, we got business elsewhere.”

  “I bet you got business all right,” Earl adventured on. “Leona business. Snatch a kiss, kiss a snatch, all the same to you, McCaskill, ain’t it?”

  I can’t truly say I saw it happen. Not in any way of following a sequence: this and then this and then this. No, the event simply arrived into my mind, complete, intact, engraved before its realization could make itself felt. Versions of anything of this sort are naturally suspect, of course. Like that time Dempsey fought Gibbons up at Shelby for the heavyweight championship. About ten thousand people were there, and afterward about a quarter million could provide you an eyewitness account. But I will relate just as much of this Earl and Alec episode as I can vouch for. One instant Earl was standing there, admiring the manufacture of his last comment, and then in the next instant was bent in half, giving a nasty tossing-up noise, auheughhh, that made my own stomach turn over.

  What can have inspired Alec, given that the time-honored McCaskill procedure after loss of temper was to resort to a roundhouse right, to deliver Earl that short straight jab to the solar plexus?

  That economical punch of Alec’s produced plenty, though. Every bit of this I can see as if it were happening over again right now. Earl now in full light, doubled down as he was, Alec stepping around him to collect Leona, and the supper crowd in its long file out of the Sedgwick House stopping and gawking.

  “God DAMN!” exploded between Ray and me, Arlee pushing through and combining his oath with the start of a haymaker targeted on Alec’s passing jaw.

  Targeted but undelivered. On the far side of Arlee’s girth from me Ray reached up, almost casually it seemed, and latched onto Arlee’s wrist. The intended swing went nowhere after that, Ray hanging on to the would-be swingster as if he’d just caught him with that hand in the cookie jar, and by the time Arlee squared around and managed to begin to tussle in earnest with Ray—thank heaven for the clomping quality of the Zane brain—I had awarded Arlee a bit of a shove to worry him from my side.

  Where the ruckus would have progressed beyond that I have ever been curious about. In hindsight, that is. For if Arlee had managed to shake out of Ray’s grip, he was elephant enough to provide us both some pounding.

  But by now my father was on hand, and Pete and two or three other men soldiered out of the crowd to help sort us into order, and somebody was fetching Tollie Zane out of the Medicine Lodge on Earl’s behalf.

  “Jick, that’s enough,” my father instructed. “Turn him loose, Ray. It’s over.”

  This too I am clear about. Those sentences to Ray and me were the full sum of what was said by any McCaskill here in this aftermath. What traveled to Alec from my father was a stare, a studying one there in the frame of hotel light as if my father was trying to be sure this was the person he thought it was.

  And got back from Alec one of the identical caliber.

  Then Leona was in the grasp of my brother, and my mother stepped out alongside my father, and each couple turned and went.

  • • •

  “Ray?”

  “What?”

  We were side by side in bed, in the dark of his room. Outside the open twin windows a breeze could be heard teasing its way through the leaves of the giant cottonwood.

  “You helped a lot, there at the dance.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You’ll want to watch out Arlee doesn’t try get it back on you.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was silence then, and the dark, until Ray startled me with something between a giggle and a laugh. What the hell now? I couldn’t see what he was doing, but as soon as words started issuing from him, I knew. He was pinching his nose closed.

  “He wants to watch out around me” came droning out in exact imitation of Tollie’s rodeo announcing, “or I’ll cut his heart out and drink his blood.”

  That got me into the act. With a good grasp on my nose, I proposed in the same tinny tone:

  “Yank off his arm and make him shake hands with it.”

  Ray giggled and offered:

  “Grab him by the epiglommis until his eyes pooch out.”

  “Sharpen the point on his head”—I paused for my own giggles—“and pound him in like a post.”

  “Kickenough crap out of him to daub a log barn,” Ray envisioned. “Goddamn booger eater him anyhow.”

  With each atrocity on Arlee our laughing multiplied, until the bed was shaking and we tried to tone things down before Ray’s folks woke up and wondered just what was going on.

  But every time we got ourselves nearly under control, one or the other of us erupted again—“thump old Arlee as far into hell”—on and on, laughing anew, snorting it out in spite of ourselves—“as a bird can fly in a lifetime”—sides shaking and throats rollicking until we were almost sick, and then of course we had to laugh at the ridiculousness of that.

  Nor, when Ray finally did play out and conked off to sleep, did that fever of humor entirely leave me. I would doze for a while and then be aware I was grinning open-eyed into the darkness about one or another moment of that immense day, that never-can-be-forgotten Fourth. Here I rest, world, as happy as if I had good sense and the patent on remembrance. My mother on the park stump giving her Ben English speech and Dode at the top of that leap by Coffee Nerves and my father calling out the Dude and Belle to the dancing crowd and my brother one-punching Earl Zane and Ray pitching in on Arlee and, you bet, Stanley Meixell collecting Velma Simms. Scene by scene they fell into place in me, smooth as kidskin and exact as chapter and verse, every one a perfect piece of that day and now of the night; a set of hours worth the price of the rest of the life.

  THREE

  The sun shines, hay is being made. All along English Creek and Noon Creek, mowing and raking and stacking are the order of the day. As to how this year’s cutting compares with those of recent years—have you seen any rancher lately who wasn’t grinning like a Christian holding four aces?

  —GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, JULY 20

  “HAND ME A H
ALF-INCH, would you, Jick.”

  “Here you go.” I passed the open-end wrench of that size to Pete beneath the power buckrake. There was a grunt of exertion, a flash of metal as the wrench flew and clattered off the chassis, and the news from Pete:

  “Sonofabitch must be a three-eighths.”

  I had been here before. “Did you hit your knuckles?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Did you round the head off the bolt?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Are you sure you want to put up hay again this year?”

  “Guess what, nephew. The next rusted-up sonofabitch of a bolt under here has got your name on it.”

  At noon of that first day of preparing Pete’s haying machinery, when he and I came in to wash up for dinner Marie took one look at the barked knuckles and skin scrapes and blood blisters on the both of us and inquired: “Did you two count your fingers before you started all this?”

  • • •

  Despite what it took out of a person’s hide I still look back on that as topnotch employment, my job of haying for Pete.

  The Reese ranch was a beauty for hay. Pete inherited not only my grandfather Isaac Reese’s acreage there along Noon Creek but old Isaac’s realization that nurturing more than one source of income is as good an idea as you can have in Montana. Pete was continuing with the sheep Isaac had turned to after the crash of cattle prices and also was improving the ranch’s hayfields, running ditches into the bottomland meadows of wild hay to irrigate them from Noon Creek. Even in the Depression’s driest years, Pete always had hay to sell during the winter. This year it looked as if he would have a world of the stuff. Those wild meadows of timothy and wiregrass lay one after another along the creek like green pouches on a thong. Then there was the big field atop the Noon Creek–English Creek divide which grew dry-land alfalfa. In a wet year like this one, the alfalfa was soaring up more than knee high and that wide benchland field looked as green as they say the Amazon is.