Prairie Nocturne Read online

  Whatever that word was, in this life.

  Still needing to assure himself this was really happening to him, he sneaked another look around the boat. The Major and the music mistress at the bow, taking in the sights. The Swede couple who took care of the Major’s Helena house, huddling under the canvas canopy bewildered as chickens. Himself and Harris, chauffeurs by land and water. Six folks total on an excursion craft that would hold, what, fifty?

  The boatman had followed his gaze around the vessel. “Normal people, I don’t take out here this soon in the year,” Harris muttered.

  Like to meet any of those in this lifetime, normal, Monty’s mind raced on. But the man has a point. “Normal” wouldn’t cut it for a shindig like this. Notions jittered in him today like fancywear on a clothesline. It was boggling: a different life to fit over the one he already had on? Was there enough of him to change into all that? Let his imagination tailor it and there was. If he could get trained up for it, maybe he could show the world something this time around. New York, even. And right away caught himself letting his hopes run too high; there was also every chance his bright idea of becoming a real singer was going to be over the instant he didn’t make his mouth work right for that woman up there in the bow.

  To be doing something besides picturing himself in full song beneath chandeliers that scintillated like the diamonds in the necklaces and stickpins of the rapt audience one moment and envisioning himself pucker-mouthed and mute as a trout in front of this music woman the next instant, Monty craned out enough to catch a glimpse of the higher reaches of the Big Belt mountains. Gulches to nowhere, slabs of cliff around every corner, round-shouldered summits that didn’t amount to that much. Not like the resounding wide-open Two Medicine country he was lifelong used to, with its dune shapes of the Sweetgrass Hills way over east there with the prairie in between as if they were pretty mirages that miraculously never faded, and the mighty reefs of the Rockies pushing up everywhere into the sky to the west. But he had to admit this river was quite a thing, rolling its way mile after mile through rock-solid canyon. And dead-end views or not, the low mountains stacked around the canyon showed nice clean fresh snow on their slopes; good tracking snow. He half wished he was up there hunting, cutting the tracks of a bull elk in one of those open parks near timberline, instead of down here at this. But wishing was what had landed him into this, wasn’t it.

  Of its own accord his turned-up overcoat collar all at once drooped and let the wind in on him, surprising him the way nearly everything was surprising him today. No reason to be jumpy, he told himself as he turned the unruly collar back up. Yes, there was. White lady variety. They could be worse than the men. Treat you like some sort of moron who sleeps in the sheepdip trough. He sneaked another peek toward the bow of the boat and wondered again about this Miss Duff. Why wasn’t she a Mrs. Duff, for starters? She looked lofty, although maybe it was only the altitude temperature that went with her being so ungodly tall for a woman. Whatever way she stacked up, the Major claimed she was the sharpest thing going, where training up a singing voice was involved.

  Look at it like resorting to a doctor, one of those specialists; that was the point of view he was going to try to take. It would be a lot easier on the nerves, though, if her skin tone and his weren’t as far apart as those white and black Scottie dog magnets he had played with as a boy, one capable of propelling the other across the floorboards simply by being the opposite kind. But that was the sort of principle he would have to put up with to get where he wanted to go, he resolved again.

  That’s if she even consented to take him on, after this. He could kick himself for the way he’d messed up back at the dock. “How do you do, again, Miss Susan,” he’d heard come out of his mouth when she stepped aboard the boat and walked up to him as if examining a bad painting. He had no earthly idea why again hopped in there that way. It wasn’t as if he was on speaking acquaintance with her—although he had heard enough talk about the Major and her, back a few years before he was driving for the Major—but somehow the fact that he and she both were products of the Two Medicine country seemed like a kind of knowing each other or each other’s families or general circumstances of growing up there or some such. His try at conveying that, though, had come out sounding all too much like they were peas from the same pod.

  Snooty wasn’t quite the word for the way she’d stood there giving him a going over, or at least he hoped it wasn’t. Keen, that was it, he tried to convince himself. Although maybe starchy said it better. Whatever the correct read of her was, she came right back at him with: “You seem to have caught the Major’s ear, Mister Rathbun. Such a spot for a debut.”

  “He’s giving me a good help, that’s sure.” He had not known what more to say about the Major providing all of outdoors as a music hall. Being a Williamson, the Major could do about anything he wanted, couldn’t he. So, with that the two of them ran out of the makings of talk and he’d had to stand there like a mooring post while she and the Major went on with chitchat until the boat chugged to life and he headed to the stern in the natural gravitation of things.

  What if he got buck fever, in front of her, and couldn’t remember the words? Couldn’t possibly forget words to something you’d known all your life. “Sing with Momma while she washes, Montgomery. Ah ah AH! That’s it, sing with Momma.” Just to make sure, he ran the song through his head again now.

  Then what if he sang it word-perfect and she still said she had heard a better voice on a bullfrog?

  Nervously he rubbed an eyebrow with the knuckle of his thumb. Nobody around but the clam running the boat and the dumb-cluck couple to watch him make a fool of himself, at least. That hadn’t been the case often enough lately, he reflected with overdue wisdom as the boat slowed to an aquatic waddle in the presence of the most imposing cliffs yet. He grimaced, the reminder of his last time in town still so fresh. The dustup over his fantan debt, nothing really hurt except his dignity; but on top of that, the brush-off from Leticia. A man could hardly come to town anymore without getting treated like Job’s dog. “Leticia?” those joyboys in the Zanzibar had razzed him unmercifully. “Call out the militia!” This time his wince cut all the way to the heart. He had been stuck on Leticia. She wasn’t street baggage, she was a good decent copper-brown woman with a part-interest in a millinery establishment and a sideline in cosmetics. He had sounded her out on marriage, even. And received: “You’re a lovely man, Monty, but you are no provider.” Quite a lot about life he had learned to laugh off, but when Leticia let him have it with both barrels that way, it registered deep. Off she had gone with that slickback head waiter from the Broadwater Hotel, and that was that.

  Maybe it had taken him too long to get himself in gear, maybe he shouldn’t have needed yet another dose of Clore Street to teach him. But in any case he had dragged his tail back to the ranch admitting to himself that life as he was practicing it was never going to provide beyond what it already did—the room on the back end of the washhouse, the choreboy’s place at the long table three times a day, and wages that were gone before you could clink the dollars together. Which is why he had mustered himself and asked the proper source:

  “Major? You know anything about those singers, on stage and that?”

  * * *

  “Pity.” Wes was peering critically at the Missouri’s volume of water, already running high with the first of spring melt against the shoreless base of the cliffs.

  “What is?”

  “Oh, nothing. It would’ve made a wonderful place to put a railroad through.”

  “You and your railroad notion,” Susan made fun of him. “You would levitate it, would you?” Actually, it occurred to her, magic carpets were his stock in trade. Wes had but to say presto and keep the change and this steam launch awaited where the Missouri swept into the mountains. Monty and the Doozy presenting themselves at the dock, both looking newly spiffed up. Susan herself had been royally fetched from Highland Street by Wes’s household couple, although she h
ad stiffened when she learned the Gustafsons—Mrs. Gus’s middle name was Nosey, Gus’s was Gloomy—were to be her escorts. In the past she had asked Wes why on earth he kept them on, and he had pondered and then said he supposed it was because they provided all the discomforts of home.

  “An outing for the servants, is this to be?” she had jabbed him with, this time around.

  “Your old friendship with Mrs. Gustafson must be kept green.” Then in his married tone: “It’s that usual matter, how things have to look. Please, Susan.”

  Clasping her scarf to her throat against another incursion of the raw wind, she glanced back along the length of the boat. Mr. and Mrs. Gus sat shivering, dressed too lightly. Susan had little sympathy. Sweden was not exactly a Mediterranean clime, why did the Gustafsons think Montana’s latitude would be balmy?

  She centered her attention back on the matter of Monty. The taproot of talent is ambition. This man was quite far along in life to be wanting a career; what had he been saving himself for until now? Not to mention far along the palette of pigmentation, compared to the flesh tones of the audiences he seemed to crave. Yet she knew he had already come some way up in life. The dawn-and-dusk chores of the Duff homestead would never leave her, and when she multiplied those by what must be the drudgeries asked of a choreboy on a ranch as huge as the Double W, yes, this Monty person had come considerably up. The emphatic crease of his trousers, the good hat. And he smartly wore a greatcoat, nearly as capacious as that on Wes. She wondered how he and his mother had ever alit with the Williamsons: two shakes of pepper in that salt-white confederacy of riders and masters.

  She kept watch on him now as Wes beckoned him from the stern. He had a roomy chest, which gave her hope. Ropy in build, and as yet he had no belly to speak of. Full-lipped, but no more so than the bee-sting look that was popular on motion-picture women. Glowering brows, but his eyes did not seem to start off with any color grudge; not quite crafty in look, thank goodness, but taking in more than he seemed to, if she knew anything about human nature. No prominent Adam’s apple to bob up and down disconcertingly while he sang, she was glad to note. And small ears, tight to his head. Hair that hadn’t been fiddled with, no misplaced faith in doses of straightener. Spotless hands and fingernails. In outward appearance, she was forced to admit, so far so good with Montgomery Rathbun, songbird on the edge of the Williamson nest.

  “All of a sudden you feel that it’s due him?” she had tried to press Wes.

  “You might say that.”

  “Him in particular? I’m only asking.”

  “Why so suspicious? You make it sound as if I have more motives than Rasputin. Isn’t the glimmer of a voice enough for you to go on?”

  “Wes, you yourself say that your ear is straight from the tinsmith.”

  “I knew what I was hearing when I first heard you, didn’t I?”

  There was a fluster at the center of the boat as Mrs. Gustafson scurried out from under the canopy and announced noon by pointing to the sun. She brought forth the dinner basket: fresh baked bread, headcheese, boiled eggs. A lard can of doughnuts.

  “It’s a hard-and-fast rule of the profession,” Susan headed this off, “that Mister Rathbun must sing with an empty stomach.”

  “Then we’ll listen, in hungry concert,” Wes pronounced. He looked around at the cliffs, like opera-house walls grown to five hundred feet: La Scala fashioned out of a fjord. “Will this do?” He seemed to be serious.

  Susan smiled ever so slightly. “As good a place as any.”

  “Harris, can you let us drift?” Wes called to the launch operator.

  As soon as the engine was shut off, the silence was overpowering. The wind stirred the swags of branches far above them, but evidently was blocked by the oxbow turn of the river.

  At Susan’s nod, Monty took a position in the center of the boat. She was dismayed to see he stood like a cowboy, hip-sprung, spraddled. But then that’s what he was, among a confusing number of other things, she reminded herself.

  Here goes nothing from nowhere, he tried to bolster the inside of his head with the chant that breathed luck on a pair of dice, sometimes. As if feeling the need for correction in her look, he grasped the lapels of his coat, thought better of that stance, and let his hands drop to his sides. There they opened and closed. He drew in an audible, open-mouthed breath, but no sound issued forth. Standing as if rooted to the deck, he discovered he was dry-lipped, dry-mouthed, dry-throated, a desert down to the moons of his toenails. Be there, he implored his voice. “Excuse me one moment,” he half coughed out, went over beneath the canopy and swigged from a glass of the lemonade Mrs. Gustafson had thought to welcome spring with, then returned to his amidship spot.

  It dawned on Susan that Wes was making this hard for him, depositing him out here in this magnificence, proffering him his moment in grand style, testing him. Deliberately?

  “Ready when you are, Monty,” issued from Wes now, not exactly an order but close enough.

  Stiff as a cactus, Monty aimed himself at the crowding cliffs and suddenly let out:

  “Go down, Moses,

  Way down in Egypt land—”

  There was a catch of breath, Monty’s and everybody else’s, then he sang on in a tone as deep as the sound of a bronze bell.

  “Tell old Pharaoh

  To let my people go.

  When Israel was in Egypt land,

  Let my people go.

  Oppressed so hard, she could not stand,

  Let my people go.”

  Wes listened with everything in him, the song taking him back through time. Back nearly as long as he could remember, Angeline Rathbun’s spirituals hovered over the white clotheslines behind the ranch house, indeed like angelic sea chanties wafting above a ship under sail. The carry of Monty’s voice, though, except when he sang while at his barn chores, had mostly been in evidence at branding time and roundup, when the other riders would encourage him to yell the cattle down out of distant coulees. That, and shouting tag ends of jokes to his interlocutor, the announcer, in his rodeo period. This might mend that, and more. If he has it in him. If she can’t resist seeing if he has it in him. That skinny compass-needle word, if. All the directions it could waver to. But he had given this due thought, in many a long night, and come back to his starting point, the overpowering urge that now was the time if—that, again—the needful was ever to happen. It just might work. Please. Listening to Monty now, Wes put his head down and focused on the upside-down steeple of his fingertips meeting, very much as he did when he was in the confessional.

  Susan keenly watched Monty’s every breath, as the echoes chorused off the cliffwalls.

  “You’ll not get lost in the wilderness,

  Let my people go,

  With a lighted candle in your breas’,

  Let my people go.

  Go down, Moses,

  Way down in Egypt land,

  Tell old Pharaoh

  To let my people go.”

  When he finished, the Gustafsons hesitantly beat their mittened hands in applause. The boatman leaned forward in fascination. Wes nodded firm encouragement to Monty. Five faces now turned toward Susan.

  “Again, please, Mister Rathbun.”

  Monty sagged.

  “Don’t be down in the mouth,” Wes consoled at once. “She’s known to be hard to please.”

  “If you could possibly hold off on the man-to-man sympathy,” Susan shushed him. “Mister Rathbun? Again?”

  “Miss Susan, honest, that’s as good as I can do.”

  She seemed surprised. “Then simply do it the same. I’m sorry, but one time through a song is not being a singer. That’s merely”—she searched for an uncritical set of words—“whistling with your voicebox. Mister Rathbun, I need to hear certain things again in how you managed that song. I thought that’s why we’re here.” She locked eyes with him, the stare that had conquered a thousand pupils. “Now then.”

  Wes broke their deadlock. “Harris?” He twirled a finger a
t the boatman, and the launch coughed to life and turned back upriver to where Monty had aimed his voice at the canyon amphitheater. As soon as the engine was cut, Monty squared away, with his eyes closed this time against the skinning-knife challenge of Susan’s, and in slow measure summoned up from wherever he could reach in himself:

  “Go down, Moses . . .”

  When the last echo expended itself, Wes clapped once, hard, and swung around to Susan. “Well?”

  “Well.”

  “Susan, blast you,” Wes was nearly laughing in exasperation, Monty scarcely daring to breathe, “what’s the verdict?”

  NINIAN’S LAND

  · 1924 ·

  Scotch Heaven may not have amounted to much as a site, but you cannot beat it as a sight.

  —from the diary of Susan Duff

  SUSAN SCRUBBED THE floor a second time. The homestead house had stood empty a half dozen years. Almost the same could be said of the valley.

  The world was definitely a different habitat on hands and knees. Her kneeling parts ached and her knuckles were red from the harsh washwater as she attacked the uneven pine floorboards with the scrub brush, round two. Cows had been in here; Whit Williamson’s drizzling cows, Wes’s drizzling cows, depending on whichever end of the beasts he held title to in the Double W scheme of things.

  Troughs of the past pooled with sudsy water as she slaved away at the old floor. The oblong worn spot in front of the cookstove where her mother had fended, morning, noon, and night, for thirty years. “Susan, see to Samuel, pretty please. The taties are refusing to boil, the devils.” Over there where the table had sat, the most seriously rubbed groove was the spot where her father’s sizable workshoes shuffled. “A man needs a firm understanding,” topmost in the tiny horde of jokes he allowed himself. Her father could quarrel with the wind, then turn around and recite from heart the most lilting Bible passage. It picked at her that contradictions were still the fare of this house. Ninian Duff had swept into this pocketed-away valley on the North Fork of English Creek in 1887 with a bemused wife and a daughter inquisitive beyond her three years of life and a ramrod determination to make his chosen acres of American earth a homesteaded Eden, whether or not the given ground had those ingredients. Ninian’s land, all this had been called, even the pasture domain up under the mountains that was nowhere on the proving-up papers of the homestead and was now national forest. And here I am, back at his old haunt. I can hear him now. “Ay, Susan, we couldn’t have kept you in Scotch Heaven with heavy fetters, and here you are back because of a notion worth its weight in moonbeams?” Her scrub brush retaliated with furious vigor on a floorboard. She knew the chapters of her life did not sit well together, she didn’t need telling by the echoes here.