Wolf Willow

  When we drove away we closed the gate carefully on our empty pasture, shutting in shack and privy and chickencoop and the paths connecting them, hooking shut three strands of barbed wire around the place we had made there, enclosing our own special plot of failure from the encroaching emptiness. We congratulated ourselves that it was such a tight, firm fence. Wandering stock couldn’t get in and camp in the chicken house, or rub anything down scratching off winter hair. We told ourselves that some day we would be back. We memorized the landmarks of five years.

  But we knew, we all knew, that we wouldn’t be back any more than the families of our acquaintance who had already left; and I imagine we obscurely felt that more than our personal hope had died in the shack that stayed in sight all the time we were bumping down along the field to the border. With nothing in sight to stop anything, along a border so unwatched that it might have been unmapped, something really had stopped there; a crawl of human hope had stopped.

  As we turned at the Line, headed for the county road that began at Hydro, we could still see the round roof of the shack lifting above the prairie north of us. There was nothing else in sight up there but empty prairie. My mother drew in her breath and blew it out again with a little laugh, and said the words that showed us how such a departure should be taken. “Well,” she said, “better luck next time!”

  EPILOGUE: FALSE-FRONT A THENS

  She looked across the silent fields to the West. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska; a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.

  SINCLAIR LEWIS, Main Street

  Once nostalgia has been stirred and placated by the sight of old places and the corroboration of the ineradicable images, I have no personal excuse for extending my return to Whitemud. But I do extend it for several days, reading old files of the Leader and talking with Corky Jones and going back and forth through the town to see what, in its less than fifty years, it has become. Has it anything, by now, that would recommend it as a human habitat? The question ought to be answered without the scorn of a city intellectual or the angry defensiveness of a native son; and it is not easy.

  From one point of view Whitemud is an object lesson in the naivete of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to a country rut, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village—in Clarence King’s phrase, the pilgrimage from savagery through barbarism to vulgarity. That curve is possible anywhere in America, but nearly inevitable on the Plains, because on the Plains the iron inflexibilities of low rainfall, short growing season, monotonous landscape, and wide extremes of temperature limit the number of people who can settle and the prosperity and contentment of the ones who manage to stick.

  The drouth of the 1930’s suggested not only that a large part of the semi-arid Plains country was over-populated, but that those who continue to live there are probably doomed to a lower standard of living than most parts of the country enjoy. And there are corollaries of a non-economic kind. Whitemud, a generation past its pioneering stage, demonstrates all over again how much of amenity and the refined intelligence is lost when civilized men are transplanted to a wilderness. It raises the question, unthinkable to pioneers but common enough among their expatriate sons, whether any Whitemud can hope to develop to a state of civilization as high as that which some of its founders abandoned—whether those pioneers who were educated men did not give up a heritage of some richness to become part of a backwater peasantry incapable of the feeblest cultural aspiration. If the answer to that question is yes, if generations of children are to grow up without architecture, art, theater, dance, music, or conversation, and if at the same time the charm of savagery is systematically reduced by the uglifications we call progress, then the only alternatives for the intelligent and talented young will be frustration (see The Story of a Country Town, The Damnation of Theron Ware, The Spoon River Anthology, Winesburg Ohio, Main Street, One of Ours) or escape. These are not quite the alternatives that the dream of the new world promised.

  Obviously it is unfair to demand that Whitemud demonstrate itself a rural Athens, or even a Syracuse. Few gods came along into this Latium; one of the conditions of settlement was that old gods be lost and new ones developed, appropriate to the time and place. And these are hard to discern, slow to make themselves apparent. Still, precisely because it is belated and a backwater, the Cypress Hills country tempts one into a trial balance between what was given up on the frontier and what the new town has regained or created since. Implicit in any such trial balance is the testing of what was once an American faith: that a new society striking boldly off from the old would first give up everything but axe and gun and then, as the pioneering hardships were survived, would begin to shape itself in new forms. Prosperity would follow in due course. A native character would begin to emerge, a character more self-reliant and more naturally noble than any that could be formed in tired and corrupt Europe, and new institutions would spring from the new social compact among free and classless men. After an appropriate interval this society ought to find its voice in unmistakably native arts.

  What came? A whole baggage of habits, customs, tendencies, leanings, memories, political and religious affiliations, codes of conduct, educational practices. Pioneers always try to use the past as a template by which to cut the future. The most viable imports, because the commonest, were associated with democratic-cooperative politics, the English language, and Prot estantism, but there were other elements in the mixture, and by no means all of the English-democratic-Protestant baggage survived.

  In my years there, Whitemud had one Jewish family, one Syrian family, one Greek Orthodox bachelor, and two Chinese, who could have been Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist without its making the slightest difference. For the isolates there were only two alternatives: join or be excluded. And joining, which would have had to be both religious and social, was not always practicable. The Jews, the Greek, and the two Chinese stuck to their own traditions and were never really a part of the town. On the contrary the Syrians, despite a glutinous Middle-Eastern accent, were actively and completely a part of it because they sent their children to the United Presbyterian Sunday School, and their children, who were lively, bright, and about nine in number, made the transition for them.

  Other religious divisions made no transitions, but maintained their separateness. The Anglicans were a faintly superior group of exclusives, especially after they had a church built for them as a war memorial by the Girls Friendly Society of Huntley, diocese of Chichester, Sussex. The Catholics, who had inaugurated Christianity in the area through the labors of Father Lestanc, limped along for seven years having Mass celebrated in the Pastime Theater by a visiting priest from Dollard, until in 1921, after we left Whitemud, they got a parish church and a resident priest of their own. The United Church, following the amiably non-sectarian precedent established by the two camping seminarians in 1914, served a collection of Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Dutch Reformeds, and others who, like the Syrians, were not denominationally choosy. Religiously, Whitemud became the counterpart of ten thousand little American and Canadian towns. Of all the habits and customs imported, its religious traditions were least modified by the frontier.

  In other ways, too, it tried to tie itself to the forms of what it had left behind, and to bend immigrants from other cultures to those patterns. Within two months of the first meeting of the Village Council, a group was agitating for the formation of a Masonic Lodge, and within two years they had it. Nine years later they let the ladies in by getting a charter for a chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. In 1917 the all-seeing eye of the I.O.O.F. began looking up Main Street from the false front of Chris
tenson’s pool hall, which had once housed the school.

  The school itself, though it had to make early concessions as to quarters, was from the beginning a stabilizing and traditional element in the town’s life. From the loft above the pool hall it moved briefly to a shop next to Jakey Klein’s butcher shop. Though the official town history, compiled for the 1955 Jubilee, does not mention that stage in the school’s development, I know it existed. That was where I. first saw colored crayons and plasticine, where I embroidered on a pre-stamped, pre-punched card a gorgeous yarn maple leaf, and where I fell in love for the first time—with a girl whom I later cruelly jilted because some of my friends pointed out she was bowlegged. The butcher-shop temple of learning must have been a very temporary makeshift, for in 1915 the town built the first two rooms of a new brick school, and in 1917 finished two more. There we spent the hours from eight to four, five days a week, ten months a year. The classrooms tied us to the past, the school yard to the present and future.

  If my memory is reliable at all, the teachers were at least average, and made up in enthusiasm and dedication whatever they may have lacked in training. In particular I remember Miss Birch, a delicate, rather pretty girl who always shrank from me a little after I put my dirty bare hoof on her desk to show her where I had shot myself through the toe. Also Miss Mitchell, a city slicker from Kingston, Ontario, for whom I nourished a sullen, implacable hatred because she once made me stand from recess to noon bent over the water fountain. The object was to cure me of stopping for a drink after the bell. It cured me. But Miss Mitchell got hers. In the flu epidemic, when she was in bed in her old schoolroom, one of the volunteer nurses found a quart of bootlegged rye whiskey between her knees. Over in the first-and-second-grade room where I was lying at death’s door with deliriums and nosebleeds and a fever of a hundred and four, I heard that story as it spread, and I swear it made me well.

  I remember also Mr. McGregor, a young and active principal whom we liked as universally as we disliked Miss Mitchell, probably because for the first time in our experience he was a male in the schoolroom. And his maleness was real. He was a mighty swimmer and ball player, a great hand at a frolic or masquerade, a promoter of town entertainments, and a firm but not harsh judge of schoolboy delinquencies. God rest him, where-ever he is. I do not recall his intellectual attainments, but I know he praised mine, and so I must think he was a good teacher.

  Our curriculum was out of joint with our life, but it did tie us into Western civilization; if it told us little about who we were, it taught us something of who we had been. Along with the arithmetic, reading, writing, geography, and history that had all been made for other children in another world, we got a heavy steeping in the growth-and-progress gospels that were peculiarly our own. The success story, however dubious it may look later, is the inevitable literature, because it is the unquestioned faith, of a frontier. And if part of our education was indoctrinating us with assumptions that we would shortly have to unlearn, that was of the very essence of the frontier experience. As I snoop around my old town I do not find evidence that the urge toward success has been chastened since my time. I hear a good deal about people I grew up with, and most of it concerns how they married an American millionaire, or made it big as a geologist for Standard Oil, or tour the country every year giving piano recitals, or have become contractors in Calgary, bankers in Victoria, newspaper publishers in Regina, teachers or doctors or executives somewhere else. It even seems that in the town’s own terms the children of Whitemud have had more than their share of honors and success. But always somewhere else. Instead of developing as a land of opportunity, Whitemud has become an exporter of manpower to the places where real opportunity exists.

  I find myself ruminating on the kind of manpower it has been able to export, the kind of people that the children I knew might have grown into. Frontiers, like wars, are said to break down established civilizing restraints and to encourage demoralization. They are also sometimes said to engender in people, by freeing them from artificial restraints and throwing them into contact with clean nature, a generosity, openness, independence, and courage unknown to the over-civilized. We were all sensuous little savages. Was that good or bad for us in the long run? Did it encourage depravity or promote natural goodness?

  According to Leslie Fiedler, “There is a sense, disquieting to good Montanans, in which Montana is the product of European literature.” So there is; some of what Whitemud was, and some of the image I learned to have of myself, derived from words spoken and attitudes struck by romantic philosophers and poets. But I doubt that the fact is as disquieting to good Montanans as Mr. Fiedler thinks, nor to good Saskatchewanians either, who are the same breed, only more backward. Like all westerners, they are prone to glorify the pioneer time (after all, what other history and what other mythic figures are so intimately theirs?) and to applaud in themselves the perhaps phantasmal echoes of Noble Savagery. It has its ridiculous aspects when Frontier Days come around and the boys start growing beards. But it also has its salutary aspects, in that it provides models of conduct that may be limited but are never ignoble. It likewise may give a child a faith in life by teaching him what it means to be a healthy animal. Finally, I doubt that self-deception is as widespread in Montana or the West at large as Mr. Fiedler thinks it is, or natural goodness (western brand) so universally assumed. I think none of the people I grew up with would deny that a snake grew in the pioneer garden, and found it as much to his liking as any Noble Savage ever did. As frontier children, we demonstrated just about as much natural goodness as would balance our old Adam.

  On one side we were junior Boones and Bumppos, self-reliant individualists with nothing between us and the lightnings except our own unparted hair. We swam without lifeguards, hiked without scoutmasters, carried deadly weapons before we had reached the age of discretion, came and went as we pleased except when school kept us hobbled. On the other hand we had mothers, most of us, who became all the more aware of the proprieties as the proprieties suffered slippage; and we were Sunday Schooled, reproved, jawed, and licked almost as much as if we had grown up in Eton jackets. Altogether, it amounted to a stand-off.

  Only one of my Whitemud generation, so far as I know, grew up corrupt or criminal, but his example must be accounted for. He was the Town Bull of our later years in the village. Some years after we left, he took a girl to an abandoned shack in the hills and kept her there three days, feeding her Spanish fly. She died and he went to jail, and there were many, I am sure, who ran back over T.B.’s career and said I told you so, he was a bad one all the way. And yet not unrecognizably different from the rest of us. I knew that shack, for I had raided it with my gang once or twice, had once helped steal a .44 pistol and some dynamite caps from it, and had once tried to burn it down just for the hell of it. We were not well-bred young gentlemen, and not all our young ladies were ladies. All of us were guilty of juvenile thefts; in the face of our envious wants and lacks no property was really safe. Likewise we grew up killing things, and that might have matured in violence. The boys (I was one) who hunted down every stray cat and shot it for its fifty-cent hide could have come to any of several bad ends. As for the ugly sort of crime that T.B. committed, it might have been expected of more of us. Our sexual environment was a combination of conventional prudery and barnyard freedom. Perhaps our infantile sexual investigations did not differ much from those that go on in any rural and unchaperoned place, but we were more unchaperoned than most. No boy was a man if he did not indulge in backhouse pornography, we had our show parties in haylofts, gang diddling of complaisant little girls happened now and then, and at least once a group of us witnessed a public exhibition of brother-sister incest.

  All this is sufficiently barbarous or natural, depending on the point of view. But it is important that it went on in conjunction with an official adult prudery to which we all tacitly subscribed. Psychiatrists would call it most unhealthy. Sometimes I wonder if it was as unhealthy as it is supposed to be. Rand
om historical investigations will not tell us how many of my Whitemud companions have been driven to repent their hypocritical upbringing on the couch, but I would guess very few. For one thing, even if we had been warped by the lack of frankness in our sexual education, going to a psychiatrist about it would strike most of us, I imagine, as both crybabyish and mouthy. We discussed sexual matters frankly enough, and with frank sniggers, when we got the chance; but on the subject of our personal hurts our morality told us to be as taciturn as stones.

  It was not only Pop Martin, with his attempt to create a gentleman’s seat in the Whitemud Valley, who lost everything he brought in. Conventions also suffered decay and disintegration in our backwoods community. And the amenities suffered even worse than the conventions. In particular, the educated and the English, who were often but not invariably synonymous, found that it was impossible to keep alive on the frontier the things that made life agreeable. Many made the most strenuous efforts to naturalize their old life on new soil, but a great deal of what they transplanted has died, and some of the survivals are surprising.

  Tennis, for example. A group of English found that the silty clay of the bottoms made a smooth firm surface. They scraped and leveled a court, erected backstops, bought rackets, balls, and net by mail order, and one morning sallied out in their flannels, ignoring the ill-bred snickering of the village. They formed a club, held a tournament every Victoria Day, had club matches with Gull Lake, Shaunavon, Swift Current, and Maple Creek. But soon some of them went off to the war, and others drifted away, and tennis waned. It was a game for die-hards. In its whole history in Whitemud it does not seem to have been learned by a single Whitemud child, or played by a single adult who had not learned it elsewhere. Simply, it did not take. And what happened to the tennis crowd happened in identical terms to the golfers who used to knock balls around the sports ground. I look carefully, but I see not a sign of either golf or tennis now; when I inquire, I find that no one has attempted to revive them for years.