Dancing at the Rascal Fair

  The sheep began to raise their heads from the hay, nosing the air.

  “They hear it, too.”

  “Listen. Isn’t it getting louder?”

  Off came our flap caps, not just for keener listening but because the air strangely no longer seemed chilly. In minutes the great flowing sound was dispensing itself down from the peaks and crags as a sudden stiff breeze, but a breeze warm all through. A day that had been firmly fifteen degrees below zero began to feel tropical. As we finished the pitchfork work we had to shed our scarves, then our coats. Not until Rob and I talked with Ninian a few days later, the snow already gone from every south slope and elsewhere retreating down into its deep coulee drifts, did we learn the word of that miracle wind, which was chinook. But driving the haysled home from the sheep on that chinook day, our gloves next off, the two of us kept flexing our pale winter hands, one and then the other as if shedding old skin, in that astonishing blowing air of springtime.

  • • •

  In the after years, Rob always made the jest that the winter with me was what caused him to marry Judith Findlater.

  “Your cooking, of course I mean to say, Angus. Every recipe you knew was elk, do you remember. Judith brought one of her mince pies to a dance and I was a gone gosling.”

  I laughed ritually each time, but what Lucas had forecast about Rob’s route into marriage always tinged the moment. For I did see it come, Judith’s quiet sorting of us during her husband-looking winter—me too wary and waitful, George Frew so gawkishly silent, Allan Frew too irresponsible, Tom Mortensen too old and bachelorly, but Rob bright and winnable, Rob always pleased to find himself reflected back in someone’s attention. When Archie Find-later came that March to ask Rob for a few days’ skilled help in building lambing pens, work which anybody who could fit fingers around a hammer could do, and mentioned “Take your meals with us too, why not, and save yourself the ride back and forth,” he may as well have brought Judith and the marriage license with him.

  The wedding, in almost-warm-enough weather you could step into blindfolded and know it was May in Montana, was in Rob’s front yard. All of Scotch Heaven assembled there under the crest of Breed Butte for the valley’s first matrimony, and as best man I had the closest look of anyone except the minister at how Rob and Judith gleamed for each other. He was newly dismustached and his smile seemed all the fresher. Judith already looked wifely, quietly natural beside Rob. He’d teased her beforehand that when the major question came he was going to respond, “Can I toss a coin to decide that?” But when the moment arrived, Rob spoke out “I do” as if telling it to generations before and aft.

  Afterward we ate and danced and talked and danced and drank and danced. As evening came on, before heading home I got Rob and Judith aside to congratulate them one last time.

  “For people who just got married beyond redemption, you both look happy enough about it,” I assessed for their benefit.

  “You’re the best best man there could be,” Judith nicely assured me and rose on tiptoes to kiss my cheek while Rob warned merrily, “Not too much of that, now.”

  Riding toward home with the bunch from the wedding, I took full notice that the May dusk was telling us the lengthened days of summer were truly on their way, but otherwise I heard with only half an ear the jokes and chat that were being passed around. Until silent George Frew and I swung off together on the trail to our homesteads. Then George, who was sloshing a bit with the amount of wedding drink in him, jerked his head back toward Breed Butte and blurted: “They’re at it now.”

  No doubt Rob and Judith were. I’d have been, in Rob’s place. But George’s whiskeyed words set off something in me. I rode home thinking over whether I ought to have made the maneuvers—maybe I flattered myself, but I believed it would not have taken any too many—that would have put me in Rob’s place. And decided again, no. The same voice in me that said all winter about Judith, not yet, not this one, was saying even stronger now, wait, let time tell. Oh, I knew that all you can count on in life is your fingers and toes, but I was determined to do marriage as right as I could when I did it at all. Did I have an enlarged sense of carefulness, where weddings were concerned? Maybe, but I felt it had grown naturally in me. My parents’ case, a marriage locked in ice whenever it wasn’t shaking with thunder, was not anything I intended to repeat. No, there had to be better than that. And the matrimonial exchange I had just witnessed on Breed Butte: Judith bagging a husband, Rob pocketing a wife. I hated even to think it of two people I so prized, but there had to be better than that, too. A high idea, maybe, but the North Fork valley around me and the strong mountains over me seemed the place for such a thought. If better could not be done here, on new land on a new continent, myself a new version of a McCaskill—the American version—where could it ever be done?

  • • •

  Say you are a stone that blinks once a year, when the sun of spring draws the last of winter from you. In the wink that is 1891, you see nine houses in the valley of the North Fork where there had been but those two of the Duff and Erskine homesteads. You note the retreat of timber on Wolf Butte where Rob and myself and Archie Findlater and Jesse Spedderson and old Tom Mortensen and the Frew cousins George and Allan sawed lodgepole pines to build those houses. You notice lines of new fence encasing each of Scotch Heaven’s homesteads, straight and taut as mesh. You see Vinia Spedderson’s laundry flying from a hayrack, to the disgust of the other wives. You see the Erskine boy Davie riding his pony along the creek as if in a race with the breeze-blown hay.

  Your next glimpse, 1892, shows you newborn Ellen, the first of Rob and Judith’s girls. You see slow-grazing scatters of gray which are the sheep of one or another of us, maybe mine and Rob’s working the grassy foothills west of my homestead, maybe the new band belonging to Rob and Lucas there on the slope of Breed Butte. (Were not stones famously deaf, you would have heard Rob try to the end to persuade me to come in with him and Lucas on that second thousand of sheep, Angus, you’re thinking small instead of tall, I’m disappointed in you, man; and from me, to whom deeper debt did not look like the kind of prosperity I wanted, Rob, if this is the first time or the last I disappoint you, you’re lucky indeed.) You see rain booming on the roofs in the rare two-day May downpour that brought the North Fork twice the crop of hay any of us had expected or imagined. You behold Ninian Duff coming home from town with a bucket of calcimine, and you watch as every Scotch Heaven household, mine included, quickly whitens a wall here or there.

  And now in your third blink, 1893, you notice an occasional frown as we lords of sheep hear how the prices are beginning to drop in the distant wool and lamb markets. You see my life as it was for the rest of that year, achieveful yet hectic as all homestead years seemed to be, tasks hurrying at each other’s heels: turn out the last bunch of ewes and their fresh lambs onto new pasture and the garden needs to be put in; do that, and fence needs mending; mend that, and it is shearing time; shear the beloved woollies, and it is haying time. You see me look up, somewhere amid it all, to a buck-board arriving, drawn by Ninian Duff’s team of matched bay horses.

  On the seat beside Ninian perched Willy Hahn. School board business, this could only be.

  Ninian pulled his bays to a halt and announced down to me: “News, Angus. We’ve lost our teacher. George Frew is marrying her.” With the school year so close on us, Ninian was saying what was in our three minds in the last of his pronouncement: “Maybe she can teach him to speak up sooner.”

  “So we’ve a fast advertisement to write, have we?” I responded. “Come down and come in, I’ll—”

  Ninian interrupted, “In point of fact, Willy and I already have located a replacement teacher. Haven’t we now, Willy?” Willy dipped his head yes. “More than that even,” Ninian swept on, “we’ve voted to hire.” Willy dipped again.

  I was peeved to hear this. By damn, I was more than that. These two old puffed-up whiskerheads. “Well, then. Since the pair of you are running the school board so aptly w
ithout me, we haven’t anything more to talk about, now have we. Don’t let me keep you here, busy persons like yourselves.”

  Ninian winked solemnly to Willy. “The man doesn’t see it.”

  “What’s to see?” I blazed. “You two parade in here and—”

  “Anguss,” Willy put in mildly. “It iss you we voted to hire.”

  • • •

  Ordain me here and now as the Lord High Kafoozalum and I would be no more surprised than I was to be made the South Fork schoolteacher. Not that there was ever any supposition I was the pedagogical genius the world had been seeking since Jesus went upstairs; after all, back there in Nethermuir I had only ever been the pupil-teacher assisting Adam Willox, never the actual master of a schoolroom. What designated me now, as Willy and Ninian cheerfully made plain, was that time was short and I was nearest.

  “Temporary, just for the year,” Ninian assured me as if school-teaching could be done with my little finger.

  “Can’t Flora fill the situation as well as I can?” I astutely retorted to him, citing the only other person in the vicinity who had experience at standing at the front of a classroom. Willy tittered, cast a glance toward Ninian on the wagon seat beside him, then looked down at me severely. Which caused me to remember that Flora Duff was currently a prominent six months in the family way.

  Ninian and Willy proceeded to argue qualm after qualm out of me. Yes, they would see to it that I had help with my homestead tasks as needed. Yes yes, they would put in a word with Rob about the necessity of adjusting our sheep arrangement if I took the school. Yes yes yes, they would find someone more suitable for the position next year.

  “There is of course the matter of the teacher’s wage,” Ninian at last found around to, and there he met me coming, I do have to admit. That year of 1893 was the sour kind that we hadn’t known was in the calendar of America. Prices of wool and lambs both were falling through the floor while I still was trying to climb out of Lucas’s wallet. And be it said if it needs to, no homesteader was ever his own best paymaster. Besides, I had come across the bend of the world looking for a different life, had I? The one thing certain about a year as the South Fork teacher was that it would be different.

  “All right, then,” I acquiesced to my electors. “If you haven’t come to your senses in the last minute, I’m your schoolkeeper for this year.”

  “Anguss, you are chust the man,” Willy ratified, and I swear Ninian very nearly smiled at me.

  • • •

  That first South Fork morning. The Hahn brothers were the earliest to trudge down the road toward the waitful school and waitful me, dragging with them the invisible Gibraltar of burden of having a father on the school board. The children from the other families of that branch of the creek as well, the Petersons and Roziers and Van Bebbers, all lived near enough to walk to school and soon they were ricocheting around outside in those double-quick games that erupt before the class day takes everyone captive. I turned from the window for one last inventory of my schoolroom. Desk rows across the room. Blackboard and a roll-down map of the world fastened above. Framed portraits of Washington and Lincoln, men whose lives I knew only the vaguest of, staring stoically at each other on the far wall. I hammered days of nails when this schoolhouse was built, I came here many a time with Ninian and Willy to tend to our teacher, I had danced on this schoolroom’s floor, mended its roof. Yet I tell you, it was a place foreign to my eyes as I waited for the minute when it would fill with pupils. My pupils.

  For the dozenth time I looked at the alarm clock ticking on my solitary desk at the front of the schoolroom. This time it told me I had to ring the bell to begin school, even though a significant half of my pupil population hadn’t yet appeared.

  Ring I did.

  In trooped the South Fork boys and girls.

  I hemmed and hawed and had them take temporary seats until the others arrived.

  But still no others.

  Accident? Boycott? Jest of the gods? Possibilities trotted around in me until I needed to do what I had been resisting, retreat out onto the porch and peer up the North Fork road. With me went the echo of Lucas’s reaction to my new and quite possibly stillborn career: By Jesus, Angus, you’re the first swamper the Medicine Lodge ever had that’s turned out to be a schoolmarm. Maybe I was in over my head, trying to be schoolkeeper as well as homesteader as well as sheep partner with Rob. Maybe . . .

  Here they came, the child cavalry of Scotch Heaven. The three Findlaters on a fat white horse named Snowy. Susan Duff regal on one of Ninian’s blood bay geldings. Jimmy Spedderson on a beautiful blazeface black worth more than the rest of the Speddersons’ homestead combined. George Frew’s daughter Betsy on an elderly sorrel. Davie Erskine on his fast-stepping roan with small sister Rachel clinging behind him.

  I let out a breath of thanks. But to show them I did not intend for tardiness to become habit, I stood conspicuously waiting while they put their horses on picket ropes. Already there on a length of grazing tether was the Dantley mare Patch that I still rode, and with all our horses picketed around the schoolhouse, the scene suddenly hit me as one of life’s instants I had been through before—Rob and I gawking at the Floweree outfit’s cow camp the day we arrived green as peas into Gros Ventre. I reminded myself how greatly more veteran in life I was by now, and tried to believe it in the face of what advanced on me here, Susan Duff.

  She poised below me as if bearing a message from Caesar. “We cut through our lower field and couldn’t get the gate open and the top loop was too tight and barbwire besides,” she reported in funereal tones. “My father will need to fix that gate.” Unaccountably my spirits rose as I thought of Ninian having to deal with this daughter. “Meg Findlater’s nose is running and she doesn’t have a hanky, and Davie Erskine forgot to bring his and Rachel’s lunch.” This seemed to conclude Susan’s docket, and up the porch steps and into the schoolhouse she marched with the other Scotch Heaven children in a straggle behind her.

  I kick myself yet for not anticipating the next snag of that morning, although I am not sure what I could have done about it. My gender. In Scotland schoolmasters were thick on the ground. But here, having a man teacher proved to be an unexpected thought to pupils accustomed to Miss Milgrim. The larger boys were plainly restless about me, and I was afraid little Meg Findlater’s eyes would pop from her head every time I leaned far down to bring my handkerchief to the rescue of her nose.

  My predecessor still governessed that schoolroom in another way, too. After I had everyone sorted and seated and the littlest ones were more or less occupied with the new things called desks and books, I started on my upper grades in what I thought was peerless emulation of Socrates, “Tell me, anyone please, the presidents from Washington to Lincoln.”

  I drew back stares.

  There I stood wondering what had taken their tongues, until Susan Duff informed me that it was the practice of Miss Milgrim to tell the pupils such matters as the presidents to Lincoln, while they listened.

  “That’s as may be, Susan. But I look very little like Miss Milgrim, don’t I, and so I need to do things my own way. Now who’ll tell the presidents, Washington to Lincoln?”

  A silence deep as a corner of eternity. As the silence yawned on, my only immediate hope was Susan again. But a look at her told me she had lent me all the instruction she currently intended to.

  This tiny box of school, on the universe’s ocean. How could we in here ever hope to know enough to get by on, let alone improve the race at all? I despaired and was starting to reach for the chalk and begin listing presidents, anything to stir this congealed schoolroom, when I heard:

  “Hickory Jackson.”

  I turned, blinking. Davie Erskine was regarding me with a helpfulness that managed to be vague and earnest at the same time. I’d made mental note to share my lunch with him and his little sister Rachel; this opening effort of Davie’s resolved me to give them it all. Taking my surprise for encouragement, the boy visibly searched around
in his head some more. After a while:

  “Quincy Adams.”

  Yet another Davie spell of thought—Shakespeare could have written a couple of acts during this one—and:

  “Some other Adams.”

  I was desperately debating within myself whether to shut off this random trickle of presidents, try to suggest some order into it, or what, when Davie’s thought-seeking gaze lit on the wall portraits.

  “Abe Lincoln,” he announced to us. “George—”

  It was too much for Susan Duff. Up shot her hand. “Washington-johnadamsjefferson,” she launched, “Madisonmonroejohnquincyadams—”

  • • •

  My pupils, my minnow school of new Montana. It was like having tailor’s samples, swatches, of Scotch Heaven’s families all around you daylong. Susan Duff had bones longer than they knew what to do with themselves, in the manner of Ninian, so that her elbows stuck over the aisle the way his poked wide when he cut his meat. The Findlaters all were marvels at arithmetic. The Hahn boys had cherubic lispy voices like Willy’s, you would never suspect that one or more likely both of them had just been in a blazing fistfight during recess. Yet I always needed to watch out not to peg a child according to his parents or older brothers and sisters. Along came small Karen, of the cog-at-a-time Petersons, and she had a mind like a magic needle. It penetrated every book I managed to find for her, and of my bunch in that schoolroom Karen was the one spellbound, as I had been at her age, by those word rainbows called poems.

  And so there I stood before these sons and daughters of the homesteads, their newly minted teacher of such topics as the history of the United States of America, with my Scottish schooling which had instructed me thoroughly in the principal events from Robert the Bruce to the Union of the Crowns. My daily margin of American history over my various grades was the pages I’d scurried through the night before. Fortunately, not all the subjects were as lion-sized as history. Even in America lessons in handwriting were lessons in handwriting, and reading was reading. And spelling was spelling except when harbour arrived to this side of the ocean as harbor, tyre as tire, and sundry other joggled vowels. But geography. The grief of American geography. When it came to geography, my pupils and I had to be strange pickles together. In that schoolroom of mine were children born in Bavaria and Scotland and Norway and Alsace-Lorraine, and others who never had been farther in the world than ten miles down the creek to Gros Ventre. Our sole veteran traveler of the continent we were on was Jimmy Spedderson, seven years of age, who had lived in Missouri, Kansas, North Dakota, Manitoba, and now Montana—a life like a skipping stone. Whatever the roll-down map of the whole world proclaimed, every one of us there came from a different earth and knew only the haziest about anyone else’s. For me, terra incognita was the 99% of Montana where I had never been. I could instruct my pupils perfectly well that Thomas Carlyle—he of I don’t pretend to understand the universe; it’s a great deal bigger than I am—originated at Eccle-fechan, pronounced Eckle-FECK’n, county of Dumfries in south-most Scotland, near to Carlisle and the Solway Firth. But I had to learn along with them the sixteen counties of Montana and the mysterious town names of Ekalaka, Ubet, Saco, Missoula, Shawmut, Rimini, Ravalli, Ovando . . .