“People think we’re as alike as eggs, yes. Beth has a mind of her own, though.” Anna glanced at me. “But then I suppose there are those who would say an independent child serves me right.”
“Send me anybody who says so much as word number one against you and I’ll pound the tongue out of him for you.”
Her gaze stayed on me. “You would, too, wouldn’t you, Angus. In spite of everything, you would.”
Yes and then some. I would defend her in any arena, even the one within myself. Every instant of the next few minutes, as I helped Anna unhitch the sorrel team and situate her family’s night gear under the shelter of the wagon, and then accompanied her to the shearing pen a discreet adult distance from where Lisabeth and Peter were engrossed in watching the clipwork, it was beyond belief to me that, yet and now, this still could be so. But I felt as thundershook by love for this woman as that first giddy ride home from the Noon Creek schoolhouse when it was all I could do not to fall off the back of Scorpion. Not to fall off the planet, for that matter.
Like a dozen marionettes, the shearers made their patterned motions, stooping, clipping, rising to begin over again. The sheep, betrayed and dismayed, gave up their buttery fleeces with helpless blats. While I was there beside Anna assiduously spectating the shearing pageant, my mind was everywhere else.
I knew I had only moments in which to contrive, before she gathered Lisabeth and they marched off to the cook tent. Yet she wasn’t showing great sign of going, was she. Watching wool depart from sheep seemed the most absorbing activity either of us could imagine.
“Anna,” I finally began, then found nowhere to alight next but onto: “The times we meet up are few and far between.”
“Yes, they are. And now you’re busy here. I mustn’t take up your time, Angus.”
“No, I thoroughly wish you would.” I signaled to Davie to come up and work the cutting gate for the next batch of ewes into the catch pens. “I’ve had my fill of wool today, the crew can get along fine without me a bit.” As I said it I wondered: did she know I would be here, handy beside her road north? By now everyone in the Two country above nipple age would have heard of the McCaskill-Barclay advent of sheep onto the Blackfeet reservation. But granting that Anna knew, did she come because I would be here on her plausible route to Isaac? Or in spite of it?
I tried to test that water now. “It’s glorious to see you. But what’s Isaac going to think of you”—I didn’t want to say spending the night—“stopping over here?”
“Isaac knows me.” I questioned how thoroughly true that could be. How much any skinsack of existence ever can know of what is in another. She went on: “If it’ll relieve your conscience, he’ll at least know nothing out of order could happen with so many people around.” Yes, two of them his own—your and his—children. That was unfortunately so, my yearning told me. Yet I was aware there was something else here with us. Her tang of interest toward me. The air’s taste of about-to-happen, that I had caught so clearly during our noon hour together the time in Valier. I was every inch conscious of it again, and so was Anna. She was making every effort to say lightly: “Counting the sheep into the situation, Angus, we have chaperones by the hundred, don’t we.”
Sheep or not sheep, sentinels were going to have to get up before early to stop me from seeing this woman. The liquid fire/of strong desire. I gathered it all behind my words and asked her rapidly:
“Anna. Will you do a thing for me?”
She scrupulously kept her eyes on the wool brawl in front of us. “If I can, I will. You know that, Angus. What?”
“See the dawn with me tomorrow.”
A blue flash of eyes from her, quicker than quick, then away. I reasoned to her profile: “It’d be our one time to talk alone.”
There was that same narrow hesitation she had shown when I asked her four years before, Do you have the life you want? Now her answer:
“Yes. Show me a Two Medicine dawn.”
• • •
Rob pulled in just before suppertime, the automobile gray with mud halfway up itself like a pig that has been wallowing, Rob himself more than a little dirt-freckled as well.
“See now, McAngus,” he called out, “I’m the only land merchant who carries his real estate on his person.”
I had to grin a bit. Even when he was abominably late, the man arrived the way olden travelers might have been announced by a drum.
Rob waved a hand toward his automobile.
“Badger Creek,” he explained ruefully. “The Lizzie got stuck in the crossing and I had to troop off and find the nearest Blackfeet to pull me out. You can just about guess how involved an enterprise that turned out to be, Angus. A person might as well dicker with the creek, at least it has some motion to it. How those people manage to—” He broke off. The girl Lisabeth was stepping out of the cook tent with a kettle to fill from our milk cans of drinking water. Like the wraith of Anna stepping out of years ago.
Rob rid himself of his look of confoundment as fast as he could, then offered speculatively: “Company, have we. I thought Isaac was somewhere north, contracting roads or some such.”
“He is,” I affirmed.
Rob scanned around until he found the Reese wagon, plainly parked for the night, and for once seemed not to know what to say. Which of course did not stop him from coming out with: “A girl that age isn’t kiting around the country by herself, I hope.”
“No,” I solemnly assured him.
He gave me a close look that had me on the verge of answering him by hand. By the holy, how did this man think he was the clerk in charge of my life?
“Angus,” he began, “I don’t savvy what in the hell—” and I didn’t want to hear the rest.
“Her brother is with her, Rob. And her mother. She’s thoroughly chaperoned,” as if I still meant Lisabeth, although we both knew that I meant Anna. I enlightened him about their journey onward to Isaac in the morning, and he unruffled considerably. But couldn’t help adding:
“It’s just a bit odd to have overnight guests in a shearing camp, is all I meant.”
“Don’t worry about your reputation, Rob,” I gave him. “I’ll vouch for you.”
He cocked his head and ajudged, “You’re a trifle touchy, McAngus,” which I thought made two of us by that description. “Well, I’d better wash this Blackfeet real estate off me. Supper guests and all that, a person needs to keep up his appearance, doesn’t he?”
• • •
Steel on grindstone and whetstone, the keen-edged chorus of the shearers sharpening for the day. A wisp of wind, the grass nodding to it.
I leaned over into the corral where the sheep had been wrangled up against the chute mouth by Davie and the shearing crew’s choreboy, and felt the wool on three or four ewes’ backs for dew. Dry enough to shear, now that the sun had been up for a few hours.
But before beginning the shearing day I cast a look to all the directions, lingering on north and the road to Browning that had taken a wagon with bright yellow wheels and a team of sorrel horses from sight a bit ago. The morning was bright as yesterday and so was I.
“Prrrrr, Percy, you’re ready to bring them through, are you? Let’s start making wool, Percy, what do you say.”
The bellwether blinked idly at me in reproach and stayed where he stood in the mouth of the chute. Well, he was right. I needed to live up to my end of the proposition if I expected him to enter into his, didn’t I. Life has its rules of bargaining.
“Here you are, Percy, half a brown cracker. Prrrrr, Percy, come get the rest here at the cutting gate. Prrrrr, sheep, follow Percy, that’s the way. Everybody into the chute, prrrrr, prrrrr.”
All the while that I was shunting sheep from the chute into the shearers’ catch pens, all the while that the crew was taking their places and beginning the snipwork of taking the fleeces off the ewes, all the while I was not truly seeing any of it, but the scene at dawn instead. The barest beginning of light in the east, and Anna materializing from the d
irection of the shearing camp and joining me under the brow of the ridge, out of sight to all but each other. Anna, you need to see this with me, that vow from another June morning, the first time I saw this green high bluff above the Two Medicine River, the precipice of the buffalo cliff, the prairie heaven of grass emerging from the sky’s blue-and-silver one. Then as the warming colors of morning came, our words back and forth, my hope and her ver—
I felt the hand drop onto my shoulder just as I finished filling the catch pens. The clamping touch alone told me this was Rob, back from his start-of-day chore of spreading yesterday’s shorn sheep along the slope of the ridge to graze. I glanced around at him inquisitively, for I’d assumed he would be taking his place behind the sheep to help Davie with the wrangling.
The face on Rob Barclay was thunderous. He grated out: “What in Christ’s name is it between you and her, man? Out there this morning, like a couple of slinking collie dogs.”
Again, was this. Rob patrolling my life again, Rob the warden of my marriage again. And again no more able than ever to understand the situation between Adair and me, and therefore Anna and me.
“Put it in the poorbox, Rob,” I told him flatly.
But plainly he didn’t intend to be dissuaded from giving me what was on his mind. He persisted: “You’re not answering—”
“Oh, but I am. I’m telling you what I told you before, Anna isn’t a topic of discussion between us. So just save yourself the trouble of trying, all right?” Save us both it. The two of us had been through this backwards and forward, after Valier. That outbreak of in-law from you was more than enough, Rob. Neither of us had one damn least iota of a thing to gain by—“Neither of us has a thing to gain by getting into this again,” I kept to. “You know my opinion by heart, and yours is stamped all over you.”
“You’d like the trouble saved, all right, wouldn’t you. Well, not this time. You’re going to hear me on this, goddamn it.” Beyond Rob I saw that Davie was watching us wide-eyed, Rob’s words loud enough to carry anger above the sounds of sheep and shearing.
“Then it better be away from here,” I informed Rob, and I went off enough distance from the chute and corral, him after me.
We faced each other again. Still determined to carry me by the ears, Rob began: “You just won’t make yourself stay away from her, will you. Even after that last talking-to I gave you—”
“Try giving me a leaving-alone, why not,” I answered. “Anna and I are still none of your business, Adair and I are still none of your business, and climbing out of your bed this morning to spy on me was none of your business either, Rob.” Oh, I had known even while it was happening that Anna and I were seen. But not by these Barclay gray eyes that were auguring into me now. No, it was when Anna returned first from our dawn, went to the wagon and had a look at her sleeping children, and then headed on toward the cook tent to begin helping toward breakfast; and I meanwhile came up over the ridge from a deliberately different direction. Beneath the wagon, Lisabeth’s head suddenly was up out of the bedroll. She watched her mother go. Then she turned enough to watch me come. Across that distance, I knew she knew. The steady attitude of her head, the gauging way she looked at us both, and then conclusion. That lovely young face in its frame of black hair, like a portrait of Anna gazing from the past, seemed to have seen through the ridge to where her mother and I were together. And there was no explaining I could do to the girl. It was a situation I would make worse if I so much as tried to touch it; Anna would have to be the one to handle it if Lisabeth brought out the question. The truth would have to handle it. The truth, Lisabeth, that I had asked your mother: Anna, when Lisabeth and Peter and Varick are grown and gone . . . if Adair takes herself back to Scotland then . . . if and when, Anna, is there the chance then of our lives fitting together? Of you answering my love with yours, if and when? And her, Angus, you know how I am. Beyond anyone else, really, you grasp the kind of person I am. So you know all too well, I can only decide as far as I see a situation. The judging hesitation, the click as she gauged. But I can’t see ahead to forever, can I. Whether Isaac is there in my life, after the children go—or whether . . . Her eyes honestly telling me the same as her words. I’m sorry the words aren’t any better than they were, those years ago. You more than deserve better ones from me. But they’re the same, Angus. If I ever see that Isaac and I have become wrong together, I’ll know in the next minute to turn to you. Again and yet and still: Isaac was not lastingly innocent of the hazard of losing Anna: I was not irredeemably guilty of loving her hopelessly. Not Proven, the verdict one more time. Well, we had life ahead yet to see if proof would come, didn’t we. I had lost no ground since our meeting in Valier, I could stay on the compass setting Adair and I had agreed to, getting on in life as best we could for Varick’s sake, hers, mine, ours.
“You’ve utterly got to stop this infatuation of yours,” Rob was delivering urgently to me now. “It was one thing when you were just mooning around like a sick calf over her. But this is the worst yet. Meeting her out there to go at it in the grass.”
I stared at Rob as if some malicious stranger had put his face on. Go at it in the grass? On the one hand, this slander was the worst thing that had come out of him yet today, which was saying a lot. On the other hand, the random stab of what he had just said showed that at least he hadn’t slunk out after us this morning close enough to count our pores. All during our meeting of dawn, Anna and I had not so much as touched. We knew we didn’t dare. Starved as I was for her—and I recognized, from another morning, long ago, that she was more than a little hungry for me—we didn’t appease those cravings. Anna was still Isaac’s, I was still Adair’s; until those facts managed to change, we did not dare make the remembered touches we wanted to on each other’s body, for families and lives would tumble with us.
“Rob,” I uttered flat and hard. “You’re going way too far.”
“Somebody finally has to tell you what a lovesick sap you’re looking at in the mirror every morning,” he retaliated. “Adair has been too easy on you, all these years.”
“Who made you the world’s expert on Dair and me?” I burst out. “Man, just what is it you want from the two of us—doves and honey every blessed minute? She and I have what life together we can manage to. And we have Varick. Those are worth whatever Dair and I have cost each other.”
The Barclay face bright with anger wasn’t changed by my words. I took a last try.
“Rob. Will you just remember that your sister and I are a pair in life you devised yourself. Dair and I knew from early that we weren’t perfect for each other, and it’s damn far past time for you to accept that fact, too.”
“I’m not accepting that you can sniff off after her”—he jerked his head north toward Anna’s route to Isaac—“whenever you get the least little chance. Angus, how is it you can’t see that when you’re the way you are about Anna, you’re only half a husband to Adair. And that’s not enough.”
“ANGUS AND ROB!” Davie had limped halfway our direction to call out worriedly to us. “The shearers are hollering for more sheep.”
I gave Davie a wave of reply. And then I answered Rob, one last time. “It’ll have to be enough. It’s as good as I can ever do.”
Rob shook his head stonily, at me, at my answer, at the existence of Anna. Each of us had said our all, and we hadn’t changed each other a hair. That was that, then. I turned from him to go to the shearing pens, but had to let him know this useless argument couldn’t go on perpetually.
“Rob, don’t ever give me any more guff about something that’s none of your business, all right?”
Behind me, his tone was tighter than ever. “I’m telling you this. I’ll give you more than guff if you don’t get her out of yourself.”
• • •
For the rest of the shearing, speaking terms between us were short and narrow. When Rob announced, as soon as we were done loading the woolsacks for hauling to the depot at Browning, that he’d like to get on back t
o Breed Butte immediately, I nodded and silently applauded. The three or so days before I finished the wool-hauling and made my ride back to Scotch Heaven would give us both some time to wane from the argument about Anna. I just wondered what year it would be on the calendar when Rob Barclay decided he had to get huffy in a major way again.
• • •
The third day later, I was atop the divide between Noon Creek and the North Fork when I decided to veer past the ranger station on my way to home and Adair. There was no telling how soon I’d see Varick if I didn’t snatch this chance to drop in on him at his summer employ, and I much wanted him to hear the news that as far as our Two Medicine sheep and shearing was concerned, the world was wagging its tail at us.
When I rode over the crest into sight of the ranger station, I was double glad I’d come by. Varick was out behind the building boiling fire camp utensils in a huge tub of lye water, a snotty job if there ever was one, and good news would sound even better amid that.
By the holy, I swear the son I was seeing ahead of me had put another inch on himself during the week and a half I’d been at the Two Medicine. Growing so fast his shadow couldn’t keep up with him.
Varick’s fire under the lye tub was crackling crisply—odd to hear, this warm almost-July afternoon—and he was judiciously depositing into the boiling murky water a series of camp pots as black as tar buckets. I got down from Scorpion and went over to him. With a grin I said, “When the Forest Service washes dishes, it really means it, ay?”
My tall son stayed intently busy with his lye cauldron until all the pots were drowned, then turned around to me. And delivered:
“You and Mrs. Reese. Is that true?”
The inside of me fell to my shoetops.
Varick’s face showed all the strain behind the asking, all the confoundment of a fifteen-year-old not wanting to believe the world was askew. I made myself look back at him steadily before I said: “I suppose that depends on what you’ve heard.”
“What I hear is that you and her get together any chance you can. Out in the grass along the Two Medicine, say.”