English Creek

  I waited out the clock because I had to. It at last came up on the noon hour. The time to do it.

  Out the kitchen door I went, sprinting to the ranger station. Just before coming around to its front, I geared myself down to what I hoped was my usual walking pace.

  Chet was tipped back in a chair in the shade of the porch while he ate his lunch, as I’d counted on. Dispatchers are somewhat like gophers: they’re holed up indoors so much they pop out into the air at any least chance.

  “Hey there, Jick,” I was greeted by Chet as I sauntered onto the porch. “What’s up? It’s too blasted hot to move if you don’t have to.”

  “I came to see if it’s okay if I use the town line. I forgot to tell Mom something and I want to leave word for her at the Lunchery.”

  “Sure thing. Nothing’s going on right now, you can help yourself. You should’ve just rung me, Jick. I’d have gone in and switched it for you.” Uh huh, and more than likely have stayed on and listened, as was a dispatcher’s habit. Rubbering was something that worked both directions.

  “No, that’s okay, I didn’t want to bother you. I won’t need the line long.” In I went to the switchboard and moved the toggle switch that connected the ranger station to the community telephone line.

  “When you’re done,” Chet said as I headed off the porch past him, “just ding the dealybob and I’ll switch things back to our line.”

  “Right. Thanks, Chet. Like I say, I won’t be long.” I moseyed around the corner of the station out of Chet’s sight, then sped like hell back to our house.

  Facing the phone, I sucked in all the breath I could, to crowd out my puffing and my nervousness about all that was riding on this idea of mine. Then I lifted the receiver, rang central in Gros Ventre, and asked to be put through to the Double W.

  Onto the line came a woman’s voice: “Hello?”

  Perfect again: Meredice Williamson. I hadn’t been sure what I was going to resort to if Wendell answered.

  “ ’Lo, Mrs. Williamson. Can I—may I speak to Alec McCaskill in the bunkhouse, please? That is, would you ask him to go to the phone out at the bunkhouse? This is, uh, personal.”

  Down the line came the silence of Meredice Williamson pondering her way through the etiquette of yet another Two country situation. Maybe I would have been better off with Wendell’s straightforward bluster. At last she queried: “Who is this, please?”

  “This is Alec’s brother Jick. I put Blanche and Fisheye in your barn that time, remember? And I’m sorry to call but I just really need to talk to—”

  “Oh yes. Jack. I remember you well. But you see, Alec and the other men are at lunch—”

  “Yeah, I figured that, that’s why I’m calling right now.”

  “Could I have him return your call afterward?”

  “No, that’d be too late. I need to talk to him now, it’s just that it’s, like I said, private. Family. A family situation has come up. Arisen.”

  “I see. I do hope it’s nothing serious?”

  “It could get that way if I don’t talk to Alec. Mrs. Williamson, look, I can’t explain all this. But I’ve got to talk to Alec, while he’s alone. Without the whole damn—without everybody listening in.”

  “I see. Yes. I think I see. Will you hold on, Jack?” As if from a great distance, I heard her say: “Alec, you’re wanted on the phone. I wonder if it might be more convenient for you to answer it in the bunkhouse?”

  Now a dead stretch of time. But my mind was going like a million. All of the summer to this minute was crowded into me. From that suppertime when Alec stomped out with Leona in tow, through all the days of my brother going his stubborn way and my parents going their stubborn one, through my times of wondering how this had come to be, how we McCaskills had so tangled our family situation, to now, when I saw just how to unknot it all. At last it was coming up right, the answer was about to dance within this telephone line.

  Finally a voice from across the miles. “Jick? Is that you? What in the holy hell—”

  “Alec, listen, I know this is kind of out of the ordinary.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “But just let me tell you all this, okay? There’s a fire. Dad’s gone up to it, at Flume Gulch—”

  “The hell. None of that country’s ever burned before.”

  “Well, it is now. And that’s why I got hold of you, see. Alec, Dad’s only help up there is Paul Eliason, and Paul doesn’t know zero about that part of the Two.”

  A void at the Double W bunkhouse. The receiver offered only the sounds within my own ear, the way a seashell does. At last Alec’s voice, stronger than before, demanding: “Jick, did Dad ask you to call me? If so, why in all hell couldn’t he do it him—”

  “No, he didn’t ask me. He’s up on the fire, I just told you.”

  “Then who—is this Mom’s idea?”

  “Alec, it’s nobody’s damn idea. I mean, it’s none of theirs, you can call it mine if it’s anybody’s. All that’s involved, Dad needs somebody up there who knows that Flume Gulch country. Somebody to help him line out the fire crew.”

  “That’s all, huh. And you figure it ought to be me.”

  I wanted to shout, Why the hell else would I be on this telephone line with you? But instead carefully stayed to: “Yeah, I do. Dad needs your help.” And kept unsaid too: this family needs its logjam of quarrel broken. Needs you and our father on speaking terms again. Needs this summer of separation to be over.

  More of the seashell sound, the void. Then:

  “Jick, no. I can’t.”

  “Can’t? Why not? Even goddamn Wendell Williamson’d let you off to fight a forest fire.”

  “I’m not going to ask him.”

  “You mean you won’t ask him.”

  “It comes to the same. Jick, I just—”

  “But why? Why won’t you do this?”

  “Because I can’t just drop my life and come trotting home. Dad’s got the whole damn Forest Service for help.”

  “But—then you won’t do it for him.”

  “Jick, listen. No, I can’t or won’t, however you want to say it. But it’s not because of Dad, it’s not to get back at him or anything. It’s—it’s all complicated. But I got to go on with what I’m doing. I can’t—” All these years later, I realize that here he very nearly said: “I can’t give in.” But the way Alec actually finished that sentence was: “I can’t go galloping home any time there’s a speck of trouble. If somebody was sick or hurt, it’d be different. But—”

  “Then don’t do it for Dad,” I broke in on him, and I may have built up to a shout for this: “Do it because the goddamn country’s burning up!”

  “Jick, the fire is Dad’s job, it’s the Forest Service’s job, it’s the job of the whole crew they’ll bring in there to Flume Gulch. It is not mine.”

  “But, Alec, you can’t just—” Here I ran out of argument. The dead space on the telephone line was from my direction now.

  “Jick,” Alec’s voice finally came, “I guess we’re not getting anywhere with this.”

  “I guess we’re not.”

  “Things will turn out,” said my brother. “See you, Jick.” And the phone connection ended.

  • • •

  It was too much for me. I stood there gulping back tears.

  The house was empty, yet they were everywhere around me. The feel of them, I mean; the accumulation, the remembering, of how life had been when the other three of my family were three, instead of two against one. Or one against two, as it looked now. Alec. My mother. My father.

  People. A pain you can’t do without.

  Eventually I remembered to ding the phone, signaling Chet that I was done with the town line. Done in, was more like it.

  For the sake of something, anything, to do, I wandered to my bedroom and listlessly thumbed through magazines for any more sea scenes to put on the wall. Prey to a Profound Preoccupation, that was me.

  • • •

  At last
I heard the pickup arrive. Nothing else I did seemed to be any use in the world, maybe I at least had better see if my mother needed any help with the fire lunches she was bringing.

  I stepped out the kitchen door to find that help already was on hand, beside her at the tailgate of the pickup.

  A brown Stetson nodded to me, and under it Stanley Meixell said: “Hullo again, Jick.”

  Civility was nowhere among all that crowded my brain just then. I simply blurted:

  “Are you going up to the fire?”

  “Thought I would, yeah. A man’s got to do something to ward off frostbite.”

  My mother was giving Stanley her look that could peel a rock. But in an appraising way. I suppose she was having second thoughts about what she had set in motion here, by fetching Stanley from the Busby’s ranch, and then third thoughts that any possible help for my father was better than no help, then fourth thoughts about Stanley’s capacity to be any help, and on and on.

  “Do you want some coffee?” she suggested to Stanley.

  “I better not take time, Bet. I can get by without it.” The fact was, it would take more than coffee to make a difference on him. “Who’s this dispatcher we got to deal with?”

  My mother told him about Chet, Stanley nodded, and she and he headed for the ranger station. Me right behind them.

  “Getting those lunches up there’d be a real help, all right;” Chet agreed when my mother presented Stanley. But all the while he had been giving Stanley a going-over with his eyes, and it must be said, Stanley did look the worse for wear; looked as old and bunged up and afflicted as the night in the cabin when I was rewrapping his massacred hand. In this instance, though, the affliction was not Stanley’s hand but what he had been pouring into himself with it.

  Not somebody you would put on a fire crew, at least if your name was Chet Barnouw and the responsibility was directly traceable to you. So Chet now went on, “But beyond you taking those up for us, I don’t see how we can use—”

  “How’re you fixed for a hash slinger?” Stanley asked conversationally.

  Chet’s eyebrows climbed. “You mean it? You can cook?”

  “He’s A-number-one at it,” I chirped in commemoration of Stanley’s breakfast the morning of my hangover.

  Chet needed better vouching than my notorious appetite. He turned to my mother. If ever there was a grand authority on food, it was her. She informed Chet: “When Stanley says he can do a thing, he can.”

  “All right then,” said Chet. “Great Falls more than likely would just dig out some wino fryhouse guy for me anyway.” The dispatcher caught himself and cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get you signed up here.”

  Stanley stepped over to the desk with him and did so. Chet looked down at the signature with interest.

  “Stanley Kelley, huh? You spell it the same way the Major does.”

  My mouth flapped open. The look I received from my mother snapped it shut again.

  All politeness, Stanley inquired: “The who?”

  “Major Evan Kelley, the Regional Forester. The big sugar, over in Missoula. Kind of unusual, two E’s in Kelley. You any relation?”

  “None that I know of.”

  • • •

  Chet went back in his belfry, and Stanley headed to the barn to rig up a saddle horse and Homer as the pack horse. Ordinarily I would have gone along to help him. But I was shadowing my mother, all the way back to the house.

  As soon as we were in the kitchen I said it.

  “Mom? I’ve got to go with Stanley.”

  The same surprise as when I’d stepped up and asked to dance the Dude and Belle with her, that distant night of the Fourth. But this request of mine was a caper in a more serious direction. “I thought you’d had enough of Stanley,” she reminded me, “on that camptending episode.”

  “I did. But that was then.” I tried, for the second time this day, to put into words more than I ever had before. “If Stanley’s going to be any help to Dad, I’m going to have to be the help to Stanley. You know what he told me, after the camptending. When he said he couldn’t have got along up there without me. The fire camp will be even worse for him. Paul’s going to be looking down his neck the whole while and the first time he catches Stanley with a bottle he’ll send him down the road.” Plead is not a word I am ashamed of, in the circumstances. “Let me go with him, Mom.”

  She shook her head. “A fire camp is a crazyhouse, Jick. It wouldn’t be just you and Stanley this time. They won’t let you hang around—”

  Here was my ace. “I can be Stanley’s flunky. Help him with the cooking. That way I’d be right there with him all the time.”

  Serious as all this was, my mother couldn’t stop her quick sideways grin at the notion of me around food full-time. But then she sobered. With everything in me, I yearned that she would see things my way. That she would not automatically tell me I was too young, that she would let me play a part at last, even just as chaperone, in this summer’s stream of events.

  Rare for Beth McCaskill, not to have an answer ready by now. By now she must have been on tenth and eleventh thoughts about the wisdom of having asked Stanley Meixell to go to Flume Gulch.

  My mother faced me, and decided.

  “All right. Go. But stay with Stanley or your father at all times. Do you Understand That? At All Times.”

  “Yes,” I answered her. Any term of life as clear as that, even I could understand.

  • • •

  Stanley was my next obstacle.

  “She said you can? C-A-N, can?”

  “Yeah, she did. You can go on in and ask her.” I kept on with my saddling of Pony.

  “No, I’ll take your word.” He rubbed the back of his right hand with his left, still studying me. “Going to a fire, though—you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

  Canada Dan and Bubbles and Dr. Al K. Hall in a tin cup had come into my life at the elbow of this man and he could stand there and ask me that?

  I shot back, “Does anybody ever?”

  The squinch around Stanley’s eyes let up a little. “There you got a point. Okey-doke, Jick. Let’s get to getting.”

  • • •

  Up the North Fork road the summer’s second Meixell-McCaskill expedition set out, Stanley on a buckskin Forest Service gelding named Buck, leading the pack horse Homer with the load of lunches, and me behind on Pony.

  • • •

  I still don’t know how Stanley managed the maneuver, but by the time we were past the Hebner place and topping the English Creek–Noon Creek divide, the smoke rising out of the canyon of the North Fork ahead of us, I was riding in the lead just as on our camptending expedition. That the reason was the same, I had no doubt. I didn’t bother to look back and try to catch Stanley bugling a bottle, as that was a sight I did not want to have to think about. No, I concentrated on keeping us moving at a fast walk, at least as fast as I could urge Pony’s short legs to go.

  Something was different, though. This time Stanley wasn’t singing. To my surprise I missed it quite a lot.

  • • •

  Smoke in a straight column. Then an oblong haze of it drifting south along the top of Roman Reef. The day’s lone cloud, like a roll of sooty canvas on a high shelf.

  A quantity of smoke is an unsettling commodity. The human being does not like to think its environs are inflammable. My mother had the memory that when she was a girl at Noon Creek the smoke from the 1910 fires brought a Bible-toting neighbor, a homesteader, to the Reese doorstep to announce: “This is the wrath of God. The end of the world is come.” Daylight dimming out to a sickly green color and no distinct difference between night and day, I suppose it would make you wonder.

  That same 1910 smoke never really left my father. He must have been about twelve or thirteen then, and his memory of that summer when the millions of acres burned in the Bitterroot while the Two had its own long stubborn fire was the behavior of the chickens there at the family homestead on the North Fork. “
Christamighty, Jick, by about noon they’d go in to roost for the night, it got so dark.” The 1910 smoke darkness, and then the scarred mountainside of Phantom Woman as a later reminder; they stayed and stayed in my father, smears of dread.

  Stanley too had undergone the 1910 smoke. In the cabin he had told me of being on that fire crew on the Two fire west of Swift Dam. “Such as we were, for a crew. Everybody and his cousin was already fighting some other sonuvabitch of a fire, Bitterroot or somewheres else. We dabbed at it here as best we could, a couple of weeks. Yeah, and we managed to lose our fire camp. The wind come up and turned a flank of that fire around and brought it right into our camp. A thing I never will forget, Jick, all the canned goods blew up. That was about all that was left when the fire got done with that camp, a bunch of exploded goddamn tin cans.”

  All three of them, each with a piece of memory of that awful fire summer. Of how smoke could multiply itself until it seemed to claim the world.

  • • •

  Now that my father had stepped in as fire boss at Flume Gulch, Paul Eliason was the camp boss. I will say, Paul was marshaling things into good order. We rode in past a couple of CCs digging a toilet trench. A couple of others were setting up the fire boss tent, each of them pounding in tent pegs with the flat of an ax. The feed ground—the kitchen area—already was built, and there we encountered Paul.

  Paul still had an expression as if somebody big was standing on his foot and he was trying to figure out what to say about it, but he lost no time in sending one of the CCs off with Homer and the lunches to the fire crew. “Late is better than never,” he rattled off, as if he invented that. “Thanks for delivering, Jick,” he next recited, awarded Stanley a nod too, and started back to his next target of supervision.

  “Paul,” I managed to slow and turn him, “somebody here you got to meet. This is Stanley, uh—”

  “—Kelley. Pleased to know you, ranger.”

  “—and, he’s here to—” I finally found the inspiration I needed: “Chet signed him on as your cook.” Well, as far as it went, that was true, wasn’t it?

  Paul studied this news. “I thought Chet told me he was going to have to get one out of Great Falls, and the chances didn’t look real good even there.”