“Darleen’s got the coffeepot on,” he assured me as if that was foremost in my mind as well as his, and hung up.
“Sometimes you eat the bear,
sometimes the bear eats you.
Sometimes you drink the flood,
sometimes you sip the dew.
Sometimes you both are one,
sometimes you break in two.”
When I got there, Kenny was walking jerky little circles behind Darleen while she did the dishes, neither of them looking anywhere near at the other and the radio Roadkill bunch yowling right along with them. I know there is no one style for mating, but the fact that these two ended up with each other still confounded me. While Kenny was forever performing his conversational perambulation or bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck or swinging his arms or craning a look out the nearest window to get his eyes fidgeting along with the rest of him, Darleen sloped along with no excess motion, and often no motion at all. Or was theirs what was meant by an average marriage, the way they so radically averaged each other out.
Right off I noticed that Kenny now sported muttonchop sideburns—they made him look like a shampooed lynx—for Gros Ventre’s centennial beard contest. But the moment I stepped in the kitchen, it was my countenance that received a startled going-over from Kenny and Darleen both. I wondered what secret from myself was showing there, until I remembered my own accumulating snowy whiskers.
The two of them gave each other a side glance. Then Kenny felt the abrupt need to know, “Jick, how you doing this morning?” while Darleen matter of factly chipped in, “You must’ve seen a helluva swath of Montana by now.”
“Okay” and “yeah” I recited to those and while we were getting coffeed up for the day, Kenny filled me in on ranch matters. Rather, he told me as much as he could think of and Darleen filled him in on all he forgot to tell. Haying was about a week behind because of breakdowns, but on the other hand Kenny did the repairing himself and avoided mechanics at multiple dollars per hour. For the first time in several summers Noon Creek was flowing a good head of water, but on the other hand the beavers were gaily working overtime on damming. A considerable stretch of fenceline had been mended, but on one more hand, the roof portions that blew off the lambing shed in the Alaskan Express storm of February hadn’t been. A last prodding glance from Darleen further reminded Kenny that, uhmm, well, actually he hadn’t got around to tending the sheepherder yet this week, either. All in all, things were not really any worse than I expected, nor a damn bit better.
Now came Darleen’s turn, to give a cook’s-eye view of how grocery prices were rocketing. As she recited a blow-by-blow of her latest bout with Joe Prentiss at his cash register in the Gros Ventre Mercantile, I nursed away at a second cup of Darleen’s muscular coffee and tried to ponder how long I could operate this ranch by remote control through Kenny and her. How long did I want to keep trying? You can’t get decent help any more, ran any rancher’s chronic plaint; probably it went back to Abel’s last recorded remark about Cain. But actually the pair here in this kitchen were as decent as I had any right to expect. Take Darleen, yakking away at a rate that had me thankful I wasn’t paying her by the word. She was made of tough stuff, I always had to grant her that. When a foot of heavy wet snow hit on Memorial Day of this year, wonderful moisture for the grass but hell on young lambs and spring-shorn ewes, Darleen slaved side by side with Kenny and me through all that terrible day of fighting weakening sheep to shelter. And Kenny, although he couldn’t manage his time even if you hung a clock on his nose, would whale away at any given task until he eventually subdued it; all you could ask of a person on the wages a rancher can pay, really. No, another Kenny, a different Darleen, would not inch my ranch situation toward solution.
“. . . Joe Prentiss goes, ‘What do you want me to do, give this stuff away?’ ” Darleen at last was wrapping up her grocery tale, “and I go, ‘You bet that’s what I want, but I sure don’t see any sign of it happening.’ ”
I did what I could to grin approval of Darleen’s defense of our kitchen budget, but my result was probably thin. All at once, the three of us seemed to be out of conversation. Kenny squirmed into a new configuration in his chair. Darleen appeared to have plenty more to say but instead was silently watching Kenny contort. I took sipping refuge behind my coffee cup and watched them both. What the hell now? Something was missing from this morning’s session about the ranch-work, something that wanted saying but was being held back, and the other two knew it just as well as I did. Whatever it was I was about to cover it over by supposing out loud that we had better get to getting toward the day’s labor—by now I had it worked out in my head that I’d camptend the sheepherder, fix any downed fence while I was up there, then swing home by way of upper Noon Creek to attack the beaver dam problem; I knew it would take Kenny three separate trips to achieve the same—when Kenny crossed his arms and put his hands on his shoulders as if hugging himself and brought out:
“Uhhmm, Jick, I met up with Shaun Finletter along the east fence there a couple days ago and he said to tell you he’d like to talk to you about the place.”
And here it was, yet and again. The missing. The first peep of it, anyway. Because, the fact was that though Shaun Finletter’s tongue would do that talking, the throat under the words was WW, Incorporated. The everloving goddamn corporaiders. Not twenty minutes after that conglomerated outfit bought the big Double W ranch from Wendell Williamson’s heirs—as a tax write-off, naturally—some guy in a tie was here to make me an offer for this ranch. Other Double Dubsters had tried me regularly the past half dozen years, and now that Shaun was their manager of the Double W, I evidently was in his job description too: buy out the old pooter at the head of the creek. I have to say, in a way I missed Wendell Williamson, whom I despised heartily when he was alive. At least with Wendell you knew directly who was trying to gobble you; not some distant multibunch who saw you as a scrap of acreage they could make tax arithmetic out of.
“Did he,” I at last remarked as neutrally as possible about Kenny’s relay from Shaun and brought my coffee cup to the ready position for one more refill that I did not want. But at the stove Darleen was waiting for my real answer before she would lift the coffeepot, as if my words might make the load too much to handle; and Kenny still was in his self-hug. Both of them watching me so closely it was as bad as being in Mariah’s strongest lens. They had reason. For if I sold, this ranch would be folded into the Double W holdings as one more cow pasture, the way every other ranch along Noon Creek had been. WW, Inc. saw no need for the Kennys and Darleens of this world.
BRRK BRRK.
Kenny sprang to the phone on the wall. “Hullo? You bet, he’s right here.” Before I could gather myself, Mariah’s voice was in my ear:
“Hi. You know what? You don’t have to come back to Helena for us.”
“I don’t?”
“See what a terrific daughter I can be when I half try? Riley and I can’t tell yet when we’ll be done here today, so we’ll rent a car and come up to the Two whenever we are. We need to get going on that part of the state next anyway. Think you can keep yourself occupied without us a little while? Gas up the Bago. Bye.”
• • •
It was midmorning by the time the grocery boxes and I made our escape from the Gros Ventre Mercantile and Joe Prentiss’s opinion of Darleen, and headed west out of town toward the sheep camp.
Remarkable how quiet and thought-bringing a pastime it is to drive along without a photographer blazing away beside you and a word-wright whanging his laptop behind you. This road I knew like the back of my hand and so I simply had to hold the motorhome away from the slidey gravel edges of the roadbank and let my mind do whatever solo it wanted, this cream-of-summer morning. Everywhere ahead the mountains, the jagged rim where the Two Medicine country joins onto the sky, today were clear and near. A last few desperate patches of snow still showed bright among the topmost clefts of Roman Reef’s wall of rock, but their destiny was ev
aporation in another week or so. The benchlands on either side of the valley road already were beveled pastures of crisp grass; summer in the Two country always takes on a tan by August. Against the slope of the high ridge south of town, the big GV outline in rocks painted white by the Gros Ventre high school freshmen each fall was by now like a fading set of initials chalked onto leather.
Yet the land still was green where it counted: beside me as I drove, the column of tall old cottonwood trees extending west alongside the county road, through hay meadow after hay meadow until at last thinning into a pair of willow lines that curved down out of the mountains—English Creek, its main channel and north and south forks like a handle and tines uncovering my beginnings to me.
There is nothing left standing of my father’s English Creek ranger station. I inescapably know that, and could not help but see so, yet again, as the Bago topped the rise of the county road and started down the long slow slant of grade to the forks of the creek. But the absence always registers hard on me. The station. The house behind it where we lived from my fourth year of life through my fifteenth. Barn, corral, sheds, flagpole. Not a stick of any of those is left. In one way of looking at things this is appropriate, really. The U.S. Forest Service extinguished that site from our lives in the winter of 1939 when it directed my father, over his loudest kicks against the policy, to move his district office of the Two Medicine National Forest into town in Gros Ventre, and so the facade of that earlier English Creek time may as well have taken its leave.
Its thoughts, though, do not go.
“Mac, if headquarters doesn’t send us out some new oilcloth one of these years, they are going to get A Piece of My Mind.” My mother, Lisabeth Reese when she began life and Beth McCaskill from her nineteenth year to her eighty-fourth and final one, had a certain tone of voice that signaled in high letters Watch Out. My father, officially Varick McCaskill but Mac to all who knew him in his lifetime of rangering, listened when he had to and otherwise went his way of simply loving her beyond all the limits. They stand in my memory at English Creek as if they were the highest two of those sky-supporting mountains. Her reminding him for the fourth time in as many days that his ranger diary for the week thus far was a perfect blank, lifting her black eyebrows significantly as she half-turned from the cookstove and supper-in-the-making to inquire, “Are you trying for a new record, Mac?” Him angling forward in his long-boned way as he peered out the west window, restless under any roof, declaring of the perpetual paperwork, “I tell you, Bet, USFS stands for just what it sounds like, Us Fuss. If there’s an outfit with more fussing around to it than the Forest Service, I’d like to know where.”
And the other echo. The one that clangs like iron against iron in my remembering. That never-ended argument from an English Creek suppertime.
“You’re done running my life,” my brother flinging behind him as he stomped from that vanished house.
“Nobody’s running it, including you,” my father hurling after him.
The issue was warm and blond, her name Leona Tracy. A blouseful of blossom, seventeen years old and already eternal. She and Alec vowed they were going to get married, they would find a way of existence different from the college and career that my Depression-haunted parents were urging onto Alec, they would show the world what fireproof love was like. None of it turned out that way. By that autumn of 1939 Alec and Leona were split. Her life found its course away from the Two Medicine country. And Alec’s—
“Goddamn Riley anyhow,” I heard declared in an angry voice. Mine. A lot was working on me. It always did, here along English Creek. But right now Riley somehow represented the whole business, Alec and Leona and my amazed grief as a not-quite-fifteen-year-old watching them cut themselves off from my parents and me, every nick of that past like scars across my own skin. Why is a centennial supposed to be such potent arithmetic, will somebody just tell me that? I mean, you think about it, it always is a hundred years since one damn thing or another happened; the invention of the dental drill or the founding of junk mail or some such. But the half centuries, the fifty-year wedges that take most of our own lifetimes, those are the truly lethal pieces of calendar. Instead of chasing off after olden topics, what about those closer truths? Maybe I was not such a hotshot at history as Riley Wright was, but this I knew deep as the springs of my blood: in spite of ourselves, or because of ourselves—I still cannot judge which—the family we McCaskills had been here at the English Creek ranger station never truly recovered from the ruction between my parents and my brother when Alec declared himself against the future they hoped for him, and in favor of linkage with Leona, that summer of fifty years ago.
Yet—there always seemed to be a yet where the goddamn guy was involved—the one person on this green earth to whom I’d shown my feelings about our McCaskill family fracture was Riley.
He did not know the entirety, of course. Not nearly. But its topmost raw residue in me, he knew. Four, five years ago, that English Creek evening of Riley and myself? Whenever, it was back before his and Mariah’s marriage went off the rails, when during one of their weekend visits to the ranch at Noon Creek he mentioned that he’d been going around to cemeteries, seeing what he could gather for a column on tombstone inscriptions sometime, and did I suppose the Gros Ventre cemetery would have anything worthwhile? “Oh hell yeah,” I assured him, ever helpful me, and so before sundown I found myself there amid the graves with Riley. Just we two, as Marcella and Mariah had let us know a cemetery visit was not their idea of entertainment.
The lawned mound of the Gros Ventre cemetery stands above the edge of town and the treeline of English Creek as if the land has bubbled green there; one single tinged knoll against the eastward grainfield plains and the tan benchlands stretching west like platforms to the mountains. I am never there without thinking of the care that the first people of Gros Ventre put into choosing this endsite.
Riley took to the headstones in the old part of the cemetery like a bee to red clover. He immediately was down on one knee, dabbing inscriptions into his notebook, looking close, looking around. I could tell when a person was involved with his job, so I told him I’d wait for him up in the area where people were being buried currently. The active part of the cemetery, so to say.
There I knelt and did a little maintenance against weeds on my father’s grave. Beside him the earth on my mother’s was still fresh and distinct. While I weeded, other more desperate upkeep was occurring nearby where a sprinkler went whisha whisha as it tried to give the ground enough of a drink after the summer day’s hours and hours of sun.
Riley read his way along the headstones toward me, every now and then stopping to jot furiously. I noticed him pausing to copy the old-country commemoration off one particular lichen-darkened tombstone:
LUCAS BARCLAY
born August 16, 1852
Nethermuir, Scotland
died June 3, 1917
Gros Ventre, Montana
IN THE GREEN BED ’TIS A LONG SLEEP
ALONE WITH YOUR PAST MOUNDED DEEP.
Then I was back into my own thoughts and lost track of Riley until he was almost to me, lingering at the grave just the other side of my parents’.
“Who’s this one, Jick, an uncle of yours?”
“No.” I got up and went slowly over to where Riley was, in front of the stone that read simply:
ALEXANDER STANLEY MCCASKILL
“Mariah’s uncle. My brother.”
Riley gave me a sharp glance of surprise. “I never knew you even had one.”
There’s just a whole hell of a lot you don’t know, I had the surging urge to cry out to him, but that was the pain of this place, these gone people, wanting to find a target.
I hunkered down to work on the chickweed on Alec’s grave and managed to answer Riley only: “No, I don’t guess you had any way of knowing. Alec was killed in the war. Although by now I suppose a person has to specify which one. The Second World War.” The desert in Tunisia in 1943, the German plan
e slipping out of the low suppertime sun on its strafing run. The bodies, this one among them, in the darkening sand.
Whisha, the lawn sprinkler slung its arc of water down the cemetery knoll below us, then an arc back up the slope, whisha. After a minute I glanced at Riley; rare for him to be wordless that long. He was looking at me like a cat who’d just been given a bath. Which surprised me until I remembered: Riley had his own turn at war. Not that he ever would say much about it, but the once I had outright asked him what it had been like in Vietnam he answered almost conversationally: “Nam was a fucking mess. But what else would anybody expect it to be?” So it must have been the cumulative total of war, wars, that had him gazing into me and beyond to my destroyed brother.
“How old was he when—” Riley indicated with a nod of his head at Alec’s grave.
“Twenty-two, a little short of twenty-three.” Riley himself I knew was born in 1950; how distant must seem a life that ended seven years before his began, yet even now I thought of Alec as only newly dead.
Riley faintly tapped his notebook with his pen. He appeared to be thinking it over, whether to go on with the topic of Alec. Being Riley, he of course did. “You named Lexa after him.”
“Kind of, yeah. That ‘Alexander’ has been in the family ever since they crossed the water from Scotland, and I guess maybe before. So Marce and I figured we’d pass it on through one of the girls. You got it right, though—Lexa’s full name is Alexandra.”
Riley was listening in that sponge way he had, as if every word was a droplet he wanted to sop up. His eyes, though, never left Alec’s headstone.
“His stone,” he said after a little. “It’s—different.”
By that he meant what was missing. No epitaph, no pair of years summing the sudden span of life. As though even the tombstone carver wasn’t sure Alec’s story was over with.
“Yeah, well, I guess maybe the folks”—I indicated the side by side graves of my mother and father—“didn’t feel they were entitled to any particular last word on Alec. What happened was, there was a family ruckus between them and him. Alec, see, was brighter than he knew what to do with. My folks figured he had a real career ahead of him, maybe as an engineer, once he got out of his cowboy mode. But then he came down with a bad case of what he thought was love and they considered infatuation. In any event, Alec was determined to give up his chance at college and whatever else for it.” (My mother bursting out at his news of impending marriage and staying on as a rider for the Double W: Alec, you will End Up as Nothing More Than a Gimped-Up Saddle Stiff, and I for one Will Not—) “The girl”—I swallowed hard, thinking of smiling lovely Leona and grinning breakneck Alec, the couple too pretty to last in a hard-edged world—“the girl changed her mind, so all the commotion was over nothing, really. But by then it was too late, too much had been said.” (Alec at the other end of the phone line when I tried, beseeched, a summer-end mending between him and our parents: Jicker, it’s—it’s all complicated. But I got to go on with what I’m doing. I can’t—Alec’s voice there veering from what he was really saying, I can’t give in.) Riley was watching me a lot more intently than I was comfortable with as I concluded both the weeding of the grave and the remembrance of Alec. “It was just one of those situations that turned out bad for everybody concerned, is all.”