In truth, it was hard not to burst out at the contradiction of a nephew emulating Riley yet not chousing after the female of the species. But the eventuality in what Leona had just told me was out-echoing that. So even the prospering Wrights were only postponing, staving off for one more generation, the question of what would become of their ranch.
Suddenly the ranch topic lost its appeal for both of us and Leona said she’d better put in a session on her Russian flashcards. I offered my services, figuring I could riffle cards in any language, and she brightened right up. “Spaseebo. Thank you. It’ll make the situation seem more real to have you trying me out on the words instead of doing it myself.”
I flicked and flipped to the best of my ability, springing stuff like What time is it now, please? on her until she said that was about enough vocabulary for any one day.
The topic that had been in my own mind while she’d been practicing pah rooskee had to come out. “Something you mentioned earlier, Leona. I’d kind of like to talk to you about it, if you wouldn’t mind too much. All those years you spent with Herb—a lot like what I spent with Marce.” I worked my throat overtime but managed to get the next words out. “What can you tell me about—this.”
She knew what I meant. About being a widow, a widower. About being the one who lives on alone.
Leona’s hands fiddled with the box of flashcards. The same little crimp of concentration she’d shown while I quizzed her on vocabulary appeared again between her silvered eyebrows, but her eyes stayed steady into mine. “You still miss Marcella something fierce, don’t you.”
I swallowed heavily and said, “That’s still the case, yeah. I guess really that’s what I’m wondering from you. Does it ever get any easier?”
“In some ways.” Leona paused. “Maybe it has to, or we wouldn’t be able to stand it. We’d crush down until there wasn’t anything left of us either. But it . . . the grief, the worst of it anyway, eventually does”—I could see her search as she sometimes did for a Russian phrase—“space itself out some. Every now and again, something pops into memory that hurts as much as ever. And there are days you wish you could take off the calendar forever. Herb’s birthday is always hard for me. And our anniversary. And the start of calving time, because that’s the time of year he died. But,” she found a smile to encourage me, “that leaves a majority of days when a person can get by okay, I suppose is how I look at it.”
“Leona, if this is too damn personal, just up and say so and we’ll skip it. But—how come you never remarried?”
She flushed a little and looked down at the table, but did tackle my question. “I’ve had a couple of chances. Not as many as you maybe think. But every time it seemed like such an effort. To get used to someone all over again. I suppose I’m set in my ways, and at this—stage of life, the other person is bound to be, too.”
“Yeah, I seem to be finding that out in myself. Old dogs bark the loudest.” Immediately I wished that hadn’t spouted out. Leona was, what, two years further into age than I was.
That inadvertent crack put her to looking squarely across at me again. She said, though, as if going right on with her catalogue of why she hadn’t gone the matrimonial route with anybody in the years since Herb Wright’s death: “Besides, you know my history, Jick. I don’t seem to marry easily.”
Huh. So she would at least allude in that direction. To Alec. Her jilt of him. The blond bolt of lightning she was for the McCaskills, back there half a century ago.
I didn’t want to get into that with her now, given the missionary work she and I had ahead on Mariah and Riley and their marriage propensity. Instead I kept on the course I’d started with the remarrying question. “There’s a real reason I’m trying to get a line on this. See, one thing I’ll be going home to, after our newspaper aces finish off the centennial, is somebody who’s got herself convinced she and I ought to get together.” Althea Frew probably right at that moment was humming around Gros Ventre red-circling on every calendar in town November 8, Centennial Day and the return of widower/bachelor/eligible-male-at-loose-ends-and-not-yet-utterly-decrepit, one J. A. McCaskill. “And at honest to Christ moments I wonder if she might just be right.” Or as the Althea matter formed itself in the whispers in my mind, My God, am I going to end up having to do that? If I am, I’ve got some overhauling to do on my thinking about that woman. And soon. Centennial Day was not that far down the pike now, life beyond Mariah and Riley and the steering wheel of the Bago was fast coming at me, and if I was going to try and follow widower logic—admittedly, it was there—then pairing up with Althea would at least cure what loomed ahead of me at Noon Creek after that eighth morning of November, the aloneness. Loneliness.
“Oh, sure, she has plenty of things about her that kind of bug me,” I summed Althea to Leona’s smile of encouragement, “but she can probably double that in spades about me. We could likely iron each other out enough to make a marriage work, more or less, if it came to that. And that’s what I’m wondering. Whether it’s maybe worth it, not to have to try the rest of life”—the last of, we both knew I was saying—“all alone. But pretty plainly you’ve decided it’s not worth it, huh? From your side of things, I mean.”
That other side of things, I genuinely did have a long curiosity about. In the skin of a woman, how does life seem? I could remember speculating that about my mother, when I was still only a shavetail kid, fifteen or so; ranching and the Forest Service, male livelihoods both then—what did Beth McCaskill think of her existence in that largely man-run scheme of things? Certainly I’d had the occasions to mull McCaskill women since, too. Lexa, taking herself off to Alaska. Mariah—God, you bet, Mariah. And even though I felt we knew each other to the maximum, sometimes even Marcella had stirred that skin-whisper question.
“Maybe it’s not just a matter of that,” Leona was saying now, “the worth-it part, that is. Maybe it’s more a matter of getting up enough nerve for it. I seem to have spent my nerve formating, whatever you’d say, on Herb.”
Thinking how complete my version with Marcella had been, I could understand that too. “Uh huh. Could be that our share of enthusiasm for hearing wedding bells over and over again got parceled out to these kids of ours instead.”
She laughed, looking a little relieved at the excuse to. I figured now was as logical a time as any, to start putting our heads together about Mariah and Riley and the flopperoo marriage they were determined to repeat.
“That’s something I been wanting to get to with you, too, Leona. I don’t have a whole lot of sway with Mariah, where Riley is concerned. But I wondered if there’s any way you can work on him—or hell, her, for that matter—to keep them from going off the deep end again.”
Leona gave me a smile, of a calibration I hadn’t seen before. And delivered:
“Jick, you couldn’t be more wrong. I think Riley and Mariah should get married again.”
My ears about fell off.
While I was gaping at the woman, trying not to believe I’d heard what I’d heard, she was piling more on. “You’re looking at me kahk Srehdah nah Pyahtnyeetsoo. Like Wednesday looks at Friday. But I’d think you, as Mariah’s father and all, would be the first person in the world to want them back together.”
“Togeth—? Leona, that first marriage of theirs didn’t just come apart! Pieces of it are still flying through the air, it blew up so goddamn bad! Why in the name of anything holy should they make the exact identical mistake again?”
“Maybe they’ve learned how to do better.”
“Or maybe they’re only going to be better at how to make each other miserable. They weren’t a couple of skim-milk kids when they got married, that first time. Now they’re even more—well, indegoddamnpendent, is about the most polite way to put it, the both of them.”
She still toyed with a small smile, which did nothing to improve the rotten humor this suddenly had me in.
“So you’re not really for people remarrying either?” she tried on me, I suppose apropos o
f the Althea theorizing I’d been doing.
“I’d be a thousand percent happy to see Mariah and Riley remarried,” I protested. “Just not to each other.”
“Jick, it’s their choice.”
“I know it’s their choice.” If it was mine, there’d have been no chance of a repeat performance by those two. “I also know neither one of them is dealing with a full deck when it comes to deciding about the other one.” How to render this politely. No, to hell with polite. “They get hot to trot, out on their job all the time like they are without any other candidates around to button their bellybuttons to, and then while they’re at it, so to speak, they figure hey, wow, they’re magically back in love. But Leona, that’ll only last as long as the bedsprings squeak. Then they’ll be dishing out hurt to each other again, which is what I dread for them. And I don’t see why you aren’t leery of that, too. For Riley’s sake, if nothing else. Maybe I’ve been misreading, but I somehow got the impression Mariah is not your favorite person in the universe.”
Leona stood her territory.
“I have my difference with Mariah, that’s all too true. We all side with our own children when a marriage of theirs breaks up. After all, we’re parents, aren’t we, Jick, not neutral peacekeeping forces. But I’m not the one who wants to try married life with Mariah again, am I. Riley is. I know you think he’s gone loco about this”—understatement of the century—“but Riley’s instincts are generally right. Usually more right than mine.” Her expression suggested the not remote possibility that they might be righter than my own, too.
If she expected that to get a rise out of me, it did.
“Let’s back up here a goddamn minute. Didn’t I just hear you putting remarrying out of your own picture? If that’s true for you, why in all hell isn’t it true for Mariah and Riley after they’ve already flubbed the dub with each other once?”
“A difference in Vitamin G level, I suppose,” wafted across the table from her to me.
“Huh?”
“In guts, Jick. I said ‘nerve’ before, but I guess we’re into speaking plain, aren’t we. My time of life, my way of—getting through, isn’t anywhere near the same as Riley and Mariah’s. Their generation has its own agenda and it should have. I know you can’t help but feel Riley and Mariah are being scatty about this, but Jick, they’ve got so many more years ahead of them they can afford to take those chances, can’t they? If they possess the guts to try to make a go of life with each other again, good for them.”
Like the kid starting his third year in the second grade, it was beginning to dawn on me how much ground I was losing. Good God in sweet heaven. Here I’d invited Leona Tracy Wright along as an ally against the tendency of our offspring to get dangerously smitten with each other and she turns out to be their head cheerleader.
So I wasn’t one bit better at getting through to her at this farther end of life than I’d been at the early part, was I. The realization knocked every blossom off me. Why was it, the consequence always had to be the same where this person was concerned? I had believed I was putting aside the past between Leona and the McCaskills, shelving that oldest grudge of her having been too good for my brother, spending these Bago hours getting to know her as she was now instead of a disruptive memory, but no. I still didn’t have the shadow of a clue to the real Leona, any more than that other time I had tried to be at my social utmost with her.
Probably she wouldn’t even remember that time; there wasn’t any great reason for her to. The Fourth of July rodeo, that summer when Leona and Alec were going at romance hot and heavy. I could see Leona yet, her silver hair returned to gold, the half-century gone to leave her magically at seventeen again, there in a clover-green blouse with good value under it, perched on a car fender by the arena fence. Alec was entered in the calf roping and he glommed on to me to go over and entertain his lady love while he spruced up to compete. It promptly emerged, though, that besides keeping her company Alec wanted me to keep her occupied; he didn’t want Earl Zane, Arlee’s equally bigheaded older brother, to come strutting around and cut in on his progress with Leona.
I was just in the midst of telling Alec nothing doing, that my not-quite-fifteen-year-old-yet repertoire of life didn’t include anything on how to handle hearts and hand-to-hand combat, when Leona revolved in our direction, patted the car fender beside her, and of course beamed me in with a smile the way a moth would head for a lamp.
Well, okay, maybe, I thought to myself as I zombied over to her leading my horse. The horse, my father’s big gray saddle mount named Mouse, which he’d grandly lent me for the holiday, actually was my best hope with Leona, for she was such an avid rider she definitely knew horseflesh.
In one way of looking at it, my subsequent brief stay with Leona on that fender did serve Alec’s purpose of repulse: Earl Zane never showed his ugly face, nor did any saber-toothed tigers. On the other hand, entertaining Leona was an uphill battle every moment. Things reached their ultimate dead end just after I had told her a joke she didn’t get, which is infinitely worse than no joke at all, when Mouse chose that moment to unroll his business end and proceed to take a world-record leak in front of my horrified eyes and Leona’s evidently interested ones. Honest to God, the tallywhacker on that horse looked like a firehose in action and Leona studied it like it was the newest thing in hydraulics. Mouse’s golden stream washed away what little composure I had left, and by the time Alec showed up and asked Leona how I did as company, she in all too much truth reported: “He’s a wonder.”
Her current opinion of me probably wasn’t even ankle-high to that. She was the same calm Leona, dentproof as her smile, but her voice had a different bearing than when we’d been rushing Russian into her.
“Jick, really, I’m sorry we don’t see the same way on Riley and Mariah getting together again, but—”
“Forget it. I need some weather in me.” I quickly got up and jammed on my hat and coat and went out the Bago door.
Wouldn’t you know, the afternoon had turned as blustery outside as in. Clouds needed to come a long way to these eastern Montana plains and they always seemed to mean business by the time they got here. There already was rain monkeying around to the west and a gusty wind was clearing the way for it into Circle. I wished I’d grabbed my winter cap instead of my Stetson. Not that I’ve had that much experience at domestic strife, but one of its drawbacks evidently was being dressed wrong for stomping out.
Misery and company. I was forging past the RV park office, head down, when the manager pottered out and called to me.
“You’re site five, aren’t you? Mr.”—he checked the sheet of paper in his hand—“McCaskill?”
When I said I supposed I was, he handed me the piece of paper. “This just came in for you.”
“Came in?”
“Sure, by fax. Got our machine right there in the office, in case you want to send something back.”
By now I had taken a look at the last line of the facsimile, Yours with every fond thought followed by the emphatic signature Althea, and in my current mood the reply that popped to mind was the legendary telegram to headquarters we used to joke about in the Forest Service, the fed-up ranger wiring his forest supervisor: Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.
However, not knowing the law on transmitting imaginative language by fax, I declined the campground manager’s eager offer and dragged a lawn chair over behind a Lombardy poplar for a bit of shelter from the wind and sat to see what was to be contended with in Althea’s missive.
Jick, dear—
Not that I ever need an excuse to keep in touch with you, but those of us on the committee who are not off glamorously wandering the world (just joking! you know me!) have been arranging our Dawn of Montana ceremony, and as you are our orator I’m sure you will appreciate knowing the schedule.
5:00–5:30 a.m. Gather at the Medicine Lodge; musical interlude
5:30–6:00 Pancake breakfast
6:00–6:45 Dawn dance
6:45–6
:50 Assemble at the centennial flagpole
6:50–6:52 Introduction of centennial speaker Jick McCaskill (Penciled in: by you know who!)
6:52–7:10 Centennial speech by Jick McCaskill
There was more, you bet there was—Althea could have given lessons to Cape Canaveral on countdown—but I skipped past the rest of the schedule to see what she’d tamped in to her last pair of paragraphs.
It’s hard to believe our centennial celebration is almost here. I’ll have to find something to do with myself after November 8. But then I’m not the only one in that situation, am I?
Kenny, who of course kindly told me where you are at this very moment (isn’t fax such an advance!), says he’ll see you in a day or two when you ship your lambs. I’ll give you a jingle.
In Glasgow the day after, Riley and I went to a car agency so he could jimmy onto the expense account a rental means of transportation for me—I made damn good and sure it was going to be a Ford Taurus instead of a Yugo—and I scorched road home to the ranch. That next morning at Noon Creek, events kept on at about the pace of a catfight in a rolling barrel. Typical of shipping days, a bonechilling squall swirled down off the mountains and we didn’t even have the lambs started into the trucks before Shawn Finletter drove up and said his bosses back east just could not understand why I wasn’t ready to sell. Right then, with sleet sifting down the back of my neck and a thousand lambless ewes blatting and Helen’s dogging in the lamb pen rending the air with barks and Kenny profanely trying to fill the loading chute with lambs who had decided they were afraid of the color of the truck, I could not understand why either. At suppertime, Darleen informed me she and Joe Prentiss of the Gros Ventre Mercantile were no longer on speaking terms, even to argue, but before achieving that state of affairs Joe made it known that the Merc would no longer carry us on a monthly credit account and all groceries hereafter were strictly cash basis. I was still digesting that fiscal turn when Althea Frew was on the line—plain telephone, this time—offering herself as audience for me to rehearse my centennial speech on, and I had to freehand invent that I’d left my only copy back in the Bago, which even as we spoke was being driven by Mariah and Riley to a remote site on the Missouri River where Lewis and Clark had once camped, thus regrettably out of range of fax.