Sometimes you know a thing because even invisible it fills a gap. I asked anyway. “On the ride out from town that night, wasn’t it. When you told Alec that.”
Surprised herself, Leona swung to look directly at me again. “Yes. Jick, did Alec . . . have you always . . . ?”
“No, he never said a word of any of this to me. To any of us. I just remember there was something about you two when I watched you come over the rise.” Alec with his head up even more than his customary proud riding style, Leona golden and promising even at too great a distance for details. Their perfect gait, horseman and horsewoman, down from outline against the June sky as I crossed the yard from a boyhood chore to that suppertime. One of those moments that is a seed of so much else.
“Alec was both scared to death and as happy as he could be,” Leona spoke now as if we were both watching that saddle-throned figure of my nineteen-year-old brother. “You can be that way, when you’re young and convinced you’re in love. Right then and there, on the county road before we came into sight of the ranger station, he wanted to know if it was safe for me to be on horseback, would it hurt the baby? I laughed and told him he was getting away ahead of the game, worrying about that already.” But that was Alec, wasn’t it. All go and no whoa, as my mother always said of him. Beside me Leona was saying now: “It was happening sooner than he’d wanted, in one way—we still couldn’t get married for a few months, until he’d saved up his wages and talked the Double W into some kind of living quarters for us. And in another way, he was thrilled pink with the idea he and I were going to have a child. I hope you see, Jick. It decided for us. A baby then meant the pair responsible had to get married, there wasn’t just . . . living together. That was the thing about it: my telling Alec settled so much we were still trying to figure out. It made life seem so much—safer. And he wanted some kind of sure path as much as I did, something he could just latch on to and go with. You know how Alec was.”
Yes. Alec McCaskill and Leona Tracy, I knew how they both were then. In memory the perfect two of them, another month into that summer of 1939, at the after-rodeo dance in Gros Ventre when Alec won the calf roping, my brother tall and alight with the fact that he was astraddle of the world, beside him Leona golden-haired in a white taffeta dress that flounced intriguingly with her every step. His armful of her as Alec advised my friend Ray Heaney and me, enough younger that the only company we kept at dances yet was the wall, You guys better think about getting yourselves one of these. That was the appearance, royal Alec and priceless Leona. In actuality, both before and after Leona, my brother stubborned his way into a life that did not lead to much of anywhere. And Leona there at seventeen, who looked like her life was on clockwork—smile; let her hair gleam in the sun; beautify whatever scene she found herself in, on the back of a horse or twirling in taffeta at a Fourth of July dance—in actuality, a seventeen-year-old head on a body with the collected urges of centuries in it, on it. No more than the figurehead is steering the ship under full sail was Leona Tracy in charge of herself then.
This next I didn’t ask. Why the episode with Alec didn’t come out the way she’d set it in motion. This she owed herself to tell.
“I couldn’t go through with it,” the Leona of now was saying as if still in accusation against herself. Her voice had the same crimp of hard—hurtful—concentration that I knew was pierced in between her eyes. “Pretty soon after the Fourth, I told him that . . . it was a false alarm, that I was . . . back in step with Mother Moon. Oh, I think Alec more than half knew what I’d done. Started to do. Especially when I went on and said I thought we had better hold off on marriage entirely, that I’d decided to finish high school and take a look at life then.”
A person tends to think that the past has happened only to himself. That it’s his marrow only, particular and specific; filling his bones one special way. The anguished look on Leona disabused me of that forever.
“It’s there, isn’t it, Jick. If I’d kept matters that Alec and I simply were going together, that I didn’t want to get serious about marriage right then, he might’ve eventually listened to what your folks wanted for him.” And gone to college and made the life that education could have brought him, I mentally finished the fifty-year-old family accusation against her. “Or if I’d gone ahead and shotgunned him into marrying me, we in all likelihood really would have had a child by the time the war came.” And Alec would not have charged off and enlisted the week after Pearl Harbor, this new burden of proof against Leona ran. “Either way,” she finished with difficulty, “Alec might not have . . . ended up as he did.”
I felt a sting at my eyes, but Leona was nowhere near crying. There is a dry sorrow beyond tears.
She waited, there in the almost-dark of the motorhome cab.
Life is choices. I could go back to the long McCaskill grudge against her, fortified now by knowing that my parents and ultimately I were righter than we had even imagined, about her effect that family-tearing summer. Or. Or I could make as much of a start as I could in the other direction.
By saying, as I now did:
“Leona Tracy was somebody the McCaskills never knew how to contend with. So I think we’re lucky to have Leona Wright take sides with us.”
• • •
We pulled in to the Wright ranch at close to midnight, the yard light illuminating the tidy buildings and the cow corrals and a Chevy pickup with a considerable portion of the ranch on it as mud. Out from under the pickup materialized a half-grown dog letting out a nightsplitting woof.
“Morgan and Kathy will be wondering what Manslaughter has got treed,” Leona said. “I’ll go across and let them know I’m back in one piece.” She sounded strangely shy, tentative, with the next: “You want to come with, come in for a little while?”
“Naw, I’m going to turn in pretty quick, thanks anyhow.”
“I guess it’s a rare chance in this rig”—she cast a memorizing look around in the motorhome, which suddenly was seeming as empty as an unloaded moving van—“to have some sleeptime all to yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I managed to semichuckle.
“You’ll have breakfast with us, surely,” she stipulated.
“Actually I can’t. I’ve got to pull out for the Two Medicine country real early. I need to get home and sort out the situation there.”
“Then I’d better say thanks now, for bringing me back. And for everything else you did today, Jick.”
“That’s okay, thanks for riding along. Been nice having some company. Been interesting.”
Leona leaned across from the passenger seat and gave me a no-nonsense kiss, surprisingly like Mariah’s version, on my approximate cheek. She smiled, maybe still a little sadly, before she opened the passenger door of the Bago. “With my background, would you believe it’s taken me sixty-seven years to kiss a man with a beard?”
DAWN ARTICULATING
When asked what he thought of today’s centennial celebration, 89-year-old Garland Hebner, odds-on winner of the beard contest, declared: “A time was had by all.”
—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, NOVEMBER 8, 1989
AHUNDRED HOURS LATER, which had seemed like a century, the Noon Creek road was a dike through the dark as I headed the Bago in from my ranch toward Gros Ventre and centennial morning.
The only other creature up this early was at the crest of the bench-land, a jackrabbit that leapt in panic and ricocheted back and forth in the tunnel of light cut by the motorhome’s bright beams. I switched onto dim and the skittering jack managed to dart free into the barrow pit.
Otherwise, nothing but before-dawn blackness on either side of the gravel embankment of road until the gateframe at the turnoff into the Double W, high and logthick, came into the headlights.
I flipped onto bright again, as if the increased wash of light would bleach away that triumphal WW sign and the cable-strung cow skull swaying beneath in the wind. Still no such luck. Nearer and nearer the gateway drew, the motorhome’s headlights le
veled steady on it; my trigger finger itching as ever here, both of my gripping hands feeling the shotgun rise in aim at the hated goddamn fancy transom, my eyes sighting in on the welcome vision of putting an end to that plaything skull by blasting it to bits.
But by now other conclusions, this final nightful of thinking them through, shouldered that one away and I drove past.
• • •
Life was definitely awake when I reached town. The Medicine Lodge was as lit up as boxed lightning. Switched on in more ways than one, too, for music was blaring out of the radiant old saloon as I climbed down from the Bago. The municipal serenade hit a crescendo that sounded like a truckload of steel guitars rolling over and over and then a woman’s voice boomed in amplification: “That was a little tune we picked up from a rock group called Drunks With Guns. So now you’ve had your wake-up music and can tackle the pancake breakfast these nice folks have got ready for you, and we’ll be back shortly.”
Yeah, well, I guess there are all different ways of feeling gala, and musical commotion of their sort must be one of them. I started to cross the street to the site of rumpus, not to mention breakfast, but had to wait for traffic, one lone van toodling through town from the south. I stood impatiently for it to pass, more than ready to scoot across and get myself in out of the chilly wind; November is not much of a pedestrian season in the Two Medicine country. The leisurely vehicle at last reached me and I started to get my thoroughly cooled heels into motion again. But right in front of me the van pulled up, blockading my path, and the driver tapped out on his horn beep beepitybeepbeep beep beep!
I remained there with my jaw on my shoetops while geezers in dress-up stockman Stetsons, the dapper low-crowned kind you don’t see often any more, came stiffly climbing out both sides of the van. “How you doing, Jick? All revved up to go through this again in 2089?” “Jick, you Two Medicine people get up before God sends Peter out to the Gate.” “Got your speechmaking pants on this morning, have you, Jick?”
The Baloney Express gang and I shook hands and slapped shoulders and conducted general hubbub there in the middle of the street until I managed to ask, “What, you mean to tell me you guys got up before the chickens and drove all the hell the way up here from Great Falls just for our ceremony?”
“How could we stay away?” Roger Tate responded from behind the steering wheel of the van. “Ain’t we all been waiting most of a hundred years for this?”
“Besides, it’s only ninety miles back to the Falls,” Julius Walker chipped in. “The way Roger drives, it’ll only take us half an hour to get home.”
“Had to deliver this anyway,” Dale Starr declared and presented me a five-dollar bill and four ones.
“What’s this, you guys running a lottery now too?”
“Compliments of our Shoeless Joe from Fargo,” explained Dale, about our broke-and-barefoot casualty in the rest area a couple of months ago. “Wrote that things are still pretty tough with him, but he’s trying to scout up enough odd jobs to get by on.”
Then the other Walker, Jerome, had me by an elbow and was steering me back to the side of the street I’d started from. “We got something to show you over here, too. Don’t look so alarmed, we didn’t bring none of those used cars with us.”
He headed me toward the rear of my Winnebago, where a couple of the more nimble members somehow had slipped away to and already were standing there with full moon grins. Gingerly I stepped around to peer at the rear of the Bago, and there on the bumper blazed a sticker in Day-Glo orange:
HONORARY BALONEY EXPRESS RIDER
“We had it made up special,” announced Bill Bradley, rocking back on his tiny heels as if nearly bowled over with pride.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or bawl, and so likely did a mix of the two.
After I had thanked them sevenfold, the bunch said they realized I needed to gather my mind toward the speech I was going to make—“Say what you’re gonna say good and loud, or at least loud,” ran the general tenor of their advice—and off they hobbled toward the Medicine Lodge and pancakes and coffee.
• • •
A minute to compose myself was definitely required, and I moved to the side of the Bago that was out of the wind and stood looking at Gros Ventre. Like other Montana towns, no Easy Street anywhere in it. Instead this highway main street, born wide because freight wagons and their spans of oxen or workhorses had needed maneuvering room, the twin processions of businesses, dead and alive, now aligned along that original route, the high lattice of cottonwood limbs above the sidewalks. With all the cars and pickups parked downtown at this usually empty hour and only one building alight, Gros Ventre looked busy in an odd concentrated way, as if one behavior had entirely taken over and shoved all other concerns out of the way. Maybe that is what a holiday is. The dark up there beyond the cottonwoods was just beginning to soften, the first of the hourlong suggestion of light before actual sunrise. I gazed across the street at the crowd of heads behind the plate glass window on the cafe side of the Medicine Lodge. Bobbing amid them, in a rhythm of choosing and coaxing and focusing and clicking, was a fireball of hair deeper than red. Mariah riding the moments as they came. Riley was not in action yet. I could see him propped against the cafe wall, arms folded, not even wielding his notebook yet.
I squared myself, ready at last to go across and be part of the occasion. I wish you were here for this, Marcella. But you are not. And so I hope I bring to this day the strength of what we were together.
• • •
Gros Ventre entire seemed to be within the straining walls of the Medicine Lodge when I entered. Never in the field of human jubilee had so many so voluntarily got up so early. Some were history-costumed, here and there frock coats and Lillian Russell finery, elsewhere cowboy and horsewoman outfits complete with hats of maximum gallonage; even occasional fringed leather trapper getups. Others were in common clothes. In whatever mode, conversation was epidemic, people yakking and visiting back and forth in a mass from one end of the cafe to the other. The back wall was startlingly bare, the centennial flag down now and in folded repose across a number of long tables like a golden tarpaulin, ready to be taken out for hoisting when the time shortly came. All other tables of the Medicine Lodge and a borrowed bunch more had been pushed together in spans devoted to pancake consumption.
But my policy had to be first things first, even ahead of breakfast, so I made my way over to her.
Naturally Mariah was in midshoot of Amber Finletter, who was wearing big goony glasses with blunked-out lenses like Orphan Annie’s eyes and a housenumber “1” attached off the side to make the eyerig read as a 100. Such centennial embodiment notwithstanding, I got Mariah aside and had the talk with her I needed to have.
To my news she simply gave me a ratifying buzz on the cheek and added: “What can I say? I was the one who kept at you to get yourself going again, wasn’t I. You don’t vegetate worth a damn, Jick.”
Then it was her turn, of telling me what she needed to.
Four months’ worth of words with this daughter of mine dwindled to basics. I only asked:
“You’re real sure?”
“I finally am,” said Mariah.
• • •
Away she flew, back to work, and myself to breakfast. Sleepy 4-H kids were ladling out the food. I negotiated a double plateload of pancakes and swam them in syrup, further fortified myself with a cup of Nguyen’s coffee, then went over and found a seat across from Fred Musgreave, who had surrendered his bar domain to the music posse.
Fred appraised my hotcake stack and asked, “Gonna build a wind-break inside yourself?”
“Uh huh,” I acknowledged cheerfully and began forking.
A fresh gust rattled the plate glass window. “At least it isn’t snowing,” Fred granted.
“Shhh,” I cautioned him against hexing the weather.
After pondering me and my steady progress through the pancakes, Fred concluded: “I gather you’re saving up your inventory of wor
ds for your speech.”
I suppose I was. But also, by now a lot of the essential had been said. Said and done. I forked on and watched Mariah aiming her camera at Bill Rides Proud, his Blackfeet braids spilling down his back.
When pats descended on my off arm, the noneating one, I didn’t even need to look. “Morning, Althea.”
“Oh, Jick. It’s so nice to see you back for good.”
A Mariah-style “mmm” was all I was willing to give that until I had the last of the hotcakes inside me. In something close to alarm, Fred Musgreave abandoned the chair across from me to Althea and she took it like a throne. This morning her sense of occasion featured turn-of-the-century regalia, a sumptuous velvet bustle-dress with matching feathered hat; it broke my eating rhythm a moment to realize that, feathers excluded, the plum color of everything on Althea Frew exactly matched that of my Billings wedding motif.
“What a nice bolo tie,” she found to compliment on me after considerable inspection. I only mmmed that too, all the help really that Althea needed with a conversation. Pleasant as fudge, she proceeded to give me a blow-by-blow account of our centennial committee’s doings in my lamented absence and then on into every jot and tittle of this dawn event and beyond. “Then we’ll have more dancing, then when the bells ring all over the state at 10:41, we’ll start our parade. Then—” You could tell she could hardly wait to get going on the next hundred years; for that matter, Althea would be gladly available by seance when Montana had to gird up for its millennium.
Suddenly music met its makers in the bar half of the Medicine Lodge, the band tuning up thunderously cutting off Althea in midgush.
“Interesting chamber orchestra,” I remarked for her benefit.