Althea flinched the least little bit as a new chorus of whangs and clangs ensued. “I put Kevin in charge of hiring the music. He told me they’re a dance band.”
“Depends on the dance, I guess.”
Over the throb of the music she swung back onto that ever favorite topic of hers, me. “We’re all so anxious to hear your speech.”
I grinned, by far the fondest I’d ever given her, making her bat her eyes in surprise, before I said: “I kind of feel that way myself.”
Mood music was not the term I ordinarily would have applied to whatever the band was performing, yet somewhere behind my grin was the amplified tune beating through my body in an oddly familiar way. Then the voice of the woman singer resounded:
“Somewhere south of Browning, along Highway 89!”
The singer interrupted herself to announce it was action time, everybody better find their feet and stomp a quick century’s worth. Even without that I was already up, needing to go see, assuring Althea I’d connect with her at speech time. And yes, as I passed I gave her a pat.
“Just another roadkill, beside life’s yellow line!”
National anthems I can take or leave, but the music put out by these Roadkill Angels now drew me as if it was the strongest song of the human clan. And was drawing everybody else in the Two Medicine country, judging by how jampacked the bar side of the Medicine Lodge suddenly was with dancers and onlookers. The players in the band, mostly armed with guitars of colors I didn’t even know they made them in, held forth on a temporary stage that had been carpentered across the far end of the bar. Behind and a little higher sat a drummer in a black plug hat with an arrow through it.
Amid this onstage aggregation the woman singer didn’t look like much—chunky, in an old gray gabardine cattledealer suit, her blond hair cut in an approximate fringe—but her voice made maximum appearance, so to speak. She sang, my God, she sang with a power and a timbre that pulled at us just short of touch, as when static electricity makes the hair on an arm stand straight when a hand moves just above it. Holding the microphone like she was sipping from it, she sent that voice surging and tremoring, letting it ride and fall with the cascades of the instruments but always atop, always reaching the words out and out to the crowd of us. She activated the air of the Medicine Lodge: the floorful of solos being danced in front of the Roadkill Angels band was magnificent, the 4-H kids especially shining at the quick-limbed undulations this music wanted.
Up near the bandstand I spotted Mariah and Riley in conference, I assumed about their coverage of this spree. But then he looked at her for a moment, smoothed his mustache before nodding, and stuck his notebook in his pocket while she went over along the wall to where Howard Stonesifer and his ancient mother were sitting, Howard watching the dancers, and his mother watching the dancers and Howard. To old Mrs. Stonesifer’s astonishment and Howard’s blushing agreement, Mariah with royal fuss hung her cameras one after another around Howard’s neck for safekeeping. He sat there proudly sashed and bandoliered with her photographic gear as she and Riley found space on the dance floor.
This was not the slow clinging spin in each other’s arms as it had been at The Lass in a Glass. But even while dancing apart as they now were, the two of them responded to each other like partners who have heard all possible tunes together. Again, as that night in Chinook, their eyes steadily searched each other’s.
When the song ended, they headed toward me.
I favored Riley with the question, “So how would you describe this band?” He responded, “It definitely isn’t elevator music.”
Mariah, though, was the one with something on her mind. She stood in front of me, a bit flushed from her round on the floor with Riley. “Dad,” she said, “how about dancing with me?”
“Mariah, I can’t dance to this stuff. Parts of my body would fall off.”
She gave me a monumental grin and said, “I’ll bet they can tone the music down just enough to keep you in one piece,” and she flashed away to the bandstand to put in her request to the singer.
I started to take this chance to say to Riley what I needed to, but he beat me to the draw by digging into the front pocket of his pants. “Before I forget, here,” and he handed me a folded wad of money.
Inquiry must have been written on me as large as the bankroll I was gaping down at.
“For Bago repairs, courtesy of the expense account,” Riley droned in what was probably a bean counter voice.
At that I rapidly performed finger arithmetic on the currency and sure enough, dented grill–lost hubcap–assorted ailing windows–and what all, it was the whole damages. All this and the surprise remuneration delivered by Baloney Express. By God, business was finally picking up as Montana approached its second hundred years.
I had to ask. “What’d you make up to charge this much off to?”
“Helicopter rental,” said the scribbler nonchalantly.
“Heli—? Christamighty, how are you ever going to get the BB to believe that?”
“By the note I stuck on that says we also used the flight to spot mountain goats up behind your ranch.”
• • •
After that, I almost hated to give him my news. And at first it did stupefy him. Riley was resilient, though, and by the time Mariah got back to tow me onto the dance floor, we left him looking only somewhat fogged over.
“So we’ve survived
the nicks of time . . .”
The music still had enough steel in it to be sold by the metric ton, but the woman singer was almost gentle now.
“Done our best against
the tricks of time . . .”
Whatever Mariah and I may have lacked in grace as a dance team we made up for in tall, our long McCaskill legs putting us at an eyelevel above almost all the other couples’. There was a privileged feeling in this, like being swimmers through water controlling itself into small bobbing waves, hundreds of them but each one head-size. I started to say something to Mariah about the specialness of this a.m. guitar cotillion scene, but she was immersed in it too, her eyes alight as our slow tour of the floor in each other’s arms brought us past what seemed the entire community of the Two Medicine country.
“They’ll say of us that
we had a past . . .”
Elbow to elbow, wall to wall, the Medicine Lodge was a rainbow swirl of twined couples. Dancers came in all varieties. A tall young woman with a ponytail stared soulfully over the hairline of her partner half a head shorter than her. Of the English Creek contingent, plaid-shirted Harold Busby, with an Abe Lincoln beard since I’d last seen him, twirled by with his wife Melody in a swishing black skirt with white fringe.
“But we know our way
to now at last . . .”
Althea Frew freighted me a chiding look as she steered an apprehensive Fred Musgreave by us. I felt a rump bump and glanced back to find it was Kenny, his jeans tucked in the tops of his boots, earnestly waltzing with his arms cocked wide and his behind canted out, as if about to grapple with Darleen as she tried to match steps with him.
But of them all, people in costumes of the past century, people dressed in everyday, people with generations behind them in the Two country, people newer to its demanding rhythm of seasons—of them all, I concentrated on Mariah, her lanky form perfectly following mine as we danced, her face intent on mine, on this time together. I could not but think to myself, how did Marce and I ever do it, give the world this flameheaded woman?
• • •
After the music, we rejoined Riley. He and Mariah talked matters over a last time as I just listened. Before any too much could be said, though, marching orders for all of us came from Althea, commandeering the singer’s mike: “It’s time, everyone! Out, out, out!”
True to her words, the crowd did begin to sluice out of the Medicine Lodge into the street, Amber Finletter and Arlee Zane at the door handing out to everybody, man woman child whatever, gold-colored ballcaps with DAWN OF MONTANA printed on the front. A
rlee and I somehow managed to thoroughly ignore each other even while he held out a cap which I took. Behind me Riley of course wanted to know if there were any with earflaps for the Two Medicine climate, but then clapped a cap onto his frizzhead insofar as it would go and trooped on out with the rest of us.
It was breezy and then some, I will say. Quite a swooshing overhead as the wind gusted around in the tops of the cottonwoods. But Two Medicine people are born recognizing the nearest windbreak, and the centennial crowd now divided almost exactly to bunch in front of either the Mercantile or the Gleaner office, the empty lot with the flagpole between them, in a way that reminded me of sheep on either side of a fast creek. Meanwhile Riley for once had an idea that was useful as well as bright. I reluctantly loaned him the keys and he hustled off and moved the Bago around to the alley behind the Merc and the Gleaner, parking it broadside across the back of the flagpole lot to block at least a fraction of the wind.
Before I quite knew it, Althea had herself and me up into the back of Arlee Zane’s auctioneering pickup, our vehicular speaking stand for the occasion. Above, the ropes still sang in their pulleys on the flagpole, but Althea seemed to regard it as the most refreshing weather of the entire century as she bustled forward to the microphone setup to introduce me.
I only half-heard her toasty testimonial to me, occupied as I was with my own words to come, the shapes and shadows of all I had to try to articulate. When is a person ever fit to speak for his native patch of ground? Old Churchill must have been something beyond a human being. Too quickly, Althea’s pertinent part was ringing out—“and it’s my deep personal pleasure to present to you our Dawn of Montana speaker, Jick McCaskill!”—and I was up there peering out over the loudspeaking apparatus atop the pickup cab and having the microphone bestowed on me reverently by Althea.
There in the half-light, sunrise impending only a number of minutes away, I could make out individual faces of the crowd. I could see Mariah’s Dawn of Montana cap, backward on her head to keep the bill out of the way of her camera. I could pick out the screen glow of Riley’s word processor where he’d perched it on the pickup fender down in front of me. For the first time, it struck me that words of mine here might pass into print via Riley. The Montanian’s last centennial story, me at his laptop mercy. The thought of that once would have scared me spitless, but now I simply smiled at it as fact. Ink outlasts blood.
So I began.
“I don’t really have the best feet for it, but I’m following in my mother’s footsteps here. Hers was a Fourth of July speech, back when Montana was only half this old—and some of us were as young as it was possible to be, it seems now. The idea, there at that holiday gathering of the Two Medicine country in 1939, was for her to commemorate the pioneer Ben English and the creek that carries his name for us.”
Silent this morning within the greater rush of the wind, English Creek flowed at the edge of the town, of the crowd, of the amplified reach of the speaker’s voice.
I held the pages of my speech firmly in both hands against the zephyrs both outside and within me. “Most of you knew my mother, at least in her last years, so you know that from Beth McCaskill you customarily got more of what was on her mind rather than less. I suppose it shouldn’t have been any surprise”—although it mightily had been; I could yet see my father in breathless freeze beside me on the picnic grass as we heard her multiply that occasion up from mere ritual—“when she began to speak not only about English Creek, where my father’s ranger station was at the time, but of Noon Creek, where she was born on the ranch I have operated for the past forty years.”
I drew a breath and made it into those words of my mother’s:
“ ‘Two creeks, two valleys, two claims on my heart,’ she said on that day in 1939. And being Beth McCaskill she was not about to stop at that. No, she proceeded to call the roll of dead ranches along Noon Creek. Of the families who had to leave those places during the Depression with the auction hammer echoing in their ears. The Torrance place, the Emrich place, the Chute place, old Thad Wainwright’s place. The Fain place, the Eiseley place, the Nansen place.” Places, all, she knew as vacant and doomed; but where my hotblooded brother and the Leona of then found spring shelter for what their bodies wanted. “Places that are still being added to, yet today, across the emptying parts of this state. A little while back you maybe read, as I did, how Riley Wright summed up a lot of this: ‘Of all of Montana’s hard weather, the reliably worst has been its economic climate.’ ”
Only the sound of the wind making the cottonwoods give followed into the pause of his words.
“There are goodbyes to be said today besides our farewell to Montana’s original century,” I spoke it out while watching the writing figure. “The person down here doing the story of our ceremony, the selfsame Riley Wright, is one of those who is leaving for a life elsewhere. What he’s going to find to say about us this morning, heaven only knows and even it usually has to guess, where Riley is concerned.” For that he cocked an applesauce eyebrow at me but kept typing. “Riley and I have not always seen eye to eye. But I’ll say this for him: life never looks quite the same after Riley Wright has shown it to you.”
I paused and peeked down at him as the crowd clapped a sendoff for Riley. It was hard to be sure under partial light, but the sonofagun may have blushed.
I made myself resume.
“The other leave-taking, the one that makes today’s goodbyes plural, is geographically closer to home. This one—no offense to Riley, but this other one knocks an even bigger hole in me. This other one is my—”
My throat caught, and I looked out at my daughter in the crowd, Mariah with her camera down, giving me her validating grin; I swallowed as hard as I ever have and finished the saying of it:
“—self.”
There was a stir at that. Of all the honors there are, that moment of the Two country’s twinge toward me is what I will take.
“My leaving is of my ranch,” I went on. “The Reese place, as it began. Part of it also the Ramsay place, the homestead of my grand-mother’s side of the family. The McCaskill place, I guess since I had a moment of sanity about forty years ago and came back to the Two country from other pursuits and married Marcella and we settled in to work the place, our place. Now, though. Now like so many others I’ve had to face the day when the land and the McCaskill family no longer match up. It is no easy thing to admit”—all of them within listening range knew so, yet I had to tell them the specific hardness of it—“because I have always believed, as the people before us did and as I’m sure you have, that he who owns the soil owns up to the sky.”
His words climbed as he threw his head back to outspeak a gust that rattled his pages, to send his voice higher, stronger. Language is the light that comes out of us. Imagine the words as if they are our way of creating earthlight, as if what is being spoken by this man in a windswept dawn is going to carry everlastingly upward, the way starshine is pulsing constantly across the sky of time to us. Up through the black canyons of space, the sparks we utter; motes of wordfire that we glimpse leaving on their constellating flight, and call history.
“So, when you’ve got it to do,” I resumed like a man resolved, “you wrestle the question until you see where it falls. The automatic answer is to let my ranch follow all the others on Noon Creek. Go the way”—the Double W way, the conglomerate way, I did not even need to say—“that such places economically have to go, we all know.”
I took an even firmer grip on the pages of my talk and headed into what I had to say next.
“However.”
Funny, how that lone word made Shaun Finletter suddenly look as if his arithmetic had been smudged.
“The automatic way of doing things isn’t necessarily mine, any more,” I kept at the matter. “I’ve maybe learned a little something about being usefully ornery, from the company I’ve been keeping these past few months.” Mariah only paused for a half-second in biting off the leader of an exposed roll of fil
m in her lightning reload of the camera. Riley gave me a gaze of kitten innocence. “Anyway,” I delivered the rest of it, “I’m leaving my ranch, yes. But leaving it to . . .”
• • •
The Nature Conservancy guy on the other end of the phone the night before had sounded simultaneously enthused and curious, as if he wished he could peer across the distance from Helena to Noon Creek and gauge me face to face.
“Naturally we’re interested in a piece of country like yours, Mr. McCaskill. We try to keep real track of what’s left of the original biology there along the Rocky Mountain Front, and those native grasses on the prairie part of your place qualify for the kind of preservation we want to do. We know how you’ve taken care of that land. What, ah, did you have in mind?”
When I told him for comparison what the Double Dub through Shaun was offering me, he responded: “We don’t always have the dollars to pay market value like that, but there’s a way of doing it called a bargain sale. What that is, the differential between the market value of a ranch such as yours and what the Conservancy can afford to pay qualifies as a charitable gift; it comes off your income tax load, you net out on it. Let me run some numbers by you, okay?”
After that trot across the calculator, I said to him:
“Good enough. The outfit is yours, if you can do a couple of other things for me.”
“And those are?”
I laid it on him that Kenny and Darleen had to be kept for at least a year, given a chance to perform the upkeep or caretaking or whatever on the place. “They aren’t either one exactly whiz kids, but they’re hell for work.” My figuring was that the two of them would be able to show their worth okay within a year, but also that it conceivably might take every minute of that span.
“We can stand them, it sounds like,” the Conservancy director granted in a dry tone. “And the other thing?”
When I told him, his voice sat up straighter.
“Actually, we’ve been thinking about a preserve for those someplace on this side of the mountains, if we could manage to get enough land together out north from Pine Butte.”