“It’s got to be part of the deal,” I made good and sure. “The name and everything.”
Through the phone earpiece I could all but hear the land preservation honcho thinking Holy smoke, we don’t get many ranchers who are such a big buddy of . . . Then with determination he said: “We’ll do it.”
I took a pleasant moment to cast a gaze east from the ranch house, out across the moonlit hay meadows and grass country between there and my fenceline with the Double W. If Pine Butte could be kept a fen, this ranch could be kept a range. After all, WW Inc. wanted to see maximum animal units on this piece of land, didn’t it? It was about to have them. Buffalo. A whole neighboring ranchful. Right in here next to a corporate cow pasture would now be the Toussaint Rennie Memorial Bison Range, original inhabitants of this prairie, nice big rambunctious butting ones. Let the sonofabitching Double W tend its fences against those, for a change.
The Nature Conservancy headman, trying to keep delight out of his tone, carefully checked to see that we were really concluded. “That’s all the details of our transaction then, Mr. McCaskill? We sure appreciate your doing this.”
“One more thing,” I said into the phone. “Happy next hundred years.”
• • •
“I guess I see this as giving back to the earth some of the footing it has given to me and mine,” I told the intent crowd now. “If we McCaskills no longer will be on that particular ground, at least the family of existence will possess it. That kind of lineage needs fostering too, I’ve come to think—our kinship with the land.”
Mariah, of course operating as if she and I and the camera were the only three for miles around, had come climbing up over the bumper onto the other front fender of the auctioneering pickup and was kneeling there for a closeup of me framed between the loudspeaker horns.
“Speaking of lineage . . .” I resorted to with a rueful glance down at this ambushing daughter.
When the audience had its laugh at that, I looked from the impervious lens of Mariah to them and back to her again before I could resume.
“Mariah here is going into the next hundred years in her own style, as you might expect. She begins it immediately after our ceremony today. With Riley leaving—our loss and California’s gain, but they need all they can get—maybe the Montanian figured it might as well trade in Mariah’s job too. In any case, her new arrangement is—I don’t know what something like this is actually called, but Mariah is being turned loose on this state as the Montanian’s photographer at large.”
• • •
When she and I came off the dance floor to him this morning, Riley looked at her as if he was seeing the last one of a kind. “I still think we could’ve made it work this time, Mariah Montana.”
“I don’t,” Mariah said gently but firmly, “and that’d have been a fatal start right there.”
“You know, that’s the trouble with reality checks,” Riley said as if he’d been asked for a diagnosis. “They fuck up the possibilities of imagination.”
“Better that than us,” she gave him back, keeping her tone as deliberately light as his. “Riley, you know what?”
“I hope you’re not going to tell me this builds character,” he said in the voice of a man somewhere between keeping his pride and facing loss.
“Huh uh, worse. What I finally figured out is that you and I love just some of each other, mostly the job parts. We collaborate like a house afire. If the centennial trip went on forever maybe we could too. But that’s just it—beyond our work, we make trouble for each other. We didn’t manage to wear any of the rough edges off each other in three years of being married, and trying it again would be just more of the same. New try, new place, new whatever, but we’d be the same.” Mariah cocked her head as if it was her turn to diagnose. “We’re each in our own way so ungodly focused.”
“Spoken like a photographer,” he couldn’t resist intoning.
“What it is, Riley,” she said as quietly as before, “we can’t keep up with each other. I don’t know anything to be done about that and I think you don’t either.” Still looking at Riley, Mariah inclined her head toward me. “Jick McChurchill here would probably say we’re geared too different. You’ve got a definite direction of what you want to do, and it turns out I’ve got mine.”
“I’ve got to point out, Mariah,” Riley said with care, “staying put is a funny kind of direction.”
“Mmm. I know. I’m maybe a funny kind.” She looked at me in a way that made Riley do the same. “I come by it honestly, huh?” But then she turned to him again, her gray eyes delivering quietly but definitely to his gray and blue. “If I go to California because of your chance there, I’m tagging after. If you stay here in Montana because of me, you’re tagging after. Riley, neither one of us is cut out for that, are we.”
Riley had known ever since the motel in Ekalaka; Mariah was distinctive even in fashioning a goodbye. After that, the BB was undoubtedly the easier case, Mariah letting him blab on about how very unique her photowork in the centennial series had been until he found himself agreeing that her best use of talent would be to keep on picturing Montana as it struggled with Century Number Two, wouldn’t it.
And so Riley for once didn’t argue. There in the Medicine Lodge, waiting to do their last piece before it became Mariah’s job to rove and his to transplant himself to the Globe column, he managed at least a semblance of his sly look as he said to her: “You may be right—we’re maybe a little advanced to be playing tag.” But for half a moment I felt sorry for Riley, going off to California with just his mustache for company.
• • •
“The last some months,” the microphone carried my words, “I’ve been on the go in parts of this state of ours that I’d scarcely even heard of. A lot of my daily reading since the Fourth of July has been roadmaps, and it eventually dawned on me that Montana is the only state of the continental forty-eight that is a full time zone wide. Where the Clark Fork River crosses into Idaho it gains into Pacific time, and when the Missouri River flows across into North Dakota an hour is adjusted onto life from there to the Great Lakes—while we here beside the Continental Divide that sends those rivers on their way exist on Mountain time. And I wonder whether Montana maybe fills a span of time all to itself in more than just that map sense.
“An awful amount of what I saw across this state, what Riley wrote of and Mariah caught in her pictures, does raise the question of what we’ve got to celebrate about. Montana has a tattered side. You look at the blowing away prairies that never should have been cut by a plow and the little towns they are taking with them, you look at the dump heaps and earth poisons left by mining, you look at so many defeated lives on the Indian reservations, you look at a bottom wage way of life that drives our young people generation after generation to higher jobs elsewhere, you look at the big lording it over the little in so much of our politics and economy and land—you look at these warps in Montana and they add up in a hurry to a hundred years of pretty sad behavior.
“Then you draw a deep breath, get a little of this endemic fresh air sweeping through your brain”—the wind surged stronger than ever through the treetops, and members of the audience made sure they weren’t beneath cottonwood limbs that could crash down—“and you look at the valleys that are the green muscles on the rock bones of this state, you look at the last great freeflowing river in the continental U.S., the Yellowstone; you look at people who’ve been perpetually game to outwork the levels of pay here because they can love a mountain with their eyes while doing it, you look at the unbeatable way the land latches into the sky here atop the Rocky Mountain Front or on the curve of the planet across the eastern plains—and you end up calculating that our first hundred years could have been spent worse.
“So, what I’ve come to think is that Montana exists back and forth that way. That this wide state is a kind of teeter-totter of time. Maybe that expanse, and our born-into-us belief here that life is an up and down proposition, are what g
ive us so much room and inclination to do both our worst and our best.”
Do they hear us yet, the far suns of the night? A hundred years may be only enough to start the waft of our words, the echo chorus of what we have been like. The voices wing up and up, trying to clock us into the waiting sum of time. A man on the roof of the Helena Herald that morning an exact century ago, shouting down into the streets the telegraph news: “Statehood!” The accented cluck of a Danish-born teamster reining his horses around as they grade the roadbed of the Great Northern railway. A homestead wife weeping alone in her first days of cabined isolation, saying over and over “I will not cry, I will not” until at last she does not. The potentates of Anaconda Copper calculating the profits of extraction and the social costs of it not at all. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin’s unique double “No!” in the stampede votes for war, spaced apart by the years between World War One and World War Two. Grudges and fears, our tellings carry starward. Doubts and dreams and hopes. Eloquence of loss, a Montana specialty. Love’s whisperings . . .
Sounds of distance have changed with the years. I found so when I placed the other call last night, after settling the ranch matter with the Conservancy. No longer comes the silent stretch of time as you wait for the other person to be summoned to the phone. The phone miles now have a kind of fizz to them, a restless current of connection as if the air is being held apart to make way for the words back and forth. I have made other calls in my life that I thought were vital—Christamighty, I had just done one—but what I said into the phone now pulsed out of me as if I had been rehearsing for it forever. Maybe a person at last knows when he is ready. Maybe he simply can’t stand being unready any longer. Whichever, I spoke it all into the humming listening miles.
“Jick, I didn’t expect . . . isn’t this sort of—quick?” Leona said at the other end.
“Not if you count from fifty years ago. I’d say we better get started and make up for lost time.”
“Is this a proposal? Because you know I haven’t been able to bring myself to remarry . . . and you said you aren’t really sure eith—”
“A kind of one. Enough of one to get us started, how about.”
At that, she was nowhere near as overcome with surprise as a certain son of hers had been. This morning when Mariah had gone off to the bandstand to modulate the music and I’d used that opportunity to tell Riley what Leona and I intended, he looked at me like Wednesday looks at Friday. Then asked in a stupefied way:
“Wait, wait, let me get this straight. Are you telling me you’re marrying my mother?”
I couldn’t resist. Actually, I didn’t try overly hard.
“Who said anything about marrying? We figure we’ll just see how things go.”
Even over the phone I’d been able to feel the smile that came into Leona’s tone after I suggested we simply try life together, preacherless. The two of us, spend some time here in Gros Ventre in the house I’d be buying with the ranch money, some time there on the Wright ranch if I solemnly promised to Morgan not to get in the way—or whenever we felt like it, do some Bago travel.
“Without being chaperoned by Riley and Mariah?” she came back at me with a laugh.
“We outlasted them fair and square, so here’s our chance,” I advocated.
She had to turn serious, though. We both did. Leona phrased it slowly, still more than a little afraid of it.
“Jick, is this because of Alec in some way?”
I wanted that said, I needed for her to know the full terms. It freed me to state the new truth:
“No. Finally, it isn’t because of that.”
The rest of my phone performance tumbled out fast. I told my intent listener that the stirrings I felt were for her, Leona Wright as she now was, and not some vanished girl who never married my brother. That I knew we were both shaky about defining love all over again at our age but I hoped she felt enough toward me to give this a try. That the time we had already spent together justified sharing some more, that we needed to see whether it could extend into years. Into lasting together. The gold ring kind of lasting if it developed that way, but any kind that proved enduring was worth a whirl. That—
Leona quit listening and spoke back across the miles.
“Yes,” she magically said. “Yes to it all. Let’s be together, Jick, and see from there.”
We spent a delicious excited minute working out how and when to start, then each fell silent, not wanting the goodbye. After a bit Leona said in that woodsmoke voice of hers:
“Jick?”
“Yeah?”
“You are a wonder.”
All, all the spoken sparks we are capable of kindling, trying to pattern us against the nightdrop. And reflecting back into us, as this man is saying in the Gros Ventre near-dawn, as the afterglint we know as memory.
“Memories are stories our lives tell us,” I went to now, seeing Althea check her watch meaningfully. “I believe that you can’t come to a day such as this one, a gathering such as we all are, without hearing those murmurs from within ourselves. One such, in me this moment, is of seeing Lila Sedgwick on these streets, when she was as old as I was young. Lila’s own mind by then had some better days than others, but no days were clear, any more. Yet it was because of Lila, the unclouded Lila when she was young in 1889, that we are at this ceremony this dawn. When Lila’s mind no longer could tell her the story of that morning a hundred years ago, it lived on in another memory. Toussaint Rennie told it to me, and I want to speak it now, to pass it into your memories.”
The cadences of Toussaint, the rememberer of the earlier Two country, began in me now.
“ ‘Way before dawn. Out to the flagpole, everybody. It was still dark as cats, but Dantley from the livery stable had a lantern. Lila says, “This is the day of statehood. This is Montana’s new day.” Sedge puts up the new flag, there it was.’ ”
Then in my own refound voice:
“As those first Montanans did, let’s now put up our flag and, for as long as our eyes or our memories hold out, see what we can make our days bring.”
As the applause resounded the flag-raising team set to business, the furled cylinder of fabric being carried to them at the base of the pole by many arms . . .
The next thing was, I was blindsided by Mariah, hugging and kissing me and declaring I had an entire new career ahead as a public spieler. I told her I hoped to Christ not, then held her just far enough away to gauge as I said: “Petunia, I hope you’re ending up out of all this okay. I mean, without any—company?”
Mariah performed the little sidetoss of her head, the proud cascade of hair clearing away from her gray eyes as if offering me the clearest possible look into them, into her.
“You know how Missoula is,” she stated with a grin. “Somebody interesting will come along.” She swung her gaze just for a moment past me to the figure scrutinizing the flag ceremony and tapping steadily into his writing machine, soldiering on. “Riley did.”
Now ready to hoist, four men take grips on the lariat-thick lanyard . . .
“So when do you have to head down the road?” Mariah issued next, her camera up and ready but not yet firing as we turned to watch the flag-raising.
“Right after this.” By afternoon the Bago and I would be there at the other ceremony, when Leona and her women’s club videoed the Crazy Mountains country for their Sisters of Peace to see.
“Tell your sweetie for me I hope her Russian pronunciation knocks their garters off in Moscow,” Mariah instructed.
“I surely will.”
The flag-raisers had their hands full. Shaun Finletter and Joe Prentiss and Kevin Frew and Larry Van Der Wende, strong men all, were hefting down hard on the rope, but only slowly did the flag do any significant unfolding, the attached end streaming up in a draggy thin triangle as more and more of the tremendous bundle lifted out of the holders’ arms. They were going to have to go some to get it all the way aloft by sunrise.
Then, though. Then the streamer was high e
nough to reach the full wind, funneling over the Bago between the buildings, and the golden cloth caught at that force, bellying like a boatsail. The men pulled and pulled, the giant flag billowing out and out, writhing up through the air.
“Christamighty, listen to that!”
Why I let that out I don’t know, for Mariah beside me plainly was hearing the same astounding thing. Everybody in Gros Ventre was, maybe everybody period. Now snugged against the top of the pole, up in that storm of air the blowing flag was making a sound that filled the sky, a roaring crackle like a vast fire blazing. Blizzard, chinook, squall, gale, I thought I had heard them all but never this. Ultimate Montana wind and great field of cloth, they were creating thunderous melody of flow over our heads.
The central emblem panel of THE TWO MEDICINE COUNTRY 1889 1989 GREETS THE DAWN OF MONTANA shimmered, as if in emphasis, every time the wind powerfully snapped the flag into another loud rumple.
But suddenly there was a new, quicker, dancier snap of rhythm within the flag roar.
The upper border of the flag, the sheep-cow-horse repeating design, was flying on its own, as if the livestock were bucking free of the heavier fabric beneath.
Then the panel below that, with the sewn-on representation of a Blackfeet chief’s headdress, tore free and similarly flew from the flag rope on its own.
The crowd, stunned, awed, whatever, gaped up in silence until there came the vexed voice of Althea Frew:
“Oh, foo.”
One by one the other sewn seams were freeing themselves there in the wild ride of the wind, the bottom border of forest and stream abruptly a separate wing of banner, next the stitchwork panel of Gros Ventre’s buildings undulating independently as if the wind had lifted the entire town.
“Every part up there’s got a mind of its own!” a voice—odds were it was one of the Baloney Express bunch—called out, setting off laughter.
“By God, this’ll give us something to remember!” someone else shouted, and the laughter grew.