Wolf Willow, Page 29

  “Borrow it.”

  “Go in debt to stay up here?”

  “Molly,” he said, and she heard the slow gather of determination in his voice, “when else could we pick up cattle for twenty dollars a head with sucking calves thrown in? When else could we get a whole ranch layout for a few hundred bucks? That Good-night herd we were running was the best herd in Canada, maybe anywhere. This spring roundup we could take our pick of what’s left, including bulls, and put our brand on ‘em and turn ’em into summer range and drive everything else to Malta. We wouldn’t want more than three-four hundred head. We can swing that much, and we can cut enough hay to bring that many through even a winter like this last one.”

  She watched him; her eyes groped and slipped. He said, “We’re never goin’ to have another chance like this as long as we live. This country’s goin’ to change; there’ll be homesteaders in here soon as the railroad comes. Towns, stores, what you’ve been missin‘. Women folks. And we can sit out here on the Whitemud with good hay land and good range and just make this God darned country holler uncle.”

  “How long?” she said. “How long have you been thinking this way?”

  “Since we got John’s letter.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “I kept waitin’ for you to get the idea yourself. But you were hell bent to get out.”

  She escaped his eyes, looked down, shifted carefully to accommodate the wild thing snuggled in darkness at her waist, and as she moved, her foot scuffed up the scalloped felt edge of the buffalo robe. By her toe was a half-crushed crocus, palely lavender, a thing so tender and unbelievable in the waste of brown grass under the great pour of sky that she cried out, “Why, good land, look at that!”—taking advantage of it both as discovery and as diversion.

  “Crocus?” Ray said, bending. “Don’t take long, once the snow goes.”

  It lay in her palm, a thing lucky as a four-leaf clover, and as if it had had some effect in clearing her sight, Molly looked down the south-facing slope and saw it tinged with faintest green. She put the crocus to her nose, but smelled only a mild freshness, an odor no more showy than that of grass. But maybe enough to cover the scent of carrion.

  Her eyes came up and found Ray’s watching her steadily. “You think we could do it,” she said.

  “I know we could.”

  “It’s a funny time to start talking that way, when I’m on my way out.”

  “You don’t have to stay out.”

  Sniffing the crocus, she put her right hand under the mackinaw until her fingers touched fur. The pup stiffened but did not turn or snap. She moved her fingers softly along his back, willing him tame. For some reason she felt as if she might burst out crying.

  “Haven’t you got any ambition to be the first white woman in five hundred miles?” Ray said.

  Past and below him, three or four miles off, she saw the great slough darken under a driving cloud shadow and then brighten to a blue that danced with little wind-whipped waves. She wondered what happened to the ice in a slough like that, whether it went on down the little flooded creeks to add to the jams in the Whitemud and Swift Current, or whether it just rose to the surface and gradually melted there. She didn’t suppose it would be spectacular like the break-up in the river.

  “Mumma and Dad would think we’d lost our minds,” she said. “How much would we have to borrow?”

  “Maybe six or eight thousand.”

  “Oh Lord!” She contemplated the sum, a burden of debt heavy enough to pin them down for life. She remembered the winter, six months of unremitting slavery and imprisonment. She lifted the crocus and laid it against Ray’s dark scarred cheek.

  “You should never wear lavender,” she said, and giggled at the very idea, and let her eyes come up to his and stared at him, sick and scared. “All right,” she said. “If it’s what you want.”

  IV

  TOWN AND COUNTRY

  My native town was a mining town in the Sierra Nevada —a place five or six years older than myself. My earliest recollections include the very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new com munity. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner’s grave was to be found in a lonely spot not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. I dimly reflected that this sort of life had apparently been going on ever since men dwelt in that land. The logs and graves looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long inter ested the people of whose love for my country I had heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life’s business was to find out what all this wonder meant.

  JOSIAH ROYCE, The Hope of the Great Community

  1

  The Town Builders

  Until after the turn of the century—until after the winter of 1906-07, in fact—the population of the Cypress Hills country was thin and mobile. The typical ranch was a little home place and a big lease, the typical way of life a calculated movement between summer and winter range and between range and railroad. But something new came in with the owners of the Lazy-S.

  Though they began as ranchers, they were not wanderers; and very early in their residence in the valley of the Whitemud they started the drift that could lead only to permanence and people. One of them in particular had the Myth of the Garden bad, but he had it in a special way, for he was no homesteader bent on hewing out a family home in the wilderness, but a town-builder with a manorial imagination. Though he would not have recognized himself in literary form, he is a common figure in our novels, from Cooper’s Judge Temple, who gave Leatherstocking so much trouble with his settlement law, to Captain Forrester, who declines so symbolically in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. He was literally the father of our town. He did not want to be merely a tenant of Eden, he wanted to be its founder, creator, landlord, and patron.

  Call the partners Martin and Fisher. Their money came from a business in Butte that some said was restaurant, some saloon, some gambling joint, and some whorehouse. All the descriptions may have had validity, for all I know. In any case there was plenty of money, and along with the money a compulsion to dream big. Fisher I never knew, but I have a 1906 photograph of him on horseback and in a Chihuahua hat, with Schulz’s great staghound beside him, under the flume that crossed the eastern reach of the Whitemud. He is only a name and a somewhat theatrical picture. But Martin was the rich man of my boyhood, his son Homer the rich boy, his wife Nellie the grande dame. Because Pop Martin shaped much of the structure of the town of Whitemud, he shaped my perceptions and recollections; because he blew in a certain way, my vane turned to match his wind.

  The Martins lived in the big Lazy-S ranch house surrounded by screened verandas. They had a Chinese cook (Mah Li’s brother Mah Jim) and an English maid, and on moonlit winter nights there was sometimes a team and a bobsled full of straw, with a ranch hand to drive, and the word went through town like the news of an exposed nerve in a tooth, so that we came laboring and slipping, panting smoke into the iron air, and flopped behind the belly-flopping sled last in line, and caught ankles and hung on, and felt our ankles caught in turn, and so strung out, a black line with the moon pouring on us and the trailside snow touched with red from the lantern on the endgate, until we reached the Swift Current hill where the best coasting was.

  Eheu. They are the material for a sermon on the vanity of human wishes. The last time I saw Homer Martin he was jerking soda in a Hollywood drugstore; his mother was running a beauty parlor that catered to the stars; his father was long dead and longer bankrupt. By that time, twenty years or so after Pop Martin founded our town, half its population had drifted out or been driven out; Mah Jim had taken Mah Li’s body back to China for burial among his ancestors; the English maid Irene, married for a while to one of th
e cowpunchers, had divorced him out of love of a married man. After we left Whitemud she lived with us for a while in Salt Lake City: I helped pump her out one night when she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Later she returned to Whitemud, married again, bought our old house in the west end, and lived there in apparent content until she died of cancer.

  So far off and long ago, so wavering across time like rain on a windowpane! Poor Irene did not find contentment easily. Nearly a half century ago she scared me half out of my skin when, sent to her house on some errand, I found her drinking with friends at her kitchen table. She had a crying jag well begun, and when I arrived unseen in the doorway she was telling the others, through angry tears, that she was not ashamed of her shape. While they laughed, she started yanking at her clothes. Her skirt was kicked against the wall, her shirtwaist came off. She was down to her high laced shoes and the frilled pants that the British call knickers before she saw me. “Peeping little bugger!” she said, and came for me with her big breasts bobbing. I looked back once, in time to see her friends catch and hold her at the ditchbank, but by that time I was a block away, and gaining. That is one of the saddest memories I carry with me from that town. It was a hard town on women.

  But for men, or at least men of a certain gambler kind, it opened up into the future with the triumphant certainty of a pat flush picked up card by card.

  Martin and Fisher bought the Lazy-S brand in 1902, and moved it to the bottomlands at the east edge of the hills. They stocked it with whitefaces the next spring, and the year following, taking advantage of the territorial law which permitted acquisition at low cost of lands brought under irrigation, they completed a dam —really a weir—across the Whitemud a couple of miles west of the ranch. With the diversion planks in, the weir raised the level of the river enough to send water down the main ditch to irrigate about 500 acres. In winter the planks were removed, so that in the spring breakup floodwater could carry the ice smoothly over the whole structure.

  Eheu again. I loved that dam and the main ditch. Almost as much as the river they defined my world of town. For a reason I never understood, the pilings of the dam’s anchoring buttresses were a place much liked by weasels. I caught four prime ermine in that one spot in the winter of 1918, and the only mink my brother and I ever succeeded in trapping came out of the ice-shelled little rapid below. As for the ditch, I learned to swim in it, I walked its welted banks to school and Sunday School and town, I played shove-your-neighbor on its narrow plank foot-bridges. When there was a gopher to be drowned out anywhere in the town area, we ran to and from the ditch with lard pails, leaving our old dog Caesar trembling at the mouth of the burrow, ready to snap on any slicked-down drowned-rat head if it popped out of the guggle and sink of the hole. There was a lovely summer sound the ditch made, flowing softly against its banks and waving the long grasses like hair; at the weirs that diverted it off into side ditches the water poured curves of amber glass. In winter the dry channel drifted full of snow and made a place for forts and entrenchments. And there was always, whenever we got over into the east end of town, the flume. What the children of Whitemud got out of Martin’s irrigation system was not the thing he built it for, but I can’t help thinking it important.

  Martin and Fisher were not seriously hurt by the winter of 1906-07, for they had good bottom hay land. And anyway, cattle were not their true business. They were horse men, and being gamblers they liked horses that could run. They leased and fenced three entire townships—nearly 70,000 acres, 48 miles of fence—on the southern flank of the hills and stocked that princely pasture with a band of brood mares and a champion trotter stud. They imported several sulkies and laid out a trotting track inside the western bend. By the time we arrived, the dream of feudal grandeur had altered to a dream of unearned increment, and the racetrack was gone, but there was still something. Every time we stopped along the trail for lunch on our racking sixteen-hour drive to the homestead in the spring, those wild range horses used to come with a rush and a drive and a flow of manes and tails to stand prick-eared on the ridge and send our team into nervous whickerings. Perhaps Martin never made a dollar from his horses, perhaps he made them profitable selling them as remounts to the Mounted Police; in any case I owe him something for that part of his dream too. To see two or three hundred horses as wild as antelope, shining black and blood bay and sorrel and chestnut, pour across that apparently limitless pasture under that big sky—beautiful wild creatures born to run, and a country made to run in—that was something to catch at the breath. I have seen my mother watch them with tears in her eyes. I hope Pop Martin got as much as we did out of his horse ranch.

  Without the coming of the branch railroad, Martin and Fisher might have remained for a long time lords of a free and enviable domain. But they had been counting on the railroad, and had probably helped promote it. Like other pioneers, they would have believed in Progress, and would have realized no better than others how surely Progress destroys what makes a frontier satisfying. I do not know that any record exists of the deal they made with the Canadian Pacific to guarantee themselves a townsite. If they had offered the railroad a block of lots they would not have been entirely out of line with common practice. In any event they assured themselves not merely a townsite but a division point, and in 1913, when the line began building out from Moose Jaw, they surveyed their bottomland into lots and formed the Whitemud Townsite Company. Thus the accidental huddling of people that had begun with Cowie’s Hudson’s Bay Company post, and had later become a mutually helpful ranch, post office, and Mountie detachment, was ready to move on toward the system, the legal structure, the permanence, and the density of population that both town-father fantasies and the profit motive suggested.

  2

  Whitemud, Saskatchewan

  It began crude, but it began strenuous. The first meeting of the Village Council was held on March 30, 1914, when the population was 117. Its first act was to establish the town nuisance ground on land donated by Pop Martin. In doing so it corroborated a truth known wherever men have gathered into permanent communities: we are the dirtiest species, and must make provision for our wastes. At the end of May, when we arrived, Whitemud was a straggle of shacks, a general store, a frame hotel, a railroad boarding house, and some derailed dining and box cars rigged for housekeeping. In wet weather the town’s one street was gouged and furrowed; in dry it was a river of gray powder, with saddle horses and teams dozing at the hitching bars and flies rising and settling over mounds of dung.

  By July 9 a live-wire Board of Trade had opened bids for plank sidewalks, thereby earning the gratitude of every woman in the place. It was not merely mud and dust that women found troublesome. My mother complained that one of the worst things was the way we all wore our shoes out at the toes, kicking through the weeds and sweet clover. Until we took up moccasins, she solved the problem for my brother and me by letting us run barefoot in good weather, and by having our shoe-toes capped with sheet copper. But for a lady there were no such alternatives. I remember, as a rueful commentary on how the amenities suffered among us, the lopped-over high laced shoes in her cupboard, with their heels worn down and their toes whipped and roughened.

  On July 17 we had our first stampede, down in the bend where Martin’s racetrack had been. That was the stampede at which I adopted Slivers, who won the saddle bronc competition, as my guide in life. (As for me, my brother and I took fourth in a three-legged race for boys seven and under, and I finished out of the money, trussed and humiliated, unable even to get up without help, in the children’s sack race.)

  By September we had street lights—about a half dozen as I remember—hanging globes of popping radiance between blocks of absolute blackness along Main Street. Off that street we still groped along footpaths by moonlight or starlight or the light of coal-oil lanterns that threw blobs of shadow around a walker’s feet and confused more than they illuminated. The lighting of the town illustrated how rigid a pattern habit can impose on a new community. To do
any good, the lighting system should have strung itself out along the paths that spoked and took shortcuts through the bottoms, instead of reaching out a road where nobody lived and nobody walked at night.

  Before the village was anything but a shack camp, the press and type of the Whitemud Leader, having served one tour of duty in another forming Saskatchewan town, arrived from Gull Lake by wagon. By June 11 the first issue was on the street, full of oil prospects, clay prospects, glass prospects, filings and pre emptions, opportunities, and suggestions to the Board of Trade. Shortly it could add patriotism to its normal frontier frenzy of practical optimism, for on August 4, honoring her treaty with invaded Belgium, England declared war on Germany, and Canada acquired the double duty of providing cannon fodder and growing bread to feed the cannon fodder. The Dominion sent around recruiters, the Province dispatched a Better Farming Train to teach Cockneys and Ukrainians how to grow wheat. A man without funds could get a government loan of Red Fife seed wheat, specially developed in Manitoba for the short growing season of northern latitudes. There was still plenty of land for the filing, though it might be, like ours, fifty miles from a town or a railroad, and though the man who filed on it might find himself in a Flanders trench before he could get a crop in the ground.

  Church and school arrived almost simultaneously with the press. During Whitemud’s first summer a pair of vacationing seminary students, one a Presbyterian and the other a Methodist, camped together out by the dam, living an idyl and pooling their rival theological systems for Sunday services in the room above Christenson’s pool hall. When they returned to school in September the pool hall’s loft became the town’s first school, where fifteen of us learned to read and write and cipher to the click and mutter of farmers playing rotation pool in the billiard hell below. If we needed to go out we raised one or two fingers and were excused to visit the pool hall’s privy, whose walls taught us reading faster than the school blackboard did. If we wanted a drink we got to go down to the pool hall itself, a place that smelled of lignite smoke and wet boots and the sweetness of pop and the sour-yeasty smell of beer, and ask one of the men sitting around to reach us down a dipperful from the pail of river water on a shelf in the corner.