Bucking the Sun, page 3
• • •
Charlene Duff wondered how it had come to this, that she all of a sudden was jealous of a mound of dirt.
The Fort Peck Dam occupied Owen from the minute he heard the rumor of it. The next thing Charlene knew, the job there had plucked him away and left her rattling around the apartment in Bozeman. Housing would be flung up at Fort Peck as soon as possible, Owen kept telling her, but meanwhile he and the other engineering whizzes were hoteling it in Glasgow and she had to make do here alone. She no longer liked the notion of alone. Not that she liked the sound of Fort Peck much better.
My dearest, she began this night’s letter to him, and thought, I should probably quit right there. Just write that over and over fifty or a hundred times, like a kid who has to stay after school.
So glad to recv yours of last wk, she jotted in store hand, and hurried the ink on through disposal of the weather and Bozeman’s onslaught of collegians again, now that September was here. Then she and the fountain pen took their time, careful with the next:
It is just about more than I can stand, being apart from you this way, sweet one. You know the song—the “Miss” in “Missouri,” that’s me missing you. Oh Owen, I wish you were here right now and—well, you know. But next to that, what I wanted to tell you is that I met up with Prof Z downtown today, and he told me there is going to be a “Bozeman bunch” hired for the 2 Columbia River dams, Grand Coulee and I forget the other one. I wonder, darling? If you could latch on at one of those, maybe we wouldn’t have to wait and wait for Fort Peck to ever put a roof over our heads. . . .
The Missouri River had maundered through enough of Charlene’s life already. Her father had been the barber in the little riverside town of Toston, a place with none too many male heads to start with, and those there were in the habit of a haircut only about every sixth Saturday night. Her mother passed her days trying to pretend there was enough clientele among Toston’s females, even fewer and more set in their hairdo habits, to justify her beauty parlor in a partitioned-off area of the barber shop. Both of these scissor merchants devoted their spare time, a nearly unlimited amount, to trying to catch every fish in the Missouri River. In short, with these parents who had about as much enterprise as pigeons, Charlene Tebbet spent her Missouri River girlhood sweeping up hair and raising herself and her younger sister, Rosellen.
The Missouri was only twenty miles old at Toston but already five hundred feet wide and so implacably smooth you knew it had to be deep, drownable deep. When the Tebbet sisters played along the riverbank, beneath the flight paths of fish hawks and just above the swim zones of muskrats, Charlene simply assumed that the responsibility for not falling in was hers, for both of them. Not that Rosellen was a careless or reckless child, but she could be mischievous enough that Charlene felt obliged to order her around for her own good. Rosellen took the bossing without open warfare over it, but by the time Charlene packed up for a store job in Bozeman and Rosellen was about to start high school, they both knew that the older-sister superintendence had run its course.
. . . I haven’t had a line from Rosellen since Christmas, the little rip. Will write her anyway as soon as I finish this to you. . . .
Bozeman put Toston so far into the shade as to constitute total eclipse. The stimulation of city traffic, two moviehouses, the Big Dipper ice cream parlor, a room to herself at the Gallatin Riverview boardinghouse, the freshness of working as a counter clerk in Cunningham’s Department Store, the other young women on the staff full of jokes and pranks and sass and gossip, all this and an actual salary, too—Charlene giggled more her first month in Bozeman than she had in all her previous life.
And all of a sudden, Owen.
Always after, Owen maintained that if he had been content to count on his fingers instead of replacing the slide rule he had lost, he would still be a free man. He was on his way across town from campus to another of his odd jobs, night minder in a chick hatchery, when he swerved by Cunningham’s for a new slide rule. He found the one he wanted and kept fiddling with it, to get used to how the middle tabular part slid, on his way to the counter. When he looked up, he saw that the clerk had coal-black hair and dark, dark eyes and carried herself like one of those hieroglyphic princesses, head tautly up, shoulders just so. Charlene, in turn, saw a strong-featured face with an engaging quizzical underline to it in the wide cut of the mouth.
While she wrote up a sales slip for the slide rule, Owen dug a couple of silver dollars out of his pocket. Charlene took the dollars and dropped them clinking into the canister. She yanked the dispatch cord and the canister whizzed up to the balcony office where Priscilla or Janie would make change.
This was the part that gave her the fidgets, the waiting. She always saved to now to ask, “Would you like that wrapped?”
Owen considered. “No sense to. I’ll be using it right away.”
“Oh.” Charlene fussed with the sales slip pad. What was keeping the change canister? She managed to glance over the customer’s shoulder to the balcony. Pandemonium up there in honor of the tall goodlooking man. Priscilla was out from behind her desk and doing a little Charleston shimmy while biting her lip suggestively. Janie, worse, was not even counting out the change yet but just leaning over the rail lapping him up with her eyes. If the customer turned around . . .
“What does a slide rule do?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Just about anything. Multiplication. Long division. Logarithms.”
“You’re at the college, then.”
“You bet. Engineering.”
“That sounds ambitious,” Charlene said, trying to stare the pair on the balcony into civil behavior. “I can’t imagine what’s holding up your change.”
Owen laughed, an interesting grin staying on after. “Could be they’re testing the silver in those dollars.”
Could be they’re going to get their hair roots pulled out when I get hold of them, too, Charlene thought to herself, just as she heard a descending zing. “Oh, here it comes. At last.”
When Charlene opened the canister she saw a scrap of memo paper along with the sales slip and the change. Shielding it with her body, she peeked down and read:
He’s a dish! Don’t let him get away!
Charlene crumpled the note, turned and placed the change in the man’s broad palm. Then she took a breath, uncrumpled the note and pushed it across the counter to him.
• • •
What compels love?
Cross-examine the Charlene of 1933 and she would never tell you that Owen’s blue blaze of drive, there in his eyes and on inward to his brain and gut and backbone, had singly been enough to make him compulsory for her, five years back; wasn’t that the likelihood, though?
Try the question on the Owen of then and he would swallow his tongue rather than count off such small attractions as the way Charlene’s hair topped out perfectly for his cheekbone to rest against when they danced and so on; but add up enough of those and don’t they become compulsion?
Sharing a close call can clinch the matter, too, as on the long-since night when the pair of them were in the college’s hydraulics laboratory where sometimes Owen worked late on his thesis research and sometimes they necked. The night watchman could be heard on his way, so Charlene, her dress mildly askew, hid down behind the nozzle cupboard. Flinging open the lab door, an aroma of moonshine brew emanating in with him, the watchman appraised Owen at his flow sink and recited:
The heights by great men reached and kept
were not attained by sudden flight;
but they while their companions slept
were toiling upward in the night.
Then slammed the door and went away.
Charlene and Owen laughed into their hands until they were sure the watchman was out of range, then really broke loose. They stayed in this silly spasm to the point of hiccups, until Owen managed to catch his breath, straighten up soberly, and say to her:
“What if?”
Her heart dropped. What if they’d been caught, he could only mean; what if he’d faced expulsion for—what did they even call something like this, violating college premises by . . .
But she saw he was smiling, not at all resembling someone about to announce that they must never neck in the hydraulics lab again.
“Charlalene, what if that guy is right, hmm?” Owen said urgently as he reached both arms around her waist and a little below; reached and kept. “That this beats sleeping.”
• • •
They stayed a steady couple on through Owen’s years of college, each of his weeks dizzy with classwork and the desperate odd jobs and the details of Charlene, hers crammed with him and the ever longer hours at Cunningham’s (but for gradually less pay, a personal impingement by the Depression which started her thinking about the order of things). 1928, 1929, 1930; those years sped and yet seemed endless, the waiting, waiting, waiting until Owen graduated and latched onto a job and they could get married.
Making love helped. It scared the daylights out of them, too, every time. Whenever the kissing and embracing and fondling led to more, separately and mutually they would vow afterward that they had better quit this. (Charlene did not know so, but Owen had been keeping a diary ever since he came to college, one of those five-year ones with a quintet of spaces down each page, and it was when he found himself jotting Ch. & I again below the previous year’s identical entry that he gave up the diary.) Bleary watchman aside, there was really no one to catch them sinning away like burglars of each other’s bodies, yet everything teetered when they did: if Owen made Charlene pregnant, here came premature marriage and there went her paycheck, his college trajectory, and their chance of climbing, any at all, up life’s splintery rungs. They (mostly Charlene) learned just enough precaution so they could keep scaring themselves that delicious way.
She wondered even yet, pen to the page, at the risk built into love. She could remember how daring she felt when she shed Toston and tried on Bozeman, seven years ago. New to herself. Once before, some spring and early summer of her girlhood, rain for once came to Montana at perfect times and amounts, and the ranchers from the Big Belt Mountains when they swung into town for groceries and haircuts kept saying of the unbelievable grass, “It’s like Africa.” That’s the sort of thing she first thought about herself in Bozeman, how much taller and more lush and rare and therefore chancy her life suddenly was. Then she met Owen, and learned what a dare really meant. The geography of another person, that was where you went blindfolded and raw and in over your head. The magnitude of being apart had come into it now, too. Out the window of the apartment, down the Gallatin River to the Missouri’s headwaters at Three Forks, on past Toston, the distance to Fort Peck was 625 miles.
Resentfully she eyed the hour on the clock, which somehow seemed both too early and too late to suit her. Nights now, she hated to go to bed, with no future there except sleep. She supposed bed blues like these were no more than right a first time apart in three married years, but knowing so didn’t take any of the edge off the feeling. Of course, according to his hurried letters Owen had his own rankles, but of a different sort. Dispatches from a stampede, his account of life in Glasgow sounded like. Glasgow woke up at 2:30 one morning and realized that its fortune was piling into town. What unfolded first was a hotelier’s dream: so many men of the Fort Peck project suddenly coming and going that rooms could be rented out twice in the same night, first to those who wanted to catch some sleep until time for the “through train” at half past two, and then to those who tumbled off the Pullman cars. When either shift climbed out of bed they wanted a meal, so the cafe owners hit it rich five and six times a day. Reasonably often the food was washed down with a few drinks, and the bars along the south side of the railroad tracks lit up. Among the swarm of Fort Peck comers and goers were quantity buyers, for either the government or the construction contractors, who would snap up all the axes in Glasgow one day and, the next, hire every fry cook and washerwoman. Amid this frenzy, Owen and the other engineers had to contrive the dam plans, which his most recent letter had likened to trying to sort pie tins in a hailstorm.
So, Owen had his own load, Charlene didn’t deny that in the least. But there still was this of hers; with Owen gone these months on the Fort Peck job, this was like being married to herself.
Dear one, about the other dams, she finished off the night’s letter to him. I hope you don’t mind what I had to say. I only want the world to really see how Goin’ Owen can go.
The next-to-last Monday in October, ordinarily a time of year when not much is underway in northern Montana except the weather sharpening its teeth, the money began at Fort Peck.
The hiring in Glasgow that morning had a carnival spirit to it. Men milled into lines, expectant, not wanting to hope too much but buoyant with the prospect of a paying job, a steady half-dollar-an-hour after the cashless bafflement the Depression had brought. Preference, Hugh Duff noted, seemed to be wholesale. From the talk of them, here were other bottomland farmers and backpocket ranchers from along the river, yes, but the streets of Glasgow had been swept to come up with some of these other specimens. He and Neil and Bruce stayed together in the crowd, for what that was worth. They had filled out employment forms, been given a brass button with an employment number (9 for Hugh, Neil 10, and Bruce inexplicably 57) to pin on a shirt pocket, and stood around waiting for the transportation which the government men told them every five minutes would be here in five minutes; the first day of anything has some wobble to it. At last they climbed up into one of the crew trucks for the jouncing ride of seventeen miles to the river. So far, Hugh thoroughly despised everything about government relief work.
The Duffs knew enough about riding in the back of a truck on rutted sectionline roads to stand up behind the cab, hanging on to the boxboards, and so while the Glasgow street denizens tried to sit and were getting their spines pounded from the base up, Hugh, Neil, and Bruce met the Fort Peck country face-on.
When their truck, in the lead, topped into the view of sprawling river plain, Neil’s and Bruce’s first thought was the same: that the makeshift little convoy of trucks and pickups and a couple of touring cars would turn one way or the other from this overlook and head off toward tighter terrain where the dam site must be. But there was nothing to head off toward.
Upstream and down, across and beyond, the valley of the Missouri boomed away to horizons of its own making, wide-open country split down its middle by a muscular tan channel—no, on closer inspection, two channels; the river here divided around a massive wedge of silt called Cow Island—where century in and century out these twin flows—no, honestly three flows; the third a river of timber and brush, in and of itself substantial, miles of diamond willows and stands of leafless cottonwoods along the near bank—had ebbed and swelled with the methodical might of the seasons.
Everyone aboard the truck now stood and peered, calculating madly on how many man-years of wagework it was going to take to throw a dam across this, and a voice from the back put all their incredulity into:
“Keep a light in the window, Mother, I’m coming home to die!”
As their truck lurched down the bluff, Neil pointed.
There where the river plain met the base of the benchlands, perhaps a mile yet below the truck route, sat a farm with a stepped-roof barn, so much like the one on the Duff place that Hugh felt stabbed by the sight.
Neil’s gesture, though, pinpointed the helpers working behind a survey party, spreading sacks of lime in a white line across the ground from stake to stake. The straight streak of white narrowly missed the back of the barn, and it could be extended with the eye across the middle of Cow Island, and then across the stubble of the alfalfa fields on the opposite side of the river, and at last up out of the bottomland to where the axis of the dam would meet the far bluff.
Downstream from the white line, the trucks cut their engines and men piled out and stood looking around skeptically at the underbrush and big wrinkled cottonwoods that cloaked the river. During the hiring sign-up in Glasgow, the war veterans among them had been freely saying this was reminiscent of army life, all right, much commotion but little motion, so now everyone became impressed at how briskly an Army Engineer lieutenant dealt them into three groups, one crew to saw down cottonwoods, another to clear brush, and the third to build a toolhouse. When the lieutenant strode by the Duffs, he designated Bruce to the sawyers, Neil to brushwhacking, and Hugh for the toolhouse crew, which infuriated Hugh. Who was this Army shavetail anyway, to decree that Hugh Duff was too old to do axework? He stepped out after the lieutenant and said in a stung tone, “I’ve fought brush all my blessed damn life and can fight it some more.”
“If you’d really rather,” the lieutenant said brusquely. He darted his attention back to Bruce and Neil. “One of you to the toolhouse detail, then.”
Neil spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind.”
• • •
Owen didn’t strictly have to be there, this first day of the manual labor force descending on Fort Peck, but only death or disablement could have kept him away.
That morning, he stuck his head in the temporary Corps office in Glasgow only long enough to make the excuse of needing to run another porosity test on weathered shale, then caught a ride to the river on the tool truck. There he went through the motions of sending the rock docs across to auger out more samples from what would be the dam’s shaley east abutment, but mainly he wanted to view this next day one.
His brothers had already crossed paths with him, while his father deliberately did the opposite, at the community hall breakfast thrown by the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce a few hours ago. He had only seen them, what, half a dozen times in the years since he took himself to Bozeman. Pair of unfolding kids, they’d been then, and while in a sense he knew each of them from the ground up—Neil who always watched his way as if he were on stilts, Bruce built on springs—Owen worried a bit that they were not ready for Glasgow and Fort Peck. In the community hall’s thronged atmosphere, wild with passed plateloads of breakfast, they especially looked short of adjusted. Young men who knew plenty, but maybe not this particular verse. But who’s to say who is out of place at a time like this, Owen told himself as he went over to instigate handshakes and the quizzical grins that were a Duff trademark.
