Bucking the Sun, page 7
“Oh, swell, just what I’ve sat up nights wanting to be,” she gave him with a poke toward his ribs. He dodged, then grabbed her in a roundhouse hug. They laughed at each other at extremely close quarters.
When they had to break their clinch or risk freezing together into nose-to-nose statuary, Owen glanced at the sun and said they’d better be heading back to Glasgow. As Charlene turned to find her footing down the snowbank, she heard him make another pronouncement:
“That’s the family dam. Now for the damn family.”
• • •
So, Charlalene, no matter how we set our faces for it, this is how a Duff gathering goes. Bruce won’t give me the time of day, which suits me fine. The Old Man and I agree we’re going to disagree without quite taking an axe handle to each other. And as you already noticed about Neil, he’s got his own set of tracks he follows. Sometimes it’s a pretty close call, isn’t it, whether enough of us are speaking to the rest of us to get the salt and pepper passed. With a dozenth sideways glance Owen checked to see how she was doing. From the look of her, Charlene was taking it like an ace. Determined to dress up for Christmas dinner even if it did mean squooshing in at a cook-house table where the plank bench and oilcloth supported forty-two other fannies and sets of elbows besides those of the six Duffs, she had put on her green velvet outfit. It definitely paid off, Owen thought; with her hair gleaming dark and her arms and just enough neckline gleaming white, he could not remember when he had last seen her this snazzy.
Glossy as a magpie, thought Hugh, giving one more regard to Charlene’s combination of ever so black hair and snowy complexion. “ ‘Under my plumage everything prospers,’ sang the checkered bird.” Better get used to marital prosperity again, eh, Owen?
Fawncy came to mind in Meg, the old Inverley term for those who took their tea in thin cups, although she told herself she did not like to think that of Owen’s choice of a wife, really she didn’t.
“—knows his stuff when it comes to Christmas presents, don’t you, Neil,” Charlene felt forced to carry more than her share of the dinner conversation. “Delivered me for this right on time. Now all you’ve got to do is go shopping for yourself. Something that comes in redhead, maybe?” She could tell that Neil, poor kid, had a crush on her, and figured the sooner she razzed him out of it the better.
One moment was going to stay with Bruce from this Christmas, which otherwise seemed to him pretty much a sad soup-kitchen affair; with the cookhouse horde for involuntary holiday company, he missed the homestead in a sizable way for the first time.
Neil was sitting next to him, more than a little unsettled from Owen’s roughing his hair and asking him if he had a patent yet on coaxing women to ride in a car with him all weekend. Next to Neil, the Old Man automatically performed his “We’ll come to the table as long as we’re able and eat everything this side of the stable,” which all but Charlene had heard him do any number of times before, and she did not seem overly impressed. Across from the Old Man, their mother seemed to be trying to make Charlene welcome for Owen’s sake, but not necessarily for Charlene’s own.
Here she was, then, Bruce suddenly saw—highly attractive Charlene with that black hair any man would want to bury his face in, midnight jewel among the worktanned Duffs—and yet Owen seemed a bit elsewhere. Bruce tucked that away, this first glimmer that Owen could have more on his mind than he knew what to do with.
No one in all the planning at Fort Peck had foreseen the town without limits, Wheeler.
The town that picked up the name of Montana’s senior senator and dam-wangler sifted to the dam site on tradewinds as old as enterprise and lust. On a day that was neither quite the end of the winter of 1933 nor the start of the spring of 1934, one lone trailer house suddenly was parked on the prairie near the official Fort Peck townsite (“the cookie cutter town,” as that Corps version of municipality already was being called), brought in by some arithmetician who had torn out the modest double bed and installed eight bunks for workmen weary of the drive back and forth from Glasgow. Not much sooner was that trailer house unhitched than here came a tavern or two or was it three; they replicated so fast it was hard to keep track. In a dead heat, housing and houses that were not to be confused with housing started mushrooming. Happy Hollow, snug in a little dip at the back end of Wheeler, was the distinct area where the houses of prostitution proliferated, under nicknames such as the Riding Academy and the League of Nations. Some of that particular trade also freelanced in the dancehalls that kept springing up until downtown Wheeler was rife with them.
As to housing in a more domestic sense, everything was built on the principle that temporary was good enough. When the dam was done, Wheeler’s population would pick up and move anyway. So, tumbleweed structures built up and built up along streets that drew themselves onto the prairie. Into your shack, shanty, lean-to, or dugout you could barely fit such basics as bedsprings and kitchen table—all over Wheeler, family trunks sat outside the door under a drape of canvas tarp—and for decoration, a framed famous picture such as that wolf gazing down at a ranch house on a midwinter night, his breath smoking, would suffice.
Squalid, flirty, hopeless, hopeful, nocturnal and red-eyed, Wheeler almost immediately grew to three thousand strong (fifteen hundred damworkers and fifteen hundred camp followers, the demography was usually given as) and still burgeoning. In the midst of this, across a couple of weekends the Duffs whacked together sets of Wheeler lodging, a rough-lumber cabin of two rooms for Hugh and Meg, and a one-room beaverboard special for the enthusiastic new bachelor householders, Neil and Bruce.
• • •
Sheriff Carl Kinnick took up the implications of the Wheeler frontier with the county commissioners in Glasgow.
“I’m about to have a Klondike on my hands. What do you want done about it?”
What they wanted, when translated, was for blood not to flow openly in the Wheeler streets but the gush of damworkers’ wages toward cash registers to stay unobstructed in any way.
The sheriff at least shamed them into granting him another undersheriff. He would have told you it was coincidental that the one he hired and assigned to Wheeler stood six feet three inches tall and looked bigger.
• • •
Owen swung by to see his parents’ new place of residence.
He sat in the government pickup a minute, determined to swallow the lump in his throat. Every day now he had been driving past Wheeler and its alley-cat aspects, but it never fully registered on him until seeing this particular clapped-together shack. Worse, he felt obscurely guilty, although it was none of his doing that the cookie cutter town of Fort Peck was being built for the Corps personnel and the civvie engineers and a big swatch of barracks for manual laborers who weren’t married, while those with families were left to fend out here on the prairie—what the hell, the Corps would build anything you pointed it toward, and in this particular instance it simply had not been told to house people universally. And it wasn’t as if he and Charlene were having such a swell time of it in Glasgow either, making do in one of the breadbox trailer houses out back of the temporary Corps offices.
But no two ways about this, Meg and Hugh Duff’s new home was a tough looker. Rough raw boards and a couple of small windows and, as the Old Man doubtless had already said, not enough room to cuss a cat without getting fur in your mouth. Oh, Owen knew the place was still in process, his father and the twins would bank dirt around the base of the house before winter and his mother would coax out flowers, even if it was only morning glories. But he still felt burdened by what he was seeing, as he opened the door of the pickup and headed for the house.
“Owen! Welcome to the holy city.”
The sight of his mother didn’t help. She had just come off her morning shift at the cookhouse newly installed near the boatyard and while she had all the usual smile for Owen, the rooms around her resembled a rummage sale. He recognized household items from the homestead, stacked and piled into corners, with no particular order nor apparent prospect of any.
Meg gestured as if she would take care of it in a moment. “We’re in, and a roof over us. That’s at least something.”
“I’ll get Charlene to come down and give you a hand.”
“Oh, that’s not—” Meg said, too swiftly, then did a major repeal. “Of course, that’d be appreciated.”
“She can come down with me Monday, stay the day here with you. Do her good.” He grinned broadly at his mother. “Do you both good. Maybe do the metropolis of Wheeler some good, even. How’s the cookin’?”
“Adventurous. Those dredgebuilders of yours are on an onion-sandwich kick. One of them started it, and now Mr. Jaarala and I spend half our time in tears, slicing—Owen, whatever are you looking at?”
“What I’m afraid it is, is daylight.”
He went to the back wall and felt at the join of the uneven lumber. Sure enough, he could put the end of his little finger in some of the cracks between the boards.
“Your father hasn’t come around to accepting tarpaper quite yet,” her words barely reached him. “There’s time, luckily, before next winter.”
Owen blew out a depressurizing breath to keep from saying anything.
Meg busied herself at pouring coffee, as though that would put etiquette between them and the matter of Hugh. When she handed Owen his cup, though, his expression said they weren’t done with their oldest topic. They knew each other too well. He took one sip and asked her outright:
“How’s his behavior?”
“Predictable, at least.” Meg laughed her laugh that played with what she had just said. Then she looked over at her prize son. “Not what you think. He hasn’t gone on one of his tears since—well, it’s been some little while, honestly, it has, Owen.”
Which means he’s overdue. He felt it traveling around and around in him again, why it had to be this way with his father, whether it might have come out differently when
Hugh and the eighteen-year-old Owen were finishing the seed harvest, the late-summer glorious time of the year, there on the homestead. Financial daylight at last, Hugh was sure with a crop like this. An absolute shortcut to the bank: with alfalfa seed you needn’t even build haystacks nor run the hay through sheep or cattle nor be at the mercy of livestock buyers in gabardine suits. You merely harvested the hay, sacked up its rich little seeds and sold the sackfuls. Infinitely easier than flax, which was slippery stuff to make cooperate with a binder reel, and a better payoff, much better, than oats or barley. By now, a decade and a half into the homestead, he had the touch for alfalfa seed, if he did say so himself. It takes anyone ten years to learn how to farm a particular piece of land. But when you got it right, learning to live with one year’s rainfall and the next year’s lack of it, figuring out the pattern of yield hidden in the soil, and the splendid alfalfa sprang into gallant green and bursting purple, which led at last to this harvest of the valuable buckshot-size seeds: this was as close as Hugh Duff could come to prayer.
And there would be more such fields. He and Owen simply had to keep at it. “We’re very nearly there, Ownie. That lowlying acreage will set us up, something wonderful. The two of us can clear it and break it out yet this fall, eh?”—Owen gave a short uninflected response—“then next spring we can work it . . . What’d you just say?”
“Not me.”
Hugh peered at him, trying to comprehend.
“More schooling, is what I’ve got in mind,” Owen answered the question unspoken. Then he swallowed, and said it entirely: “College, at Bozeman.”
Here again how life could change in the space of a word or two; Hugh had always hated that and forever would. Just when a person thought he had found his footing, that’s when something like this caved it out from under him again.
He controlled himself to the extent necessary to say:
“I need to ask you . . . to hold off on that, a year.”
Owen was ready for that one. “Then there’ll be another year. Something else you need me for. No, this is quits. This year.”
Hugh did not want to ask further, but had to. “Just when is it you’re taking yourself off to such great things?”
“Not for a week yet.” Owen had this readiest of all. “I can take care of the place while you go to town.”
While you go on your bender. While you fall off the water wagon as you so regularly do. While you hide in a bottle. Owen might as well have spoken the charges every conceivable way, it would not have mattered more. What hit Hugh was his son’s basic calculation, Owen’s calm allowance of time for his father to behave in the expected unreliable manner.
“Throw salt on it and walk away, eh, Ownie?” Hugh spoke with fury. “That’s going to be your notion of life, is it? Don’t trouble yourself any here. Your mother and the twins will get by while I’m in town. Those of us who can take a knock for each other’s sake will get by.”
“Has he said—will he stick with the work here, do you think?” Owen asked his mother now, past his original intentions. What the hell else can I do, when she’s sitting here in a shack the wind will pour through? Damn him anyway, why is it always so rough—
“There is no other choice whatsoever,” Meg willed away his question just as she had done all the times it rose up in her.
“That hasn’t always stopped him, has it?” His mother and he had always been natural allies. Yes, go, she had told him the summer of his break from home. Have it better for yourself than we’ve been able to. You are special to me, Owen, and I want to see you make your way to fine things. “Hanging on to the homestead practically forever,” Owen cited as if prosecuting in absentia, “the way he did. You saw he was throwing good money after bad, I saw it—how did he get to be the only Scotchman who doesn’t know how to keep his hand around a dollar?”
“He’s Hugh Duff,” Meg said. “He takes slowly to persuasion.”
“He’d better take the chance here,” Owen said reflectively, eyes on the chinks of daylight through that back wall, “or he’ll find himself sweeping out whorehouses, the damned old—”
“Don’t!”
She was giving him a look that peeled him back to boy, the scold that seemed to hurt her twice as much as him. He felt his face flush. Then his mother seemed to come to herself, and smiled the apology. “I’m never going to like hearing you take on against your father, even when I feel like knocking his ears down myself.”
“All right, I guess we better keep our priorities straight,” Owen resorted to. “Nailing his hide to the wall isn’t nearly enough to help this place any.” He figured he knew just the thing that would, though.
The Blue Room, it came to be called, after Owen snuck back the next day with an armful of discarded blueprints and a pot of wallpaper paste. Paperhanging was not his strong point and the room’s corners ran every way but square, but the heavy plan paper covered over the cracks and knotholes.
When Hugh came home that night, he stood for a long minute looking at the white-on-blue lines of the cross section of the dam, the elevations and dimensions of Owen’s engineering world.
Watching him, Meg bit her lip, wondering which way this would go.
It somehow went more than one. Hugh first of all said with savage satisfaction, “Have him perform a few more hundred domestic miracles around here, and we’ll almost be living like people again.” But then he passed a hand over his face, a downcast expression following it.
“Hugh, wash for supper,” Meg quickly urged.
He shook his head. “I’m going downtown. I may be a while.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” They both paused, and when he made no answer, she said with familiar anger, “But don’t let that stop you, I suppose.”
“It never yet has,” he dropped over his shoulder as he went out the door.
• • •
Two days later.
Neil and Bruce were in their cinematic period. A Wheeler entrepreneur had deduced that people could not drink and dance 100 percent of the time, and opened a moviehouse; the two Duff brothers became instant addicts. For days after seeing George Arliss and Reed Beddow in Squadron from the Clouds, they piled into the crew truck with the cry, “Pilots, to your machines!” They yowled for a week after Charlotta Hoving, playing the advertising agency secretary in Stupendous, attained the halibut magnate’s hand by thinking up the winning slogan “Lutefisk, the hominy of the sea.” Night after night the pair of them goggled in the dark of the movie theater, in the congregation of hundreds like them, and swaggered out as if they’d been to harems and casinos. When they piled into their parents’ house on their way home and retold that night’s movie, Hugh and Meg had something to agree on—that their twin sons had not behaved this way since they were five-year-olds.
This particular end of an afternoon, Bruce and Neil were a bit ahead of themselves, as they generally were in trying to burn up their leisure time, and so decided to sample the latest sights along the main street of Wheeler until the sacred moviehouse opened. As usual the town reeked of newly cut lumber and fresh pitch, as if the community perfume were turpentine. Construction would flare up in one spot, then seem to change its mind and hop across town. This was one of the things about Wheeler, it built and built and changed and changed but wasn’t nearly all in working order yet. Directly in front of them down the block, a top-heavy man in a suit and vest shot out from a vacant slapboard building, turned, and gave the fresh construction a kick. He seemed to think it over briefly, then kicked the structure twice as hard.
“I felt that from here,” Bruce said aside to Neil. “If that guy keeps on, he’ll be in the market for assistant kickers.”
“Wait a minute,” Neil said. “Let’s just see.” He went over to the edifice assailant. “You putting up this building, mister?”
“No,” the man said with supreme disgust, “I’m just throwing money at the goddamn place for exercise.”
“What’s left to do?” Neil peeked into the walled-in shell of building, atop bluish Fort Peck clay. “Only the flooring? My brother and I can handle a hammer.”
When they had to break their clinch or risk freezing together into nose-to-nose statuary, Owen glanced at the sun and said they’d better be heading back to Glasgow. As Charlene turned to find her footing down the snowbank, she heard him make another pronouncement:
“That’s the family dam. Now for the damn family.”
• • •
So, Charlalene, no matter how we set our faces for it, this is how a Duff gathering goes. Bruce won’t give me the time of day, which suits me fine. The Old Man and I agree we’re going to disagree without quite taking an axe handle to each other. And as you already noticed about Neil, he’s got his own set of tracks he follows. Sometimes it’s a pretty close call, isn’t it, whether enough of us are speaking to the rest of us to get the salt and pepper passed. With a dozenth sideways glance Owen checked to see how she was doing. From the look of her, Charlene was taking it like an ace. Determined to dress up for Christmas dinner even if it did mean squooshing in at a cook-house table where the plank bench and oilcloth supported forty-two other fannies and sets of elbows besides those of the six Duffs, she had put on her green velvet outfit. It definitely paid off, Owen thought; with her hair gleaming dark and her arms and just enough neckline gleaming white, he could not remember when he had last seen her this snazzy.
Glossy as a magpie, thought Hugh, giving one more regard to Charlene’s combination of ever so black hair and snowy complexion. “ ‘Under my plumage everything prospers,’ sang the checkered bird.” Better get used to marital prosperity again, eh, Owen?
Fawncy came to mind in Meg, the old Inverley term for those who took their tea in thin cups, although she told herself she did not like to think that of Owen’s choice of a wife, really she didn’t.
“—knows his stuff when it comes to Christmas presents, don’t you, Neil,” Charlene felt forced to carry more than her share of the dinner conversation. “Delivered me for this right on time. Now all you’ve got to do is go shopping for yourself. Something that comes in redhead, maybe?” She could tell that Neil, poor kid, had a crush on her, and figured the sooner she razzed him out of it the better.
One moment was going to stay with Bruce from this Christmas, which otherwise seemed to him pretty much a sad soup-kitchen affair; with the cookhouse horde for involuntary holiday company, he missed the homestead in a sizable way for the first time.
Neil was sitting next to him, more than a little unsettled from Owen’s roughing his hair and asking him if he had a patent yet on coaxing women to ride in a car with him all weekend. Next to Neil, the Old Man automatically performed his “We’ll come to the table as long as we’re able and eat everything this side of the stable,” which all but Charlene had heard him do any number of times before, and she did not seem overly impressed. Across from the Old Man, their mother seemed to be trying to make Charlene welcome for Owen’s sake, but not necessarily for Charlene’s own.
Here she was, then, Bruce suddenly saw—highly attractive Charlene with that black hair any man would want to bury his face in, midnight jewel among the worktanned Duffs—and yet Owen seemed a bit elsewhere. Bruce tucked that away, this first glimmer that Owen could have more on his mind than he knew what to do with.
No one in all the planning at Fort Peck had foreseen the town without limits, Wheeler.
The town that picked up the name of Montana’s senior senator and dam-wangler sifted to the dam site on tradewinds as old as enterprise and lust. On a day that was neither quite the end of the winter of 1933 nor the start of the spring of 1934, one lone trailer house suddenly was parked on the prairie near the official Fort Peck townsite (“the cookie cutter town,” as that Corps version of municipality already was being called), brought in by some arithmetician who had torn out the modest double bed and installed eight bunks for workmen weary of the drive back and forth from Glasgow. Not much sooner was that trailer house unhitched than here came a tavern or two or was it three; they replicated so fast it was hard to keep track. In a dead heat, housing and houses that were not to be confused with housing started mushrooming. Happy Hollow, snug in a little dip at the back end of Wheeler, was the distinct area where the houses of prostitution proliferated, under nicknames such as the Riding Academy and the League of Nations. Some of that particular trade also freelanced in the dancehalls that kept springing up until downtown Wheeler was rife with them.
As to housing in a more domestic sense, everything was built on the principle that temporary was good enough. When the dam was done, Wheeler’s population would pick up and move anyway. So, tumbleweed structures built up and built up along streets that drew themselves onto the prairie. Into your shack, shanty, lean-to, or dugout you could barely fit such basics as bedsprings and kitchen table—all over Wheeler, family trunks sat outside the door under a drape of canvas tarp—and for decoration, a framed famous picture such as that wolf gazing down at a ranch house on a midwinter night, his breath smoking, would suffice.
Squalid, flirty, hopeless, hopeful, nocturnal and red-eyed, Wheeler almost immediately grew to three thousand strong (fifteen hundred damworkers and fifteen hundred camp followers, the demography was usually given as) and still burgeoning. In the midst of this, across a couple of weekends the Duffs whacked together sets of Wheeler lodging, a rough-lumber cabin of two rooms for Hugh and Meg, and a one-room beaverboard special for the enthusiastic new bachelor householders, Neil and Bruce.
• • •
Sheriff Carl Kinnick took up the implications of the Wheeler frontier with the county commissioners in Glasgow.
“I’m about to have a Klondike on my hands. What do you want done about it?”
What they wanted, when translated, was for blood not to flow openly in the Wheeler streets but the gush of damworkers’ wages toward cash registers to stay unobstructed in any way.
The sheriff at least shamed them into granting him another undersheriff. He would have told you it was coincidental that the one he hired and assigned to Wheeler stood six feet three inches tall and looked bigger.
• • •
Owen swung by to see his parents’ new place of residence.
He sat in the government pickup a minute, determined to swallow the lump in his throat. Every day now he had been driving past Wheeler and its alley-cat aspects, but it never fully registered on him until seeing this particular clapped-together shack. Worse, he felt obscurely guilty, although it was none of his doing that the cookie cutter town of Fort Peck was being built for the Corps personnel and the civvie engineers and a big swatch of barracks for manual laborers who weren’t married, while those with families were left to fend out here on the prairie—what the hell, the Corps would build anything you pointed it toward, and in this particular instance it simply had not been told to house people universally. And it wasn’t as if he and Charlene were having such a swell time of it in Glasgow either, making do in one of the breadbox trailer houses out back of the temporary Corps offices.
But no two ways about this, Meg and Hugh Duff’s new home was a tough looker. Rough raw boards and a couple of small windows and, as the Old Man doubtless had already said, not enough room to cuss a cat without getting fur in your mouth. Oh, Owen knew the place was still in process, his father and the twins would bank dirt around the base of the house before winter and his mother would coax out flowers, even if it was only morning glories. But he still felt burdened by what he was seeing, as he opened the door of the pickup and headed for the house.
“Owen! Welcome to the holy city.”
The sight of his mother didn’t help. She had just come off her morning shift at the cookhouse newly installed near the boatyard and while she had all the usual smile for Owen, the rooms around her resembled a rummage sale. He recognized household items from the homestead, stacked and piled into corners, with no particular order nor apparent prospect of any.
Meg gestured as if she would take care of it in a moment. “We’re in, and a roof over us. That’s at least something.”
“I’ll get Charlene to come down and give you a hand.”
“Oh, that’s not—” Meg said, too swiftly, then did a major repeal. “Of course, that’d be appreciated.”
“She can come down with me Monday, stay the day here with you. Do her good.” He grinned broadly at his mother. “Do you both good. Maybe do the metropolis of Wheeler some good, even. How’s the cookin’?”
“Adventurous. Those dredgebuilders of yours are on an onion-sandwich kick. One of them started it, and now Mr. Jaarala and I spend half our time in tears, slicing—Owen, whatever are you looking at?”
“What I’m afraid it is, is daylight.”
He went to the back wall and felt at the join of the uneven lumber. Sure enough, he could put the end of his little finger in some of the cracks between the boards.
“Your father hasn’t come around to accepting tarpaper quite yet,” her words barely reached him. “There’s time, luckily, before next winter.”
Owen blew out a depressurizing breath to keep from saying anything.
Meg busied herself at pouring coffee, as though that would put etiquette between them and the matter of Hugh. When she handed Owen his cup, though, his expression said they weren’t done with their oldest topic. They knew each other too well. He took one sip and asked her outright:
“How’s his behavior?”
“Predictable, at least.” Meg laughed her laugh that played with what she had just said. Then she looked over at her prize son. “Not what you think. He hasn’t gone on one of his tears since—well, it’s been some little while, honestly, it has, Owen.”
Which means he’s overdue. He felt it traveling around and around in him again, why it had to be this way with his father, whether it might have come out differently when
Hugh and the eighteen-year-old Owen were finishing the seed harvest, the late-summer glorious time of the year, there on the homestead. Financial daylight at last, Hugh was sure with a crop like this. An absolute shortcut to the bank: with alfalfa seed you needn’t even build haystacks nor run the hay through sheep or cattle nor be at the mercy of livestock buyers in gabardine suits. You merely harvested the hay, sacked up its rich little seeds and sold the sackfuls. Infinitely easier than flax, which was slippery stuff to make cooperate with a binder reel, and a better payoff, much better, than oats or barley. By now, a decade and a half into the homestead, he had the touch for alfalfa seed, if he did say so himself. It takes anyone ten years to learn how to farm a particular piece of land. But when you got it right, learning to live with one year’s rainfall and the next year’s lack of it, figuring out the pattern of yield hidden in the soil, and the splendid alfalfa sprang into gallant green and bursting purple, which led at last to this harvest of the valuable buckshot-size seeds: this was as close as Hugh Duff could come to prayer.
And there would be more such fields. He and Owen simply had to keep at it. “We’re very nearly there, Ownie. That lowlying acreage will set us up, something wonderful. The two of us can clear it and break it out yet this fall, eh?”—Owen gave a short uninflected response—“then next spring we can work it . . . What’d you just say?”
“Not me.”
Hugh peered at him, trying to comprehend.
“More schooling, is what I’ve got in mind,” Owen answered the question unspoken. Then he swallowed, and said it entirely: “College, at Bozeman.”
Here again how life could change in the space of a word or two; Hugh had always hated that and forever would. Just when a person thought he had found his footing, that’s when something like this caved it out from under him again.
He controlled himself to the extent necessary to say:
“I need to ask you . . . to hold off on that, a year.”
Owen was ready for that one. “Then there’ll be another year. Something else you need me for. No, this is quits. This year.”
Hugh did not want to ask further, but had to. “Just when is it you’re taking yourself off to such great things?”
“Not for a week yet.” Owen had this readiest of all. “I can take care of the place while you go to town.”
While you go on your bender. While you fall off the water wagon as you so regularly do. While you hide in a bottle. Owen might as well have spoken the charges every conceivable way, it would not have mattered more. What hit Hugh was his son’s basic calculation, Owen’s calm allowance of time for his father to behave in the expected unreliable manner.
“Throw salt on it and walk away, eh, Ownie?” Hugh spoke with fury. “That’s going to be your notion of life, is it? Don’t trouble yourself any here. Your mother and the twins will get by while I’m in town. Those of us who can take a knock for each other’s sake will get by.”
“Has he said—will he stick with the work here, do you think?” Owen asked his mother now, past his original intentions. What the hell else can I do, when she’s sitting here in a shack the wind will pour through? Damn him anyway, why is it always so rough—
“There is no other choice whatsoever,” Meg willed away his question just as she had done all the times it rose up in her.
“That hasn’t always stopped him, has it?” His mother and he had always been natural allies. Yes, go, she had told him the summer of his break from home. Have it better for yourself than we’ve been able to. You are special to me, Owen, and I want to see you make your way to fine things. “Hanging on to the homestead practically forever,” Owen cited as if prosecuting in absentia, “the way he did. You saw he was throwing good money after bad, I saw it—how did he get to be the only Scotchman who doesn’t know how to keep his hand around a dollar?”
“He’s Hugh Duff,” Meg said. “He takes slowly to persuasion.”
“He’d better take the chance here,” Owen said reflectively, eyes on the chinks of daylight through that back wall, “or he’ll find himself sweeping out whorehouses, the damned old—”
“Don’t!”
She was giving him a look that peeled him back to boy, the scold that seemed to hurt her twice as much as him. He felt his face flush. Then his mother seemed to come to herself, and smiled the apology. “I’m never going to like hearing you take on against your father, even when I feel like knocking his ears down myself.”
“All right, I guess we better keep our priorities straight,” Owen resorted to. “Nailing his hide to the wall isn’t nearly enough to help this place any.” He figured he knew just the thing that would, though.
The Blue Room, it came to be called, after Owen snuck back the next day with an armful of discarded blueprints and a pot of wallpaper paste. Paperhanging was not his strong point and the room’s corners ran every way but square, but the heavy plan paper covered over the cracks and knotholes.
When Hugh came home that night, he stood for a long minute looking at the white-on-blue lines of the cross section of the dam, the elevations and dimensions of Owen’s engineering world.
Watching him, Meg bit her lip, wondering which way this would go.
It somehow went more than one. Hugh first of all said with savage satisfaction, “Have him perform a few more hundred domestic miracles around here, and we’ll almost be living like people again.” But then he passed a hand over his face, a downcast expression following it.
“Hugh, wash for supper,” Meg quickly urged.
He shook his head. “I’m going downtown. I may be a while.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” They both paused, and when he made no answer, she said with familiar anger, “But don’t let that stop you, I suppose.”
“It never yet has,” he dropped over his shoulder as he went out the door.
• • •
Two days later.
Neil and Bruce were in their cinematic period. A Wheeler entrepreneur had deduced that people could not drink and dance 100 percent of the time, and opened a moviehouse; the two Duff brothers became instant addicts. For days after seeing George Arliss and Reed Beddow in Squadron from the Clouds, they piled into the crew truck with the cry, “Pilots, to your machines!” They yowled for a week after Charlotta Hoving, playing the advertising agency secretary in Stupendous, attained the halibut magnate’s hand by thinking up the winning slogan “Lutefisk, the hominy of the sea.” Night after night the pair of them goggled in the dark of the movie theater, in the congregation of hundreds like them, and swaggered out as if they’d been to harems and casinos. When they piled into their parents’ house on their way home and retold that night’s movie, Hugh and Meg had something to agree on—that their twin sons had not behaved this way since they were five-year-olds.
This particular end of an afternoon, Bruce and Neil were a bit ahead of themselves, as they generally were in trying to burn up their leisure time, and so decided to sample the latest sights along the main street of Wheeler until the sacred moviehouse opened. As usual the town reeked of newly cut lumber and fresh pitch, as if the community perfume were turpentine. Construction would flare up in one spot, then seem to change its mind and hop across town. This was one of the things about Wheeler, it built and built and changed and changed but wasn’t nearly all in working order yet. Directly in front of them down the block, a top-heavy man in a suit and vest shot out from a vacant slapboard building, turned, and gave the fresh construction a kick. He seemed to think it over briefly, then kicked the structure twice as hard.
“I felt that from here,” Bruce said aside to Neil. “If that guy keeps on, he’ll be in the market for assistant kickers.”
“Wait a minute,” Neil said. “Let’s just see.” He went over to the edifice assailant. “You putting up this building, mister?”
“No,” the man said with supreme disgust, “I’m just throwing money at the goddamn place for exercise.”
“What’s left to do?” Neil peeked into the walled-in shell of building, atop bluish Fort Peck clay. “Only the flooring? My brother and I can handle a hammer.”
