Bucking the Sun, page 18
“This is—”
“—daft, I know.” Hugh kissed the tip of her nose, then her cheekbone, then her chin. “Where were we?”
“You know perfectly well where,” she murmured, presenting her lips for his again.
This is daft, Darius groused to himself, trying to appear ostentatiously nonchalant for the figure watching with suspicion from the leaded-glass window. Making a gowk of myself while Hugh is spooning her in like dilly sauce.
“That father of yours—”
“—believes you are interested in my hand,” Meg backed off a fraction from Hugh’s latest exploration. “Little does he know.”
The more her father pounded away about Hugh’s supposed lackings, the more she thought Hugh needn’t be all of one metal. That was the way her father was, after all; pure preacher in an impure congregation, the world, and she did not want to be fastened to that kind of absolute again. If Hugh Duff came with a dent or two already in, she told herself she didn’t care; and she didn’t, then.
• • •
By the time of their marriage Darius was off on his own, the shipyards along the River Clyde were more home to him than the farm-market town of Inverley had ever managed to be. Steel sang to him. The longships find their harbor in the head, began the poem of the Clydeside he loved best, and Darius filled himself from the eyes in with the constant armada along the resounding industrial river. Great Britain was determined to maintain a fleet that would overshadow Germany’s. The Asquith government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the fateful Lloyd George, had contrived a tax on estates: “Every time a duke dies,” he crowed, “we can build a dreadnought.” Those crammed years when the shipyards were at full boom, Darius had to make his start low, as mere bucket boy, and next came the testing stint as rivet-backer, that earsplitting chore within the hulls. Then, though, to riveter, and the riveters were the princes of the river, the canny hands at crafting the seams that held ships together and the bargaining voices that the others of the Clyde workplaces harkened to. And so for Darius Duff and his rivet gun, those years, the Clydeside work held results close to magical: the laying of keel plates, the curving rise of the hull, the cladding of steel onto structural skeleton; make one vessel and you could make any, you could rivet together any longship that could be imagined.
• • •
Darius on frequent visits down from the Big Smoke, Glasgow, from his aeries of steel, was a Darius with even more spice to him, Hugh couldn’t but note. Keener, more glinty; honed against those shipsides of the Clyde, maybe it must be put. Not even to mention prospering. Hugh knew he could tend oats on the MacLaren estate from now until next doomsday and never keep up with his brother’s pay packet. Be that as it may. The land took a while, Hugh was always capable of telling himself, but it and he would be there when Darius was deaf and doled.
Yet would it. The day came, in the spring of 1910, when Hugh arrived home dazed with fundamental questions. He walked in to find Owen, barely past his second year, seated manfully at a tiny desk and chair, Meg laughing and Darius with a lordly grin.
“Worth a try at getting a scholar, don’t you think, Hugh?” Darius knelt down to spiderwalk his hand across the desktop, Owen’s gaze avidly following. Desk and chair were both exquisitely crafted; the lathes of the Clydeside shipyards were the world’s finest, Hugh had no doubt. “It skipped us a bit,” Darius was going on, “but you put together that lamented father of ours and the late great Reverend Milne in this lad’s background and he’s likely to be apt at turning pages, wouldn’t you have to say?”
“We surely would,” Meg gaily provided as she swept Hugh’s tea-can from him and kissed the vicinity of his ear. “Hugh, did you ever know you had such a lovely brother?”
“It’s been generally well disguised,” he said.
The only sound then was the pattycake of Owen’s palms on his resounding new little desk.
“Hugh,” Meg said in a voice that did not quite waver. “What?”
What, yes. The radical acceleration of these visits from Darius since Owen’s birth? The embedded suspicion in Hugh that Meg’s choosing of him had been a close decision in the first place, and now down from Glasgow every fortnight or less was a fresh reason for her to rethink that decision? The firm recitation in Hugh that he could not, did not dare, believe she would ever actually toss him over for Darius? The accompanying fact that he could never quite remove the chance of that from his mind, either?
Hugh shook his head, to bring himself back to the day’s blow. “The MacLaren land. It’s going to tenements.”
Meg came to him without a word. What was spoken was pure Darius:
“This we can fix like that, Hugh.” Fingersnap. Across the crown of Meg’s hair, Hugh looked at his triumphant brother. “There’s every chance waiting for you on the Clyde. I only have to put in the word for you with the right somebody, Monday at the yard.”
Were you Hugh, you knew in that moment that you were going to have to put an ocean between you and the Clydeside.
• • •
“You’re as even tempered as ever, Hugh,” Darius let out with a smile and an extended hand as he crossed the floor of the shack. “Full steam all the time.”
Hugh gave him a handshake, but during it demanded: “What’s behind this?”
“The times,” his brother said evenly, “what else.”
Hugh cocked him a look they both remembered. “You can’t mean to tell me even your blessed Clydeside is feeling the pinch.”
“It’s beyond pinch,” Darius confessed.
“Darius, yes, tell us how things stand,” Meg painted in, shooing the visitor toward the kitchen table and sending Hugh the Milne gaze that conveyed As a last resort you could try manners, Hugh Duff. “Sit, the both of you, and I’ll—” she rapidly attacked the coffeepot and the firebox of the cookstove.
“The times, you were saying.” Hugh would not leave this alone, Darius saw. “They handed you yours?”
Darius fought back the risings at the back of his throat, the anger and the other. Do it as rehearsed, he made himself hear himself. You knew this has to be got past.
“The Clyde and I parted company, yes. Out the gate, and so I kept going. Knew a fellow. He was able to make me a place on a ship. And then—” Darius jerked his head in the general direction of the railroad. “Old habits die hard, Hugh. Family seems to be one of the incorrigible ones. Worse than a sweet tooth.” He carefully kept looking his brother in the eye. “Truth to tell, I didn’t know where else . . . ”
“You’ve come late to see us at our best,” Hugh said tautly. “When we had the farm—”
“Yes, I’ve seen that. Tidy. Tucked away like a swallow’s nest, though.”
Something came on in Hugh’s eyes, then went out. Meg and untouched cups of coffee had joined the two men at the table. Darius knew it was time to give Hugh the high ground.
“You were far ahead of me about America. I’ll say it now: I couldn’t see past the Big Smoke. Although—” the smile suddenly in there “—wouldn’t you know they have a Glasgow here, too.” Such as it is.
Hugh took this in; admissions from Darius had never been frequent. He turned toward Meg a moment. The sight of her on the same side of the table with him seemed to give him heart. The weight of life is what holds us to this world, eh, Meg? He cleared his throat. “So you’re not here as a tourist, then.”
“I haven’t come as a charity case, either,” Darius kept in tenor with. “I’d put some money by, I’m not hurting on that quite yet.” He made himself go through with it. Use the slow spoon, you’ve had to before. “A job of work is what I have in mind, if you happen to know of anything about the hiring here, Hugh. If you could lodge a good word for me in the right somebody’s ear, say.”
Hugh shook his head, but then inclined it toward Meg. “She’s your man on that, Darius.”
• • •
“We keep on, the whole payroll’s gonna be Duffs.”
Medwick shuffled through his boatyard shift roster. “Owen, you know Montana residents get hiring preference.”
“Sure, Cece, everybody and his uncle knows that.”
Medwick glanced up at the figure standing beside Owen in brazenly brand-new Mighty Mac bib overalls. “Where is it you been living, mister?”
“Helena,” stated Darius with confidence but also with an un-Montanan long e in the middle. Seeing the wince on Owen, he tried again: “I’ve a cousin there, she’s a music teacher. Her name’s Heleena. She lives in Helehna.”
“Yeah, well, don’t coincidences never quit.” Medwick put a long look to Owen, then a longer one to Darius. “How long since you came across from the old country?”
“An age ago.”
“You know how we are, Cece,” Owen thrust in. “Anybody with the name Duff on him will work himself silly for you.”
“Uh huh, Bruce was all the proof I needed on the silly part, at least.” Medwick sighed, picked up a pencil and jotted on a roster. He said sourly to Darius, “Welcome to the Montana navy.”
• • •
“CASCADE SPILLWAYS, THOSE’RE CALLED. YOU CAN SEE, WHEN WE PIPE THE FILL UP INTO THE CORE POOL THEN THE WASTEWATER GETS DISCHARGED DOWN THOSE SO WE CAN CONTROL THE LEVEL OF . . .
“BITUMEN SPRAYING, THEY’RE DOING OVER THERE. THE SON OFABITCHING BEARPAW SHALE TURNS SOFT AND SLICK WHENEVER IT GETS REALLY WET, SO WHEN WE UNCOVER AN OUTCROP WE GIVE IT A COAT OF . . .
“TRYING OUT A THREE-BLADE BUTTERFLY VALVE HERE, SEE IF WE CAN CUT DOWN ON THE CLAY PLUGGING THE DREDGING SETUP WHEN . . . ”
Owen’s headlong, half-heard, nine-tenths baffling tour for Darius before delivering him to his shift at the boatyard had looped through nearly all of Fort Peck by now. This and that were pointed out with offhand pride as the biggest in the world, but Darius seemed most keen on sorting out the swarms of workers. “And these be—?” he asked persistently as Owen drove him past site after site of vast construction that he seemed determined to find unastonishing.
Okay, bloke from the Big Smoke, be that way, Owen thought with some amusement, and kept on going after they had crossed the temporary bridge over the river, heading the government pickup on into the hills beyond the east end of the dam.
Darius did not appear taken, either, with this bouncing tour of the countryside, to flatter it with that appellation. Ash heaps in the earth’s backyard, these gray dumpy little hills more looked like as the pickup zigged and zagged along the road that threaded their maze. He rapidly gave up on the dismal scenery and studied Owen. However Hugh happened to come by him, this is a thorough one. Owen’s profile still unsettled him. Darius felt as if he had fallen among some complicated tribe wearing mocking masks of past history. Bruce and Neil looked so much like a younger Hugh that it was truly unnerving—the aspects of Hugh in duplicate!—while Owen alarmingly resembled both Darius’s and Hugh’s father and Meg’s, the memorable Reverend Milne. Wouldn’t you think, Darius mused, life would refashion us more than it does. The women at least weren’t such a confusion. A set of inspections might have convinced him Charlene and Rosellen were sisters, but otherwise he wouldn’t have known so without being told. And cinnamon-stick Kate, definitely one of a kind. But then there was Meg, who still looked like every expectation he’d ever had of a woman, and that was most complicated of all.
He suddenly felt the sideways scrutiny Owen was giving him.
Their composite Darius uncled in the dimmest back corners of the Duff sons’ imagination, unstirring there for years at a time, until something abrupt from the direction of Scotland would trigger speculation or hearsay. The Christmas when the toy steam engine arrived from over the ocean, the younger two boys fingered it with mouths open while Owen, ten-year-old sprout, studied the machinery and asked: “Dad, what’s it run on?” Hugh took a close look, then looked sharply again. “Alcohol,” he had to intone, there in 1918, the year Montana voted itself dry. A few years on from then, Bruce had come across the engine again in a box under the bed and fired it up for an incessant half day of play, meanwhile pestering an outline of Uncle Darius from his mother. When Bruce abandoned the steam toy for adventure in the hayloft, that was the last time he’d given thought to the uncle in Scotland. Neil, after he had taken to teenage carpentry and someone remarked on his swift knack with tools, heard his father say once: “He comes by it sideways in the family—I’ve a brother with a canny hand that way.” Only once; other times Hugh would say, “I don’t know where he gets it.”
In the nephew trio, then, Owen alone in grown life had ever deliberately thought about the figure in the Clyde shipyard.
His junior year course Strength of Materials 321 had practically forced him to, with its provocative questions of steel against seawater; he had tried to picture the shipwright life, another Duff life of the moment but across the flex of the world. And then Owen’s Panama voyage, his shifts as boiler fireman in the cave of hull, where he could all but read his phantom uncle’s trade in the firelit lines of rivets. Now that Darius had sprung to life in Montana, in their net of attention to this family newcomer Owen’s mesh was the finest. He had noticed Darius’s slight ruffle when Bruce, lately in favor of universal matrimony, put the question: “We don’t get an aunt along with you, huh? Never married?”
Darius had seemed to take Bruce’s measure for a moment, then smiled. “Not so far. Applications are still being sought.”
“Almost there.” Owen eased his eyes off his uncle and back to the anonymous hills. “How about a jag of jumping bean?” Driving full tilt one-handed, he groped under the pickup seat and pulled out a thermos bottle of coffee. Every American whom Darius had encountered so far was a caffeine fiend. “You get the cup first, you’re the guest,” Owen decreed.
While Darius mastered pouring an unwanted beverage in a bouncing vehicle, Owen glanced sideways at him and asked:
“How’d you know to find us here?”
“Process of elimination. I found where you weren’t, first.” Darius took one sip of the coffee and pined for tea. “The farmstead looked like just the place for Hugh. Somewhere private for him to pound the ground, make the earth say—what, not oats, some sort of fluffaloofa . . . ”
“Alfalfa,” Owen supplied.
Darius folded his hands around the thermos cup and watched Owen for the effect of this next:
“Someone’s scavenging the place. The boards are torn off the buildings and stacked there.”
“It’s the Old Man,” Owen said shortly. “And Neil. They take the truck—”
“My brother is scavenging his own farmhouse?”
“He didn’t want to see it burned.”
Darius was given no time to digest that. “You’d better toss that coffee into yourself or out the window,” Owen was advising as he shifted into lower gear. “We go mountaingoat here.”
He veered the pickup off the road and straight up the tallest gray hill, wheels spinning as Darius bounced like a ball beside him.
At the top, the Fort Peck country spread around them in billowing reaches. The rumpled land hid away even the dam project, and permitted the river out only in a single streak of glitter in the middle distance, the horizon beyond as far and sharp as the quit of a map. As Owen braked the pickup to a hard stop, a canyon gaped below Darius’s side of the vehicle.
At once he took in the sawcut sides, the engineered taper of the huge channel wedged between the set of hills he and Owen were on and a similar lumpy range of them a considerable distance across the way. There in the tremendous trench-cut gap between, a series of forms was under installation, concrete being poured into them by truckloads. Cranes swung bindles of steel through the air, legions of workers were erecting still more of the giant pillar forms. Owen, absolutely unable not to look pleased with himself, watched Darius watch the potboil of construction below.
“What’s this, then—another dam?” Darius at last hazarded. “Do you practice building them, between every two hills?”
“It’s the spillway.”
To Owen’s satisfaction, Darius at last registered astonishment. “But it’s to hell and gone, here, from your dam!”
“Three miles, that’s true. But the water’ll come here in no time. The lake will back up out into the base of those bluffs.” Owen indicated toward the disheveled geography to the south, then cut an arc under it with his extended forefinger. “It’s just about a perfect natural reservoir. And when the lake level reaches where we left the road down there, the spillway goes to work.”
“Not at your dam itself, though, this spillway,” Darius dwelt on. “Why’s that?”
“The dam can be just what it is, this way,” Owen began as if savoring music. “See, Darius, we’re dealing with water here that’s about as changeable as the goddamn weather.” Darius watched him turn as intense as the small boy drumming on his new sounding board of a desk in an Inverley cottage. “The Missouri’s big on floods,” Owen was saying. “Exactly how big it can get, we don’t even know because our records don’t go back that far. What we do know is that there’s a whole pot of things that can pour water at us here. A heavy winter. A late spring, thawing and freezing again all the time. Then how about, say, a cloudburst up in the Rockies, just to get the runoff really running. That, my friend”—Owen tilted his head toward Darius a bit but kept his eyes on the immense spillway—“is what we call a hundred-year flood. The spillway, out here separate, takes care of that, and the dam doesn’t have to do two things at once—hold back floodwater and let floodwater through. Integrity of the design, it’s called.” Owen caught himself. “But you’d know that from your own line of work, wouldn’t you.”
“Fancy,” said Darius as if mostly to himself, and peered again down the canyonwall to where rocksaws screeched into the crumbly top layer of shale and the black fog of bitumen sealed the cutaway trench of un-weathered Bearpaw bedrock beneath. “If you have all the room in the world to gouge around in, I suppose this is the sort of thing you can do.” Owen was reaching to start the pickup when he heard Darius add:
