Bucking the Sun, page 6
“Sometimes they’ll be a real handful for me,” she whispered on. “You know there are times when your daddy has to be gone. That’s when I’ll need you to—to be my help, with your brothers. Will you do that for me?”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Austin walloped some food onto a plate for Hugh, to try to get him fed and out from underfoot in the house so that she could pat the situation of the new mother and twin babies into place. To look at him, you would think Hugh Duff had just invented parenthood. Yet she had seen this man in town drunk as a skunk not a month ago. Which meant that his pregnant wife and the little boy Owen were here home by themselves while he was getting himself soused. True, at the time he had been at his wagon loading his groceries with the concentration of a clockmaker—no one is as overly serious as a drunkard—but Mrs. Austin gave him no marks for heading home while it was still daylight; if he hadn’t he would be a brute on top of being a spree hound.
Her civility was in short supply, then, when she observed to Hugh that twins were no simple newcomers to a household. “The mother can’t help but feel done in, for a while. I can send our girl Cora to help mind the babies and their brother some afternoons. I’d think your wife would like that.”
Hugh rounded on her so quickly it scared her.
“You’re a doubly adequate midwife, Mrs. Austin,” he told her softly. “But you don’t know thing one about Margaret Duff.”
• • •
Neither of them was ever able to pass up a mirror. And neither wanted to see any twin exactness reflected back.
Hugh and Meg Duff’s double helping of sons were not identicals, that was never the question. Naturally they’d had all the mysterious pacts that twins start out with. As toddlers, Bruce and Neil, Neil and Bruce, prattled away in their private language for everything from the spoon in their mush to petting the dog. As growing boys, they were possessed of that spooky knack of always knowing what the other one was up to, even when out of sight. (Owen sometimes speculated whether they navigated off each other like bats in the dark.) But by something like instantaneous mutual decision, at about thirteen they’d had enough of being a matched set. (Their father, they already knew, was eternally going to see them that way, as two halves of the one thing—his prize workhorse team. Their mother, they equally sensed, could always catch them at their differences before they themselves could.) Bruce let the world know so by his war paint. Neil came out of the wallpaper at you.
The truth of the looking glass, though: there was no total cure for being twins. At Fort Peck they still habitually tagged around with each other after-hours, to see what that might provoke; while at the same time you could not have paid them enough of a wage to make them work side by side. By keeping some distance between them on the job, they at least could avoid the name mix-ups. Neil and Bruce, Bruce and Neil, grudgingly accepted that they shared a resemblance, but for the life of them they didn’t see how anyone could think either of them was the other.
Winter came early to Fort Peck that year—there were those who claimed it did every year—and, at least to the Duffs, felt oddly welcome.
Birdie Hinch and other out-of-staters for whom this was the first Montana winter thought it was cold when the temperature sank to zero or so, and the Montanans laughed at them and maintained that this was an open winter, no three-day blizzards, next thing to shirtsleeve weather. Maybe so, but the route from Glasgow to the dam site, dim excuse for a road in any season, now had ample windshield-high snowdrifts to create work for squadrons of shovelers (Bruce among them, although Neil had been picked as a carpenter’s helper in the setting up of the boatyard). Teams of horses were called into use to pull out stuck trucks (briefly giving Hugh something he could handle the reins of) and to draw haysleds carrying massive construction timbers, apparitions in harness trudging their load across snowy prairie to this most modern of dam sites. In Glasgow, though, winter was simply the white calendar outside the windows while officework kept on furiously as ever (Owen, closeted with blueprints and specifications, would have told you it blizzarded inside all that winter), as did the round-the-clock feeding (Jaarala, Meg was pretty sure, had actually smacked his lips after tasting one of her dozens of batches of dough for cookhouse Christmas cookies) and other necessities to keep up with the Fort Peck project’s constant spasms of growth.
• • •
Eight-thirty, Saturday morning, December 23rd, Charlene worked the pair of nightlock keys to let herself in the big double doors of Cunningham’s. A nice fresh inch of damp doughy snow squelked beneath her overshoes; on that entire block of Main, about a good snowball fight’s worth. Just enough to pretty the street, put a holiday cap of white on downtown Bozeman. She hoped, though, that the man sleeping it off behind the steering wheel of the muddy Ford coupe (doubtless one of the hick bachelor ranchers from the gumbo country around Maudlow, her Toston prejudice said) parked at the curb hadn’t frozen to death during the night. Probably not; the coupe’s windows were merely fogged up, not iced over; serve him right if he had, though.
She went on into the department store and turned on a side-aisle bank of lights, so she could see her way up to the cloakroom. While she still had her coat and scarf and overshoes on, she really ought to go back out and wake up the swacked-out sleeper in the car, she knew. She considered leaving him for one of the younger salesgirls, Aggie or Wilma, when they came in at nine. Tell them there was a ready-made boyfriend waiting for them outside, just needed a little thawing out. Oh sure, and if the snoozehound froze stiff in the meantime . . . Charlene giggled; or in any other part of himself . . .
As she opened the store door and stepped back out onto the snowy sidewalk, the window of the coupe rolled down and Charlene Duff realized she was looking at another Duff.
“Bru—Neil! Isn’t it?!” She crossed the sidewalk while the breath of her words still hung in the air.
“Yeah, hi, Charlene.” He accomplished the feat of yawning and smiling at the same time. “Didn’t know just where you lived, so I—”
Owen! The world fell around her. Owen had drawn Christmas duty, but was coming down next weekend to spend New Year’s with her. Something had happened— Something so awful they couldn’t resort to a telegram, had to send a member of the immediate— Charlene stared, glared, at Neil. She understood why olden peoples killed messengers who showed up with bad news.
“Owen’s good,” Neil recited, still a little sleepily. “Or was, when I left yesterday forenoon.”
“Then what—why’re you—” Charlene knew that her mouth was hanging open, and when other people did that she asked them if they were catching flies. “Neil, tell me what your being here—what this is about.”
“Came to see if I could take you up north.”
Charlene’s silence seemed to fill the street. Neil fidgeted behind the steering wheel.
“I figured I’d give Ownie a kind of a Christmas present,” he said, suddenly shy. “That’s if you like the idea, too.”
She saw immediately what Neil had put into this. Talking somebody into working a double shift to cover for him at the dam, having to pay it back later. Borrowing somebody else’s car; probably that would need to be paid off, too, with extra work. Then coming all this way, presenting himself on her doorstep. Even wackier, on the department store’s doorstep.
“There’s one thing, though.” Neil seemed reluctant to say it. “I drove all of yesterday and most of last night getting here. If I play out, can you drive some?”
This was dopey. To the utmost. Owen’s kid brother needed his head examined, breezing in here to cart her off to Glasgow and Fort Peck as if—
Charlene heard herself saying, “I can drive lots.”
• • •
“So, do you mind?” she whispered, her fingertip playing at his earlobe.
“I sure as hell do,” he murmured. “This having to keep the noise down cramps a person’s style. Hotel rooms might as well not even have walls.”
“I meant my showing up. Out of nowhere.”
“Out from under Neil’s hat, more like. That goddamn milk-calf kid anyway.” Owen laughed, Charlene joining in, the bed shaking. “What did you think, when he hung his face out that car window at you?”
“I thought he was crazy. Sweet, but crazy—”
“Huh uh. You want crazy, that’s Bruce.”
“—and then I thought, maybe he has something there.”
“Sweet, huh? That the kind of guy you go for?”
“I go for Bozemaniacs, you may have noticed.”
“I did notice something of that sort.” In the semidark, Owen’s hand had started up again, doing one of the things she liked done. “But that was way last night, and this’s this morn—”
A storm of coughing announced that the occupant of the room next door had come awake.
They went still, trying to hold in their laughter. Owen nudged Charlene’s bare hip with his own. “Go sell that guy a box of cough drops, why don’t you.”
“Oh, sure, me. And what if he wants a slide rule, Mister Smartie Ownie, where would that leave you?”
“Never mind on the cough drops. I’ll go next door and pay him not to cough.”
They talked on in low tones, catching up on having each other so near, so available. Charlene felt as though she had somehow kidnapped herself, dared to take herself away into another custody, Owen’s, Owen’s and her own. The car trip had been more than cutting catercorner across Montana for a hurried Christmas with a husband. More like the world’s longest free taxi ride, near endless but exhilarating. Neil had driven like a person newly back from blind. Like most farm kids, he could handle a steering wheel and still be seeing off in a dozen directions. She would have bet that his gaze had registered every butte, mountain, coulee, fencepost, and jackrabbit between Bozeman and Glasgow. While she conjured the only direction that interested her one whit, ahead, and sneaked peeks at Neil to make sure his eyelids were still up. In profile he looked startlingly like Owen at the age when she had met him and fallen for him like nobody’s business, but in the next moment Neil would gawk one way or another and all she could read on him was w-e-t behind the e-a-r-s. But so what, if he had had no notion of how thoroughly he was fetching her to Owen, to Glasgow such as it was. Every minute that Neil’s borrowed coupe had scooted north, she had been that much farther along in abandoning lonely. For Christmas, Charlene was giving herself Owen.
“Nobody has any real place to be,” he was laying out the Duffs’ holiday situation to her, “right now.” Including us, he thought. Sangster had nobly vacated his share of this hotel room and moved in down the hall with Cody, but Cody’s room partner would be back from Kansas City a few days after Christmas—Owen had half his mind going, all the time now, on where to put Charlene and himself. Did he mind that Neil had deposited her practically like a bedwarmer on Christmas Eve? No. Did he mind that he was going to have to scramble to come up with lodging for them in chockful Glasgow? He sure as hell did. Charlene’s unwrapping-us-for-Christmas-Eve announcement that she had handed in her job at the department store back in Bozeman threw him for a minute. Here she was, for permanent, way ahead of schedule. In the desperate matter of housing, the only shortcut he could think of was to ask the Corps officers to use their influence. He supposed that’s what colonels and majors were for.
“As far as Christmas dinner, the cookhouse is about it,” he went on now. Charlene watched him from horizontal inches away. “We’ll grab a table for the six of us, and Mother can get off long enough to eat with us all.”
“We’re on our own for Christmas Day,” Charlene asked, trying not to sound relieved, “until then?”
“I have plans,” Owen said. “Some of them may even take place out of this bed.”
• • •
The day was cloudless, the snow brightly silken in the fields along the road to the river. They both were a little woozy and smug from their start-of-day lovemaking, and Owen honked the horn and gave a languid two-fingered wave to every truck they met, while Charlene sat over next to him so close you couldn’t have put the edge of a dime between them. Wearing a capacious pair of his wool pants and one of his flannel shirts and her own heaviest coat, she felt wonderfully swaddled in clothes. Owen was spiffy all the way down, even in winter getup; she had always liked his habit of fully buckling his overshoes with his pants legs neatly bloused into them, so that he looked like something instead of flapping along buckleless like most men.
At the Fort Peck bluff, he pulled into a turnaround banked high with plowed snow, parked the government pickup, and with a straight face told her this was it, Mrs. Nanook, they had to mush on foot the rest of the way.
Charlene could tell he was kidding but not how much. The snow stood as high as her head, everywhere around. Oh, Owen, don’t do this to me, not when I’m trying, really I am. Before knotting the headscarf she was putting on, she swallowed and asked: “How far?”
“As far as you can see,” he said but grinning now. “Right there, the top of that biggest snowbank, is all. Come on, I’ll give you a hand up.”
They clambered onto the firm pile of snow, and the site where the dam-to-be had risen to Owen’s eyes that spring and the bottomland farms and fields put their pattern into view for Hugh and Bruce and Neil that autumn, now stunned Charlene with stark winter river.
The first snow, more than a month ago, had done away with the chalked outline of the dam, but the cutting by brush and timber crews had incised the boatyard into the landscape. Work was scheduled to begin on the hull of his first dredge only two weeks from now, so the boatyard was automatically the first place Owen looked. The immense hull timbers could be seen waiting, asking to be envisioned into his 170-foot-long vessels, the white fleet of the Missouri River.
Beside him Charlene peered just as hard, but she could not have told you at specifically what. Ruts ran everywhere, gray muddy tracks of trucks and heavy equipment darkly streaking the snow of the bottomland. There were giant muddy gashes along the riverbanks where timber had been torn out. War, fought with mud, this mainly looked like. What appeared to be a cross between a lumberyard and a junkyard held all of Owen’s attention, she saw, in fact had him smiling wide with satisfaction. Yet if he were to turn to her right now and say, “Surprise! We’re in a dream,” or in Siberia or somewhere, she would not have been surprised. The Missouri, which she had been picturing as a bigger version of the stretch of the river past Toston, looked nothing whatsoever like its younger self there; this was an eternity of river, something beyond vast, winter-ugly even in the rare December sun. The split channels around Cow Island were edged with ice. The color of the water, even, said colder than you can imagine.
Charlene moved around to warm up, and Owen came and put his arms around her from behind to help out. He rocked from side to side a little, her enclasped body swaying with his, as they both gazed out over the valley and the start of the damwork. Then he asked:
“So what do you think, prettypants?”
“It’s lots of river.”
“The bigger the better, for making people some work.” He might have been commending the room capacity of paradise to her. “The PWA guys about wet their pants when they hear we can put five hundred men onto the boatyard down there, and near a thousand on the spur railroad, and on and on. This is going to be one of the population centers of Montana before we’re done, know that?”
She felt him stop the gentle swaying, as if having come to what he needed to say next.
“You maybe can’t tell from the looks of it yet, but it’s on its way to being one sweet hell of a dam, Charlalene.” He laughed, close above her ear. “I know what you’re about to say—what’s the sense in hanging around to build it if I’ve already got the thing built in my head, hmm?”
“Owen, now, I was not,” she maintained. “It’s just that for somebody who isn’t you, it’s so—so hard to put together.”
“The devil is in the details, you bet. But the big thing here is pretty simple when you think about it. This is an even-steven process, really that’s all in hell it is. Using the river’s own water and riverbed to regulate it. Dredge the fill, pipe it to where you want to make your dam. That’s the trick. You don’t need to pile concrete a mile high to have a dam, or have you heard me say that before?”
He laughed once more, while she wished again she had gone to Panama and Pennsylvania with him the summer of his thesis research. Not simply because she had missed him like everything, the long days and slower nights—the half-sick flu-ey feeling that told her definitely there was no mistake, she loved Owen Duff to the base of her being—but so she might have seen with him, all along the way, the earthfill history that entranced him. From here on out, she told herself as she leaned back against him with determination, at least she could join him in his Fort Peck vision. She could begin by swallowing the fact that what looked to her like the most haggard country in the world looked to Owen like dirt engineers’ heaven.
Charlene had vowed to herself she would pull her tongue out by the roots rather than tussle him about the domicile topic on the very day of Christmas, but Owen thought of it himself, glancing at her a little guiltily.
“Oops, the townsite. It’ll be right down over there, on that apron of land just up from the base of the bluff, see it?” She thought she more or less did. “When they get rolling on the construction next spring,” Owen was assuring her, “the town’ll go up so fast it’ll make your head swim.”
“They’re going to name it Owentown, aren’t they?” she teased to reward him.
“Hnn nn, no such luck. The Corps boys came up with something real original—‘the Fort Peck townsite.’ But tell you what, we’ll do better than that, right now.”
Owen struck a pose, one overshoe puttee out in front of the other. “I claim this territory in the sovereign name of Charlene, the—what rank do you want?—”
“Empress, why not.”
“—the Princess—”
“Queen!”
“—the Duchess of the Big Muddy prairie.”
