Then the wind dies. The river of people flowing from the compartment bottlenecks in the doorway. Bodies from the choked opening to the guardrail twist and writhe and a vast shouting commences. Middie says No! This must stop! He grips the Blackfeet man’s belt with both fists and pulls him upward. His big body is a countermovement against the rise of all around him, but angry yells issue from wide red mouths and the mob grows to an impossible mass that pushes and swells, and breaks free in a sudden gush. Middie finds himself with the Indian airborne, cast into the gulf without foot or handhold, he has lost everything, and falling he sees a shaft of blue high in the gray above him and he is surprised at how light he feels, and how time has slowed to nothing. He reaches back, seeking a purchase he will not find, and in the singular sweep of his arm he takes people unaware—Prifflach, the fat man, his wife, the slick man—they all fly from the edge, effortless in the push of the mob, unstrung bodies and tight faces, over the lip of the guardrail and down between the cars, down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.
—for my grandmother, whom we call the Great One
THREE FROM MONTANA
“You ever see a house burning up in the night …”
—Annie Proulx
I. THE LAND
NO HISTORY GOES on unheard, no atrocity—the shootings and the sex crimes, the monstrosities, the mayhems that inhabit the ranch towns and small cities: Cohagen of eight people, Miles City of ten thousand, Plenty Coups more than one hundred, Bozeman tens of thousands. In Montana, skies tilt from a wooden porch all the way to the horizon line, and nothing keeps back the dawn. Cars from the reservations, dirty white trucks, yellow buses packing in hundreds, carting fans to basketball games in midwinter, the sons of trappers and the daughters of sheep shearers, the blood of a child in the trunk of an Eldorado, white crosses in twos or fives at the bends of this two-lane mountain are nearly transparent in the backlight. Everyone who has ever come here, remains. The land and the vault of sky are everything and people so insignificant they are struck by the idea that God doesn’t owe them anything.
They are together in the deep high country, his father, his brother, himself. Much older than they were. All three grown now, each of them men. Shale and Weston brothers. Edwin their father. They are still together, a lie Shale tells himself, knowing Weston flew from the edge of Beargrass Mountain and died in a car crash at twenty-two. But he carries Weston with him, knows he always will, and yes, knows his father carries him too. A thick layer of cloud surrounds the peak up high to their right, rounded, massive shoulder, forested at the base beneath the cloud cover, treeless and rocky at the top where it breaks free crowned in dawn’s light. Birds fly in the drafts, gold dark eagles. To the south the cloud bank thins and open sky reaches from the slight promontory where they stand, holding their arms, looking out, down the draw of scrub pine and mottled veins of sage, blown timothy grass bent to the ground and everything converging along the silver-blue of the big river. Out from there the sweep of the valley, the four directions, the compass rose, and far to the south a landmass like the broad back of a giant sleeper. The air comes from the north, chill and fast from the great gap of Canada down the channel from Glacier over the western mid-Montana plains to the mountains again, the line that unites the Beartooths, the Bridgers, the Spanish Peaks, and blind northeast behind them the Crazies. The bold land—cerulean forms of three plateaus, the one high bulk of mountain with gold swept among the blue, and in the shadowed valley the brown and tan of earth and grasses bound to the mercury of river water, boulders like crumbled towers, and sky bigger, flung out more bold than all—the land takes them and holds them. The
—for my grandmother, whom we call the Great One
THREE FROM MONTANA
“You ever see a house burning up in the night …”
—Annie Proulx
I. THE LAND
NO HISTORY GOES on unheard, no atrocity—the shootings and the sex crimes, the monstrosities, the mayhems that inhabit the ranch towns and small cities: Cohagen of eight people, Miles City of ten thousand, Plenty Coups more than one hundred, Bozeman tens of thousands. In Montana, skies tilt from a wooden porch all the way to the horizon line, and nothing keeps back the dawn. Cars from the reservations, dirty white trucks, yellow buses packing in hundreds, carting fans to basketball games in midwinter, the sons of trappers and the daughters of sheep shearers, the blood of a child in the trunk of an Eldorado, white crosses in twos or fives at the bends of this two-lane mountain are nearly transparent in the backlight. Everyone who has ever come here, remains. The land and the vault of sky are everything and people so insignificant they are struck by the idea that God doesn’t owe them anything.
They are together in the deep high country, his father, his brother, himself. Much older than they were. All three grown now, each of them men. Shale and Weston brothers. Edwin their father. They are still together, a lie Shale tells himself, knowing Weston flew from the edge of Beargrass Mountain and died in a car crash at twenty-two. But he carries Weston with him, knows he always will, and yes, knows his father carries him too. A thick layer of cloud surrounds the peak up high to their right, rounded, massive shoulder, forested at the base beneath the cloud cover, treeless and rocky at the top where it breaks free crowned in dawn’s light. Birds fly in the drafts, gold dark eagles. To the south the cloud bank thins and open sky reaches from the slight promontory where they stand, holding their arms, looking out, down the draw of scrub pine and mottled veins of sage, blown timothy grass bent to the ground and everything converging along the silver-blue of the big river. Out from there the sweep of the valley, the four directions, the compass rose, and far to the south a landmass like the broad back of a giant sleeper. The air comes from the north, chill and fast from the great gap of Canada down the channel from Glacier over the western mid-Montana plains to the mountains again, the line that unites the Beartooths, the Bridgers, the Spanish Peaks, and blind northeast behind them the Crazies. The bold land—cerulean forms of three plateaus, the one high bulk of mountain with gold swept among the blue, and in the shadowed valley the brown and tan of earth and grasses bound to the mercury of river water, boulders like crumbled towers, and sky bigger, flung out more bold than all—the land takes them and holds them. The
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