SAMUEL DANT LUDLOW 1897-1915
WE WILL NOT SEE HIM BUT WE SHALL JOIN HIM
CHAPTER 2
Tristan's midsummer dreams were full of water; the rolling cold Atlantic swept through his sleep in green unfurlings. If he awoke in the night he would slide his hand hopefully across Susannah's belly. In the two months of their marriage he had been a truly crazed lover though not for any biological reason, but the wound in his brain over Samuel. He idly considered prayer then laughed to himself thinking that God would likely give him a muskrat for a son. He was a week from his unannounced departure to Havana to meet his grandfather, a matter he knew to be unshakably perverse but he could not help himself. A hundred years before he would have been content to travel the land, the mountains and rivers seemingly without end, but now at twenty-one in 1915 there was little or none of that left, and his compulsion was to see beyond the seven millionth wave and further. And not that he didn't love where he was: in fact short of Canada north Montana was his sole option. And perhaps he loved his wife as much as a young man of his unique nature could. He doted on her, kept her to himself, and they talked for hours of mostly imaginary (on his part) plans for the future: to ranch and raise a family and blooded horses and, of course, cattle to support the venture. Susannah would sit near the corral under a parasol to protect her fair skin and watch Tristan and Decker break and train horses aided by the strange half-black Cree who stuck to most difficult mounts like a burr in a setter's hair.
Ludlow had been kept busy entertaining Susannah's father, Arthur, who had come west on a sporting expedition with a large trunk full of H. L. Leonard fly rods. It seemed odd to Ludlow that the man seemed openly to care more for Alfred than Tristan. Alfred's back had repaired itself, but he still needed a cane for his leg. After a few weeks fishing, though, the financier having enjoyed himself so thoroughly looked for something to buy in that curious tradition of the rich who in a state of general good feeling cast about for something to buy. He settled on a large adjoining ranch calling it a wedding present for his daughter and son-in-law though he retained a half share to insure what he referred to as "prudent business practices."
Ludlow became courtly again with his wife: their grief finally too large to be held privately. The rawest time had occurred one hot Sunday afternoon when they were having a picnic on the lawn and a girl in a cheap summer dress rode bareback up to the gate. Tristan immediately strode out and lifted her from the mount, recognizing her while the others watched puzzled but mildly bored: it was the honyocker's daughter from up near Cut Bank to whom Samuel had given his gold watch for safekeeping. She approached the table hugging her satchel to her breast. Tristan introduced her, brought her a plate of food and a glass of lemonade. He sat down beside her and balefully watched as she drew Samuel's watch from her satchel. She had heard of his death in the Helena newspaper and had made the three-day ride to return the watch, and if anyone cared to, they might read Samuel's letters to her. There were a hundred or so, one for each day of his service, and each in his meticulous script. Isabel began to read, then was overcome. Ludlow paced the lawn cursing while Alfred stared at the ground. Susannah took the girl off to give her a bath and a rest. In the middle of the afternoon she said she had to leave and asked that they send the letters to her when they were finished. She would accept nothing, not clothing, money or the gold watch though she asked for a photo of Samuel because he had neglected or was too shy to send one. Tristan rode silently with her a few miles wishing that she were pregnant and that would somehow bring back Samuel, but no, he died pure and virginal. And now she rode off with only a photo to console her. He wanted to strangle the world.
Tristan returned from the short ride in a mood so foul that he tried to break a young stallion that they had had no luck with. It was a tough beefy-looking animal that years later would be referred to as a quarter horse. He intended to breed it to three of his father's thoroughbred mares which Ludlow thought to be an interesting idea, but which Susannah's father, an aficionado of racehorses, thought outrageous. Tristan worked through the late afternoon until it occurred to the watchers at twilight that one of the beasts in the corral, whether the horse or Tristan, would likely end up dying in the match. Susannah's father quipped that the horse would serve a better purpose as dog meat, and Tristan stared at him and said he would name the horse in his honor Arthur Dog Meat at which he stomped off refusing to join them all later for supper and demanding an apology which he didn't get.
Late that night the ocean again entered Tristan's dreams: he tossed his bruised body and saw the black sky and immense rolling swells of the night watch, the rattling of an ice-stiffened foresail, and later the sky shot with stars too large to be stars. He awoke with Susannah covering him and the curtains blowing as if they were sails. He went to the window and stared down at the stallion in the corral; in the moonlight he could see the outline of its thick swollen neck. He told Susannah that he would be going away for a few months, or perhaps even a year, to meet his grandfather's ship in Havana. She said that she could tell that he needed to go and she would wait for him forever. At breakfast he kissed his father and mother good-bye and rode off with One Stab to Great Falls to meet the train. One Stab gave him his skinning knife and Tristan remembered that his own was buried with Noel at Ypres. He embraced the old Indian and said that he would return, to which One Stab only said, "I know it," as he rigged a lead line for Tristan's horse.
The voyage never really ended, except as it does for everyone: in this man's life, on a snowy hillside in Alberta late in December in 1977 at the age of eighty-four (a grandson found him beside the carcass of a deer he had been gutting, his hand frozen around the skinning knife One Stab had given him that day in Great Falls—the grandson hung the deer in the tamarack and carried the old man home, his snowshoes sinking only a little deeper in the snow).
Tristan took the train east to Chicago, spent a few days out of curiosity studying the Great Lakes ships at the docks, then went south to New Orleans and over to Mobile where he spent a few days on a schooner owned by a Welshman out of Newfoundland and on down through Florida to Key West where he took a night ferry to Havana after watching a load of green turtles being unloaded at a kraal from a Cayman's schooner, a graceful but filthy ship.
It was his first time in the tropics and on the night passage to Havana he was sleepless, spending the hours pacing the deck and wondering at the moist dense heat which the slight breezes of the Gulf Stream did not dispel; and beneath the bow where he walked to escape the smell of coal smoke from the stacks, the waves were phosphorescent. In the first light with Havana in distant view he sipped rum from his flask watching his first porpoises cut across the bow, lie back, then hurtle across the wake: turning he saw the strange vast purple penumbra of the Gulf Stream casts in the sky. He was red-eyed and strained from his travel but for the first time in half a year he felt something akin to ease in his soul, as if the dawn shore breeze laved the surface no matter the currents and turmoil below. He smiled at the water and the thought of his grandfather's schooner which though relatively new held so small a place in the world of the great steamers anchored off Havana. But it was a matter of less money and going where you wanted, the ports undesirable to the large shipping companies, or bays too shallow for big drafts and heavy tonnage. Besides the old man said he disliked the smell of smoke or the sound of engines at sea and it was too late for him to develop an interest in the grotesque.