A love song for Ellie Mae

“Cowboys and gals, we’ve got a special treat for your dancing pleasure this evening–all the way from Anaconda, Montana, this is the Shay Brothers Band!” The chubby rancher steps off the stage as the boys swing into “Muleskinner Blues” and the assembled teenagers start a lively two-step. It’s hot under the stretched canvas canopy next to the riding arena, and the heat seems reflected in the strings of yellowish incandescent bulbs running above the shiny planks of the dance floor.

The band has expanded to a five-piece over the course of the last year. Ellie Mae’s learned to play some basic chords on mandolin, but it’s her high harmonies over Frank and Bernie’s long-practiced perfection that really bring the crowds to life. A newspaper in Bozeman even calls them “the Carter Family of the West.” Wes Tittle, formerly of the Tri-Mountain Boys, brings his fiddle to the table, and the act is rounded out by the comedy and blinding banjo skills of Stringbean Norton.

Stringbean’s been on the road with the Shays for almost a year, but nobody knows what his real first name is.

“Yellow Rose of Texas” is next, and Frank takes the lead while Wes trades solos with Bernie. There’s a little dust in the air, now, from dancing feet and crushed straw underfoot, and when Stringbean sings the lead on “You Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often” Bernie realizes he can’t see anything but people all the way out into the darkness beyond the lights.

“Cattle Call” and “Ridin’ Down The Canyon” keep the kids on the floor, and then it’s Ellie Mae’s turn to step out front, for “Wildwood Flower.” This brings a larger number of cowboy hats down front, and Frank and Bernie both sidle up behind her just in case one of the buckaroos has had a little too much liquid courage.

“Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” has the kids blushing over more than just the exertion of dancing, “Froggy Went A’ Courtin'” gives Stringbean another moment at the front of the stage, and then the Shays wind it up, as they’ve been doing since they were children, with “Yodeling Cowboy.”

Where a man is a man and a friend is a friend
Where all my cares and worries end
I have no troubles nothing but joy
I’m just a yodeling cowboy.

Bernie and the rest of the band have headed off to find a late supper, Frank has just collected the night’s pay (a princely $20) and he and Ellie Mae are just closing the last of the guitar cases when a chubby, sweating older man in a rumpled linen suit and bolo tie appears, mopping the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief and leaning on a lacquered white cane with a brass head in the shape of a duck.

“That was a mighty fine set of songs, there, son,” he says. “You fellows sing together like angels, and this young lady here has got a voice that would put Judy Garland to shame. You all made any recordings yet?”

“No sir,” Frank says. “We’ve been playing barn dances and rodeos, mostly.”

“I’m Reggie Riley,” the older man says. “I run KFXD radio up in Boise. Maybe you’d like to come on the air with me some time and play a few songs.”

Thirty feet away, Bernie stops and watches from the darkness outside the canopy as Ellie Mae leaps into Frank’s arms.

It’s just after eight p.m. when the Shay brothers come down Main Street to find a parking spot by the Elks Building. It’s a clear, warm summer evening, and Bernie has taken the top down on his 1928 Model A Roadster pickup, purchased with the last of his $300 mustering out bonus from the service.

Frank is in the passenger seat, and both men are wearing the finest pearl-button snap-down shirts, fresh new Levis, ten-gallon hats and new boots. They came home three weeks apart, Frank first, and have waited until now–the first big summer dance at the Elks–to reintroduce themselves into Anaconda society.

The streets around the Elks building downtown are packed with cars and teenagers; the gleaming soda fountain at F.W. Woolworth’s on the ground floor of the Elks is doing booming business, and the auctioneer-like cadence of a square dance caller is coming out of the ballroom windows overhead as the Shays hit the sidewalk.

Bernie cocks an ear skyward. “Square dancing?”

Frank looks back at the guitar cases in the bed of the pickup truck. “We can do better than that, can’t we?”

Five minutes later, the boys are in the middle of the ballroom floor, swinging through “Frankie And Johnnie,” surrounded by a crowd of teens who have all but forgotten the elderly square-dance band and caller.

Two cowboys suddenly walking out into the middle of the dance and starting a song was bad enough, but now he’s lost the crowd, and some of them are teenagers and are dancing way too close, so the caller, a short and paunchy little man who sells shoes at the Sears & Roebuck in Butte, tries to restore some semblance of order. He is ignored. Frank and Bernie’s harmonies, tuned by hours of singing together under the open night sky, are razor-sharp, and the dancers around them are two-stepping and all smiles.

Frankie drew back to her kimona she took out a little 44
Rooty toot toot three times she shot right through that hardwood door
She shot her man he was doing her wrong.

Bowing to the inevitable, the caller brings Frank and Bernie up the two steps to the worn hardwood planks of the stage. “What are your names, boys?” he asks, smiling as if the entire interruption was his idea all along.

Frank and Bernie look at each other. “We’re the Shay Brothers,” says Bernie.

The caller turns back to the fist-sized microphone, suspended in its web of spring-loaded shock mounting. “Folks, let’s have a big Anaconda round of applause for the Shay Brothers!”

Three hours later, they’ve played every song they know, some of them two or three times. Bernie is just putting his guitar away and drinking a Coca-Cola someone brought him from the Woolworth’s downstairs. Frank has gone for a smoke on the fire escape out back.

The girl is slim, brown-eyed, curly red hair falling past her shoulders in a style she’s copied from the movie actress Linda Darnell. She’s carrying her letter sweater over one arm, and  makes her way across the slowly emptying ballroom from the far wall where she paused to put her saddle shoes back on, having kicked them off for the last couple of dances.

Bernie tries hard to pretend he doesn’t see her coming, and fails miserably when a member of the square-dance band hands him a towel. He’s just finished mopping sweat off of his head when he lowers the towel and almost falls on her. She’s got the deepest eyes he’s ever seen, and he feels as if he could dive into them and swim around a while.

She is literally the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life, and for a minute he can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t speak. He wants this instant to last forever.

“We’ve been looking at each other all night,” she says, “and I’m not leaving until we get acquainted. I’m Ellie Mae.”

Cattleman Vedal Shay laid to rest after accident claims him.

Anaconda, May 3–Local drover Vedal Shay, a longtime member of the Elks and Moose lodges and a well-known cattleman for the Swift Cattle Co. was buried in the Veterans Cemetery in Anaconda on Saturday, May 3, 1937.

Mr. Shay was moving a herd of cattle on the Flatiron some sixty miles north of Anaconda when his horse and a number of surrounding steers were startled by a snake; the resulting stampede claimed the lives of Mr. Shay and two of his coworkers.

As a veteran of both the Spanish-American war and the Great War, he was buried with full military honors. The casket was drawn through town on a caisson from C Company of the 163rd Infantry, based in Missoula, and the 21-gun salute was provided by members of the Anaconda American Legion.

Vedal was born in Aubrac, France, home of the famed Aubrac beef cattle. He was the son of Arlo and Marie Shay, and came to the United States as a toddler in 1885. The family name, originally Oleachea, was changed to Shay when they came through Immigration.

The family originally resided in Wisconsin and then relocated to Montana when Vedal was a boy, and he spent happy summers with his brother Charlie and his father herding the family cattle.

He married Ann Geiger on Christmas Day, 1920. Mrs. Shay and their two sons, Bernard and Franklin, survive him. Mrs. Shay recalls many happy times listening to the boys and their father sing songs around the family hearth; Vedal was an accomplished banjo player and his sons both play several instruments.

Contributions in lieu of flowers may be made to the Crane Boarding School For Young Men of Crane, Oregon.

“So we were on that troopship sitting off the coast of Japan for days, then they finally tell us we’re coming ashore in Kyushu and we’re gonna be part of the occupation force, keep the peace, keep the Marines from tearin’ up the place too bad, like that.

They ring the alarms, and we go down the cargo nets into the barges, just like we were coming in under fire, only they was no fire, see, as the Japs had already surrendered. Still, we were plenty scared. Rumor was that not all of the Japs had given up–hell,the last guy got killed in the war was in December, and this was just barely September, and here I am in a barge full of seasick soldiers coming in on the shores of Japan herself? It was a long way from Montana, let me tell you that.

So we come up the beach, about half expecting to get cut down by machine guns, and all along the drift in front of us, these Japanese soldiers pop up, and they’re all waving these little American flags, about the size of handkerchiefs. And my buddy Rollo is walking up the beach with me, and he asks me what the hell is going on, and I tell him I figure ain’t none of them speak English, so waving the flag was the best way they could let us know they wanted to be friends now.

Which was about the size of the whole deal. We couldn’t speak Japanese, and they couldn’t speak English, but pretty soon we were trading stuff back and forth showing each other pictures of our families back home. I got that rifle over there in the corner from one of them, traded him some cigarettes and a couple of chocolate bars for it. I’ve carted that thing around for 60 years now. I thought I’d give it to a grandson one day, and I still might, but it’s got no ammunition. I don’t know if they even make ammunition for it. Probably better off with a regular old hunting rifle.

So we was military police, and one of my jobs was driving officers around, and I had this jeep they assigned me. I take this one colonel down to some warehouses on the docks at Kagoshima–beautiful there, there’s actually an island in the middle of this bay with a live volcano on it, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. He’s looking around in this big warehouse, and I figure I should watch his back, because it’s just me and him out there, and about a million Japs, and I don’t see anybody waving any little flags.

Well, he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, so we come back outside, and damned if someone hasn’t stolen the jeep. So this colonel, whose back I’ve been watching, is now eleven kinds of pissed off because he’s going to have to walk back to post, and he tells me not to come back until I have found his jeep, and I ask if I can have that in writing, sir, because I don’t want to be AWOL.

He doesn’t like that at all, see, so I don’t push it; I walk with him back to the post, and then I go looking for a needle in a haystack. Kagoshima was a good-sized town even in those days, and there were GIs and  jeeps everywhere.

Long story short, I spent the next two days looking for that jeep, only to find it parked in front of a tavern in Nishitakeda, which was right outside of town. The tavern’s owner was this little fat guy who had these two monkeys working as bartenders–seriously, real monkeys. I mean, the only thing to drink in there was sake, so it wasn’t like the monkeys were making cosmopolitans or anything, but still. You’d go in, sit down, one monkey would bring you a hot towel to wash your hands with, and the other would come up just like a waiter. Say ‘sake,’ and he’d head off behind the bar out of sight and come back with a bottle and a couple of cups. Damndest thing ever.

Anyway, I’m so happy I finally found the jeep I decide to have a couple of drinks, and I’m partway into the first one when I hear crashing sounds from upstairs, and a G.I. goes flying out an upstairs window and lands in the dirt in front of the jeep. He’s just brushed himself off and is trying to get the jeep started when I put the hammerlock on him, right? And he turns sideways to me and goes to elbow me in the gut, and I realize all of a sudden it’s Bernie, my brother, who I thought was in Germany.

And he looks at me, and the first thing he says is ‘where the hell ya been?'”

Bernie Shay has just set up in the music room at Crane Boarding School For Young Men, hefting his treasured Kay arch-top guitar on one casually crossed knee, just like in the smiling picture of Jimmie Rodgers tacked up over his cot in the dormitory.

He’s starting his second year at the school, working all summer for his parents driving cattle for the Swift Cattle Co. and saving his money. He’s a frugal kid, is Bernie, but he has two weaknesses: Beech-Nut gum and phonograph records.

His Uncle Charlie, who taught him a few basic chords, also showed him how keeping the spit flowing would help his singing voice. In Charlie’s case, this involved a golf ball-sized plug of Yankee Girl Chewing Tobacco, wadded up from the familiar red-and-white pouch and planted firmly in his left cheek. The one time Bernie tried it, he didn’t think he was ever going to stop throwing up–or that Uncle Charlie was ever going to stop laughing.

So now he chews a couple of carefully-hoarded sticks of gum and cranks the Victrola before carefully pulling a spike-like steel stylus from a manila paper envelope and positioning it in the clamp. Unlike seemingly everyone else at school, Bernie actually reads directions, and he knows you only use these needles once–78’s have an abrasive on them that intentionally wears the needle out after one play, and if you don’t replace the needle it’ll then damage your records. So he keeps his own stash of needles for these afternoon sessions and carefully replaces the school’s needle when he’s done.

The record is Jimmie Rodgers singing “In The Jailhouse Now,” and Bernie has been working on the bassline for the best part of a week. Near as he can tell, Rodgers is playing three parts at once, and while he can keep the chords going with his fingers, plucking out even a simple two-note line on the bottom strings at the same time is giving him fits.

The smell of chalk and lemon oil in the dusty schoolroom makes him want to sneeze, but Bernie is determined, and halfway through the treasured packet of steel needles he finally gets it, the heel of his shoe thumping out the time on wooden floorboards worn to a glass-like sheen from the passage of decades of young feet.

The headmaster is passing in the hallway and pokes his head in, prompting a startled Bernie to almost drop his guitar. Bernie is a good student and well-behaved, but the headmaster has diplomas all over his wall and lives in what to Bernie seems like an aura straight from Mount Olympus. He speaks, campus legend has it, seven languages.

Today, however, he just looks like a little, sad, balding old man.

“There you are. I’ve just had a telephone call from your mother,” said the headmaster. “Your father’s been killed in an accident on the ranch. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m afraid she wants you to go home.”

Bernie sits there silently for almost two minutes, before the headmaster says “Son, did you hear me? We need to pack your things.”

“I heard you, headmaster sir,” Bernie says. “It’s just taking a minute to sink in.”

“I’ll be in the office when you’re ready to go down to the station,” the headmaster said. “I’ll take you myself.”

The receding thumps of the man’s heels on the wooden floor of the corridor sound to Bernie like the beating of his own heart, or maybe the last few beats of his Dad’s. Now he’d never know. He takes a deep breath and starts to play again.

Frank Shay wakes to the kind of steamy, stinking heat he associates with Turkish saunas and garbage dumps. He peers over the side of his bunk, which he is sharing with all of his worldly possessions and the gear Uncle Sam gave him (pretty much one and the same, come to think of it) at the three levels of canvas and steel bunks below and his fellow military policemen, most of whom are being lavishly and copiously seasick.

Waves don’t bother Frank. The rocking of the troopship might as well be Mama Shay rocking his cradle. Years of sleeping next to his brother Bernie have taught Frank to sleep anywhere. He lights a Lucky Strike and wonders if Bernie is in the air, right now, manning the waist gun on his B-17. Hadn’t heard from Bernie since just after V-E Day. But he’d had other things to think about.

Two weeks ago, his unit had been preparing to storm ashore and take Japan, and fully expecting to die in the process. Frank had been to Guadalcanal, and Saipan, and a couple of other less pronounceable places, and had seen what happens when flesh and barbed wire and high velocity bullets intersect. He knew the Japanese had been taught they were the greatest offensive fighters in history but were actually capable of defending tiny rocks in the ocean armed with nothing more than sticks and stones.

Then his platoon had been called together in the bowels of the ship to hear President Truman announce over a tinny, scratchy loudspeaker that a new kind of bomb had been dropped on a place called Hiroshima. The President allowed as to how he thought that would make the Japs surrender right away. They didn’t. So, three days later, Nagasaki got its own miniature sun, and that got the Emperor’s attention.

Now they were waiting to go ashore again, but this time not into a hail of bullets–this time, the idea was to keep the peace and maintain order.

At least, that what was what his lieutenant said. Frank is looking forward to sake, geishas, and a good long bath.

In the meantime, he smokes, and looks up at the scratched enamel on the bulkhead ten inches from his face, and tries to block out the noise and the smell. There was a song he used to sing, one of the first he’d learned on the endless, starry nights in Montana with his Dad and his brother, and it takes him a minute to find the words again.

Still he thinks of his mother in a faraway land,
And his thoughts by memory was stirred,
And he sees himself to the old home again,
As he sings a wild song to his herd.

Bernie wakes to the smell of woodsmoke and the flickering amber campfire light just making it over the circle of stones his Dad, Uncle Charlie and the three hired hands have placed to help keep them all warm in the night.

It’s dark, as dark as it can only get this far from the nearest town, and looking up from under the pile of horse blankets he can see more stars than he can count. Dad calls it a pincushion sky, after the little padded ball his mother keeps her sewing pins stuck in.

His brother Frank stirs and mumbles something next to him. Frank is eight, two years younger, and a terminal pain in Bernie’s behind. This is the first time Dad has allowed Frank to come along as they bring the Swift Cattle Co.’s 5,000 head of Red Angus steers down from the high winter pastures, to put them on the cattle cars for the long trip to Chicago.

Ten feet from his head, Uncle Charlie has pulled his banjeaurine from a saddlebag, and is quietly plunking out a familiar tune. His Dad begins to sing.

When it’s peach pickin’ time in Georgia
Apple pickin’ time in Tennessee
Cotton pickin’ time in Mississippi
Everybody picks on me

When it’s roundup time in Texas
The cowboys make whoopee
Then down in old Alabama
It’s gal pickin’ time to me.

He knows the song well; it’s by Jimmie Rodgers, the yodeling brakeman, and he’s heard it many times on the radio. Bernie and Frank will often stay up late into the night, a blanket over their heads, carefully tuning in the crystal radio set Grampa Stan made them for Christmas, with its hundreds of yards of fine copper wire wrapped around a Quaker Oats box, and the chunk of fool’s gold that Grampa said was the heart of the whole deal.

On clear nights they would get KGFX out of South Dakota, with the smooth sounds of Guy Lombardo and Paul Whiteman. Sometimes it was WDAY out of North Dakota, and Bernie loved the English accent of Richard Gordon as Sherlock Holmes, sponsored by Baker Chocolate, not to mention the hillbilly music of the “National Barn Dance, live from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville,” with Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and the Binkley Brothers’ Dixie Clodhoppers.

But Bernie’s favorite times were the few glorious nights when the stars would align and the tiny, scratchy sounds of the crystal set would bring in XERA, the station that called itself the most powerful in the world, with “studios in Del Rio Texas and a million-watt transmitter right across the border in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico!”  XERA was where he’d first heard Jimmie Rodgers, and the terrifying but somehow compelling Dock Boggs, and strange Mexican singers whose words he couldn’t understand but whose plaintive singing made him think of empty spaces, and deep blue skies, and sometimes of pretty girls.

Frank stirs again and elbows him in the ribs. All around, just outside the firelight, the unseen mass of tons of huge steers loom, palpable, warm somehow even though he can see his breath in the flickering camp glow. There is a hiss as someone dumps the dregs of a tin cup of coffee into the fire.

He closes his eyes on the pincushion sky and dreams of blue eyes, pink ribbons and a high lonesome yodel coming from somewhere he can’t see.