by Mary Oppen
After school, for an hour or so before dark, Raymond and I played in the snow. We chose teams, built forts, and fought battles that lasted from day to day. At times the game was too bitter and we weren’t easily friends again. As I stepped out my front door, not thinking about the fighting, I’d be hit by a snowball and the battle would be on. I liked best to roll a snowball so big that I could not roll it anymore. I placed a smaller snowball on top, and then a third, and the sculpture work began. Or sometimes I made a dome out of a number of snowballs, with spaces between. I placed a lit candle inside the dome, and after I had gone home I could see, from the window of our house, my little snow-dome glowing and glimmering in the dark.
Before going to bed Papa always stepped outside the door, and sometimes I stepped out with him into the cold, sparkling Montana night. The Aurora Borealis sometimes lit the northern sky behind the mountains, and right at our door the snow sparkled, and we pointed to Orion, the Dipper and the North Star.
A great deal of the activity in our household went on in the basement. My parents sat before a box with electric light inside it, and against two holes in the box they held egg after egg; if the egg was clear, it was put in a crock of water-glass, a liquid which shut off the oxygen from the pores of the egg-shell and preserved the eggs. In winter I was sent to the basement, and from the row of big crocks I took sauerkraut or eggs, or from the big bags and barrels I took potatoes or apples, or I selected a jar of fruit for our dessert. I sat on the broad steps to the basement to watch my father and brothers skin the deer they brought home from the hunt, and it was also in the basement that Papa and I made new ammunition. He set out a blow-torch with the flame directed against a cast-iron pot full of lead and a ladle with a long handle to dip the lead when it was melted. The molds were laid out below the lead-pot, and we set out pans for the newly molded bullets. As the lead melted he dipped and poured it into a mold; a little hole at the end of the mold received the lead, and it flowed into the mold to make a dozen bullets at a time. When these cooled I spilled them from the opened mold and placed them in rows in the pans, and we melted grease and poured it into the pans to hold the bullets. On another evening I helped fill the shells. Pressing an empty shell against a device which released a measured amount of gunpowder into the shell, I then handed it to Papa, who operated a simple press that forced the new bullet into the shell casing.
Spring came all of a sudden. In March the Chinook wind blew, and we woke to the sound of running water; we knew the snow was melting, and we were suddenly too warm in bed. In the morning the snow was slush, and by afternoon the gutter in front of our house was running with swift water. I whittled a boat to launch it in the swift current, then I pursued it, for it carried the coffin of Ferdinand de Soto, who had asked that he be set adrift in the Mississippi river when he died. I thought of him and wondered if he had ever reached the sea.
When the Chinook wind blew we drove to the foothills to see the windflowers, the earliest flowers to bloom where the snow first leaves the ground. And in the early spring I wandered on the prairie behind our house, gathering the flowers that covered the ground with color. The farthest I walked was to the coulée, where the Indians encamped. Sometimes there was one teepee, sometimes several; these were Flathead Indians who had come to town to trade. The women sat on the ground working soft deerskin into moccasins or shirts. I went one year with my brothers to an Indian woman’s teepee, and with some trepidation I gave her my foot to be measured. She made me a pair of beautifully beaded moccasins.
I had my own plot in the large family garden behind our house. When Papa gave me a red rose bush I planted it there, and when my pet rabbit died I buried him in a corner of my garden. Bergamot grew on his grave, and for years I thought that bergamot grew where rabbits were buried. Papa had rows of prize-winning gladioli, and Mama preferred roses in her part of the garden, but my brothers found garden work tedious. When they worked in the garden they pulled so many planted things along with weeds that Mama gave up asking them for help. Much of their time was spent in the forests hunting or fishing, but it was music that enchanted Paul. He unwillingly left his clarinet to go to school, and he raced up the stairs to practice when he entered the house; my childhood was accompanied by the sweet music of his clarinet.
When Paul was two years old he waded out in a flooded creek to an islet where his cat was stranded, and Mama had to rescue them both. Paul, my middle brother, had the redgold hair and strong Norman features of our maternal ancestors. In his outward boy-life he teamed with Noel in a boys’ world of hunting, trapping, and fishing—two boys’ secret world—but in the house he withdrew into his music, with which he surrounded himself and held us out. If he was drawn into conversation, he had a flashing, wicked wit and merciless humor; he was mockingly handsome. Paul was a loner—I think even his friendship with Noel closed as they approached adulthood. As a fourteen-year-old, Paul wore knickerbockers, one pant-leg always hanging, with his hair over his eyes as he lay on the floor reading, oblivious to all of us. He trained our animals, demanding slavish obedience and the devotion of our dogs, and he could also betray the dog with cold cruelty. Paul asked one day, “Mary, may I take your dog with me hunting?” I said yes, but he never brought my dog home. I have always thought that Paul shot my dog; perhaps the dog was a nuisance to the rest of the family, I never knew for sure. But the child’s intuition is believed by the child, and I believed that Paul killed my dog.
What was it in Paul, what was the betrayal in his own young life that isolated him and alienated him? My mother did not reject either Paul or Wendell, they were her favorites; but Paul was never open to friendship from me. I found him closed at the time I first remember him, by the time I began talking. He looked on, perhaps never really very aware that I was there. Paul was intent on music as a career, but Papa did not see that Paul could support himself with music; he always thought of Paul’s music as an avocation.
In the community, any prank was attributed to my brothers Paul and Noel (“those Colby boys”). My brothers tell of ringing front doorbells on Halloween until the irate householder burst from his door, to fall headlong because my brothers had removed the wooden steps from his porch. They tell of putting a buggy or a wagon on the roof of a man’s own shed, of ringing the church bell until the preacher ran out of his parsonage, of way-laying the high-school principal and beating him up. My brothers, especially Paul, were outlaws. They got into nearly serious trouble: they ran away, they vandalized cottages at resort places, they had accidents, they got into escapades which required all the help our father could muster. In the outside world which seemed so mysterious to me, Papa had the strength which made our family a fortress against that world, a fortress to which we could retreat to recuperate for another attempt on the world outside the family. The home was a place so safe that by the time I was older, I assumed the world, too, would be a safe place for me.
Noel, youngest of the three boys, was charming—handsome not in the classic style that was Paul’s but with a high, proudly-held head and bearing. He stood near Mama as she worked in the kitchen and talked to her, or when she was doing fancy-work he was so interested that she promised him the embroidery would be his one day. Noel charmed his teachers, his girlfriends—he was in a sense defeated by his charm, because he depended on it until he found himself at an age and with pride grown so strong that he was unable to pursue what he really wanted. Perhaps he never tried very hard to find what it was that he really did want. He grew cynical. He tried and failed in the great world outside; he was always uneasy, ready to feel he was being used for his intelligence or his charm. He never broke through these feelings to be his own man, with mature confidence in his own ability to live a life of the mind, and his mind gave him no peace. He had wanted to go to Annapolis, but my father’s politics prevented his appointment in the year he graduated from high school, so he joined the Marines as a substitute for Annapolis. Noel served three years in Nicaragua during the intervent
ion by the U.S. in that country; he came home malarial and thin, but to me he was a romantic figure. I was in love with everything about him—his uniform, the Spanish he spoke, his gaunt and meager body. It was a long time before he regained normal weight; when he recovered he worked for a while driving a taxi in San Francisco, then on the Pilot boat, the same old Bluenose Fisherman that still serves, now with reduced sails and a larger motor. The boat stayed a week at a time out near the Light-Ship waiting for the incoming ships to take pilots, until all the pilots were gone ashore and the pilot-ship came in to be replenished. I tell about these jobs because anything that touched Noel touched me. My father felt he had to find a way for the three brothers to continue in their lives, as they did not go ahead for themselves, and Noel gladly came home to Grants Pass when my father urged him to return. Perhaps it was too early in the history of education in the West to have thought of college for them, but I do not think such an idea was discussed. It would be a little strange not to think of college, because Mama had left Kalispell to go back east to a teachers’ college and Papa had attended a business college. I think Noel did not know how one went to college, or what careers were open to him. When I was of an age to leave high school, I would not easily have found my way to college if the County Agent had not been vigilant to find me and to make it easy for me to get there. Noel did not find such help at the moment he needed it, and no male in our family line had taken the path to higher learning. The paths the two families had pursued had been agriculture and business, and the revolt of my brothers was to reject business or farming for lumbering, trucking, or the cutting of Christmas trees.
Wendell, Mama’s first child, was bound to her as long as she lived; either she never let him go, or he never left her. Wendell stood outside the close relationship of his two younger brothers, yet “those Colby boys” included him although he never participated in their wild pranks or their adolescent anarchy. Wendell has clung to blood relationships. Mama broke up his marriages, and Wendell returned each time to live with her, until she died, when he remarried his wife Al, whose children eventually provided him with grandchildren. Wendell loves children and buys bicycles for his grand-nephews, just as he had bought me my first bike when I was nine and he was twenty-one, with the money he earned on his first job. Although Al divorced Wendell a second time, he still keeps a bond with all the young relatives.
I had a favorite cup and saucer from which I drank my morning chocolate. Once Wendell came into the kitchen, grumpy and not yet awake, and complained that I was not dressed as he wanted me to dress (I was adolescent and probably my skirts were too short). I only remember that I turned my full cup upside down, smashing it on the table, then stood up and left the kitchen. I knew that Wendell loved me; what I did not understand was that he wanted me to remain his little sister forever.
Wendell now comes to visit at Christmastime, when his Christmas trees are all sold. At seventy-nine, Wendell is a happy man. I sometimes ponder his happiness—is it that he is the best survivor of those Colby boys?
Mama enters my memory where she is necessary: to cook, run the house, care for me, rock me to sleep, sing to me. She seemed a part of myself at my earliest time. Energetic, lively, cheerful, strong, she was very active in her own house and in her own town. She sang professionally and practiced her music every day. She entertained her club members in our house. With her family of four children and with only a young farm girl to help her with the housework, she worked hard. She did all the baking, washing, ironing, mending, and sewing, as well as hunting with my father and brothers. I was probably with her more often than I was with my father, but my memories of her are less fond, for while my father never failed me, she often did.
Saturday was baking day and our pantry held loaves of freshly baked bread, cakes, and pies; and the cookie jar was replenished for the following week. When Mama baked she moved around our pantry confidently, in a swift smooth rhythm. These were life-long rituals from the earliest years of her life on the farm, transferred to her own kitchen in Kalispell. Rhythms from ancient times still held everywhere in the weekly order of household work; Monday was washday and all down the block washed clothes hung out to dry in the back yards. If I visited Raymond’s house on Tuesday, his Mum would be ironing just as my Mama was ironing.
Mama had had enough of farms, and animals, and outdoor work. She had spent her childhood, one of fourteen children, living in a log cabin. I probably can’t know what such a life was like, but below my mother’s surface exuberance I know she felt deprived, and she wanted to make up for the deprivations. It seemed to me that she drove herself to take extra jobs; when she had a job that took her away from home, she organized the household and we shifted around a little to allow her to leave the house. When she sold the old black kitchen range and had an automatic electric stove installed, she would put our supper into its waterless slow cooker, set the timer, and when she came home at night supper was cooked. She seldom complained, and she was always pleased to be working. She and her sister sang at churches, funerals, lodge ceremonies and other social affairs; she also did office work at the County Courthouse. I think it likely that she felt compelled to be busy, and did not know how to slacken her pace, to reflect and to think.
Sunday was a day of rituals also. On Sunday mornings my parents lay abed, and I woke in the same room in my crib. When they began to stir I asked, “Can I come into your bed?” My brother Noel then poked his head around the doorpost and asked, “Can I come in too?” This day was the most carefree of the whole week; we all delighted in the free day ahead of us. After breakfast we sat a long time at table, taking turns choosing a Bible story for my father to read. I always chose Daniel in the Lion’s Den or the story of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego: “Then Nebuchadnezzar came to the opening of the white-hot furnace and called to Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego: ‘Servants of the most high God, come out,’ and Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego came out.”
Papa preferred to read a Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .” In the evenings he read aloud from other books, and he asked each of us to take a turn at the reading. I can’t remember learning to read, but I must have learned while Papa read aloud, pointing out the letters and then the sounds to me.
Papa lived his life at a different pace than did Mama; he went more slowly, and liked to walk, to talk, to read. Papa spent long hours at work, but he seemed to enjoy being wherever he was at the time that he was there. I felt that he was really with me when we were together, and whatever we did, he seemed to prefer doing it at that moment more than any other activity. I am convinced that he loved me entirely, and my brothers feel the same way about his love for them.
By the time I went to school I was reading for myself, and I progressed from grade to grade uneventfully. At the Carnegie Grant Library, on my way to or from school, I returned books I had read and chose new ones to take home. Reading fairy stories and myths of different countries, I found myself, my brothers, my mother, my father in them; the stories could have been rewritten from all that I found around me.
Montana was so newly settled that children and Indians were the only natives. My teachers talked of back east just as my parents did; they came from the midwest, but for them as for my parents “back east” was the center of the continent. Young women who had attended teachers’ colleges applied for jobs in the far west in the more newly settled states. These young women were alone, and Papa, who had also come west and was far from his family too, was concerned for them. My parents often invited our teachers to dinner, and we did not feel strange with the teachers—after they had been in our house they became friends. An exception was my two brothers’ school principal, whom they hated; perhaps he had struck or beaten one of them, because Papa met with the school board and proposed that a rule be made that no teacher strike a child, and it was made a rule.
Whenever we went for a walk in the town, Mama was amused; she woul
d say, “Mary doesn’t pay much attention to my friends, but she talks to every dog she sees.” An enormous bulldog was my special friend; he walked the streets with one of the few remaining Civil War veterans, and they both waited for me to come from school. The dog ran to meet me, and we rolled and tumbled on my lawn—he looked ferocious but was gentle. The old soldier told me stories as I examined his cane, and he explained where he had found each treasure embedded in the cane: engraved bits of silver, broken jewelry, shiny bits of glass he had found as he walked, and he had inset them in the cane from ferule to handle; it glittered with every hue that had caught his eye as he walked all day with his dog.
From a catalog Mama ordered long-sleeved and long-legged underwear for winter, which we put on as soon as it arrived. We felt snug and warm, and we looked ready for a tumbling act. But by spring we looked less elegant, and I always longed for the freedom and lightness of summer underwear and short socks, for slippers instead of buttoned or high-laced shoes. Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as though I skimmed the earth.
Papa worked an early shift at times in the Post Office and went to bed at the same time I did. I crept in with him, and until I went to sleep I would go over with him the happenings of the day at school, or he told me a story; this was probably the only way to be alone together in our large family. We woke early, and I climbed over the rail of my crib and hurried to the warm kitchen, heated by the fire banked for the night; a flicker of red light glowed from the cracks around the stove lids on the stove. Papa shook down the ashes, put the sticks of wood on the coals, and soon the fire sent out lovely heat. The oven door was usually open, and sometimes bread was rising to be baked; we removed the bread, and I sat on the oven door to dress. Going to bed and getting up together on these cold mornings was the closest association I had with Papa, who seemed to give me all his attention as we talked with a gay kind of ease. I do not remember moments of the same degree of intimacy with Mama; but when she was with one of my brothers a charge in the air let me know that she enjoyed them in a way which was closed between her and me.
