by Ivan Doig
"That includes you, Duffy," she converses to the horse. "Let's go, boy."
As the horse answers that and the dig she gives him with her heels by grunting his way up the slope, Berneta is glad her body is becoming accustomed to the saddle again. Getting toward toughened in, although not entirely there yet. Already, this early, she can notice that horsework is work for the rider too. She always marvels at Charlie. Beat up as he is in various parts of himself, he can climb on a horse and go at it all day without ever feeling an effect.
The sheep fan out a little as she wants them to, their interest perfectly where it ought to be, one clump of grass to the next. She reins up beside the hooved cloud, her horse pointed upslope a certain neck-bowed way, herself posed attentive to the moment a certain way, and it happens. The years peel away and she is the photographed horsewoman again, arch of a mountain framing her. Some differences; there always are. Here, she is dressed not for the camera lens but for the job; work-shirt, workpants, workshoes that she knows she must be careful not to thrust through the stirrup when climbing on even imperturbable-seeming old Duffy—one of Charlie's worst poundings hit him when his horse shied at a snake as he was mounting and the stirrup snared his foot through to the ankle, dragging him like a gunny-sack alongside the kicking hooves of the runaway. Nor is she quite the hatbrim-shaded leather-chapped cowgirl cometing against the stone sky of Wall Mountain, any more. No leg-swatting sagebrush grows at this altitude, and the best that she could find for headgear to herd in is Charlie's winter cap. But in wanting to be herself on horseback; in the neighborhood of high eye-opening earth; in June dreamscape of her own; in the solitary essentials of her outline today, she is enough like that picture of girl-turning-woman again.
***
Dreams give us lift, she's known that ever since Moss Agate. The trick is to bear up after the weight of life comes back.
Slamjam it all into herself at once and what an avalanche everybody's circumstances make. Her father in his coughing old age, ancient choreboy stuck in an annex to a chickenhouse. Wouldn't think a life could go downhill much from Moss Agate, but his has. Her mother, tough as a grindstone against her father and yet putting up with all the allowances asked by the Norskie. And her mother and Charlie, scarcely able to be civil to each other. Berneta knows too well she is at the heart of that situation, daughter-wife tug of war, but can't see much of anything to be done about. Charlie Doig and Bessie Ringer neither one is ever going to be quick to give in, and a person had better charge it off as one more price of family. You can pick your clothes/you can pick a rose/ but kin and nose/you can't pick those. Includes brothers, who're somehow both easier and harder than parents. Paul, closest to her in age and outlook, but a distancer and being made more so by the war; there in the army in Australia, he has married a Queensland nurse and gives every indication he may stay on there after the war. Wally, out on the Ault. She thinks his is the unfairest story, in a way. The one of all the fate-begrudged Ringers who has his essentials intact, youth and health and a warmth toward life's possibilities. Instead of the duty of war, he could be devising a life with Winona. Even when he isn't in battle it must be hard, penned up with so many people. How she'd hated that herself at Alzona Park. Aboard ship must be a double confinement. Wally lately wrote that he wonders sometimes if he is really informed about how things are with the family, whether hard news of the never-easy state of the Ringers is kept from him. Not knowing can be worse than knowing, Berneta has always savvied that too, and so she has written back a line which came out odd yet is in the point-blank attitude he seems to need from somebody on the homefront. Don't worry, Wally—if there is anything very bad happens here at home, I'll write and tell you.
***
A few lines once again to let you know that I am fine, my grandmother meanwhile works away at her weekly letter to him from her Norskie kitchen captivity. And I hope these find you the same, Wallace.
Her third-grade penmanship toils for whatever can be reported. Another hard rain slowing up the plowing but helping the hay. A fire in a neighbor's chickenhouse. The chance of maybe going into town to a rodeo on the Fourth of July.
Then, amid her account of rhubarb canning and doing a big load of wash, suddenly here is Winona being written off. She's a nice enough kid in a way. But I learned Winona's ways what little time I spent with her. I nearly got my head bit off several times over nothing. It kind of amuses me about these silly girls.
Wally's breakup loyally ratified, my grandmother makes the usual turn toward closing. Well, dear, there doesn't seem to be much of any thing more to write about...
She determinedly says nothing, yet, about Berneta out there farther than ever in the Sixteen country.
***
"Sixteen Creek. Sixteen Creek." The barber contemplates with his comb still trying to find some natural order to my hair. "Never been up into that country. Can a man catch a fish there if he holds his mouth right?"
"Oh-it's-so-so; the-water's-pretty-riley; ye've-got-to-fight-brush," my father guards the stream which is all but tossing trout into our frying pan.
The scissors are starting to operate around my ears. "Hold still, Sunny Jim," the barber warns me. To my father again: "Suppose we about have this war won? What do you think of this man Truman?"
Affairs of world and nation get pronounced on while I goggle out the barbershop window at all-business Bozeman. Women and more women beeline into the shops and stores. An occasional calcified male goes creaking past to a bar. Cars have the street in frequent but not frantic use. This is neither martial Phoenix nor wind-worn White Sulphur Springs, this is a sound-as-a-dollar little city catering to its plump valley.
Here comes the part of barbering I really hate, the hair tonic. This of course is a barber who likes to slosh on the pooh-pooh water, positively dousing a persons scalp with the smelly stuff and rubbing it in like analgesic. Gabbing a mile a minute while his fingers mess around up there: "This'll fix you up for the Fourth of July, got your firecrackers picked out yet?"
Now it's my father's turn under the scissors. You have to look at him twice to figure out that he only slimly has the majority of a head of hair left. The sides from the temples back are perfectly full, and the stand of hair in the middle of his head is still holding strong; it is either side of the middle that has thinned away, widow's peaks that kept on going. He has had his glasses on for reading the Bozeman paper, and looks abruptly younger again with them off.
"Always have to have the noon news," the barber announces, and turns on the radio.
***
Broadcasting the sheep, Berneta's patient activity now is called, in the original sense of the word. Casting them broad across the range, in a scatter so that there is maximum grass for each.
"So far so good, Flopper," she says aside to her dog partner.
Their morning pandemonium forgotten, the ewes and their copying lambs have drifted comfortably up the mountain nearly to timberline; this far up, stray jackpines stand dark against the otherwise open slope, drifters from the belt of timber. A slow-motion gamble, letting the band scatter from-hell-to-breakfast this way, but the best kind of herding if you can manage to do it. Doesn't take much tickle of the imagination to see the lambs putting on pounds as they nibble along. Keeps the herder and horse busy, though, riding a community loop around the wide-spread band to watch against all the things that sheep can get into and that can get into them. Even prettiness serves as a poison to sheep, the standing white blossoms which Berneta charges into atop Duffy and hyaahs a bunch of lambs away from. Fight them away from death camas in spring bloom, and away from lupine when it forms peas in autumn, you have to.
As broadcaster of sheep her mind is free to go while the rest of her has to ride the horse, and she dreams ahead now. Wouldn't know it to look at her this instant, but she is tired of being portable. She and Charlie have talked things through, the evenings in the cabin when dusk lasts in the air for hours, and reached their decision against contracting hay this summer. Stay
here at the Rung place instead, is the impulse they both have. Take on the herding themselves once shearing is out of the way, using the cabin as their camp. Charlie could stand a slow summer of mending his health some more and, truth is, so could she. She can't account for it, how much better she feels in mountain circumstances, but that's the physical how of it. Not easy traveling, this rifleshot country, but you can't beat it for grass, scenery, verve of the mountain air. The rest of June and July and August here, on their own, will be a rhythm she and Charlie have not had since Grass Mountain. Even the Maudlow road can't stay muddy all summer.
Beyond, though. After August when the sheep deal is over, she and Charlie are going to have to quit thinking in seasons. Settle down and stay settled a good long while. With Ivan starting school we are going to have to stay in one place, Wally has been confided in, the wish told to him more than once lately. Some place of our own.
Time of her own, how different that'll be, too. Ivan out of her midday hours. She enjoys a sardonic moment thinking of that transfer, like handing along a clock that boings whenever it feels like doing so. Going to be a handful for the first-grade teacher, he is. Try to start him out on c-a-t and first thing he'll show her he can read catalog and everything in it. There are times she has wondered whether it was such a smart idea to further him in the reading as she tirelessly did, there in the winter and night of Faulkner Creek and since; he's quite enough of a little old man, growing up around adults all the time instead of other children, and having his nose in a book all the time will make him more so. But she herself never could wait, could she, to quit being a kid. Extend yourself full slam; if she has found anything to believe, it's that. It reached her to Charlie, lyrical wire in the wind. It was what pushed her to the gamble of Ivan, chancy pregnancy atop her chancy lung health. No, the reading and the rest of it she would not change. She can't feel regret for how any child of hers ridge-runs the country of his head.
A deep sound suddenly announces itself at her, part owlhoot, part airhorn. A grouse's cry. She is sure the alarm came from a big pine just up the slope from her, out by itself. She checks on the sheep, finds no catastrophe in sight, and turns to the pine. Nudging Duffy slowly toward the tree, she tries to single out the bird. Grouse make a riddle for the eye. Camouflaged virtually to invisible, they can sit as motionless as the tree-limbs themselves. Berneta reins the horse to a quiet halt as close to the pine as she thinks she dares, and rests forward in the saddle. It takes her several minutes to discern the blend of feather pattern against the bark.
As if dislodged by her view of it, the grouse plunges out of the tree, wings set, sailing down the mountain. Quick and far; a hundred yards, two hundred, three hundred, the breathtaking unflapping glide goes on. At last, still without the tremor of a wing, the grouse vanishes into another tree.
All as it was; mountainside of businesslike sheep, her horseback self, tin roof of the Rung cabin far below. She notices Flop straying off in inveterate curiosity and calls him in, her voice drumming back from the mountain. That air dance of echo allures her. The play of words crisscrosses in her trial shout:
"Ringling, Ringer, Rung!"
***
Charlie Rung teeters in the cabin doorway, a dozen summers before, drawn by a disturbance in the air. The toot of a grouse, was that?
He squints at the meadow, quiet with hay and the blossoms of his potato patch, then up the slope of Hatfield at his handful of cows, their heads already dug into the grass again.
Not sure now he heard anything, he regrets the nips of his chokecherry wine. Homebrew for lunch is not a sound idea.
He steadies himself to look around the place, sort out what wants doing next. As ever, his eye can't get past it; the stack of house lumber, no longer the fresh yellow of when he hauled it here three years ago, four? Took receipt of it straight out of the boxcar at the Maudlow depot, borrowed the Morgans' big wagon and labored the wood in load by load, damn near tipping over every time coming up that gulch. And there the pile sits, board footage for four rooms downstairs and three up, not counting attic and screen porch. Rafters and studdings and gables and shingles, the whole shebang.
The thing of it is, the house exists in Charlie Rung's mind. The only discrepancy is that it needs to be framed up and nailed together. Time he did that. He can't fully fathom how it hasn't happened already. Hadn't he done fine with the barn? And been triple careful with the walls of the cabin, so as not to wake up some clear January morning frozen stiff? But the carpentry of the house he has not quite attended to.
Middle of June, already. Haying is about to need doing, then the barn patched and mucked out for winter, then sixty bushels of potatoes to be dug and gunny-sacked and stored in the root cellar for winter, and cord after cord of stovewood to be chopped for winter too, and he is no youngster any more. All at once he knows he will never budge that lumber.
***
Blat is in the echoes now, the sheeps' medley of a thousand calls of baa bouncing here to there on Hatfield Mountain as the ewes are mothering up their lambs. They're ready to shade up, and Berneta too drops down for a rest. Army of mothers, encampment of wool at the top of the mountainslope. Berneta unwraps her sandwiches for lunch and gives Flop a share.
***
Out of the barbershop Dad and I march, shining at the back of the neck, and hurry through egg salad sandwiches at the lunch counter of the drugstore. The day is going and, last bite down, so are we.
Onward to conspiracy. This is the part that is secret from Berneta. My father had confided it to me as soon as we turned Prince Al loose. I outright dance to the idea, and my father looks like he could spring down the street in a burst of jigsteps himself.
At our destination, though, two of the women shoppers who seem to be the occupying force of Bozeman are passing by, one shaking her head and telling the other: "You ought to just see the prices they've got in there."
"'Spensive?"
"Awful. I walked in and walked out."
The Doigs are not daunted. In we plunge, my father's jaw geared forward into determination.
Shelves, counters, racks, boxes. Storeload of stuff, and the saleswoman is busy with a woman customer buying something whispery. We're on our own and glad of it.
"What's it a present for?" I'd asked my father when he unveiled this intrigue of his.
That threw him for a moment. Nearly three months yet to Berneta's birthday, and their wedding anniversary had been six, no, already seven weeks ago.
"The first day of summer," he resorted to. "Approximate."
This was good, though. My father feeling relieved enough about the arc of the sheep deal so far, about cabin life and the summer range, to think in gift terms. Berneta has been through a lot, this hobo quintet of months since he fell sick in Alzona Park. Time for her to have a surprise of the decent sort.
My father zeroes in on the merchandise he has in mind. Picks one up and eyes it as if trying to see through it.
"What color would ye say this is, Ivan?"
How to define that it has a kind of off-reddish tint, neither quite one color nor another, stumps me until I think to declare: "Hereford."
"That's no good to us then," he puts it sharply down. "We want straight brown, so it'll go with anything."
I manage to single out undiluted brown, my father decides on the fanciest style, and we're already halfway in business. Away we swagger to another section of the store, for the other item of splurge to go with this one.
There, the saleswoman catches up with us. We feel we don't noticeably need her help, but she seems to think otherwise.
"This brown is close enough to the other one," she undertakes to show us, "to go together nicely."
"Close enough isn't what we're after," my father lets her know.
Down cascade more boxes of the item, the saleswoman displaying one after another until I exercise our proxy on the precise same color.
Dad names the size, and the saleswoman wonders if that doesn't sound too big. My father g
ives no ground. He knows the size of everything Berneta wears, and barely keeps from telling the snooty salesclerk it was all volunteer arithmetic, too.
The saleswoman wants to know what other assistance she can render us. My father informs her the spree is over, how much are the damages? She adds up the set of purchases, he flips his checkbook out and writes the figure as if it was pocket change. Away, rich in gifts, we go again.
Groceries next, by the boxload. The trunk of the Ford swallows it all away and my father looks twice at his wristwatch. All we need now is Prince Al. Naturally he has not shown up, here at the hour Dad absolutely instructed him to.
My father starts to stew. The thirty-five-mile drive yet ahead, mudholes in ambush; a stop at the Morgans to tell them we've done our own camptending this week; tarping the groceries into slingpacks behind our saddles; the three-mile horseback ride from the mouth of the gulch up to the cabin—he doesn't want added into all that a door-to-door search of Bozeman for Prince goddamn Al.
"Daddy, are you going to can him?"
