Heart Earth

by Ivan Doig

  "To even do that we need to find the sonofabuck." As much to the lengthy main street of Bozeman as to himself or me, he addresses: "Where do ye suppose a bird like him would hang out?"

  Choices are plenty, although all in one category. Just from where we stand I can read the twinkling signs of several nominees—the Crystal Bar, the Rocking R Bar, the Park Bar, the Stockman Bar.

  My father casts another glance, this time at the sun, midway down the afternoon sky, and starts us toward the nearest of the bars at his racing pace. "Bastard him anyway, we don't have the time—"

  ***

  Time to head down out of here, Berneta can tell from her glance at the sun; start the sheep moving down the mountain toward the place for night.

  The sheep, contrary old sisters that they can be, have forgotten their earlier affection for the bedground and want to keep on stuffing grass into themselves. Words fly out over the mountain: "Around them, Flop. Way around them." While the dog makes his rounds, Berneta adds whistling and a clatter chorus of cans. Grudgingly, the ewes shift around and mince slowly down the slope, their lambs skittery at their sides. It will be a push, to make them move down to the cabin meadow before dark. The horse and dog both are showing themselves tired and, message from her body, she is getting seriously that way, too. Stay on the horse, she again reminds herself. Riding is work, but walking this vast sidehill is more so. She spurs Duffy closer to the herd.

  ***

  "Of-all-the-goddamn-times-to-have-to-herd-the-goddamn-herder," my father tells the world. He and I ransack the drinkeries on the south side of the street first, Dad giving a description of Prince Al which grows more blazing with each bar. But the bartenders shake their heads, chorus that they sure haven't laid eyes on any such specimen. We even resort to the Oaks Cigar Store, on the chance he's in there stoking up on chaw.

  No luck. "Worse mess, if we go back out without him," my father reminds himself by stating to me, and we begin canvassing the north side of the street.

  Who would have thought it of scruffy gopher-cheeked Prince Al? He was ensconced in the cocktail lounge of the swanky Baxter Hotel, the absolute last place to look, pickling himself with mixed drinks called Brown Bombers.

  "Got your compensation fixed up, it looks like," my father begins with mere sarcasm, then he really lights into him. Takes the hide off him for breaking his word about meeting us on time, for going off on a bender, for general misbehavior while a woman has to handle his sheep for him. Yet not quite firing him. We still desperately need a herder, even one of this candlepower, until shearing.

  Without a word, Prince Al follows us out and folds himself into the car.

  ***

  The route from the Maudlow road up to the cabin was beginning to take on familiar features, like a caravan run. The creek dodged through the thick brush, every ripple purring in hiding. Yellow shaley rock cliffed out wherever the gulch broke at a bend. Ahead, overhead, Hatfield Mountain topping out in its thatch of timber. At the halfway point, the sudden stand of low-branched cottonwoods to watch out for or they would slap you half off your horse.

  I nod along in the dreamslow rhythm of the ride, perched, lulled, being carried by event. But go to my father and he is remaking the day, casting away the delay and lateness, churning worry into reassurance: if it would only stay churned. Holy-J.-Christ, his mood runs, how-can-ye-ever-figure-it-all? Prince Al possibly would've behaved himself, not gone off and got plastered, if Berneta had been the one to take him to town. Yet, couldn't really blame her for not wanting to fight the Maudlow road; lucky enough that my father didn't get us stuck himself, in those mudholes that would swallow a person's shadow. Besides, maybe Prince Al would've fallen off the wagon even if a dozen Bernetas had taken him to town, maybe he was just that kind. But oh damn the weather that we were always having to try to sneak past, outguess, make muddy choices. If it'll only let us settle in; the Rung place is restful when it's not a day commotion like this. The sheep deal will pay off in just a couple more weeks, at shearing. Then there'll be the lamb money this fall, and even a bit of profit at selling the ewes too; money enough to set us up for a good long time. We can see if Berneta will try Arizona again, that ranch country around Prescott. Or if she can get by in Montana as well as she has this spring, maybe that's as much as can be asked. Ivan in school this fall, we'll need to place ourselves and we will. Not far now to the cabin. Damn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, how late in the day it's gotten to be. But her stint with the sheep ought to have gone well, browsing them a little way up the mountain like he had laid out for her. And the weather hadn't been terrible, which qualified it as good. And she is veteran at all this, after all. Knows the country, Berneta does. Knows herself, better even than he's ever managed to. What was it she'd said? "Don't worry none, I'm not about to walk myself to—"

  ***

  Dearth of activity at the meadow, the cabin, as we file up out of the tangly gulch.

  It is nearing dark. The sheep are bedded at the upper end of the meadow, where my father had conveniently sited the herder's tepee that morning. Prince Al, sobering up grumpy, heads his horse toward the tepee.

  Duffy, still saddled, is grazing in the high grass alongside the barn. Berneta is nowhere in sight.

  My father stands in his stirrups, suddenly tiptoe with the strain of trying to see behind the cabin windows slurred with dusk. "Berneta, we're home,"he shouts almost as if it were a question.

  The cabin.

  The barn.

  The bedded sheep.

  Nothing answers him except echo.

  ***

  Then in the frame of the cabin doorway, just distinct. Wiping her hands with a sack towel, she calls out:

  "Back the same day, are you."

  The sheepdogs appear, one on either side of her, yawning from their cozy cabin stay.

  Burden of worry off him now, my father clucks his horse into faster pace across the meadow. I bounce on the back of Star, trying to keep up.

  They've all kissed and gone on to generalities about the day by the time I slide down from my horse. My mother hugs me and calls me her Bozeman Ivan, laughs that Dad and I don't seem to be cut out for town barbering, we've come home looking like a couple of scared preachers.

  My father does a necessary asking. "How'd ye do with the sheep?"

  Her day on the mountain revolves again. The sheep when they were pigheaded, the sheep when they were perfect. Varieties of weather. Taste of the sandwich lunch, sound of the grouse. Exasperation, exaltation, sufficiency of each. Common day in the week of life.

  She sums it as she will for Wally, in transoceanic ink, in the morning:

  I got along okay.

  The mail and groceries have to wait. First out of the pack are the conspiratorial boxes for her. This, my father the cowboy suitor could perform blind. "We happened to bring ye a couple little somethings, dear," he pronounces and flourishes the first box to her, then with a grin hands me the other one to hand to her.

  "What have you two been up to?" She gazes, as captured with surprise as we could wish, back and forth at my identically grinning father and me.

  "Try em on," my father says with acey-deucey confidence.

  Publicly done, as everything is in the single room of the cabin. She slips the first item on, exclaims to us about the perfect fit, which of course we knew. She peeks in the second box.

  Lifts out the other half of the outfit with an "Oh, I ought to send you two to town all the time." Puts it on by ducking down to adjust it just-so in Dad's shaving mirror.

  Turns to us, rigged out new from head to toe.

  Charlie and Ivan brought me the nicest pair of brown boots and a big hat.

  So I am a combination cowgirl sheepherder now.

  ***

  Away to the Ault flowed that third June letter of hers, full of her herding triumph and the summer to be ridden into with newly given garb. Somewhere it crossed mail-paths with the only letter from Wally that has come to light.

  All his others, nearly a stea
dy year's worth from such war addresses as Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Eniwetok and Luzon and Okinawa, went the way of discard and loss. But this single one hid in plain sight, in print. Proudly sent to the editor of the White Sulphur Springs weekly newspaper by my grandmother, it appears in full on the front page of July 4, 1945. Now don't think that this is all that could be said, Wally tags on an immediate warning. It is what they will let past the censors.

  ...Many exciting encounters ... helping to make history each day ... bringing the end of the war nearer... Beyond the dehydrated handout to send to the folks at home, the Ault was wending its own route through the last of the Pacific war. The ship is in Samuel Eliot Morison's naval history of World War Two, a photograph of the destroyer taking on fuel in heavy seas, white water smashing over its every deck. The Ault and Wally ultimately would make it into Tokyo Bay for the ceremony of surrender by Japan. A night soon after, something Wally and the other young sailors had never seen: their ship's running lights. (Logbook of the Ault: BY ORDER OF COMMANDER TASK GROUP, ALL SHIPS TURNED ON NAVIGATIONAL LIGHTS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE DECEMBER 7, 1941.) Three hundred forty-five men cocooned in a skinny vessel three hundred sixty-nine feet long, the Ault crew survived to do its own telling of the war.

  Don't think that this is all that could be said. What was slighted worst of all in the officially prepared letter home for Wally and the other Ault men was the actual business of war, taking toll. Nowhere the sense that this promised to be the to-the-death summer when an American bomber sent down a new manner of bomb which torched the city of Hiroshima in white-hot radiation, and then repeated on the city of Nagasaki. Deliberate amnesia of hurt and death is the order of the day. The Ault's sailors had watched planes burst into fireballs over them, had plucked survivors and bodies from the ocean when the carriers Wasp and Franklin and Hancock and Bunker Hill were aflame, had felt the close pass of kamikaze attacks, had fed ammunition into hypnotic gunchambers through eighty straight days of Okinawa combat. But the official warworld of Wally's ship is rounded off to: We have our less happy times...

  Only the letter's closing lines seem not canned, start to sound like true Wally again. The Wally who can't bring himself to stay listless even in censored circumstances. Some of it is not as had as it sounds, the feel of his war comes out on paper, Some of it was worse. He leaves off in a dreamtime of his own, sailor Montanan trying to deploy himself into a future. This is just about our last operation.... Maybe next spring we will get to see each other again.

  In the column exactly beside Wally's letter was printed my mother's obituary.

  ***

  Word came aboard the Ault in the worst possible way, in a p.s. miserably penciled onto one of my grandmother's weekly letters to Wally.

  Dear Wallace, some awful sad news to tell you since I wrote your letter. Berneta passed away last nite. That's all the word I've gotten so far. I don't know where they're at or where she died at.

  She didn't suffer any at the last, Wally—the pencilscript now my father's shaken hand in an ensuing letter—for which I am thankful. She was feeling extra good all evening and we talked until eleven that night. She passed away at 2.30 A.M. on the 27th of June, Ivan's birthday. I didn't even have time to awaken Ivan, she went so fast.

  Swift, then, the attack by which she died. Not the customary siege of short breath, the jolting coughs and lung convulsions, the air-short fatigue, that she had ridden out so many times before. Not the open mayhem of asthma. Instead on her death certificate, immediate cause is given as an overstretching of the cardiac muscle—which was to say, a heart condition. Nowhere ever written, then or since, was the simultaneous fact of earth: the acrobat heights of Montana earth that kept her so alive, until they killed her.

  ***

  Nobody got over her. Doig or Ringer, those around me in my growing-up stayed hit, pierced, by my mother's death in the mountain cabin.

  My father was wrenched back and forth by how welcome the return to Montana had been for Berneta, and how treacherously it struck her down; how risky the one last mountain summer turned out to be, how unsaveable his wife's health ultimately was.

  To my grandmother, her suspicion of "out there" was horridly proven, Berneta taken from her in some remote visitless place. Having had to toughen herself against so much, Bessie Ringer now faced what would never go away, death of a daughter.

  For Wally, the reaction was a lifelong clutch at his sister's last letters, the keeping of news which shot in just when it had become clear that he himself would survive the war.

  Always after, for all of us, it was not simply that Berneta had died young. There was always the echo-plus of "out there in the Sixteen country," "up there on the mountain," "on Ivan's sixth birthday." A private family dialect of magnitude and conjunction and consequence. The Sixteen country held that magnified proportion for my mother; her manner of death held it for those who most loved her.

  On through that summer of 1945, the last of the letters in Wally's packet were written and sent out in misery and confusion, several by my grandmother and a pair by my father.

  Brittle and cracking a bit more each time I unfold them, they still manage to stab. So blue, my grandmother lets down onto the page, seems all I do is cry & cry some more. My father tries to convey the deadweight of time on him now. No one can understand it that hasn't been through it. The days are weeks and the weeks are months for me. Then, sad dream going into nightmare, their lines turn and spit sour toward each other.

  I haven't seen your mother for a long time, Wally.

  Wallace dearest, I haven't seen Charlie or Ivan since we laid Berneta away.

  She never comes around to see Ivan.

  I've got no way to go see them. Then I haven't the heart to go where Charlie is anyway.

  She could have come nearer giving Ivan mother love than any other person in the world.

  Got a letter from Charlie yesterday in answer to the one I wrote and asked him if I could help them in any way. But he gave me to understand that I wasn't fit to help take care of Ivan. The only way he can think of me is with pity and regret.

  I feel bad to think she and I can't get along.

  He knows he can hurt me through Ivan.

  I shall try so hard to bring Ivan up to be the kind of son his mother would wish.

  I'll write Ivan but I'll not write him.

  ***

  It took my father and my grandmother five more years to quit their grievous scrap, but that was a lot better than never.

  In the last twist of all, they turned together to raise me. When my father faced himself in the glass door of a phone booth in White Sulphur Springs a night in 1950 and went through with the long-distance call to the Norskie country, he closed down the war that had begun over Berneta and continued over Berneta's child. As my grandmother managed to swallow away as much grudge as she heard being swallowed at the other end of the line, she volunteered herself yet another time into a shortsided situation, never to be a wife nor even a lover, not the mother of me yet something beyond grandparent. From then on, the cook during haying or calving or lambing at the ranches where my father worked was Bessie instead of Berneta, the couple who would throw themselves and their muscles into sheep deals were Charlie and his mother-in-law instead of his young wife. I grew up amid their storms, for neither of these two was ever going to know the meaning of pallid. But as their truce swung and swayed and held, my growing-up felt not motherless but tribal, keenly dimensional, full of alliances untranslatable but ultimately gallant (no, she's not my mother, she's ... no, he's my father, not my grand-) and loyalties deep as they were complex. So many chambers, of those two and of myself, I otherwise would have never known.

  In the eventual, when I had grown and gone, my grandmother and father stayed together to see each other on through life. April 6, 1971: his time came first, from emphysema which was the cruel lung reprise of my mother's fate. October 24, 1974: my grandmother remained sturdy to her final instant—one mercy at last on these people, her death
moment occurred in the middle of a chuckle as she joked with a friend driving her to a card party at the Senior Citizens Club.

  Their twenty-one years together, a surprising second life for each, I've long known I was the beneficiary of. The letters teach me anew, though, how desperately far they had to cross from that summer of grief. Theirs was maybe the most durable dreaming of all, that not-easy pair; my father and my grandmother, and their boundaryless memory of my mother.

  ***

  And I see at last, past the curtain of time which fell prematurely between us, that I am another one for whom my mother's existence did not end when her life happened to.

  Summoning myself—summing myself—is no less complicated, past fifty, than it was in the young-eyed blur at those howling Montana gravesides. Doig, Ivan, writer: independent as a mule, bleeder for the West's lost chances, exile in the Montana diaspora from the land, second-generation practical thrower of flings, emotionally skittish of opening himself up like a suitcase, delver into details to the point of pedantry, dreamweaver on a professional basis—some of me is indisputably my father and my grandmother, and some I picked up along the way. But another main side of myself, I recognize with wonder in the reflection of my mother's letters. It turns out that the chosen world where I strive to live full slam—earth of alphabet, the Twenty-Six country—had this earlier family inhabitant who wordworked, played seriously at phrase, cast a sly eye at the human herd; said onto paper her loves and her fears and her endurance in between; most of all, from somewhere drew up out of herself the half hunch, half habit—the have-to—of eternally keeping score on life, trying to coax out its patterns in regular report, making her words persevere for her. Berneta Augusta Maggie Ringer Doig, as distinct as the clashes of her name.

  Ivan is fine, growing like a weed, her pen closes off its last letter ever, June 19, 1945. You don't need to worry about him forgetting you, he remembers his Uncle Wally and knows what ship you are on. He'll probably have a million questions to ask when you get back.