This House of Sky

by Ivan Doig

  All in all, stepping out of the pickup at a herder's camp had some of the touchiness of coming ashore on a self-exile's island. I can think of only one of McGrath's herders who seemed entirely to thrive on the lonesome life—Louie, a tall soldierly man with a German accent. He owned a pair of tiny deft binoculars which snapped open like a case for eyeglasses, and spent his time peering for wildlife on the mountain slopes. Yesterday a black bear come, up over there. I watched at him all morning. But the others had the common herder's affliction, the mind sprung by the weight of the silences against it.

  However slowly, and if it could be pried out at all, there generally would be news to be heard from the sheepherder: a coyote seen on a hillside, a ewe gone lame or ripped by a snag, a porcupine treed by his dogs as they suicidally tried to get their faces full of quills. Dad, if it was his turn at camp tending, would smoke and chat until the herder began talking, then only nod and ask enough to keep the flow coming. McGrath's style was to blurt at the herder until the man at last set off on some startled telling or another, the two of them steaming toward full exasperation. Then abruptly, an instant before the herder was ready to fling his job in McGrath's face, we would wheel away to move the sheepwagon to a new pasture site.

  The sheepwagon could be seen to be a child of the prairie schooner. With its rounded canvas top and high spoked wheels, a first glance easily found it back amid the beadlike file of white-topped wagons westering through our history. But a sheepwagon always existed alone, remote as a drifting brig on the grass ocean. It was built for one man to bide through the narrow months in, and that single life only: in the mountain dawn or dusk, yellowed light from the kerosene lamp at a herder's wagon showed like one frail star fallen into the timber.

  Inside the wagon with Dad or McGrath, it felt to me as if space, the very air, had changed, somehow tidied and tamped itself. I wanted to live in a sheepwagon, so much more interesting were they than the blank room back at the Camas. Nowhere else had the sense of deft shrinkage as if a house had been pulled in and pulled in until it came down just above your head and out past your fingertips. Storage bins doubled as places to sit, the table hinged daintily down from a wall when wanted, every built-in cabinet had a tiny firm clasp snugging its door. The bunk bed fit across the inmost end of the wagon as properly as a blade snicked into a jackknife. At the opposite end on a platform all its own sat the small square stove, usually with a pan of mulligan stew or a blue-enameled pot of sour tarry coffee waiting to be fired up one more time. Finally, to let the herder glance out more easily to the sheep, the wagon had a Dutch door; with its bottom half closed, I could lean out on it and feel as if far up on a lookout across this high pasture of summer.

  In place, the wagon was a kind of ship's cabin for the herder, tidy, buttoned, comely. But during the move to the next site, it became only a floating bin. Everything loose had to be packed away in the wagon's nooks, then onto the floor was piled whatever firewood the herder had chopped, his coal oil can and likely a creamery can full of drinking water, his wash basin, the battered metal dish his dog ate out of, the gunny-sacked ration of oats for his horse, white sacks of salt for the sheep, and last of all, the small front steps for the doorway.

  Because a sheepwagon sat so high on its running gear—the floor nearly chest high to a man on the ground—it towed across rough country with a staggering topheavy gait. A successful move of a sheepwagon was one that didn't topple the chimney pipe and leave it to be searched out of a few miles of roadside brush. At the new site, there was leveling to be done. A cup of water would be put on the table to see how the wagon tilted, then small holes were dug for the wheels to drop in, or a stout stick was shouldered under a corner of the wagon box to lift it into steadiness for another week.

  Such, at least, was how a sheepwagon was properly moved. McGrath in his headlong way was apt to tow it as if dragging a tree stump. More often than not, he would forget to fasten the cabinet doors, and a flour can would fly out and explode snowily over everything, pots and pans then avalanching from the oven and likely a can of lard or jar of jam leaping in after.

  Credit him, McGrath always seemed genuinely surprised to fling back the door and find the gooey wreckage. For a minute or so he would dab at it doubtfully, firing pots and pans back into the oven and kicking flour out the door in tiny puffs, then would snort The hell with it, a sheepherder's got more time than I do, and off we would buck to the next sheepwagon move.

  More than two years were spent on the Camas this way, the seasons milling into one another like the fitful sheep themselves. Dad and Grandma steadied the ranch with their work, but had less luck with each other. Ours remained a brink of a family, the two of them at sudden edge with each other, then calming again. When they came to take me to the Camas for the weekends with them, usually the mood seemed to me as chancy as among McGrath's wild sheepherders. But as the third winter of this was about to begin, something vaster to judge came along. McGrath had made a proposition. He was going to give up the Camas for other ventures, and one of them was the lease of a small ranch two hundred miles to the north. He would put two thousand ewes on the place: would Dad run the ranch and the sheep for half the profit?

  None of us had been to that far region of Montana, and naturally McGrath's prospects were as unpredictable as the country. But Dad was for going. He took me aside and talked out his reasoning: Ivan, I think I'll take on those two bands of sheep for McGrath. He's a bearcat to work for, but the son-of-a-buck knows livestock and he knows how to turn money ... I think it's a chance to take, going up north. But I don't know now, how do you feel about changing schools?

  Eight weeks earlier I had started high school in White Sulphur, with the classmates I had known since Dad and I came away from the mountains after my mother's death. The school, the town, the valley made all the lifestream I knew anything about. Yet when I put all this against Dad's words and the musing look on his face, the sum did not add up to as much as I expected. It may have been that I was more weary than I knew of the suitcase life of boarding out in White Sulphur, or that I was just now coming across a portion of restlessness inherited from Dad. Whatever was behind it, I swallowed and gave my father the answer he wanted, and apparently the one I secretly did too: I feel okay about that.

  Grandma. She had lived in the valley for forty years now, nearly all her adult life. Her friends, her sons, her patterns of existence were there. The alliance between Dad and her had problems which showed no sign of easing. Whatever the ties of affection between her and me, I couldn't believe she could be talked into this total uprooting toward the north. We'll just have to see about her, Dad said. He rehearsed to me a dozen arguments he would put to her, and when the moment came simply fired out: This damn valley has never got us much of anywhere, Lady. All either of us has to show for our lives here is a helluva pile of hard work. I say we ought to try out new country. Will ye come?

  She was silent a long while—but a thinking silence, not a perturbed one. At last: All right then. When can we be gone and get it over and done with?

  The two of us watched, struck silent, as she honked into a handkerchief and then clouted pots and pans onto the counter for the next kitchen chore. She was truly corded to us now, and the fact came with a sense of wonder and relief—and somehow among them, a nudge of concern.

  One shard of time repeats itself like the snow-helmets of mountains across each season of my memory. An edged piece of the day, that is, in the strictest sense—the high sun-point called noon.

  It seems curious now that this one daily interval counted for so much. Daybreak did not, nor dusk; days arrived and went with an unnoticed ease then. But noon climbed up like a crier to a tower, and my father reckoned his life, and those of his ranch crews, and mine at his side, by its powers: After noon we'll just go and ... Let's get shut of this by noon ... Better noon up and get some grub, don't ye think? And my grandmother, noon meaning to her the vast midday meal—we called it dinner, in full honor—to be arrayed along the sweep
of table for a lambing crew or a shearing crew or a haying crew or whatever other kinds of crew might turn up from the world: Ivan, pretty please, yammer the bell to call those good-for-nothin's in here. Noon it was, too, when Taylor Gordon might be met on the street in White Sulphur, on the way to his cabin for his own dreaming meal and turning back at you to leave one last New York story or particle of philosophy: Y'know, I've found in life that I'd rather make a fast dime than a slow buck. Or when Harold Chadwick, straddled onto a counter stool in the Dupuyer cafe, might be coaxed to tell of hunting elk, when he was my age, with the ancient Métis mountain man Toussaint Salois: He had his big old buffalo coat and could set by the campfire just as comfortable—the rest of us 'd be freezin' to death. Even my mother, the one voice unknown from any of these years, can be almost-heard in some noontime, talking as she would have with my father as their morning's harvest of grouse sizzles on the campfire of their Grass Mountain herding site.

  For so potent a piece of time, noon was not exact at all. It never meant to us high twelve o'clock, any more than to the early English countryfolk who accounted their noon at three p.m., the ninth hour after sunrise. Noon meant instead the controlled curve of the day from morning into afternoon, where the beginning of labor crossed into the lessening of labor. A gradual but distinct passage, that is to say, which the sundial still could have expressed better than the clock. There would have been the advantage, too, that the blankness of the sundial on an overcast day would have said more truthfully how vague time became when clouds curded grayly over the valley and all work of the ranch was drenched out. Once or twice I can remember a two-day rain, which was all the rain we could imagine, and the loss of two working-noons in a row was befuddling, ominous, a dank eclipse. More than enough testimony, each time, that the sun's topmost moment of arch stood as a necessity in our world of ranchcraft.

  NORTH

  As the Irish fellow says, this place must be the back of the neck of the world. For once, my father's damnation of a ranch was underdone. He could have peppered in a few dozen of the Irish fellow's forlornest cusswords in justice to this one.

  We had come the hours of distance north from the Smith River Valley and driven onto the ranch during the night. As Dad puzzled through the darkness along fainter and fainter scuffs of prairie road, our three styles of apprehension began to cloak in on us. Before we were halfway, Grandma demanded: Gee gollies, aren't we never gonna get there? Dad notched his chin ahead another full inch and choked the steering wheel as if it had betrayed him. I tried to stare shapes out of the blackness, but could find only an occasional jackrabbit racing in the net-edge of our headlights.

  At last, Dad gave a start, began to brake the pickup down a sudden careen of slope, and the headlights fingered wildly onto a squat white building. By gee, at last. That was Grandma; not a word out of Dad. Where is the place, down in a hole like this? More silence from him. As we stumbled from the pickup toward the house, the white walls too seemed to hold back from us in the dark, ghostly and telling nothing of themselves.

  Daylight did all the telling we wanted. Testing doors, we found ourselves locked off from all but the back three rooms of the house—a small bedroom for Grandma, one hardly larger for Dad and me, and a high-ceilinged cavern of a kitchen. McGrath's doings, I'll warrant you, Grandma announced rightly: in haggling for the lease, he had euchred a point of some sort with the ranch-owning family by allowing them to store their belongings in the front portion of the house. From a keyhole I reported up to Dad and Grandma that furniture and boxes were piled all around a broad, be-windowed living room, with other rooms opening off as well. Plainly, the divvy of the house had dealt the larger share in there to dust and silence.

  In alarm, we studied the ungainly little set of rooms left to us, and the single narrow envelope of view out the kitchen windows—to a dilapidating bunkhouse, the outhouse, and a bit of brown treeless slope ramping up to the benchland. Even Grandma couldn't come up with words for the situation, although the line of her lips said she was working on it.

  She and I went out to peer in the windows of the denied rooms, as if we needed to confirm McGrath's treachery. I glanced around toward the silver-boarded sheepshed which squatted hugely across the yard from us. At least, I tried in what I thought was entirely grown-up sarcasm, old McGrath got us a scad of room for the sheep. But Grandma's attention had hit on the bleak bench of land rimming above us to the south, where the road curled in. She turned, and the same bench rimmed over us in the west. Another turn, and an identical flat lid of horizon to the north. She rotated to the last chance, the east, and was met with rimming benchland again, like the fourth lip of a vast square pit. Hmpf. House in a hollow makes the weather follow, she recited, slammed away into the back of the house, and wouldn't be spoken to for the rest of the morning.

  Dad and I walked around the outbuildings. The sheepshed spread itself big beyond relief, bunkered along the base of a slope for a full forty yards, then elling off into the coulee for another forty, then closed around with a high board fence like a stockade. The one thing such expanse insured was endless walking for the day man—Dad—during lambing time. Moose of a damn place, he muttered now as if trying to shrink it.

  Weathered and dour as a fortress, the sheepshed looked to have crouched on its site eternally. Every other building in the ranch yard, however, reared from open ground to open sky as though spilled into place, hard, only an eyeblink before. Nothing greater than a spear of grass backed the buildings—no brushy windbreak, no board fence, not even a pitying fluff of sage as the valley would have provided. As for trees, the entire sum of them on the 2500-acre ranch—two—hunched low at the front of the house, evidently trying to cower in out of the wind.

  McGrath had told us that this leasehold—it was called the Jensen ranch—began as a homestead, which meant that people had lived here from at least forty years earlier. How had they never managed to make the place look less stark? From where we stood, a machine shed yawned with disuse on one side of us, a granary shed answered on the other. Between the pair bulked a barn built of notched logs, and its brown-gray mass only made the sheds look all the more cadaverous. Everything in sight—ground, barn, sheds, a rusting windmill—was slightly aslant, as if the impact of the giant sheepshed at the bottom of the yard had teetered the entire ranch toward it.

  It was when Dad noticed that he hadn't yet found a place on the ranch where he could stand without one foot lower than the other that he pronounced the Irish fellow's lament on our new home. Then: Aw the hell, Skavinsky, we might as well go see what the grass looks like. The two of us—neither willing to risk a peace gesture in Grandma's direction yet—drove back up the long snout of benchland in front of the house.

  We came up over the crest and were walled to a stop. The western skyline before us was filled high with a steel-blue army of mountains, drawn in battalions of peaks and reefs and gorges and crags as far along the entire rim of the earth as could be seen. Summit after summit bladed up thousands of feet as if charging into the air to strike first at storm and lightning, valleys and clefts chasmed wide as if split and hollowed by thunderblast upon thunderblast. Across the clear gape of distance, we could read where black-quilled forest wove in beneath cliffs and back among the plummet of canyons, we could make out the beds of scree crumbled and scattered beneath the marching shields of rimrock. The Smith River Valley had had mountain ranges all around. This high-set horizon twenty miles to our west thrust itself as if all those past ranges and twice their number more had been tumbled together and then armored with rimrock and icefield.

  Off this carom-line of summits, we knew, the Continental Divide tipped rivers away to both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The shouldering might of what Dad and I were looking at seemed as if it could send those entire oceans too sloshing along routes of flow if the notion struck. Then as the pair of us stared and cleared our throats to one another, we began to see a thing more. Along these mastering mountains, all the hundred miles of gashing skyline in ou
r sight, fresh snow was draping down.

  Here was a thought. Dad and I had lived our lifetimes beneath weather-making mountains, none of which tusked up into storm clouds as mightily as this Sawtooth Range of the Rockies would. In front of us now loomed the reefline of the entire continent, where the surf of weather broke and came flooding across, and both of us knew what could be ahead when full winter poured down off these north peaks. Yet for the instant, to have come upon grandness anywhere near this spavined ranch, neither of us had the heart to care.

  Down from the mountains as well, it turned out, this north country stretched as a land of steady expanse, of crisp-margined distances set long and straight on the earth. All the obliques of our valley life seemed to have been erased and redrawn here as ruler-edged plateaus of grassland, furrowed panels of grainfield, arrowing roads, creeks nosing quick and bright from the Rockies. The clean lines of this fresh landscape everywhere declared purpose and capacity, seemed to trumpet: Here are the far bounds, all the extent anyone could need. Now live up to them.

  Dad stepped from the pickup, slid his hands into his hip pockets and studied the shards and shields of the Sawtooth Mountains and then the bold-edged distances north and south and east. Dandy country, he said, and turned to grin wide at me. As the fellow says, just dandy fine. Let's go tackle that Lady situation.

  Dad by now had learned a considerable trove about how to handle Grandma—the remainder of his problem being that there seemed to be some dozens of troves yet to be figured out about her—and he had hit on what was needed to get her mind off the alarming ranch. We got to figure some place for Ivan to stay for school, Lady. These roads are gonna be too much to drive every day when winter sets in this country. What do ye think we ought to do?