This House of Sky

by Ivan Doig

  The four lives mix richly in Carol's first visit to Montana. The first night in the house in Ringling, Grandma departs at bedtime to spend the night at the Badgetts'; Dad takes her place on the living-room couch, Carol and I take his in the bed in the tiny bedroom. Ah, burrs my father's voice through the quiet to us, as the fellow says, this is the place to be when night comes.

  We wake in the morning to a bell jangling close outside the window. Carol starts: What's that? I ponder for her benefit. Mmm, could be sheep, or a goat. Or somebody's milk cow. Or a horse. Probably not a chicken, it'd have trouble dragging the bell around. She looks out the window: All right, it's a horse. She gives me a grin of love and disbelief. It widens as the front door is clattered open, Spot explodes in and instantly has his head onto the bed-edge lolling rapturously up at us, Grandma cheerily is announcing: Hi, you stay-a-beds in there getting up today?

  ***

  And in the next year, the set of decisions which lifted Carol and me westward: that we had had enough of the mountainless Midwest, and of midway-up-the-masthead jobs we could do with automatic skills. I had come to feel that if I was going to go through life as bookish as I was, I might as well bend with the inclination and become a professor. No sooner had I said so than Carol said: Let's go do it.

  The University of Washington accepted me into graduate study. In the late summer of 1966, Carol and I arrived in Seattle, set out at once to walk its hills and shores and to explore into the mountain ranges scarped along the entire horizons east and west of the city. We were on new ground of the continent, and stretched gratefully to it. And then, as quick as this, we learned that now we were on another ground in life as well. My father had begun to die.

  A story more out of memory, heard from my father a hundred times, and never enough:

  It was along about 1935. Your mother and I were herdin' sheep just then at the old D.L. place. Jobs was scarce in those days. Ye had to take anything ye could get. Well, a damned bear got to comin' in to the ranch there, killin' sheep. Boy, he'd kill 'em right and left. He'd always wait till after the moon went down, till it got good and dark. All the neighbors, there'd be some of 'em there pretty near every night with me, to try get that bear, but we never could.

  Your Uncle Paul, he came down there. The two of us were gonna spend the night in an old log barn there. The loft end of it was open, and we were gonna get old mister bear for sure. This bear now, he'd just kill his sheep and leave 'em lay, that's the way a bear does. They don't like fresh meat, they like it after it gets spoiled. So we got one of the first sheep he'd killed, up on the hill, and drug it down there, to bait him down there under that loft, ye see. We both swore we never slept a wink, but that night that bear ate the whole sheep within thirty feet of us, and we never knew it.

  We went on not havin' any luck that way. Generally all we'd see would be the bear's eyes as he'd take off out of there in the dark. This one evening, Berneta—your mother, I mean—and me and the neighbor, Mrs. Christison, were sittin' there in the front room of the house. It had big windows, and the house sat up on a knoll, we could see down to where the sheep were bedded in just below. We didn't corral 'em, we didn't dare. That beard get into 'em and pile 'em up and kill half of 'em at once. So I heard the sheep bells aringin' and I looked out the window, and here comes the whole band, right towards the house. That bear was after 'em.

  I grabbed the rifle—didn't have a very good rifle, either, just an old broken-down one I had loaded and sittin' there—and went back through the dining room through the kitchen and sneaked out the back door. I got out behind the bunkhouse. Then there's a creek there with heavy willows, I was gonna get on the edge of them and sneak around behind the bear. I thought I'd sure fix that boy this time.

  I got about halfway to the brush and I looked up and here he had a sheep cut out right against the house wall. There's a pole fence come up and nailed right onto the corner of the house, and he was trying to catch this sheep in there. The radio was agoin', and your mother and Mrs. Christison were standin' there in the window just like that, watchin'.

  I cut down on him with that old rifle, and he went WOOF! I don't know if I hit him or not, but I changed his mind anyhow.

  Well, he either had to come toward me or go right back through the middle of the sheep, so here he comes toward me. He got, oh, about sixty feet from me, and he was gonna head around the edge of the sheep then. I cut down on him again, and I know I hit him that time. He let another WOOF! out of him, and he was mad now. Here he comes. He had his old head turned sidewise. I could have counted his teeth there in the moonlight.

  I never give it a thought to run. Anyhow, he got up, oh, pretty close, I'd say about here to that window, six feet or so. I was tryin' to shoot him between the eyes. He had his head turned a little bit, and I got him right—you know the way a bear's head is, his ears are up towards the top of his head—I got him right the side of the ear there. The bullet went down through his neck and all the way into his lungs.

  That took the WOOF! out of him. Sat him back on his haunches, and he made a pass at me, and I ducked him as he come around or he'd of ripped me in four pieces. Just as he went by I jammed the gun against his ribs, right behind his shoulder there, and cut loose on him again. WOOF! he says again, and away he went.

  He had to go about thirty feet there till he hit a brand-new four-wire fence with cedar posts. He tore out about a hundred yards of that fence when he hit it.

  He went across the creek into the brush, and boy, he was cuttin' up in there, groanin' and growlin' and tearin' up the brush. I looked up and here's Mrs. Christison and your mother, standing right on the bank above me. They'd been there all the time while I was shootin' at him. And one of 'em had a lantern. I don't know what they were gonna do with that lantern.

  Mrs. Christison had this other old gun that was in the house. She says, You got any shells left?

  I says, Yeah, I got some in my pocket— that'd been the last shell I had in the gun when I put it again him there.

  Well, she says, Mrs. Christison says, let's go in and get him.

  You can go in and get him, I says, I've had enough of him.

  So we waited a little bit. It was all quieted down in the brush there, and I knew he's either dead or gone. So we went down the creek a little ways, there's a bridge there, and come up where the brush wasn't so thick.

  He was layin' there in a heap of brush, dead.

  I didn't get scared during it; never gave a thought to run when that bear was comin' at me. But I shook all night afterwards, after it was all over.

  A hundred times told, and always that last lilt of wonder in his voice that he could have been both hunter and hunted.

  ENDINGS

  Split the tongue of the silence that beats in you when you first know that a parent is dying, and it will begin to recite everything unsaid across a lifetime. Unsaid: that even in our most desperate time, when you were plunging into that wrongheaded marriage with Ruth and poisoning us away from the one you have come to call Lady, you somehow kept to the one great Tightness as well—the constant clasp of keeping me at your side, whatever the place or the hour or the weather or the mood or task or venture. So swiftly did you have me grown beyond my years that neither of us entirely understood the happening of it, but knew it to be rare, a triumph and terribly needed ... that it was you, in your burring troubadour's way of passing to me all you knew of the valley and the Basin, who enchanted into me such a love of language and story that it has become my lifework ... that I know, if have never said, that as I stepped off from you to books and schools, you somehow saw yourself riding free from the Basin homestead and so had not a word for me but in praise, encouragement, proudness ... that I know, and again could not speak it, how drastically you turned your own life for me, choking down pride as never before to speak the truce with Lady ... know too that when you risked that truce time upon time, it was because you needed risk, needed somehow to sizzle ordinariness by dropping danger into it now and again ... know,
and could say least of all, the final fact of triumph that you and Lady had made your way to a cherishing of each other which went beyond family lineament.

  Then the first and only words of this which would say themselves as they did now in my own voice: Dad, we've got to find the doctoring for you.

  Late or soon, the siege of death-against-life must clamp itself around every family, and never the same for any two. I see now that ours had begun its queer quiet trenching some time before it could be recognized for all it was. There is this tremor, from the Christmas week of 1963, when Dad and Grandma came to spend the holiday with me in Decatur. Before their train trip back to Montana, I drove them north to Chicago for a weekend, at last to show them the Northwestern scenes—Latham House, the school of journalism, the cathedral-towered library, Lake Michigan lapping beside it all like an unexpected ocean—which had filled five years of letters to them.

  Both of them were untiring sightseers, and the morning's saunter of the campus pleased us all, brought us proudly together in the accomplishment of having laddered me to such a place. We went next to our hotel in downtown Chicago, and in the snapping cold of the sunlit afternoon, a moment when I thought the city looked its ponderous best, I suggested we walk the surrounding blocks which offered the gaudy store windows of Michigan Avenue, the exotic bulk of the Art Institute, the skyline above the street canyons.

  Grandma eyed everything with her mixture of suspicion and sharp interest, asking me explanations to why the sidewalks were so wide and the people so fast-paced. But Dad: I remember looking across at him in surprise, as if finding a stranger with us, when he suddenly said he had had enough, he felt short of breath.

  On the way back to the hotel he had to stand and breathe deep time after time, the three of us a knot of concern in the grain of sidewalk traffic. Once he said, worry thick in his voice: How-long-is-this-damned-block?

  But inside the warmth of the hotel, as I was set to call for a doctor, Dad's chest eased at once, he became himself and made a joke about Chicago being too cold for a sane man to walk around in anyway. And like him, not knowing what more to find in it—often enough through his life he had felt mild damp-weather discomforts in his lungs from die breakage of those horseback accidents and from his decades of heavy smoking—I wrote off the moment to the stabbing chill of the winter lakefront.

  Then late in the next spring, weeks before I was to step into the editing job at The Rotarian, a bulletin from Grandma: Dearest Ivan. Well dear one I have to write you that Dad isn't none too good. He is in the hospital in Gt. Falls they told him he has to quit smoking or else. I am here with him but he's so awful weak and coughing so....

  Phone calls told me that he was not in danger at the moment. The hospitalization indeed was to begin easing him away from cigarettes and out of the coughing spells that were becoming chronic. When I hurried to Montana between the end of my old job and the beginning of the new, he told me the rest himself. Once out of the hospital and at home in Ringling, he had laid one fresh pack of cigarettes on the end table beside his easy chair. When he could no longer stand it, he smoked a cigarette. Some days only one, other days two, but never more than two. When the pack had emptied itself, he took that as the moment when he had finished with cigarettes for all time. Hardest damn thing I ever did, ye know that? But I did 'er.

  Dad's nerves jumped worse than ever now, which was saying much, and he looked like a thinner replica of himself. But his appetite was gaining and he felt he soon could be doing some part-time work. Well, don't rush things, I said, uneasy with myself for feeling there was more that ought to be said. Yet the doctors were finding nothing alarming, Dad seemed merely—if that word was right for any trouble beneath the breastbone—a man who had got in the habit of oversmoking and needed to be weaned from its eventual dangers.

  This quick braid of times together, then, before it came clear that my father was in serious illness. I finger apart their pattern here because these are the moment-strands each of us will think of afterward and wonder, Did I miss there some hint, some flicker of doubt or pain or incredulity, which told what was to come? And the greater wondering beyond that: If not, how can that skein of no apparent peril and the skein which followed it be portions of the same life?

  For now calamity began to make itself known as rapidly as if it had been invented entirely for Dad: a man who lived on his feet, he was finding himself more and more short of breath after each briefest stint of walking.

  At first the doctors he saw suggested that he might have a kind of asthma. There was all the grief on earth in that verdict, with its convulsed echoes of my mother's agony. Yet Dad showed none of the wheezing attacks which so devastated her—his lung difficulty nagged less violently but more steadily—and the diagnosis shifted. It was sometime late in 1966, the year Carol and I had arced our lives to the Pacific Northwest, that a word neither he nor I had heard before was uttered to my father: emphysema.

  In my mechanical way I read all I could find about the affliction, and each word more brought its own gloom. Emphysema, it emerged, could become a torture of the body beyond even my mother's suffering or the holocaust of cancer itself. As the honeycomb of air sacs in the lungs was destroyed by it, breathing would become forever more labored, a constant struggle against a sensation of suffocating. The act of breath would deliver less and less oxygen to the bloodstream, overload the heart into harsher and harsher pumping. Until the recent past, emphysema usually had been confused with asthma or bronchitis, and it had the worst of those ailments—an increasing wheeze, congestion-as well as its own cycle of deterioration in the deeps of heart and lung.

  Somehow through the null medical words— generalized overdistension, difficulty of exhalation, excess mucus—I came to picture the disaster happening in my father's lungs as a pattern like the splotched burning of a sagebrush fire. Perhaps it was the years of blue haze drifting up from his cigarettes that made me think so of smolder and slow flame-lick. For whatever reason, the image came to me of the black turf such a fire spreads in its steady searing fan across the land, and the thought too that there would be no grass-bright greening in this fire's wake as time passed. Only char and more char.

  And the role those words and that image spoke for me: For the dozen years since I had faced away from a storm-blasted band of sheep on the Blackfeet Reservation, this father of mine and this grandmother of mine unveeringly had shown me that they assumed I knew for myself what I was doing in life—which was a tremendous assumption. Then too, by the books and schooling I piled up, I was granted to be the authority on the world outside Montana. If I happened to be on the scene when Grandma was writing one of her letters to her son in Australia, she still would ask me, as she had when I was eleven, how to spell some Down Under mystery such as kangaroo; if I had told her q-y-n-g-u-r-u, she would have thought it odd of the Aussies but certified correct because I had said it. When I wrote an article about rodeo and put in a few lines about Dad's own bronc-stomping days, he passed the marvel around to friends until the magazine wore out: That kid of mine can write, if I do say so myself, unarguably saying so. Beyond that, there was my becalmed temperament, amid the pair of theirs which swayed and whanged.

  It all said that now I must truly become the authority in the family, this time on a matter beyond all of us. Here was the turn of time, sooner by a decade than I ever could have imagined, when I must become father to my own father, and I feared the matter, and wrestled it, and began to do it.

  I sent along to Montana the levelest words I could draw from what the medical journals and texts said of emphysema, and the two conclusions which I said demanded doing: winnow until we had the most expert diagnosis and advice we could find about this mystery licking its way inside Dad, and move him from the blizzardy isolation of Ringling nearer to medical care.

  The second of these, Dad himself took on as if snapped from a spell. Almost overnight he found and bought a small frame house in White Sulphur. Ungrand as it was, and carrying a sheaf of deeds which s
howed that it long had been a quick way-station for a procession of souls who couldn't afford better at the moment, the house nonetheless improved on the Ringling shanty in size and warmth and all else.

  Grandma was uneasy about the move: Don't we get by good enough as we are? Gee gosh, at our age, buyin' another house and all. ... I was the one to woo her from that. Carol said once: If you told her you were going to run an opium den, she would come around onto the side of opium dens. As promptly as I had Grandma persuaded out of Ringling, she flung into tidying and flower-bedding the new site. A month after she and Dad moved in, it looked as if the pair of them had lived there from time out of mind.

  Yet one of them was not going to live any time at all unless care for emphysema could be found, and the next piece of persuasion was to keep Dad from throwing himself under surgical knives. An operation he had heard of was claimed to lift the sensation of heavy breathing; already the pushing effort needed to make his lungs work was dismaying him. I'm not sure I've got anything to lose by trying that out, Ivan.

  By phone and letter, I found doctor after doctor against the surgery. Guardedly, carefully, I brought Dad around from the idea of the operation and to agreeing that he would come to Seattle to be examined at a highly reputed clinic as quickly as I could arrange it. In his mind, I believe, glinted the hope that he could somehow be rescued into wholeness again as he had been on the operating table at the Mayo Clinic sixteen years before. In mine was simply the vague medical prayer that the emphysema could be slowed, eased; I desperately wanted him not to be savaged into the worst of what the disease could inflict.