by Judy Blunt
At age thirty, John had been eager to start a family. Having been raised with a twin sister and no other siblings, he began our marriage with rosy visions of a large family—four children, maybe five. Having the experience of the large family to draw on, I was less enthusiastic but willing to go along. When Jeanette arrived two years after our wedding, he became a papa in the deepest sense of the word, a man enchanted by this tiny, marvelous creature who ran to meet him and saved her best smiles for him alone. He remained distanced only in the areas of diaper changing and discipline. When Jason followed seventeen months later, my struggle to manage two babies along with the ranch wife's workload caused him to rethink the large family. Two seemed quite a lot of worry and work, and he found it difficult to get used to the chaos and mess that went with babies. And then our little surprise, James, arrived a week before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I headed into that next long winter with a newborn, a two-and-a-half-year-old and a four-year-old to tend, in addition to cooking and washing for a husband, a father-in-law and a hired man.
As my family grew larger, my activities outside the house shrank in equal measure, a natural result, though I struggled against it. For the first two years, I had reveled in the freedom and status of outside work, getting to know the expanse of prairie and badlands that was my new home. The spring before Jeanette's birth, I rode in the branding roundup, using rubber bands to expand the waist of my Levi's. Even when I stood in the stirrups, my belly cleared the saddle horn by a safe margin, but the neighbors were aghast, especially the men. A week later, while I was gathering yearlings from a creek pasture, the bog-sour gelding I rode hit an alkali sink hidden by weeds and pitched a fit. He reared, freeing his forefeet from the sucking mud, and the momentum carried us both over backward. As his head tipped past that center of balance, I cleared the stirrups and shoved off from the pommel with both hands, landing full length on my side. The saddle gouged a deep scar in the ground a few feet from my head where the horse hit and rebounded, twisting to find his feet in the instant he touched down. The wreck was minor, no injuries but the hoof-shaped bruise on my forearm where he trampled me as he scrambled back to his feet. A close call, nothing more.
It was nearing summer when I snubbed a range cow to a post, trying to convince her to feed her starving calf. Twice, after stretching the cow's hind leg back with a lariat, I straddled the calf and shoved him toward her tight udder, and twice she fought the ropes, choking, losing her balance and falling. The third time I left slack in the leg rope and she stood, panting and rolling her eyes. Already I'd felt the first butterfly kicks of my unborn daughter and I'd grown thick enough through the middle to feel clumsy as I leaned forward to push a hard, swollen teat into the calf's mouth, squeezing to give him the taste of milk. In a few months I would have a new appreciation for how that might feel, but at the time I was unprepared. With a bawl, the cow lunged forward, bowling the calf and me over in a tangle, then sat back on her neck rope, giving that one hind leg enough slack to drive like a piston. She caught the calf first, a solid knock that spun his head in a half circle, then nailed me twice in the second it took to unsnarl my legs and roll free. The first blow grazed my thigh, the second bounded off my hipbone and caught me solid in the lower belly.
Lamaze breathing got me through the pain, but as I crawled upright against the corral, a gout of bright blood flowed toward my boots. I made deals then, with God or the devil, whichever was listening, as I walked carefully toward the house, uncertain if what I felt was bruise pains or labor. I would stay away from the cattle; I would quit trying to do everything I'd done before, if only I could have another chance. The bleeding stopped as quickly as it started, and I kept my end of the bargain, finally convinced that I couldn't have it all. In my determination to prove I could do anything a man could do, I'd lost sight of the fact that I was already doing the one thing no man could.
The next year, with one toddling and another on the way, I slowed a little more, raising chickens and one hell of a garden, sometimes calving the night shift. I still got out to help with riding and branding when I could justify asking some equally burdened neighbor woman to keep two babies, but with the birth of James, even that became logistically impractical. Helping outside was a one-way street, and when I finished there, my own work waited back in the house. Boredom wasn't the same as having time on my hands. My days were full to exhaustion with the garden, the canning and freezing and butchering, three kids and three men, and when hunters invaded the Breaks and the weather turned, the boundaries drew even closer.
In October I would carry the pressure canner to the basement and pause to take stock. Wooden shelves lined the concrete walls, and I could run my hands along the rank and file of quart jars, hundreds of them touching shoulders in precise rows, arranged so the colors came to life in the dim light. Tomatoes bloomed between the corn and sauerkraut. Pickled beets rested the eye between the dills and the 224-day sweets, rich purple plums livened the space between pears and peaches.
Up the stairs in the porch, the bulk of our winter's meat lay in huge freezers, two steers or dry heifers butchered and hung in the walk-in cooler, cut and wrapped on the kitchen table. The roasts were weighed on my baby scale, the largest a fifteen-pound standing rib or top round selected from the fattest carcass, double-wrapped and tagged with grease pencil. I centered that one in the bottom of the second freezer, where it remained buried through the winter. My first glimpse of the branding roast through diminishing layers of burger and steak signaled spring as surely as the crocus.
Outside, past the untidy mountain of split Cottonwood and across the road, the root cellar jutted from the base of our hill, facing south. The double doors built of bridge plank reeked of creosote where the sun hit, but inside the air hung so rich and heavy I could take it up by mouthfuls. I never breathed the earthy smell of the cellar without thinking of my grandmother Pansy, a story she told me the first summer I was pregnant. Where my grandparents homesteaded, the land was flat, and their root cellar had a trapdoor entry with steps leading down to an earthen chamber deep below the frost line. She didn't recall which pregnancy it had been, the sixth or seventh maybe, when she made her way down the stairs with a pail to get a mess of spuds for supper. Something in the smell made her stop, she said, and she sat on the pail in the gloom of the cellar for a long time, breathing in the damp odors of roots and earth. A pale vein midway up the dirt wall had shed a litter of bone-colored rocks and without thinking, she picked one up and slipped it onto her tongue. The rock crumbled into powder against her teeth, and her mouth watered at the taste, the taste of the air.
When she left the cellar she carried the chipped enamel pail heaped with potatoes and tucked in her apron pocket, a handful of brittle white stones. She nibbled them in secret, lest her half-grown daughters or her husband catch her eating dirt. "I just felt I wanted it," she told me, still grimacing with wonder at her own behavior, still wanting it secret after fifty years.
There'd been a time she spent four years on the homestead between trips to Malta, back when the trip was two days in a buckboard, too much for the baby still in diapers, too rough for the mother heavy with another. She shrugged. Trips to town were rare, the wagon often loaded with grain to sell, no room to ride; Alfred, my grandfather, was impatient with stopping to feed children or rinse diapers in the potholes along the creek, impatient with the nonsense, the inefficiency. "Well, the kids was too little," she'd say, as if that said everything.
The oldest books on my shelf belonged to her, Pansy Robinson McNeil Blunt' and to my other grandmother, Pearle Watson Aikins. Both raised their children, my parents, on homesteads in Phillips County. Pearle had kept her own mother's book, my great-grandmother Mary Ann Deffenbaugh Watson's Civil War-era guide to the practical household. Mrs. Owens' Cook Book and Useful Household Hints tucks medical information here and there around notes on the management of servants, instructions for building roads, making hair mattresses and dyes for cloth, curing windgall in horses and caked udder
in cows. Between pages of printed recipes are blank pages covered margin to margin in a glowing script, records of milk sold to Mrs. J. L. Ball in 1894 crowding into later entries I guess to be my grandmother Pearle's, recipes and notes that become cramped and jagged as the arthritis that finally crippled her begins to show She was dead before I was old enough to know her. My other grandmother lived to know my children.
On the back of a recipe for Nannie's Cake, my great-grandmother records one to cure cholera. Mix well, equal parts of Cayenne, opium, tincture of rhubarb, essence of peppermint and spirits of camphor Dose 10 to 20 drops in a wineglass of water Give according to age & violence of attack, etc.
Grandma Pansy fills the flyleaf of her 1908 edition of The Practical Guide to Health with a recipe she has gotten from another source, perhaps passed on to her by a neighbor or sister. Diphtheria. At the first indication in the throat of a child, make a room close, then take a tin cup & pour into it a quantity of tar & turpentine equal parts. Hold the cup over afire so as to fill the room with the fumes. This will loosen the membranous matter & the disease will be thrown off thru the mouth.
The cures my grandmothers believed in were as useless in their time as they were in mine, but they had the mercy of not knowing. At least recipes were possible then, when tinctures of this and spirits of that were kept in corked bottles and any woman who had a tin cup and the steady hand to hold it over fire had all she needed, all she could hope to have. No one knew better than tar and turpentine, and no one expected more. They lived where they lived, a simple notion of "just being" that set the moral for every story. "We didn't know any different," Pansy would say, or "that's just the way things were then," always with her palms spread, balancing the good with the bad and coming up even. For her, isolation and solitude were a meaningless complication of terms. The rules were the same: wanting what you could not have was the worst form of foolishness.
Born in the seventies, my babies came with a modern set of standards for immunizations, well-baby checkups and prompt medical treatment for illnesses, store-bought vitamins and cereals, fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. To be a responsible parent now meant getting out. Travel was easier for me than it ever had been for my grandmothers, or even my mother, what with modern vehicles and graded roads. But the distance was still there, and the new roads were all built of the same old soil.
My grandmother would have found comfort in my root cellar, carrots layered in clean sand, onions and potatoes sacked in burlap against the stone walls, Hubbard squash wrapped in newspaper on shelves near the ceiling. There was security in food, the gathering of all we needed and more, the preservation of body and soul against whatever might come. There was peace in all this plenty, somewhere. But as I made my rounds in the early autumn, from basement to freezer to root cellar, the sheer abundance of the harvest felt threatening, a measure of the months ahead.
Carol talked a lot longer than I listened that autumn afternoon, but for all my stoic silence, my face must have flickered like a neon sign. The next fall and every year after that, she and her husband pulled up on opening day of hunting season and unloaded their truck on my doorstep, boxes and grocery bags filled with paperback books, hundreds of them gathered at rummage sales over the summer. "Just in case you get five minutes to yourself," she'd say, brushing aside my thanks. My husband greeted this windfall as he might have a crowd of slick-haired rivals who appeared on his doorstep each October, wearily accepting the affairs he knew would play themselves out by spring. I got acquainted with them all as I sorted them, reading covers with a tingle of expectation, arranging long rows on the floor of the attic, best-sellers and murder mysteries first, spy thrillers and horror novels in the middle, bodice-rippers and romances pitched into a far corner, something to sneer my way through around March.
For months I lived inside stories as strange as my own, emerging guilt-ridden to do what needed done in spasms of speed and efficiency. I pushed away thoughts by reflex, learning like my mother and grandmothers the cautious shutting down of self to any needs beyond those provided. Making do, we called it. No one gave us orders. We were partners in an uncertain business, responsible, hardworking, self-limiting. I understood it as I did no other way of living. The change was gradual, but slowly over the years, as I sacked the last spud and watched ice film the reservoir, the solitude I treasured took the shape of isolation. With the first blizzard of the season came a shift in perception, a mental shutting down as quiet and predictable as that final December day when frost stitched through the center of the last windowpane, and I no longer looked outside.
Sunday, May 15, 1977. Eight p.m. My daughter's screams bounce off the walls of the bathroom, inspiring wails from her baby brother on the bath mat by my knees, drowning out the plaintive notes of her father's fiddle in the next room and the murmurs of comfort I direct first to one, then the other, as I kneel by the tub. The water in the tub is tepid, though on the phone the doctor said cold—cold water, fifteen minutes. Even so the bath is agony, her grip on my wrist so tight I have to pry her fingers loose to palm the water over her chest and neck.
Jeanette weighs just over twenty pounds at nineteen months, a perfectly proportioned little dynamo who scales cupboards like a monkey and can stand flat-footed under the kitchen table with inches to spare, a pixie compared with the angry, hungry boy on the floor. At five weeks, Jason's long past the ten-pound mark, and the fists waving on either side of his mouth are nearly as big as his sister's. The milk he wants trickles unheeded down my stomach, my breasts pressed against the edge of the tub as I hold as much of Jeanette's body in the shallow water as I can manage with only two hands. She arches, each scream going silent as she runs out of air, jaw chattering so wildly I'm afraid she will bite her tongue between breaths. Her dark eyes remained fastened on my face, her arms outstretched, begging.
Two hours have passed since I spoke with the doctor, and in that time I have forced unwanted liquids down her throat, stripped away the solace of her blankie and wrapped her head in wet towels. I have invaded her rectum with thermometers, aspirin suppositories and cool-water enemas, so deaf to her protests that she has taken to protecting herself, clinging frantically to the edge of her diaper when I unpin it for the cold bath, pleading for her papa over and over—the parent who does not hurt her He has retreated in anguish, unable to help or hurt, covering her pain with his headphones, volume cranked up, bow flying over the strings. He's learning to play by ear, a little over a year since he started.
Numbers clear my mind, keep me calm and methodical. The watch balanced on the edge of the tub marks three and a half hours since Jason's last feeding, his cries intermittent now, muffled by the noisy sucking of his fist. After eight minutes, Jeanette quiets to hiccups, exhausted, compliant. Through the wall, the fiddle strains at a hoedown, and I croon the familiar words like a lullaby:
Never marry an old schoolmarm I'll tell you the reason why — She'll blow her nose in old cornbread And call it pumpkin pie! Oh, boil them cabbage down, boys, boil them cabbage down. . . .
A bath thermometer shaped like a turtle floats by my arm, rocking on the waves. Outside, it's 45 degrees and steady under a clearing sky, the rain slowed to a sprinkle, over an inch in the gauge when John came in for supper. When I last looked, the moon had risen over the east meadows, and the barnyard shone like foil, water glistening in the ruts, a riotous night for the coyotes. The bathwater has cooled to 79, down 6. At last reading, the little body balanced on my arm registered just over 105 degrees and rising.
"Are you sure you're reading the thermometer properly?"
"Yes, I'm sure." There was a pause on the other end of the phone, and I drew a deep breath. I'd left a call for the doctor in Malta early that Sunday afternoon, and he'd finally gotten free to return it at 5 p.m. His voice sounded distracted as he thumbed through the notes the nurses had jotted. Though he'd been in Malta for two years, Dr. Ramaiya was still the new guy, the topic of neighborhood gossip. He would not prescribe over the phone or write pen
icillin and sulfa prescriptions for people who wanted to keep these medicines on hand and dose themselves as needed. Old-timers regarded him with some suspicion. He was a vegetarian, for one thing, an "India-type Indian" whose wife made timid appearances in local store aisles wrapped up to her chin, even in summer, a red spot painted on her forehead. Worse than that, he didn't appear to take his job seriously, the old cowboys complained. Not a group to run to the doctor for every sniffle, they expected some serious attention when they finally felt rotten enough to go. But those who dragged their virus-ridden bodies to Ramaiya rather than wait hours to see the old doctor often left empty-handed and insulted. He would not dispense antibiotics for routine colds and flu, and most ranchers weren't "bed rest and fruit juice" kinds of guys. They wanted a pill, and the bigger it was the better.
The new doctor was most popular with the young women in the county, because he approved of drug-free births and was less resistant to fathers in the delivery room, something the older doctors had seldom allowed. Although he'd been educated in England and spoke with a clipped British accent, Ramaiya had doctored in remote African provinces, experience that came in handy in Malta's ill-equipped little hospital. In 1975, when my sister-in-law required an emergency cesarean, there was no time to call an anesthesiologist from Havre, ninety miles west. Dr. Ramaiya performed the surgery with local anesthetic, using injections to deaden her skin like a dentist before pulling a tooth. For Karen, the procedure was neither pleasant nor cosmetically rewarding, but she survived and Kurt was born bright and healthy. Ramaiya had delivered both of mine.
