Heart Earth (10 page)

Now that she had left him, she has taken shelter here in the Shields River country in another lopsided situation, as cook for a Norwegian widower. Living like nun and monk as far as anybody can tell, the pair of them operate the old Norskie's tidy little outfit, part farm and part cow ranch, here under the long slopes on the west side of the Crazy Mountains. I would bet hard money that the old Norskie never saw fit to break his creamy silence and say so, but the place could not have been run without my indefatigable grandmother: she even did the plowing, with a team of horses. My father or any other veteran ranchman would have shouldered labor like this only on shares. For doing much the same work, and the cooking and housekeeping besides, she eked out a wage from month to month and beyond that she literally had nothing—what we call benefits were nowhere in the picture because even Social Security then was regarded as too great a paperwork burden on owners of farms and ranches, and "agricultural employees" such as my grandmother were specifically excluded from its coverage.

Instead, she had what she was. The only thing about my grandmother that ever went gray was her hair. All else stayed brisk, immutable; the pleasant enough proclamation of face where the origin of my mother's and for that matter mine is instantly read, the body of German sturdiness. The hands and arms of Bessie Ringer were scarred from every kind of barbwire work, yet there she sat hooking away at the most intricate of crochetwork, snowflaking the rough rooms of her existence with doily upon doily. After a schooling that petered out so early, she couldn't much more than handle i and 2 for you, but anything you could hum she could sit down to a piano and faithfully play. "The baby is born and his name is Dennis," she would rattle off as her proverb of completing anything, fingerlace or ear-taught tune or the perpetual twice a day milking of cows in that bent-pail life at Moss Agate. There at Moss Agate too, she had been the parent who somewhere always found time to pull on boxing gloves when her sons went through a pugilism phase. And to pamper an asthmatic daughter. Situations she hadn't the foggiest notion of how to handle, she handled. The chicken chapter: softhearted as she was toward all creatures except the human, she could never bear to chop the head off a chicken. Early in her Montana life, when my mother was still a toddler, there came a Sunday when chicken was the only available meal and nobody else was around to do the chopping. My grandmother caught the chicken, tied its legs, put it in the baby buggy with my mother, and trundled down the road a couple of miles to the next ranch to have a neighbor do the neck deed.

Grandma's straight-ahead set of mind came useful for her here in the Norskie situation, too. On no known social scale ought she have been able to fit into the stolid local women's club—merely an itinerant cook, and beyond that, married to somebody she wasn't living with but who definitely was not the Norwegian widower she was under the same roof with—but she impressed those farm wives and ranchwomen with her own stiffbacked rectitude and was brought in. Annually the women drew "secret pal" names out of a hat and each sent whomever they drew little surprise gifts and cards throughout the year. My grandmother undoubtedly was the only peasant plow-woman who was also a secret pal, but she had a saying ready for the way life revealed its surprises, too. "So that's the how of it."

So that was the how of her, my stormfront grandmother. Wide-grained and with hard knots of stubbornness, rilesome and quick to judge and long to hold a grudge. And in the turbulent time to come, I learned to love her for even the magnificence of her shortcomings.

Back there in our visit it is Grandma, you can bet your boots, who comes out with it about my grandfather. Have we seen the old-good-for-nothing?

Dreadfully, we have. Tom Ringer is living in one room of a shanty, the rest of which is used as a chickenhouse. The alfalfa chaff scratched up by the baby chicks
got him down,
my mother has passed the word to Wally from our visit;
one of those short-winded spells ... a bad one.

Gnarled and bent as a Knockadoon walking stick, my grandfather; my grandmother, on the other hand, so sturdy she could carry the rest of us over the Crazy Mountains on her back.

My mother, the product of the extremes, tries to give an unflavored report.

"Hmpf," she receives for her trouble. "I just wish to gosh he'd behaved hisself when we were—"

By now I pretty well know where Grandma is going with this, and out I whip to explore the Norskie country.

As ever, Grandma has a panting overfed dog around like an old lodger. Shep instantly wants to go helling off with me in every direction at once. Him aside, though, this ranch is disappointingly kempt and quiet. No suicide slope for me to roar down as in my Faulkner Creek daredeviltry days. Next I thrash around in vain for the shop, as a blacksmithery is called on a ranch; no alluring rusty nests of iron, no forge with a fanwheel to turn faster and faster into a wondrous straining screech. Nor, can you believe, is there even a bunkhouse, let alone a mussy crew of ranch hands with names like Zoot and Diamond Tony; the Norskie's son from up the creek and the Norskie—and Grandma—handle the calving by themselves.

I have been shortchanged. I know to the snick of his jackknife being opened what my father is doing exactly now, fifty miles north of here in his lambing shed kingdom, jacketing a bum lamb with the hide of a dead one and enforcing the suspicious ewe to adopt the newcomer: "That's right, ye old sister, this is your new one. Get under there, Jakey, and get yourself a meal before she catches on to you."I am missing out on that, for this becalmed mission to Grandma?

Gone goofy with the thrill of having someone to romp with, Shep keeps giving me baths with his old tongue. Dog slobber is limited fun. I evacuate from the ranch yard to the kitchen congress again.

"Sit you down, dear," Grandma welcomes me back to the table as if the sun rises and sets in me, and then their talk buzzes on. At last my mother and her mother have got going on the populace beyond the family. Other people's doings, blessed relief. I nibble the one-more-cookie-but-that's-all which my mother decrees to me while news of this one and that is ruthlessly swapped. So and so is just as much of a scatterbrain as ever and of course thinks she was terribly abused in the service. Had to work a little, something she isn't used to. Thus and such are going to have an increase in the family. Have to feel sorry for any kid with them as parents.

Never more than a sentence away in any of their gossip is the war. The war has consumed Montana. Not in the roaring geared-up military factory fashion of Arizona, but in a kind of mortal evaporation. Young men, and no few women, have been gone for years and in their place the ghostly clink of dogtags from the charnel corners of the world; striplings who have eaten plateloads at the ranch tables of my grandmother and square-danced with my mother and pranced me on a knee are wasting away in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, have perished in the Bataan death march, been wounded at Palau, fought in the Aleutians and the Marianas and Normandy.

My ears all but turn inside out when Grandma frets to my mother about Wally, where his ship might be, what's happening there in the Pacific. She is mighty right to do so.

***

Logbook of the
Ault,
May 11, 1945:

1010 SIGHTED ENEMY PLANE (ZEKE) WHICH CAME OUT OF LOW CLOUD ASTERN AND DIVED INTO
THE AFTER FLIGHT DECK OF USS
BUNKER HILL.
OBSERVED ANOTHER ENEMY PLANE TO COME FROM ASTERN. OPENED FIRE. PLANE CRASHED INTO
BUNKER HILL
FLIGHT DECK AMIDSHIPS. MANEUVERING AT EMERGENCY TURNS AND SPEEDS.
BUNKER HILL
WAS BURNING FURIOUSLY.

1023 OBSERVED TWO ENEMY PLANES SHOT DOWN IN DOGFIGHT. A THIRD BEGAN A RUN IN TOWARDS FORMATION AT LOW ALTITUDE WITH A FRIENDLY FIGHTER ON HIS TAIL. OPENED FIRE WITH ALL GUNS AS PLANE PASSED STARBOARD QUARTER ... PLANE ATTEMPTED TO MAKE SUICIDE DIVE ON THIS VESSEL AND WAS SHOT DOWN BY THIS SHIP, FALLING CLOSE ABOARD THE PORT QUARTER.

***

And only days ago, the war ate down into my own age bracket. This had happened a block or so away from us in White Sulphur, during a collection drive of waste paper for the war effort. Schoolchildren darting from house to house, carrying the scrap to the truck, hopping onto the truckbed to ride to the next houses, the truck driver thinking everyone was aboard and starting ahead: crushing under the rear wheels his own seven-year-old son.

Such a death of a child, even these life-calloused Ringer women do not talk over. What happened to that boy has been my interior topic, the imagining of how the wheels couldn't/wouldn't have made their fatal claim if it had been me. The not-quite-six-year-old's dream insulation from the world, quite convinced I am deathproof.

Out of nowhere, which is to say everywhere, I abruptly am hearing:

"...afraid you'd gone to old Arizona for good," my grandmother to my mother. My mother back to her, "Charlie figured—we figured we had to give it a try there."

Grandma manages not to say anything to that, but her silence about my father is as starchy as her apron.

I did not know so until the letters, but the vendetta between my father and my grandmother was already raging. The message inevitably has gone out to Wally from Grandma:
Charlie doesn't have much to say to me but I'm used to that now.
All the later years of my growing up, trying to solve the world of consequences brought on by this pernicious feud, I hunted wildly in the two of them for the reason. Did our Arizona trip itself set things off, Bessie Ringer with two sons gone to the war simply finding it the last straw that my mother was moving so far away? My grandmother had endured beyond other last straws. No, my in-the-dark guess was that the mysterious matter of family itself, its specific weight and gravity, brought on their wrangle. In the Faulkner Creek ranch years, there had chronically been a cluster of Ringers around, one or two and often all three of my mother's brothers working seasonal jobs for my father, and Grandma visiting every instant she could pry loose from the Norskie's chores. I figured my father then and there wore out on in-laws. But to my grandmother, after Moss Agate—because of Moss Agate?—family was the true tribe, she and the four kids bound together forever by having survived the utmost that my grandfather and the cow ghetto could bring down on them. If a Doig clan buckaroo married into the family, then he had simply been lucky enough to gain himself some family, by her notion of it.

So, the motives I found in those factions that I grew up between still howl true. As far as they go. What I was too near to my father and my grandmother to see was their greater ground of dispute, beyond a winter of veer to Arizona, beyond the ornery jousts of being in-laws. Their deadly tussle was over my mother.

"...Not another cookie. Honest to Eleanor, Mom, you'll have him so spoiled..."

"...Growing boy needs a little something to grow on, don't you, Ivan, yes..."

All said and done, although for an iron eon yet it would not be, the contest of spite between my grandmother and my father was about treatment of my mother. Nothing to do with medical terms, nor in any physical or even emotional sense; one thing neither could ever accuse the other of was lack of pure devotion to the girl and woman Berneta. Call it the geography of risk, of how best to situate my mother. My grandmother desperately wished that my parents (my father) would simply choose someplace in Montana—right about across the road from her would be ideal—and hunker in there at whatever the job happened to be and hope for the best. Surely-for-gosh-sakes it couldn't be good for Berneta to be living here, there, and everywhere, could it? To my father, just as desperately trying out footings until one felt secure for us, the worse risk was to sink so economically low we couldn't afford my mother's medical costs and whatever else might help her. He saw permanent ranch wagework as more of the mire of Moss Agate for her, and surely-to-Jesus-H.-Christ that can't be the best anybody can do, can it?

"...sure awful glad, dear, to have you back where..."

"...couldn't tell beforehand how Phoenix..."

Now comes the moment my mother has been bracing toward ever since we arrived on this visit. My grandmother wants to know where next; where my mother and my father and I will spend the summer.

"Gee gosh, Berneta!" Grandma lets out when told, which from her is high-octane blue language. "I dread to think of you out there!"

"We don't know for absolute sure we're going," is resorted to by my mother the daughter. "Maybe something closer will turn up."

"You just get back from old Arizona and then you're gone to out there.'Tt is the mark of my grandmother that she can blurt this and yet not have it scald out as complaint or blame or pain or plea, but simply her thought of the moment. The headturn of her endurance toward what needed to be faced next.

I help myself to the cookie plate, in child's sly wisdom that another oatmeal cookie or two won't even weigh in the scale of what's occurring around me just now. My mother is busy telling my grandmother whatever good sides she can of our next notional move. My grandmother would dearly like to be reassured but, with a catch in her throat, at last can't help but sound her worst warning:

"You be careful with yourself, dear."

To that my mother utters nothing, for answer is none. If careful could make a great enough difference in the chokehold in her lungs, then that most enormous leap of care, my father's uprooting of us to the lenient altitude and climate of Arizona, ought to have done it. What Berneta Ringer, now Berneta Doig, has grasped out of the discard of her Moss Agate girlhood is the conviction that she all too easily could careful herself into being an invalid; that the triple pillows of asthma could coax away her days as well as her nights if she didn't adamantly stay upright on the ground, heart-chosen ground. If this constituted reckless, this seemed what she still wanted to be.