Heart Earth (2 page)

My parents and my father's sister Anna and her husband Joe and the five-year-old dirtmover that was me had thrown what we had into a Ford coupe and pin-balled our way down through the West a thousand and fifty miles, ration books straining from gas station to gas station along U.S. 89, me most of the time intrepidly shelved crosswise in the coupe's rear window, until we rolled to a halt in Phoenix the night before Thanksgiving of 1944. The next Monday my father and Joe latched on as Aluminum Company of America factory hands and our great sunward swerve settled into Alzona Park orbit.

Unit 119B, where the five of us crammed in, consisted of a few cubicles of brown composition board, bare floors and windows howlingly curtainless until my mother could stand it no longer and hung some dimestore chintz; along with fifty-five hundred other Alzonans, we were war-loyally putting up with packing crate living conditions. But pulling in money hand over fist: my father and Joe drawing fat hourly wages at the aluminum plant—
hourly,
for guys who counted themselves lucky to make any money by the month in Montana ranchwork. Surely this, the state of Arizona humming and buzzing with defense plants and military bases installed for the war, this must be the craved new world, the shores of Social Security and the sugar trees of overtime. True, the product of defense work wasn't as indubitable as a sheep or cow. Aluminum screeched through the cutting area where Dad and Joe worked and a half-mile of factory later was shunted out as bomber wings, but all in between was secret. For the 119B batch of us to try to figure out the alchemy, my father smuggled out down his pant leg a whatzit from the wing plant. I remember the thing as about the size of the business end of a branding iron, the approximate shape of a flying V, pale as ice and almost weightless, so light to hold it was a little spooky. "I'll bet ye can't tell me what this is," Dad challenged as he plunked down the contraband piece of metal to wow my mother and Anna and me and for that matter his brother-in-law Joe. Actually he had no more idea than any of the rest of us what the mystifying gizmo was, but it must have done something supportive in the wing of a bombing plane.

Like light, time is both particle and wave. Even as that far winter of our lives traced itself as a single Arizona amplitude of season along the collective dateline of memory, simultaneously it was stippling all through us in instants distinct as the burn of sparks. The sunshiny morning when suddenly the storm of hammering breaks out and does not quit for forty days, as a hundred more units of Alzona Park are flung up. The time Anna tries to coax me into a trip to the projects store for an ice cream cone and, ice cream passion notwithstanding, I will not budge from my mother, some eddy of apprehension holding me to where I can see her, not lose her from my eyes even a moment. The night of downtown Phoenix after my father and mother have splurged on the double feature of
I Love a Soldier
and
A Night of Adventure.
Maybe we were letting our eyeball-loads of Paulette Goddard succumbing to Sonny Tufts settle a little, maybe we were merely gawking at a Phoenix of streets tightpacked with cars nose to tail like an endless elephant review and of sidewalks aswim with soldiers and fliers fifteen thousand strong from the twenty bases in the desert around; we had not seen much of cities, let alone a city in fever. Either case, here the three of us onlook, until my mother happens to send her eyes higher into the night. "Charlie, Ivan. Look how pretty, what they've put up." She points to the top of the Westward Ho Hotel. Dad and I are as dazzled as she at the sign on the peak of the tall building, stupendous jewelry of a quartermoon with a bright, bright star caught on its horn. We peer up at the design, trying to fathom the perfectly achieved silverghost illumination, until my father ventures, "Ye know, I think those are real." We forge a few feet ahead on the crammed sidewalk to test this and sure enough, moon and star go trapezing upward from the hotel roof to hang on sky—not an advertising inspiration after all, but the planet Venus and the ripening moon in rare conjunction.

On such a night, the fresh zodiac of Arizona must have seemed just what my parents were looking for after their recent Montana struggles. We all recalled Christmas as a rough spot on the calendar, but now it was healful 1945, February in fact, next thing to high summer in this palmy climate. Lately at Alcoa the management had realized how rare were undraftable colorblind 43-year-olds who knew how to run a crew, and my father came zinging home from the plant newly made a foreman. Before my mother could assemble our promising news off to Wally on his Pacific vessel, though, the ink turned to this:

His stomach bothers him all the time. He is so thin. I'm worried to death about Charlie.

Always before, it took something the calibre of getting tromped beneath a bucking horse to lay Charlie Doig out. But this ulcer deal ... how could a gastric squall put my whangleather father on the couch, sick as a poisoned pup?

My father being my father, he tensely urges my mother to relax, will she, about the situation: "Oh-hell-Berneta-I'll-be-okay-in-just-a-little-bit."

There that Sunday as my father tries to sleep away the volcano in his middle, my mother all of a sudden is alone. Anna and Joe are newly gone, called away by the death of Joe's father and obligations back in Montana. Busy in the rear yard and childhood, I am obliviously pushing my roads to the gates of Berlin and raining bombs onto Tokyo. Beyond 119BS windows, Alzona Park is entirely what it is built to be, war's warehouse of strangers. By instinct, not to say need, my mother goes to her companion the ink.

Dear Wally—

...Somehow you seem to be a better pal than anyone else...

This first letter in the chain that Wally chose to save must have come aboard the
Ault
to him like her voice thrown around the world. Certainly that is what she is trying, quick as the pen will push through such afraid words as
worried to death,
such Alzona aloneness that
I have to spill over to someone.
Creed of all writers:
I have to.

Noon wears past; a missed mealtime, unheard of in our family. Then the half hour and she still writes, does not awaken my father. Dares not.
If Charlie doesn't improve...

Well, I better calm down,
the lines to Wally work themselves wry.
If a censor reads this, he probably won't even let you get it.

Taking to paper with that Sunday of worries about an abruptly ailing husband, my mother knowingly or not put her pen at the turning point in their marriage, their fates. The very reason we had catapulted ourselves to Arizona was because, always before, he was worried to death about her.

***

What I know of her is heard in the slow poetry of fact.

The freight of name, Berneta Augusta Maggie Ringer, with its indicative family tension of starting off German and ending up Irish. Within the year after her birth in 1913 in Wisconsin, her parents made the one vaulting move they ever managed together and it was a whopper: in the earliest photo I have of my mother Berneta after the westward train deposited them in Montana, she is a toddler in a sunbonnet posed with a dead bear.

Ringer family life kept that hue, always someplace rough. Up in the Crazy Mountains, the bear lair, where Tom and Bessie Ringer and this infant daughter somehow survived a first Montana winter in a snow-banked tent while they skidded out lodgepole logs as paltry as their shelter. Then other jounces of job and shanty which finally landed them near the railroad village of Ringling. Off and on for the next thirty years, some shred of the family was in that vicinity to joke about being the Ringers of Ringling. It says loads in the story of my mother that a single syllable was utterly all those coincidental names had in common, for Ringling was derived from
the
Ringlings of circus baronage.

Was it some obscure Wisconsin connection—the Ringlings of Baraboo origins, the Ringers most lately from Wisconsin Rapids—or just more fate-sly coincidence, that brought about my grandparents' employment by the Ringlings? Maybe Dick Ringling, the circus brothers' nephew who ran the Montana side of things, was entertained by the notion that a millennium ago the families might have been cousins across a medieval peat bog. By whatever whim, hired they were, and the Ringers began their milky years at Moss Agate.

Not exactly a ranch, even less a farm, Moss Agate flapped on the map as a loose end of circusman John Ringlings landholdings in the Smith River Valley of south-central Montana. Sagebrushy, high, dry, windy; except for fingernail-sized shards of cloudy agate, the place's only natural resource was railroad tracks. When he bought heavily into the Smith River country John Ringling had built a branch line railroad to the town of White Sulphur Springs and about midway along that twenty-mile set of tracks happened to be Moss Agate, although you would have to guess hard at any of that now. Except for a barn which tipsily refuses to give in to gravity, Moss Agate's buildings are vanished, as is John Ringling's railroad, as is the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul transcontinental railroad which Ringling's line branched onto. At the time, though, around the start of the nineteen-twenties, John Ringling and his nephew Dick saw no reason why all those vacant acres shouldn't set them up as dairy kings. They built a vast barn at White Sulphur Springs, loaded up with milk cows, and stuck the leftovers in satellite herds at places such as Moss Agate with hired milkers such as the Ringers.

There is one particularly bitter refrain of how my mother's family fared at Moss Agate: the cow stanza. From Wisconsin arrived a trainload of the dairy cattle, making a stop at the Moss Agate siding en route to the ballyhooed new biggest-barn-west-of-the-Mississippi-River at White Sulphur Springs. Grandly the Ringers were told to select the excess herd they would run for the Ringlings. The cows turned out to be culls, the old and halt and lame from the dairylots of canny Wisconsin. My grandfather and grandmother tried to choose a boxcarload that looked like the least wretched, and the Ringling honchos began unloading the new Moss Agate herd for them. Not clear is whether the cows were simply turned loose by the Ringling men or broke away, but in either case cows erupted everywhere, enormous bags and teats swinging from days of not having been milked, moo-moaning the pain of those overfull udders, misery on the hoof stampeding across the sage prairie while away chugged the train to White Sulphur to begin Dick Ringling's fame as a dairy entrepreneur. Even the frantic roundup that Tom and Bessie Ringer were left to perform was not the final indignity; Moss Agate at the time did not yet provide that woozy barn or even any stanchions, so the herd had to be snubbed down by lariats, cow after ornery kicky cow, for milking.

The Ringlings could afford Montana as a hobby; the Ringers were barely clinging to the planet. My grandfather Tom seems to have been one of those natural bachelors who waver into marriage at middle age and never quite catch up with their new condition. My grandmother Bessie, I know for sure, was a born endurer who would drop silently furious at having to take on responsibility beyond her own, then go ahead and shoulder every last least bit of it. Certainly over time their marriage became a bone-and-gristle affair that matched the Moss Agate country they were caught in. Nonetheless, child after child after child: Paul, then Bud, then Wally. My mother had reached five years old when the first of this brother pack came along, so she was steadily separate by a span or two of growing-up; veteran scholar at the one-room schoolhouse by the time the boys had to trudge into the first grade, willowing toward womanhood while they still mawked around flinging rocks at magpies. The shaping separateness of Berneta within the Ringer family, however, did not spring simply from being the eldest child and the only daughter. No, nothing that mere. Another knotting rhythm of fact: she slept always with three pillows propping her up, angle akin to a hospital bed, so that she could breathe past the asthma.

To this day, people will wince when they try to tell me of asthma's torture of my mother. Most often a midnight disorder, sabotage of sleep and dream that had just decently begun, the attack would choke her awake, simultaneously the blue narcotic of carbon dioxide buildup bringing on faintness, a suffocating fatigue. At once she had to fight to sit up and wheeze, her eyes large with concentration on the cost of air, hunching into herself to ride out the faltering lungwork. In and out, the raw battlesound of debilitation and effort sawed away at her. Then worse: a marathon of coughing so hard it bruised you to hear. The insidious breath shortage could go on for hours. Medication, inhalers, alleviation of any true sort waited a generation or so into the future. When my grandparents stared down into a Wisconsin cradle and for once agreed with each other that they had to take this smothering child to the drier air of the West, they gave her survival but not ease.

***

She first comes to me, naturally, by pen.
There are many disadvantages to farming in some parts of Montana...
The earliest item from her own hand is a grade school booklet she made about Montana, report of a forthright rural child.
Some times there is alkali ground and in other places gumbo soil and then the chinook winds and grasshoppers and all different kinds of insects and some times not enough rainfall.
Language is the treasury of the poor, and Berneta minted more than her share even in the busy-tongued Ringer family—
fee-fee
was her saying of barefoot, anything spooky brought on not the willies but
the jimjams,
and she it was who coined for the family the marvelous eartrick
merseys
for Moss Agate's Jersey-cows-in-need-of-mercy. Phrases were dressed up for fun, any dark cloud
commencing to look like rain,
any fancy angler categorized as having
his face hung out as a fisherman.
Emphasis had a vocabulary all its own in this youngster. Riding her horse as fast as it could be made to go was
full slam.
Her father patching the Moss Agate roof, which always needed it to the utmost, was Papa tarring
the life out of it.
When a chance at something, such as a trip to town, was seized upon, it was
glommed on to.
Hard luck, though, was
a bum go.