Heart Earth (4 page)

Up only went so far, though. Montana's vast wheel of seasons always had a flat, skewed side—the biggest side—and that was winter. You could thud pretty hard in autumn, too, and before spring managed to definitely get on track. For year-round ranching, even a go-getter needed an extensive piece of inherited land or a hefty family wallet or a father-in-law with deep pockets. None of which Charlie Doig had been put on this earth with, and he well knew it. "As the fellow says," I hear his burr coming, "where's all the wherewithal?"

So, a summer on a mountain that shouted its name in grass, with a bride both new and long-awaited at his side, must have made a high season indeed for my father. No question about it for my mother, either. I know—have seen for myself in the years beyond hers—how the elevation there on Grassy opens up the view of the closed-away Sixteen country, diminishes the relentless sage and the raw shale cutbanks and the pinched gulches where failed homesteads are pocketed away, and takes the eye instead toward the neighboring and more generous Bridger Mountains; and just before the Bridgers, the one cocky tilt in the nondescript Big Belts, Wall Mountain. The imagination is easily led down past Wall Mountain's inclined rimrock to the canyon of Six-teenmile Creek, as ornery for its size as any chasm anywhere. The first railroad that was squeezed through there required fifty-eight bridges in eighteen miles. Enough floods and avalanches, plus an earthquake or two, and the Sixteen Canyon spat out both that first railroad and the subsequent Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul transcontinental line. Not a rail, not a tie, is left on the scar of roadbed, but the rattlesnakes that the railroad maintenance men hung on the right-of-way fence as sarcastic trophies are back in force. I always have a feeling, along those lines, about this original America of the Doigs, this Sixteen country and these Big Belt Mountains: one moment, the look of the land strongly stops you in your tracks, and the next, there is something ominous around your ankles. We were expected to grow used to it, I suppose, as Scotch endurers, as cockleburr American high-landers. But what am I to make of my mother's embrace of all this? Unlike me, unlike my father, she was not born into this chancy Sixteen country. She came as a convert. For, of course, that proudest photo of her, rhinestone cowgirl beneath the stone rainbow, that photo was taken at Wall Mountain, summit of the Sixteen country.

After their 1934 summer of herding, my parents went on into a skein of ranch jobs together, my mother cooking for whatever crew my father was running. But ranch wages were always thin coin. Settled down now, comparatively, into marriage, my father felt he had to turn his hand to operating a place "on shares," which was to say running somebody's ranch for them for a cut of each year's profit. The center years of my parents' story together come now at the hem of Grass Mountain, the first years of World War Two when the pair of them took the Faulkner Creek ranch on shares.

***

A scrape of road pierced through that sagebrush of the Sixteen country toward Wall Mountain until suddenly making a veer toward Grassy, and the Faulkner Creek drainage.

Not paying much attention to the rest of the world or each other, the ornery mountains of the Big Belts did hold pockets of ranchcraft for people as acquainted with work as my parents were. For better or worse, a place such as Faulkner Creek met them on its own clear terms. A tidy sum of rangeland without being elbowy about it, with plump hayfields and the creek almost at the front door, that ranch in a majority of ways represented what the Doig homestead could only ever be the kernel of or the Moss Agate tenancy a gaunt ghost of. A do-it-yourself expanse, the West was supposed to be and rarely is. The makings were there at Faulkner Creek, if you were nimble enough and canny enough and stubborn enough and enough other enoughs, to profitably handle a thousand sheep or a couple hundred cattle year in and year out. My parents filled the bill. The Sixteen country was their business address, they knew it like Baruch did Wall Street.

So they also knew about the isolation, more than twenty miles to town and most of that simply to reach a paved road, which they were going to have to put up with at Faulkner Creek. Polarly remote a couple of seasons of the year, it was the kind of ranch, in my mother and father's saying for it, where you had to be married to the place. Two other ranches lay hidden even farther down the gulches of Sixteen Creek and Battle Creek, but otherwise weather was the only neighbor. Clouds walking the ridgelines, hurried by chilly wind. Rain, rare as it was, slickening the road as quick as it lit. And if the winter was a tough one—they always were—my father fed hay on the road so that as the sheep ate, they packed down the snow and improved the chance of getting out to the hospital at Townsend when one of my mother's hardest asthma attacks hit.

I will always have to wonder whether some of the distances in myself come from starting life there beside Faulkner Creek. My parents had greatly hoped for twins, but instead got the mixture that was me. Maybe the medical stricture that one pregnancy was plenty for my mother to risk, that after I eventuated into the picture in the summer of 1939 there were going to be no sisters or brothers for me, made my parents allow me into the adult doings of the ranch. As far back as memory will take me, I liked that; honorary membership with the grown-ups, admittance to their talk. It does give you the habit from early on, though, of standing back and prowling with your ears.

Definitely I was doted on. My mother's photo album contains a flurry of my uncles holding me atop horses until, probably when I was between three and four years old, there I sit in the worldly saddle by myself and handle the reins as if I know what I'm doing. By then, too, World War Two and its songs on the radio had come, and I was the combination of kid who could listen to
mairzy doats and dozy doats, and little lambsie divy,
and staidly tell you, sure, everybody knows mares eat oats and a doe could too, and lambs would take to ivy; then go outside and disappear into fathoms of imagination the rest of the day. Touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy, healthy as a moose calf, I seem to have sailed through the Faulkner Creek years with my adults giving to me generously from their days. Words on a page became clear to me there, long before school; somebody in the revolving cast of busy parents and young Ringer uncles hired to do the ranch chores and a visiting grandmother checking up on us from Moss Agate, one or another of those had to have been steadily reading to me. My immersion into print, the time indoors with books and a voice willing to teach me all the words, surely I owe to that ranch's long winters.

Winter also brought out the trapper, to be watched from our kitchen window in the snow-roofed ranch house, tending the trapline on Faulkner Creek.

The bundled figure sieves in and out of the creek-side willows, a dead jackrabbit in hand for bait. Gray to catch white, for weasels in their snowy winter coats are the quarry, their pelts fetching a prime price from the fur buyer in Helena.

The weasels hunt along the creek in invisibility against the snow, terror to grouse and mice, or dart up to the ranch buildings, murder in the chickenhouse; their sylph bodies are such ferocious little combustion tubes that they have to eat with feverish frequency to live. Wherever the double dots of weasel tracks indicate, the trapper sets a small contraption of jaws and trigger and neatly baits it with a bloody morsel of rabbit. Ritual as old as any tribe—though these traps are springsteel, bought from a catalogue—but every trapper possesses a trademark and this one distinctively takes the trouble to bend a bow of branch in attachment to each trap. When the animal sets off the trap, the branch will yank the entire apparatus up into the cold air and the weasel will die a quicker, less contorted death.

One after another the traps are attended to this way, an even dozen in all. The trapsetting impulse evidently is the same as in catching fish, the snarer hates to quit on an odd number.

Not nearly all the visited traps hold weasels this day but enough do, each frozen ermine form dropped in careful triumph into the gunnysack at the trapper's waist. At last, from the end of the trapline the figure turns back up the creek, again toward the ranch house with the meringue of snow on its roof. The trapper is my mother.

***

Her sharp-aired victories over asthma, an hour at a time there on her trapline while my father sat sentinel with me at the kitchen window, were one calendar of the Faulkner Creek years. Another was my father's rhythm of mastering the ranch. The livestock in his canny rotation of pastures, the hayfields encouraged by his irrigating shovel, a ranch hand or two deployed at fence-fixing or other upkeep, all responded to the zip he brought to the place. Faulkner Creek's wicked road showed a bright side here; the ranch owner from Helena didn't chance out to the place very often, and good thing that he didn't. My father could run something as everyday as a ranch fine and dandy. What he refused to regulate was his lifelong opinion of bosses. "Can ye imagine that Helena scissorbill wanting me to put the upper field into alfalfa? The sheep'd get into that and bloat to death until Hell couldn't hold them. A five-year-old kid—Ivan here—knows better than that."

One more mark of my parents' aiming-upward-but-allegiant-in-other-directions was the Ford. Our snappy sky blue 1940 coupe, fat-fendered and long-hooded, a good two-thirds of the car prowing ahead of us as we fought the Faulkner Creek road. What the four of us, my mother and father and I and the Ford, are most remembered for is the ritual of washing before a funeral. Parked in the middle of a creek crossing, we would peel off our shoes and socks, my father and I would roll up our pants legs and my mother would safety-pin her dress into a culotte and out we would step into the pebbled water. I was given a rag and granted the hubcaps to wash, the steel circles like four cleansed moons rising from the creekwater. My father and mother went to work on the greater grit, mud caked on the fenders, bug splatters on the hood, the Ford gradually but dependably coming clean under tossed bucketsful of rinse. Ready now for the drive behind the hearse, we headed on into White Sulphur Springs, where the deceased actually do go a last mile from town out to the cemetery. The men who were to be buried, for they almost always were men, were the hired hands of the Big Belt country who had worked with my parents at haying, lambing, calving—people who drew no cortege while they were alive. People with a wire down somewhere in their lives, a lack of capacity to work for themselves, an emigration into an America they never managed to savvy nor to let go of, many with a puppy-helplessness when it came to alcohol, some with sour tempers and bent minds; mateless. At any of these funerals, my mother most likely would be the only woman there. Neither my mother nor my father could have said so in words, but in that wiping away of the mud and dust from the Ford coupe's fenders and flanks—that handling of the country—was a last chore to mark those other chore-filled lives.

Faulkner Creek was no closer to Eden than it was anywhere else, but by every family fragment of that time and place my parents seemed to be in their element. Camera shots again say so, most of all in the trophy pictures from the war with the coyotes.

Sunny day, icicles starting to shrink upward to the log eaves of the ranch house. Everybody has paraded around the corner of the house to take a pose with the vanquished coyotes.

My mother, especially pert in one of her striped housedresses and only a short jacket.

My visiting grandmother even hardier, out there in apron and bare arms.

My mother's second youngest brother Bud on hand as our hired man, in dutiful earflap cap.

Then my father and his rifle and me.

Since I, little Mr. Personality in a brass-button snow-suit, appear to be not quite a three-year-old, the photo likely dates from near the end of the winter of 1941–42. This scene speaks in several ways. First of all, the extraordinary statement of the coyotes around and above my father and me as we pose, twenty-eight of them in simultaneous leap of death up the log wall where their pelts are strung. Winterlong they had been picked off, for the safety of the sheep and the sake of bounty, as they loped the open ridges above Faulkner Creek; ideal coyote country, but unluckily for them, also ideal coyote-hunting country for somebody who could shoot like my father. Next, it always comes as a pleasant shock, how on top of life my father looks in this picture. Forty years and jobs after his start on the doomed Wall Mountain homestead, bounty of all kinds seems to be finding him at last. Posed there, he is in command not just of one season a year but a prospering ranch, he knows of at least twenty-eight coyotes who will give his sheep no further trouble, he has a son and heir, his coveted wife is taking the photo of this moment, a winter-ending chinook has arrived with this sun—a day of thaw, truly.

***

My own farthest pattern of memory is the Faulkner Creek ranch's generator—the light plant, we called that after-dark engine, throbbing diesel factory of watts—as it hammered combustion into the glow of kitchen and living-room bulbs. The light plant was used sparingly, like sparks put to tinder when the cave most needed dazzle; when company dropped in, say. And so the yammer of it in the night-edge of my mind must be from a few of my recalcitrant bedtimes, boy determined not to waste awakeness while luscious light was being made.

But why that diesel monotony of echo?

Why not the toss of wind in the restless pine that overleaned the ranch house, or a coyote's night-owning anthem?

Why persistently hear, even now in the rhythms of my writing keys working, the
puh puh puh
labor of that light plant?

Because in every way, this was the pulse of power coming into our rural existence. Not simply the tireless stutter of electrical generation but the sound of history turning. We had only a diesel tidbit of it there at Faulkner Creek and my parents were of the relic world of muscle-driven tasks, yet, like passersby magnetized out of our customary path, power now made its pull on us. One of the great givens of World War Two manufacture was that power could kettle an ore called bauxite into bomberskin called aluminum.