Heart Earth (11 page)

"Careful as I can be, Mom," she sizes it down for my grandmother. "Anyway, we'll write," she announces as if letters will be the reward packets for our vanishing over one more horizon. Suddenly my mother gathers me away from the cookie plate in a big tickling hug, laughing, holding hard to me.

"Ivan and I will write you, won't we, kiddo."

Berneta and Charlie during their honeymoon summer of 1934, when they herded sheep on Grass Mountain.

December 25, 1962.
Orange as an ember, the canyon plow slips out onto deserted Highway 12 and skims west through an hour ago's snow. Here at the rumbling start of its plowing run the huge bladed truck appears to be grooving a pathway into the crystal heart of a cloud, the highway only barely creasing the snowed-over sagebrush flatland. But this first stretch west of the highway maintenance section house is merely the top-of-the-stairs landing before the road dives between Grass Mountain and Mount Baldy dropping and dropping like twisty cellar steps, nearly twenty unremitting miles of curves and constrictions. Winterlong, Wally drives the plow down the canyon of Deep Creek as many times of day and night as needed.

Beside Wally in the truck cab perches my father, guest passenger for this dusk run before Christmas supper. (I am in bellicose Texas, activated to an air force base there during the Cuban missile crisis.) A blue cigarette haze of truce accompanies the men; they both smoked like a fire in a coffin factory. Otherwise as unalike as brothers-in-law chronically are, the two of them get along when they're out like this; a loose fit, somewhere outdoors, has always been the best between the Doigs and the Ringers. There in the snowshoving truck my uncle and my father are still pleased with themselves and each other from their hunting season that autumn, the pinnacle day when, with Wally's ten- and twelve-year-old sons Dan and Dave along, they got into a herd of elk on an open slope in the Castle Mountains and blazed away, taking three big bulls in a minute's marksmanship. Dad's aging little jeep was their hunting vehicle. Somehow the two men and two boys crammed the most massive elk, nearly horse-size, behind the seats, antlers out the tailgate like bizarre table legs; then strapped the other two beasts across the hood, drew a deep breath and started down the mountain with their ton and a half of elk. Instantly the Jeep's brakes gave up. Dad managed to swerve sideways to a stop, peered down the miles of mountainside to the Smith River Valley below and told Wally his nerves were not quite up to this. Taking over (I can see him grin a little at the windshieldful of elk carcass, hear him give out another of those pronouncements you could always count on: "The main thing is, not to get excited"), Wally hunched his brawn over the steering wheel and crept the jeep into motion, groaning the load of wild meat down the mountain in low gear.

My father was sixty-one years old that autumn, and with the bad turns of health ahead of him, the elk bonanza was his last great hunt. Now, in the canyon plow, he is keen for another wizardly drive by Wally. Familied up for Christmas, the two men share a past bigger than their in-house divisions from each other. Snow-tented Grass Mountain ahead is something mutual too, Wally's recreational horizon every working day here on his section of highway, my father's remembered summer mountain from the herding honeymoon with my mother. But on this run of the snowblade, what my father looks forward to most of all is the defeat of Deep Creek Canyon, the one piece of earth I ever knew him to despise. To look at, Deep Creek is a beauty. Summoned by the Missouri River in the Broadwater Valley ahead, the clear creek speeds along within touch of the road, tumbling rhythmically down white steps of elevation, bumping raucously past rockfaced cliffs and between mountain vees of forest, pretty as can be pictured; but as a driver you are inside a snake. "I'd rather take a beating than drive that damn canyon," my father forever declared of this gauntlet he went through during the years of hospital dashes to Townsend with my mother. Deep Creek engorged us as quick as we returned from Arizona in 1945.
Took us 4 hours to come home
after a supper visit to our relatives in Townsend, my mother wrote to the young Pacific version of Wally.
The gas line on the car was plugged and we'd go about a mile, then get out and blow the thing out with the tire pump,
all this to be imagined in blackest night with other cars hurtling around Deep Creek's blind curves at our gasping Ford.

My father has never been rapid to credit any Ringer except my mother, but he swears that Wally could drive this treacherous canyon blindfolded. He gets a particular charge out of Wally's latest stunt with the canyon plow. The highway safety engineers have busily installed reflector posts to mark the shoulders of the road all through the canyon; these are in the way whenever Wally goes to shove a snowdrift off the road, so he has demonstrated to Dad how he is eliminating Deep Creek's new metal posts one by one, accidentally-on-purpose dropping the wingplow at just the right instant to clip a post off at its base and send it zinging up into the timber like a phosphorescent arrow.

At the head of the canyon, my father sits forward to watch, and my uncle gears down the tons of truck and blade. The snowplow starts down the brink beside Grass Mountain into the first curves of Deep Creek and commences zigzagging.

***

When the German half of World War Two was taken care of in May 1945, V-E Day couldn't even find my father and my mother and me by radio.

As you can see from our address,
a map speck called Maudlow which actually was seven miles from us,
we have moved again,
on into my father's second season of sheepwork that spring,
lambing for Frank Morgan.
Our chosen land this time was that eye-taking rough horizon where the Big Belt Mountains and the Bridger Mountains butt up against each other.

The Morgan ranch buildings nestled on the Bridger side of this colliding geography, which is to say the prosperous side. Out the back door of the ranch stood the northmost Bridger peaks, Blacktail and Horsethief and Hatfield, but at its threshhold the land took a running start down to the Gallatin valley, fertile as a green dream. Based there on the rim of the broad Gallatin, the Morgans could afford to use the high country only for summer pasture and the rest of the year simply be thankful they were down out of the mountains' commotions of weather. To my parents, whose Big Belt history had been high country or higher, bad weather or worse, this was velvet ranching.

Charlie wrangles bunches, spends some time with the drop band, works in the lambing shed, in fact anything there is to do.
Naturally my father is going like a house afire, but he isn't the only one who feels the green vim of the Gallatin country.
Ivan goes wrangling sheep with Charlie after sup
per.... He is growing, getting tall.
My mother herself is in charge of the Morgan cookhouse this staccato month of May.
I have
7
to cook for.
Twenty-one appetites a day don't faze her—
seem to have plenty of time so far
—but our mute radio does.
Sent for a battery. A person hates to be without a radio when there are so many things happening.
Elderly Frank Morgan and his son Horace are wonders to work for, ranch bosses who pitch in at all tasks themselves in a style that shames the baronial Smith River country.
Mr. Mor. hardly stops a minute, sure gets a lot done for a man his age.
Because the war is still on, the Morgan lambing crew is short-handed and my mother views a couple of them as short in the head, too.
The kid herding the drop band,
the maternity ward of ewes,
has a saddle horse and he never gets off all day long outside of to eat lunch.
I fabulously come into wealth when Frank Morgan promises ten dollars to anybody who kills a coyote, Dad's rifleshot bowls one over, but the corpse can't be found.
Charlie said he didn't want the money as he couldn't produce the coyote, so Mr. Mor. gave the money to Ivan.
Winona pops in for a weekend visit and sets off flutters among the bachelor ranch hands.
Did she tell you one of the sheepherders fell for her?
my mother can't resist passing along to Wally.
Poor Winona, we razzed her so much.
When did any of us ever sleep?

***

Maudlow, though. Any tinier and it would have been microscopic, any more remote and it would have been off the planet. Maudlow was the deepest depot along the Milwaukee Railroad's route through the stubborn canyons of the Big Belts, a maintenance spot which had accrued a post office and a store of sorts. Here around the corner from the Bridger Mountains, the country went wild in a hurry. Hardly anybody possessed the mental compass to settle in this isolated bottom end of the Big Belts. Even my mother from none too cosmopolitan Moss Agate and Ringling called the Maudlow country
the sticks.

Maudlow mattered because of the summer ahead of us.

***

I never saw such muddy roads in my life and as you know we've traveled some pretty muddy ones.

The storm is coming toward us on lightning stilts.
CRACKuunnggg,
the thunder-and-echo.

"Rain some more, why don't ye," my father responds from the mudhole where the Ford sits axle-deep.

We want to get a horse pasture fixed up and a few odd jobs done, but all we did was get out of town as far as the Dave Winter place and got stuck.

My mother waits behind the steering wheel, wearing the look that says she and muddy roads do not get along. I am out of the car clumping around in her overshoes, not about to miss this chance to wallow in the mire in an almost official capacity.

And actually, if you have to be stuck hubcap deep in mud, this is a scenic spot for it. Willows cluster nearby in testimony of the seep of springwater that causes the mudhole. Wild roses and wild carrot and lupine bloom around. Nor, in spite of an absence of other people for fifteen miles in either direction, are we alone. Gophers are plentiful that rainy spring, and a hawk is having a feast. Silently drifting down he makes his grab and flies off, the snatched gopher's back legs pedaling in air.

"Try it now, Berneta," my father directs, standing on the Ford's back bumper hoping his 130 pounds will add vast traction. "Just give it the littlest bit of gas—"

"I know."

"—until it starts going—"

"Charlie, I
know.
"

"—and then gun it."

While my father bounces energetically on the bumper, my mother eases down on the gas pedal as if trying to tiptoe out of trouble, but the back wheels spin like greased tornadoes.

"No good," my father calls a halt to my mother's accelerator foot and hops down off the bumper, fresh freckles of mud all over him. He chews the inside of his mouth as he tries to see through buttes to Maudlow, a lot of miles away, and then in the other direction to Ringling, just as many miles. Closer than either is the coming island of lightning, thunder, and rain. My mother appears distinctly unsurprised at the verdict my father reaches.

Had to jack the car up, put boards under it.

The boards are the old Dave Winter homestead, collapsing at the foot of a butte about a quarter of a mile from us. My mother makes me sploosh back to the car so she can have her overshoes, administers me into my own, which seem even more babyish now after the roominess of hers, and the two of us march out of the mudhole. My father is waiting for us, barely, at the brow of the little dip that holds the mudhole. Here we all take off our overshoes, because they're not needed on the shaley ground across to the old Winter place; the Maudlow road has the monopoly on mud.

At the Winter buildings we scavenge fast, plucking boards from the dilapidated sheepshed and anywhere else we can find loose ones. What's left of the windowless house of this homestead, though, we studiously avoid in our plunder; Dave Winter in his time had married into the Doigs, and so this house of his is in a way us, too.

Back to the mudhole we totter with our armloads of boards. Our overshoes are there waiting for us like three sizes of floppy puppies.