Heart Earth

by Ivan Doig

  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.

  And so I wonder. Do I meet my own mother, young, in the experiences of Western women who endured a land short of everything but their own capacities? Is her favorite school subject of Latin—the gravitas of declensions as a refuge, as it was for me—prefigured in well-spoken Kathryn Donovan, teacher of all eight grades at the sagebrush-surrounded Mos
s Agate school? Did she take to heart, sometime when she visited the Norwegian family tucked over the hill from Moss Agate, gaunt Mary Brekke's immigrant anthem of "You better learn!" that marched Brekke child after child into educated good citizenship? Such civic women are caryatids of so much of that hard Montana past, they carry the sky. Yet I find it not enough to simply count her into their company. Too many pictures of this familiar-faced stranger say she was dangerously more complicated than that, she cannot be sculpted from sugar.

  Instead: from photo after photo with shacky Moss Agate or marginal Ringling in the background, Berneta Ringer assembles herself as someone not growing out of childhood but simply flinging it off, refusing to lose time to the illness in herself. Sick of being sick, shed surely have said it, time and again she pals with a crowd of cowboy hats and Sunday frocks in the pose of a person out and launched in life—but when I interrogate time and place, I realize I am looking at five feet of uncorked teenager. Some dreams, mostly of the daylight sort, we are able to aim; the motion of Berneta's mind often was horseback, her saddle-straddling generation finding its freedom in the ride to Saturday night dances and two-or three-day Fourth of July rodeos. Right there, perhaps, is where the female rural youngsters of the twenties parted from the generation of their mothers, in riding astride to those dances with a party dress tied behind the saddle; or as in Berneta's case in the photo taken when she can have been barely fifteen, mounting a rodeo cowboy's horse in her flapper dress and cloche hat, her high heels flagrantly snug in the stirrups.

  This teenage Berneta, then, has the strange independence of a comet, a pushed pitch of existence that makes her seem always beyond her numerical age. In every camera-caught mood, wide-set eyes soft but with a minimum of illusions: on the verge of pretty but perfectly well aware she's never going to get there past the inherited broad nose. Wally's face was a borrowed coin of hers, with that enlivened best-friend quality from the central slight overbite which parted the lips as if perpetually interested and about to ask. But her query breathes up from the album page not as Wally's romping ready to go? but the more urgent how do I keep life from being a bum go? What comes out most of all, whether the camera catches her as an inexplicable pixie in a peaked cap or gussied up as a very passable flapper, is that whenever she had enough oxygen, Berneta burned bright.

  The most haunting photograph I possess of my mother is a tableau of her on horseback, beneath a wall of rock across the entire sky behind her. This is not Moss Agate but higher bolder country, and she has costumed herself up to it to the best of her capacity. She wears bib overalls, a high-crowned cowgirl hat, and leather chaps with montana spelled out in fancy rivets down the leg-length and a riveted heart with initials in it putting period to the tidings. The mountain West as a stone rainbow, a girl-turning-woman poised beneath it.

  ***

  Enter the Doigs, at a gallop.

  Once, on a government questionnaire which asked a listing of "racial groups within community," back from the Doigs' end of the county sailed the laconic enumeration, "Mostly Scotch." The country out there toward Sixteenmile Creek even looked that way, Highlandish, intemperate. Certainly the Doigs inhabited it in clan quantity: six brothers and a sister, with aunts and uncles and cousins and double cousins up every coulee. Above the basin in the Big Belt Mountains where the family homestead-stretched-into-a-ranch was located sat a tilted crown of rimrock called Wall Mountain, and my father and the other five Doig boys honed themselves slick against that hard horizon. A generation after the steamship crossed the Atlantic, they spoke with a Dundee burr and behaved like test pilots.

  A dance, of course, did the trick; began the blinding need of my mother and my father for each other. When the Saturday night corps of Claude and Jim and Angus and Red and Ed and Charlie Doig hit a dance at the rail villages of Ringling or Sixteen or any of the rural school-houses between, the hall at once colored up into a plaid of bandannaed gallantry and hooty mischief—wherever you glanced, the Doig boys would be taking turns doing the schottische with their widowed mother and jigging up a storm with their girlfriends, not to mention wickedly auditing their sister Anna's potential beaus whether or not she wanted them audited. Amid this whirl of tartan cowboys, the one to watch is the shortest and dancingest, a goodlooking jigger of a man built on a taper down from a wide wedge of shoulders to wiry tireless legs. There at the bottom, newbought Levi's are always a mile too long for Charlie Doig but he rolls them up into stovepipe cuffs, as if defiantly declaring he fills out a pair of pants in every way that really counts. The rhythm of his life is the chancy work of ranches, which began in bronc riding that left him half dead a couple of times and which he has persevered past to shoulder into respect as a foreman of crews, and Saturday night entitles him to cut loose on a hall floor with slickum on it. Charlie in his habits is the fundamental denominator of the Doig boys, saddle scamps who also have a reputation for working like blazes. Customarily after these rural nightfuls of music and other intoxicants, people wobble home for too few hours' sleep before groaning up to milk the cow or feed the sheep or other dismally looming chores. But the Doig boys, whatever their state, fly at the chores the minute they reach home and sleep uninterrupted after. The double energy it takes to be a practical thrower of flings is concentrated here in Charlie, built like a brimming shotglass. This time, this Saturday night of fling, when the square-dance caller chants out to the gents dosiedoe, and a little more doe— well, there stands Berneta.

  Promisingly full of bad intentions, my tuned-up father must have been just what my mother was trying to figure out how to order. Boundaries of dream take human shape, there when our bodies begin their warm imagining. But beyond the welcoming geography of the first touch of each other in the small of the back as the two of them danced together stood twenty horseback miles between the Doig place and Moss Agate. My father being my father, he simply made up his mind to treat that as virtually next door. Berneta Ringer and her newly given fountain pen reciprocated. My grandmother would tell me decades later, still more than a little exasperated at the fact, that she could never set foot off Moss Agate without having to mail another batch of Berneta's letters to Charlie Doig. "If that's who she wanted, I couldn't do any other."

  So. There was ink, ink, ink then too, trying to speak the moments of my parents' earlier wartime, the battle toward marriage. (My mother's youngness and tricky health were in the way, my father's sense of obligation at the struggling Doig property was in the way, everybody's finances, or dearth of, were in the way.) The box curtains of the mind: we never fully imagine, let alone believe in, what was said to one another by those impossible beings, our parents before they were our parents. Yet I overhear enough in her later letters, Wally's packet, for an educated guess that those Moss Agate pages crackled with diagnosis of her and my father and those they knew. How soft-voiced she was, I am always told; so the snow angel outline everyone has given me of my mother luckily takes a devilish edge when she puts on paper for Wally such gossip as the jam Little Miss Buckshot got herself in. Married to 3 soldiers and no divorces, & getting allotments from all three. She was doing alright until the F.B.I. caught up with her. Entire plot of a novel tattled there, I note with professional admiration. What Berneta found to say by mail to her cowboy suitor, my father, surely had similar salt in the tenderness.

  He gave back the tense hum of a wire in the wind. Charlie Doig coming courting sang several lives at once, a number of them contradictions. In that dependable square-lined face it could be read that there was much inward about him, a tendency to muse, dwell on things; and yet as the saying was, you could tell a lot about a guy by the way he wore his hat and Charlie always wore his cocked. A delicious talker when he wasn't busy, but he was busy all the time too. Temper like a hot spur, yet with plenty of knack to laugh at himself. Bantam-legged as he was, he practically ran in search of work, forever whanging away at more than one job at a time, in lambing or calving or haying on the valley's big ranches and meanwhile pitching in with the other Doi
g brothers to try to make a go of the family livestock holdings at Wall Mountain, during Montana's preview of the Depression. Such exertions sometimes tripped across each other, as when Berneta threw a birthday party for him and he was detoured by a bronc that broke his collarbone. "I could've sent the horse," she was notified by him from the hospital, "he was healthy enough." It didn't matter then to my adoring mother-to-be, but how could a man that whimsical be so high-strung, how could a man so high-strung be so full of laughing? In and out of his share of Saturday night flirtations, this lively veteran singleton might have been counted on to kiss and move on. But he contradicted contradictions. From that first night of dancing in Ringling, my father's attachment to the half-frail half-vital young woman at Moss Agate flamed so long and strong that in the end it must be asked if his, too, didn't constitute an incurable condition.

  ***

  The brusque sagebrush would slap at your stirrups, polishing the leather at the bottoms of your chaps, if you rode their country yet today.

  Sage like a dwarf orchard, climbing with the land as the valley around Moss Agate swells west into ridges, then cascades toward Sixteenmile Creek in more and more hills, a siege of hills.

  Except where dominated by Wall Mountain and Grass Mountain, the higher horizon now begins to repeat those tough anonymous foothills in summits that bulge up one after another in timbered sameness.

  This Sixteen country is a cluttered back corner of the West where the quirky Big Belt Mountains are overshadowed by the grander Bridger range immediately to the south. From the air over the Big Belts, the nature of their oddly isolated sprawl becomes evident. Not particularly lofty, not especially treacherous in skyline, not much noticed in history except for the long-ago goldstrike at Confederate Gulch, this wad of unfamous mountains nonetheless stands in the way of everything major around them. They haze the Missouri River unexpectedly northwest from its headwaters for about ninety miles before the flow can find a passage around their stubborn barrier and down the eastern slope of the continent. By one manner of geologic reckoning, the main range of the Rocky Mountains ends, a little ignominiously, east of Townsend where the mudstone and limestone perimeters of the Big Belts begin. Across on the Smith River Valley side of the Big Belt range, the steady plains of mid-Montana receive a rude bump upward to a valley-floor elevation of 5,280 feet. Goblin canyons chop in and out of the sixty-five-mile frontage of the Big Belts, but a scant two give any route through: Deep Creek Canyon where the highway has been threaded between snowcatching cliffs, and the Sixteen Canyon, graveyard of railroad ventures.