Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “You know better than that.” Gram went down on her knees with a sharp intake of breath to dig out the wicker suitcase from under her bed. “They need the cook shack for whatever gut-robber Wendell Williamson hires next.”

  “Yeah, but—” In a panic I looked around the familiar tight quarters, lodgings for Double W cooks since time immemorial, not much more than a cabin-size room and a few sticks of furniture, yet it had providently housed the pair of us the past two years, and if we were being kicked out, temporarily or not, I couldn’t help clinging to whatever I could. “I can stay on the ranch, I mean. Be in the bunkhouse with the haying crew, why not. I bet nobody would care and I wouldn’t take up hardly any room and—”

  “For one thing, Donny, you’re not old enough for that.” Trying not to be cross with me but awful close to it, she squinted my direction through the bifocals that made her look like her eyes hurt along with the rest of her. “For another, Wendell may be short on brains, but he’s still not about to let you gallivant around the ranch on your own. So don’t talk just to hear your head rattle, we need to get a move on or you’ll miss the mail bus.” After more or less dusting off the suitcase, which was the best that could be done with wicker, she flopped the thing open on my bed. I didn’t care that it came from the old country with my grandfather’s father or somebody, to me it was just outdated and rickety and I’d look like some ridiculous comic strip character—PeeWee, the dim-witted little hobo in Just Trampin’ readily came to mind—carrying it around. Ignoring my fallen face, Gram directed, “Hurry up now. Go pick out your shirts. Three will have to do you, to start with.”

  I stalled. “I don’t know what to take. What’s the dumb weather like back there?”

  “About like anyplace else,” she said less than patiently. “Summer in the summer, winter in the winter. Get busy.”

  Grudgingly I went over to the curtained-off nook that substituted for our closet. “Fuck and phooey,” I said under my breath as I sorted through shirts. I was at that stage—part of growing up, as I saw it—where cusswords were an attraction, and I’d picked up this expression from one of the cowhands being sent out in the rain to ride herd on stray cattle all day. It applied equally well to a dumb bus trip to Wisconsin, as far as I was concened.

  “What was that?” Gram queried from across the room.

  “Fine and dandy,” I mumbled, as if I’d been talking to the shirts, and grabbed a couple I usually wore to school and my dressy western one. “Put that on to wear on the bus,” Gram directed from where she was aggregating my underwear and socks out of the small dresser we shared, “and these,” surprising me with the new blue jeans still in store folds. “People will think you’re a bronc rider.”

  Oh sure, a regular Rags Rasmussen, champion of the world at straddling saddle broncs, that’d be me, riding the bus like a hobo with a broken-down suitcase. Knowing enough not to say that out loud, I stuck to: “I bet they haven’t even got rodeos in Wiss-con-sun.”

  “Don’t whine.” Cheering me up was a lost cause, but she made the effort. “Honest to goodness, you’ll look swayve and debonure when you get on the bus.” I took that as a joke in more ways than one, suave and debonair the furthest from how I could possibly feel, packaged up to be shipped like something out of a mail-order catalog. She gave me a wink, not natural to her, and that didn’t help, either.

  Folding things smartly like the veteran of many moves that she was, she had the suitcase nearly packed while I changed into the stiff pants and the purple shirt with sky-blue yoke trimming and pearl snap buttons, which ordinarily would have lifted my mood. Back and forth between gauging packing space and my long face, Gram hesitated. “You can take the moccasins if you want to.”

  “I guess so.” Truth told, I didn’t care what else went in the hideous suitcase as long as those did. The pair of decorated Blackfoot moccasins rested between our beds at night, so whichever one of us had to brave the cold linoleum to go to the toilet could slip them on. Each adorned with a prancing fancy-dancer figure made up of teeny beads like drops of snow and sky, they were beauties, and that couldn’t be said for any other of our meager stuff. Gram somehow had acquired them while she was night cook at the truck stop in Browning, the rough-and-tough reservation town, before she and I were thrown together. By rights, she deserved them. My conscience made a feeble try. “Maybe you’ll need them in the—where you’re going?”

  “Never you mind. They’ll have regular slippers there, like as not,” she fibbed, I could tell. “And after”—staying turned away from me, she busied herself more than necessary tucking the moccasins into the suitcase—“the nuns will see to things, I’m sure.”

  After. After she had some of her insides taken out. After I had been sent halfway across the country, to a place in Wisconsin I had never even heard of. My voice breaking, I mustered a last protest. “I don’t want to go and leave you.”

  “Don’t be a handful, please,” she said, something I heard from her quite often. She took off her glasses, one skinny earpiece at a time, to wipe her eyes. “I’d rather take a beating than have to send you off like this, but it can’t be helped.” She blinked as if that would make the glistening go away, and my own eyes stung from watching. “These things happen, that’s how life is. I can hear your granddad now. ‘We just have to hunch up and take it.’” Gram kept in touch with people who were no longer living. These were not ghosts to her, nor for that matter to me, simply interrupted existences. My grandfather had died long before I was born, but I heard the wise words of Pete Blegen many times as though he were standing close beside her.

  Straightening herself now as if the thought of him had put new backbone in her, she managed a trembling smile. “Nell’s bells, boy, don’t worry so.”

  I didn’t give in. “Maybe I could just go to the hospital with you and the nuns would let me live with them and—”

  “That’s not how something like this is done,” she said tiredly. “Don’t you understand at all? Kitty and Dutch are the only relatives we have left, like it or not. You have to go and stay with them for the summer while I get better,” she put it to me one last time in just so many words. “You’ll do fine by yourself. You’re on your own a lot of the time around here anyway.”

  She maybe was persuading herself, but not me. “Donny,” she begged, reading my face, “it is all I can think to do.”

  “But I don’t know Aunt Kitty and him,” I rushed on. “I’ve never even seen a picture. And what if they don’t recognize me at the bus station back there and we miss each other and I get lost and—”

  Gram cut me off with a look. As redheaded as a kid could be, a wicker suitcase in hand, I was not especially likely to escape notice, was I. No mercy from her on the rest of it, either. “I seem to remember,” she said flatly, “telling you not five minutes ago that I wrote down their address and phone number and tucked it in your memory book, just in case. Quit trying to borrow trouble, boy.”

  “Yeah, well, I still don’t know them,” I muttered. “Why couldn’t they come in a car and get me, and see you and help you go to the hospital and things like that?”

  This caused her to pause. “Kitty and I didn’t always make music together, from girls on,” she finally came up with, hardly the most enlightening of explanations. “The Great Kate, you’d think her full name was back then, the stuck-up little dickens.” She sighed, sad and exasperated in the same breath. “She always did have her own ways, and I had mine, and that was that. So we haven’t much kept in touch. I didn’t see any sense in trying, until now.” Gram drew what seemed to be another hard breath. “Because when that sister of mine gets a certain notion in her head she can’t be budged. I suppose that’s how she’s got to where she is in life. And your Uncle Dutch is”—a longer pause—“something else, from what I hear.”

  Whatever that was supposed to mean, she lost no time changing the subject, saying my big trip was a chance that did not come o
ften in life, really, to get out in the world and see new sights and scenes and meet people and have experiences and all that. “You could call it a vacation, in a way,” she tried hopefully.

  “It’s vacation here,” I pouted, meaning school was out and I had the run of the ranch and could do pretty much what I wanted without being shipped off to complete strangers back east in Wisconsin.

  “Oh, Donny,” she groaned, and let loose with, “I swear to Creation, I don’t know up from down anymore”—one of her standard sayings when things became too much for her. Outbursts of that sort scared the daylights out of me at first, but I had learned such squalls passed as quickly as they came. Certain complaints gathered on a person with age, it seemed. This woman who meant everything to me carried the burden of years and deprivation along with all else life had thrust on her, including me. As much as I adored her and tried to fit under her wing without causing too much trouble, my grandmother was from another universe of time, another century, actually. My six grades of schooling already were twice what she ever received in the sticks of North Dakota, if North Dakota even had sticks. She read recipe books with her finger, her lips silently moving, and had to call on me to help out with unfamiliar words such as pomegranate. Not that she lacked a real vocabulary of her own, for besides sayings that fit various moods and occasions, she possessed a number of expressions that edged right up to cussing, without quite qualifying. The way she’d meet something dubious with “That’s a load of bulloney” always sounded to me suspiciously close.

  At least she didn’t resort to any of that now, instead telling me to temper my attitude in what for her were measured terms. “It’s not the end of the world,” a look straight at me came with the words. “School starts right after Labor Day, you know that, and this is only till then. Kitty”—she loyally amended that—“your Aunt Kitty will make sure you’re back in time, and I’ll be up and around by then, and we’ll get on with life good as new, you wait and see.”

  • • •

  BUT I DIDN’T NEED TO wait to see, plain and simple, that if what was happening to us wasn’t the end of our world, it was a close enough imitation. Just the sight of Gram, the way her apron bagged on her never very strong build, caused a catch in my throat. There was not much of her to spare to surgery, by any measure. And while I did not fully understand the “female trouble” discovered in her by some doctor at the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, I grasped that the summerlong convalescence in the pavilion ward run by the nuns made her—us—a charity case. Maybe we weren’t poorer than lint, like the worst-off people, but apparently not far from it. If that, plus losing our only shelter on earth—the cook shack, for what it was—did not add up to the edge of disaster, even without my banishment to a town in Wisconsin I wasn’t even sure how to spell, I didn’t know what did. This awful day, the second worst of my life, both of us were becoming medical casualties. Gram was the one with the drastic condition, but I was sick at heart. For I knew if this operation of hers did not come out right, we were goners, one way or the other. If something went wrong, if at the very least she could no longer work, it would be the poorfarm for her. And what I knew with terrible certainty would happen to me then was keeping me awake nights.

  Argument over as far as she was concerned, Gram gave a last pat to my packed clothes. “That’s that, the suitcase is ready and I hope to high heaven you are.”

  By now I didn’t want to look at her and couldn’t look away. My mother’s face was legible in her drawn one at times like this, women without any extra to them to start with and hard luck wearing them down even more. It was showing every sign of being a family characteristic, if I didn’t dodge it.

  Call it luck or not, but right then I had an inspiration. An impulse on top of an inspiration, more like. “Can I run up to the boss house for a minute? With my autograph book?”

  “Not unless you want Sparrowhead’s,” she dismissed that out of hand. “And you know how he is. Sometimes I think that man has a wire down.” Then she added, as if I had forgotten, “He’s the only one there, with Meredice away.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s sort of what I had in mind,” I fumbled out. “It’s just, you know, I have everybody else’s.”

  Gram’s pursed expression questioned my good sense, judgment, and maybe other qualities, but she only said, “Child, you get some of the strangest notions.”

  Biting her tongue against saying more on that score, she checked the clock. “All right, I suppose if you have to. But make it snappy, pretty please. You need to catch your ride to town with the vet as soon as he’s done in the cow shed.”

  • • •

  MY MIND BUZZED as I crossed the grassless packed earth of the yard, so called, that separated the cook shack, bunkhouse, barn, sheds, corrals, and the rest of the sprawl of the Double W from the extravagant structure in “ranchin’ mansion” style that was the stronghold of the Williamsons. Rather, of the Williamson men who had ruled the huge ranch for three generations, while the Williamson wives of equal duration had as little as possible to do with the white-painted pile of house poking up out of the prairie.

  “I don’t blame Meredice for scooting off to California every chance she gets,” Gram sympathized wholly with the current lady of the house. “It’s like living in a hide warehouse in there.” That may have been so, but the ranch headquarters, the so-called boss house with its dark wooded rooms and manly leather-covered furniture and bearhide rugs and horned or antlered heads of critters on the walls—most spectacularly, that of the bull elk shot by Teddy Roosevelt on one of his visits to the ranch before being president took up his time—held a sneaking allure for me. Cowhide furniture and trophy heads can do that to you when you’ve lived the bare-bones style Gram and I were stuck with.

  I entered by the kitchen door without knocking, as the kitchen and the adjoining windowed porch where the ranch crew ate at a twenty-foot-long table were Gram’s domain, where I hung around to lick the bowls when she was baking and even did small chores for her like taking out the ashes and filling the woodbox. Pausing in the familiar surroundings to gather myself, I gazed around for possibly the last time at the cookstove of the old kind that cooks called a hellbox and the creaky cupboards and the rest of the tired kitchenware Gram had made do with, three times a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, as the latest in the succession of Double W cooks fending with a shortage of modern conveniences and a surplus of Wendell Williamson, classic tightfisted employer. I swallowed hard. What I was about to do was a gamble, but I was a hundred percent sure it would work. Well, fifty percent at least, the rest maybe the kind of hope only someone at that age can have. “Hunch up and take it” might be good enough advice if you were willing to go through life like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm, but I was determined to try for better than that.

  Getting ready, I smoothed open the autograph book. A memory book was another name for it, because collecting autographs really was an excuse to have people dab in some lasting bit of wisdom, humor, or simply something supremely silly along with their signature.

  • • •

  WHAT WOULD I HAVE DONE, in that difficult period of life, without the inch-thick, cream-colored album with the fancily lettered inscription YE WHO LEND YOUR NAME TO THESE PAGES SHALL LIVE ON UNDIMMED THROUGH THE AGES embossed on the cover in gold or at least gilt? Autograph books were one of those manias that sweep through a student population, and at our South Fork one-room school it started when Amber Busby, as spoiled as she was curly-haired and dark-eyed, showed up with a fancy leatherette one she’d been given for her birthday and began cornering all of us to write in it. Immediately everybody, from the littlest kids just able to print their names to the seventh- and eighth-grade galoots edging up on the fact of a world half filled with girls, had to have an autograph book; it’s a miracle how something ceases to be sissy stuff when everyone does it. Like other schoolyard manias, this one wore itself out in a week or two, but I kept at it
, away from school as well as in. Gram, always desperate to keep me occupied—over time I had worn out enthusiasms on jigsaw puzzles, pen pals, board games, and things since forgotten—wholeheartedly encouraged this particular diversion, not that I needed extra motivation. The variety of sentiments people came up with to be remembered by appealed to the grab-bag nature of my mind, and by now I had a good start on filling the pages. I knew there was a long way to go, though, because I wanted to set a record. I loved the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! panel in the Sunday funnies of the Great Falls Tribune that the Williamsons passed along to us when they thought of it, with its incredible facts that a North Dakota man ate forty-one pancakes in one sitting and that the Siamese twins Cheng and Peng shared a total of six wives in their lifetime and so on. I could just see myself in a full-color drawing: Donal Cameron—my name correctly spelled and everything—the Montana boy who collected more autographs and their attached memories than any other known human being. What that total was, of course, remained to be determined, but I was working at it. And this next autograph request counted double, in a sense.

  Flipping past the scrawled sentiments of my classmates and the other schoolkids—When you see a skunk in a tree / Pull his tail and think of me was pretty typical—I picked out a nice fresh page, holding the place with my thumb, and set off for the office down the wood-paneled hall.

  Only to slow to a halt as ever at the display table in the hallway nook. The show-off table, Gram called it, there to impress visitors with items discovered on the ranch from pockets of the past. I never passed without looking the fascinating assortment over. A powder horn and bullet pouch from the days of the fur trappers. A long-shanked jinglebob spur a cowboy lost on a trail drive from Texas. A big bone of some beast no longer seen on earth. All stuff like that until the array of Indian things, spearpoints and hide scrapers and flint skinning knives and other remnants of buffalo hunts long before Double W cattle grazed the same land. And resting there prime amid those, the object I longed for, the dark black arrowhead that was my find.