Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  During my first winter at college, he died. He left me a little black notebook in which year by year he’d copied out poems he loved. In it, I found again William Carruth’s once-famous, swelling lines I had first heard spoken in his Gaelic accent:

  A fire-mist and a planet, a crystal and a cell,

  A saurian and a jellyfish, and a cave where the cave-men dwell.

  Then a sense of law and order, and a face turned from the sod.

  Some call it Evolution. Others call it God….

  and so also of Autumn, and Longing, and Consecration, all of which some others “call God.”

  Then I put the book away in guilt and sorrow and also in silence, for my father’s resistance to talking about death or the dead spread an anesthesia throughout our household. For him, it would never wear off. After he carried his father’s ashes back to the mountain in a box, he would never return or mention the place again, nor would he speak of his mother. But many years later, when I picked up the black notebook again, I found my grandfather had inscribed one poem twice, first in his youth, and then, on the last, unfinished page, tremblingly he had traced its first words, “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me….”

  Only nine words they were, but placed just before the silence of the book’s end, they sank deep into my mind, evoking the thoughts even a young person has of the dark distance into which all things are swept. And as life goes on, other deaths and losses add to this store of darkness, so it deepens, until the smallest natural happening—a roll of thunder, the edge of a wind lifting the hair, an animal cry at night—can open, again, the sluiceway behind which waits one’s own death, ahead.

  “It is gone, the beloved clan,” I imagine my grandfather saying, sitting on his narrow iron bed in Ohio, staring down at his black, bulbous city shoes.

  It would be twilight of a winter evening. His little room at the back of the house was pleasant enough in summer, for it overlooked the garden. But in February, it surveyed a desolate scene of flower beds in burlap, icicles along the windowframe.

  A frozen branch rattles against the roof, the radiator bubbles and begins to knock. The old man remembers the harsh, sweet smell of woodsmoke and peaches cooking.

  “The land lies behind, covered in mist,” he thinks. “The river will find the sea.

  “I believe we shall meet again.

  “But where is the past, and what is the shape of the world to come—these are mysteries.”

  The radiator falls silent. A pall of cold air falls from the window onto the old man’s knees, drifts down to his shins.

  “Mudwayushka, little firefly,” he mutters, laying his hands on his knees, fingers outstretched, his gaunt head sinking, his eyes big behind heavy lenses.

  A whippoorwill calls. A bobcat screams.

  The children are on his knees, pressed shoulder to shoulder.

  “O Bappa, when will you die? You are so old, your eyes are red.”

  Golden is gone, brown is gone.

  How then shall we all come back together in the end?

  WALLACE STEGNER (1909-1993)

  For over fifty years, Wallace Stegner wrote short stories, novels, essays, biography, and history. In 1972, his boldest novel, Angle of Repose, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and in 1977, The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award in fiction.

  He taught at Harvard University from 1939 to 1945; from 1946 to 1971 he directed the creative writing program at Stanford University. He served on the National Parks Advisory Board, and was assistant to the secretary of the interior (1961).

  His last book concerns living and writing in the West: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992).

  Wolf Willow, his 1955 memoir, is experimental and mixed in form. He subtitled it “A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.” Here he describes the part of his boyhood he spent homesteading on the Saskatchewan plains in Canada. The nearby town he calls Whitemud. Wheat farming went poorly, and after five years the family moved to Montana.

  from WOLF WILLOW

  What we did on the homestead was written in wind. It began as it ended—empty space, grass and sky. I remember it as it originally was, for my brother and I, aged eight and six, accompanied my father when he went out to make the first “improvements.” Except for the four-foot iron post jutting from the prairie just where our wagon track met the trail to Hydro, Montana, and for the three shallow holes with the survey stake at their apex that marked the near corner of our land, there was nothing to distinguish or divide our land from all other, to show which 320 acres of that wind and grass were ours.

  That was our first experience of how flat land could spread from the wagon and tent by which we attempted to demonstrate ownership—flat to the horizon and beyond, wherever we looked, except that, halfway to our western line, a shallow, nearly imperceptible coulee began, feeling its way, turning and turning again, baffled and blocked, a watercourse so nearly a slough that the spring runoff hardly flowed at all, its water not so much moving as pushed by the thaw behind it and having to go somewhere, until it passed our land and turned south, and at the border found another coulee, which carried in most seasons a little water—not enough to run but enough to seep, and with holes that gave sanctuary to a few minnows and suckers. It was called Coteau Creek, a part of the Milk-Missouri watershed. In good seasons we might get a swim of sorts in its holes; in dry years we hauled water from it in barrels, stealing from the minnows to serve ourselves and our stock. Between it and our house we wore, during the five summers we spent vainly trying to make a wheat farm there, one of our private wagon tracks.

  Coteau Creek was a landmark and sometimes a hazard. Once my father, gunning our old Model T across one of its fords, hit something and broke an axle. Next day he started walking the forty miles into Chinook, Montana, leaving me with a homesteader family, and two days later he came back carrying a new axle on his back and installed it himself after the homesteader’s team had hauled the Ford out of the creek bed. I remember that high, square car, with its yellow spoke wheels and its brass bracing rods from windshield to mudguards and its four-eared brass radiator cap. It stuck up black and foreign, a wanderer from another planet, on the flats by Coteau Creek, while my father, red-faced and sweating, crawled in and out under the jacked-up rear end and I squatted in the car’s shade and played what games I could with pebbles and a blue robin’s egg. We sat baldly on the plain, something the earth refused to swallow, right in the middle of everything and with the prairie as empty as nightmare clear to the crawl and shimmer where hot earth met hot sky. I saw the sun flash off brass, a heliograph winking off a message into space, calling attention to us, saying “Look, look!”

  Because that was the essential feeling I had about that country—the sense of being foreign and noticeable, of sticking out. I did not at first feel even safe, much less that I was helping to take charge of and make our own a parcel of the world. I moped for Whitemud, nearly fifty miles north and east on its willowed river, where all my friends were and where my mother was waiting until we could get a shack built. Out here we did not belong to the earth as the prairie dogs and burrowing owls and gophers and weasels and badgers and coyotes did, nor to the sky as the hawks did, nor to any combination as meadowlarks and sparrows and robins did. The shack that my father built was an ugly tarpaper-covered box on the face of the prairie, and not even its low rounded roof, built low and round to give the wind less grip on it, could bind it into the horizontal world.

  Before the shack was finished we lived in a tent, which the night wind constantly threatened to blow away, flapping the canvas and straining the ropes and pulling the pegs from the gravelly ground. And when, just as we were unloading the lumber to start building, a funnel-shaped cloud appeared in the south, moving against a background of gray-black shot with lightning forks, and even while the sun still shone on us the air grew tense and metallic to breathe, and a light like a reflection from brass glowed around us, and high above, pure and untroubled, the
zenith was blue—then indeed exposure was like paralysis or panic, and we looked at the strangely still tent, bronzed in the yellow air, and felt the air shiver and saw a dart of wind move like a lizard across the dust and vanish again. My father rushed us to the shallow section holes at the corner, and with ropes he lashed us to the stake and made us cower down. The holes were no more than a foot deep; they could in no sense be called shelter. Over their edge our eyes, level with the plain, looked southward and saw nothing between us and the ominous bent funnel except gopher mounds and the still unshaken grass. Across the coulee a gopher sat up, erect as the picket pin from which he took his nickname.

  Then the grass stirred; it was as if gooseflesh prickled suddenly on the prairie’s skin. The gopher disappeared as if some friend below had reached up and yanked him down into his burrow. Even while we were realizing it, the yellow air darkened, and then all the brown and yellow went out of it and it was blue-black. The wind began to pluck at the shirts on our backs, the hair on our heads was wrenched, the air was full of dust. From the third section hole my father, glaring over the shallow rim, yelled to us to keep down, and with a fierce rush rain trampled our backs, and the curly buffalo grass at the level of my squinted eyes was strained out straight and whistling. I popped my head into my arms and fitted my body to the earth. To give the wind more than my flat back, I felt, would be sure destruction, for that was a wind, and that was a country, that hated a foreign and vertical thing.

  The cyclone missed us; we got only its lashing edge. We came up cautiously from our muddy burrows and saw the tent collapsed and the sky clearing, and smelled the air, washed and rinsed of all its sultry oppressiveness. I for one felt a little better about being who I was, but for a good many weeks I watched the sky with suspicion; exposed as we were, it could jump on us like a leopard from a tree. And I know I was disappointed in the shack that my father swiftly put together. A soddy that poked its low brow no higher than the tailings of a gopher’s burrow would have suited me better. The bond with the earth that all the footed and winged creatures felt in that country was quite as valid for me.

  And that was why I so loved the trails and paths we made. They were ceremonial, an insistence not only that we had a right to be in sight on the prairie but that we owned and controlled a piece of it. In a country practically without landmarks, as that part of Saskatchewan was, it might have been assumed that any road would comfort the soul. But I don’t recall feeling anything special about the graded road that led us more than half of the way from town to homestead, or for the wiggling tracks that turned off to the homesteads of others. It was our own trail, lightly worn, its ruts a slightly fresher green where old cured grass had been rubbed away, that lifted my heart. It took off across the prairie like an extension of myself. Our own wheels had made it: broad, iron-shod wagon wheels first, then narrow democrat wheels that cut through the mat of grass and scored the earth until it blew and washed and started a rut, then finally the wheels of the Ford.

  By the time we turned off it, the road we followed from town had itself dwindled to a pair of ruts, but it never quite disappeared; it simply divided and subdivided. I do not know why the last miles, across buffalo grass and burnouts, past the shacks we called Pete and Emil, across Coteau Creek, and on westward until the ruts passed through the gate in our pasture fence and stopped before our house, should always have excited me so, unless it was that the trail was a thing we had exclusively created and that it led to a place we had exclusively built. Here is the pioneer root-cause of the American cult of Progress, the satisfaction that Homo fabricans feels in altering to his own purposes the virgin earth. Those tracks demonstrated our existence as triumphantly as an Indian is demonstrated by his handprint in ochre on a cliff wall. Not so idiotically as the stranded Ford, this trail and the shack and chicken house and privy at its end said, “See? We are here.” Thus, in the truest sense, was “located” a homestead.

  More satisfying than the wagon trail, even, because more intimately and privately made, were the paths that our daily living wore in the prairie. I loved the horses for poking along the pasture fence looking for a way out, because that habit very soon wore a plain path all around inside the barbed wire. Whenever I had to go and catch them, I went out of my way to walk along it, partly because the path was easier on my bare feet but more because I wanted to contribute my feet to the wearing process. I scuffed and kicked at clods and persistent grass clumps, and twisted my weight on incipient weeds and flowers, willing that the trail around the inside of our pasture should be beaten dusty and plain, a worn border to our inheritance.

  It was the same with the path to the woodpile and the privy. In late June, when my mother and brother and I reached the homestead, that would be nearly overgrown, the faintest sort of radius line within the fireguard. But our feet quickly wore it anew, though there were only the four of us, and though other members of the family, less addicted to paths than I, often frustrated and irritated me by cutting across from the wrong corner of the house, or detouring past the fence-post pile to get a handful of cedar bark for kindling, and so neglected their plain duty to the highway. It was an unspeakable satisfaction to me when after a few weeks I could rise in the flat morning light that came across the prairie in one thrust, like a train rushing down a track, and see the beaten footpath, leading gray and dusty between grass and cactus and the little orange flowers of the false mallow that we called wild geranium, until it ended, its purpose served, at the hooked privy door.

  Wearing any such path in the earth’s rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities. He lacks the proper mana for it, he is out of touch with the earth of which he is made. Once, on Fifty-eighth Street in New York, I saw an apartment dweller walking his captive deer on a leash. They had not the plea-sure of leaving a single footprint, and the sound of the thin little hoofs on concrete seemed as melancholy to me as, at the moment, the sound of my own steps.

  So we had an opportunity that few any longer can have: we printed an earth that seemed creation-new with the marks of our identity. And then the earth wiped them out again. It is possible that our dam still holds a reservoir behind it, that our family effort has endowed the country with one more small slough for which nesting ducks and thirsty coyotes may bless us. It may be that some of the ground cherries my mother brought as seed from Iowa and planted in the fireguard have grown and fruited and been spread by wind and birds. If so, field mice opening the papery husks and dining on the little yellow tomatoes inside may bless us too. There is not much else that we can be blessed for. Because of us, quite a lot of the homestead’s thin soil lies miles downwind. Because of us, Russian thistle and other weeds that came in with the wheat have filled the old fields and choked out the grass and made much more difficult the job of bringing back the old natural range. But with those exceptions, we are erased, we are one with Fort Walsh. Though it established itself permanently in more favored parts of the region, the wheat frontier never got a foothold in “Palliser’s Triangle,” at whose base our homestead lay, and we ourselves helped corroborate Palliser’s 1858 prediction that agriculture would prove impracticable there. Our dream of a wheat bonanza, or failing that, of a home, is as lost as the night wind that used to blow across the prairie’s great emptiness and, finding a little human box in its way, moan and mourn under the eaves and through the screens.

  The homestead, though it was a stead of sorts, was never a home. There was only a handful of real homes on either side of the Line. Most houses were like ours, shacks made to be camped in during the crop season; and some were like Pete and Emil, never meant to be lived in at all, but only to satisfy the law’s requirement. (The grass grows more sweetly on Pete and Emil than on our place, for during their simple-minded effort to cheat the government out of title to 320 acres their owners plowed no prairie, imported no weeds, started no dust bowl.) Those of us who really tried to farm lived on the prairie as summerers, exact opposites of the métis winterers who knew that
country first, and anyone who tries to farm there now will still be a summerer. Nobody, quite apart from the question of school, wants to risk six hard lonely months thirty or forty miles from fuel, supplies, medical care, and human company.

  As agriculturists we were not inventive. We used the methods and the machinery that were said to be right, and planted the crops and the varieties advised by rumor or the Better Farming Train. At least once, tradition did well by us. Because my parents had brought from Dakota the notion that flax is the best crop in a newly broken field, we endowed our prairie briefly, in 1916, with twenty acres of bluebells. I remember the pleasure their beauty brought us all; that was a green and rainy summer, and the sight of lush grass and wildflowers and the blue wave of flax persuaded us for a little while that we did indeed live in the Garden of the World. But I remember them also for the evidence they give me now of how uneventful and lonesome the homestead must have been for two boys who had read everything in the shack ten times, had studied the Sears Roebuck catalog into shreds, had trapped gophers in increasing circles out from the house until the gopher population was down to bare survivors, had stoned to death the one badger they caught in a gopher trap, had lost in a big night windstorm their three captive weasels and two burrowing owls, and had played to boredom every two-man game they knew. We couldn’t even take our .22’s and go killing things, for we had no money for cartridges, not even shorts, not even the despised BB’s.

  To keep us from our interminable squabbling, my father said we could reap as our own crop all the flax that had grown up too close to the pasture fence for machinery. We cut our flax with butcher knives and threshed it by beating it against the inside of a washtub. It took half an hour to realize a cupful, but we kept at it until we had filled two flour sacks. It brought us, as I recall, about four dollars—memorable money. But I have a more lasting souvenir of that piece of bored laboriousness. Cutting at flax stalks with my knife, I slammed my hand into a cactus clump and drove a spine clear through my middle finger. There was no pulling it out, for it was broken off at the skin, and so I waited for it to fester out. It never did. It is there in the X-rays yet, a needle of authentic calcified Saskatchewan, as much a part of me as the bones between which it wedged itself.