Breaking Clean
Page 2
The day after they moved in, Dad trucked water from his parents' place to fill an old iron cistern Henry kept near the house, enough to last the summer if they were careful. The milk cow and my mother's saddle horse, Sox, were turned in around the buildings to battle the weeds. A couple of kittens took charge of the mice that sifted through the woodwork. Margaret and Kenny were given the standard lecture about snakes and set loose with the dog, Purp, to play for hours in the dim recesses of the log barn. Neither wired for electricity nor plumbed for water, the two-room shanty featured bare board floors, beaded ceilings and a twenty-year accumulation of dirt and grease that literally filled the narrow grooves of the ceiling panels. Although unusually strong and decisive when it came to making things right, Mother was not one to linger at pointless tasks. She gave it all a going-over, concluded that the devil himself couldn't get it clean and left it at that. The closest neighbors were miles away. Dad would be gone most of the summer, working on ranches to the north and south until the new place came empty after harvest. Mother dusted off her hands and settled in.
I'm not hard-pressed to imagine my mother as a young woman, for even in her seventies she remains independent, opinionated and fiercely practical. She'd been born late in the lives of her parents, one a homesteading schoolteacher up from the Dakotas, the other a Scots farmer who had emigrated from Canada to farm with his teams of horses in far northern Montana. Hers was one of many poor families in the Lovejoy community struggling to get by on white beans and garden truck, but being an only child afforded her opportunities she might never have known as a member of a large, hungry family. She learned at her mother's elbow. By the time she entered high school, she could sew expertly, cook adequately, milk a cow, break a colt, tend a garden and preserve the vegetables it produced. Unlike many women in her generation, she finished high school and went on to take secretarial and bookkeeping courses at a community college. From her gentle Scots father, she'd acquired a love of horses and from both parents, a love of reading. Hardly surprising that in her thirties this woman waded into the summer without a qualm, not only willing but determined to spend the third trimester of a third pregnancy in a two-room shack twenty feet from the outhouse and a dozen miles from a telephone.
Freed from the notion of white-glove cleaning, freed of the work of gardens and large meals, freed from the blistering summer cycle of cattle and crops, my mother propped books on her swelling belly and rested, sharing the shade of the house with Sox and the cow, one ear tuned to the games of her children and the vast quiet of the country around her. Days ended with a flare of fire in the sky over the Little Rocky Mountains and began again with the golden glow over the prairie to the east. It was, my mother recalls in a fond and misty voice, one of the most peaceful and pleasant summers of her life.
In the next few years, she would have cause to look back on that time with unbridled nostalgia, drawing up memories like a comforter—the lazy afternoons that Sox thrust his great sorrel head through an open window to mooch bread crusts, Kenny's birthday cake rising to fill the tiny oven of the sheep-herder's stove, a straggle of red and pink petunias she and Margaret planted and kept alive by emptying the dishpan water around the roots every evening. The growing season parted and swept around them, weeks that passed like a bloom of light in the eye of a storm, a sudden stillness made all the sweeter for its brevity and the inevitable crash of thunder that followed.
That August, barnyards shook with the roar of threshing machines tuning up for harvest, iron-wheeled monsters pulled from behind outbuildings to be tinkered and tightened until they bellowed. That August, the hay was up and the seed crops fell to the blades of sickle mowers—wheat, oats and third cutting alfalfa raked into windrows to dry and gathered into maw-sized bunches to await the threshing crews. That August, with this one final harvest chore standing between my parents and their new home, it began to rain.
My father spent the month on a harvest crew north of Malta, cutting grain between rain showers, a day sitting for every day in the field, and finally ground his way home in disgust. He got on building fence for a neighbor, a job that lent itself to soft ground. Anderson's crop of alfalfa seed lay in the field as the days poured and dripped and spat and drooled into September. The roads turned to gumbo soup, rendering travel impractical when it wasn't impossible, and Dad knew time was running out. Margaret needed to start school. Mom, in her ninth month of pregnancy, was still stranded without transportation most of the week. Anderson was holding firm, waiting out the wet.
In September the family broke and scattered. The two kids were farmed out to Mons and Clara Veseth, who had a son in school as well as a little boy Kenny's age. Mom moved to a friend's house in Malta to be nearer the hospital. Dad camped in Anderson's front yard, helping him thresh alfalfa, borrowing Anderson's machinery to plant his first crop of winter wheat. My mother sums it up with a shake of her head, the disciplined cap of dark curls, the black snap of her eyes unchanged by the passage of time, although any real exasperation has given way to ironic humor. "You," she says in wry accusation, "you were the only damned thing that arrived on time that fall." And so I was born, landed, yet homeless, oblivious to the chaos, the second week of October, 1954.
The nights had turned cold, and when the new place finally came free, Dad traveled on the frost to fetch us from Wagner, a tiny community outside of Maka where Mom's parents had retired. She stoked up the stove at the Picotte place, stowed me in a basket with handles and started packing with her free hand. On moving day, I jounced along on the front seat of the farm truck, greeted for the first time by my older siblings as we plowed through the gumbo to retrieve them, then fishtailed up the road to our new home. We got stuck twice on the quarter-mile stretch leading to the house, but when the truck ground to a stop, we were home for good.
My mother bowed her neck and waded into the mess, building islands of boxes in each of the six small rooms. The next day, Dad returned to saddle Sox and drive the milk cow cross-country to the empty barn. By Christmas the house was put together, and my mother took stock. A new baby, a new ranch, a home of her own. Her name was on the deed next to my father's, the ink dry, the die cast. Time to settle in and hang on for the ride.
There are perspectives in my stories that I can only imagine, conclusions I come to based on the circumstances of the lives that led to my own. My family and the stories I tell are neither typical nor very unusual. My grandparents were part of the last wave of homesteading that began in Montana at the turn of the century. Their parents had been restless people, emblematic of a restless era. The Civil War, the economic shift from small farms to factory industry, the influx of immigrant labor and the discovery of gold all combined to create an upheaval, a ripple of movement like waves lapping a shore that pushed my ancestors a little farther west with each generation. Far back, the family stories track uncles and older siblings who caught wagon trains west, families coming apart as daughters married and followed their men to other states and sons followed their half-formed dreams over the horizon, always to the west. On both sides of my family tree, the women died young, both of my grandmothers' mothers succumbing to illness and overwork, giving birth to children every year or two until their bodies wore out. The men married again, and moved on.
Depending on the decade, I find the trail of my great-grandparents in Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, North Dakota, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Most were farming families of rather nondescript English/Irish/German lineage who would settle in one spot for a decade or more, then sell out and move a bit west where the grass seemed greener. My mother's dad was one of a large clan of Scots who followed the timber camps through Ontario to Saskatchewan and branched south. The Great Northern Railroad had punched a trail along the Hi-Line from east to west, leaving in its wake a string of sidings, or depots, spaced along the tracks. In 1887, a blindfolded clerk at the railroad's Minnesota headquarters named them all by spinning a globe and pointing randomly: Glasgow, Saco, Malta, Harlem, Zurich, Havre. The railroad advertised
for merchants to make towns, farmers to grow wheat, people to order goods from the east and west, and they came. Within a few years of each other, each from his or her own direction, my grandparents crossed the border into Montana as young adults, took up homesteads independently of one another, met, married and stayed, rooted and grounded, through the great exodus of settlers that followed.
Nearly ninety years have passed since they cast their lot with the land locator and filed claims equally distant to the north and south of the cow town of Malta, Montana. Whatever drove them to see beyond the horizon grew quiet when they settled here. George Aikins and Pearle Watson, Alfred Blunt and Pansy Robinson McNeil stayed on, whether through optimism or exhaustion, to see their children raised and married, their grandchildren born to the same land, and in the case of my father's mother, Pansy, to admire upwards of thirty great-grandchildren. All four are buried in the same cemetery in Malta. Their legacy is a hardheaded independence still visible in the fourth and fifth generations of Montana-born children, and a restlessness that crops up every now and again, like the occasional head of red hair.
Ignorance allows for hope in any life, and if there was a mercy to my parents' first years on the ranch, that would be it. They couldn't see ahead. I imagine my mother laughing at the antics of her children that first Christmas on the ranch, applauding Margaret's performance in the school play with me tucked in the crook of her arm, Kenny wiggling with excitement on our father's knee, clinging shyly as Santa's weather-burned face smiled at him through the cotton beard, a bowlegged Santa with wide, chapped hands and little paper bags of ribbon candy. They shared that first Christmas with neighbors, holding paper cups of coffee by the rim to keep from scalding their fingers, laughter and the smoke of a dozen cigarettes ringing the schoolroom. They couldn't have seen then, the moment forecast for later that spring—a day in late March or early April—when my mother would wake to the changes in her body like a driver in a bad dream, fumbling for the brakes and feeling her feet sink all the way to the floorboards.
Exactly one year later, Dad attended the school program alone and within minutes of his return home, he and my mother were careening toward town on a sheet of black ice. Dad skittered and skated the old Jeep between ditches, pushing up to forty-five miles an hour when my mother's breath caught in her teeth, easing up whenever she could pull in enough air to yell at him: "I'd rather have them on the road than in the ditch." Traveling fifty miles in fits and starts took twice as long as the birth. My father received the news with his hat still crimped in his hands, his knees still rubbery. Gary came first, a sturdy seven pounds, and on his heels, Gail, two pounds smaller, but loud and healthy.
I imagine the trip back, the driver torn between celebration and exhaustion as he retraced the icy route to be home in time for chores. Some things couldn't be planned for, couldn't be gotten around. The birth of twins had been forecast by the old country doctor in August, but no one had predicted the hailstorm that had battered that first crop of winter wheat flat to the ground, the money for seed and fuel and taxes borrowed against time. There was no calf crop to make up the loss. They started that spring with fifty head of Hereford cattle, his father's cows, running them on shares. The heifer calves Dad would keep to start a herd of his own, but the steers, the bread-and-butter calves, belonged to his father.
My mother arrived home a few days after Christmas with a newborn on either arm, a year-old baby, a three-year-old and an excited schoolgirl waiting to greet her. Her life was already a serious business, but she stepped across the threshold to a logistical nightmare. Three babies in diapers, one climbing the rafters and one in school, her partner preoccupied with his own staggering workload, a young man jerked from boyhood into fatherhood still believing, as boys will, that a day's work earns a man the leisure of a night's sleep. Mornings he stepped out into the quiet of daybreak. Evenings he came in tired, set down a pail of milk and washed up. He pulled a chair to the table like a workhorse entering a stall, waiting to be fed, pushing his plate to the center of the table when he finished, shedding clothes as he made his way to bed. Just as easily, as predictably, he did not come home, but was gone playing tenor banjo or fiddle at a dance, or when he could scrape together a few loose dollars, gone to town for supplies in midafternoon, staggering home late or early or not at all until the next morning.
That first winter the teenage daughter of a neighboring family stayed to help with the twins. I became Margaret's baby, her after-school and weekend duty to change and feed. It was she who guided my first spraddle-legged explorations of our shared world, she who best remembers the contrast between the brightly lit, orderly schoolroom where she spent her day and the dimly lit chaos she returned to near dusk, lifting the solid bulk of me to one narrow hip as I greeted her with a six-toothed grin and raised arms. With me in tow, she played in the narrow alleys between cribs and cots, keeping me safe from the stove in the living room where the A-frame drying racks hung point down from hooks in the ceiling, swaying under loads of diapers. From these early years she acquired a view of motherhood that kept her childless into her thirties. When her son was born, she took a year's sabbatical from teaching and steeled herself for the onslaught, only to discover the delight of caring for one child in a modern home on an adequate income.
Our little house on the prairie was not charming, though by homestead standards, it was livable and remained relatively unchanged until we kids were grown and gone. From the outside, we entered a rough enclosed porch, passing between a row of muddy overshoes and a couple days' worth of split wood to the kitchen door. Over that threshold, linoleum cabbage flowers bloomed through the house, shades of maroon and green fading to black where the color had worn away in traffic lanes and doorways. In one corner of the kitchen built-in benches seated two sides of the square kitchen table, one step from the double-oven cookstove, one step from the washbasin, one step from the woodstove we stoked with white Cottonwood logs, the sort of punky wood that churned out an equal measure of heat and soft ash. The dark-red linoleum covering the countertops peeped through its own covering of gallon milk jars, crockery and pots that wouldn't fit in the narrow cupboards. Small islands of work space around the sink and stove filled and cleared a dozen times a day.
My sisters and I slept just off the kitchen in one nine-by-nine room outfitted with a foldaway cot and a set of World War II army bunks. Two similar rooms crouched under the low eaves off the living room for my brothers and my parents. The girls' room shared a wall with another stamp-sized square that just fit a wringer washing machine, a claw-foot bathtub and the red iron pitcher pump where we got our household water.
In my grandparents' day, the term "running water" triggered a dozen witty definitions. Running water could refer to the pace a good wife set from well to house with a bucket in each hand, or the relative speed of the wildlife one found orbiting the bottom of those buckets. If shallow potholes and reservoirs were the source, water might run one morning, and scamper or dart or slither the next. Plumbing was another ripe topic. If the door worked on the outhouse, you had indoor facilities. The outdoor kind consisted of a tall sagebrush. We enjoyed one form of running water, in that one had to run the hand pump to get it, but it was a luxury compared with the bucket and barrel plumbing it replaced.
Anderson had modernized the house by burying a cement-lined cistern near the west wall and installing the hand pump. One slim pipe snaked through the wall over the tub and joined the pump. Another long swag of pipe connected the cistern to the well in one fifty-foot leap through the air. The artesian well was nearly a thousand feet deep, and the water that filled our cistern was softer than soapsuds and certified bug-free. It also carried enough sulfur and alkali to kill fish and plants. It reeked like a hot-water spa. Only fit for drinking, my father would say, finishing off a tall glass. Not always so. Anyone not raised on the stuff suffered cramps and diarrhea within an hour of drinking it.
Straight from the tap our water seldom made it past a visitor's nose, so very bl
ack coffee or murky gray lemonade were the seasonal offerings, and with these my father was insistently generous. A thick, rugged man, Dad was six feet tall and had hands like the paws on a grizzly bear. Just awkward enough in the kitchen to be endearing, he would lumber up from his chair and top off the coffee cups of unwitting hunters, salesmen and government officials every third sip or so. They, in an effort to be polite to their host, would ingest something akin to a triple dose of laxative at a kitchen table fifty miles from the nearest flush toilet. This was an unending source of amusement to my father.
Until I was seven years old, we drew water from the hand pump into pails and heated it on the stove for the weekly washing. On bath night the tub filled once and we children bathed in groups or by turns, the last one scrubbing quickly in the chilly gray residue of his siblings. Once filled, the old iron tub and sink drained by themselves—another relative luxury compared with the task of dipping it up and hauling it outside. Wastewater drained into a common pipe that shot out over a bank into a vile-smelling pothole behind the house, a private lagoon that flushed itself whenever the creeks ran. We dumped slops there, too. Coffee grounds, eggshells and kitchen waste heaved over the bank broke through an iridescent scum and sank out of sight, out of mind. The fireweed and cattails grew head-high in the driest year.
When the Rural Electrification Association (REA) strung electrical wires through southern Phillips County in the late fifties, the change was less dramatic than one might expect. Ours was one of the last areas in the nation to receive power, and by the time it arrived our community had long since become self-reliant where it mattered. In addition, for a farm or ranch to be connected to electricity required the expense of revamping existing home wiring and a pledge to use $45 worth of electricity each month. Many neighbors already relied on propane gas for cooking stoves and refrigeration. Wood and diesel fuel provided heat. Most had rigged up "light plants" for power, using windmill-driven or gasoline-fed generators to charge rows of wet-cell batteries lining a dirt basement beneath the house. A set of fifty-five glass storage batteries wired into the house provided enough 110-volt DC current to run lightbulbs and a few specially adapted appliances. The batteries that my parents inherited with the ranch were too old to hold a charge for long, and running the generator was a daily chore. In cold weather, the batteries could freeze unless they were fully charged. As a last resort, the old kerosene lamps and gasoline storm lanterns could be hauled out of the closet and pressed into service.