Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [0]
Ivan Doig
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A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.
ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDON
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Copyright © Ivan Doig, 1993
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should
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Doig family photographs used by permission of the author.
First published by Atheneum in 1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan.
Heart earth/Ivan Doig.—1st Harvest ed.
p. cm.—(A Harvest book)
1. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.
2. Ranch life—Montana. 3. Montana—Biography.
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3554.0415Z468 2006
813'.54—DC22 2005037023
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603108-0 ISBN-10: 0-15-603108-6
Text set in Adobe Caslon Pro
Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2006
C E G I K J H F D
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For
Carol Doig
Linda Bierds
and
Sydney Kaplan
when we traveled the Montana heart and perimeter and won at electronic poker, too
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Author's Note
The chain lightning of memory and family never quits in us. Years after it all, I made a book out of the pair of reliably stormy antagonists—Charlie Doig, my father, and my mother's mother, Bessie Ringer—who bent their lives to give me mine:
"Here is a man and here a woman. In the coming light of one June morning, the same piece of life is axed away from each of them. Wounded hard, they go off to their private ways. Until at last the wifeless man offers across to the daughter-robbed woman. And I am the agreed barter between them."
This House of Sky set out the story of how, after the loss of my mother in 1945, those stricken two—we three—struggled ourselves into becoming a family and staying one. Told and done, I thought with satisfaction, as that book took on a life of its own. Until a day when my mother's letters from that end-of-war year found their way to me. Their record of ricochet was stunning: from American deserts and mountaintops to a ship in combat in the South Pacific to a family trunk closed away for forty-one years to a last will and testament to, at very last, a son's eyes. Line by line Berneta Ringer Doig's own report, from the turbulent half-year before the opening pages of This House of Sky, could go from commonplace to searing, from sassy gossip to monumental anguish.
Out of that unexpected narrative of hers comes this saga-within-a-family-saga, of an indelible young woman and the resonances of heart and earth.
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Intervals of dreaming help us to
stand up under days of work.
—Pablo Neruda, Memoirs
Berneta Ringer and Charlie Doig during their courtship days.
In that last winter of the war, she knew to use pointblank ink. Nothing is ever crossed out, never a p.s., the heart-quick lines still as distinct as the day of the postmark, her fountain pen instinctively refusing the fade of time. Among the little I have had of her is that pen. Incised into the demure barrel of it—my father must have birthdayed her a couple of weeks' worth of his cowhand wages in this gesture—rests her maiden name. Readily enough, then, I can make out the hand at the page, the swift skritch of her letters racing down onto paper for Wally—someone—to know. But all else of her, this woman there earmarking a warstriped airmail envelope with the return address of Mrs. Chas. Doig, has been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since. I had given up ever trying to uncurtain my mother. Now her pages begin her: I have to spill over... Upward from her held pen, at last she is back again.
Aluminum and Arizona in their wartime tryst produced Alzona