Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [1]
Spies, saboteurs, the kind of subversive traffic you get in back yards seemed to me to deserve precisely such a ducking, but my mother stood firm on foxholelessness. I suppose she had in mind our standing with our Alzonan barracks neighbors, who, if she would just trust my reports, all the more justified a foxhole: hunker in there, peeking over the earthrim, and see what they turned into, housewife snipers in the 200 building to be fended off with a pretend rifle, pchoo pchoo, the long 300 building a sudden Japanese battleship, the foxhole now needing to be a gun battery on the destroyer USS Ault, blazing away at those fiends threatening our aircraft carriers, holding them at bay until down in the torpedo room Wally—
***
Wally. February 17, 1986. Four fingers of flame thrust toward the snowfields of Mount Baldy and extinguish into echo. Stiffly working their rifle bolts to reload, the Veterans of Foreign Wars honor guard aims and lets fire again, the combined muzzleflash flexing bright another instant. Then a last volley, and the honor guard dissolves into World War Two oldsters clutching at their campaign caps in the cemetery wind.
Ceremonially Wally Ringer's chapter of life was over, that wind-ridden afternoon. But in the family plot of time, not nearly done with. Can this be what that brother of my mother had in mind with the letters, sensing the carrying power of ink as a way to go on? By making me heir to the lost side of my past, to my mother's own communiques of time and place doing to her what they did, he would find a kind of lastingness too?
At the moment I only knew I was the most grudging of pallbearers, gritting against the shiver, more than windborne, of having come back where Id promised myself not to. To where all the compartments of my earliest self rode together on me, nephew, son, grandson, native of this valley, economic refugee from it, ranch kid, town nomad, only child awash in family attention, indrawn half-orphan. Chambered as a goddamn nautilus. Three times before, I watched a saga of my family echo into the earth here, and in the glide of years since convinced myself I was safely done with Montana burials. Those earliest voices of the heart held no more to tell, Id thought. Wally's in particular I no longer gave ear to, even though for most of my life—most of his, as we were only fifteen years apart in age—he was that perfect conspirator, a favorite uncle. That extracurricular relative we need, some close-but-not-immediate livewire in whom the family blood always hums, never drones. As pushful through life as the canyon snowplow he piloted over black ice, bull-chested, supremely bald, with the inveterate overbite grin of my mother's people which brought the top teeth happily out on parade with the rest of him: as he'd have said it himself, quite the Wally. Here at his funeral were his first and third wives, both in utmost tears, and his second wife sent bereaved regrets from New Mexico.
In my own remembering he bursts home with that whopping grin on him, ever ready to fetch the boy me off to a trouty creek or up into the grass parks of the Castle Mountains to sight deer or elk, or to an away game of football or basketball, never failing to sing out his announcement of our arrival, "Here we are, entertain us!" If I could but choose, the go-anywhere-but-go streak in this likable uncle of mine I would hold in mind, together with my go-along soberside capacity to take everything in. Avid as the Montana seasons, the team