Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [13]
Sunny day, icicles starting to shrink upward to the log eaves of the ranch house. Everybody has paraded around the corner of the house to take a pose with the vanquished coyotes.
My mother, especially pert in one of her striped housedresses and only a short jacket.
My visiting grandmother even hardier, out there in apron and bare arms.
My mother's second youngest brother Bud on hand as our hired man, in dutiful earflap cap.
Then my father and his rifle and me.
Since I, little Mr. Personality in a brass-button snow-suit, appear to be not quite a three-year-old, the photo likely dates from near the end of the winter of 1941–42. This scene speaks in several ways. First of all, the extraordinary statement of the coyotes around and above my father and me as we pose, twenty-eight of them in simultaneous leap of death up the log wall where their pelts are strung. Winterlong they had been picked off, for the safety of the sheep and the sake of bounty, as they loped the open ridges above Faulkner Creek; ideal coyote country, but unluckily for them, also ideal coyote-hunting country for somebody who could shoot like my father. Next, it always comes as a pleasant shock, how on top of life my father looks in this picture. Forty years and jobs after his start on the doomed Wall Mountain homestead, bounty of all kinds seems to be finding him at last. Posed there, he is in command not just of one season a year but a prospering ranch, he knows of at least twenty-eight coyotes who will give his sheep no further trouble, he has a son and heir, his coveted wife is taking the photo of this moment, a winter-ending chinook has arrived with this sun—a day of thaw, truly.
***
My own farthest pattern of memory is the Faulkner Creek ranch's generator—the light plant, we called that after-dark engine, throbbing diesel factory of watts—as it hammered combustion into the glow of kitchen and living-room bulbs. The light plant was used sparingly, like sparks put to tinder when the cave most needed dazzle; when company dropped in, say. And so the yammer of it in the night-edge of my mind must be from a few of my recalcitrant bedtimes, boy determined not to waste awakeness while luscious light was being made.
But why that diesel monotony of echo?
Why not the toss of wind in the restless pine that overleaned the ranch house, or a coyote's night-owning anthem?
Why persistently hear, even now in the rhythms of my writing keys working, the puh puh puh labor of that light plant?
Because in every way, this was the pulse of power coming into our rural existence. Not simply the tireless stutter of electrical generation but the sound of history turning. We had only a diesel tidbit of it there at Faulkner Creek and my parents were of the relic world of muscle-driven tasks, yet, like passersby magnetized out of our customary path, power now made its pull on us. One of the great givens of World War Two manufacture was that power could kettle an ore called bauxite into bomberskin called aluminum.
***
Out of those particles, those waves, this first deliberate dream.
The heavy rain on Christmas Eve of 1944 is contradicting my mother's notion of what both Christmas and Phoenix ought to be. She is trying to work the mood to death, baking an army of cookies and rapidly wrapping Anna and Joe's presents (filmy kerchief for her, carton of cigarettes for him) while they're out visiting friends they know from Montana, and naturally the weather is keeping me inside, which is to say in her hair, until she puts me to crayoning a festive message to my grandmother. I come up with merry Christmas grandma in the countless fonts of my printed handwriting and devote the rest of the page to dive-bombers blowing up everything in sight.
The outside door rattles open, solving the whereabouts of my father, late from the aluminum plant this night of all nights. But his inevitable approximate whistling of "The Squaws Along the Yukon" doesn't follow on in to the front room. All of a sudden he is in the kitchen with my mother and me, checking us over with his sheepcounting