Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [15]
Fuss about her health has always put a crowbar in my mother's spine and it does again now. She straightens up as if shedding this hard year. She tells my father all the truth she has at the moment.
"I'll try to get over this, Charlie."
She takes a breath as big as she is, not an asthma gasp but just fuel for what she needs to put across to him about her isolation amid a cityful of strangers, how she misses everything about Montana there is to miss.
"It's going to take some trying," she lets him know.
Invisible in plain sight at the kitchen table, crayoned combat forgotten on the tablet paper in front of me, I watch back and forth at these gods of my world in their confusion.
At last my father nods to my mother and says as though something has been settled: "That's all we can any of us do, Berneta, is try."
***
The escaped Germans do not devour us in our Christmas Eve beds—hightailing it to nonbelligerent Mexico seems more what they had in mind—and so we climb out to the day itself and its presents. Up out of the fiber of that boy who became me, can't my Christmas gift prospects be readily dreamed? Tricycle? Toy truck? Wicked new shovel? No, beyond any of those. Threadbare Alzona Park presented an actual item more magical than imagined ones can ever be. From out beyond the world's possibilities, I have been given—
The Ault.
Blessed conspiracy of Wally and my mother, this; he by mailing it in time and she by sneaking the gift wrapping onto this toy replica of his ship. Replica does not say it, really, because my Ault was tubby, basic—a flat-iron-sized vessel with a block of superstructure and a single droll dowel of cannon poking out, more like a Civil War ironclad than anything actually asteam in the United States Navy in 1944; but painted a perfect navy gravy gray, and there on the bow in thrilling authentication, the black lettering USS Ault. Wally would have had to go to the dictionary for avuncular, but he managed to give me a most benevolently unclelike warship.
Naturally the grown-ups have wasted Christmas on each other by giving dry old functional things back and forth, so while Anna and Joe and Dad and even my mother try to have what they think is a good time, my Ault and I voyage 119B all that day, past Gibraltars of chair legs, through the straits of doorways to the bays of beds. (All December the logbook of the actual Ault has been repeating an endless intonation—0440 COMMENCED ZIGZAGGING. 0635 CEASED ZIGZAGGING. 0645 RESUMED ZIGZAGGING—as the newly commissioned destroyer practiced the crazystitch that would advance day by day from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.) We make frequent weather reconnaissances to a window, for my mother has promised that if the rain ever stops we can breast the moistures of Arizona outside.
All the while, all this holiday, although I am not to know so until the letters return forty-two years later, my parents and I and Arizona are on Wally's mind. Along with my gift ship arrived his inquiry to my mother whether she thinks he would have any prospects where we are, after the war; are there flour mills and feed stores where he might land a trucking job?
Through us, like a signal tremor along a web strand, Phoenix is making itself felt even into the most distant Pacific. You can feel the growth thrust gathering (it undoubtedly is what my mother has been feeling), the postwar land rush coming when you can throw a doorknob on this desert and a dozen houses will sprout.
Yet my mother, glad as she would have been to have him on hand in our future, does not sing back what her favorite brother wants to hear.
As she was with my father, she will be doggedly honest with Wally, sending back to him that