Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [28]
Winona speaks more gladly of my mother and my father. She remembers regularly mailing cartons of cigarettes to Arizona for my father that war-rationed winter. My mother she paints without surprise as "a real good conversationalist"—then Winona breaks into another terrible coughing spasm, terribly reminiscent. When her breath returns, Winona suddenly switches memory to me when I was a tyke falling in love with words: "You knew a lot of things. I remember you going through your books, telling me all the things in them."
Smoke interrupts the afternoon. Winona's husband catches the whiff first, she about one sniff later. I still don't, having inherited the useless Ringer nose—substantial in every way except the capacity to smell—but when they pile out of the mobile home and start scanning upwind, I certainly do, too. A prairie fire would burn through this country until the moon was cooked. So I am relieved when Winona and her husband categorize the smoke as general, a haze from far-off forest fires.
Unincinerated one more time, the ranch couple take it for granted that I'll follow back inside for further gab and caffeine, although I tag behind to keep peering around at this backland enterprise of theirs. In one direction the giant bald ridge which the road kinks down from, in two others sharp slopes eroded at the top into chopped-up formations of pale ashen clay, and for a finale the distant river badlands which aren't much worse than any other of the country crumpled all around here. Every horizon ruptured and stark. Liver-Eating Johnson supposedly lurched through this neck of the weeds, hunting Indians like they were partridges, in the previous mad century. Since then, this stretch of land has been occupied by people willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for forty or fifty years at a time. I struggle to imagine Wally here, superimpose him as the husband coping with this dryland dowry, so far away from his fishing holes and elk meadows. Never.
***
Back in the kitchen arsenal of 1945, my mother and Winona wage on against chiffon, mice, life and fate and budget.
"Before I forget. How much did the material set us back?"
"All of $4.63."
"Then your time. Nonie, I have to give you something for all your sewing."
"Like fun you will. You came all the way to Ring-ling and got me, so you're out the cost of your gas, let's just—
"No, now, that's not the same as—" Another mortal whack of a mousetrap cuts off both voices.
"Hit 'im again, McGinty!" Winona whoops. "Berneta, how in the world many is that, just since noon?"
"Twelve, this'll make. Keeps a person busy just keeping count."This must be the trap in the grocery cupboard, from the sound of my mother's voice going enclosed. "How many more jillion dozen do you suppose—"Then she exclaims: "Nonie, talk about mouse trappers, we're it! Ivan! Come see!"
Already I am out of my couch cave, scrambling in from the living room. A lilac cloud of chiffon smothers half the kitchen, but over at the cupboard Winona is on tiptoe beside my mother peering in at their catch. I hop up on a chair to see.
Double bull's-eye! Two dead mice in one trap, clamped neck to neck in their permanent race for the bait of cheese.
The victorious trappers are already at the next stage, how to hang on to credit for their feat. "Charlie will never believe we're in here catching them two at a time."
"I know what. We'll just save the trap for him the way it is, for proof."
Winona and my mother ruthlessly giggle.
***
What can account for my mother's high spirits at being back in that drafty mousy attic of Montana, the mile-up-and-then-some Big Belt country where sour winter stayed on past the spring dance?
I have stared holes into those mountains, those sage-scruffed flats and bald Sixteen hills, trying to savvy their hold on her and thus on us, particularly there in severe 1945. The village of Ringling, its railroad future already behind it, was waning into whatever is less than a village. The town of White Sulphur Springs had been handled roughly by the Depression and the war, sagging ever farther