Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [30]
Maybe watered coffee sums up my grandmother's lot. Compared with even my parents, who were not exactly at the head of the caste parade, my grandmother's existence was just this side of the poorhouse. It had been that way from Moss Agate where, with at least a roof over their heads, the Ringers maybe had not been penniless but there were plenty of times when they were dollar-less. My grandmother ever after referred to any item that reminded her of Moss Agate as "old junk," which in fact was pretty much what the life there had consisted of—junk cows, a junk ranch. It wouldn't have taken much for society to consider the Ringer family itself junk. True, this grandmother of mine and even my grandfather had fended greatly better as community members than their economics suggested. My grandmother, only a third-grade education to her name, served on the school board so that the Moss Agate country could have a one-room school, and somehow raised the Ringer kids as though their home life wasn't as patchy as it was. My grandfather Tom at least toughed out their marriage until the four children were grown and gone, and brought in whatever he could from second jobs of carpentry and general craftwork. He, I now realize, may have been deviled by a different damage within him than he was ever ascribed; a house painter in his younger life, his mood and health may have fallen prey to the lead used in paint at the time. By whatever shaping, to the end of their separate existences my grandparents, Tom Ringer choring on ranches, Bessie Ringer cooking on ranches, perpetually shifted around under mid-Montana's mountain horizon but could never rise.
Now that she had left him, she has taken shelter here in the Shields River country in another lopsided situation, as cook for a Norwegian widower. Living like nun and monk as far as anybody can tell, the pair of them operate the old Norskie's tidy little outfit, part farm and part cow ranch, here under the long slopes on the west side of the Crazy Mountains. I would bet hard money that the old Norskie never saw fit to break his creamy silence and say so, but the place could not have been run without my indefatigable grandmother: she even did the plowing, with a team of horses. My father or any other veteran ranchman would have shouldered labor like this only on shares. For doing much the same work, and the cooking and housekeeping besides, she eked out a wage from month to month and beyond that she literally had nothing—what we call benefits were nowhere in the picture because even Social Security then was regarded as too great a paperwork burden on owners of farms and ranches, and "agricultural employees" such as my grandmother were specifically excluded from its coverage.
Instead, she had what she was. The only thing about my grandmother that ever went gray was her hair. All else stayed brisk, immutable; the pleasant enough proclamation of face where the origin of my mother's and for that matter mine is instantly read, the body of German sturdiness. The hands and arms of Bessie Ringer were scarred from every kind of barbwire work, yet there she sat hooking away at the most intricate of crochetwork, snowflaking the rough rooms of her existence with doily upon doily. After a schooling that petered out so early, she couldn't much more than handle i and 2 for you, but anything you could hum she could sit down to a piano and faithfully play. "The baby is born and his name is Dennis," she would rattle off as her proverb of completing anything, fingerlace or ear-taught tune or the perpetual twice a day milking of cows in that bent-pail life at Moss Agate. There at Moss Agate too, she had been the parent who somewhere always found time to pull on boxing gloves when her sons went through a pugilism phase. And to pamper an asthmatic daughter. Situations she hadn't the foggiest notion of how to handle, she handled.