Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [31]
Grandma's straight-ahead set of mind came useful for her here in the Norskie situation, too. On no known social scale ought she have been able to fit into the stolid local women's club—merely an itinerant cook, and beyond that, married to somebody she wasn't living with but who definitely was not the Norwegian widower she was under the same roof with—but she impressed those farm wives and ranchwomen with her own stiffbacked rectitude and was brought in. Annually the women drew "secret pal" names out of a hat and each sent whomever they drew little surprise gifts and cards throughout the year. My grandmother undoubtedly was the only peasant plow-woman who was also a secret pal, but she had a saying ready for the way life revealed its surprises, too. "So that's the how of it."
So that was the how of her, my stormfront grandmother. Wide-grained and with hard knots of stubbornness, rilesome and quick to judge and long to hold a grudge. And in the turbulent time to come, I learned to love her for even the magnificence of her shortcomings.
Back there in our visit it is Grandma, you can bet your boots, who comes out with it about my grandfather. Have we seen the old-good-for-nothing?
Dreadfully, we have. Tom Ringer is living in one room of a shanty, the rest of which is used as a chickenhouse. The alfalfa chaff scratched up by the baby chicks got him down, my mother has passed the word to Wally from our visit; one of those short-winded spells ... a bad one.
Gnarled and bent as a Knockadoon walking stick, my grandfather; my grandmother, on the other hand, so sturdy she could carry the rest of us over the Crazy Mountains on her back.
My mother, the product of the extremes, tries to give an unflavored report.
"Hmpf," she receives for her trouble. "I just wish to gosh he'd behaved hisself when we were—"
By now I pretty well know where Grandma is going with this, and out I whip to explore the Norskie country.
As ever, Grandma has a panting overfed dog around like an old lodger. Shep instantly wants to go helling off with me in every direction at once. Him aside, though, this ranch is disappointingly kempt and quiet. No suicide slope for me to roar down as in my Faulkner Creek daredeviltry days. Next I thrash around in vain for the shop, as a blacksmithery is called on a ranch; no alluring rusty nests of iron, no forge with a fanwheel to turn faster and faster into a wondrous straining screech. Nor, can you believe, is there even a bunkhouse, let alone a mussy crew of ranch hands with names like Zoot and Diamond Tony; the Norskie's son from up the creek and the Norskie—and Grandma—handle the calving by themselves.
I have been shortchanged. I know to the snick of his jackknife being opened what my father is doing exactly now, fifty miles north of here in his lambing shed kingdom, jacketing a bum lamb with the hide of a dead one and enforcing the suspicious ewe to adopt the newcomer: "That's right, ye old sister, this is your new one. Get under there, Jakey, and get yourself a meal before she catches on to you."I am missing out on that, for this becalmed mission to Grandma?
Gone goofy with the thrill of having someone to romp with, Shep keeps giving me baths with his old tongue. Dog slobber is limited fun. I evacuate from the ranch yard to the kitchen congress again.
"Sit you down, dear," Grandma welcomes me back to the table as if the sun rises and sets in me, and then their talk buzzes on. At last my mother and her mother have got going on the populace beyond the family. Other people's doings, blessed relief. I nibble the one-more-cookie-but-that's-all