Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [32]
Never more than a sentence away in any of their gossip is the war. The war has consumed Montana. Not in the roaring geared-up military factory fashion of Arizona, but in a kind of mortal evaporation. Young men, and no few women, have been gone for years and in their place the ghostly clink of dogtags from the charnel corners of the world; striplings who have eaten plateloads at the ranch tables of my grandmother and square-danced with my mother and pranced me on a knee are wasting away in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, have perished in the Bataan death march, been wounded at Palau, fought in the Aleutians and the Marianas and Normandy.
My ears all but turn inside out when Grandma frets to my mother about Wally, where his ship might be, what's happening there in the Pacific. She is mighty right to do so.
***
Logbook of the Ault, May 11, 1945:
1010 SIGHTED ENEMY PLANE (ZEKE) WHICH CAME OUT OF LOW CLOUD ASTERN AND DIVED INTO THE AFTER FLIGHT DECK OF USS BUNKER HILL. OBSERVED ANOTHER ENEMY PLANE TO COME FROM ASTERN. OPENED FIRE. PLANE CRASHED INTO BUNKER HILL FLIGHT DECK AMIDSHIPS. MANEUVERING AT EMERGENCY TURNS AND SPEEDS. BUNKER HILL WAS BURNING FURIOUSLY.
1023 OBSERVED TWO ENEMY PLANES SHOT DOWN IN DOGFIGHT. A THIRD BEGAN A RUN IN TOWARDS FORMATION AT LOW ALTITUDE WITH A FRIENDLY FIGHTER ON HIS TAIL. OPENED FIRE WITH ALL GUNS AS PLANE PASSED STARBOARD QUARTER ... PLANE ATTEMPTED TO MAKE SUICIDE DIVE ON THIS VESSEL AND WAS SHOT DOWN BY THIS SHIP, FALLING CLOSE ABOARD THE PORT QUARTER.
***
And only days ago, the war ate down into my own age bracket. This had happened a block or so away from us in White Sulphur, during a collection drive of waste paper for the war effort. Schoolchildren darting from house to house, carrying the scrap to the truck, hopping onto the truckbed to ride to the next houses, the truck driver thinking everyone was aboard and starting ahead: crushing under the rear wheels his own seven-year-old son.
Such a death of a child, even these life-calloused Ringer women do not talk over. What happened to that boy has been my interior topic, the imagining of how the wheels couldn't/wouldn't have made their fatal claim if it had been me. The not-quite-six-year-old's dream insulation from the world, quite convinced I am deathproof.
Out of nowhere, which is to say everywhere, I abruptly am hearing:
"...afraid you'd gone to old Arizona for good," my grandmother to my mother. My mother back to her, "Charlie figured—we figured we had to give it a try there."
Grandma manages not to say anything to that, but her silence about my father is as starchy as her apron.
I did not know so until the letters, but the vendetta between my father and my grandmother was already raging. The message inevitably has gone out to Wally from Grandma: Charlie doesn't have much to say to me but I'm used to that now. All the later years of my growing up, trying to solve the world of consequences brought on by this pernicious feud, I hunted wildly in the two of them for the reason. Did our Arizona trip itself set things off, Bessie Ringer with two sons gone to the war simply finding it the last straw that my mother was moving so far away? My grandmother had endured beyond other last straws. No, my in-the-dark guess was that the mysterious matter of family itself, its specific weight and gravity, brought on their wrangle. In the Faulkner Creek ranch years, there had chronically been a cluster of Ringers around, one or two and often all three of my mother's brothers working seasonal jobs for my father, and Grandma visiting every instant she could pry loose from the Norskie's chores. I figured my father then and there wore out on in-laws. But to my grandmother, after Moss Agate