Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [4]
His stomach bothers him all the time. He is so thin. I'm worried to death about Charlie.
Always before, it took something the calibre of getting tromped beneath a bucking horse to lay Charlie Doig out. But this ulcer deal ... how could a gastric squall put my whangleather father on the couch, sick as a poisoned pup?
My father being my father, he tensely urges my mother to relax, will she, about the situation: "Oh-hell-Berneta-I'll-be-okay-in-just-a-little-bit."
There that Sunday as my father tries to sleep away the volcano in his middle, my mother all of a sudden is alone. Anna and Joe are newly gone, called away by the death of Joe's father and obligations back in Montana. Busy in the rear yard and childhood, I am obliviously pushing my roads to the gates of Berlin and raining bombs onto Tokyo. Beyond 119BS windows, Alzona Park is entirely what it is built to be, war's warehouse of strangers. By instinct, not to say need, my mother goes to her companion the ink.
Dear Wally—
...Somehow you seem to be a better pal than anyone else...
This first letter in the chain that Wally chose to save must have come aboard the Ault to him like her voice thrown around the world. Certainly that is what she is trying, quick as the pen will push through such afraid words as worried to death, such Alzona aloneness that I have to spill over to someone. Creed of all writers: I have to.
Noon wears past; a missed mealtime, unheard of in our family. Then the half hour and she still writes, does not awaken my father. Dares not. If Charlie doesn't improve...
Well, I better calm down, the lines to Wally work themselves wry. If a censor reads this, he probably won't even let you get it.
Taking to paper with that Sunday of worries about an abruptly ailing husband, my mother knowingly or not put her pen at the turning point in their marriage, their fates. The very reason we had catapulted ourselves to Arizona was because, always before, he was worried to death about her.
***
What I know of her is heard in the slow poetry of fact.
The freight of name, Berneta Augusta Maggie Ringer, with its indicative family tension of starting off German and ending up Irish. Within the year after her birth in 1913 in Wisconsin, her parents made the one vaulting move they ever managed together and it was a whopper: in the earliest photo I have of my mother Berneta after the westward train deposited them in Montana, she is a toddler in a sunbonnet posed with a dead bear.
Ringer family life kept that hue, always someplace rough. Up in the Crazy Mountains, the bear lair, where Tom and Bessie Ringer and this infant daughter somehow survived a first Montana winter in a snow-banked tent while they skidded out lodgepole logs as paltry as their shelter. Then other jounces of job and shanty which finally landed them near the railroad village of Ringling. Off and on for the next thirty years, some shred of the family was in that vicinity to joke about being the Ringers of Ringling. It says loads in the story of my mother that a single syllable was utterly all those coincidental names had in common, for Ringling was derived from the Ringlings of circus baronage.
Was it some obscure Wisconsin connection—the Ringlings of Baraboo origins, the Ringers most lately from Wisconsin Rapids—or just more fate-sly coincidence, that brought about my grandparents' employment by the Ringlings? Maybe Dick Ringling, the circus brothers' nephew who ran the Montana side of things, was entertained by the notion that a millennium ago the