Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [44]
He stops. Berneta is shaking her head.
I'll play sheepherder tomorrow.
"What, instead of making the trip to town? How'd ye get that in your head?"
I'd rather herd than to take him in. The roads in this country get my goat.
My father rethinks. A possibly slippery drive through the Maudlow mudholes, versus a horseback day with the sheep for her. "That's what you'd really rather, is it." Then the central concern: "You're sure ye feel up to that?"
"I can get by with the herding," she reassures him. "The horse and the dog will do the most of it. Don't worry none, I'm not about to walk myself to death chasing after fool sheep."
She cheerfully turns to the matter of me. "Which for you, Ivan? Playing sheepherder or into town?"
I blink. It had never occurred to me the town trip might not include me. By now I am practically the child gazetteer of towns, Phoenix to Maudlow. Later it dawns on me, too late, that going herding with her would have been an entire dreamday aboard my own horse. But instead I choose horsepower, the Ford, habit of journey and whatever obtains: "Town, I guess."
***
The next morning my father and I and Prince Al slewed our way first of all into Maudlow. Maudlow gumbo: a bum go, Maudlow. Whipping the Ford's steering wheel this way and that, my father comes up with the sarcastic theory that the only reason the railroad was routed through this country was because the mud is thick enough to float a train. Prince Al, chawing away, mutely doesn't get it.
Six miles of slip and slide, and we tromp into the tiny Maudlow post office to collect our backed-up mail. Wally is heard from, Winona, Anna and Joe, of course my grandmother (three of those envelopes), four or five other friends or relatives, the weekly paper from White Sulphur Springs and a batch of my comic books which I would have read before we were out of the post office if Dad had let me. Bemeta has hungered for these letters: haven't had the mail for 2 wks. Went down to get it Tues. but the road was washed out this side of Maudlow. Her letters in turn cascade into the Maudlow mail slot, away to the Ault goes her dispatch of us written just yesterday. We are all pretty well. Some days I don't feel too good but can't complain most of the time.
More mire, between us and Bozeman. The windshield keeps threatening to go blind from mudspots, so whenever my father guns the car through ruts of standing water he flips the wipers on after the splash. Dirty water to wash dirtier. The slap of the wipers sounds frantic, as if the Ford is trying to bat away the accumulating muck.
We smear our way past ranches now, fundamental sets of buildings, then the Morgans'workstained sheep-shed. The arched backs of the Bridger Mountains slowly file along beside us.
Eventually the road drops, and drops some more, into an eyelet of gap between farmed ridges, and the Gallatin Valley opens up prosperously for twenty miles ahead.
Downhill now, glide all the way to the long main street of Bozeman. My father points out a field where as a young man he worked in the grain harvest. (Land that later grew four lanes of freeway and a Holiday Inn.) Downtown in Bozeman, we let Prince Al out at the government office and tackle our own chores. First thing, fill the Ford with gas; rationing still rules. Then something I was distinctly not keen on; under orders from Berneta, what my father calls getting our ears lowered.
Normally our haircuts were homemade, and a barbershop's fuss and strangenesses spooked me. Green eye-shade worn by the hovering barber; why put lime color atop the eyes, why not skyblue? The barber chair with those corrugated arm-ends as if the chair was enough of a participant to tense its own knuckles. The mirrors on the walls both in front and back of the haircut victim, I actually could see the use of; ease of glance for the barber so that he wouldn't snip you lopsided. But the surplus of reflections echoing away, where do those bounces ever stop and why don't they?
Even my hair seemed to know it was in odd circumstances. The barber tucked the whispery cloth