Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [52]
Duffy, still saddled, is grazing in the high grass alongside the barn. Berneta is nowhere in sight.
My father stands in his stirrups, suddenly tiptoe with the strain of trying to see behind the cabin windows slurred with dusk. "Berneta, we're home,"he shouts almost as if it were a question.
The cabin.
The barn.
The bedded sheep.
Nothing answers him except echo.
***
Then in the frame of the cabin doorway, just distinct. Wiping her hands with a sack towel, she calls out:
"Back the same day, are you."
The sheepdogs appear, one on either side of her, yawning from their cozy cabin stay.
Burden of worry off him now, my father clucks his horse into faster pace across the meadow. I bounce on the back of Star, trying to keep up.
They've all kissed and gone on to generalities about the day by the time I slide down from my horse. My mother hugs me and calls me her Bozeman Ivan, laughs that Dad and I don't seem to be cut out for town barbering, we've come home looking like a couple of scared preachers.
My father does a necessary asking. "How'd ye do with the sheep?"
Her day on the mountain revolves again. The sheep when they were pigheaded, the sheep when they were perfect. Varieties of weather. Taste of the sandwich lunch, sound of the grouse. Exasperation, exaltation, sufficiency of each. Common day in the week of life.
She sums it as she will for Wally, in transoceanic ink, in the morning:
I got along okay.
The mail and groceries have to wait. First out of the pack are the conspiratorial boxes for her. This, my father the cowboy suitor could perform blind. "We happened to bring ye a couple little somethings, dear," he pronounces and flourishes the first box to her, then with a grin hands me the other one to hand to her.
"What have you two been up to?" She gazes, as captured with surprise as we could wish, back and forth at my identically grinning father and me.
"Try em on," my father says with acey-deucey confidence.
Publicly done, as everything is in the single room of the cabin. She slips the first item on, exclaims to us about the perfect fit, which of course we knew. She peeks in the second box.
Lifts out the other half of the outfit with an "Oh, I ought to send you two to town all the time." Puts it on by ducking down to adjust it just-so in Dad's shaving mirror.
Turns to us, rigged out new from head to toe.
Charlie and Ivan brought me the nicest pair of brown boots and a big hat.
So I am a combination cowgirl sheepherder now.
***
Away to the Ault flowed that third June letter of hers, full of her herding triumph and the summer to be ridden into with newly given garb. Somewhere it crossed mail-paths with the only letter from Wally that has come to light.
All his others, nearly a steady year's worth from such war addresses as Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Eniwetok and Luzon and Okinawa, went the way of discard and loss. But this single one hid in plain sight, in print. Proudly sent to the editor of the White Sulphur Springs weekly newspaper by my grandmother, it appears in full on the front page of July 4, 1945. Now don't think that this is all that could be said, Wally tags on an immediate warning. It is what they will let past the censors.
...Many exciting encounters ... helping to make history each day ... bringing the end of the war nearer... Beyond the dehydrated handout to send to the folks at home, the Ault was wending its own route through the last of the Pacific war. The ship is in Samuel Eliot Morison's naval history of World War Two, a photograph of the destroyer taking on fuel in heavy seas, white water smashing over its every deck. The Ault and Wally ultimately would make it into Tokyo Bay for the ceremony of surrender by Japan. A night soon after, something Wally and the other young sailors had never seen: their ship's running lights. (Logbook of the Ault: BY ORDER OF COMMANDER TASK GROUP, ALL