Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [53]
Don't think that this is all that could be said. What was slighted worst of all in the officially prepared letter home for Wally and the other Ault men was the actual business of war, taking toll. Nowhere the sense that this promised to be the to-the-death summer when an American bomber sent down a new manner of bomb which torched the city of Hiroshima in white-hot radiation, and then repeated on the city of Nagasaki. Deliberate amnesia of hurt and death is the order of the day. The Ault's sailors had watched planes burst into fireballs over them, had plucked survivors and bodies from the ocean when the carriers Wasp and Franklin and Hancock and Bunker Hill were aflame, had felt the close pass of kamikaze attacks, had fed ammunition into hypnotic gunchambers through eighty straight days of Okinawa combat. But the official warworld of Wally's ship is rounded off to: We have our less happy times...
Only the letter's closing lines seem not canned, start to sound like true Wally again. The Wally who can't bring himself to stay listless even in censored circumstances. Some of it is not as had as it sounds, the feel of his war comes out on paper, Some of it was worse. He leaves off in a dreamtime of his own, sailor Montanan trying to deploy himself into a future. This is just about our last operation.... Maybe next spring we will get to see each other again.
In the column exactly beside Wally's letter was printed my mother's obituary.
***
Word came aboard the Ault in the worst possible way, in a p.s. miserably penciled onto one of my grandmother's weekly letters to Wally.
Dear Wallace, some awful sad news to tell you since I wrote your letter. Berneta passed away last nite. That's all the word I've gotten so far. I don't know where they're at or where she died at.
She didn't suffer any at the last, Wally—the pencilscript now my father's shaken hand in an ensuing letter—for which I am thankful. She was feeling extra good all evening and we talked until eleven that night. She passed away at 2.30 A.M. on the 27th of June, Ivan's birthday. I didn't even have time to awaken Ivan, she went so fast.
Swift, then, the attack by which she died. Not the customary siege of short breath, the jolting coughs and lung convulsions, the air-short fatigue, that she had ridden out so many times before. Not the open mayhem of asthma. Instead on her death certificate, immediate cause is given as an overstretching of the cardiac muscle—which was to say, a heart condition. Nowhere ever written, then or since, was the simultaneous fact of earth: the acrobat heights of Montana earth that kept her so alive, until they killed her.
***
Nobody got over her. Doig or Ringer, those around me in my growing-up stayed hit, pierced, by my mother's death in the mountain cabin.
My father was wrenched back and forth by how welcome the return to Montana had been for Berneta, and how treacherously it struck her down; how risky the one last mountain summer turned out to be, how unsaveable his wife's health ultimately was.
To my grandmother, her suspicion of "out there" was horridly proven, Berneta taken from her in some remote visitless place. Having had to toughen herself against so much, Bessie Ringer now faced what would never go away, death of a daughter.
For Wally, the reaction was a lifelong clutch at his sister's last letters, the keeping of news which shot in just when it had become clear that he himself would survive the war.
Always after, for all of us, it was not simply that Berneta had died young. There was always the echo-plus of "out there in the Sixteen country," "up there on the mountain," "on Ivan's sixth birthday." A private family dialect of magnitude and conjunction and consequence. The Sixteen country held that magnified proportion for my mother; her manner of death held it for those who most loved her.
On through