Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [54]
Brittle and cracking a bit more each time I unfold them, they still manage to stab. So blue, my grandmother lets down onto the page, seems all I do is cry & cry some more. My father tries to convey the deadweight of time on him now. No one can understand it that hasn't been through it. The days are weeks and the weeks are months for me. Then, sad dream going into nightmare, their lines turn and spit sour toward each other.
I haven't seen your mother for a long time, Wally.
Wallace dearest, I haven't seen Charlie or Ivan since we laid Berneta away.
She never comes around to see Ivan.
I've got no way to go see them. Then I haven't the heart to go where Charlie is anyway.
She could have come nearer giving Ivan mother love than any other person in the world.
Got a letter from Charlie yesterday in answer to the one I wrote and asked him if I could help them in any way. But he gave me to understand that I wasn't fit to help take care of Ivan. The only way he can think of me is with pity and regret.
I feel bad to think she and I can't get along.
He knows he can hurt me through Ivan.
I shall try so hard to bring Ivan up to be the kind of son his mother would wish.
I'll write Ivan but I'll not write him.
***
It took my father and my grandmother five more years to quit their grievous scrap, but that was a lot better than never.
In the last twist of all, they turned together to raise me. When my father faced himself in the glass door of a phone booth in White Sulphur Springs a night in 1950 and went through with the long-distance call to the Norskie country, he closed down the war that had begun over Berneta and continued over Berneta's child. As my grandmother managed to swallow away as much grudge as she heard being swallowed at the other end of the line, she volunteered herself yet another time into a shortsided situation, never to be a wife nor even a lover, not the mother of me yet something beyond grandparent. From then on, the cook during haying or calving or lambing at the ranches where my father worked was Bessie instead of Berneta, the couple who would throw themselves and their muscles into sheep deals were Charlie and his mother-in-law instead of his young wife. I grew up amid their storms, for neither of these two was ever going to know the meaning of pallid. But as their truce swung and swayed and held, my growing-up felt not motherless but tribal, keenly dimensional, full of alliances untranslatable but ultimately gallant (no, she's not my mother, she's ... no, he's my father, not my grand-) and loyalties deep as they were complex. So many chambers, of those two and of myself, I otherwise would have never known.
In the eventual, when I had grown and gone, my grandmother and father stayed together to see each other on through life. April 6, 1971: his time came first, from emphysema which was the cruel lung reprise of my mother's fate. October 24, 1974: my grandmother remained sturdy to her final instant—one mercy at last on these people, her death moment occurred in the middle of a chuckle as she joked with a friend driving her to a card party at the Senior Citizens Club.
Their twenty-one years together, a surprising second life for each, I've long known I was the beneficiary of. The letters teach me anew, though, how desperately far they had to cross from that summer of grief. Theirs was maybe the most durable dreaming of all, that not-easy pair; my father and my grandmother, and their boundaryless memory of my mother.
***
And I see at last, past the curtain of time which fell prematurely between us, that I am another one for whom my mother's existence did not end when her life happened to.
Summoning myself—summing myself—is no less complicated, past fifty, than it was in the young-eyed blur at those howling Montana gravesides. Doig, Ivan, writer: independent as a mule, bleeder for the West's lost chances, exile in the Montana diaspora