Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [6]
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She first comes to me, naturally, by pen. There are many disadvantages to farming in some parts of Montana... The earliest item from her own hand is a grade school booklet she made about Montana, report of a forthright rural child. Some times there is alkali ground and in other places gumbo soil and then the chinook winds and grasshoppers and all different kinds of insects and some times not enough rainfall. Language is the treasury of the poor, and Berneta minted more than her share even in the busy-tongued Ringer family—fee-fee was her saying of barefoot, anything spooky brought on not the willies but the jimjams, and she it was who coined for the family the marvelous eartrick merseys for Moss Agate's Jersey-cows-in-need-of-mercy. Phrases were dressed up for fun, any dark cloud commencing to look like rain, any fancy angler categorized as having his face hung out as a fisherman. Emphasis had a vocabulary all its own in this youngster. Riding her horse as fast as it could be made to go was full slam. Her father patching the Moss Agate roof, which always needed it to the utmost, was Papa tarring the life out of it. When a chance at something, such as a trip to town, was seized upon, it was glommed on to. Hard luck, though, was a bum go.
And so I wonder. Do I meet my own mother, young, in the experiences of Western women who endured a land short of everything but their own capacities? Is her favorite school subject of Latin—the gravitas of declensions as a refuge, as it was for me—prefigured in well-spoken Kathryn Donovan, teacher of all eight grades at the sagebrush-surrounded Moss Agate school? Did she take to heart, sometime when she visited the Norwegian family tucked over the hill from Moss Agate, gaunt Mary Brekke's immigrant anthem of "You better learn!" that marched Brekke child after child into educated good citizenship? Such civic women are caryatids of so much of that hard Montana past, they carry the sky. Yet I find it not enough to simply count her into their company. Too many pictures of this familiar-faced stranger say she was dangerously more complicated than that, she cannot be sculpted from sugar.
Instead: from photo after photo with shacky Moss Agate or marginal Ringling in the background, Berneta Ringer assembles herself as someone not growing out of childhood but simply flinging it off, refusing to lose time to the illness in herself. Sick of being sick, shed surely have said it, time and again she pals with a crowd of cowboy hats and Sunday frocks in the pose of a person out and launched in life—but when I interrogate time and place, I realize I am looking at five feet of uncorked teenager. Some dreams, mostly of the daylight sort, we are able to aim; the motion of Berneta's mind often was horseback, her saddle-straddling generation finding its freedom in the ride to Saturday night dances and two-or three-day Fourth of July rodeos. Right there, perhaps, is where the female rural youngsters of the twenties parted from the generation of their mothers, in riding astride to those dances with a party dress tied behind the saddle; or as in Berneta's case in the photo taken when she can have been barely fifteen, mounting a rodeo cowboy's horse in her flapper