This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [1]
That left an open day ahead, with me sitting around my fathers and grandmother's house, with a pert new tape recorder and reels of tape. The voices of This House of Sky began there. To humor me and my new gadget, my father began storytelling about his misadventures with horses and about killing a bear by the light of the Montana moon, and my grandmother in turn began by recalling an exasperation with Charlie Doig of a full forty years before, when she and my mother had planned a birthday party for him and he didn't show up because he'd been hospitalized by a bronc.
The next day Carol and I did manage to talk with Taylor Gordon, for an entire afternoon of rich anecdotage, but the article I wrote about him turned out to be more semi- than academic and still hasn't seen the light of scholarly day. So, out of that pair of July afternoons the unexpected gain proved to be that session with my father, which was the one and last chance to catch his voice and some of his storying onto tape. By autumn he no longer had the breath for such matters and was in the first of many hospitalizations between then and his death in early 1971.
Over the next few years I discovered that even with a doctorate on my wall I was hopelessly a writer rather than a professor—and that what I most wanted to write was something about my father and a way of life that seemed to be passing with him.
Voices kept helpfully arriving at my tape recorder during this time. My grandmother in particular would often meet one of my questions with "Well, I don't just know about that, you better go ask so-and-so." And I would. So-and-so once was bartender Pete McCabe of my fathers favorite saloon, the wondrous Stockman Bar; another time, twangy Clifford Shearer, who had worked on ranches with my father since they were both homestead kids. Three or four times a year, another voice of so-and-so into the tape recorder.
Then in mid-1971, a few months after my fathers passing, my own voice began chiming in. I started maintaining a journal in which I mulled what was then known in our household as "the Montana book." In that notebook I wrote whatever details of my family's Montana past that could be dug from mind. There's a notation on May 7th about the gutwagon that was used to bring ewes and their fresh-born lambs to the lambing shed on the ranches where my father was a hired hand and my grandmother cooked—certainly the first time I'd thought of that gloriously awful ranchword "gutwagon" in a dozen or more years. And another note, on my fathers manner of cussing: that rapid hyphenated style of Scottish exasperation that made goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway into a single, hundred-proof word. Haying crews and sheep shearers and gumboot irrigators presented themselves out of memory on the notebook pages. So did sheepherders and their moods, that delicate moment when you come to tend camp and find out whether you're going to have an abruptly resigned sheepherder and two thousand fleecy animals to deal with.
There were not a lot of these journal paragraphs—a couple of dozen during that year. But I had noticed that they would sidle in from memory readily enough when I could find time to coax them.
The next year, 1972, came a big bonus. Carol was granted a sabbatical