This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [107]
Weary of the steady life with the sheep— Godamighty, Lady, do ye realize it's been nineteen months since either of us had a day off? Dad ground out one evening—Dad and Grandma decided to wait until spring to look for their next work. When the ranches busied up then, a lambing man of his skills and a cook of hers would have no trouble finding jobs.
The leisure had its uses. Three years almost to the moment from when we had first seen the Sawtooth Mountains carving their canyons of stone into the sky edge, we at last had time to set foot in the range. On a crisp and bright deer-hunting day, Dad shot a fat young buck beneath one of the great rimfolds driven up into the blue; Tommy Chad and I skidded the carcass down through the scree and timber and we had meat for weeks to come. Grandma visited with Gertie at the cafe, and as we should have known it would, work came looking for her. Dupuyer lacked baby-sitters, especially babysitters with five raisings of children to their credit. Grandma began spending entire days with the small daughters of a family busy with travel, then evenings for other families. When a night came that two stints of work were offered her at once, she eyed Dad: Why don't you take this other one, Charlie? I looked at him for the fight to start. Instead he answered, Yes, and why the hell don't 1?
Through the evenings of winter after that, the two of them regularly went babysitting several times a week. The notion at first embarrassed me; it didn't seem genuine work for grownups, especially for my top-hand father. But I began to see that they both enjoyed the change of task and scene. The household was easier to breathe in when we weren't crammed against each other every moment. The pair of them soon had more babysitting than they could handle, and I took some evenings of it myself. It was, I suppose, a way for Dupuyer to lend us a hand, and for us to lend one in turn, not the least of the town's graceful moments in our life.
In that last year of high school, 180 classroom days between me and the world, I began threshing for ways to go away to college. I did not know it, and it seemed least likely, but the one ally more I needed I met on the football field.
I had begun playing the autumn before, when my knee finally was declared healed. My season was brief that time: as if the quadrants of my body were going to take turns about this, my left hand was fractured in one of the first scrimmages. I suppose in the way Dad never had hesitated to swing back into a saddle after another of his near-destructions on horseback, it didn't occur to me not to try football again—although it did to Grandma, who loudly sounded her Gee gosh, you he careful now.
As it turned out, on the field at the first practice a new coach was waiting, a chunky, sharp-eyed man in his early twenties. His name was McCarthy; he had grown up in the smelter town of Anaconda and gone through a small Jesuit college on a football scholarship. He told me, without ever having seen me before, that I would be his fullback. Given Valier's small enrollment and the lack of heft among the seniors, he had decided simply to field the four quickest of us as running backs, like dice flipped across green felt. You'll be the blocking back, since you're heftier than Butch or Vern or Glenn —at 155 pounds I actually was only the least featherlike— and we'll show these teams some footsteps.
We did. Ours was the fastest backfield in the conference, and the most fitful. On the first play of the season we scored on an 89-yard run, and went on to lose the game. When we managed to mesh ourselves