This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [140]
She recuperated briskly enough to go on living much as she had, but to her disgust needed to rely on heart-regulating pills. Whenever she felt the first signs of angina, usually needlelike sensations at the tops of her arms, she would pop a nitroglycerine pill into her mouth as if it were an aspirin, determinedly sit still for a few minutes, and be up and at some chore again. Outwardly, she aged hardly at all. I compare photos of her taken five years apart, and they seem to have been snapped within the same minute, the identical pursed smile beneath the resolute upper face and gray-white field of hair.
I found that now Grandma filled not only her own role for me, the one of stand-in mother begun twenty years earlier when she and I moved into the house in Ringling, but what had been Dad's as well: my compass-point to the past, to my own youth. Whenever she visited Seattle or I came to Montana, she began to talk readily of the gone years, to tell even of her marriage to Tom Ringer, and of life on the Wisconsin farm.
Her mind was not wandering back—it was as solid and set on the chore of the moment as ever—but she seemed freed at last of the tempers which had covered over such stories. True, there still came bursts out of her which could have resounded at any point of her past sixty years in the valley. Leave a light switched on in her house past early morning, and you would hear hmpf! burnin' a hole in the daylight! and the abrupt click. A long-haired white cat had recognized her front porch as a provision port, and he came and went, battered from alley fights and matted with cockle-burrs, to the rhythm of her feedings and scoldings. But most of the time now, Grandma was in mellower mood than I could ever remember, as if old age was coming gently into her in compensation for the way it had ripped apart Dad.
I took the chance to have her retell what I had heard from her as a boy, confirm the details, imprint her private wordings. Before I quite knew it, the cadences of this book had begun out of listening to her. Listening and seeing, for the one scribe of my family's past had been the Brownie box camera. I dug out Grandma's photo albums which had gathered dust under one bed or another for sundry decades, I remember one early evening spent in the White Sulphur house, a set of hours as she went through for me an album which had belonged to my mother. Picture upon picture of my father and mother—in their herding days on Grass Mountain, on horseback at rodeos, dressed up in flat-cap-and-bonnet finery beside the square hulks of 1920s automobiles—brought sniffles or hard-swallowed sentences from Grandma, and by the time I had jotted my notes on the final page, the emotion she had been putting into the room had worn me out.
That should be enough for tonight, I said in a weary glaze. She turned to me in surprise: But we got these others to get through. Hadn't we just as well to keep on? And we did.
And then the moment, for there always is such a pivot moment, when it truly became clear how far along in life she was. At the end of September, 1974—she was eighty-one by now—she flew to Seattle to spend a few weeks with us. When Carol and I saw her coming slowly up the ramp from the plane, we waved, she gave us her pursed smile. Then she stopped and leaned against die wall of die ramp, and I bolted toward her. By the time I reached her, she was fumbling the bottle of heart pills from her purse. A pill and getting her to a chair eased the angina; before long, we were on our way, but with her now a more fragile piece of life than she had been minutes before.
Time and again in that visit, she had to sit and ease the heart symptoms. But she would not be kept idle, nor did I think she ought to be. She had lived under the same roof with Dad's helplessness; a repeat of that would be the cruelest affliction