This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [21]
Charlie and I didn't know what a stick of lumber was, hardly —this from Clifford, with his drawling chuckle— we thought everything was made out of logs, y'know. But they asked us if we knew anything about lumber, and we said 'Well, sure.' When the first rain of the Aberdeen winter whipped in, the pair of them slopped through their shift wondering to one another how soon the yard boss would take pity, as any rancher back home would decently have done, and send them in out of the downpour. By the end of that wettest day of their lives, they still were in the rain but had stopped wondering.
Well, hell, we needed the job, y'know. It was November and the streets was lined with men, and we was a long ways from home. So I said to Charlie, by gollies, I'm goin' uptown and see if they won't trust a feller for some rain clothes. Clifford slogged off and talked a dry-goods merchant out of two sets of raingear on credit. But a drier skin didn't ease Dad's mind entirely. He got homesick, y'know. You never saw a guy got so homesick as Charlie. Dad toughed it out in Aberdeen for some months, told Clifford he couldn't stand it and headed back to Montana. That Aberdeen winter was the longest one in my life, and godamighty, the rain.
When he came home shaking off the Pacific Coast damp, Dad was less interested in the world beyond the valley. He did some more cowboying, and some more time on sheep ranches; three seasons, he sheared sheep with a crew which featured a handsome giant shearer named Matt Van Patten. The best looking guy I think I ever remember seeing. A sheep shearing sonofagun, too; he could really knock the wool off of 'em, went over 200 ewes on his tally every day. And a drinking sonofagun. Dad last saw him when the crew finished its final season and broke up. Old Matt, he started hittin' the booze, he had a fug somewhere, along the middle of the afternoon. By suppertime he was so drunk he couldn't walk. The crew had a dead-ax wagon to haul its outfit in, and he was lay in' in the bottom of that with his head hangin' out over the tailgate.
When Clifford returned from the Coast, there was serious roistering to be caught up on with him, too. I remember that me an' Charlie might get a little bit on the renegade side now and then, y'might say. This once, there was three of us—me an Charlie and D.L.'s son Alec—caught the train from Sixteen up there to the dance at Ringling one night. We got our room from Mrs. Harder, the old German lady who run the Harder Hotel there. Then we went on down to the bootleg joint and bought a gallon of moonshine. So of course we got pretty well loaded off of it, and full of hell. Anyway, Mrs. Harder, she called up the sheriff's office and said for the sheriff to get down there: 'Dere's sechs boys from Sechsteen, and dey're wreckin' my hotel!' Well, hell, there was only three of us, but I guess she thought we was as bad as six.
But the deep ingredient of my father's adventuring in those years of his early twenties was horses. It was a time when a man still did much of his day's work atop a saddle pony, and the liveliest of his recreation as well. And with every hour in the saddle, the odds built that there was hoofed catastrophe ahead. Built, as Dad's stories lessoned into me, until the most casual swing into the stirrups could almost cost your life: I'll tell ye a time. I was breakin' this horse, and I'd rode the thing for a couple of weeks, got him pretty gentle—a big nice tall brown horse with a stripe in his face.