This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [46]
And always, always, the two voices which went at each other just above my head. Ruth, where the hell you been? If you think you can just walk off and leave me with the cafe that way, you got another think coming ... Mister, I didn't marry you to spend all my time in any damn cafe. Where I go is my business... The look in my direction, then: Better leave us alone, Ivan..., But the voices would go on, through the walls, until one more silence set in between my father and my second mother.
The silences stretched tauter until a day sometime in the autumn of 1948, when the Grill and our town life came to an end. Dad and Ruth could agree on one thing: the tremendous hours of cafe work were grinding them down. They gave up the lease, and now bought a thousand head of sheep and arranged to winter them at a ranch on Battle Creek in the Sixteen country, not far from the Basin where Dad had grown up.
There seemed to be no middle ground in the marriage. Not having managed to make it work while under the stare of the entire town, now the two of them decided to try a winter truce out in what was the emptiest corner of the county, just as it had been when Peter and Annie Doig came there to homestead a half-century before and as it is whenever I return now to drive its narrow red-shale road. Gulch-and-sage land, spare, silent. Out there in the rimming hills beyond the valley, twenty-five miles from town, Dad and Ruth would have time alone to see whether their marriage ought to last. Could last.
And I began what would be a theme of my life, staying in town in the living arrangement we called boarding out. It meant that someone or other, friend or relative or simply whoever looked reliable, would be paid by Dad to provide me room-and-board during the weekdays of school. It reminds me now of a long visit, the in-between feeling of having the freedom to wander in and out but never quite garnering any space of your own. But I had some knack then for living at the edges of other people's existences, and in this first span of boarding out—with friends of Ruth, the Jordan family—I found a household which teemed in its comings-and-goings almost as the cafe had.
Indeed, We call it the short-order house around here, Helen Jordan said as deer season opened and a surge of her out-of-town relatives, armed like a guerrilla platoon, swept through. Ralph Jordan himself came and went at uneven hours of the day and night, black with coal dust and so weary he could hardly talk: he was fireman on the belching old locomotive called Sagebrush Annie which snailed down the branch-line from White Sulphur to the main railroad at Ringling. Ralph with a shovelful of coal perpetually in hand, Helen forever up to her wrists in bread dough or dishwater—the Jordans were an instructive couple about the labor that life could demand.
And under their busy roof, I was living for the first time with other children, their two sons and a daughter.