This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [62]
And back beyond all that, she had the news of how I'd arrived into the world: You were born in Dr. McKay's hospital in White Sulphur, it's that building just up the hill from—oh, what's the name of that joint? Hmpf. The Stockman, just up the hill from the Stockman. When you were born, you had two great big warts right here in front of your ear, and your right foot splayed off like this, and you had the reddest hair. You were something grand to see, all right...
Nor was that nearly all. At times she talked a small private language which must have come from those two islanded times of childhood, her own growing up on the Wisconsin farm and her children's years at Moss Agate. Words jigged and bellied and did strange turns then: I'll have a sipe more of coffee, but if I eat another bite, I'll busticate.... Get the swatter and dead that fly for me, pretty please? ... Hmpf, I been settin' so long my old behinder is stiff.... Anything which lay lengthwise was longways to her; the stanchions of a milking barn were stanchels, the cows themselves were a word of my mother's as a child, merseys.
Her sayings too took their own route of declaring. That it was time to get a move on: Well, this isn't buying the baby a shirt nor paying for the one he's got on. Or to take a doubtful chance: Here goes nothin' from, nowhere. Or when she did not understand something I read to her from one of my books: Like the miser man's well, too deep for me, boy. Or when she did understand: I see, said the blind man to his deaf wife. Neighbors were rapidly tagged with whatever they deserved: She goes around lookin' like she's been drawed through a knothole backwards.... That pair is close as three in a bed with one kicked out ... That tribe must never heard that patch beside patch is neighborly, but patch upon patch is beggarly.
Each time the prairie wind swirled up her dress, there would be said: Hmpf! Balloon ascension! At least one meal of the day, she would pause between forkfuls and pronounce like a happy benediction: I hear some folks say they get so tired of their own cooking. By gee, I never have. And whenever something irked her, which was sufficiently often, she had her own style of not-quite cussing: Gee gosh, god darn, gosh blast it....
And always the stories, such as the one of an early Moss Agate neighbor, a homesteader, who had a head huge and twisted as an ogre's. After a lifetime of despair over his own ugliness, the man began rethinking it all and soon before he died proudly willed his skull to medical science. As I shivered a bit at the tale, Grandma chuckled and said in her declaring style: Headless man into heaven, think of that.
To my surprise, dogs and cats fully counted into her conversations. Dad likely had not glanced in a cat's direction since the last time my mother had scratched Pete Olson's gray ears, and he spoke to dogs only to send them kiting off after strayed livestock. But Grandma communed with them all, especially all dogs. There had been one or another of them, generally named Shep, in her households ever since a huge woolly sheepdog back on her parents' Wisconsin farm, and the last of that name had moved to Ringling with us.
A fine white-and-tan with a hint of collie about him, Shep had gone old and as lazy as my grandmother would allow anything to be. He panted as he walked and spent most of life stretched under the kitchen table, where he filled all the space there was. Several times a day Grandma would shift her feet as she sat at the table playing solitaire, and there would be an explosion of pained howling