This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [68]
Grandma and I went into our first winter together. A small window faced straight west just above the head of my bed. Mornings, as the first sounds of day scuffed outside, I had been able to sleepily lift myself on an elbow and see which of the town's cows or horses or sheep were munching past. Now this window also told the weather, even without my looking all the way out; mewls of wind came sneaking under the sash, and on genuine blizzard mornings the sill would have its own miniature snowscape, tiny sifts white as spilled sugar.
We learned at once that on blowy days our house leaked wind everywhere, like a weary little scow jetting water into itself the instant it touched the surface of the sea. Hardly knowing where to plug first, we would stuff a rag rug along the crack under the front door, pull the blinds down over the whistling windows, desperately fire up both the big square range in the kitchen and the little round stove in the living room, and hope for the storm to ease away promptly.
Shivery and caging as such blizzard weather was, it had to be admitted that Ringling looked much its best in a storm. The bald gaps between houses lost their starkness with windrows of snow gracefully coned between them. The very whiteness of a snowstorm came as a relief, a bright sudden paint over the worn town. Somehow, too, space danced itself along the wind into new distances. If we could not see the depot, a hundred fifty yards down the slope, the storm counted as a genuine shrouding blizzard, and we slogged around telling one another what a very devil of a bluster this was. Mr. Brekke looked like a general in winter camouflage when he handed our mail through the doorway now. Kate's binoculars could not cut the feathery swirl and find the news for the usual courier's gait of her tongue, so Grandma went over to play canasta with her by the hour to compensate. Walter's woodpile heaped under the whiteness like a buried haystack. The trip to the Badgetts' for water became a feat of walking with chin tucked into your coat and the filled water bucket tugging you off-balance as you broke through the drifts. Another trip had its hazards as well: Grandma and I joked about how far the outhouse— the visit to old Mother Jones —seemed to have wandered out onto the prairie since the blizzard whirled in. The only thing in the neighborhood which still seemed to be in place was Shep, and he was more firmly planted than ever. Throughout such weather, he could not be budged from under the kitchen table, and so was stepped on by Grandma ten times a day instead of his usual half dozen, his injured howls a mate-cry out into the keening of the blizzard.
Then when the snowfall and wind at last stopped, the world's one noise would be the scrushing sound of boots on silk-dry snow. In the fresh calm, wood smoke climbed straight up from chimneys, until it appeared as if the fat gray ribbons were dangling all the town's houses down into a bowl of snow. The comfortable cushioned silence would last until the first pickup truck began the fast ratatatat of its chained tires.
In this snow-scarfed weather as all other, once a week Dad would appear out of the night. The job he had taken after his operation was with a sheep rancher named McGrath at the Camas ranch, fifty miles from us on the far side of White Sulphur Springs. Dad intended to bide through there until summer, when he would have the contract to harvest the ranch's big hay crop. But he had come up with an idea further. The Camas might be a place for Grandma and me as well.
I would wake at once those nights he arrived, and come intent as a hiding fox. The open doorways leading from the kitchen to the living room and on into my bedroom were aligned, and a panel of light came thrusting through them all onto the foot of my bed, like a square flame from the charged talk which was beginning across the kitchen table.
The ritual I quickly knew by heart. Dad would ask if there might be a can of beer in the house, just anything for a sip. This was high