This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [74]
When he finally came—all of this might have crackled for only twenty minutes or so—he generally would try an offhand Ready to go? She would give it back to him— We been ready for ages —and the silent battle would begin. Halfway to the ranch, one or the other might try to break it. But most often a trip which started in ice ended the same, and I would look aside out the window touching cold on my shoulder, wordlessly crying a kind of prayer that the mood would get no worse, damning in my head the one or the other of these chilly warriors. Or more often, the both.
Beneath it all was a hard unsaid truth we all knew. The three of us by then had been together long enough, and closely enough, that if my father and my grandmother parted ways, I now could have the choosing of which one I would five with—and I would choose at once to go with Dad again. I felt love for Grandma, she would bring me up more steadily and standardly than he could, in countless ways would make more sacrifices in her life for the sake of mine. In justice to us both—perhaps all three of us—she was the one to raise me less hazardously, if choice ought to be made. But I would never choose so.
By then, I had been shaped on the opposite side of the family from her, the side which indeed cared less for family than for friends and the valley's flow of life, and so suggested that if my ranchman father could not manage to be enough family for me, at least he was going to be a friend such as none other in the world. The side, too, which always had half a notion to hie off for opportunity rather than settle in for obstinacy.
In outlook and manner then—and I suppose in inner murmurations which I could not hear until much later—I had become more thoroughly Charlie Doig's son than I could ever become Bessie Ringer's grandson. It lay as a hammer of fact amid us that she knew all this, and that, a woman who long since had determined she was through putting up with bad bargains in life and longer since had earned that right, she could only accept these short-sided terms.
If, that is, she stayed on with Dad and me at all, now that his health had mended once more. It apparently became a guessing game in the valley whether she would. A town voice has reported: There was some that said they didn't see how she could take over the daughter's husband, and the child too. But I said there was love there, that was the way of it. It wasn't quite the way of it, for there still was all too little sign of love—or affection or admiration or much of any other warmth—shown between my father and my grandmother. They were, after all, an alliance, corded together only by the bloodline which knotted in me, and perhaps the best that could have been expected of them was the wary civility of allies. Some of the time, as in the aftermath of those trips to town, it took their most dogged efforts to muster that.
Yet the months added up, and the three of us remained under the same roof. Rather, Dad and Grandma remained under it, and I edged under on weekends, for when the school year began again, I once more had to board out in White Sulphur.
If it had occurred to me, over the next span of time I had all the grounds to demand of Dad just how this pieced-together family of ours was making my life any less unsettled. In the several years between my mother's death and Grandma's arrival, I had followed Dad through seven or eight places to live. In the year and a half after Grandma and I left Ringling, I ricocheted among half a dozen. Two of Grandma's sons and their families lived in White Sulphur, and whenever possible I boarded now with one or the other of them. But the sons themselves were in a period of changing jobs and homes, and in fast sequence here when I was twelve and thirteen years old, I hopscotched after them through households as various as they were numerous. One of the