This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [82]
None of us had been to that far region of Montana, and naturally McGrath's prospects were as unpredictable as the country. But Dad was for going. He took me aside and talked out his reasoning: Ivan, I think I'll take on those two bands of sheep for McGrath. He's a bearcat to work for, but the son-of-a-buck knows livestock and he knows how to turn money ... I think it's a chance to take, going up north. But I don't know now, how do you feel about changing schools?
Eight weeks earlier I had started high school in White Sulphur, with the classmates I had known since Dad and I came away from the mountains after my mother's death. The school, the town, the valley made all the lifestream I knew anything about. Yet when I put all this against Dad's words and the musing look on his face, the sum did not add up to as much as I expected. It may have been that I was more weary than I knew of the suitcase life of boarding out in White Sulphur, or that I was just now coming across a portion of restlessness inherited from Dad. Whatever was behind it, I swallowed and gave my father the answer he wanted, and apparently the one I secretly did too: I feel okay about that.
Grandma. She had lived in the valley for forty years now, nearly all her adult life. Her friends, her sons, her patterns of existence were there. The alliance between Dad and her had problems which showed no sign of easing. Whatever the ties of affection between her and me, I couldn't believe she could be talked into this total uprooting toward the north. We'll just have to see about her, Dad said. He rehearsed to me a dozen arguments he would put to her, and when the moment came simply fired out: This damn valley has never got us much of anywhere, Lady. All either of us has to show for our lives here is a helluva pile of hard work. I say we ought to try out new country. Will ye come?
She was silent a long while—but a thinking silence, not a perturbed one. At last: All right then. When can we be gone and get it over and done with?
The two of us watched, struck silent, as she honked into a handkerchief and then clouted pots and pans onto the counter for the next kitchen chore. She was truly corded to us now, and the fact came with a sense of wonder and relief—and somehow among them, a nudge of concern.
One shard of time repeats itself like the snow-helmets of mountains across each season of my memory. An edged piece of the day, that is, in the strictest sense—the high sun-point called noon.
It seems curious now that this one daily interval counted for so much. Daybreak did not, nor dusk; days arrived and went with an unnoticed ease then. But noon climbed up like a crier to a tower, and my father reckoned his life, and those of his ranch crews, and mine at his side, by its powers: After noon we'll just go and ... Let's get shut of this by noon ... Better noon up and get some grub, don't ye think? And my grandmother, noon meaning to her the vast midday meal—we called it dinner, in full honor—to be arrayed along the sweep of table for a lambing crew or a shearing crew or a haying crew or whatever other kinds of crew might turn up from the world: Ivan, pretty please, yammer the bell to call those good-for-nothin's in here. Noon it was, too, when Taylor Gordon might be met on the street in White Sulphur, on the way to his cabin for his own dreaming meal and turning back at you to leave one last New York story or particle of philosophy: Y'know, I've found in life that I'd