This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [86]
Gertie Chadwick herself was Dupuyer's touchstone. Short and square set, almost boxy—her parents had been stocky immigrants from Belgium, and the family line had gone even broader and more short-necked with her—she stubbed up just above the top of the cafe counter. But somehow there was the energy packed in her to run her enterprise as busily and fondly as if it were a boardinghouse table and the many dozens of customers each day made up the most interesting crew on earth.
She kept open for business 364½ days of the year. At Christmas, she would come downtown in the forenoon to feed the pensioned herders and widowers and others who took their every meal with her, then resolutely go home for the holiday afternoon. In day-by-day trade, travelers trooped in to her plentifully enough, as was guaranteed by Dupuyer's spot as the lone stopover of its sort amid a kinking seventy-five-mile stretch of the highway which led north to Glacier National Park and Canada. But Gertie's main service was to provide the community itself with brimming coffee cups and the daily victual of counter-stool chat to go with the brew.
Ranchers and fanners spilled in as they passed through town: You fellows who've got winter wheat in will be able to be called Mister this fall ... It'll be a beaner if I can get 'er harvested in this christly weather ... They hailed out up across the Marias. Pounded the damned wheat flat to the ground ... Looks like eighty-five-pound lambs up on the Reservation. Just a world of grass for 'em up there this year ... Other hours, their wives made their call, on the way to buy groceries for a ranch crew or to fetch a machinery part needed in the grain harvest or just to trade news with one another. But the most precise and valued of Gertie's customers were her regulars, the lone men who bought meals from her by the month and arrived for them three times a day like figures marching across the face of an elaborate tower clock as certain hours are struck.
Since I took my meals side by side with them, the regulars eyed me briefly, learned that I was from a fending family and could see that I already was doing some of it for myself, and dealt me into their corps. A tiny ancient homesteader named Fred Groh at once told me of arriving in Dupuyer when he was my age, and at the break of spring hearing the thaw wind begin its roar down across the crags of the Rockies: They told me it was the chinook, and I wondered what kind of animal that could be, to make a noise like that. The gentle and gray postmaster John Wall eased in from across the street, puffing his pipe thoughtfully as he sparred jokes with Gertie. She upped the odds once by snipping a circle of cardboard and sliding it beneath the meat patty in his daily hamburger. As she turned back to the kitchen, he spotted the disc and slipped it out. Wordlessly he ate away as Gertie gnawed at her lip. At last the blurt from her: Don't you notice anything about that hamburger at all? He dabbed napkin to lips and gave me a slow wise wink: No sir, Gertie, it tastes just like your hamburgers always do. A gnome-faced man named Joe Smith mocked himself with little stories about his livelihood as a fur trapper, laughed with a haw-haw-haw which shook him all over, disappeared betweentimes to the traplines he had set along the creeks beneath the mountains. Gertie's husband Harold noticed my interest in this half-phantom—there was little Harold did not notice—and began mumbling information: That Joe, by the god, he can catch any beaver he wants to. How the hell he does it, I dunno. Hell go out there to a beaver dam and catch all the big ones, leave the little ones. These ranchers'll ask him to catch all them beaver, but huh-uh: he leaves them little ones for seed, by the god, for next year.
Gertie herself must have heard innumerable times everything that was ever said around that counter, yet I noticed that she listened as readily