Memory, the near-neighborhood of dream, is almost as casual in its hospitality. When I fix my sandwich lunch, in a quiet noon, I may find myself sitting down thirty years ago in the company of the erect old cowboy from Texas, Walter Badgett. Forever the same is the meal with Walter: fried mush with dark corn syrup, and bread which Walter first has toasted and then dried in the oven. When we bite, it shatters and crashes in our mouths, and the more we eat, the fuller our plates grow with the shrapnel of crumbs. After the last roaring bite, Walter sits back tall as two of the ten-year-old me and asks down: Well, reckon we can make it through till night now? I step to the stove for tea, and come instead onto the battered blue-enamel coffee pot in a sheepherder's wagon, my fathers voice saying Ye could float your grandma's flat-iron on the Swede's coffee. I walk back toward my typewriter, past a window framing the backyard fir trees. They are replaced by the wind-leaning jackpines of one Montana ridgeline or another. I glance higher for some hint of the weather, and the square of air broadens and broadens to become the blue expanse over Montana rangeland, so vast and vaulting that it rears, from the foundation-line of the plains horizon, to form the walls and roof of all of life's experience that my younger self could imagine, a single great house of sky.
Now the mood moves on, the restless habit of dream and memory, and I come to myself in a landscape of coastal western-ness so different in time and place from that earlier one. Different, yet how readily acquainted.
LADY
Sitting up in a railroad coach seat for a day, a night, and another day, Bessie Ringer is jostled westward in the springtime of 1914. The Mississippi River lay several hundreds of miles behind, vaulted by a slim bridge which had made her flick scared glances down to the gliding water all the long way over. Minnesota had been crossed, and the Dakotas, where the homesteads of an earlier generation of journeyers nested in fat patches of turned earth. Rivers new and wild to her—the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder—came looping widely beneath the roadbed, and now when the train made its wheezy stops in the middle of nowhere, the men who clomped aboard wore hats with swooping curled brims, and their women, she could not help but notice, looked leathered from the sun and wind. Where they stepped from, the arc of prairie flung straight and empty to the horizon, nothing could be imagined which might rule their lives except that sun, that wind. By the time, then, that her train was pushing out of the townless distances of eastern Montana, Bessie had come an entire world away from the pinched midwestern background she had been born into twenty years before. Come, what's more, for forever and with no regret ever said aloud. Her people back there were German stock, abrupt and gloomy as their family name— Glun. In the memories which stretched along the rails to the farmstead life in central Wisconsin's cut-over pine country, that name mocked itself into queer rhyme. It had happened because school dismayed Bessie, and in her unhappiness one day was caught whispering to the girl seated beside her. Picking up his pointer to threaten her, the teacher thundered it then: Glun, Glun, don't have so much fun, or you'll have a swat of Jack Hickory's son! At home, life was no less startling and strict under her burly mustached father: I always remember my pa so stern. I was always scared of him. Now train tracks, hour upon hour, were leaving always to the past, to the land falling away behind the West.
On Bessie's lap a daughter dozes in the train's cradling motion—my mother, Berneta, waking now and again to see the land flying and flying past her six-month-old eyes. She is plump and pretty, and with her full dark hair has begun to look like a small jolly version of a much older girl. A version, that would be, of Bessie herself not long before. On the wall by me is a studio portrait of Bessie when she had reached the age of sixteen or so, posed with the two Krebs sisters who were her best of friends. Out the oval window of photo, the sisters stare down the camera and any lookers beyond it, mouths straight as Bible lines. You would not tease with this pair, not dare their wrath without an open door behind you. They are iron and granite side by side, and are going to leave some bruises on the world. Beside them, Bessie's look is all the softer, the eyes more open and asking, her face wondering at life instead of taking it on chin first. She must have had much to wonder at, raised as such an apron-stringed girl, snugged all the more firmly into the family by the one lapse in her father's strictness. John Glun had brooded against a way of schooling which even for an instant could taunt a daughter of his, and after her third year, Bessie was not made to attend again. She spent the rest of her growing years entirely at home. That upbringing of choring for her mother and edging past her father's thunderhead temper left her unsure of herself, but guessing that the world must have something else to offer. So that's the how of it, she would say whenever some new turn of life had shown itself, and she seemed about to say it there to the camera eye. It is, all in all, an offering glance for the world, of which she might yet have had a strong gleam four years later as she held her prized daughter and watched the western Montana mountains begin to stand high ahead of the train.
Alongside Bessie, the train window shadowing his face close in beside hers, sits Thomas Abraham Ringer. Housepainter, handyman, wiry Irishman with a hatchet nose and a chin like an axe—last and least, husband. All three Glun children flew as quickly as they could from that narrow home, but Bessie went with one last disfavor from her father. He singled out for her this seldom-do-well Tom Ringer and bent her, at the age of 18, into marrying the man. Gee gosh, a girl like I was who didn't know her own mind— I done it because my pa said it was my way to get by in the world. Tom was twice her age, nearly as old as her father himself, and the one thing he had done exactly right in all his life until then had been not to take on a wife and a family. In fair charity—one-half of those who speak of Tom Ringer do give a rough affectionate forgiveness, while the other half call him something like a sour-minded reprobate—the knack of caring unswervingly for anyone beyond himself did not seem to be in this man. Alone, fussing a floorboard into place or stroking a paintbrush peevishly along a ceiling, that sharp face could simply prod all into tidiness and spear away whatever of life he did not want to see or hear. But being married was nothing like being alone, and there came the consequence which Bessie declared in the shortest and angriest of her verdicts on this husband. Tom drank.
It made a dubious marriage worse. The temper tamped inside Tom which he seemed to need to propel himself through life would turn ugly when whiskey touched it. Darn his hide. He'd he going along perfectly fine, then there'd be a big blowup. This, too: even when his wages didn't trickle away in saloons, they shrank and vanished some other way. All their married life, Tom and Bessie Ringer would live close to predicament. The one feat of finance they ever managed was this train trip, uprooting themselves half a continent westward to where a relative had homesteaded—a blind fingers-crossed jump to the strange high country of sage and silence.
At the town of Three Forks, they left the train. There the broad tilts of this new country suddenly tumbled three idling rivers into one another to greaten into the headwaters of the Missouri, and in every direction around, ranges of mountains hazed to a thin blue, as if behind smoke. Mountains and mountains and mountains, Bessie would remember.
The promise of a housepainter's job awaited Tom in this first town of the new life. But that job, or any other, wasn't to be had. What did present itself was the rumor of work at a small logging camp eastward in the Crazy Mountains. See, Tom had been in the woods some back in Wisconsin. So we went off up there near Porcupine Creek in the Crazies, and Tom cut in the timber until winter come.
Then, into the teeth of the mountain weather, Tom and Bessie and their tiny daughter climbed higher into the Crazies, to spend the winter cutting small trees for fence posts. Some thousands of feet higher than they had ever been in their Wisconsin lives, they set up a peaked photographer's tent in the dark pitch of forest, banked the outside walls with snow for warmth, fired up a long box stove which would be kept blazing all winter long, and whacked down timber from first light to la
st. No, it wasn't so bad of a winter. We got by good, there was worlds of firewood.
Through that timberland winter, isolated and snowbound, Bessie and Tom felled and unlimbed trees, then snaked the wood to a snow-packed skidway. She would clamber down the slope as Tom hitched their workhorse to the first pile of logs and looped the reins to the harness. The horse would plod down to her, the logs sledding long soft troughs behind in the snow. When Bessie unhitched the load, the horse would turn itself back up the mountain for the next load of work. That pattern of trudge was much like what lay ahead for Bessie herself, for if I am to read any beginnings at all in these lives which twine behind my own, my grandmother's knack for plowing head-down through all hardship surely begins here at the very first of these lean Montana years.
Then the kids' dad —she banished Tom to that in later times, his name never crossing her tongue if she could help it— the kids' dad got us on at Moss Agate. The rancher ran a herd of cull milk cows there, and we milked all those cows and put up the hay on the place. We lived there, oh, a lot of years.
Moss Agate was a small ranch at the southern reach of the Smith River valley, on an empty flat furred with sage and a few hackles of brush along the South Fork of the river, and walled in at every point of the horizon by buttes or foothills. The single vivid thing about the place lay in its name. The rock called moss agate is a daydreamer's stone, a smokey hardness with its trapped black shadow of fossil inside like a tree dancing to the wind or a sailing ship defying fog or whatever else you can imagine from it. Later, after my father had begun to court my mother, someone who saw him saddling for his weekly ride to Moss Agate asked if he was finding any prize agates in the hills there. One, he grinned. She's about five feet tall, with black hair and blue eyes.
On that ranch where dreams were trapped in rock, Bessie and Tom milked cows year after year, toiled to keep the few sun-browned ranch buildings from yawning into collapse, and plodded out their marriage. There was a new child now every few years—three boys in a row. Each summer, Bessie held the latest baby in her lap as she drove a team of horses hitched to the sulky-seated hay rake. I wore bib overalls then in haying time. But silly thing, I'd run and put a dress on if I seen anybody coming. Throughout the seasons, she rode horseback after strayed calves, fed hogs, raised chickens, gardened and canned, burned out the sage ticks which pincered onto the children, mucked out the tidal flow of manure-and-urine after the eternal cows. And all of it in a growing simmer against Tom.
I can watch her, in those Moss Agate years, being made over from almost all that she had been before: toughening, leathering, the salt of sweat going into her mind and heart. Even her body now defied the harsh life; the single luxury of that milking herd was dairy produce, and as her cooking feasted on the unending butter and cream, she broadened and squared.
But it was her look to the world that changed most, and in the few photos from about her thirtieth year, her tenth in Montana, a newcomer now gazes out from where the young bride had been—a flinchless newcomer who has firmed into what she will be all the rest of her life.
Her face now was strongest, almost mighty, at its center—the careful clasp of a mouth which seemed always ready to purse with no relenting, and the thick nose which has monumented itself all through the family line to her great-grandchildren. A brief ball of chin, a fine square span of forehead beneath neatly waved hair already gone gray and on its way to white. Blue eyes, paler and more flat in their declaring than, say, my father's mulling look.
She stood to the height my mother does in photograph—scant inches over five feet—but where my mother seemed a wand of a woman, this grandmother was an oak stump. Chunky as she had grown—at times weighing more than 150 pounds, and long since locked into an everlasting lost battle against her own pastries, snacks and second helpings—she somehow seemed stout without being overgirthed; steady without being stolid.
In this odd strong way, then, her very stockiness somehow made her appear taller than she really was, and a neighbor's memory at last explained: The first time I remember seeing Bessie Ringer was at the Caukins schoolhouse, at a dance out there, and I just admired her so, she always carried herself so straight and dignified.
Of course: so straight, and the dignity of that. For in both senses of the saying, Bessie Ringer was stiff-backed, with erect pride and the unbending notions to go with it. In a sense, the central ideas in her were lodged in place like the logs of a stockade: upright, sharply pointed, and as durable as they were wooden.
The first of her unattackable beliefs was family. This had started early, when my mother from her first breaths was seen to be an asthma victim and Bessie began to raise her with a special blend of love and fuss. It went on as each of her three boys arrived—musical Paul and mischievous William and adept Wallace—and were given whatever sacrifices she could that they would be able to go through the schooling she had not, make it out into life whole and able. We had to get by sometimes on a lick and a promise, but there's others didn't do as good as we managed, too. That the family thinned off markedly at Tom's end of the table simply redoubled her affections elsewhere. It was as if his portion of her commitment had to be put to use somehow, and into the children it went.
Next came work. Bessie was uncomfortable with much depth of thinking—her slim school years and that tethered girlhood had robbed her mind there, and she knew it with regret—but doing came to her with lovely ease. She worked, that is to say, as some people sing; for the pleasure of it, the habit of it, the sense that life was asking it specially of her. It gives me the willies, she would recite, to be sittin' just doin' nothin'. In her own retelling and all told about her, I can find her at almost every relentless ranch task of those years: stacking hay, teamstering horses in dead winter, pulling calves from breech births, stringing barbed wire onto fencelines, threshing grain amid the itching storm of chaff, axing ice from the cattle's watering-holes. She was a worker, comes the valley's echo of her again and again. So much a worker, it may be, that items such as a wrong husband fell away behind the pace of task and chore.
Family, work—and the clinch across both of them, steadfastness. Life was to be lived out as it came. If it came hard, you bowed your neck a bit more and endured. So without thinking it through—not entirely knowing how to—she had set her mind not to be afraid of that spare weather-whipped land, that wan ranch life.
In this total rind of determination, Bessie was not like many of the valley women, or most of the men either. Down through the valley's history, such settlers had expected something of their work, and sooner or later uprooted themselves if it didn't come. Bessie only chored on. In her unschooled way, she was greatly more fearless about wresting a fresh life in Montana than my father's family had been. Those homesteaders newcoming to the Basin had allied themselves, formed a kind of trestle of relatives and fellow Scots. Compared with them, Bessie went along as alone and unaided as a tumbleweed.
Indeed, her stories of life at Moss Agate and a number of other hard-scrabble spots in the valley most often began with the aloneness: The one time, I was alone by myself on the place—the kids' dad was off again somewhere—and it rained and it rained until the creek started to come up around the cattle in the corral. It kept coming and kept coming until I had to saddle our old roany horse and ride through to let those cows out. The water come up over my stirrups and of course that old roany made it his habit to stop dead whenever you tried to hurry him. But I got him through the water and tied one end of the rope to the pole gate and the other end to the saddle horn, and the cows could follow me out then. A person can do a lot of things like that when you're in a corner.
But a corner of another sort was where Tom loomed in his private furies, and if steadfastness held her into the marriage and the ranch life, it did not overcome the pains of them. Gone to town for groceries, Tom might not return for days. When he did come back from such sprees, he arrived rasping at the way Bessie had done the ranch chores or was raising the children. Gosh sakes, times
you wouldn't know he was a man you'd ever met. Ornery old thing him, anyhow. She began to fight back at him with silence, and she could be as grimly silent as oblivion.
Then the rancher who owned Moss Agate died, and passed from the valley with a storied funeral where the reek of whiskey oozed through the flower smells, and the tipsy pallbearers nearly dropped the coffin at the graveside. Whiskey had poisoned Bessie's life at Moss Agate, and now whiskey closed it. She and Tom and the four children moved to another ranch. That job lasted no time—it was in the deep of the Depression now—and soon they were in the tiny rail-line town of Ringling, in a ragtag house which at least put shelter atop their heads. Sometime then, Tom left Bessie alone again with the teetery household, and at last she broke the marriage.
She never bothered with a divorce. Going to law for something which she had ended in her own mind did not seem needed. But Tom—rather, the kids' dad —had passed from her as surely as if he had been tumbled into the grave with the whiskeyfied rancher.
That life done, Bessie was soon adrift. There was no income, and the last of the children were out of school and heading off on their own. In the Shields River Valley, near the Crazy Mountains where she had started in Montana twenty-five years before, she found a job as cook for an elderly farmer named Magnusson. He was prosperous but lonely, a widower, feeling old and trying to dilute his days with drink. When Bessie came, the drinking and the self-pity tapered away.
Old Magnusson came to rely entirely on her, and they became a familiar pair in the Shields River country, he driving her in his black pickup to a meeting of her women's club or off to the town of Wilsall for the week's groceries, she ruling in his kitchen and handling the farmyard chores for him.
Surely the sight of them constantly paired set tongues clanging—it took less than that—but they confounded the gossips considerably. No one ever managed to hear them call each other anything but Mr. Magnusson and Mrs. Ringer or to see them more than correctly cordial with one another, maintaining an austere arm's-length household it was all but impossible to read anything further into. Apparently suspicion fairly quickly was set aside, because Bessie became fast friends with some of the sternest neighboring wives and a well-regarded member of the Shields River community. Which left just one person on a moral high horse against her. My father.