This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

by Ivan Doig

growing known as a travel writer made me a bit uneasy. You may recall the passage in The Education of Henry Adams where Adams ponders the roaming around Europe he had done as a young man while supposedly studying civil law at the University of Berlin. If his father asked Adams at the end of it all what he had made of himself for the time and money put into him, Adams figured the only possible answer would be: “Sir, I am a tourist.”

As when I was signing copies of one of my novels and a young woman looked past me to the stack of This House of Sky and half-whispered as if thinking out loud: “I’ve got to get one of those to give to my father.” Merely making conversation, I asked why—because her father was a rancher or a Montanan? “No,” she unforgettably said in a voice so choked it brought my own heart to the top of my throat. “Because I love him.”

why is the pattern of remembered instants so uneven, so gapped and rutted and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments in the mind, from childhood. And childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time.

Imagination is the single constant friend of the child, and even imagination does its share of betrayal, scowls itself in some stalled passage of time into scaredness and doubt.

Whatever the prospects might seem in a dreamy look around, the settlers were trying a slab of lofty country which often would be too cold and dry for their crops, too open to a killing winter for their cattle and sheep.

Like much else in the wresting of this continent, the homestead laws were working to a result, right enough, but not to the one professed for them.

They turned out to be landing sites, quarters to hold people until they were able to scramble away to somewhere else.

Those two had started out even when they put their first footprints in the snow on that hunting trip. Why death for one, and not the other? No answer comes, except that even starts don’t seem to count for much.

If he was headed nowhere grand in history, at least he seemed not to mind the route.

And the mystery in her could not be missed, the feeling that being around her somehow was like watching the roulette wheel in the Maverick make its slow, fanlike ambush on chance.

Late in the last century, when the town had figured it might grow, a few grandiose buildings had been put up, and they had not yet fallen down entirely.

Both coming onto eighty years old, the Badgetts were in the kind of outliving contest which very old couples sometimes seem to have, each aging only against the other instead of against time.

The Brekkes owned the one house in all of Ringling that looked as if it truly had been built to live in rather than just to hold boards up off the ground.

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.

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.

This cafe of hers and its place in the life of Dupuyer, I quickly came to see, reflected exactly this new landlady of mine: plain to look at, hearty the day long, and years-deep in polished affections.

In what must have been her fullest spate of forgiveness, she once apologized about one of the townswomen: Once you get used to her split infinitives, you’ll find she’s a very nice person.

The Reservation country yielded two items: earth to navigate over, and the bunchgrass, sprouting like countless elfin quivers of white-tipped arrows, to nourish the sheep. All else of life had to be fetched, if it first could be found.

He asked if I wanted to ride along. My nose sighted into a book, I said my usual No, not unless you need me. I recognize now that he did need me, in a way neither of us could have put to words then, but he said only no, he’d go alone, be back soon.

Do whatever it is ye want, son, and we’ll back ye just as far as we can.

An article adapted from my thesis was accepted by a scholarly quarterly; after lights-out one night, I corrected the proofs for it in the latrine. The Air Force had scanned my college degrees in journalism and slotted me to become a propeller repairman.

I found the base library, discovered that sergeants who would have stormed Iwo Jima with a cheese parer would not come near the place.

By instinct, I hung at the edges of the system, dodged duties when I could and doubled down to endurance when I had to. I was not a good soldier, nor a poor one: I was the usual fuel of history’s armies, the time-serving soldier.

Everything now had thinned to the whiffs holding him in life, like a breeze scudding a dried leaf barely above the ground.

Across twenty years, I had watched the two of them wear grooves into each other until at last the fit of their lives became a mutual comfort, a necessity bridging between them. Their time together had passed through armistice into alliance and on to acceptance, then to affection, and at last had become one of the kinds of love.

When his life toppled away, as it must soon, a presence would go out of my grandmother’s existence like something lacking in the air of her own breathing.

Late in the second day, the minister who would read the funeral service came to the house. Across the years, I can think of little more remote from my father’s range of mind than religion.

He soon asked what Bible reading I wished at the funeral service. The one where God speaks to Job from the whirlwind. Job 38, that would be? He sat higher in his chair. It’s not a . . . usual funeral choice. I said nothing. Well . . . The first few verses, I imagine? The readings usually are brief. . . . No, all of it. All the chapter. We’re in no hurry after these years.

Nothing new can be said of the loss of a parent; it all has been wept out a million million times.