This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

by Ivan Doig

I am reminded that he was so slim down the waist and hips that the seat of his pants forever bagged in, and the tongue of his belt had to flap far past the buckle, as if trying to circle him twice.

Scotchmen and coyotes was the only ones that could live in the Basin, and pretty damn soon the coyotes starved out.

So to me now, looking at my father’s early life is something like the first glimpse ever into a stone-rippled reflection in a pond, and wondering how it can be that the likeness there repeats some of what I know is me, growing up at his side thirty years later, along with so much more that is only waver and blur and startlement, and so can only belong to some other being entirely.

It became the winter which the Basin people afterward would measure all other winters against.

what was happening, I can grasp now, was the misjudgment greater by far than their decision to be married: their mutual refusal to call it off. Each had a fear blockading that logical retreat.

His mother’s thick-set look had rebuilt itself on him—anvil shoulders and solid beams of arms, his neck a collar of heft, blocky power anywhere you looked—until he seemed almost a brother to the machinery under repair from his blunt, deft fingers.

Frances Carson Tidyman, who through a full generation had been scanning the students in her English classes as if they were muddy pebbles in a sluice box, had me under her steadiest focus.

At school, she would arrive in dark plain dresses so alike that it could hardly be traced when she changed one for another; bunned her hair into a great black burl at the back of her neck; clopped from class to class in the severest of shoes. She was buxom, much like Grandma with a half more plumped on all around; her mounding in front and behind was very nearly more than the lackadaisical dresses wanted to contain. Leaning forward from the waist as she hurried about, she flew among us like a schooner’s lusty figurehead prowing over a lazy sea.

For her the language held holy force, and she shuddered at any squander of it. 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.

with our shorn ewes we had on our hands a double thousand of the world’s most undressed creatures, caught in only their paunchy yellow-white carcasses like hospital invalids with their gowns suddenly ripped away.

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.