Free Heart Earth by Ivan Doig Page A

Phoenix try, but not nearly as bad as that Williams siege, as any of a dozen heart-hammering emergency runs from the Faulkner Creek ranch. Surely to God this desert air is making Berneta better, isn't it? Yet how much better, if an utter stranger can pick out the trouble in her lungs as casually as the tumult in a seashell.
    My father stares at the miner. Finally he can say only: "She's ... thirty-one."

Charlie range-branding a calf.
    I can hear that day of mice and thread.

    The needle of Winona's portable sewing machine sings over the material to the treadlebeat of her foot, our kitchen table is gowned with the chiffon she is coaxing to behave into hem. This way and that and the other, she jigsaws the pattern pieces she and my mother have scissored out. My mother is no bigger than a minute in build and Winona minuter yet, so they are resorting to a lot in these prom dresses. The latest nomination has been ruffles.
    "I think ruffles would go okay, Nonie, don't you? Give us a little something to sashay?"
    "What the hey, we'll ruffle a bunch up and see," pronounces Winona. Her voice is bigger than she is, deep, next thing to gruff. "If I can find my cussed ruffler."The sewing machine treadle halts while Winona conducts a clinking search through her attachments box. "Did you have the radio on, Berneta, the other day? I didn't know a thing about it until the kiddos told me the next morning. I about dropped my teeth."
    "I wish to Halifax I hadn't heard, but I did. I had it on while I was in here trying to scrub down that old—"
    Where I am holed up behind the couch in the living room, as usual overhearing for all I am worth, comes the somersault snap of another mousetrap going off.
    "My turn at the little devils?" Winona volunteers.
    "I'll fling this one," says my mother, "you're doing so good on the dresses."
    "I thought Ringling has mice something fierce," Winona gives out with. "But cripes, this place!"

    "We tried a cat, did I tell you?" An old marmalade stray one, half its tail gone, whom my mother nonetheless cooed
kitten-katten
to. "He only lasted two days. Charlie swears the mice ran the cat out of town."
    Both women laugh, until I hear my mother putting on overshoes to take the expired mouse out to the garbage barrel, feel the wind make its presence all through the house when she opens the back door. Blowy April, a thousand and fifty miles north of our Arizona try. We have reverted to Montana, pulling out of Wickenburg at the end of March (
Kind of anxious to get home, see everybody, find out how I'm going to feel, figure out what we are going to do this summer,
my mother's last words to Wally from the desert cabin) to climb back up the continent through Flagstaff and Kanab and Provo and Salt Lake City and Pocatello and Dillon and Twin Bridges—and after all that, we still are nowhere much. This rented house on a side street in White Sulphur Springs is as dreary as it is drafty, its only companionable feature the mob of mice.
    Busy busy busy, Winona's Singer goes again. I laze in my own territory, the triangle cave of couchback and room corner it angles across. My books, my trucks, my tubby
Ault,
are cached in here with me out of the prevailing weather. The wind steadily tries to pry out the nearest windowpane.
Seems as though it blows & storms all the time,
my mother has reported this polar Montana spring to Wally,
we're having our March weather in April.
We are having gabstorms and earquakes, if I know anything about it. Since Thursday I've nearly listened myself inside out. This is a job with work to it, this spying on history. Who can tell what will distill next out of the actual air, after Thursday afternoon when my mother had her programs on,
Ma Perkins
or some such, I wasn't much listening until the news voice cut in: "We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin..."

    When the bulletin was over, I came out from behind the couch on all fours, then stood up curious into another age.
    In the