This House of Sky Read online

  I know no way to adequately describe, or even account for, what happened next. Carol and I were back in Seattle by about the first of August, and on the ninth of December, the hundred-thousand-word manuscript of This House of Sky was finished.

  During those blurred writing weeks my diary went into near-collapse—probably an accurate representation of my condition—but I do remember warning myself that my editor, Carol Hill, was never going to go for all the detail I had crammed into the manuscript and I had better set my mind to cut ten or fifteen thousand words after she got a look at it.

  Away to New York went the 410 typed pages, and then, about six weeks later, on the 19th of January, 1978, as I was stepping onto the jogging track at my wife's college, Carol drove up to the gate, told me Carol Hill had phoned from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and I'd better scoot home and call her right back.

  There is a diary entry of what happened next, and it begins:

  Mark this day with a white stone.

  Carol Hill in her first few sentences about the manuscript had said over the telephone to me: "Spectacular ... beautiful ... elegant ... wonderful" and "beautiful" again.

  Then her best words of all, the ones I really needed to hear: "And we'll publish it this fall."

  In the next couple of weeks, Carol Hill got back to me about the line editing she wanted done on the manuscript. She asked me to rewrite a total of three pages; to move all the material about sheep—specifically, the rhythmic sequence I have of counting a band of sheep—into one place; to reconsider one word; to cut two sentences at one spot and a short paragraph at another. And that was utterly all the editing she wanted done on a manuscript I had thought might need to be doctored by thousands of words.

  So, This House of Sky's progress was going along like a dream. But in the publishing world, the governing god sometimes is not Morpheus but Murphy. What could go wrong did go wrong the night of March 31, when word reached me that there had been a wholesale upheaval at the publishing house, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The editor-in-chief had been dismissed and several other editors and top executives were said to be gone as well.

  Apprehension doesn't come close to describing my mood the next morning as I dialed to see whether Carol Hill—and This House of Sky—had survived the purge. But her distinctive energy-charged voice came over the line as usual and said yes, she had survived, work was going along as ever at HBJ, Sky was progressing through the production process, and that I really shouldn't worry about any of this—because she was the new editor-in-chief.

  There followed the period of nothing-to-do-but-wait, until the book's end-of-September publication date. But around noon on the sixth of September, I came back to the house after an errand to the drugstore and found a message on my phone machine from a friend who said he'd seen the review of This House of Sky in the latest issue of Time.

  What review? I said to myself.

  The review in Time, the machine repeated when I replayed the message.

  By evening I had seen that review, and it was a writer's dream. No snide asides, no news magazine cutesiness; just long, miraculous patches of pure quotation from This House of Sky.

  The next week, a review in the Los Angeles Times. Praise again, and their reviewer, the great bookman Robert Kirsch, called my father an American hero.

  Four days later, the Chicago Tribune. Praise yet again, This House of Sky credited with "all the poetry and lyricism, all the 'blood being' of a mustang running on open range."

  This was starting to be fun.

  It got to be even more fun when Sky arrived at the bookstores and by the end of the year had sold 15,003 copies. The reviews continued to flabbergast me; of thirty-two reviewers of national stature, thirty praised the book.

  By year's end I'd gone to work on my next book, Winter Brothers, and was back into a writing trance when the phone rang again one morning. The call was from Archie Satterfield, book review editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who had become an instant champion of Sky when he read it in galley proofs and was eagerly following its progress. As usual he asked me how sales of the book were going, any more good reviews, etcetera. "Oh, and congratulations on your nomination."

  "Nomination?" I say.

  "Good grief, Doig," says Satterfield. "Don't you know This House of Sky has been nominated for the National Book Award?"

  As it turned out, the mountains of Nepal were somehow judged to be more exotic than the mountains of Montana, and Peter Matthiessen's fine narrative of his trek across the Himalaya, The Snow Leopard, won the award. I think, now, that my sufficient award was that This House of Sky happened. More than 170,000 copies later, the book continues to ricochet along in its whats-gonna-happen-next fashion. Sky is used in college courses in autobiography, biography, history, and literature, has been anthologized to a fare-thee-well, been translated into German, read on National Public Radio, distributed in audiocassette by the thousands, and when the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a nationwide discussion program focusing on books about family, This House of Sky was the leadoff book. Whenever I've made bookstore appearances for any of the eight books I have written since Ann Nelson and Carol Hill and Carol Doig and I managed to retrieve my father and my grandmother and myself from relic-hood, people still queue up for Sky.

  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."

  —Ivan Doig

  October 25, 1999

  TIME SINCE

  Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped.

  The remembering begins out of that new silence. Through the time since, I reach back along my fathers tellings and around the urgings which would have me face about and forget, to feel into these oldest shadows for the first sudden edge of it all.

  It starts, early in the mountain summer, far back among the high spilling slopes of the Bridger Range of southwestern Montana. The single sound is hidden water—the south fork of Sixteenmile Creek diving down its willow-masked gulch. The stream flees north through this secret and peopleless land until, under the fir-dark flanks of Hatfield Mountain, a bow of meadow makes the riffled water curl wide to the west. At this interruption, a low rumple of the mountain knolls itself up watchfully, and atop it, like a sentry box over the frontier between the sly creek and the prodding meadow, perches our single-room herding cabin.

  Alone here on our abrupt tiny shelf, the three of us eased through May and the first twenty-six days of June secure as hawks with wind under our wings. Once a week, the camptender from the home ranch would come the dozen miles of trail to us. The blaze-faced sorrel he rode and the packhorse haltered behind would plod in from the shadows which pooled in our valley under the shouldering slopes, until at last the rider stepped off from his stirrups into the cabin clearing and unknotted from the packsaddle the provision boxes, dark-weathered in their coverings of rawhide, which carried our groceries and mail. My father, with his wise tucked grin, surely tossed a joke: Hullo, Willie. Bring us that side of T-bones and a barrel of whiskey this time, did ye? I've told ye and told ye, our menu needs some fancying up ... As surely, my mother would have appeared from the cabin, her small smile bidding the caller to the tin mug of coffee in her hands. As surely again, I would have been at the provision boxes as my father began to unpack them, poking for the tight-rolled bundle of comic books which came for me with the mail.

  Minutes later the camptender would be resaddled and riding from sight. For the next seven mornings again, until his hat and shoulders began to show over the trail crest another time, only the three of us nestled there in the clean blue weather
of the soundless mountains.

  Three of us, and the sheep scattered down meadow slopes like a slow, slow avalanche of fleeces. Before I was born, my mother and father had lived other herding summers, shadowing after the sheep through the long pure days until the lambs were fattened for shipping. Ivan, you wouldn't believe the grouse that were on those slopes then. The summer we were married and went herding on Grass Mountain, all that country was just alive with grouse then. I'd shoot them five at a time, and your mother—your mother'd cook them at noon when the sheep had shaded up. We'd eat one apiece and seal the rest in quart jars and cool them in the spring water so we'd have them cold for supper. They were the best eatin' in this world. Lot of times we'd have them for breakfast too, before we moved camp. Y'see, on forest reserve you're supposed to move camp about every day. The first summer there on Grassy, we moved camp fifty-eight times in the first sixty days. We had a brand new box camera we were awful proud of, and we'd take a picture of our campsite every time. Your mother...

  The pair of words would break him then, and fool that I could be, I would look aside from his struggling face. In these afteryears, it is my turn for the struggle inside the eyes and along the drop of throat, for I have the album pages of those campsites along the ridgelines and the swale meadows of their first summer mountain.

  Off the stiff black pages, two almost-strangers grin up into my eyes, like past neighbors seen again across too many years, and I wonder at all I know and do not know of this set of lives:

  My father looks stronger than I ever knew him, and even more handsome, the straight broad lines of his face framed cleanly around the dimple-scar in the center of his chin. His stockman's hat has been crimped carefully, sits on his head at a perfect angle. His shoulders line out level and very wide for a man just five and a half feet tall, but this strength at the top of him trims away to a lower body slender as a boy's. 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. Certain photos catch this father of mine as almost mischievous, cocking the dry half-grin which sneaks onto my own face as I look at him. In others there is a distance to him, a sense that except for accident he might be anywhere else in the world just now, and maybe a being entirely unlike the one I know here. In any pose, he looks at the camera squarely, himself a kind of lens aimed back at the moment.

  To see him, the several hims encamped across the pages, is to begin listening for the burred voice, the retellings, the veers and jogs of his life:

  Ivan, I think I'll take on those two hands of sheep for McGrath. He's a bearcat to work for, but the son-of-a-buck knows livestock and he knows how to turn money....

  That place was a haywire outfit from the start, or I'll put in with you. They had men on that place that by God you wouldn't send to fetch a bucket of water or they'd bring it back upside down. Cliff and I stood it for about a week, then we told the boss to write 'er out for us, we were heading for town....

  This doctor now, I don't know about him. If I was in as good a shape as he says I am, I wouldn't be sick atall....

  Again the sentences snap; I see the handsome steady mouth clamp itself, the chin-dot of scar come close beneath, small but deep like a tool mark nicked in when his strong head was carved. A single quick notch at the bottom of his face, as if it might be the first lightest scratch of calamity on him.

  But my mother: my mother, here in some summer of early marriage, already seems frail, so slim—too light a being to last there so near the challenge of timberline. Again, because I know what was to come, I believe myself into the notion that I can read it all gathering on the album's somber paper. I print into my mind from her every pose how fine-boned she was, hardly more than tiny, with a roundish, slightly wondering face where most of my own is quickly read. I coax from the photos all detail which seems to tell the sickness eroding in her; the pinch across her slender shoulders, the eyes which are almost too calm and accepting.

  But the one thing which would pulse her alive for me does not come. I do not know the sound of her voice, am never to know it. Instead she is wound in the other voices tracked through the years. Her teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in a sea of sage: The first morning of school, here I saw this girl coming up on a black horse, just coming as fast as ever she could. And it was your mother, and she was rushing up to tell me there were mice in the well, and not to use that water. The rancher's wife who had neighbored with her in some summer of haying: I wouldn't see anyone for hours, and I would go across to your house and there your mother would be reading to you. She'd read by the hour, on a hot afternoon she'd keep you so cool and quiet just sitting there reading ... She was so quiet, had such a soft fine voice. The forest ranger who oversaw their range that early season on Grass Mountain: She could do about anything a man could—ride, sling a pack, any of that. She even knew how to trap. We talked sometimes about runnin' a trapline, and I know she did in winters later on. But she had to be careful, y'know, anything she did, or she'd choke right down, short of breath.

  Yes. This album of summers again, as if I might finger through the emulsion patterns to the moments themselves. At the backs of my familiar photoed strangers, always a forest, and always sunlight spattering down through the pine boughs to their rough shirt fronts. The canvas slopes of their tent are triangled grayly at the back of the day camp. Two black herding dogs, ears up in dog surprise, study the lens. A pair of saddlehorses gawk in from the grassy fringes of camp as if afraid any attention might go by them. One creature in these early pictures does not fit, and this intrigues me—the pet which is being stroked in my mother's hands. Those first seasons of following the sheep, my parents kept with them in their daily sift through the forest a cat, an independent gray-and-white torn they had named Pete Olson. Somehow, amid the horses and dogs and sheep, and the coyotes and bobcats which ranged close to camp, Pete Olson rationed out his nine lives in nightly prowls of the mountain. Then as camp was moved each morning, he would be cradled like a prince between somebody's lap and the saddle pommel as the horses shouldered through the timber. My parents were childless then, told by doctors that they might always be. If the prediction had held, if I had never been, would any but the astral glance of a cat ever have seen into those far summers of theirs? Would that time be different for not having met my eyes?

  Yet the two are met, and in this season on the final mountain, the surprising drifter ducking through swags of pine branches on the back of a horse has become me. Later, my father would never tire of telling what a cantankerous source of pride I made in that riding family. The only thing we could get you on was a sawbuck pack saddle. You know what they are, like a little sawhorse setting on top of the saddle rigging. Hard as a rasp to sit on, but you straddled in there like it was the only thing going. Ride sometimes half a day in it. You were a stubborn little dickens. This, with the grin up at me as I loomed half a head over him. As I tried to find in myself that small flinty son from the past.

  Wherever it may point, my own clearest moment of myself in that far summer has just the mood of sober cussedness he recalled. I had been given a bow and a few arrows, likely an early gift for my birthday. Time and again, my arrows whacked far from the paper target my father had tacked to the side of the cabin. I see myself pouting it out, kicking at the tan bunchgrass as I think, as the creek makes its shying mutter. Then I edge close to the cabin wall until the round sharp tip of the arrow hangs inches from the paper. I let go the bowstring, and the bullseye slashes open with a hard snapping sound.

  That, with every instant of remembering clear as the noon air. Yet of my mother's death, whatever I try, just a single flicker, dim and hurtful, ever is called back: the asthma has claimed her, there are only two breathings in the cabin now, my father is touching me awake in lantern glow, his shadow hurled high up onto the wall, to say she is dead, Ivan, your mother is dead, sobbing as the words choke him.

  The start of memor
y's gather: June 27, 1945. I have become six years old, my mother's life has drained out at 31 years. And in the first gray daylight, dully heading our horses around from that cabin of the past, my father and I rein away toward all that would come next.

  Memory is a set of sagas we live by, much the way of the Norse wildmen in their bear shirts. That such rememberings take place in a single cave of brain rather than half a hundred minds warrened wildly into one another makes them sagas no less. By now, my days would seem blank, unlit, if these familiar surges could not come. A certain turn in my desk chair, and the leather cushion must creak the quick dry groan of a saddle under my legs—and my father's, and his father's. The taste in the air as rain comes over the city is forever a flavor back from a Montana community too tiny to be called a town. A man, the same alphabet of college degrees after his name as mine, trumps in a debating point during a party argument, and my grandmother's words mutter in me on cue that he grins like a jackass eating thistles.

  Rote moments, these, mysteryless perhaps in themselves. It is where they lead, and with what fitful truth and deceit, that tantalizes. If, somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself—to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence—if this is what must be, 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. Think once more how the world wavers and intones above us then. Parents behave down toward us as if they are tribal gods, as old and unarguable and almighty as thunder. Other figures loom in from next door and the schoolyard and a thousand lanes of encounter, count coup on us with whatever lessons of life they brandish, then ghost off. We peek into ourselves and find deviling there as well. Riddles are delight at its most tricksterish high chant: Thirty-two white horses on a red hill. Now they're tramping, now they're champing, now they're standing still. Where are they? Bafflement to the other, triumph to you: In your mouth! And darker frolic: this first sudden set of years also is the one season of life, for most of us, when we can kill emotion-lessly—or worse, simply from curiosity, to see how the tiny mice prodded from their field nest are different, dead, from the tiny mice, alive, of an instant ago. Cruelty comes new to us, and astonishing, yet we are at our cruelest to each other, mocking playmates home in sobs. Marauders, we are marauded, too. Darkness blankets down around a child as if the planet's caves have emptied all their shadows over him. Everything fights the child's ambitions—fences reach too high, streets stretch too wide, days too short and too long. 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.