This House of Sky (2 page)

Not wanting to spend my time as a kind of typewriting tourist—and also beginning to feel worn down by the magazine life, which as I got better and better at it seemed to pay worse and worse—I suggested to Ann that I would put in practically full time on the Montana manuscript until we had a hundred decent pages and, if she wanted to handle it, we'd send off that sample to book publishers. She said sure.

During that year, 1976, my work on the manuscript appeared to me to be going better. One diary entry: "Some of last week's work about the Stockman Bar ... has things in it I didn't know I could do." So, just after Thanksgiving, I had accumulated enough pages for the
manuscript sample and Ann had run her finger down the rosters of major publishers in
Literary Market Place
and chosen the name of a senior editor from each. We did a cover letter, made multiple photocopies of the manuscript sample, and mailed it out into the world to six editors at a time.

Over the next few months, our first batches of submissions brought us back two standard rejection slips and a growing series of semibaffled, sometimes rather wistful letters from editors.

From Simon and Schuster: "Doig's experiences and his feel for the time and place are wonderful—here and there a line about a mountain or a remembered phrase quoted from his father would strike the perfect chord. But ... I don't think it would be a successful trade book in its present shape."

From St. Martin's Press: "You do write beautifully—and what marvelous recall you have for childhood perceptions. Unfortunately, much as I do like your work, I find that what you have here is not at all commercial."

From Holt, Rinehart and Winston: "Although Ivan Doig writes intelligently and well, I don't think his memoirs are going to add up to a publishable trade book."

And then, after the
buts
and
unfortunately
s and
although
s, the lucky thirteenth letter:

"I have read Ivan Doig's manuscript sample and like it. It is an unusual kind of book, and I need a little more time to give you a final decision about whether we can publish it. I'll get back to you soon, but I wanted you to know it is under serious consideration."

Signed: "Carol Hill, Senior Editor, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich."

The date on that letter was the 24th of March, 1977.
It had taken about four months, vastly less than I thought it would, and
This House of Sky
had lucked onto its perfect editor.

Ann Nelson at once did some dickering with Carol Hill—levered the advance up from $3,500 to a whopping $4,500—and we had a book contract.

All that remained, of course, was to write the last three-fourths of the book in the next six months.

I at least knew what was needed first: a summer in Montana, to revisit the scenes of the book and to talk with more of the people who had known my family. It became a summer enormous far beyond the calendar, those middle months of 1977, as complicated and astonishing a time as I can imagine. A kind of stopless ricochet through the past, to places and persons of twenty and thirty years before.

In White Sulphur Springs, the only place Carol and I could find to rent was a set of rooms in the old John Ringling family mansion. A castle of prosperity it had been to me when I was a schoolboy in White Sulphur and the Ringlings were still circus kings; now the two of us rattled around in the place with plumbers and painters and carpenters who were trying to cobble it back together as an apartment house.

In the village of Ringling still stood the shacky little house my grandmother and I shared when I was eleven and twelve years old. In the Tierney Basin still stood the log house built by my father's father on the homestead that first rooted the Doigs into Montana.

One evening I tried a long shot, a call from the phone booth in front of the hospital in White Sulphur Springs—I saw a lot of that phone booth that summer; it inevitably had in it either a tumbleweed or several empty Olympia beer cans—a phone call to the rancher who had inherited the ranch near Bozeman where my parents were herding
sheep when my mother died, in the summer of 1945. Does that herding cabin back in the Bridger Mountains still exist? I asked.

"It does," answered Horace Morgan. "I'm going in there first thing in the morning to salt cattle. If you can get here, you can go in with me."

We got there.

I can pick out only two constancies in that mad whirl of a summer: Carol perpetually taking photos to back up my notecard descriptions of the places of the past and me perpetually going out of the apartment, tape recorder in hand and notebooks in pocket, like a door-to-door salesman. And the voices from the past began to form a summer chorus: Tony Hunolt, who had been choreboy at the great Dogie Ranch when my father and mother worked there and now, in the last year of his life, was swamping out the local grocery store; Harold Chadwick, garageman of Dupuyer from my high school years, with his memory of the Metis fugitive Toussaint Salois sitting by a campfire in a buffalo coat; Kathryn Donovan, my mother's eloquent teacher at the one-room Moss Agate school; these and fifteen or so others who ended up speaking in the book.

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

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...