This House of Sky (33 page)

Northwestern was tagged at the time with the reputation of being a "country-club university"—an epithet as exotic to me as profanity from Mars; Greek Row was ridiculous, but not mandatory—yet it also had redoubts of famous professionalism in its schools of music, speech, and journalism. In the school of journalism I tapped luck one more time, drawing as my advisor a new faculty member named Ben Baldwin. A cherub-faced man with a passion for work, he had among the batch of students assigned to him a handful of us from the West, and recognized at once our small-town capacity for chores and perseverance. Again, as under Frances Tidyman's gaudy wing, I was given encouragement and answered with effort.

One thing further I gained from Latham House and Northwestern—a room of my own, the first of my life. Throughout Latham's welter of odd-angled walls and random hallways were a few leftover pouches of space which had been made into single rooms, and in my junior year I qualified for the Shoe, a tiny top-floor room nicknamed for its shoebox dimensions. There was barely space to edge into the Shoe between the cot crowded against one wall and the dresser against the other. The metal clothes closet for the room stood outside the door in the hallway, like a fat man thwarted by a narrow gate. My first act of occupancy was to congest the Shoe further: I saw the chance to swap its spindly desk for a huge, handsomely-shelved one down the hall. With the biggest accomplice I could recruit, I emptied the Shoe of all its furniture, dismantled as much of the pirated desk as I could, wedged the rest into the room and across the far wall, and reassembled the great piece to bulk there like an oak galleon in a bottle. Alone and thoroughly outfitted, I levered my grades up more, multiplied my reading. Across the shelves of my vast desk, Dinesen began to murmur beside Faulkner, Turgenev to tip hats with Wilder.

Dearest Ivan. Well dear toe are done at McTaggarts. Dad gave him notice last nite that we'll stay on another week more. Then dear we are going back south to Ringling to live. Its so awful lonesome up here what with you gone away and no place of our own. The darned old days are longer than ever. Dad don't mind so much as he is with McTaggart or out and doing somewhere but he says he is willing to go we don't have anything here to hold us. So when you come home Christmas come on the train to Ringling. Can you cash in the one train ticket for the other.... Your loveing grandma.

Dearest Ivan. Just some lines to tell you we are counting the days till you come home for summer. I am at the Higgins ranch outside Ringling with Dad now. Cooking for the crew.
Dad says he can get you on the crew here for summer. That way we can be all together for a while again there is a place upstairs in the cookhouse here for you to sleep. The job will be haying mostly they put up a whole lot of hay.... Your loveing grandma.

Behind the bale stack, the pair of us sat waiting for the morning to inch on. Jeff swore steadily, like a sewer gurgling after a downpour:
sparrowheaded sonofabitch him anyhow. ...'II show the bastard, he can keep his goddamn stack fences and do the sonsabitches hisself....
Jeff was burly, bright-nosed with decades of boozing, tobacco-stained at the corners of his mouth from the splatters he exploded to punctuate the cusswords. His forehead sloped back under his greasy hat, and his mind sloped off into hatreds and furies I could scarcely imagine. In the bunkhouse after breakfast, he had crossed tempers with the rancher as the day's work was doled out. It had been only an instant, Jeff going hard-mouthed as quickly as he had flared. Now, the two of us sent out together to fence haystacks, he had been in eruption all morning, in one spate sledgehammering posts into the ground as if he were a fence-building machine, in the next plopping behind the haystack to curse some more. I
know he's the world's bastard to work with,
Dad had said,
but he's an old hand on this place and if you say anything against him, there'll be hard feelings for all three of us. Stand the scissorbill if you can, will ye?
I thought back to my farming summers at Dupuyer and Valier, alone on a tractor with the north mountains to sight on over the silent rich pattern of fields, and began to count the time—July
suck-egg sonofabitch
August
never seen such a jangled-up spread
half of September
brain like a bedbug—
until I would step abroad the train toward Northwestern again.

***

Back from whatever chore had taken me into Ringling, I turned the ignition key to kill the motor of the pickup and stared with dread at the cookhouse. Then I stepped down and went in to say what had to be told. Dad quizzed me with a quick look.
It's Angus,
I said.
I heard it in town. His horse fell with him while he and the boys were working calves. They've got him at the hospital in White Sulphur.
My father whitened and whispered:
Just-like-Jim.
But there was to be a grim difference: this second brother of his to die off the back of a horse lay unconscious for more than two years before the last life went from him.

Each trip to and from Northwestern hinged into a midmorning wait between trains in St. Paul. I made it a habit to leave Union Station and walk the neighborhood, nosing into a used-book store, dawdling over coffee in one half-awake cafe or another, and going at last back toward the depot along a hill street overlooking the Mississippi River, which I liked for its great fjordlike channel gouging through the city.

The coldest of these mornings, as I stood at the river overlook a last minute, a noise scuffed close behind me. I turned quickly to find two tan-skinned men tottering in broken shoes and wavery caps and dirt-stiffened blue jeans.

Buddy,
the bigger and less drunk one began to recite,
you ever heard of Ira Hayes? Ira Hayes was Navajo like us. Come off the Gila River Res'vation. Wait, buddy. Listen. You know about Iwo Jima in that war? Sonuvabitch island there in that war? When they put that flag up there on that Iwo Jima, Ira Hayes was one of 'em. Know that, buddy? An' he come home, big hero. An' one morning they find him dead on the ground. Like that. Drowned in his own puke. Passed out, choked to death in his own puke, buddy. Muscatel got him. Helluva way for dying, buddy.
The second
Navajo wobbled, tried to firm himself somewhere between dignified listening and the threatening hunch of his mate. I used the interruption, put a silver dollar in the air before me as I had one other time. This time, it was shakily grabbed.

The pitcher's mound at Wrigley Field swelled from the infield grass like the back of a giant turtle swimming in a dark green sea—and atop it, I was throwing as teeterily as if the turtle had caught the hiccups. My stride awkward on the curved height, a pitch to Grant in the batter's box would fly high and away from him, then the next one explode off the dirt two feet in front of the plate.

Schulte, behind his camera tripod, began to look dismayed. The May morning was his—his idea to meet a course assignment in film-making with a quick reel of baseball instruction, his notion that because Grant and I knew something about baseball we would be his cast, his family connection with the management of the Chicago Cubs which ushered the trio of us into the empty stadium—and his film whirring away in frames of me firing baseballs to sky and earth.

I drew a pitcherly breath, looked up at the colossal shell of grandstand roof above us, its high straight fines fitted onto the sky above the green-and-buff geometry of the baseball field. Full of inhaled inspiration, I grinned into the giddy expanse of it all and got down to business, lobbing the ball now as tamely as if playing catch with a toddler. Grant cautiously timed the spongy throws and smashed ground hits which went whopping in huge easy bounces into the outfield. Encouraged, Schulte filmed busily:
lob-splak!
—whop, lob-
splak!
—whop.

What else do toe show?
he asked at last.
I've got to fill five minutes of reel.
I trotted to first base, poised myself a short three steps off the bag, broke for second with my left
leg coming across to put me in full stride, splayed into a ragged hook slide. Twice more as Schulte shot. Then Grant fielded balls I rolled to him at shortstop, maneuvering massively as a skating bear to scoop into the caretended dirt and paw the ball across to an invisible first baseman. Each thrown ball gave off, an instant after expectation, a hard
whunk
as it ended its catchless throw against the grandstand, as if the geometric gravity which drew such heaves into a first baseman's glove had broken down.

Grant shortstopped on and on, his barrage of pellets thwacking against a cliff of wood. Then I jogged to the outfield and caught balls Grant lobbed high for me, the dotlike white satellite each time diving to me with surprising dazzle down the backdrop of thousands of vanished spectators. My throws, on a single bounce across home plate, skidded through to make the eerie delayed
whunk
, metallic now, against the foul screen.

At last Schulte doubtfully said he supposed he had filmed enough. Now, my wage in the bargain we had set. I carried a bucket of balls to home plate. Swinging a bat as hard as I could, I found I could mortar a ball to where the center fielder might stand and catch it with a casual saluting flip of his glove.

I walked from the plate, around the high bubble of pitcher's mound, to second base. Standing over the square wad of canvas, I tossed, slugged hard, and now one after another the balls flew away to arc out over the ivy-dressed outfield walls, dropping into the bleachers in wild clunking ricochets through the empty seats. I hit bucket after bucket of them until my hands began to wear raw.

Dearest folks.... Professor Baldwin has offered me a summer ph here at college. I would he teaching and counseling in an institute they run here for high school students in
terested in journalism.... It would be for five weeks, and I can earn more than I can at Higgins' all summer. But it would mean I won't be able to come home until middle of August...

Dear son.... If you want the summer job back there you ought to take it. Your Grandma and I will miss you and wish we could all be together again this summer, but it don't always work out that way. We will be happy to see you when you come home later on ... With love, Dad.

Early in my senior year, when I had begun to write fillers for a magazine in Milwaukee and when an article of mine was the only one by an undergraduate in the glossy new quarterly being published by the school of journalism, Holden, my closest friend in Latham, squinted toward me through his steady fog of cigarette smoke and said:
Damn you, Doig, you're just gonna be bigger than any of us, aren't you?
I thought that over, as I did everything, and faced my judgment on myself:
No, Thomas, not necessarily so.

As if arguing against myself., in the spring of 1961 I finished up my intended four years at Northwestern by being awarded a scholarship for a year of graduate study. I bargained a military deferment out of my draft board, and set to work again at the school of journalism. A pair of messages markered my completion of that year. When the last pages of my thesis were handed back from their final reading by one of my research advisors, a note was clipped atop:
Around 1836 and 1837, people used to stand on the dock in New York and wait for the latest installment of the Pickwick Papers. With something of the same anticipation, I've waited for and read the chapters of your thesis.
The other arrived from Grandma:
Dearest Ivan. Well dear one I have sad
news for you. Mrs Tidaman that you liked so much at Valier died a couple days ago. I'll send you the clipping out of the Gt Falls paper when I get my hands on it. Gertie says in her letter that Mrs Tidaman fell at school and broke her hip and died somehow of that. I'm sorry dear I know she was a wonderfull person to you....

At dawn, the pewter sky beginning to warm to blue above the Castles across the valley, Dad and I already were stepping from the Jeep at timberline on Grass Mountain. Grandma had climbed out of bed when we did, given us coffee and sweet rolls, made sandwiches out of her thick crisp-crusted bread, saw us out the door with:
Don't bring home more grouse than all of Ringling can eat.
Beside her on the porch Spot stood planted in astonishment and alarm that he wasn't being invited into the Jeep with us. Dad hesitated:
No, fella. Not today.

September frost underfoot, a testing frost, the lightest dust of white on the broad bunchgrass crest of mountain. Dad handed me the single-shot .22, then the small box of bullets to put in my jacket pocket. I shook out a cartridge, barely longer than my thumbnail, clicked it into the breech. Carrying the light rifle underhand on the side of my body away from Dad, I started along the mountain slope beside him.

He had a hunter's voice, which could soften just enough not to carry far and yet be heard clearly. My own nosedived in and out of mutter as I answered him. He showed me herding sites remembered from three decades before, game trails angling up and across the summit like age-lines on a vast forehead, homestead splotches on the saged skirts of the valley far below us. In trade, I told him everything I knew of my half-year ahead, basic training at the Air Force base in San Antonio, a technical school probably elsewhere in
Texas for the rest of those months. The first grouse caught us both in midstep as it flailed like a hurled wad of gray leaves into the air in front of us.

That must've been one of yours,
I said.

And who's carrying the gun along like a crowbar froze to his hand? As
ready and free a laugh as I could ever remember from my father.
Ye could at least have throwed it at him.

In minutes, I shot the next grouse before it could fly. I handed Dad the rifle:
Here, see if you learned anything from that.
I put the bird in the sack he held out to me, followed it seconds later with the one he shot from the top of a log fifty yards away.
I like to give mine a bit of a chance, ye see, instead of sneakin' up till I'm standin' on their tailfeathers.