I lived with my grandmother, who was the cook at the Double W, the big cattle ranch near Gros Ventre owned by the wealthy Williamson family. One of the few sources of entertainment anywhere on the ranch happened to be the shelf of sun-faded Reader’s Digest Condensed Books kept by Meredice Williamson in the otherwise unused parlor of the many-roomed house, and in her vague nice way she permitted me to take them to the cook shack to read, as long as Gram approved.
Gram had more than enough on her mind without policing my reading, and lately I had worked my way through the shipboard chapters of Mister Roberts, not so condensed that I couldn’t figure out what those World War Two sailors were peeking at through binoculars trained on the bathroom onshore where nurses took showers. Probably during that reading binge my eye caught on the fine print PLEASANTVILLE NY in the front of the book as the source of digested literature, and it did not take any too much inspiration, for me at least, to conjure a father back there peacefully taking apart books page by page and putting them back together in shortened form that somehow enriched them like condensed milk.
? ? ?
“WHY, I have those kind of books!” my fellow passenger vouched, squeezing her purse in this fresh enthusiasm. “I read The Egg and I practically in one sitting!”
“He’s real famous back there at the digest place,” I kept on. “They give him the ones nobody else can do. What’s the big fat book, Go like the Wind—”
“Gone with the Wind, you mean?” She was properly impressed any digester would tackle something like that. “It’s as long as the Bible!”
“That’s the one. See, he got it down to about like yay.” I backed that up with my thumb and finger no more than an inch apart.
“What an improvement,” she bought the notion with a gratified nod.
That settled matters down, thanks to a wartime story cooked down to the basics of bare-naked nurses and a helping of my imagination. The spacious woman took over the talking pretty much nonstop and I eased away from the U.S. mail a bit in relief and provided Uh-huh or Huh-uh as needed while the small bus cruised at that measured speed buses always seem to travel at, even in Montana’s widest of wide-open spaces. There we sat, close as churchgoers, while she chatted away the miles in her somber best dress that must have seen service at funerals and weddings, and me in stiff new blue jeans bought for the trip. Back then, you dressed up to go places.
And willing or not, I was now a long-distance traveler through time as well as earthbound scenery. When I wasn’t occupied providing two-syllable responses to my seatmate, this first leg of the journey was something like a tour of my existence since I was old enough to remember. Leaving behind Gros Ventre and its green covering of cottonwoods, Highway 89 wound past the southmost rangeland of the Two Medicine country, with Double W cattle pastured even here wherever there were not sheepherders’ white wagons and the gray sprinkles of ewes and lambs on the foothills in the distance. Above it all, the familiar sawtooth outline of the Rocky Mountains notched the horizon on into Canada. There where the South Fork of English Creek emerged from a canyon, during the Rainbow Reservoir construction job my folks and I had crammed into a humpbacked trailer house built for barely two. I had to sleep on the bench seat in back of the table, almost nose to nose with my parents squeezed into their bunk. But the thrill of being right there as bulldozer operators such as my father—the honest-to-goodness one, I mean—rode their big yellow machines like cowboys while building the dam that bottled the creek into the newest lake on earth never wore off.
Next on the route of remembering, however, butted up against a rocky butte right at the county line as if stuck as far out of sight as possible, a nightmare of a place reappeared, the grim rambling lodging house and weather-beaten outbuildings of the county poorfarm—we pronounced it that way, one word, as if to get rid of it fast. Once upon a time my father had graded the gravel road into the place and dozed out ditches and so on while my mother and I spent creepy days looking out a cabin window at the shabby inmates, that lowest, saddest category of people, wards of the county, pottering listlessly at work that wasn’t real work, merely tasks to make them do something.
Seeing again that terrifying institution where the unluckiest ended up gave me the shivers, but I found I could not take my eyes off the poorfarm and what it stood for. In most ways I was just a dippy kid, but some things get to a person at any age, and I fully felt the whipsaw emotions of looking at the best of life one minute, and this quick, the worst of it.