The home in which I was reared, after the rug-cleaning days, was quite normal once my folks had gotten the hang of conventional living and threats of eviction faded. My father got a job at the post office, and there he would remain for the rest of his days, his social life depending entirely on his war buddies. My mother, more solitary by nature, found her church fulfilling enough and required my father to attend once in a while, though he always returned baffled and dazed. In the end she took pity on him and excused him from going. He still went occasionally to please her. My mother and I usually cleared out when the men got together to tell war stories. In fact, “telling war stories” had been a euphemism for rambling, until we were much older or the men had died and we began to comprehend that these backyard chatterers had endured struggle and adventures far beyond anything we would see. My mother was an Arkansas hillbilly woman swept by war and marriage into a life she was slow to accept. She had all the virtues of subsistence living, needed very little — very little food, few material goods — and could make or grow nearly all of it. She medicated herself with things she gathered and cooked up, excepting only her Doan’s Pills, and remained thin and tough until the night she didn’t wake up. I have never known anyone as free of ambivalence as my own mother. What distinguished her from her Northern neighbors was the palpable sense that just on the edge of vision God and the devil were locked in mortal combat for her soul. She knew where she stood.
Gladys and Wiley, as my parents’ best friends, often received us on their ranch, White Bird. My mother occasionally saw Wiley at her church, usually when he was trying to change some habit or another. Church had helped him battle drink but had been no help with the cigarettes, as most of the men at Rock Holy Ghost were contented smokers. I worked at White Bird, though I was bereft of ranching skills. I flatter myself that Wiley and Gladys enjoyed my company, and I did everything I was asked, but I had little ability to find things to do on my own, as I really didn’t understand ranch work. I think they were just trying to inject a few bucks into our hard-pressed family.
Wiley was an excellent horseman and to him I owe my love of horses. He showed me that patience and careful observation of a horse’s ability to learn would be instructive in keeping me out of what he called train wrecks. I saw Wiley ride some cantankerous broncs when all else had failed, and the sight of him in the middle of an exploding outlaw, his treasured cigarette undisturbed, stays with me until this day, even though he told me that riding a bucking horse had as much to do with horsemanship as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel had to do with seamanship. Wiley saved lots of little nuggets like this, but they were all about horses. His favorite was a big claybank gelding named Train, the only horse I ever saw that could jog over sliding shale without losing its footing. I rode Madelyn, a small chestnut mare with snapping black eyes and a clever trot. I suppose she’s dead by now, but what fun we had together. Wiley was raised in the twilight of a world in which the horse was involved with everything. His father had dug the basement of the biggest hotel in Montana with horses. My father was in an army that used horses. I was only a generation away from a thousand years of horse-dependent farming, but horses were still very much on our minds. Cars just weren’t the same. I say that, dedicated as I was in later years to my Oldsmobile 88, and I no longer had a horse but wistfully attended horse auctions in Billings and elsewhere. I was at a dispersal of the Bar J Hat Pin, a hundred-thousand-acre cattle operation near Cohagen that was sold to a man who had made a fortune selling vitamins on television. The cowboys, mostly older men, were all let go, and they brought their saddle horses to the sale. They pooled their mounts in a few thirty-foot gooseneck trailers and followed along in dusty sedans. I never saw such a bunch of heartbroken old men as many of their ponies were consigned to the killer pen because of their age, to be sold for meat. It all reminded me of Wiley, who by that time was long gone.
I admired Gladys and Wiley for the very realistic way they went about their lives. Theirs was a meager operation that sent a hundred calves to market each year; they were obliged to grow some winter feed, mostly non-irrigated wild hay that Wiley harvested with his 9N Ford gas tractor. I got a great lesson in precision by watching Wiley squint through cigarette smoke as he dressed and adjusted the teeth of the sickle bar on his mower when we prepared our annual siege of the meadows. His equipment was old and minimal, but it enabled him to swathe the most beautiful mix of orchard grass and clover, which we made into small sixty-pound square bales that he could ferry around in his truck and throw here and there “without breaking my goddamn back.” His little herd of Hereford cattle always did well in those days before the Angus triumph, and he was expert at the treatment of sunburned udders, pro-lapses, and eye cancers that afflicted this pleasant breed in our part of the world. By contrast, my parents invested in a mail-order shoofly pie business that foundered in a matter of months, extinguishing my mother’s pride in her baking and landing them in yet more financial turmoil, probably at least the twentieth episode since the days of steam-cleaning rugs. I once thought that my father was a willing accomplice to all these gyrations, but I eventually learned that the few years of war had crowded out the rest of his life, and thinking about them, re-imagining them, and finally relating them to some view of life took up much of his time. I expect most of his fellow veterans shared the belief that what they had experienced could never be conveyed but rather was owned as a private matter or, at best, shared with one another. I remember noticing when his war cronies were around a kind of contempt for that vast portion of the world that hadn’t “been there.” I heard one of them say that he had more respect for a German soldier than an American civilian and what a shame it was you could legally shoot only the former. That was the generation that raised me, and in general they were happy enough to watch us piss away our opportunities on cheap amusements because we were a mob of untested ninnies anyway and there was no sense spoiling our fun.
It must have been the last summer I worked on the White Bird that Wiley took me up to his summer pasture to clean moss and slime out of the stock tanks. One was on a sandstone ridge overlooking a shallow draw. Atop the ridge, a tall tree held a nest of prairie falcons, and the newly fledged young were gliding down the draw to another tree full of indignant magpies, lording it over birds that would prey on them by the end of summer. We had a packhorse carrying some war surplus panniers that opened from the bottom, and in those we carried several hundred pounds of salt, which we distributed to the salt troughs arrayed near the springs. We hobbled Train and Madelyn and took a break. Wiley shook a Camel from its pack and captured it with his lips. Striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit the cigarette and drew in the smoke with an air of grateful relief. “We ship in the fall. You need to get out there and be somebody,” he said right out of the blue. I was finished with high school and had done well, though the poor ways of my family and our crackpot religion had made me something of a pariah possessing neither cowboy boots nor penny loafers. The story was always the same: someone would find a reason to be interested in me; then they would hit that little wall which consisted in their detecting my scrutiny of them. They weren’t wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. I perhaps made too much of my enthusiasm for animals, but they did provide me the feeling of being understood, something I badly craved. In my early years of medical practice and as a man about town, I would cultivate an entirely artificial hail-fellow-well-met personality fueled by alcohol, desperation, and my first taste of spending money.