Ivan
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
I find myself rereading Ivan Doig's "This House of Sky". Someone expressed an interest in the Rocky Mountain Front and I suggested this book, to great results.
Ivan was born near White Sulphur Springs, Montana and spent time in the Valier region and near Dupuyer. Now there is a town that not all of you easterners can pronounce, let alone spell.
Here is how the book begins:
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.
The book ends shortly after his father's death at an advanced age. Ivan was then raised by his father and his maternal grandmother, two people who did not get along, but obviously worked nicely to raise the boy.
He ends up at Northwestern University, where I, who did spend some time in Pondera county as well, found myself eight or nine years after he. So the book touches on several places and times that I know.
But even if our spaces did not overlap, the appeal of the book is its very well written heartfelt tale. I suggest that you find yourself a copy and read it.
This particular edition has a newly-written preface that ends with:
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."
There are many other resonances that I find with Ivan. A few choice pieces:
School struck me as kind of a job where you weren't allowed to do anything; ...
And
Charles Campbell Doig was nine when his father died, made old enough in that instant to help his mother and his brothers carry the body in from the dark garden dirt. It must have been the first time he touched against death. And touched ahead, too, somewhere in his scaredness, to the live he was goling to have from then on that lamed family, on that flinty Basin homestead.
On this reading, I particularly notice the rhythm which resonates with my memory of family tales:
For some reason I can't summon back, once in those years Dad and I check into the Sherman Hotel for a night.
Ah, there are many more.
So I heartily recommend this book to anyone who has a Father. I particularly recommend this book to anyone from Montana, or for those who seek to understand those that are. And if you grew up in Pondera County and have not yet read this book, well, there is still time, isn't there?