Heart Earth by Ivan Doig

was the true tribe, she and the four kids bound together forever by having survived the utmost that my grandfather and the cow ghetto could bring down on them. If a Doig clan buckaroo married into the family, then he had simply been lucky enough to gain himself some family, by her notion of it.

    So, the motives I found in those factions that I grew up between still howl true. As far as they go. What I was too near to my father and my grandmother to see was their greater ground of dispute, beyond a winter of veer to Arizona, beyond the ornery jousts of being in-laws. Their deadly tussle was over my mother.
    "...Not another cookie. Honest to Eleanor, Mom, you'll have him so spoiled..."
    "...Growing boy needs a little something to grow on, don't you, Ivan, yes..."
    All said and done, although for an iron eon yet it would not be, the contest of spite between my grandmother and my father was about treatment of my mother. Nothing to do with medical terms, nor in any physical or even emotional sense; one thing neither could ever accuse the other of was lack of pure devotion to the girl and woman Berneta. Call it the geography of risk, of how best to situate my mother. My grandmother desperately wished that my parents (my father) would simply choose someplace in Montana—right about across the road from her would be ideal—and hunker in there at whatever the job happened to be and hope for the best. Surely-for-gosh-sakes it couldn't be good for Berneta to be living here, there, and everywhere, could it? To my father, just as desperately trying out footings until one felt secure for us, the worse risk was to sink so economically low we couldn't afford my mother's medical costs and whatever else might help her. He saw permanent ranch wagework as more of the mire of Moss Agate for her, and surely-to-Jesus-H.-Christ that can't be the best anybody can do, can it?

    "...sure awful glad, dear, to have you back where..."
    "...couldn't tell beforehand how Phoenix..."
    Now comes the moment my mother has been bracing toward ever since we arrived on this visit. My grandmother wants to know where next; where my mother and my father and I will spend the summer.
    "Gee gosh, Berneta!" Grandma lets out when told, which from her is high-octane blue language. "I dread to think of you out there!"
    "We don't know for absolute sure we're going," is resorted to by my mother the daughter. "Maybe something closer will turn up."
    "You just get back from old Arizona and then you're gone to out there.'Tt is the mark of my grandmother that she can blurt this and yet not have it scald out as complaint or blame or pain or plea, but simply her thought of the moment. The headturn of her endurance toward what needed to be faced next.
    I help myself to the cookie plate, in child's sly wisdom that another oatmeal cookie or two won't even weigh in the scale of what's occurring around me just now. My mother is busy telling my grandmother whatever good sides she can of our next notional move. My grandmother would dearly like to be reassured but, with a catch in her throat, at last can't help but sound her worst warning:
    "You be careful with yourself, dear."
    To that my mother utters nothing, for answer is none. If careful could make a great enough difference in the chokehold in her lungs, then that most enormous leap of care, my father's uprooting of us to the lenient altitude and climate of Arizona, ought to have done it. What Berneta Ringer, now Berneta Doig, has grasped out of the discard of her Moss Agate girlhood is the conviction that she all too easily could careful herself into being an invalid; that the triple pillows of asthma could coax away her days as well as her nights if she didn't adamantly stay upright on the ground, heart-chosen ground. If this constituted reckless, this seemed what she still wanted to be.
    "Careful as I can be, Mom," she sizes it down for my grandmother. "Anyway, we'll write," she announces as if letters will be the reward