Read Online Montana 1948 by Larry Watson - Free Book Online

house.
    Neither of my parents spoke as we rode, and the silence in the car was as oppressive as the heat. I knew why they weren’t talking. My mother wanted to refuse the dinner invitation because Uncle Frank and his wife would be there. My parents tried to keep their quarrels from me, but that morning I had heard my father say, “For Christ’s sake, Gail. They’re my parents. What am I supposed to do—break off with them too?” “You don’t have to curse,” was my mother’s only response. The next thing I knew, we were getting into the car. The excursion was all right with me. I hadn’t been out to the ranch in a while, and I was eager to see my horse and to spend as much of the day riding as I could.
    As soon as we turned off the highway and onto the rutted, washboard road that led to my grandparents’, loose gravel and scoria began to clatter under the car. A thick cloud of red-tan dust rose behind us. Almost shouting, my father said, “I’ve been thinking. What would you two think of taking a few
days later this month and going down to Yellowstone? Camp out. See the geysers.”
    â€œA real vacation,” my mother said. “The mountains.”
    â€œWhy not,” my father said, as he held the jiggling steering wheel with both hands. “Why not us?”
    It wasn’t much of an exchange, but I knew what it meant: my parents were no longer fighting. I also knew we wouldn’t go to Yellowstone. My father disliked conflict so much that he would frequently make a promise or a suggestion—like a family vacation—intended to make everyone feel better. Unfortunately, often he did not keep the promises.
    When we pulled up in front of the ranch house, Uncle Frank’s truck was already there. Covered with the day’s dust, the Ford looked even older and more battered than usual. “They’re here,” my mother said softly.
    My grandparents’ house was built of logs, but it was no cabin; in fact, there was nothing simple or unassuming about it. The house was huge—two stories, five bedrooms, a dining room bigger than some restaurants, a stone fireplace that two children could stand in. The ceilings were high and open-beamed. The interior walls were log as well. And the furnishings were equally rough-hewn and massive. Leather couches and armchairs. Trestle tables. Brass lamps. Sheepskin rugs on the floors and Indian blankets on the walls. Hanging in my grandfather’s den were two gun cases, racks of antlers from deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and antelope, and a six-foot rattlesnake skin. One of the few times I heard my father say
anything disparaging about his parents was in reference to their home. He once said, as we drove up to the house, “This place looks like every Easterner’s idea of a dude ranch.” (For a Montanan there was no greater insult than to have your name associated with the term “dude.”) My mother, who disliked ostentation of any sort, was especially offended by the house’s log construction—usually symbolic of simplicity and humility. (Her parents’ house was a very modest two-story white farmhouse—neat, trim, pleasant, but revealing nothing of the occupants’ prosperity.)
    And I?—I loved that house! It was large enough that I could find complete privacy somewhere no matter how many others were in there. The adults might be downstairs playing whist while I crept around upstairs, toy gun in hand, searching from room to room for the men who robbed the Bentrock First National Bank.
    When I slept over I was given a second-floor bedroom with wide, tall windows that faced north, and I sat at those windows and picked out the Big and Little Dippers, the only constellations I could identify. Or I imagined that the wide porch was the deck of a ship and the surrounding prairie the limitless sea.
    Grandpa stood on the porch to greet us. He was dressed in his Sunday rich