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ONCE UNDERWAY, the bus lived up to that tirelessly loping emblem on its side. In short order, the country along the highway turned to grainfield, miles of green winter wheat striped with the summer fallow of strip farming and tufted here and there with low trees planted around farm buildings as windbreaks. I stayed glued to the window, which for a while showed the blue-gray mountains I had been used to all my life, jagged tops white with snow left over from winter. All too soon, the familiar western peaks vanished behind a rise and did not come back. Apparently everything this side of the Rockies was dwarfed in comparison and only any good for plowing, not a cow or horse anywhere in sight. I could just imagine Wisconsin, the whole place a cornfield or something.
Watching the miles go by, with no company but my indistinct reflection, loneliness caught up with me. It had been held off by the woman talking a blue streak at me on the ride from Gros Ventre and then the confusion of getting settled on the Greyhound, but now if I could have seen myself, hunched in that seat amid the rows of passengers confined within themselves by the cocoon of travel, surely I matched the picture of despair conjured by one of those sayings of Gram’s, lonely as an orphan on a chamber pot.
Eleven going on twelve is a changeable age that way. One minute you are coltish and sappy, and the next you’re throwing a fit because you’re tired or hungry or something else upsetting is going on inside you. Right then my mood churned up a storm. Things had been tossed turvy, and although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me, and had been ever since some doctor’s dire words to Gram. For if I lost the last of my family to the poorfarm or worse, with that went everything connected to the notion of home as I had known it, and I would be bound for that other terrifying institution, the orphanage.
Full of instinct and intrigue as a schoolyard is, kids grasp to a terrifying extent what losing the world you have known means. Too many times had I heard the whisper race through recess, jackrabbit telegraph, that so-and-so was “going to the other side of the mountains.” Packed up and dumped in the state-run orphanage over at Butte, that meant, across the Continental Divide where the sun went down and so did kids’ lives. Designation as an orphan truly did sound to me fatal in a way, the end of a childhood in which my parents, in their shortened lifetimes, literally moved earth, and would have done the same with heaven had it been within immediate reach, to keep me always with them no matter how unhandy the circumstances.
So, right then it did not seem at all imaginary that life was turning against me, Gram and me both, to an awful extent. I resented the human plumbing or whatever it was in her case that produced this situation. If that nun back there playing with her beads or whatever wanted to do something useful, why didn’t she pray up a better system of women’s insides so a boy wouldn’t worry himself sick about losing his grandmother, all he had, to some kind of operation?
And getting booted out of the cook shack and off the ranch like we were nobody—if that wasn’t enough cause for resentment, I didn’t know what qualified. I could have driven that stacker team in haying time just fine, and if Wendell Williamson didn’t think so, he needed his sparrow head examined.
The list didn’t stop there. These shirttail relatives I was going to be stuck with for an endless summer—why hadn’t this Kitty and Dutch pair, the Brinkers by name, ever visited us, so I’d at least know what they looked like? Even if they were dried-up old coots who probably kept their teeth in a glass at night, as I figured they must be, it would have helped if I could picture them at all.
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I COULD HAVE gone on and on like that, nose against the window and feeling sorry for myself, but that gets old, too. Stirring myself so plowed fields would not bore me out of my skull, to be doing anything I took out the autograph book. It opened to In the game of life, don’t lose your marbles. Right. If you were lucky enough to own any marbles to start with. Moodily I moved on from the Double W brand of advice, flipping to the front of the book. Naturally, Gram’s was the very first inscription. Wouldn’t a person think, in a nice autograph book that she’d spent real money for, she would have carefully written something like To my one and only grandson . . . ? Instead, in her scrawl that barely did for grocery lists:
My love for you shall flow
Like water down a tater row.
Your Gram,