“It’s vacation here,” I pouted, meaning school was out and I had the run of the ranch and could do pretty much what I wanted without being shipped off to complete strangers back east in Wisconsin.
“Oh, Donny,” she groaned, and let loose with, “I swear to Creation, I don’t know up from down anymore”—one of her standard sayings when things became too much for her. Outbursts of that sort scared the daylights out of me at first, but I had learned such squalls passed as quickly as they came. Certain complaints gathered on a person with age, it seemed. This woman who meant everything to me carried the burden of years and deprivation along with all else life had thrust on her, including me. As much as I adored her and tried to fit under her wing without causing too much trouble, my grandmother was from another universe of time, another century, actually. My six grades of schooling already were twice what she ever received in the sticks of North Dakota, if North Dakota even had sticks. She read recipe books with her finger, her lips silently moving, and had to call on me to help out with unfamiliar words such as pomegranate. Not that she lacked a real vocabulary of her own, for besides sayings that fit various moods and occasions, she possessed a number of expressions that edged right up to cussing, without quite qualifying. The way she’d meet something dubious with “That’s a load of bulloney” always sounded to me suspiciously close.
At least she didn’t resort to any of that now, instead telling me to temper my attitude in what for her were measured terms. “It’s not the end of the world,” a look straight at me came with the words. “School starts right after Labor Day, you know that, and this is only till then. Kitty”—she loyally amended that—“your Aunt Kitty will make sure you’re back in time, and I’ll be up and around by then, and we’ll get on with life good as new, you wait and see.”
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BUT I DIDN’T NEED TO wait to see, plain and simple, that if what was happening to us wasn’t the end of our world, it was a close enough imitation. Just the sight of Gram, the way her apron bagged on her never very strong build, caused a catch in my throat. There was not much of her to spare to surgery, by any measure. And while I did not fully understand the “female trouble” discovered in her by some doctor at the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, I grasped that the summerlong convalescence in the pavilion ward run by the nuns made her—us—a charity case. Maybe we weren’t poorer than lint, like the worst-off people, but apparently not far from it. If that, plus losing our only shelter on earth—the cook shack, for what it was—did not add up to the edge of disaster, even without my banishment to a town in Wisconsin I wasn’t even sure how to spell, I didn’t know what did. This awful day, the second worst of my life, both of us were becoming medical casualties. Gram was the one with the drastic condition, but I was sick at heart. For I knew if this operation of hers did not come out right, we were goners, one way or the other. If something went wrong, if at the very least she could no longer work, it would be the poorfarm for her. And what I knew with terrible certainty would happen to me then was keeping me awake nights.
Argument over as far as she was concerned, Gram gave a last pat to my packed clothes. “That’s that, the suitcase is ready and I hope to high heaven you are.”
By now I didn’t want to look at her and couldn’t look away. My mother’s face was legible in her drawn one at times like this, women without any extra to them to start with and hard luck wearing them down even more. It was showing every sign of being a family characteristic, if I didn’t dodge it.
Call it luck or not, but right then I had an inspiration. An impulse on top of an inspiration, more like. “Can I run up to the boss house for a minute? With my autograph book?”
“Not unless you want Sparrowhead’s,” she dismissed that out of hand. “And you know how he is. Sometimes I think that man has a wire down.” Then she added, as if I had forgotten, “He’s the only one there, with Meredice away.”
“Yeah, well, that’s sort of what I had in mind,” I fumbled out. “It’s just, you know, I have everybody else’s.”
Gram’s pursed expression questioned my good sense, judgment, and maybe other qualities, but she only said, “Child, you get some of the strangest notions.”
Biting her tongue against saying more on that score, she checked the clock. “All right, I suppose if you have to. But make it snappy, pretty please. You need to catch your ride to town with the vet as soon as he’s done in the cow shed.”
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