Chapter 4
The Madisons: Adolescence
Ennis: 1946-52


Traveling north on the Missouri River  in 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition came to a place where the river divided into three. They named each of the tributaries for a prominent figure in the Capital—the Jefferson for the president, the Madison for James Madison, secretary of State, and the Gallatin for Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury. After naming the rivers, Lewis and Clark continued up the largest one, the Jefferson, which eventually becomes the Beaverhead. Madison had been the primary contributor to the Federalist papers and the author of  enough of the constitution that he is often called its father. As Secretary of State, he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon in 1803.  Together with Jefferson, he founded the Democratic Republican Party to oppose the more centralist policies of  the Federalists, including Hamilton and Gallatin.  He was serving as the nation’s fourth president during the war of 1812, which  started badly but ended with several notable naval victories, one at Lake Champlain, another at Lake Erie. With the Federalists in eclipse, Madison’s party governed unopposed but moderately. This was known as Era of Good Feeling.
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The weight on the handlebars exaggerated every effort to keep in a straight line, so we proceeded sluggishly and  veered about in ways that would have been dangerous if there had been any traffic. But there was no traffic,  only the blacktop, actually more gray than black because the gravel embedded in the asphalt reflected the sky. The bits of gravel in the highway were distinct as I looked ahead but  blurred as my eyes were drawn down each time I  swayed to put more force on alternate pedals with each forward stroke.
    
The weight on the handlebars was Jimmy Carpenter.   Earlier that day, I had ridden my bicycle  eight miles to Jimmy’s house, as I had done many times before,  to stay overnight. Now we were riding to the little town of Cameron,  three miles from his farm. Cameron had a gas station, café, and little store that sold ice cream. On both sides of us the Madison Range of the Rocky Mountains rose up, formidable but also sheltering, dark green to the tree-line then light gray to where the snow began, the snow that lingered in shadowed pockets all through the summer. Though the mountains were covered with trees, the only trees immediately around us were spindly cottonwoods where magpies scolded us from safety. They were so confident that we were able to march up to them with our .22’s and easily kill one each before they flew off to the next clump of trees. We cut off their feet and stuffed them into metal band-aid boxes to be redeemed for five cents a pair at the sporting goods store.

STONE FACES
    
Two mountains loomed up on our left as I took us sluggishly south: Sphinx and Fan. Sphinx was the highest of the two, at 10, 860 feet. The enigmatic face was not hard to make out once you understood that the face was not looking out, as in the original and in Yeats’ poem, but straight up into the sky. But Fan Mountain dominated emotionally. It was the most clearly visible from Ennis. We could see it from our eighth grade classroom.  It was gently concave with major creases running down toward a point, as if it had wrinkled when someone pulled it into a curve.  When Mr. Skully our eighth-grade teacher was teaching Hawthorne’s story The Great Stone Face, he made clear the boy’s relationship to the mountain by saying to us, “Without looking, how many creases are there in Fan Mountain.” We took various guesses: five, seven, nine.

Then he told us to look. Most of us counted six. Mr. Skully’s point was the boy, Ernst,  in Hawthorne’s story would have known without looking because the long years of looking would have burned in image of the mountain into his brain.

Hawthorne based his story on a real place, a natural phenomenon called the Old Man of the Mountains, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a few miles east of what is now Interstate 93. It was discovered in 1805, and Daniel Webster wrote in the florid rhetoric of the time that  “in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.” It collapsed in May of 2003,  over a long weekend of snow and freezing rain. No one saw the collapse.

In the story, Ernst grows up in the shadow of the mountain and longs to see fulfilled a prophecy that one day a great man, whose face would resemble the stone visage,  will come to their little village bringing it great bounty. A rich miser and then a war hero and finally a presidential candidate  come to the little village, and all the citizens claim to see great resemblance. But not Ernst, who waits for the Messiah and becomes a benevolent man and a preacher, a great force for good in the community.  Then a poet hears of Ernst’s good work and  seeks him out. He  listens to Ernst preach and realizes that Ernst himself has come to resemble the Great Stone Face, though Ernst himself never understands and at the end is still waiting for the prophet to appear. I am sure Mr. Skully helped us get Hawthorne’s  point, or rather his multiple points: We become what we contemplate. We become the things for which we wait. While we wait for our prophecies to be fulfilled, good and pious men are fulfilling them  every day around us.

JIMMY

Jimmy Carpenter lived on a farm about eight miles south of  town. Their house was a great barn of a place with many rooms. In all those room the linoleum was worn or broken, the broken places patched with other linoleum so that the floor was scarcely visible anywhere.  The bathroom was unreliable and using the toilet was harrowing since any given flush might produce an emergency to Jimmy’s mother would have to come and do things with the plunger. I often stayed overnight with Jimmy and  slept in Jimmy’s bed, which was large enough though the blankets were thin and we were always cold. 

Jimmy’s father farmed, not on his own land but on the land owned by a man who lived in a white mansion, set in a grove to trees on the lower slopes of the mountains that rose on the west side of their land. You could barely see it from the low stoop that served as a front porch. Only much later would I learn to call his father a sharecropper. My own father worked for the government and was regularly paid a modest salary that mother managed meticulously, writing down every penny she spent until the week she went into the hospital to die. I assume Jimmy’s parents were paid only when the crop was harvested and were expected to live the year on that.

I did not think of Jimmy as poor because I did not think of anyone I knew as poor. But one morning when we were getting dressed and Jimmy was looking in his drawer for socks, I heard him muttering under his breath, “ I don’t have any socks that match again.” He shouted to his mother, who came in to tell him gently that she had no secret cache of socks and that he could wear mismatched ones for now until laundry day. I asked him if he wanted to borrow a pair of mine since my mother always packed several pairs.  “No” he said,” I can wear two that almost match, but when I grow up, I am going to have a whole drawer full of socks.”

I did not what to say, and so I said nothing. But later, when the lunch money crisis developed, I knew what was going on. Our hot lunches cost fifteen cents and we paid  in advance for  cardboard tickets that were kept in alphabetical order in a little box. When we went in to lunch,  one of the teachers sat at a table and pulled out our card and punched a hole in one of the marked squares. When you ran out of punches, you could eat on credit for a few days but the teachers were expected to remind the students to bring the money. Our teacher,   Mr. Speck had dutifully reminded Jimmy every day for a week, making a joke of it, and even putting a rubber band on Jimmy's  wrist. I thought about going to Mr. Speck and explaining Jimmy's situation. I thought about asking my parents what I could do. But I didn't do anything except agonize.
    
One day when lunch time came Mr. Speck looked expectantly at  Jimmy who jumped from his seat, announced that he had forgotten again but that he was going to eat downtown. Then he fled from the building. Ennis schools—all twelve grades in one building--stood on a low hill overlooking main street and was surrounded by a low retaining wall made of native stone.  Mr. Speck went after him and I must have followed because the next thing I remember is Jimmy standing at the foot of hill, just above the retaining wall, Fan Mountain looming above him and Mr. Speck at the top of the hill, shouting at him to come back. The wind was ruffling  Mr. Speck’s thin locks and  lifting Jim’s blond hair that he kept plastered straight back with several applications of water a day. I knew that Mr. Speck had, finally, realized that Jimmy’s family really did not have the money for lunch.

Everyone has a half-dozen iconic memories they carry around their whole lives, though we may not even know why we remember them or what they mean. My teacher's bumbling insensitivity, capped by his bumbling compassion,  along with my friend 's unbending dignity opened up an tender place that has never really closed and from which my best instincts have, I think, continued to flow. Fan mountain  towers eternally, but the valleys are full of people whose lives are fragile and tenuous.  We are all connected by our weakness by our need for mutual kindness and support.  It was a religious insight, however half-formed, and I am grateful for it.

HUNTING, FISHING, SECRET HAUNTS

But even Jimmy never got invited into the deepest haven the Madison’s contained: Morse Creek. It was just a little stream that ran through the middle of town, probably not more than five feet across during the spring run-off, and narrower during the summer. It was generally screened from houses by a fringe of silver willow trees so dense you could only penetrate it at certain places. I knew where all those places were and loved nothing better than dropping down through them in the secret world of shade and dirt and water. When the water was lower, there would be a bank of hardened mud I could pick my away along an emerge blocks later in another part of town. Sometimes there would even be a little spot of grassy bank where I could sit or lie in complete solitary ecstasy.

Hunting was the only sure path to my father’s attention, so I took it up eagerly. We had hunted antelope earlier, when we lived on the plains, and I have vivid memories of my father  making pancakes by the light of the car headlights shining into the tent.  The pancakes were runny and the tent was cold, but I was included and nothing else really mattered.

The first time my father took me elk hunting was to the Gravely.  We stayed in the spacious cabin owned by the Orrs. The low places were full of mist early in the morning so we saddled the horses in a thick mist but soon rode out of the mist into the pine forests. But when we rode over a ridge and looked down, we saw a herd of elk wading in the smoky mist in a clearing below us. Elk are huge creatures, dark, chocolatey brown. They are not like deer, which even in death seem cute, or moose which are somehow droll even with their terrifying size and reputation. Elk would be magnificent except that the racks of the male seem almost disproportionably large as if the males might topple forward if they were not so strong. Seen from above in this setting, they were simply mythic, like brown gods swimming in an ancient cold sea, and that scene remains one of the privileged moments of my life.

I have never read Homer in Greek and never will, but I imagine it must be something like this—staring into a world I never made, could not make, could not even really enter but could somehow observe, a world remote, pristine, brooding, indifferent, a world that endowed me with power without even knowing that I existed,  simply by radiating its serene sense of being what it was supposed to be, doing what it was born to do.

I cannot remember what happened after that. Somehow or another, we killed at least one of the elk because my father fried its heart and liver that night and ate it. I was always squeamish about food and to this day cannot eat even clam chowder, so I probably did not even taste it, and broke my father’s heart again. If I could have another chance, I would gag  it down and smile. He could not enter into solemn rituals except in the hunt, but then he could enter them completely. I killed my own first elk in an orgy of killing on one of those days when I had only to point my gun in the general vicinity of an animal to watch it crumple. After the hunt, he found a bottle of wine in the house and invited me to drink a glass with him even though I was only 19 and felt guilty of breaking the law.

I did not learn to fish from my father. I think I may have taught myself with a metal telescoping rod from Montgomery Ward.  I even had a little fly-tying kit I bought from Montgomery Ward catalog, though I fished mostly with a spinner and earthworms. I grew the worms myself in moss and fed them coffee grounds. I was allowed to go out by myself provided I was back by noon and provided my mother knew approximately where I was. I would get up early and leave the house before the sun came up and walk down the graveled streets toward the river carrying my fishing rod and a Prince Albert can of  worms and a leather wallet with thick felt leaves holding the ceusw flies I had  tied myself. I would proceed from one favorite hole to another, cast my line upstream and watching  it drift down again and again until I felt that magical repetitive tug run up the line, down the pole and into my arm. I would reel in the trout—generally Rainbow or German Brown—and kill it with a single blow to the back of the head with a stick or the handle of my open pocket knife, feeling its death shudder.  Then I would string a forked willow stick through its gill in so that I could keep it safely in the water as I fished the next hole. I don’t remember ever coming back empty-handed.

Every person has moments they remember as unexpected gifts, unearned, given free and clear. Wordsworth called them “spots of time,” deposits of joy on which we can, with luck, draw upon a whole lifetime. Fishing the Madison gave me many of those, and I would expect they would be one of the last memories that old age will take away.


FIRST JOB

Some friends of my father, named the Orrs, had a cattle camp there near a small lake. My first job for money  was driving the chuck wagon for Toby Orr’s annual cattle drive that took the cows from his ranch near Ennis to the high pasture on the Gravely Range.  The chuck wagon in this case was a panel truck that trailed along behind the bellowing herd as it moved down the road, herded along by  Toby and one or two other cowboys. I was, I think, 13, much too young to have a license, but I nursed the panel truck along in compound low at only a mile or two an hour, so it was safe enough. Many of the cattle had small calves and sometimes one would be too small to keep up, so Toby would put it in the truck. Cars coming along would have to work their way through the herd. Most of the drivers were natives and understood the procedure well enough, but the cowboys would have to explain to the tourists how to honk their horns and nudge the cows to create a path.

When we got to where the highway crossed the Madison River, we would stay overnight at a cabin and eat with the host family that rented out the cabins and served a boarding house supper. After supper I would wander around the place including the ice house where huge blocks of ice were kept all summer buried in sawdust. As I dug through the sawdust, it got damper and damper as I got closer and closer to a block of ice until I brushed away the last crumbs and saw the clear ice gleaming there. I could chip away a chunk of it with my pocket knife and suck it slowly in the pleasant gloom while the mountain twilight filtered through the generous cracks in the roof. Then I would wander down along the Madison where the clear water running over clean stones had an almost mythical power to cleanse and restore  the mind.

One morning, they drove the cattle ahead and left me to clean up the cabin, pack up the gear, drive to a nearby ranch (the Neely place), hook up a horse trailer,  load up a horse which would be waiting for me at a corral  and then catch up with the herd.  I did the first two steps all right, but on the way to the ranch, I stalled out the panel truck trying to take it up the hill in too high a gear. I had no idea how to shift down while still moving, and   I didn't have enough feet or enough skill to restart the truck while holding down the brake. Perhaps I didn't even know about emergency brakes, or maybe it didn't work. In any case, I had no choice except to back the truck down the hill. I shifted into neutral, pushed hard on the brake and started down. But I had no experience backing up and soon lost control. The truck careened back and forth, tilting on two wheels this way and that until I somehow wrestled it to a stop. After I had  sobbed for a quarter of an hour,  I started the truck and went back up the hill--in compound low--to the next part of the task.

I managed to hook on to the trailer, but on flat ground, so the drop-gate was steep enough to spook the horse, and he  would not load. At one end of the halter was a 90-pound kid, at the other end a 700 pound horse, both of us scared to death. I had failed at my first real job, as I had failed so many times before with my father. Except when I had a book in my hand, I didn't seem to be able to do anything. But Toby had provided for this contingency by telling me I could go the ranch house and get help. I walked the mile or so to the house and, eyes red from crying, told my sad tale. Mr. Neely drove me over the scene of the crime,   backed the trailer against a hill so the drop gate was more level, then attached lasso ropes to each side at the back to make a kind of chute. I led the horse in while he stayed back shaking the ropes to spook the horse in.

SUMMER FALLOWING

I must have been about 13 when my father bought or leased two small plots  of land about 8 miles north of Ennis. To get to them, we turned at McCallister--another little town with a store, a bar, and a café--and went another five or six miles on gravel road. One place was mostly irrigated hayfields, though we must have grown some grain there because I remember helping shock and thrash--old-fashioned operations even then. Somehow I was responsible for one of the pitchforks we used to move the bundles of grain, and of course I left it lying in the field. A week later, my father drove the truck over it, puncturing a tire. Typically, we had no wrench that would fit the lugs that held the spare. My father grew more and more frustrated as he struggled for two hours to change the tire. When it was finally done, he screamed at me: “Let this be a lesson to you. Next time put your fucking fork away." I knew I deserved a scolding, but I was shattered nevertheless. It took me a long time to  forgive my father and to make peace with the rural life that brought us to such a terrible moment.

The other piece of land we called the Sprout Place because we got it from Jimmy Sprout, who was entirely deaf and shouted his end of all conversations. The land sat on a plateau above Ennis Lake.  The property once been a homestead and had three or four broken down outbuildings. One of them was a kind of garage built into the hillside, and another was been the family home, finished on the outside with stucco and on the inside with lath and plaster.  We used one of the rooms for a granary and kept the other as a kind of bunk house where we could go to get warm in the early spring and late fall. In 2001, I went back looking for the place once and found it, though it took me several passes.  

The first outing on the tractor, I sat on the edge of the padded seat between my father’s legs and helped steer as we pulled a cultivator around and around. The noise of the little Case tractor, and being close to my father, and the feeling of doing actual grown- up work was exhilarating. The next time, I was allowed to drive the tractor by myself, while my father watched. I felt superior to my town friends who had no such grown-up responsibilities and told my mother I could drive a tractor forever.  I soon learned different.

We did the whole range of farm things: plowing, seeding, harvesting, but what I did most was summer fallowing.  I did not even understand what the process was, though eventually I came to understand. Ever since the depression, farmers had been taught to let half their land lie fallow each summer,  keeping it loose and weed-free so that it could absorb enough moisture to grow a crop through the next summer. In a rare moment of actually explaining something to me,  my father said  that summer fallowing  did two things: it uprooted the mustard and ragweed that would otherwise suck the moisture from the ground, and it broke up the capillaries that would otherwise form and carry moisture into the air as the ground hardened.

Fallow is a wonderful word. I love it now, its two open, slack, dark vowels that you say slowly,  with your jaw hanging loose, as fallow time is slow and slack and loose. The word seems to always to imply a temporary condition, a time of waiting and preparation. Fields are left fallow as part of a process, so that later they can grow more than they would otherwise. Fallow land is quiet but hardly dead. Summer fallowing  is a way of expending energy to produce emptiness. The natural state of a piece of  land—or a mind or a soul--is not emptiness but weeds. A field or a vacant lot—or a mind, or a soul—left to its own devices will fill up with trash. Emptiness is good in its place if it is deliberate, and temporary,  and so is productivity, but to achieve either, you must work equally hard. Only vigilance and back-breaking work can actually keep a plot of land—or a mind, or a spirit—quiet  open to the rain, regenerating itself  for the next period of productivity.

The implement of choice for us was a Morris Rod Weeder, essentially a square iron rod 8 feet long, hooked to a gear-driven chain so it churned slowly two or three inches under the ground. It is not a hard job. The only thing you have to do is watch the right front wheel and keep it the proper distance from the marks of your last round, trying to straighten out any wavy irregularities, but knowing you are introducing new ones.

Perhaps it is better now. Tractors now are great behemoths, with enclosed air conditioned cabs. They  radios, probably CD players,  and seats that bounce you  on columns of air. But then we sat open to the heat and noise. Talk to anyone who has ever summer fallowed on a small open tractor, and your will hear the same story:  The sun beats down, adding its heat to the exhaust blowing back into your face. The hard rubber steering wheel grinds a black residue into your palms.  You jolt about on the iron seat covered with a thin padding. The tractor envelopes you in a cloud of noise that seems to seep into your brain and fill it with fog.
 
The great enemy is boredom. J. R. R. Tolkien, in a story called “Leaf, by Niggle,” suggests boredom might be the challenge of purgatory, where we might appropriately be asked to perform some repetitive task until we can learn to find satisfaction in it. That idea might have been a comfort, but I had no access to it. To the young, boredom is excruciating pain—hell, not purgatory. The only job I ever had more boring than summer fallowing was sorting rocks that came up on a conveyor belt at a talc mill. The tears would flow helplessly from my eyes as I sat there, hour after hour, throwing dark rocks over my shoulder and letting the white ones pass.  Singing can help. I would have been embarrassed to sing at the talc mill, but summer fallowing,  I sang at the top of my lungs, trying to outshout the tractor. Every man I have talked to who summer fallowed as a boy confesses to the singing at  top of his lungs. You sing until you are hoarse. You sing the songs you know and then  you make up songs, often obscene and blasphemous. It is said that Martin Luther farted to keep the devil at bay, your songs too are desperate and earthy gestures in the face of the boredom, which feels infernal.

The other distraction from boredom was frustration. Weeds would wrap around the rod and form thick clumps that had to be slashed through with a pocket knife and then unwrapped weed by weed. Or the chain could break, and since I could not fix it,  I would sit in the shade of the tractor or walk down to the bunk house and wait for my father to come get me at the end of the day. Or still worse, I could hit a stubborn rock and bend or even break  the rod, which would then have to be taken to town and welded.

Refueling was a nightmare. I envied my friends who lived on farms with  500 gallon gas tanks mounted high on wooden frames with hoses that dispensed fuel just like pumps in town.  Our fuel was in fifty gallon barrels that we hauled from town and then man-handled on and off the battered trucks, which were the only kind my father ever drove. To fill the tractor, we tipped the barrel to fill a five-gallon can with a funnel and then used the same funnel to fill the tractor, balancing ourselves on some part of the tractor or lifting it high above our head.  Once when my father was gone and  my mother and I were rolling the barrels into place, slipping about with weight that was too much for us, I burst out into a rage, like Lear on the heath,  against my father who, I cried out, had left us to do this impossible work while he sash-ayed about the country (as I imagined) drinking coffee and chatting with his clients. My mother would not join in my jejune attack, but she would not defend him either. She simply kept her counsel and left me to stew in my own juice.

The only saving grace was the setting. The mountains rose up to the west above me  and the lake lay shimmering blue below me. Gulls came up from the lake and followed me, looking for grubs that cultivator turned up. They would float above my head, their feet tucked neatly up against bodies that looked like they were carved from paraffin. Sometimes the cultivator would disturb nests of rabbits or young owls. The first time I tried to save the young rabbits by taking them home and feeding them with an eye dropper, but after I watched them die a miserable death, I gave up and kept the tractor moving over the remains of the scattered nests, my eyes straight ahead, letting the young ones escape if they could or be crushed and chopped by whatever instruments of death I happened to be pulling.

Even emptiness, after all, comes at a price.