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	Mary Clearman Blew, Balsamroot: A Memoir II Although Kay has warned me that eventually it would happen, I am unprepared for the afternoon I go to visit my aunt and she does not recognize me. She has shrunk down to eighty-seven pounds by now, and her eyes swim out of her skull to search my face and search past me. I know that Kay has changed her antidepressant medication to Prozac to try to stem her tears. What are the side effects of Prozac, what are the side effects of the drugs she is given to control her high blood pressure, to regulate her blood sugar, to prevent goiter, to reduce the risk of blood clots, to prevent seizures? I read about people who have taught themselves to analyze and question their prescriptions, but I have stopped trying to keep track. I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the load. Separately, every medication is working. My aunt’s blood pressure, her blood sugar are within acceptable levels. She’s only eighty-one. Her - page 180 - mother lived to be ninety-six. Aunt Mable lived to be eighty-eight. So every month I receive a three-page itemized printout from the pharmaceutical company in Salt Lake City that supplies the Villa Villekula, and I write a check on my aunt’s account for the three or four hundred dollars at the bottom of the last page. Meanwhile my aunt is restless, she cannot sit still in a chair long enough to hear a letter read to her, but she must be up and pacing the linoleum corridors—back and forth, back and forth all day, the aides tell me. She has worn through the soles of her shoes. What drives her? Is it the drugs, or the combination of the drugs? Or, as an elderly friend warns me, is her restlessness another predictable stage in her disintegration? I don’t know. I am past anger, past worry, down to the bone. After a fifteen-minute visit with my aunt, I flee back to my office and, when the English-department secretary glances up from her word processor and says, “Are you all right?” I break down in tears. That night in Boise, when a friend said, “Hello from Pete Daniels,” my blood seemed to stop, and he looked at me curiously. “Pete Daniels; yes, it’s been years, I should write to him,” I heard myself answer, and then knew what I wanted to do. Late that same night, emboldened by the wine I had drunk with dinner, I went up to my room and thought about the young woman I had been and wrote a not to the boy, no longer a boy, now a stranger, whom I had loved twenty years ago. So you were in Idaho last week. How strange to think of your being so close—not thirty miles. No wonder I’ve been dreaming about you. I hope all is well with you, and that all the old wounds healed. - page 181 - I stamped the envelope and mailed it from the hotel lobby and told myself that that was that. When a letter came back a week later, with its typewritten address, with the return address of a great southwestern university, I carried it in from the mailbox and dropped it on my desk until I was able to open it and read the polite typed words. What did I expect? I keep asking myself. What did I hope for? the only answer I can come up with is that at least my past won’t have ghosts. And yet I keep the letter and read and reread it, deconstructing the lines for every possible nuance: My wounds, real and imagined, are in pretty good shape, I think. I still smolder on some accounts, but even those seem to have become more of a resource than a liability. What a long strange trip it’s been . . . I hope you will keep in touch, and don’t let 20 years elapse this time. Then the part that keeps me rereading, the postscript in the familiar handwriting. Interpret your dreams for me . . . that’s amazing Imogene’s shame stands out in the few lines she writes about Lud’s arrest and sentencing: - page 182 - Saturday, April 9, 1938. Cleaned house & ironed. Letter from Ma. She had just heard about Lud—took it like a brick. However could he do it. And that is all for a long time. Sunday, May 1, 1938. Sylvia is 30 today. Such a dreary day, & lonesome—no company . . . Nora brought my milk—cat had kittens. . . . The teacherage is a single room behind the school. Imogene cooks a meal of bacon and fried potatoes on the coal stove and eats it by herself. No company today, nobody venturing out under a lowering sky that withholds all but a spat of sharp rain against the windowpane. The schoolyard gate stays shut, the bunchgrass grows undisturbed between the ruts of the road. Gradually the gray light darkens, and she lights the lamp, glad to see the passing of Sunday, dreading Monday. Will she sleep tonight? What if she can’t sleep? Her thoughts skitter around the edge of the abyss. She feels the onset, the falling apart, the imminent disintegration of her self into infinite fragments lost whirling in the lamp flame what if she starts to cry again and can’t stop with no one to hear will she still exist what to do to stop this when she can’t breathe wants to scream can’t escape has got to stop this. She has got to stop this. She is all alone out here, miles from town, and in any case there is nobody in the world to whom she would dare to speak of the abyss. Finally she gives up on sleep. Props pillows between herself and the iron headboard of the double bed and turns up the wick on the lamp and fits her embroidery hoop on a new pillowcase. She has to tilt the hoop to the light to - page 183 - see the stamped pattern of a lady with a bell skirt worked in dozens of tiny lazy daisy stitches. She splits her floss, threads her needle with purple, anchors it with a knot, and casts the first of the lazy daisies. Oh, better. The soft rasp of thread through fabric soothes her. The easy repetitious pattern spins an illusion between her and the abyss. Better, better. She casts and stabs, casts and stabs, creating her own fragile comfort in thread. Ever wonder why the women crocheted all those lace doilies and starched and ironed them and pinned them like so many white cobwebs over every piece of furniture? Ever wonder why all the embroidered pillowcases? All the embroidered dishtowels? All the embroidered dresser scarves with the crocheted edges lining the rooms with bare studs of walls and the rusty linoleums and the windows that looked out at pointless horizons? If they looked long enough into the windows, they could see their own faces reflected back at them, and the terrors that they had to keep secret. I never knew she was unhappy, said my mother. I never knew. And yet Imogene has not let go, not entirely. Monday, May 16, 1938. Letters from Ma & Lud—pictures. So he wrote her from prison. Did she add his letters to the bundle she left in the attic of the homestead shack, and did she write back to him? - page 184 - What would Lud have told Imogene about his experiences during the six months that he served of his sentence in the Montana State Penitentiary? The prison in 1938 was probably not much changed from 1931, when a legislative committee saw inmates lying idle, rotting away in stink and stench. The place as it is, is lousy with bed bugs and the cells are dark and grimy. The effects of the Depression had permeated Montana’s state government, and especially its penitentiary, where corrupt or inept administrators had kept even the sorry trickle of funds from improving a cellblock unit built in 1896. Two buckets sufficed in each cell; one for drinking and the other for human waste . . . A woefully inadequate electrical wiring system barely supported in each cell a single twenty-five watt bulb, too dim to read by, writes a contemporary historian. the 1931 legislative committee described the old cellblock as crying our in its filth, and the isolation area beneath the ground floor of the new cellblock as a hideous place to throw a man. The young man probably thought he was tough, probably even thought he knew a lot. Imogene, whose life had been relatively sheltered, might cry, However could he do it, but he might have answered her with Easy. That’s how. Needs must. None of Lud’s plans was working out. horsebreaking, rodeoing? No quick money there, no matter what his dreams told him. And a dollar a day was what he could earn at ranch work, supposing there was work to be had, during haying season or harvest season. What did he have to look forward to, what of his lot could he ever expect to improve? He would have known Imogene was losing heart. And what about Imogene’s young brother-in-law, Jack Hogeland, who was breaking horses during those very years, though seldom for cash? Nobody had much money. Jack was breaking horses to harness for the use of them, for the harrowing and - page 185 - seeding and cutting of scant crops on land which at least was his own. Disappointment spurred the back-biting between the sisters, the spiteful words behind each other’s backs, the doubts that Imogene had to swallow during those long afternoons and nights alone in her teacherage: What does Lud know about breaking horses, compared with Jack? At least Jack’s got his own ranch. Lud will never amount to anything. No more than Pa did. Ma says to be thankful I have a job. Oh God will I have another job next September? And then the theft of the saddle—a neighbor’s saddle, worth perhaps fifty dollars, or twenty-five dollars, or even less—which for Imogene was the ultimate humiliation of knowing her man had broken not just her rigid familial injunctions but also the settlers’ code of trust between neighbors, but which for Lud may have been an act of assertion over his own, more elemental humiliation. Whatever he may have written to Imogene, whatever bravado he may have been able to disguise himself with, his six months in the Montana State Penitentiary taught Lud one thing: the enormity of what he was really up against. After the Fairfield School ended its year in May of 1938, Imogene came back to Fergus County and lived on the ranch with her mother and father for the rest of the spring and summer. Doris and Jack were living on the old Barney ranch, less than a mile for her to walk or ride down through the bluffs to the Judith River, and she visited them more and more often. beginning that - page 186 - emotional shift that would see her drawing closer and closer to her younger sister’s family. Many of her diary references now are to horses or events that I can remember being told about. Others are mystifying, tantalizing, indecipherable. Friday, June 10, 1938. Rained a little—not enuf to get wash water—to much to clean the attic—Doris came & brot us meat. Malvin & Bud came about Dolly. Saturday, June 11, 1938. Ma & I prospected for a well. Jack & Joe came for the walking plow to ditch with. Sunday, June 12, 1938. Malvin & Bud brot Dolly home with my saddle. Doris & Jack came for a while & I went home with them to go to town tomorrow. Monday, June 13, 1938. Saw the sheriff. . . . now what—Hope to get Myrtle to do a little detective work. Thursday, June 30, 1938. More quilting—not much else. Got favorable return on my writing test. Letter from Lud. Malvin and Bud are Lud’s brothers. It sounds as though they came and borrowed the mare, Dolly, that Lud had given to Imogene, for the weekend. What about her saddle? Had they borrowed it, too, or had Lud had it? I have no way of knowing, although I remember the saddle clearly; it hung in our barn for years. It was one of these old-fashioned bronc saddles with high swells and a high cantle, and it had the soft, frayed patina of leather that has been used for a long time. It must have been at least as valuable as the saddle Lud served six months for, and it would bring an absurd price as antique tack today. - page 187 - Joe is my father’s teen-aged cousin, Joe Murray, who, until he enlisted in the navy in 1942, lived with my parents on the ranch during the summers. After the war Joe came back to work for my father, and I think it may have been Imogene’s saddle that he used to ride. Maybe she gave it to Joe, she always liked him. One more of her possessions that she had to leave behind when she left Montana, one more scrap to gather dust and finally vanish. Myrtle may be the cousin of my father’s who still lives on the ranch at Sample’s Crossing, on the Judith River. It is her husband, Noisy, whose photograph hangs in the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I don’t know what sort of detective work Myrtle might have been asked to do, or why Imogene went to see the sheriff, who in 1938 was the same Me. Guy Tullock whose deputies had arrested Lud. “I met Guy Tullock once,” Imogene told me years ago. “I went to see him about my hope chest that was stolen. He wouldn’t do anything.” A jettisoned saddle, jettisoned hopes. First the tangibles, then the memories. Maybe Imogene’s visit to the Sheriff was her way of facing one more of her illusions as a loss and writing it off. Imogene spent the rest of the summer of 1938 riding horseback and helping Doris and Jack with ranch work. Sunday, July 3, 1938. I rode the south fence—Jack, Joe, & Doris came—looked & looked for the horses . . . Got the colts branded at last. Monday, July 4, 1938. Last night we started to the rodeo—broke an axel—borrowed Noisy’s car—& had to walk home. Wednesday, July 6, 1938. We chased Dolly for 2 hours & all got mad. Ran Pet down. Spilled half my water getting home. Rode from 3:30 till 9:00. Thursday, July 87, 1938. Rode with Doris about 50 miles looking for horses. We got home about 10:00 P.M. Didn’t find the horses but got track of them. Dolly got sore footed. The ride Doris and Imogene made on July 7 of 1938 was their famous one. My father used to shake his head—“And when they told me how far they’d rode, and where they’d been, I just couldn’t hardly believe—“ “We were looking for the horses. We just kept riding a little farther, just over another hill,” my mother sniffed. “We didn’t think anything about it.” The part of the story that Imogene told me was how their mother had fretted over Doris: “A young married woman shouldn’t ride that far. She might be pregnant.” “And I knew one young married woman who was pregnant,” Imogene always added, “but I was keeping quiet about it.” But in July of 1938? When I wasn’t born until December of 1939? Another of the family legends at odds with the facts. But at least can we count on the permanence of the landscape? Where Doris and Imogene rode that day was around the base of the South Moccasin Mountains, almost all the way to the tiny community of Hanover and back again. Doris was riding Pardner, my father’s top horse, and Imogene was riding Dolly. Clouds would have rolled over the low blue peaks into a dry July sky and passed in shadows over the bunchgrass, and the sun bore down - page 189 - heavily until, approaching the long Montana twilight, it reddened and sank. Perhaps, as the sky darkened and purpled, a dry lightening storm moved across the benchland on the other side of the Judith River. The young women could see the landmarks they had known all their lives. The glint of the grain elevators at Danvers and at Ware, miles away in the weird light, and the scaffolding of the railroad bridge, miniaturized by distance, that stretched across the throat of the river gorge. Wind riffled the buckbrush in the coulees and flattened the bunchgrass and tore at the clumps of paintbrush and the heads of the balsamroot. Sweat had dried white on the flanks of the horses. Somewhere the women spotted tracks, and somewhere they decided to turn back. If they were rained or hailed on, they joked, they were a long way from shelter. But they were Montana-born and unworried, and they rode easily on their unshod horses and talked—about what? Not about her letters from Lud, if Imogene knows what is good for her. Not a word will she speak to her sister about her deepest feelings. Anyway, something is happening to her feelings. As they grow inward, they grow blunted. Numb. She shrugs to herself. Just the way things are. It’s almost completely night now. Doris is a shape riding along the other rut of the road, silent with fatigue. Darkness leaches meaning from the landscape. The women have lost direction. Coulees and cutbanks gape out of the shadows, sagebrush sends up a quickening scent as the air cools. Where is the turnoff, where is the gate? But the horses know their way home. Tired, they quicken their pace. Sore-footed, Dolly stumbles once. Imogene sends out her job applications, and on August 1 she hears that she has the Hilger School for the coming year. This is - page 190 - good news. Hilger is only a few miles from Lewistown. It has a store and a post office, and its school has two rooms, primary and secondary. Imogene will be teaching the four primary grades at eighty-five dollars a month. In September her diary resumes its familiar chronicle of repetitious days at school, small tasks, the pleasure of letters from home. Monday, October 3, 1938. I started Oliver Twist. Wonder if Lud really gets out today. I hate to see him yet want to get it over. Saturday, October 15, 1938. I had a letter from Lud who is working on a ranch. Saturday, November 19, 1938. Did very little shopping. . . . Think I saw Lud at a distance. Ma has seen him. Thursday, November 24, 1938. Lud stopped to ask Jack if he’d seen his horse—told me I’d get my $50 back. Went back with Doris and Jack. And so, in desperation, trying to replenish her sense of her self, Imogene turns to her younger sister, to the very sister who judges her. Agree with Doris. Accept her judgment. At least it’s a way of understanding, it’s a way of telling the story that makes sense. Lud borrowed fifty dollars from me? And he’s never paid it back? Just goes to show that he’s been a skunk all along. So Imogene goes down to the Barney ranch almost every weekend to see Doris and Jack. To be sure of her welcome, she lends her car, lends money. Does ranch chores, helps out after the baby - page 191 - is born, takes care of little Mary, and gradually lets herself slip into a role on the fringe as Auntie. Of course she dates occasionally, she’s only twenty-nine. But she can’t stand it when a man tries to touch her, tries to kiss her. She is in abeyance. No feelings at all, perhaps. Except when she catches sight of the hulking dark figure at the other end of the street, the angle of his head and his big shoulders as familiar as the tips of her own fingers, the line of his back as he walks away. She feels sick. How could he—how can she— She would die if anyone knew. Then nausea stabs her. The pit widens under her feet—Here it comes again, she is falling apart—she has to rush to her schoolwork, play with the baby, wait until night, when she can scribble the one or two lines she allows herself. Finally the ink scrawl absorbs her terror, and she can sleep. The fear of being alone—the fear of annihilation. I know more about night terrors than I want to tell. And I know other women who skirt the edges, who prefer to keep their dread a secret. If loss of feeling is the alternative to the agony of abandonment, who can blame us? In March of 1992, in an attempt to give the endangered wild-salmon hatchlings a chance to survive the long swim from their spawning beds to the Pacific Ocean through the turbines and bypass tunnels of the eight major hydroelectric dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers, the governor of Idaho ordered the Snake to be drawn down to its original level of eighteen years ago, before the construction of the dams had deepened and widened its flow. Conservationists hoped that the lower level and the swifter cur- - page 192 - rent would help the salmon hatchlings endure the trauma of the long swim, and the passage through the tunnels to the ocean with enough strength left to survive to adulthood and eventually return to spawn in their own beds. A futile attempt, others were calling the Snake River draw-down. The salmon were already too few. Hacked to pieces by the generators, too heavily fished, too close to extinction to save. A recovery team estimated that a thousand returning adults would be needed every year for eight years before the wild sockeye salmon could be taken off the endangered-species list; in 1992 only one returning male sockeye would be tallied at the spawning beds in Idaho’s Stanley Basin on the Snake River. For months the lobbies and the economic-interest groups battered Governor Andrus with letters and threats of lawsuits, trying to get him to rescind the draw-down order. What about irrigation water? What about damage to the marinas? What about recreational water for boating, for water skiing, for touring? When nobody even knows if the salmon can be saved? But Governor Andrus resisted these pressures, and what followed was a draw-down process which I and everybody else living at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater watched with fascination as the great river shrank by inches before our eyes. On mornings when I drove Rachel to school along Snake River Avenue, she and I looked to see what happened to the river while we slept, and in the mild spring evenings we walked out on the levee and marveled at how far the support pillars of the bridges had risen out of the water. The Lewiston Morning Tribune ran feature articles about a re-emerging landscape of inlets and eddies that no one had seen in eighteen years, and the widening wet stretches of mud on both sides of the river drew children as though - page 193 - they were returning to primordial slime. The fire department had to throw ropes and drag out one young man who ventured too far and sank to his waist in mud. But, as the river gave up its secrets—a car that had been driven into the current for reasons best known at the time, a crashed airplane, the thousand-year-old sites of villages and burial grounds mentioned in the Lewis and Clark journals, the partial skeleton of a man gone missing from the Nez Percé reservation a few years ago—I found myself increasingly preoccupied with the re-emergence of the river itself. For five years I had been driving to work and home again along that broad platinum flow, so still and so deep that it barely seemed liquid. I had seen its colors shifting with the light, its surface convoluted into indecipherable patterns by the speedboats or beaten into gold shingles by the evening wind. Now I saw that, beneath that molten surface, buried under those tons of slowly moving water, a tough western river with real gravel bars and a real current had been flowing all along. Soon they’ll let the reservoirs fill up again, and the river will rise, I wrote to a friend. Apparently it’s not possible to have a placid surface and the mean current at the same time. The phone is ringing. I struggle up from sleep. The digital clock by my bed says 2:00 A.M. Still too dazed to feel alarm—Has Auntie died?—I fumble for the receiver and say, “Hello?” A pause. “Hello, this is Pete Daniels,” he says form a thousand miles away. - page 194 - Teaching in Hilger in the fall of 1938, Imogene starts a creative-writing course by correspondence. She daydreams about earning money from her writing, supplementing her salary—she cannot save or get ahead on eighty-five dollars a month. Her roommate, Ruth, begins a hot romance with a man named Chet, to Imogene’s disgust—she can hear them on the couch at night after she has gone to bed. The winter drags on, finally passes. Imogene tries valiantly to lose weight, starves down to a hundred and fifty pounds. She is courted by an older man who irritates her. Friday, March 24, 1939. Mr. B asked me home. Ick. Then comes another puzzling sequence of entries. Monday, March 27, 1939. Had a letter from Dave & one from Lud—who said Dolly was still mine & he would bring her back to me. Thursday, April 13, 1939. Had a good letter from Doris. She said Lud was down & let on that he had not had Dolly. I sent her his letter. He told me he had her. Saturday, May 13, 1939. Got a letter from Doris. She made me blue. I was blue all day. Friday, May 26, 1939. Ma & I sewed & cleaned & talked. In the evening we took a walk up on the hill & saw a rider & lead horse go down the canyon. I’m in hopes it was Lud & that I will get Dolly. - page 195 - Just what was going on between Lud and Imogene over the mare Dolly can only be conjectured. Dolly had gone sore-footed after the fifty-mile ride in July of 1938, and Imogene turned her out to pasture and rode a mare named Beauty for the rest of that summer. Occasionally during the fall she will note, Saw the horses, and in late December she writes, I rode over to the ranch for a book. Did not see the other horses. But if Dolly was missing by the end of December, and if Imogene and Doris were speculating on what might have become of her, the diary doesn’t tell. It could be that Lud needed a horse, and so on one overcast afternoon he slipped up to Jack’s winter pasture on the slope of the South Moccasins, where Dolly was running with the rest of the horses, and he roped her out of the bunch and rode her for the rest of the winter and into the spring of 1939. Dolly was gentle and willing and useful, by all accounts. And it could be that Lud thought of Dolly as his, in a way. She had been his once; he had given her to Imogene years ago. Or it could be that he thought he was getting away with something. Dolly would have been worth a little money. Or is it possible that Dolly had become the last tangible link that held Lud and Imogene together, a link that neither wanted to let go? Imogene ends the sequence with a terse and baffling narrative: Saturday, May 27, 1939. Ma went to Kingsbury’s for the mail & while she was gone Lud came. He rode Dolly & led a black he said he’d ridden, but not alone or out of a corral. Gee I was sick with worry. I think he got knocked out by the well. At least he went to Kingsburys to get one to haze. . . . - page 196 - And then the outburst. Sunday, May 28, 1939. Doris came up for a while. Ma & I did not get much done. . . . Lud came this afternoon with Dolly. What the rest say about him makes no difference to me. He can’t lie or steal faster than those who have never been caught. And that’s it, Elizabeth. That’s all. In late May of 1992 the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is undergoing renovation, and I walk through dusty plywood-lined corridors with my shoulder bag and my book bag, wondering what I think I am doing. When I reach the Alaska Airlines gates I drop my bags on one of the plastic seats to wait for my connecting flight to the Southwest. This end of the terminal is jammed with people waiting for flights to Ketchikan and Anchorage and Fairbanks, and it occurs to me that perhaps that is the direction I should take. Mary, you didn’t—tell us you didn’t—no, you wouldn’t dream of rearranging your class schedule and buying a plane ticket and taking your aging face and body off to visit a man you haven’t seen in twenty years? Earlier in the spring, Brian had been restless. He and Elizabeth had been married, and he had settled into a fall and winter of cooking, taking care of the baby, working, and playing gigs on weekends to pay the bills and keep the household running while Elizabeth studied. Now he had a night off, and all he wanted was to go down to the Alibi Bar and listen to a band. Not just any band, - page 197 - but a group up from Boise that he used to play steel guitar with. He wanted to have a few drinks and visit with the guys on their break and remember the days when he had been a serious musician. Would Elizabeth go with him? No, she would not. She had to study. Her immunology final was on Monday, and then came her epidemiology final, and her pathology final— “Call Mother,” she suggested. “See if she’ll go with you.” Your mother and your husband went out drinking together? exclaim Elizabeth’s friends the next day, all aghast. But it strikes Brian and me as a wonderful idea. I’m restless, too, I’m tired of staying home and working on a Saturday night, and if I’m reduced to going out with my son-in-law, so be it. I get Rachel settled, and then I head up to Brian’s, where he is putting the baby to bed. Brian pours me a whiskey and finishes diapering the baby and puts his pajamas on him, and then he pours himself a whiskey and joins me at the kitchen table, where we wait to make sure the baby goes to sleep so Elizabeth won’t be disturbed. We’re feeling good, we’re looking forward to the evening. My classes are winding down, my academic year is almost over, and I’m ready for the Alibi. God, what a long time since I went honky-tonking! Brian puts on an old Nanci Griffith tape I haven’t heard, and when it comes to her rendition of “Gulf Coast Highway” we sing along. We don’t realize how noisy we are until Elizabeth stalks out of the bedroom and gets herself a drink of water. She glares at us, she’s ready to kill us for the racked we’re making. Later she says that she thought, Will they never leave? And then Why am I staying home studying while they have fun? But Brian and I are too relaxed to worry about Elizabeth’s disapproval. We float out to my car and head downtown. It’s early - page 198 – evening, the streetlights on Main Street are just glowing through the new foliage, and the air is as mild and soft as though, somehow, the earth still stands a chance and so do we. We’re playing more Nanci Griffith in the car as we cruise the length of Main Street, turn in to the parking lot behind the Alibi, and spot an empty slot just as the driver of the Dodge Daytona ahead of us spots it too, throws his gears into reverse, and slams into my front bumper. Brian leaps out to confront the moose who is getting out of the Daytona. When they start to circle each other, stiff-legged, I rush up with placating words, and so does the moose’s girlfriend. “Goddamn!” yells Brian. “Here I am, out with my mother-in-law for the evening, and you have to go and run into us!” The moose looks perplexes. “Hell,” he says, “how was I supposed to know she was your mother-in-law?” As an apologia, this for some reason strikes me as enormously funny, and I can’t stop laughing even as I inspect the damage to the front of my car, wring the name of his insurance carrier out of the moose, and tell Brian we may as well make the most of our night out. Laughter carries me into the Alibi, laughter buoys me over the slapping chords of country-western guitars, as high as the swirls of cigarette smoke rising above the palisades of empty beer bottles on ill-lit tables. Brian and I dance, and we drink beer, and we start laughing all over again—How was I supposed to know she was your mother-in-law? As though, had he but known, he never would have run into us—and we visit with Brian’s friends in the band when they take their break. Toward closing time, when Brian goes to settle our tab, I sit laughing by myself, which seems to tickle a passing kid in a big hat and cowboy boots, because he stops and asks me to dance. I’m laughing all the way home. One of those moments that fixes - page 199 - itself in memory: driving home under the shadow of the old rock terraces on Eighth Street, and then the winking traffic lights and the reflections on the water along Snake River Avenue. I think Brian is drunk. When I turn in to his driveway, I assess him again—yes, pretty drunk. A good chance he’ll never remember what we talked about tonight. And so, for the first time, I speak what has been on my mind all evening, all spring. “I’ve been thinking of going to see an old friend, but I’ve been afraid to tell Elizabeth about him.” Brian considers weightily. “What would you think, Brian, if I did that?” Never mind what Brian thinks, what do I think? Twenty years ago Pete Daniels would not leave his wife for me. What reason do I have to think he wants me now? The real man is not, after all, a projection of my imagination with a name borrowed from local legend. I know Pete Daniels will never bring me balsamroot. And yet I could wish for his control over narrative, for some of the self-igniting charge of dynamite that he has used to blast his life out of the predictable. Pete Daniels with a Ph.D. in English? “I think you ought to go for it,” says Brian after a long silence. - page 200 – From Balsamroot, A Memoir by Mary Clearman Blew. University of Oklahoma Press

Northwest Schools of Literature

Mary Clearman Blew, Balsamroot: A Memoir

Although Kay has warned me that eventually it would happen, I am unprepared for the afternoon I go to visit my aunt and she does not recognize me. She has shrunk down to eighty-seven pounds by now, and her eyes swim out of her skull to search my face and search past me. I know that Kay has changed her antidepressant medication to Prozac to try to stem her tears. What are the side effects of Prozac, what are the side effects of the drugs she is given to control her high blood pressure, to regulate her blood sugar, to prevent goiter, to reduce the risk of blood clots, to prevent seizures?

I read about people who have taught themselves to analyze and question their prescriptions, but I have stopped trying to keep track. I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the load. Separately, every medication is working. My aunt’s blood pressure, her blood sugar are within acceptable levels. She’s only eighty-one. Her

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mother lived to be ninety-six. Aunt Mable lived to be eighty-eight. So every month I receive a three-page itemized printout from the pharmaceutical company in Salt Lake City that supplies the Villa Villekula, and I write a check on my aunt’s account for the three or four hundred dollars at the bottom of the last page.

Meanwhile my aunt is restless, she cannot sit still in a chair long enough to hear a letter read to her, but she must be up and pacing the linoleum corridors—back and forth, back and forth all day, the aides tell me. She has worn through the soles of her shoes. What drives her? Is it the drugs, or the combination of the drugs? Or, as an elderly friend warns me, is her restlessness another predictable stage in her disintegration? I don’t know. I am past anger, past worry, down to the bone. After a fifteen-minute visit with my aunt, I flee back to my office and, when the English-department secretary glances up from her word processor and says, “Are you all right?” I break down in tears.

That night in Boise, when a friend said, “Hello from Pete Daniels,” my blood seemed to stop, and he looked at me curiously.

“Pete Daniels; yes, it’s been years, I should write to him,” I heard myself answer, and then knew what I wanted to do. Late that same night, emboldened by the wine I had drunk with dinner, I went up to my room and thought about the young woman I had been and wrote a not to the boy, no longer a boy, now a stranger, whom I had loved twenty years ago.

So you were in Idaho last week. How strange to think of your being so close—not thirty miles. No wonder I’ve been dreaming about you. I hope all is well with you, and that all the old wounds healed.

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I stamped the envelope and mailed it from the hotel lobby and told myself that that was that. When a letter came back a week later, with its typewritten address, with the return address of a great southwestern university, I carried it in from the mailbox and dropped it on my desk until I was able to open it and read the polite typed words.

What did I expect? I keep asking myself. What did I hope for? the only answer I can come up with is that at least my past won’t have ghosts.

And yet I keep the letter and read and reread it, deconstructing the lines for every possible nuance:

My wounds, real and imagined, are in pretty good shape, I think. I still smolder on some accounts, but even those seem to have become more of a resource than a liability. What a long strange trip it’s been . . . I hope you will keep in touch, and don’t let 20 years elapse this time.

Then the part that keeps me rereading, the postscript in the familiar handwriting. Interpret your dreams for me . . . that’s amazing

Imogene’s shame stands out in the few lines she writes about Lud’s arrest and sentencing:

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Saturday, April 9, 1938. Cleaned house & ironed. Letter from Ma. She had just heard about Lud—took it like a brick. However could he do it.

And that is all for a long time.

Sunday, May 1, 1938. Sylvia is 30 today. Such a dreary day, & lonesome—no company . . . Nora brought my milk—cat had kittens. . . .

The teacherage is a single room behind the school. Imogene cooks a meal of bacon and fried potatoes on the coal stove and eats it by herself. No company today, nobody venturing out under a lowering sky that withholds all but a spat of sharp rain against the windowpane. The schoolyard gate stays shut, the bunchgrass grows undisturbed between the ruts of the road.

Gradually the gray light darkens, and she lights the lamp, glad to see the passing of Sunday, dreading Monday. Will she sleep tonight? What if she can’t sleep? Her thoughts skitter around the edge of the abyss. She feels the onset, the falling apart, the imminent disintegration of her self into infinite fragments lost whirling in the lamp flame what if she starts to cry again and can’t stop with no one to hear will she still exist what to do to stop this when she can’t breathe wants to scream can’t escape has got to stop this.

She has got to stop this. She is all alone out here, miles from town, and in any case there is nobody in the world to whom she would dare to speak of the abyss. Finally she gives up on sleep. Props pillows between herself and the iron headboard of the double bed and turns up the wick on the lamp and fits her embroidery hoop on a new pillowcase. She has to tilt the hoop to the light to

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see the stamped pattern of a lady with a bell skirt worked in dozens of tiny lazy daisy stitches.

She splits her floss, threads her needle with purple, anchors it with a knot, and casts the first of the lazy daisies. Oh, better. The soft rasp of thread through fabric soothes her. The easy repetitious pattern spins an illusion between her and the abyss. Better, better. She casts and stabs, casts and stabs, creating her own fragile comfort in thread.

Ever wonder why the women crocheted all those lace doilies and starched and ironed them and pinned them like so many white cobwebs over every piece of furniture? Ever wonder why all the embroidered pillowcases? All the embroidered dishtowels? All the embroidered dresser scarves with the crocheted edges lining the rooms with bare studs of walls and the rusty linoleums and the windows that looked out at pointless horizons? If they looked long enough into the windows, they could see their own faces reflected back at them, and the terrors that they had to keep secret.

I never knew she was unhappy, said my mother. I never knew.

And yet Imogene has not let go, not entirely.

Monday, May 16, 1938. Letters from Ma & Lud—pictures.

So he wrote her from prison. Did she add his letters to the bundle she left in the attic of the homestead shack, and did she write back to him?

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What would Lud have told Imogene about his experiences during the six months that he served of his sentence in the Montana State Penitentiary?

The prison in 1938 was probably not much changed from 1931, when a legislative committee saw inmates lying idle, rotting away in stink and stench. The place as it is, is lousy with bed bugs and the cells are dark and grimy. The effects of the Depression had permeated Montana’s state government, and especially its penitentiary, where corrupt or inept administrators had kept even the sorry trickle of funds from improving a cellblock unit built in 1896. Two buckets sufficed in each cell; one for drinking and the other for human waste . . . A woefully inadequate electrical wiring system barely supported in each cell a single twenty-five watt bulb, too dim to read by, writes a contemporary historian. the 1931 legislative committee described the old cellblock as crying our in its filth, and the isolation area beneath the ground floor of the new cellblock as a hideous place to throw a man.

The young man probably thought he was tough, probably even thought he knew a lot. Imogene, whose life had been relatively sheltered, might cry, However could he do it, but he might have answered her with Easy. That’s how.

Needs must. None of Lud’s plans was working out. horsebreaking, rodeoing? No quick money there, no matter what his dreams told him. And a dollar a day was what he could earn at ranch work, supposing there was work to be had, during haying season or harvest season. What did he have to look forward to, what of his lot could he ever expect to improve? He would have known Imogene was losing heart.

And what about Imogene’s young brother-in-law, Jack Hogeland, who was breaking horses during those very years, though seldom for cash? Nobody had much money. Jack was breaking horses to harness for the use of them, for the harrowing and

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seeding and cutting of scant crops on land which at least was his own. Disappointment spurred the back-biting between the sisters, the spiteful words behind each other’s backs, the doubts that Imogene had to swallow during those long afternoons and nights alone in her teacherage:

What does Lud know about breaking horses, compared with Jack?

At least Jack’s got his own ranch.

Lud will never amount to anything. No more than Pa did. Ma says to be thankful I have a job. Oh God will I have another job next September?

And then the theft of the saddle—a neighbor’s saddle, worth perhaps fifty dollars, or twenty-five dollars, or even less—which for Imogene was the ultimate humiliation of knowing her man had broken not just her rigid familial injunctions but also the settlers’ code of trust between neighbors, but which for Lud may have been an act of assertion over his own, more elemental humiliation.

Whatever he may have written to Imogene, whatever bravado he may have been able to disguise himself with, his six months in the Montana State Penitentiary taught Lud one thing: the enormity of what he was really up against.

After the Fairfield School ended its year in May of 1938, Imogene came back to Fergus County and lived on the ranch with her mother and father for the rest of the spring and summer. Doris and Jack were living on the old Barney ranch, less than a mile for her to walk or ride down through the bluffs to the Judith River, and she visited them more and more often. beginning that

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emotional shift that would see her drawing closer and closer to her younger sister’s family. Many of her diary references now are to horses or events that I can remember being told about. Others are mystifying, tantalizing, indecipherable.

Friday, June 10, 1938. Rained a little—not enuf to get wash water—to much to clean the attic—Doris came & brot us meat. Malvin & Bud came about Dolly.

Saturday, June 11, 1938. Ma & I prospected for a well. Jack & Joe came for the walking plow to ditch with.

Sunday, June 12, 1938. Malvin & Bud brot Dolly home with my saddle. Doris & Jack came for a while & I went home with them to go to town tomorrow.

Monday, June 13, 1938. Saw the sheriff. . . . now what—Hope to get Myrtle to do a little detective work.

Thursday, June 30, 1938. More quilting—not much else. Got favorable return on my writing test. Letter from Lud.

Malvin and Bud are Lud’s brothers. It sounds as though they came and borrowed the mare, Dolly, that Lud had given to Imogene, for the weekend. What about her saddle? Had they borrowed it, too, or had Lud had it? I have no way of knowing, although I remember the saddle clearly; it hung in our barn for years. It was one of these old-fashioned bronc saddles with high swells and a high cantle, and it had the soft, frayed patina of leather that has been used for a long time. It must have been at least as valuable as the saddle Lud served six months for, and it would bring an absurd price as antique tack today.

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Joe is my father’s teen-aged cousin, Joe Murray, who, until he enlisted in the navy in 1942, lived with my parents on the ranch during the summers. After the war Joe came back to work for my father, and I think it may have been Imogene’s saddle that he used to ride. Maybe she gave it to Joe, she always liked him. One more of her possessions that she had to leave behind when she left Montana, one more scrap to gather dust and finally vanish.

Myrtle may be the cousin of my father’s who still lives on the ranch at Sample’s Crossing, on the Judith River. It is her husband, Noisy, whose photograph hangs in the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I don’t know what sort of detective work Myrtle might have been asked to do, or why Imogene went to see the sheriff, who in 1938 was the same Me. Guy Tullock whose deputies had arrested Lud.

“I met Guy Tullock once,” Imogene told me years ago. “I went to see him about my hope chest that was stolen. He wouldn’t do anything.”

A jettisoned saddle, jettisoned hopes. First the tangibles, then the memories. Maybe Imogene’s visit to the Sheriff was her way of facing one more of her illusions as a loss and writing it off.

Imogene spent the rest of the summer of 1938 riding horseback and helping Doris and Jack with ranch work.

Sunday, July 3, 1938. I rode the south fence—Jack, Joe, & Doris came—looked & looked for the horses . . . Got the colts branded at last.

Monday, July 4, 1938. Last night we started to the rodeo—broke an axel—borrowed Noisy’s car—& had to walk home.

Wednesday, July 6, 1938. We chased Dolly for 2 hours & all got mad. Ran Pet down. Spilled half my water getting home. Rode from 3:30 till 9:00.

Thursday, July 87, 1938. Rode with Doris about 50 miles looking for horses. We got home about 10:00 P.M. Didn’t find the horses but got track of them. Dolly got sore footed.

The ride Doris and Imogene made on July 7 of 1938 was their famous one. My father used to shake his head—“And when they told me how far they’d rode, and where they’d been, I just couldn’t hardly believe—“

“We were looking for the horses. We just kept riding a little farther, just over another hill,” my mother sniffed. “We didn’t think anything about it.”

The part of the story that Imogene told me was how their mother had fretted over Doris: “A young married woman shouldn’t ride that far. She might be pregnant.”

“And I knew one young married woman who was pregnant,” Imogene always added, “but I was keeping quiet about it.”

But in July of 1938? When I wasn’t born until December of 1939?

Another of the family legends at odds with the facts.

But at least can we count on the permanence of the landscape? Where Doris and Imogene rode that day was around the base of the South Moccasin Mountains, almost all the way to the tiny community of Hanover and back again. Doris was riding Pardner, my father’s top horse, and Imogene was riding Dolly. Clouds would have rolled over the low blue peaks into a dry July sky and passed in shadows over the bunchgrass, and the sun bore down

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heavily until, approaching the long Montana twilight, it reddened and sank. Perhaps, as the sky darkened and purpled, a dry lightening storm moved across the benchland on the other side of the Judith River. The young women could see the landmarks they had known all their lives. The glint of the grain elevators at Danvers and at Ware, miles away in the weird light, and the scaffolding of the railroad bridge, miniaturized by distance, that stretched across the throat of the river gorge. Wind riffled the buckbrush in the coulees and flattened the bunchgrass and tore at the clumps of paintbrush and the heads of the balsamroot. Sweat had dried white on the flanks of the horses.

Somewhere the women spotted tracks, and somewhere they decided to turn back. If they were rained or hailed on, they joked, they were a long way from shelter. But they were Montana-born and unworried, and they rode easily on their unshod horses and talked—about what?

Not about her letters from Lud, if Imogene knows what is good for her. Not a word will she speak to her sister about her deepest feelings. Anyway, something is happening to her feelings. As they grow inward, they grow blunted. Numb. She shrugs to herself. Just the way things are. It’s almost completely night now. Doris is a shape riding along the other rut of the road, silent with fatigue. Darkness leaches meaning from the landscape. The women have lost direction. Coulees and cutbanks gape out of the shadows, sagebrush sends up a quickening scent as the air cools. Where is the turnoff, where is the gate? But the horses know their way home. Tired, they quicken their pace. Sore-footed, Dolly stumbles once.

Imogene sends out her job applications, and on August 1 she hears that she has the Hilger School for the coming year. This is

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good news. Hilger is only a few miles from Lewistown. It has a store and a post office, and its school has two rooms, primary and secondary. Imogene will be teaching the four primary grades at eighty-five dollars a month. In September her diary resumes its familiar chronicle of repetitious days at school, small tasks, the pleasure of letters from home.

Monday, October 3, 1938. I started Oliver Twist. Wonder if Lud really gets out today. I hate to see him yet want to get it over.

Saturday, October 15, 1938. I had a letter from Lud who is working on a ranch.

Saturday, November 19, 1938. Did very little shopping. . . . Think I saw Lud at a distance. Ma has seen him.

Thursday, November 24, 1938. Lud stopped to ask Jack if he’d seen his horse—told me I’d get my $50 back. Went back with Doris and Jack.

And so, in desperation, trying to replenish her sense of her self, Imogene turns to her younger sister, to the very sister who judges her.

Agree with Doris. Accept her judgment. At least it’s a way of understanding, it’s a way of telling the story that makes sense. Lud borrowed fifty dollars from me? And he’s never paid it back? Just goes to show that he’s been a skunk all along.

So Imogene goes down to the Barney ranch almost every weekend to see Doris and Jack. To be sure of her welcome, she lends her car, lends money. Does ranch chores, helps out after the baby

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is born, takes care of little Mary, and gradually lets herself slip into a role on the fringe as Auntie. Of course she dates occasionally, she’s only twenty-nine. But she can’t stand it when a man tries to touch her, tries to kiss her. She is in abeyance. No feelings at all, perhaps. Except when she catches sight of the hulking dark figure at the other end of the street, the angle of his head and his big shoulders as familiar as the tips of her own fingers, the line of his back as he walks away. She feels sick. How could he—how can she—

She would die if anyone knew.

Then nausea stabs her. The pit widens under her feet—Here it comes again, she is falling apart—she has to rush to her schoolwork, play with the baby, wait until night, when she can scribble the one or two lines she allows herself. Finally the ink scrawl absorbs her terror, and she can sleep.

The fear of being alone—the fear of annihilation. I know more about night terrors than I want to tell. And I know other women who skirt the edges, who prefer to keep their dread a secret. If loss of feeling is the alternative to the agony of abandonment, who can blame us?

In March of 1992, in an attempt to give the endangered wild-salmon hatchlings a chance to survive the long swim from their spawning beds to the Pacific Ocean through the turbines and bypass tunnels of the eight major hydroelectric dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers, the governor of Idaho ordered the Snake to be drawn down to its original level of eighteen years ago, before the construction of the dams had deepened and widened its flow. Conservationists hoped that the lower level and the swifter cur-

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rent would help the salmon hatchlings endure the trauma of the long swim, and the passage through the tunnels to the ocean with enough strength left to survive to adulthood and eventually return to spawn in their own beds.

A futile attempt, others were calling the Snake River draw-down. The salmon were already too few. Hacked to pieces by the generators, too heavily fished, too close to extinction to save. A recovery team estimated that a thousand returning adults would be needed every year for eight years before the wild sockeye salmon could be taken off the endangered-species list; in 1992 only one returning male sockeye would be tallied at the spawning beds in Idaho’s Stanley Basin on the Snake River.

For months the lobbies and the economic-interest groups battered Governor Andrus with letters and threats of lawsuits, trying to get him to rescind the draw-down order. What about irrigation water? What about damage to the marinas? What about recreational water for boating, for water skiing, for touring? When nobody even knows if the salmon can be saved? But Governor Andrus resisted these pressures, and what followed was a draw-down process which I and everybody else living at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater watched with fascination as the great river shrank by inches before our eyes.

On mornings when I drove Rachel to school along Snake River Avenue, she and I looked to see what happened to the river while we slept, and in the mild spring evenings we walked out on the levee and marveled at how far the support pillars of the bridges had risen out of the water. The Lewiston Morning Tribune ran feature articles about a re-emerging landscape of inlets and eddies that no one had seen in eighteen years, and the widening wet stretches of mud on both sides of the river drew children as though

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they were returning to primordial slime. The fire department had to throw ropes and drag out one young man who ventured too far and sank to his waist in mud.

But, as the river gave up its secrets—a car that had been driven into the current for reasons best known at the time, a crashed airplane, the thousand-year-old sites of villages and burial grounds mentioned in the Lewis and Clark journals, the partial skeleton of a man gone missing from the Nez Percé reservation a few years ago—I found myself increasingly preoccupied with the re-emergence of the river itself. For five years I had been driving to work and home again along that broad platinum flow, so still and so deep that it barely seemed liquid. I had seen its colors shifting with the light, its surface convoluted into indecipherable patterns by the speedboats or beaten into gold shingles by the evening wind. Now I saw that, beneath that molten surface, buried under those tons of slowly moving water, a tough western river with real gravel bars and a real current had been flowing all along.

Soon they’ll let the reservoirs fill up again, and the river will rise, I wrote to a friend. Apparently it’s not possible to have a placid surface and the mean current at the same time.

The phone is ringing. I struggle up from sleep. The digital clock by my bed says 2:00 A.M. Still too dazed to feel alarm—Has Auntie died?—I fumble for the receiver and say, “Hello?”

A pause.

“Hello, this is Pete Daniels,” he says form a thousand miles away.

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Teaching in Hilger in the fall of 1938, Imogene starts a creative-writing course by correspondence. She daydreams about earning money from her writing, supplementing her salary—she cannot save or get ahead on eighty-five dollars a month. Her roommate, Ruth, begins a hot romance with a man named Chet, to Imogene’s disgust—she can hear them on the couch at night after she has gone to bed. The winter drags on, finally passes. Imogene tries valiantly to lose weight, starves down to a hundred and fifty pounds. She is courted by an older man who irritates her.

Friday, March 24, 1939. Mr. B asked me home. Ick.

Then comes another puzzling sequence of entries.

Monday, March 27, 1939. Had a letter from Dave & one from Lud—who said Dolly was still mine & he would bring her back to me.

Thursday, April 13, 1939. Had a good letter from Doris. She said Lud was down & let on that he had not had Dolly. I sent her his letter. He told me he had her.

Saturday, May 13, 1939. Got a letter from Doris. She made me blue. I was blue all day.

Friday, May 26, 1939. Ma & I sewed & cleaned & talked. In the evening we took a walk up on the hill & saw a rider & lead horse go down the canyon. I’m in hopes it was Lud & that I will get Dolly.

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Just what was going on between Lud and Imogene over the mare Dolly can only be conjectured. Dolly had gone sore-footed after the fifty-mile ride in July of 1938, and Imogene turned her out to pasture and rode a mare named Beauty for the rest of that summer. Occasionally during the fall she will note, Saw the horses, and in late December she writes, I rode over to the ranch for a book. Did not see the other horses. But if Dolly was missing by the end of December, and if Imogene and Doris were speculating on what might have become of her, the diary doesn’t tell.

It could be that Lud needed a horse, and so on one overcast afternoon he slipped up to Jack’s winter pasture on the slope of the South Moccasins, where Dolly was running with the rest of the horses, and he roped her out of the bunch and rode her for the rest of the winter and into the spring of 1939. Dolly was gentle and willing and useful, by all accounts. And it could be that Lud thought of Dolly as his, in a way. She had been his once; he had given her to Imogene years ago. Or it could be that he thought he was getting away with something. Dolly would have been worth a little money.

Or is it possible that Dolly had become the last tangible link that held Lud and Imogene together, a link that neither wanted to let go?

Imogene ends the sequence with a terse and baffling narrative:

Saturday, May 27, 1939. Ma went to Kingsbury’s for the mail & while she was gone Lud came. He rode Dolly & led a black he said he’d ridden, but not alone or out of a corral. Gee I was sick with worry. I think he got knocked out by the well. At least he went to Kingsburys to get one to haze. . . .

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And then the outburst.

Sunday, May 28, 1939. Doris came up for a while. Ma & I did not get much done. . . . Lud came this afternoon with Dolly. What the rest say about him makes no difference to me. He can’t lie or steal faster than those who have never been caught.

And that’s it, Elizabeth. That’s all.

In late May of 1992 the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is undergoing renovation, and I walk through dusty plywood-lined corridors with my shoulder bag and my book bag, wondering what I think I am doing. When I reach the Alaska Airlines gates I drop my bags on one of the plastic seats to wait for my connecting flight to the Southwest. This end of the terminal is jammed with people waiting for flights to Ketchikan and Anchorage and Fairbanks, and it occurs to me that perhaps that is the direction I should take.

Mary, you didn’t—tell us you didn’t—no, you wouldn’t dream of rearranging your class schedule and buying a plane ticket and taking your aging face and body off to visit a man you haven’t seen in twenty years?

Earlier in the spring, Brian had been restless. He and Elizabeth had been married, and he had settled into a fall and winter of cooking, taking care of the baby, working, and playing gigs on weekends to pay the bills and keep the household running while Elizabeth studied. Now he had a night off, and all he wanted was to go down to the Alibi Bar and listen to a band. Not just any band,

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but a group up from Boise that he used to play steel guitar with. He wanted to have a few drinks and visit with the guys on their break and remember the days when he had been a serious musician.

Would Elizabeth go with him? No, she would not. She had to study. Her immunology final was on Monday, and then came her epidemiology final, and her pathology final—

“Call Mother,” she suggested. “See if she’ll go with you.”

Your mother and your husband went out drinking together? exclaim Elizabeth’s friends the next day, all aghast.

But it strikes Brian and me as a wonderful idea. I’m restless, too, I’m tired of staying home and working on a Saturday night, and if I’m reduced to going out with my son-in-law, so be it.

I get Rachel settled, and then I head up to Brian’s, where he is putting the baby to bed. Brian pours me a whiskey and finishes diapering the baby and puts his pajamas on him, and then he pours himself a whiskey and joins me at the kitchen table, where we wait to make sure the baby goes to sleep so Elizabeth won’t be disturbed. We’re feeling good, we’re looking forward to the evening. My classes are winding down, my academic year is almost over, and I’m ready for the Alibi. God, what a long time since I went honky-tonking! Brian puts on an old Nanci Griffith tape I haven’t heard, and when it comes to her rendition of “Gulf Coast Highway” we sing along.

We don’t realize how noisy we are until Elizabeth stalks out of the bedroom and gets herself a drink of water. She glares at us, she’s ready to kill us for the racked we’re making. Later she says that she thought, Will they never leave? And then Why am I staying home studying while they have fun?

But Brian and I are too relaxed to worry about Elizabeth’s disapproval. We float out to my car and head downtown. It’s early

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evening, the streetlights on Main Street are just glowing through the new foliage, and the air is as mild and soft as though, somehow, the earth still stands a chance and so do we. We’re playing more Nanci Griffith in the car as we cruise the length of Main Street, turn in to the parking lot behind the Alibi, and spot an empty slot just as the driver of the Dodge Daytona ahead of us spots it too, throws his gears into reverse, and slams into my front bumper.

Brian leaps out to confront the moose who is getting out of the Daytona. When they start to circle each other, stiff-legged, I rush up with placating words, and so does the moose’s girlfriend.

“Goddamn!” yells Brian. “Here I am, out with my mother-in-law for the evening, and you have to go and run into us!”

The moose looks perplexes. “Hell,” he says, “how was I supposed to know she was your mother-in-law?”

As an apologia, this for some reason strikes me as enormously funny, and I can’t stop laughing even as I inspect the damage to the front of my car, wring the name of his insurance carrier out of the moose, and tell Brian we may as well make the most of our night out. Laughter carries me into the Alibi, laughter buoys me over the slapping chords of country-western guitars, as high as the swirls of cigarette smoke rising above the palisades of empty beer bottles on ill-lit tables. Brian and I dance, and we drink beer, and we start laughing all over again—How was I supposed to know she was your mother-in-law? As though, had he but known, he never would have run into us—and we visit with Brian’s friends in the band when they take their break. Toward closing time, when Brian goes to settle our tab, I sit laughing by myself, which seems to tickle a passing kid in a big hat and cowboy boots, because he stops and asks me to dance.

I’m laughing all the way home. One of those moments that fixes

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itself in memory: driving home under the shadow of the old rock terraces on Eighth Street, and then the winking traffic lights and the reflections on the water along Snake River Avenue. I think Brian is drunk. When I turn in to his driveway, I assess him again—yes, pretty drunk. A good chance he’ll never remember what we talked about tonight. And so, for the first time, I speak what has been on my mind all evening, all spring.

“I’ve been thinking of going to see an old friend, but I’ve been afraid to tell Elizabeth about him.”

Brian considers weightily.

“What would you think, Brian, if I did that?”

Never mind what Brian thinks, what do I think?

Twenty years ago Pete Daniels would not leave his wife for me. What reason do I have to think he wants me now? The real man is not, after all, a projection of my imagination with a name borrowed from local legend. I know Pete Daniels will never bring me balsamroot. And yet I could wish for his control over narrative, for some of the self-igniting charge of dynamite that he has used to blast his life out of the predictable. Pete Daniels with a Ph.D. in English?

“I think you ought to go for it,” says Brian after a long silence.

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From Balsamroot, A Memoir by Mary Clearman Blew. University of Oklahoma Press

©Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington. All rights reserved.