Heart Earth by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online

perfect navy gravy gray, and there on the bow in thrilling authentication, the black lettering USS
Ault.
Wally would have had to go to the dictionary for
avuncular,
but he managed to give me a most benevolently unclelike warship.
    Naturally the grown-ups have wasted Christmas on each other by giving dry old functional things back and forth, so while Anna and Joe and Dad and even my mother try to have what they think is a good time, my
Ault
and I voyage 119B all that day, past Gibraltars of chair legs, through the straits of doorways to the bays of beds. (All December the logbook of the actual
Ault
has been repeating an endless intonation—0440 COMMENCED ZIGZAGGING . 0635 CEASED ZIGZAGGING . 0645 RESUMED ZIGZAGGING —as the newly commissioned destroyer practiced the crazystitch that would advance day by day from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.) We make frequent weather reconnaissances to a window, for my mother has promised that if the rain ever stops we can breast the moistures of Arizona outside.

    All the while, all this holiday, although I am not to know so until the letters return forty-two years later, my parents and I and Arizona are on Wally's mind. Along with my gift ship arrived his inquiry to my mother whether she thinks he would have any prospects where we are, after the war; are there flour mills and feed stores where he might land a trucking job?
    Through us, like a signal tremor along a web strand, Phoenix is making itself felt even into the most distant Pacific. You can feel the growth thrust gathering (it undoubtedly is what my mother has been feeling), the postwar land rush coming when you can throw a doorknob on this desert and a dozen houses will sprout.
    Yet my mother, glad as she would have been to have him on hand in our future, does not sing back what her favorite brother wants to hear.
    As she was with my father, she will be doggedly honest with Wally, sending back to him that she really can't be sure how his chances would be here where I am dreamily
Ault
ing and where my father has brought our hopes.

    There is plenty of Phoenix I haven't seen,
she will write with pointblank neutrality.
    ***
    Our story, my mother's, my father's, mine, would seem to need no help from imagination to predict us onward from that 1944 Christmas. Americans of our time lived some version of it by the hundreds of thousands, ultimate millions, as Phoenix's population greatened beyond those of Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, beyond that of entire states such as Montana, as America's center of gravity avalanched south to the Sunbelt. The picture of us-to-be is virtually automatic. My father doctors his way out of the ulcer siege, my mother's asthma stays subdued and her homesickness begins to ebb, we continue on as self-draftees in the sunward march of America. Sheepkeepers no more, now we be bombermakers. Naturalized Alzonans, no more or less ill-fitted for project living and eventual suburbs than any other defense work importées. As this last war winter drew down toward all that was going to burgeon beyond, we were right there at hand, ready-made, to install ourselves into the metropolis future that was Phoenix. Except we didn't.

The Doig boys in the 1920s; Charlie, in the striped shirt, with three of his cowboy brothers.
    We two, my mother and I,
navigate among the cacti. The road from the cabin threads in and out of any number of identical pale braids of wheel tracks, but we have memorized strategic saguaros, arms uplifted like green traffic policemen, at the turns we need to make. Behind the steering wheel of the Ford my mother keeps watch on the cloud-puffy March sky as much as she does our cactus landmarks. She hates bad roads (and has spent what seems like her whole life on them) but at least these of the desert are more sand than mud.

    The odometer's little miles slowly go, three, seven, then ten and here is town, palm-sprigged Wickenburg. My mother believes she was not born to parallel-park,