Patterns

THIS HOUSE OF SKY: LANDSCAPES OF A WESTERN MIND

by Ivan Doig

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich;

314 pages; $9.95

Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped.

The remembering begins out of that new silence. Through the time since, I reach back along my father's tellings and around the urgings which would have me face about and forget, to feel into these oldest shadows for the first sudden edge of it all.

These opening words of This House of Sky whisper up a big promise. They say, on top of all else, that a real writer is at hand. Yet the bright prospect may, at the outset, seem at odds with the vehicle he has chosen for his first book: a personal memoir. The form, after all, is notorious for snaring even gifted writers in thickets of anecdotage and sentiment.

Ivan Doig avoids such traps. Exercising a talent at once robust and sensitive, he redeems the promise of those first fetching sentences. His mother's final breath came in a remote Montana place where "a low rumple of the mountain knolls itself up watchfully, and atop it, like a sentry box over the frontier between the sly creek and the prodding meadow, perches our single-room herding cabin." They were, he and his parents, "secure as hawks with wind under our wings."

Then came "that fierce season of bewilderment," and suddenly there were only two breathings in the cabin. The boy's world was filled entirely with a ghost and a father who would for a long time remain "in the dusk of his grief over the loss of a wife when she was only 31. The father was short, wiry, horse-stomped, work-scarred, a ranch hand, a sheep tender, a survivor of scratch-hard mountain life who cherished the few years he and his bride had followed their flocks among the timeless hills. He faced life with a "dry half-grin" and wore for good a scar on his chin--"a single quick notch at the bottom of his face, as if it might be the first lightest scratch of calamity." And now--

"The clockless mountain summers were over for my father. Forty-four years old, a ranch hand, now a widower, Charlie Doig had a son to raise by himself. He needed work which would last beyond a quick season. He had to fit us under a roof somewhere, choose a town where I could start to school, piece out in his own mind just how we were going to live from then on. It tells most about my father over the next years that I was the only one of those predicaments that ever seemed to grow easier for him."

In his telling of it, Doig lifts what might have been marginally engaging reminiscence into an engrossing and moving recovery of an obscure human struggle. There is defeat and triumph here, grief and joy, nobility and meanness, all arising from commonplace events, episodes and locales. The narrative rides mainly upon the father, but another protagonist of the book is memory itself. Moments from the chastening region of southwestern Montana haunt Doig:

"Rote moments, these, mysteryless perhaps in themselves. It is where they lead, and with what fitful truth and deceit, that tantalizes. If, somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself--to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence--if this is what must be, why is the pattern of remembered instants so uneven, so gapped and rutted and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments in the mind, from childhood."

Thus does he offer, as the title says, the landscapes of a Western mind. Strange--his remembering, like any well-told story, makes events seem as though they happened long ago, or in some time less place. A reader may be surprised now and then when the book brings a reminder that the author was born only in 1939 and grew up in contemporary Montana. Still, Ivan Doig's youth is good news. An ex-newspaperman living in Seattle, he has a lot of time remaining in which to remember and write.--Frank Trippett

With reporting by Frank Trippett

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