This House of Sky Read Free

March, 1977.
It had taken about four months, vastly less than I thought it would, and
This House of Sky
had lucked onto its perfect editor.
    Ann Nelson at once did some dickering with Carol Hill—levered the advance up from $3,500 to a whopping $4,500—and we had a book contract.
    All that remained, of course, was to write the last three-fourths of the book in the next six months.
    I at least knew what was needed first: a summer in Montana, to revisit the scenes of the book and to talk with more of the people who had known my family. It became a summer enormous far beyond the calendar, those middle months of 1977, as complicated and astonishing a time as I can imagine. A kind of stopless ricochet through the past, to places and persons of twenty and thirty years before.
    In White Sulphur Springs, the only place Carol and I could find to rent was a set of rooms in the old John Ringling family mansion. A castle of prosperity it had been to me when I was a schoolboy in White Sulphur and the Ringlings were still circus kings; now the two of us rattled around in the place with plumbers and painters and carpenters who were trying to cobble it back together as an apartment house.
    In the village of Ringling still stood the shacky little house my grandmother and I shared when I was eleven and twelve years old. In the Tierney Basin still stood the log house built by my father's father on the homestead that first rooted the Doigs into Montana.
    One evening I tried a long shot, a call from the phone booth in front of the hospital in White Sulphur Springs—I saw a lot of that phone booth that summer; it inevitably had in it either a tumbleweed or several empty Olympia beer cans—a phone call to the rancher who had inherited the ranch near Bozeman where my parents were herding
sheep when my mother died, in the summer of 1945. Does that herding cabin back in the Bridger Mountains still exist? I asked.
    "It does," answered Horace Morgan. "I'm going in there first thing in the morning to salt cattle. If you can get here, you can go in with me."
    We got there.
    I can pick out only two constancies in that mad whirl of a summer: Carol perpetually taking photos to back up my notecard descriptions of the places of the past and me perpetually going out of the apartment, tape recorder in hand and notebooks in pocket, like a door-to-door salesman. And the voices from the past began to form a summer chorus: Tony Hunolt, who had been choreboy at the great Dogie Ranch when my father and mother worked there and now, in the last year of his life, was swamping out the local grocery store; Harold Chadwick, garageman of Dupuyer from my high school years, with his memory of the Metis fugitive Toussaint Salois sitting by a campfire in a buffalo coat; Kathryn Donovan, my mother's eloquent teacher at the one-room Moss Agate school; these and fifteen or so others who ended up speaking in the book.
    I know no way to adequately describe, or even account for, what happened next. Carol and I were back in Seattle by about the first of August, and on the ninth of December, the hundred-thousand-word manuscript of
This House of Sky
was finished.
    During those blurred writing weeks my diary went into near-collapse—probably an accurate representation of my condition—but I do remember warning myself that my editor, Carol Hill, was never going to go for all the detail I had crammed into the manuscript and I had better set my mind to cut ten or fifteen thousand words after she got a look at it.
    Away to New York went the 410 typed pages, and then, about six weeks later, on the 19th of January, 1978, as I was stepping onto the jogging track at my wife's college, Carol drove up to the gate, told me Carol Hill had phoned from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and I'd better scoot home and call her right back.
    There is a diary entry of what happened next, and it begins:
Mark this day with a white stone.
    Carol Hill in her first few sentences about the manuscript had said over