All But The Waltz: A Memoir Of Five Generations In The Life Of A Montana Family

Also by the author Balsamroot (New York, 1993; paperback, Norman, 2001) Bone Deep in Landscape (Norman, 1999) (ed.) Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, with Kim Barnes (New York, 1994) Lambing Out and Other Stories (Columbia, 1977; paperback, Norman, 2001) Runaway (Lewiston, 1990) Sister Coyote (New York, 2000) (ed.) Written on Water: Essays on Idaho Rivers (New York, 2000) A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family University of Oklahoma Press NORMAN Photographs are from the author's collection. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Blew, Mary Clearman All but the waltz : A memoir of five generations in the life of a Montana family I Mary Clearman Blew. p. cm ISBN 0-8061-3321-X 1. Judith River Valley (Mont.)-Social life and customs. 2. Judith 3. Clearman family. 4. Blew, River Valley (Mont.)-Biography. Mary Clearman, 1939- -Biography-Family. 5. Authors, y. I. Title. American-20th century-Biography-Famil The paper in t h s book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the council on Library Resources, Inc. Copyright 0 1991 by Mary Clearman Blew. Map copyright 0 1991 by Viking Penguin. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University, by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A. First published in 1991 by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. First printing of the University of Oklahoma Press edition, 2001. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS The Sow in the River 1 Reading Abraham 13 Dirt Roads 3 9 Leaving Montana 57 Little Jake and the Old Ways 79 Auntie 101 Getting Married 12 1 Going to Fort Peck 137 The Unwanted Child 159 January 1922 179 All But the Waltz 203 f IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII FERGUS C o U N T Y ChOcteau County IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII To Stanford 0 10 20 I I. .-.. 6 Scale of Miles Judith Basin County . 1 1 Carrie's L:-.-. I T o the Missouri River Bridge 4 This page intentionally left blank This page intentionally left blank Spring Creek, about 1900. 3 n the sagebrush to the north of the mountains in central Montana, where the Judith River deepens its channel and threads a slow, treacherous current between the cutbanks, a cottonwood log house still stands. It is in sight of the highway, about a mile downriver on a gravel road. From where I have turned off and stopped my car on the sunlit shoulder of the highway, I can see the house, a distant and solitary dark interruption of the sagebrush. I can even see the lone box elder tree, a dusty green shade over what used to be the yard. I know from experience that if I were to keep driving over the cattle guard and follow the gravel road through the sage and alkali to the log house, I would find the windows gone and the door sagging and the floor rotting away. But from here the house looks hardly changed from the summer of my earliest memories, the summer before I was three, when I lived in that log house on the lower Judith with my mother and father and grandmother and my grandmother's boyfriend, Bill. My memories seem to me as treacherous as the river. Is it possible, sitting here on this dry shoulder of a secondary 4 Mary Clearman Blew highway in the middle of Montana where the brittle weeds of August scratch at the sides of the car, watching the narrow blue Judith take its time to thread and wind through the bluffs on its way to a distant northern blur, to believe in anything but today? The past eases away with the current. I cannot watch a single