by Richard Ford
‘Why, hello Joe,’ she said. She seemed surprised. She smiled up at me and did not look at the man who was in the room with her. ‘I guess you didn’t work today.’ She moved her hand toward the man to point him out. ‘This is Mr Miller. This is my son, Joe Brinson, Warren.’
‘I already know Joe,’ the man said. He stepped toward me with his hand out, and I saw that he had a limp in his leg, not a bad one, just a limp that made him pull to one side the way it would if one leg was shorter than the other. It was his left leg he limped toward, and it did not seem to hurt him because he smiled when he shook my hand. He was a tall, bulky man who wore glasses, and he was older than my father–fifty maybe. His hair was thin and combed straight back on his head. He looked like someone I’d seen before but couldn’t remember. I didn’t think I’d ever heard his name. Warren Miller.
When Warren Miller had my hand in his own big hand, he held it for a moment as though he wanted me to know he meant it. His skin was warm and he had a big ring on, a gold ring with a red stone. He was wearing shiny black cowboy boots.
‘I’m happy to see you, son,’ he said. I could smell him, smell something like tobacco and hair oil on his clothes.
‘I’m happy to see you,’ I said.
‘Where do you know Joe from?’ my mother said, still smiling. She looked at me and winked.
‘I know his father,’ Warren Miller said. He stood back and put his hands on his hips so that his coat pushed back and showed his big chest. His skin was very pale and he was over six feet. He seemed to be inspecting me. ‘His father’s a hell of a golfer. I played with him at the Wheatland Club on two occasions, and he parted us all from our money. Joe was there waiting for him.’
‘Do you remember that time, Joe?’ my mother said.
‘Yes,’ I said. But I didn’t remember. Warren Miller was looking at me as though he knew I didn’t remember.
‘Now your father’s out fighting this fire, is that right?’ Warren Miller said. He smiled as if there was something he liked about that. He kept his big hands on his hips.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he is.’
‘That’s what he told us,’ my mother said.
‘Well. That’s wonderful,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s very good. Do you wish you could go out and fight it yourself? You probably do.’
‘Yes sir,’ I said.
‘I think he actually does, Warren, as crazy as it seems,’ my mother said, still seated, looking up at us. ‘He and his dad think alike about most things these days.’
‘There’s not enough around to kill us, I guess,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I’ve felt that way. Men understand that.’
‘Men don’t understand much,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not their long suit. They don’t wake up crying, either. Women take care of that.’
‘I never heard that before,’ Warren Miller said, ‘have you, Joe? I’ve waked up crying plenty of times. Songjin was a place I did that.’ He looked around at my mother. I think he wanted to say something more about this subject, but all he said was, ‘Korea.’
‘Warren’s borrowing a book from me, Joe,’ my mother said, and she got up. ‘I’ll go get it right now.’ She went back into the bedroom. She kept her books stacked on the floor of the closet behind her shoes.
‘That’s correct,’ Warren Miller said, and I guess he was talking about the book then. He looked back at me. ‘Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing just to know you’re alive,’ he said, but in a soft voice, a voice I didn’t think he wanted my mother to hear.
‘I understand,’ I said, because I did understand that. I thought it was what my father had been talking about the night before, standing in the dark waiting to get on the bus.
‘Everybody doesn’t know that,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I can guarantee you that much.’ He reached down in his pants pocket and came up with something he held in his big hand. ‘Let me give you a present, Joe,’ he said. When he opened his hand there was a small knife in it, a slender clasp knife made of silver. On the side of the case in tiny blocked letters, it said BURMA-1943. ‘Some trouble isn’t worth getting into, though,’ he said. ‘This’ll remind you which to choose.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. I took the knife, which was warm and hard and heavier than I thought it would be. I felt for a moment that I shouldn’t be taking it. Only I wanted it, and I liked Warren Miller for giving it to me. I knew he would not tell my mother about it, and neither would I.
‘People do everything eventually, I guess,’ I heard my mother say from the other room. I heard the closet door close and her footsteps on the floor. She appeared in the door to the hall. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ She had a small book in her hand, and she was smiling. ‘Are you two plotting against me?’ she said.
‘We’re shooting the breeze,’ Warren Miller said. I let the silver knife slip into my pocket.
‘I hope so,’ my mother said. ‘Here.’ She held the book out to him. ‘From my private library. Ex Libris Jeanette,’ she said.
‘What is it?’ Warren Miller said. He took the book and looked at its cover, which was dark blue.
‘It’s what you asked me for,’ my mother said. ‘The selected poems of William Wordsworth. “Getting and spending we lay waste all our powers.” That’s what I remember.’
‘I remember that,’ Warren Miller said. He held the book in both his hands and looked down at the cover.
‘I taught Mr Miller how to swim recently,’ my mother said. ‘Now he’d like to learn to read poetry.’ She smiled at him and sat back down in her armchair. ‘He’s going to give me a job in his grain elevator, too,’ she said.
‘I am,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s right.’
‘Mr Miller owns a grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘He has three of them, actually. I bet you’ve seen them, sweetheart.’ She looked around toward the back of our house and pointed her arm over behind her head. ‘They’re across the river. Those big white ones. They’re what we have as a skyline out here. They’re probably full of oats, like Warren.’
‘What is in them.’ I asked.
‘Wheat,’ Warren Miller said. ‘Though this isn’t a good year for it. It’s too hot.’
‘It’s too dry,’ my mother said, ‘in case we didn’t notice. That’s why we have big fires now.’
‘That’s correct,’ Warren Miller said, and he looked uncomfortable. He kept the slender book in one hand and moved closer to the front door. It gave me an odd feeling that he was here, and that he was in his fifties and knew my mother. I tried to think about him wearing a bathing suit. ‘I’ve got to see a man about a dog,’ he said. He put his hand with the big gold and red ring on my shoulder. I could feel it on my shoulder bone. ‘I’m glad I saw you, Joe,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you did, too,’ my mother said. She didn’t get up. She seemed strange, as if something had affected her and she wanted to pretend it hadn’t.
‘Come to see me tomorrow, Jeanette. All right?’ Warren Miller said. He limped when he moved toward the door.
‘All right,’ my mother said, ‘I will. Joe, open the door for Mr Miller.’
And I did that, with my school books in my hand and the silver knife he had given me in my pocket.
‘I hope I’ll see you again,’ Warren Miller said to me.
‘You probably will,’ my mother said.
We watched Warren Miller as he limped down our front steps and out past the wooden gate to his Oldsmobile, parked in the dry leaves across the street.
‘He’s a nice man,’ my mother said, sitting and looking at me when I had shut the door. ‘Doesn’t he seem nice to you?’
‘He does all right.’
‘He can swim very nicely. You’d be surprised–for a big man. He fought in two wars but never learned to swim. Isn’t that odd? You’re not supposed to be able to do that.’ She looked up at the ceiling as if she was thinking about it. ‘I said I could explain everything, didn’t I? But I can’t.’
I looked out the front window at the Oldsmobile
, which was parked where it had been. Warren Miller was sitting in the driver’s seat looking at our house. I lifted my hand and waved at him. But he couldn’t see me. He sat there and looked for a time longer, then he started the car and drove away.
At five o’clock my mother came into my room where I was setting out a problem for my geometry class in school. She had taken a nap after Warren Miller had left, and then taken a bath and talked on the phone. When she came in my room she was dressed in a way that was new to me. She had on blue jeans and a white western shirt and some blue-colored cowboy boots I had known her to have but had never seen her wear. She had a red kerchief around her neck, tied in a knot.
‘Do you like this particular get-up?’ she said, and looked down at the toes of her boots.
‘It looks nice,’ I said.
‘Thank you very much.’ She looked at herself in the mirror over my chest of drawers, across the room. ‘I used to dress like this all the time in eastern Washington,’ she said. ‘In the last century.’ She took hold of the doorknob and turned it gently as she stood there. ‘I used to stand behind the bull chutes at the rodeos and hope some cowboy would approve of me. It made my father very mad. He wanted me to go to college, which is where I did go. And where I want you to go, incidentally.’
‘I want to go,’ I said. I had given some thought to that, already, but I hadn’t thought about a profession yet. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me about that again for a while.
‘Southern Cal’s very good,’ my mother said. She looked out my window, stooping a little as if she wanted to see out toward the west. ‘That’s where I want you to go. Or Harvard. They’re both good schools.’
‘I’d go there,’ I said. I didn’t know where either of these schools was located or why they were good. I’d only heard their names before.
‘I’ve never taken you to the rodeos, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was leaning against the door to my room, looking at me lying on the bed with my books and papers. She was thinking about something that had nothing to do with me, I thought. Maybe she was thinking about my father. ‘Western boys are supposed to go to rodeos. However. I used to race barrels in Briscoe. I certainly did do that. Against other girls. And I wore this get-up. I did it for the sole and simple reason of attracting attention to myself. They used to call us chute beauties. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that an impressive thing to know about your mother? That she was a chute beauty?’
‘Dad told me about that,’ I said. ‘He likes it.’
‘Did he? Does he? That’s good. It’s probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents. It seems merciful to me at this moment.’
‘I knew that, too,’ I said.
‘Well, good for you,’ my mother said. She walked around my bed and stood looking out the window, across our sunny yard toward the river and the oil refinery, and farther away toward the hazy sky behind which was the fire my father was fighting. ‘Would you like to take a drive?’ she said, putting her fingers on the glass as though she wanted to push it. ‘I’d like to see the fire. I think you can drive right to where it is. I read that in the paper. You can consider it the beginning of your higher education.’
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said, and closed my geometry book.
‘Maybe we’ll see something astounding that you’ll always remember,’ my mother said, her fingers still on the window glass. ‘That certainly doesn’t happen every day. At least not at my age it doesn’t. Although maybe at your age it does.’
‘How old are you,’ I asked because I realized I did not know how old she or my father was.
‘Thirty-seven,’ my mother said, and looked at me sharply. ‘Does that seem like the wrong age? Would you like it better if I said fifty? Would that make you feel better?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thirty-seven’s all right.’
‘Don’t you feel protected enough?’
‘I haven’t thought about that, I guess,’ I said.
‘I won’t be this age forever,’ she said, ‘so don’t start. It’d just confuse you.’ She smiled and shook her head. I thought she was going to laugh, but she didn’t laugh. She just walked out of the room and off into her own bedroom to get ready to go.
We drove in our family Plymouth from Great Falls, west along the Sun River and Route 200, out through the towns of Vaughn and Simms and Fort Shaw and Sun River itself, towns on the bottom edge of the wheat land beyond which were the large mountains. The light that evening was clear autumn light, and everything–the stubble, the witch grass edges, the cottonwood flats below the Fairfield bench–was gold and dry, the color of the sun. Ducks were in the river eddies, and now and then I could see a farmer cutting silage rows through his corn stand. It seemed to me an odd time for a fire to go on. Though out ahead of us, beyond the town of Augusta where the mountains commenced, smoke rose like a screen that drifted northward up the front to Canada, thick and white at the bottom but thinner and drifting above, so that as my mother drove us closer and the peaks became hidden by smoke, it came to seem that there were no mountains, and where the dense smoke began the plains and even the world itself came to an end.
‘Do you know what they call trees in a forest fire,’ my mother asked as she drove through Augusta, where there were only a few buildings–a hotel and some red bar signs, a service station–and a few people on the sidewalk.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Fuel. Trees are fuel. A fox fleeing from a flaming fuel-fed forest fire. Did you ever hear that?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It was just a funny joke when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Do you know what they call the trees that’re left up when the fire goes by?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘The standing dead,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t they have an interesting terminology for things? My father told me all about it. He felt it was broadening.’
‘What happens to the animals,’ I asked.
‘Oh, they adjust, though the little ones have a hard time. They get confused. Everything happens before they know it. I used to cry about it, but my father said it didn’t help anything. He was right.’
We drove through Augusta and out onto a dirt road that crossed a creek bottom, then went up into the white smoke. It was going nearer to dark then, and the sun was whitish behind the smoke, and north and south of us the evening sky was red and purple.
The fire was out ahead, though we couldn’t see flames yet. Along the way, a few cars were stopped on the roadside and people were standing in the grass or sitting on their car hoods, watching with binoculars or taking pictures. Some had out-of-state tags, and some people were holding flashlights. A few of the cars that had started back had their headlights on.
‘It’s a sickening smell,’ my mother said, and cleared her throat. I didn’t know if she knew where we were going. She was just driving into the smoke. ‘People get drawn to it. They don’t want it to be over.’
‘Why?’ I said, watching up onto the hillside. As the creek bottom grew narrower, I could see small individual yellow fires and longer lines of fire in the dark with barely distinguishable human figures moving in the trees.
‘Oh, I guess.’ My mother seemed annoyed. ‘I guess they think something worse is happening someplace else, so they’re better off with a tragedy they already know. It’s not a generous thought.’
‘Maybe that’s not right,’ I said. And I thought that because I didn’t see what any of this had to do with my father.
‘Maybe not,’ my mother said, ‘maybe you’re smart and I’m stupid.’
‘Do you like Miller?’ I said. I had wanted to know it in the afternoon, but there hadn’t seemed enough reason to ask, whereas now for some reason there did.
‘Do you mean Mr Miller? Warren?’ my mother said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you like him?’
‘Not very much,’ she said. ‘Things do happen around him, though. He has that feel about him, doesn’t he?’
‘I don’t know,’
I said. I had the knife he had given me in my pocket, a thing he had given me to make me like him. But that was all that had happened to me where Warren Miller was concerned.
‘He’s going to give me a job to keep his books at his grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘That’s something. And he’s asked you and me to have supper at his house tomorrow night. Which is lucky because I had plans to open up some cans. Why?’
‘I was interested,’ I said. The truth was I wanted to know what she thought about my father leaving, and I hoped this would get around to that subject. Though it didn’t, and I didn’t know how to make it.
‘It’s always just yourself,’ my mother said. ‘Nothing else.’
‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘Honey, nothing. I was thinking and talking. It’s a bad habit. You have an inquiring intelligence. Everything will always surprise you. You’ll have a wonderful life.’ She smiled.
‘Don’t they surprise you?’
‘Not much,’ my mother said. ‘Now and then I run upon the unexpected. But that’s all. Look up there now, Joe.’
Ahead of us at the end of the canyon, the creek bottom road opened into a wide grass meadow beyond which a hill went up sharply, full of small fires in sparse trees.
‘Let’s give you the full treatment,’ my mother said, and she stopped the car right there, still in the narrow canyon where there were patches of fire burning ten yards from the road. She turned off the motor. ‘Open your door,’ she said. ‘See what it feels like.’
I opened my side and stepped out on the road just as she’d told me to. And the fire was all around me, up the hill on both sides and in front of me and behind. The small yellow fires and lines of fire were flickering in the underbrush close enough that I could’ve touched them just by reaching out. There was a sound like wind blowing, and a crack of limbs on fire. I could feel the heat of it all over the front of me, on my legs and my fingers. I smelled the deep, hot piny odor of trees and ground in flames. And what I wanted to do was get away from it before it overcame me.
I got back in the car with my mother and closed the door. It was instantly cooler and quieter.
