by Richard Ford
‘I understand,’ my mother said. ‘I’m not mad at you.’
‘Love is one thing,’ my father said. And then he just stopped talking. He looked all around the room for an instant as if something had startled him, something he heard or expected to hear, or just something he thought of while he was talking that made the rest of what he was about to say fly out of his mind. ‘Where are you going to move to?’ he said. ‘Are you moving in with Miller?’
‘The Helen Apartments,’ my mother said. ‘They’re down by the river. On First.’
‘I know where they are,’ my father said abruptly. Then he said, ‘Christ almighty, it’s hot in here, Jean.’ His canvas shirt was buttoned all the way to the top, and he suddenly unbuttoned three buttons right down to the middle of his chest. ‘You should turn it down in here,’ he said. I remembered that I was the one who had turned the furnace up earlier that day when I had been alone in the house and cold.
‘That’s true,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry.’ But she did not get up. She stayed where she was.
‘Have you had a hard three days?’ my father said.
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘Not very hard.’
‘Good, then.’ My father looked at her. ‘Are we not getting along? Is that it?’
‘I think so,’ my mother said calmly. She touched her neck with her fingers. The mark was below her collar and the white bow, but she must’ve just become aware of it and wondered where it was and if he could see it, which he couldn’t. He knew nothing about it.
‘I’d certainly like to see the world the same way again. Have things be all right.’ My father said this and smiled at her. ‘I feel like everything’s tilting. The whole works.’
‘I’ve felt that way,’ my mother said.
‘Boy,’ my father said. ‘Boy, boy.’ He shook his head and smiled. I know he was amazed to have all this happening to him. He had never dreamed that it could. Maybe he was trying to think what he had done wrong, go back in time to when life was set straight. But he couldn’t think of when that was.
‘Jerry,’ my mother said. ‘Why don’t you go out and take Joe for something to eat. I didn’t cook tonight. I didn’t know you were coming till too late.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ my father said. He looked at me and smiled again. ‘This is a wild life, isn’t it son?’ he said.
‘He doesn’t know what is and isn’t.’ My mother said this crossly, in a scolding way, without any sympathy for him. She got up and stood behind the table with the decks of cards on it. She was waiting for us to leave.
‘I think I’m wasted on you,’ my father said. He was angry again in just that instant. I didn’t blame him.
‘I think you are, too,’ my mother said. And she smiled in a way that was not a smile. She just wanted this moment in her life to be over, and for something else–probably anything–to happen next. ‘We’re all wasted on everything nowadays,’ she said. Then she turned and walked out of the living room, leaving us in it all alone, just me and my father with no place to go but out into the night, and no one to be with but each other.
Chapter 7
We drove down to Central Avenue to where there were cafes and some bars I could get a meal in. It had gone on snowing in tiny flakes that swirled in front of the headlights, but the pavement was already damp and shining with water, and the snow had begun to turn to rain by the time we were downtown, so that it seemed more like spring in eastern Washington than the beginning of winter in Montana.
In the car my father acted like things weren’t so bad. He told me he would take me to a movie if I wanted to go to one, or that we could go stay in a hotel for the night. The Rainbow, he’d heard, was a good place. He mentioned that the Yankees were playing well in the World Series so far, but that he hoped Pittsburgh would win. He also said that bad things happened and adults knew it, but that they finally passed by, and I should not think we were all just an accumulation of our worst errors because we were all better than we thought, and that he loved my mother and she loved him, and that he had made mistakes himself and that we all deserved better. And I knew he believed he would make life right between them again.
‘Things can surprise you. I’m aware of that,’ he said to me as we drove down Central in the cold car. ‘When I was in Choteau I saw a moose, if you can believe that. Right down in the middle of town. The fire had driven it out of where it normally roamed. Everybody was amazed.’
‘What happened to it?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know that,’ my father said. ‘Some of them wanted to shoot it but some others didn’t. I didn’t hear about it later. Maybe it did okay.’
We drove down to the end of Central and parked in front of a bar that had bright lights inside, and walls that were painted white and very high ceilings. It was called The Presidential, and I could see through the windows from the street that men were playing cards at two tables in the back, but no one was at the bar drinking. I had looked into this bar on my walks through town and thought that railroad men went there because it was near the train stations and the railroad hotels. ‘This is a fine place here,’ my father said. ‘They have good food and you can hear yourself think a thought.’
The bar was a long, narrow room and had framed pictures of two or three presidents on the wall. Roosevelt was one. Lincoln was another. We sat at the bar, and I ordered navy bean soup and a pasty pie. My father ordered a glass of whiskey and a beer. I had not eaten since morning and I was hungry, though as I sat at the bar with my father I couldn’t help wondering what my mother was doing. Was she packing her suitcase? Was she talking on the telephone to Warren Miller or to someone else? Was she sitting on her bed crying? None of those seemed exactly right. And I decided that when I had eaten my meal, I would ask my father to take me back home. He would understand someone wanting to do that, I thought, especially for your mother, at a bad time.
‘A lot of what’s burned, you know, is just understory.’ My father’s hand was on his glass of whiskey, and he was looking at the scarred skin on the back of it. ‘You’ll be able to go in there next spring. You’ll live in a house one of these days made of that timber. A fire’s not always such a bad thing.’ He looked at me and smiled.
‘Were you afraid out there,’ I asked. I was eating my pasty pie.
‘Yes, I was. We only were digging back trenches, but I was afraid. Anything can go on. If you had an enemy he could kill you and no one would know it. I had to stop a man from running straight into the fire once. I dragged him down.’ My father took a drink of his beer and rubbed one hand over the other one. ‘Look at my hands,’ he said. ‘I had smooth hands when I played golf.’ He rubbed his hand harder. ‘Are you proud of me now?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. And that was true. I had told my mother that I was, and I was.
I heard poker chips clatter in the back of the room and a chair squeak as someone got up. ‘You can’t quit now, I’m winning,’ someone said and people laughed.
‘I’d like to live up on the eastern front,’ my father said. ‘That would be a nicer life than down here. Get out of Great Falls.’ His mind was just running then; whatever he thought, he said. It was a strange night in his life.
‘I’d like to live up there,’ I said, though I had never been closer to the eastern front than when I had gone with my mother two days before, and everything there had been on fire.
‘Do you think your mother would take a chance on it?’ he said.
‘She might,’ I said. My father nodded, and I knew he was thinking about the eastern front, someplace where it was not likely he’d be suited for things and my mother wouldn’t be either. They’d lived in houses in towns all their lives and made good with that. He was just taking his mind off the things that he didn’t like and couldn’t help.
My father ordered another glass of whiskey but no beer. I asked for a glass of milk and piece of pie. He turned around on his stool and looked at the men in the back who were playing cards. No one else was in the bar. It wa
s seven o’clock and people would not come in until later when shifts let off.
‘I guess I should’ve known about all this happening,’ my father said, facing the other way. ‘There’s always someone else involved somewhere. Even if it’s just in your mind. You can’t control your mind, I know that. Probably you shouldn’t try.’ I sat without saying anything because I thought he was going to ask me something I did not want to answer. ‘Has this been going on for some time?’ my father said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You get into these things and they seem like your whole life,’ my father said. ‘You can’t see out of them. I’m understanding about that.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again.
‘It’s the money,’ my father said. ‘That’s the big part of it. That’s the way families break up. There’s not enough money. I’m surprised about this Miller, though,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t seem like a man who’d do that. I’ve played golf with him. He has a limp of some kind. I think I won some money once off him.’
‘He said that,’ I said.
‘Do you know him?’ And my father looked at me.
‘I did meet him,’ I said. ‘I met him once.’
‘Isn’t he a married man himself?’ my father said. ‘I thought he was.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He isn’t. He was.’
‘When did you happen to meet him?’ my father said.
And suddenly I felt afraid–afraid of my father, and of what I would say. Because I felt if I said the wrong thing something in me would be ruined and I would never be the same again. I wanted to get up from my seat at that instant and leave. But I couldn’t. I was there with my father, and there was no place I could go that would be far enough away. And what I decided was that what people believed–that I knew nothing about my mother and Warren Miller, for example–didn’t matter as much as it mattered what the truth was. And I decided that that’s what I would tell if I had to tell anything and if I knew the truth, no matter what I’d thought before when I was not face to face with it.
Though I think that was the wrong thing to have done, and my father would have thought so too if he’d had the chance to choose, which he didn’t. Only I did. It was because of me.
My father turned on the barstool and looked at me, his eyes small and hard-looking. He wanted me to tell him the truth. I knew that. But he did not know what the truth would be.
‘I met him at our house,’ I said.
‘When did this take place,’ my father asked.
‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘Two days ago.’
‘What happened? What happened then?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘And you never met him again?’ my father said.
‘I met him at his house,’ I said.
‘Why did you go there?’ My father was watching me. Maybe he hoped I was lying, and he would catch me at it, lying maybe to make my mother look worse, for some reason he imagined in which I would want to do something for him, to make him feel better by taking his side. ‘Did you go to his house alone?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I went with Mother. We had our dinner over there.’
‘You did?’ he said. ‘Did you stay all night?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We didn’t. We left and went home.’
‘And that’s all?’ he said.
‘That was all then,’ I said.
‘But did you see your mother do something while I was gone that you wouldn’t like to have to tell me?’ my father said. ‘I know it’s odd to know about this. It’s all probably my fault. I’m sorry.’ He looked at me very hard. I think he didn’t want me to say anything, but he also wanted to know the truth and what part in it I’d played, and what part in it my mother had, and what was right or wrong about it. And I did not say anything else because even though I could see it all in my mind again–all those things that had happened in just three days–I didn’t think I knew everything and did not want to pretend I did, or that what I’d seen was the truth.
‘Maybe it doesn’t require an answer,’ my father said after a while. He looked back at the men playing cards at the end of the room. ‘Did your mother tell you anything?’ my father said. ‘I mean, did she say anything that you remember? Not about what she might’ve done. But just anything. I’d like to know what was on her mind.’
‘She said she wasn’t crazy,’ I said. ‘And she said it’s hard to say no to yourself.’
‘Those are both true,’ my father said, watching the men play cards. ‘I’ve felt those myself. Is that all?’
‘She said everybody had to give up things.’
‘Is that so?’ my father said. ‘That’s good to know about. I wonder what she’s given up?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Maybe she’s decided to give us up. Or just me. That’s probably it.’
The bartender brought my pie and my milk and a fork. He set my father’s glass of whiskey on the bar. But my father was looking the other way. He was thinking, and he sat that way without talking for a long time–maybe three minutes–while I sat beside him and waited and did not eat any of my pie or do anything. Just sat.
‘I was only there for three days, but it did feel like a long time,’ he finally said. ‘I can certainly sympathize with people.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I touched my fork with my fingers.
But my father turned and looked at me again. ‘I think you must have seen your mother with this Miller, didn’t you? Not just about dinner, I mean.’
His voice was very calm, so I just said, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Where were they?’ my father said, looking at me.
‘In the house,’ I said.
‘In our house?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. And I don’t know why I told him that. He didn’t make me do it. I just did. It must’ve seemed natural at that moment.
‘Well, I’m sorry, Joe,’ my father said. ‘I know that wasn’t what you expected.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘Well, no,’ my father said. ‘It’s not all right. But it’ll have to become all right with you somehow.’
He turned around away from me, then he picked up his glass of whiskey. ‘I don’t have to drink, but I just want to right now,’ he said. He drank down a little of what he had and put it down. ‘When you’re finished with your pie,’ he said, ‘we’ll go out for a ride.’
While I ate my pie, my father got up and went to the restroom. Then he came out and he made a phone call at the back of the bar. I watched him, but I couldn’t hear what he said or who he was talking to. I thought possibly he was talking to my mother, talking about what I had just told him, maybe saying that he would not be bringing me home that night, or telling her to leave home herself, or how disappointed he was with her. I thought each of those things, though he did not talk long. When he came back, he had a five-dollar bill in his hand, and he put that on the bar and said to me, ‘Let’s clear our heads.’ And we walked outside, where it was snowing lightly again. People were waiting in line down the street to go into the Auditorium. But he did not notice them and we got in the car and drove up Central away from downtown.
My father drove all the way out to Fifteenth Street. We did not talk much. He pulled into a gas station and got out, and I sat and listened as he talked to the man who filled up the car. They talked about the snow, which the attendant said would be turning to rain then ice, and about the fire in Allen Creek, which my father said he had been fighting until that very afternoon, and which he and the attendant both believed would now go out. The man checked the oil and the tires, then he opened the trunk to do something I couldn’t see. He said something to my father about needing a new taillight, and then my father paid him and got in and we drove back out onto the street.
We drove down Central again to the middle of Great Falls by the train stations and the city park and the river where I’d already walked that day, and past the Helen Apartments where my mother was moving. My father d
id not seem to notice them, or to notice much of anything. He was just driving, I thought, with no particular destination while his mind was working on whatever he had to think about: my mother, me, what would happen to all of us. As we went father out toward the east, I could see the lights of the football stadium shining in the snowy sky. It was Friday night and a game was being played. Great Falls and Billings. I was glad not to be involved in it.
‘I said a fire can be a good thing, didn’t I?’ my father said. ‘Most people don’t believe that.’ He seemed in better spirits driving, as if he had thought of something that made him feel better. ‘It’s sure surprising how fast the world can turn backwards, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’
‘Three days, if I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe things were not as solid as I thought. I guess that’s evident.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s evident.’ He looked at me, and he was smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder and could feel my bones. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘once you face it, the worst is all behind you. Things start to improve then. Going to the fire just had a bad effect on your mother. That’s all.’
‘Did you ever like being there?’ I said. And this was something I’d wanted to know.
‘Oh,’ my father said. ‘My attitude changed. First it was mysterious. Then it was exciting. Then I felt helpless about it. I felt bottled up before I went,’ he said. ‘I stopped feeling that way.’
‘Did you have a girlfriend out there,’ I asked, because that was what my mother had said two nights ago.
‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘There were women there. I saw women fight each other, in fact. I saw them fight like men.’
And that seemed strange to me–two women fighting. Though it was an exciting thought, and I realized how odd it was for me to talk this way with my father, and for us both to know what we knew about my mother and to feel the way we did about it, which was not so bad at all. It seemed like a reckless, exciting feeling to me, and I liked it.
