Canada

by Richard Ford

  That was true. I believed my mother knew something like this would happen—that a person would notice me and see that I was worth something and not leave me to be lost. I didn’t think people who were worth something could get lost forever, even if you couldn’t explain everything about yourself, why you were where you were, etc. “Why’s Mr. Remlinger here,” I said.

  Florence stood up stiffly—she wasn’t very tall and wasn’t slender like my mother. She brushed off her brown corduroy trousers and shook herself all over and patted her arms and the top of her floppy hat, as if she’d gotten cold. I had on my plaid jacket. It was colder now. “It must be Canada out here.” She grinned. “We don’t always go to places,” she said, “sometimes we just end up there. That’s what Arthur did. He ended up. ‘I don’t go to America, I leave Paris.’ That’s what the great artist Duchamp said, who would’ve thought my painting was a very funny thing.” She looked at her painting of the post office and the empty street leading away—the scene in front of us. “I like it, though,” she said. “I don’t like ’em all.” She took a step back and regarded her painting out the side of her eyes, then straight on.

  “I like it,” I said. I thought if I moved to Fort Royal I would see Florence more, and the events in my life could develop in a more positive way that would include Arthur Remlinger, who I wished I knew better.

  “I know this is very strange for you up here, dear,” Florence said. “But you just go with the Flo. Okay? That was my thing I said to my children. They got tired of hearing it. But it’s still true.” She motioned toward her Metropolitan. “If you help me carry my artistic things to my little car, I’ll drive you into town and you can get supper. Charley can bring you back. You’re a short-timer out here now. You can move in tomorrow.” She picked up her painter’s box. I took her canvas off her easel, picked up her tin can and her wooden stool and the easel, and we went on to her car. It was my last day in Partreau.

  Chapter 51

  There were three items of importance in the thick manila envelope—addressed to Mr. A. Remlinger, Esquire, from his sister, Mildred, but intended for me. One was a letter from my sister, Berner, delivered to our empty house and found there by Mildred, who checked our mailbox for days after we’d all gone. There was a short note enclosed in the envelope from Mildred herself, which said:

  Dear Dell,

  Enclosed of regrettable interest. I will drive to their trial in N.D. But only so you will know what has happened. They know your mother had nothing to do with anything. But she was in it anyway.

  Your old friend,

  Mildred R.

  Along with Mildred’s message was an entire copy of the Great Falls Tribune from September 10th, which made the envelope thick. On the front page was another story about my and Berner’s parents. This one said that “an Alabama man” and his wife, who was (again) “a native of Washington State,” had been driven on September 8th, from the Cascade County jail to the Golden Valley County, North Dakota, jail in Beach, North Dakota, after the waiving of their rights. They had been charged with the armed robbery of the Creekmore, North Dakota, Agricultural Bank, in August, following which they had been apprehended by Great Falls detectives, in their home on First Avenue Southwest. The female, Geneva “Neva” (misspelled) Rachel Parsons, had been employed as a fifth-grade teacher by the Fort Shaw, Montana, school board. The male, “Sydney Beverly Parsons,” was unemployed at the time of his capture and was retired from the United States Air Force, where he was a decorated veteran of World War Two and had served as a bombardier. The couple’s two children—an unnamed boy and girl—were missing and presumed to be with unidentified relatives. Efforts were under way to return the juveniles to Montana authorities. A “not guilty” plea had been entered for the couple in their first court hearing in Golden Valley County. An attorney had been retained for them. The Great Falls crime rate for the year—the story said—had so far seen a 4 percent rise over 1959.

  Printed above the story were the same photographs Berner and I had had left for us by our neighbor, the morning after our parents’ arrest, and that made them look like hardened desperadoes. There was also another picture—I took interest in this—showing our parents being led by uniformed officers down a set of steep concrete steps toward a black panel truck with a star on its side. They were in handcuffs—our father was wearing a gaudy, striped, loose-fitting convict suit and looking at the ground where he was stepping so as not to fall. Our mother was wearing the beltless, shapeless dress she’d worn when Berner and I visited her and that made her look extremely small. She was staring straight into the camera, her soft face thin and focused and angry—as if she knew who would see her picture and wanted them to know she hated them (which would not have included Berner and me).

  I possess this newspaper still today. I’ve reread the story and studied the pictures countless times—to remember them. But seated in my cold, drafty, stale-smelling shack, on the side of my cot beside the window, when I saw the second photo and read the story that made our parents sound like any life-long luckless criminals the world would barely notice, then forget (as if this story was all there was to their lives), I felt an odd sensation in my chest, like a pain without an ache. This sensation grew down into my belly the way hunger does, and stayed so that I thought for a while it might stay for a long time, just be there to plague my life in still another way. Of course, my parents looked like themselves, in spite of their prison clothes: my father tall, though thinner, but handsome (he’d shaved and combed his hair for his trip); my mother, impatient, purposeful and intense. Yet they also failed to look exactly familiar to me. Nothing that had happened had been in any way normal. Whatever changes had occurred in them and to them defied any idea I had of familiar. They looked like two people I knew, who I was again seeing across a distance, some unspannable divide, much greater than the border that separated us by then. I could say that their intimate familiarity as my parents, and their ordinary, generalized humanness had become joined, and one quality had neutralized the other and rendered the two of them neither completely familiar nor completely haphazard and indifferent to me. Passing carefully down those concrete steps toward the Black Maria that would rumble them away to North Dakota and their future, they had become something of a mystery to me, one I shared (I’m sure) with the other innocent children of criminals. Knowing this didn’t make me love them less. But I thought I’d never see them again when I saw this picture. So that who they’d become in such a short amount of time were two people who were completely lost to me. All they seemed to have was each other, but they didn’t really have that anymore either.

  There was also a satisfaction of a kind to all of this, which may be a surprise to know, but must’ve made my acheless pain finally go away. I’d worried and worried about our parents’ fate over the last month—had waked up worrying. I’d lost weight, grown older and more sober. I sometimes dreamed that they’d come to rescue me in their car, with Berner, but couldn’t find me and had driven away. In other words, I’d all but said good-bye to my childhood on the strength of their terrible fall. But now I knew their fate (more or less), and with that could begin to recognize something of my own—which was not a bad thing. Though I was very glad Berner didn’t have to see their picture or read the story. Wherever she was, I hoped Mildred hadn’t also sent a manila envelope to her. As it turned out she had not.

  Chapter 52

  Dear Dell-boy,

  I am sending you this letter in GF because I don’t think you are there but don’t know where else to send it. Maybe somebody will give it to you. Mother’s funny friend, Mildred somebody, maybe. I hope you are not reading this in the juvenile jail someplace—a terrible outcome if you are. I wonder if you have seen our pathetic parents and what has happened to them these days. I wonder what happened to my fish? I love you to bits, you know! In spite of all. I still have your half of the money you gave me. I thought about you going to their jail cell alone after I flew the coop. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

>   Where are you? I am living in a house with other people. A girl who is also a runaway and who is nice. A handsome boy who left the U.S. Navy without permission because he didn’t like a fight. Two other men and a woman are not always here but take care of us just fine and don’t ask very much attention in return. This house is on a long street called California Street (naturally). Since I’m in San Francisco. I forgot to say. I have not seen that unfaithful rascal Rudy Red-Daddy. We made a pack to meet in San Francisco on a Saturday, in a park called Washington Sq. I have not seen him or his mother. If you see him tell him to take care of himself. I don’t love him. He could also write to me.

  It is strange to write letters to each other like grown-ups isn’t it? I wish you would come here if you are able to. I would still boss you around. But you could play chess here. People in the Washington Park Sq. also play. You could learn things and be the champion. I have learned that other people (kids) can have problems with their parents too. Not about going off and robbing a bank—not that bad—and maybe committing suicide. But other things. Have you gotten a letter from them? Naturally I haven’t. I wonder what they think of me at this point. Do they know I ran away? It’s beautiful here and not cold yet and things feel like they are happening. I like being on my own. I’ve told people about our parents, but no one believes it. Maybe I will quit believing it, too, or quit telling it. I wish I could see you, even though when I left I thought I never would again. I now think we will. I am still on the same earth as you, although I’m glad I’m not in GF, which is a crap town and always will be.

  Someday I will tell you how I came to get here. I made it without being killed and without being taken too much advantage of or starving to death. Gotta skee-daddle.

  Love,

  Berner Parsons

  P.S. I thought of some new things. You can write to me at this address, and should. I am glad for the passage of time, so you don’t have to hurry.

  If you saw me you wouldn’t recognize it. I have my two ears pierced. I shave my legs and under my pits and have cut my wire mop short and cute. I don’t mind my old freckles. I have some breasts now. The man, Uncle Bob is what we call him, asked me if I was Jewish. I said of course. My complexion has unfortunately blossomed out. I had a job two times as a babysitter if you can believe that for me. I can remember being a baby myself. You still are one, where I’m concerned. I will give you the robbed money you gave me when I see you.

  It is too bad we have the parents we have and haven’t been luckier. Our life is ruined now, although there is a lot of it left to fill up. Sometimes I miss them. I did—do—have one dream. I killed someone in it, I don’t know who, but then forgot all about it. Then it just rises up—the killing I did—and I know I did it and other people do too. It’s terrible since I didn’t really do it but still have the dream. I wake up later feeling like I’ve been crying and running a race. Do you have that? Since we are twins I believe we feel the same and see things the same (the world?). I hope it’s true. I remember one of mother’s poems. I say it out loud to the Navy boy. “Had I once a lovely youth, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold, good luck to spare. Through what crime—” I can’t remember it all now. Sorry. It was French. She always thought it was about her, I guess.

  Love ya again,

  Berner Rachel Parsons, your twin

  Chapter 53

  The time that began for me in Fort Royal, in the Leonard Hotel, was in every way different from my lonely weeks in Partreau, and superior to them and felt—though it didn’t last long and ended in disaster—like a life I was actually living, instead of life at a standstill, the partial life of a person lost on an empty prairie who somehow makes it to shelter but stays lost, and for whom nothing could be right again.

  More Sports began arriving. Five or six of them at a time—their big American cars with colorful American license plates parked in the dirt lot out behind, full of their hunting gear that couldn’t fit in the tiny rooms. From my little radiator-warm closet down the hall from Remlinger, I’d hear the men’s voices up through the floorboards and the pipes, talking to each other in low tones far into the night. I would lie silently in my narrow bed, trying to make out the things they said. Since they were mostly Americans, I felt they might say things I would recognize, and provide me with understandings that would be useful. I don’t know what I thought those things could be. I never heard much—people’s names spoken—Herman, Winifred, Sonny; complaints about insults or injuries one person or other had suffered. Someone laughing.

  At night in the Leonard bar, after Charley and I had gone for our sundown scouting and determined where new pits should be dug (two Ukrainian boys were hired to dig them after dark and cover the clump piles with wheat straw), I usually came back and ate my supper in the hotel kitchen, then passed the early evening beside the jukebox in the smoky, noisy barroom, or standing behind the card players in the gambling pit, or talking to the Filipino girls who served drinks in the shadowy bar light and danced with the Sports and sometimes with each other, and who often (as I’ve said) disappeared with one man or another and then weren’t seen the rest of the night. I no longer swamped rooms, so I rarely saw them climbing into their waiting taxi back to Swift Current.

  The Americans in the bar were mostly large, loud-talking men dressed in rough hunting attire. They laughed and smoked and drank rye whiskey and beer and enjoyed themselves. Many of them thought that being in Canada was highly comical, and made jokes about having Thanksgiving in October and the strange ways Canadians talked (I’d never much detected it, though I tried) and how Canadians hated Americans but all wished they lived there and could be rich. They talked about the election campaign “down below,” how they expected Nixon to overpower Kennedy, and how important it was to fight the Communists. They talked about the football teams where they were from. (Some were from Missouri, others from Nevada, others from Chicago.) They made jokes about their wives and told stories about their children’s achievements, and their jobs back home, and about noteworthy events that had happened on other hunting expeditions and how many ducks and geese and other animals they’d killed. Sometimes they talked to me—if they noticed me, or if they’d earlier in the day sent me on an errand to the drugstore or the hardware for some piece of equipment they lacked. They wanted to know if I was Canadian, or if I was “Mr. Remlinger’s son,” or the boy of some other hunter who was there. I told them I was visiting from Montana, that my parents had gotten sick, but I’d be going home again soon and back to school—which often made them shout out and laugh and clap me on the back and say I was “lucky” to be skipping school and would never want to go back after being a “hunting guide” and leading a life of adventure most boys only dreamed of. They seemed to think Canada, although comical, was mysterious and romantic, and where they lived was boring and corny, yet they still wanted to live there.

  At the end of these evenings—it was before eight o’clock, when Charley would pass through, having checked the goose pits, and was telling the Sports to go to bed, since we were rising at four—I would climb the stairs back to my room and lie in bed, reading my Chess Master magazine, and later on would listen to the hunters thumping up to their rooms, laughing and coughing and hocking and clinking glasses and bottles and using the bathroom and making their private noises and yawning, and boots hitting the floor until their doors closed and they’d be snoring. It was then I could hear single men’s voices out on the cold main street of Fort Royal, and car doors closing, and a dog barking, and the switchers working the grain cars behind the hotel, and the air brakes of trucks pausing at the traffic light, then their big engines grinding back to life and heading toward Alberta or Regina—two places I knew nothing about. My window was under the eave, and the red Leonard sign tinted the black air in my room, whereas in my shack there had been only moonlight and my candle and the sky full of stars and the glow in Charley’s trailer. I lacked a radio now. So to set my mind off toward sleep I inventoried the experiences of the day and
the thoughts that had accompanied them. I considered, as always, my parents, and whether it was hard for them to be good in jail, and what they would think about me now, and how I would’ve conducted myself had I been present at their trial, and what we would’ve said, and whether I would’ve told them about Berner, and if I would’ve said I loved them where others would hear. (I would’ve.) I also considered the hunters’ gruff American voices and the achievements of their children, and their wives waiting at the kitchen door, and all their adventures, none of which caused me envy or resentment. I had no achievements so far, or anyone waiting for me, or even a home I could go back to. I just had my days’ duties and my meals and my room with my few possessions. Yet I surprisingly went to sleep almost always relieved to feel the way I did. Mildred had told me I was not to think bad of myself, since what had happened had been through no fault of mine. Florence had told me our lives were passed on to us empty and our task was to make up being happy. And my own mother—who’d never been where I was now, and knew nothing about Canada except as a view across a river, and who did not even know the people she’d handed me over to—even she had felt it was better for me to be here than in some juvenile prison in Montana. And she undoubtedly loved me.

  Berner had written that our lives were ruined but had far still to go. And I couldn’t have made it up that I was truly happy. But I was satisfied not to haul my water in a pail, not to bathe myself using the pump and the hot plate and a bar of soap, not to sleep in the cold, drafty, acrid shack and see no one I knew, and not to share the privy with Charley Quarters. It’s possible, I felt, that I was experiencing improvement, which for a time I hadn’t believed I ever would. So that it was possible to think—and this was important to me—that at least some part of my human makeup was inclined to believe life could be better.