by Richard Ford
It was on a night that Penny and Boyd Mitchell were in our house that trouble came about. My father had been working his regular bid-in job on the switch engine, plus a helper’s job off the extra-board—a practice that was illegal by the railroad’s rules, but ignored by the union, who could see bad times coming and knew there would be nothing to help it when they came, and so would let men work if they wanted to. I was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich alone at the table, and my mother was in the living room playing cards with Penny and Boyd Mitchell. They were drinking vodka and eating the other sandwiches my mother had made, when I heard my father’s motorcycle outside in the dark. It was eight o’clock at night, and I knew he was not expected home until midnight.
“Roy’s home,” I heard my mother say. “I hear Roy. That’s wonderful.” I heard chairs scrape and glasses tap.
“Maybe he’ll want to play,” Penny Mitchell said. “We can play four-hands.”
I went to the kitchen door and stood looking through the dining room at the front. I don’t think I knew something was wrong, but I think I knew something was unusual, something I would want to know about firsthand.
My mother was standing beside the card table when my father came inside. She was smiling. But I have never seen a look on a man’s face that was like the look on my father’s face at that moment. He looked wild. His eyes were wild. His whole face was. It was cold outside, and the wind was coming up, and he had ridden home from the train yard in only his flannel shirt. His face was red, and his hair was strewn around his bare head, and I remember his fists were clenched white, as if there was no blood in them at all.
“My God,” my mother said. “What is it, Roy? You look crazy.” She turned and looked for me, and I knew she was thinking that this was something I might not need to see. But she didn’t say anything. She just looked back at my father, stepped toward him and touched his hand, where he must’ve been coldest. Penny and Boyd Mitchell sat at the card table, looking up. Boyd Mitchell was smiling for some reason.
“Something awful happened,” my father said. He reached and took a corduroy jacket off the coat nail and put it on, right in the living room, then sat down on the couch and hugged his arms. His face seemed to get redder then. He was wearing black steel-toe boots, the boots he wore every day, and I stared at them and felt how cold he must be, even in his own house. I did not come any closer.
“Roy, what is it?” my mother said, and she sat down beside him on the couch and held his hand in both of hers.
My father looked at Boyd Mitchell and at his wife, as if he hadn’t known they were in the room until then. He did not know them very well, and I thought he might tell them to get out, but he didn’t.
“I saw a man be killed tonight,” he said to my mother, then shook his head and looked down. He said, “We were pushing into that old hump yard on Ninth Avenue. A cut of coal cars. It wasn’t even an hour ago. I was looking out my side, the way you do when you push out a curve. And I could see this one open boxcar in the cut, which isn’t unusual. Only this guy was in it and was trying to get off, sitting in the door, scooting. I guess he was a hobo. Those cars had come in from Glasgow tonight. And just the second he started to go off, the whole cut buckled up. It’s a thing that’ll happen. But he lost his balance just when he hit the gravel, and he fell backwards underneath. I looked right at him. And one set of trucks rolled right over his foot.” My father looked at my mother then. “It hit his foot,” he said.
“My God,” my mother said and looked down at her lap.
My father squinted. “But then he moved, he sort of bucked himself like he was trying to get away. He didn’t yell, and I could see his face. I’ll never forget that. He didn’t look scared, he just looked like a man doing something that was hard for him to do. He looked like he was concentrating on something. But when he bucked he pushed back, and the other trucks caught his hand.” My father looked at his own hands then, and made fists out of them and squeezed them.
“What did you do?” my mother said. She looked terrified.
“I yelled out. And Sherman stopped pushing. But it wasn’t that fast.”
“Did you do anything then,” Boyd Mitchell said.
“I got down,” my father said, “and I went up there. But here’s a man cut in three pieces in front of me. What can you do? You can’t do very much. I squatted down and touched his good hand. And it was like ice. His eyes were open and roaming all up in the sky.”
“Did he say anything?” my mother said.
“He said, ‘Where am I today?’ And I said to him, ‘It’s all right, bud, you’re in Montana. You’ll be all right.’ Though, my God, he wasn’t. I took my jacket off and put it over him. I didn’t want him to see what had happened.”
“You should’ve put tourniquets on,” Boyd Mitchell said gruffly, “That could’ve helped. That could’ve saved his life.”
My father looked at Boyd Mitchell then as if he had forgotten he was there and was surprised that he spoke. “I don’t know about that,” my father said. “I don’t know anything about those things. He was already dead. A boxcar had run over him. He was breathing, but he was already dead to me.”
“That’s only for a licensed doctor to decide,” Boyd Mitchell said. “You’re morally obligated to do all you can.” And I could tell from his tone of voice that he did not like my father. He hardly knew him, but he did not like him. I had no idea why. Boyd Mitchell was a big, husky, red-faced man with curly hair—handsome in a way, but with a big belly—and I knew only that he worked for the Red Cross, and that my mother was a friend of his wife’s, and maybe of his, and that they played cards when my father was gone.
My father looked at my mother in a way I knew was angry. “Why have you got these people over here now, Dorothy? They don’t have any business here.”
“Maybe that’s right,” Penny Mitchell said, and she put down her hand of cards and stood up at the table. My mother looked around the room as though an odd noise had occurred inside of it and she couldn’t find the source.
“Somebody definitely should’ve done something,” Boyd Mitchell said, and he leaned forward on the table toward my father. “That’s all there is to say.” He was shaking his head no. “That man didn’t have to die.” Boyd Mitchell clasped his big hands on top of his playing cards and stared at my father. “The unions’ll cover this up, too, I guess, won’t they? That’s what happens in these things.”
My father stood up then, and his face looked wide, though it looked young, still. He looked like a young man who had been scolded and wasn’t sure how he should act. “You get out of here,” he said in a loud voice. “My God. What a thing to say. I don’t even know you.”
“I know you, though,” Boyd Mitchell said angrily. “You’re another featherbedder. You aren’t good to do anything. You can’t even help a dying man. You’re bad for this country, and you won’t last.”
“Boyd, my goodness,” Penny Mitchell said. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that to him.”
Boyd Mitchell glared up at his wife. “I’ll say anything I want to,” he said. “And he’ll listen, because he’s helpless. He can’t do anything.”
“Stand up,” my father said. “Just stand up on your feet.” His fists were clenched again.
“All right, I will,” Boyd Mitchell said. He glanced up at his wife. And I realized that Boyd Mitchell was drunk, and it was possible that he did not even know what he was saying, or what had happened, and that words just got loose from him this way, and anybody who knew him knew it. Only my father didn’t. He only knew what had been said.
Boyd Mitchell stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He was much taller than my father. He had on a white Western shirt and whipcords and cowboy boots and was wearing a big silver wristwatch. “All right,” he said. “Now I’m standing up. What’s supposed to happen?” He weaved a little. I saw that.
And my father hit Boyd Mitchell then, hit him from across the card table—hit him with his right hand, square into the chest
, not a lunging blow, just a hard, hitting blow that threw my father off balance and made him make a chuffing sound with his mouth. Boyd Mitchell groaned, “Oh,” and fell down immediately, his big, thick, heavy body hitting the floor already doubled over. And the sound of him hitting the floor in our house was like no sound I had ever heard before. It was the sound of a man’s body hitting a floor, and it was only that. In my life I have heard it other places, in hotel rooms and in bars, and it is one you do not want to hear.
You can hit a man in a lot of ways, I know that, and I knew that then, because my father had told me. You can hit a man to insult him, or you can hit a man to bloody him, or to knock him down, or lay him out. Or you can hit a man to kill him. Hit him that hard. And that is how my father hit Boyd Mitchell—as hard as he could, in the chest and not in the face, the way someone might think who didn’t know about it.
“Oh my God,” Penny Mitchell said. Boyd Mitchell was lying on his side in front of the TV, and she had gotten down on her knees beside him. “Boyd,” she said. “Are you hurt? Oh, look at this. Stay where you are, Boyd. Stay on the floor.”
“Now then. All right,” my father said. “Now. All right.” He was standing against the wall, over to the side of where he had been when he hit Boyd Mitchell from across the card table. Light was bright in the room, and my father’s eyes were wide and touring around. He seemed out of breath and both his fists were clenched, and I could feel his heart beating in my own chest. “All right, now, you son of a bitch,” my father said, and loudly. I don’t think he was even talking to Boyd Mitchell. He was just saying words that came out of him.
“Roy,” my mother said calmly. “Boyd’s hurt now. He’s hurt.” She was just looking down at Boyd Mitchell. I don’t think she knew what to do.
“Oh, no,” Penny Mitchell said in an excited voice. “Look up, Boyd. Look up at Penny. You’ve been hurt.” She had her hands flat on Boyd Mitchell’s chest, and her skinny shoulders close to him. She wasn’t crying, but I think she was hysterical and couldn’t cry.
All this had taken only five minutes, maybe even less time. I had never even left the kitchen door. And for that reason I walked out into the room where my father and mother were, and where Boyd and Penny Mitchell were both of them on the floor. I looked down at Boyd Mitchell, at his face. I wanted to see what had happened to him. His eyes had cast back up into their sockets. His mouth was open, and I could see his big pink tongue inside. He was breathing heavy breaths, and his fingers—the fingers on both his hands—were moving, moving in the way a man would move them if he was nervous or anxious about something. I think he was dead then, and I think even Penny Mitchell knew he was dead, because she was saying, “Oh please, please, please, Boyd.”
That is when my mother called the police, and I think it is when my father opened the front door and stepped out into the night.
All that happened next is what you would expect to happen. Boyd Mitchell’s chest quit breathing in a minute, and he turned pale and cold and began to look dead right on our living-room floor. He made a noise in his throat once, and Penny Mitchell cried out, and my mother got down on her knees and held Penny’s shoulders while she cried. Then my mother made Penny get up and go into the bedroom—hers and my father’s—and lie on the bed. Then she and I sat in the brightly lit living room, with Boyd Mitchell dead on the floor, and simply looked at each other—maybe for ten minutes, maybe for twenty. I don’t know what my mother could’ve been thinking during that time, because she did not say. She did not ask about my father. She did not tell me to leave the room. Maybe she thought about the rest of her life then and what that might be like after tonight. Or maybe she thought this: that people can do the worst things they are capable of doing and in the end the world comes back to normal. Possibly, she was just waiting for something normal to begin to happen again. That would make sense, given her particular character.
Though what I thought myself, sitting in that room with Boyd Mitchell dead, I remember very well, because I have thought it other times, and to a degree I began to date my real life from that moment and that thought. It is this: that situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved. Tonight was a very bad one. But how were we to know it would turn out this way until it was too late and we had all been changed forever? I realized though, that trouble, real trouble, was something to be avoided, inasmuch as once it has passed by, you have only yourself to answer to, even if, as I was, you are the cause of nothing.
In a little while the police arrived to our house. First one and then two more cars with their red lights turning in the street. Lights were on in the neighbors’ houses—people came out and stood in the cold in their front yards watching, people I didn’t know and who didn’t know us. “It’s a circus now,” my mother said to me when we looked through the window. “We’ll have to move somewhere else. They won’t let us alone.”
An ambulance came, and Boyd Mitchell was taken away on a stretcher, under a sheet. Penny Mitchell came out of the bedroom and went with them, though she did not say anything to my mother, or to anybody, just got in a police car and left into the dark.
Two policemen came inside, and one asked my mother some questions in the living room, while the other one asked me questions in the kitchen. He wanted to know what I had seen, and I told him. I said Boyd Mitchell had cursed at my father for some reason I didn’t know, then had stood up and tried to hit him, and that my father had pushed Boyd, and that was all. He asked me if my father was a violent man, and I said no. He asked if my father had a girlfriend, and I said no. He asked if my mother and father had ever fought, and I said no. He asked me if I loved my mother and father, and I said I did. And then that was all.
I went out into the living room then, and my mother was there, and when the police left we stood at the front door, and there was my father outside, standing by the open door of a police car. He had on handcuffs. And for some reason he wasn’t wearing a shirt or his corduroy jacket but was bare-chested in the cold night, holding his shirt behind him. His hair looked wet to me. I heard a policeman say, “Roy, you’re going to catch cold,” and then my father say, “I wish I was a long way from here right now. China maybe.” He smiled at the policeman. I don’t think he ever saw us watching, or if he did he didn’t want to admit it. And neither of us did anything, because the police had him, and when that is the case, there is nothing you can do to help.
All this happened by ten o’clock. At midnight my mother and I drove down to the city jail and got my father out. I stayed in the car while my mother went in—sat and watched the high windows of the jail, which were behind wire mesh and bars. Yellow lights were on there, and I could hear voices and see figures move past the lights, and twice someone called out, “Hello, hello. Marie, are you with me?” And then it was quiet, except for the cars that drove slowly past ours.
On the ride home, my mother drove and my father sat and stared out at the big electrical stacks by the river, and the lights of houses on the other side, in Black Eagle. He had on a checked shirt someone inside had given him, and his hair was neatly combed. No one said anything, but I did not understand why the police would put anyone in jail because he had killed a man and in two hours let him out again. It was a mystery to me, even though I wanted him to be out and for our life to resume, and even though I did not see any way it could and, in fact, knew it never would.
Inside our house, all the lights were burning when we got back. It was one o’clock and there were still lights in some neighbors’ houses. I could see a man at the window across the street, both his hands to the glass, watching out, watching us.
My mother went into the kitchen, and I could hear her running water for coffee and taking down cups. My father stood in the middle of the living room and looked around, looking at the chairs, at the card table with cards still on it, at the open doorways to the other rooms. It was as if he had forgotten his own house and now saw it again and didn’t like
“I don’t feel
I know what he had against me,” my father said. He said this to me, but he said it to anyone, too. “You’d think you’d know what a man had against you, wouldn’t you, Frank?”
“Yes,” I said. “I would.” We were both just standing together, my father and I, in the lighted room there. We were not about to do anything.
“I want us to be happy here now,” my father said. “I want us to enjoy life. I don’t hold anything against anybody. Do you believe that?”
“I believe that,” I said. My father looked at me with his dark blue eyes and frowned. And for the first time I wished my father had not done what he did but had gone about things differendy. I saw him as a man who made mistakes, as a man who could hurt people, ruin lives, risk their happiness. A man who did not understand enough. He was like a gambler, though I did not even know what it meant to be a gambler then.
“It’s such a quickly changing time now,” my father said. My mother, who had come into the kitchen doorway, stood looking at us. She had on a flowered pink apron, and was standing where I had stood earlier that night. She was looking at my father and at me as if we were one person. “Don’t you think it is, Dorothy?” he said. “All this turmoil. Everything just flying by. Look what’s happened here.”
