by Richard Ford
After realizing he wouldn’t make enough money to support our family while he learned the farm and ranch business—even with his two-hundred-eighty-dollar Air Force pension and my mother’s salary from the Fort Shaw school—my father set out to find someone who could be a new customer for stolen beef, someone he would be the middle man for. There wouldn’t be many such possibilities in Great Falls, he knew. Columbus Hospital. The Rainbow Hotel—where he knew no one. One or two steakhouse clubs he might’ve known about, but which were watched by the police because of illegal gambling. What his eye fell on was the Great Northern Railway, which ran the Western Star passenger train through Great Falls on its way to Seattle, then back in two days to Chicago, and that had a steady need to supply the dining cars with first-class food, coming and going. Our father believed the provider of prime beef could be him, again in association with the Indians near Havre. He knew about an airman who’d sold ducks and wild geese and venison (all illegal) to a Negro who worked for the railroad and was a head waiter in the dining car service. It was to this black man our father paid a visit (went to his house in Black Eagle) and proposed to sell him beef that he (our father) would supply from the Indians he said were his associates.
This Negro man—his name was Spencer Digby—was positive to the proposal. He’d been involved in other such schemes over the years and wasn’t afraid of them. The railroad, it seemed, wasn’t that different from the Air Force. I remember my father came home one afternoon and was in a rising jolly humor. He told my mother he’d formed an “independent business partnership” with “people on the railroad,” which was going to supplement our income while he learned the ins and outs of the farm and ranch game. It wouldn’t change everybody’s life and fortunes forever, but it would put things onto surer ground than they’d been on since he’d left the base.
I don’t remember what our mother said. What she wrote in her chronicle was that she’d been thinking about leaving my father for some time and taking my sister and me to Washington State. When he’d described to her the arrangement for selling stolen meat to the Great Northern (which he apparently wasn’t embarrassed about), she wrote that she’d opposed it, and had right away begun feeling a “terrible tension,” and decided—because everything seemed to be going very wrong—that she should leave with us very soon. Only she didn’t do that.
Of course, I don’t know what she actually thought. It was certainly true that our mother—a young, educated woman with good values (she was thirty-four)—didn’t think of herself as having anything in common with small-time criminals. It’s possible she didn’t know about the previous Air Force connivance, since our father went off to the base every morning like it was any other job, only you wore a blue uniform. He may not have talked to her about what went on there, since she would probably have opposed it then, too, and he might’ve known she was more and more disenchanted at still finding herself an Air Force wife.
She may have thought she was near the end of that particular life by then, and that better things would be possible once Berner and I were old enough, and divorce was finally thinkable. She could’ve left him the minute he told her about the Great Northern scheme. But again she didn’t. Therefore, all that might’ve happened if she’d never met Bev at a Christmas party, the poems she’d have written and published, the small-college teaching possibilities, the marriage to a young professor, the different children from Berner and me—all that which might’ve happened to her in a revised life, didn’t happen. Instead, she lived in Great Falls, a town she’d never before heard of (so confusable with Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Cedar Falls), lived in one world taken up with us, feeling isolated, not wanting to assimilate, and thinking only frustratedly, complicatedly of the future. And all the while our father existed in another world—his easy scheming nature, his optimism about the future, his charm. They seemed the same world because the two of them shared it, and they had us. But they weren’t the same. It’s also possible that she loved him, since he unquestionably loved her. And given her general unoptimistic frame of mind, given that she might’ve loved him, and that they had us, she conceivably couldn’t face the shock of going away and being just alone with us forever. This is not an unheard-of story in the world.
Chapter 5
For a while, my father’s dealings with the Indians and the Great Northern must’ve gone smoothly. Although my mother wrote in her chronicle that at this time—it was mid-July—she began to experience “physical ennui,” and for the first time in years began to talk to her parents on the telephone when my father was out learning about selling ranches and overseeing the delivery of stolen beef. Our grandparents had never taken any part in our family life. My sister and I had never even met them, which we knew was unusual, since we were aware of people in our school who saw their grandparents all the time and went on trips with them, received cards and gifts and money on their birthdays. Our Tacoma grandparents had opposed their intelligent daughter with a decent college degree marrying a slick, smiling Alabama ex–fly boy, who set off alarms in their insular immigrants’ world in Tacoma. They had offended my father by letting their disapproval be known. He was insulted by being undervalued, and as a result he never encouraged us to visit them or them to visit us, though I don’t think he ever specifically forbid it—not that they would’ve come to any of the places we lived. Texas or Mississippi. Dayton, Ohio. They had the idea our mother should’ve entered “the professions,” should’ve lived in a sophisticated city and married a CPA or a surgeon. Which my mother told Berner she never would’ve, since she always wanted—being the rare person as she knew herself to be—a more adventurous life. But her parents were pessimistic and fearful and inflexible—though they’d been in America since 1919. And they found it permissible to turn their backs on their daughter and her family and let us all disappear off into the interior of the country. “It would still be nice for you to know your grandparents before they die,” she said to us a few times. She kept a framed black-and-white photograph, taken at Niagara Falls—three bespectacled, miniature people who looked alike, each wearing a rubber raincoat, looking miserable and mystified, posing on the gangplank of a boat (the Maid of the Mists, I now know, having since ridden it myself) that made tours right into the roaring downspout of the falls. It was her parents’ return trip across the continent on their twentieth wedding anniversary, in 1938. Our mother was twelve. Woitek and Renata were their names. Vince and Renny, their American names. Kamper wasn’t their name either. Kampycznski. My mother’s name, Neeva Kampycznski, was a name that fit her better than Kamper, or even Parsons—the second one not fitting her at all. “There’s a real cataract, there, kids,” she said, staring at the cracked photograph, which she’d fetched out of her closet for us to see. “You’ll both see that someday. It makes these puny falls here look like a joke. They’re not great falls—unless they’re all you know, like these hicks who live here.”
I believe our mother expressed to her parents her dissatisfactions and possibly talked about leaving our father and taking Berner and me with her to Tacoma. Before that, I didn’t know Seattle and Tacoma were so close. I had known about the Space Needle from our weekly school newspaper, and that it would soon be built. I wanted to see it. The World’s Fair seemed brilliant and dazzling contemplated from Great Falls, Montana. I have no idea if our grandparents were sympathetic to our mother’s complaints or would’ve welcomed us home with her. It had been fifteen years that she’d been gone, without their blessing. They were old—rigid, conservative, intellectual people who’d saved their own lives at a bad time and wanted life to be predictable. They merely could’ve been receptive. Though neither, as I’ve said, do I believe leaving would’ve been a simple matter for her—even as out of place as she was. In that way she may have been less unconventional and more conservative than I give her credit for being. More like her parents than she knew.
I was by then extremely interested in beginning Great Falls High School and wished it could start long before Sept
ember, so I would be out of the house more. I’d found out the chess club met once a week through the summer in a dusty, airless room in the school’s south tower. I rode my bicycle over the old, arched river bridge, all the way up to Second Avenue South, to be an “observer” of the older boys who played against each other and talked cryptically about chess and about their personal strategies and power sacrifices and tossed around famous players’ names I didn’t yet know—Gligorish, Ray Lopez, even Bobby Fischer who was already a master and admired by the club members. (He was known to be Jewish, which I took some unreasonable, silent pride in.) I had no idea about how to play. But I liked the orderliness of the board and the antiquated appearance of the pieces and how they felt in my hand. I knew a person needed to be logical to play and be able to plan moves far in advance and have a good memory—at least the other boys said as much. The members didn’t mind my presence, and were arrogant but friendly, and informed me about books I should read and about the monthly Chess Master magazine I could subscribe to if I was serious. There were only five of them. No girls were members. They were the sons of lawyers, and doctors at the hospital, and talked pretentiously about all sorts of things I knew nothing of but was fiercely interested in. The spy plane incident, Francis Gary Powers, the “Winds of Change,” the revolution in Cuba, Kennedy being a Catholic, Patrice Lumumba, whether the executed murderer Caryl Chessman had played chess instead of having his last supper, and whether it was right or wrong for baseball players to have their names on their jerseys—conversations that made me realize I didn’t know much that was going on in the world, but needed to.
My mother encouraged my playing. She told me her father used to play in a park in Tacoma against other immigrants, sometimes competing in several games at once. She thought chess would sharpen my wits and make me more at ease with how complex the world was, and make confusion not be a thing to fear—since it was everywhere. With what I’d saved of my dollar-a-week “bat-hide” allowance, I’d bought a set of Staunton plastic chess pieces at the hobby shop on Central, along with a roll-up vinyl board, which I kept permanently set up on my dresser top, and also bought an illustrated book the club members recommended to teach myself the rules. This I kept with my Rick Brant science mysteries and the Charles Atlas muscleman books that had been left in the house and I’d read. I specifically liked it that all the chess men looked different, slightly mysterious and had complicated responsibilities that required them to move only in predetermined ways for specific strategic missions, which my book described as representing how real war went on at the time when chess was invented in India.
My mother didn’t play. She preferred pinochle, which she said was a Jewish game—although she had no one to play it with. My father didn’t like chess because, he said, Lenin had been a chess player. He preferred checkers, which he claimed was a more natural game that required subtle, deceptive skills. This made my mother sneer and say it was only subtle if you were from Alabama and couldn’t think straight. When I got my set, I laid it out and showed her how the men moved. She tried to execute some of these, but grew uninterested and finally said her father had ruined it for her by being too demanding. I found out from my book that players all played chess against themselves for practice and would spend hours studying how to beat themselves so that when they played against a real opponent in a tournament, the game became just something you played in your head—which appealed to me, though I couldn’t figure out how to do it and made rash, uninformed moves the club members would’ve hooted at. Several times I tried to convince Berner to sit on the opposite side of the board, on my bed, and let me perform moves that I read straight out of the Chess Fundamentals book, and which I would then instruct her how to answer. She did this twice, then also got bored and quit before the game had barely begun. When she was disgusted with me, she would stare hard at me and not speak, then breathe through her nose in a way that was meant for me to hear. “If you ever were any good at this, what difference would it make?” She said this as she was leaving. I, of course, thought this wasn’t the point. Everything didn’t have to have a practical outcome. Some things you only did because you liked doing them—which was not her way of thinking about life by then.
Berner was, of course, my only real friend. We never endured the rivalries and bitter disagreements and belligerence brothers and sisters can suffer. This was because we were twins and seemed often to know what the other was thinking and cared about, and could easily agree. We also knew the life with our parents was very different from other children’s lives—the children we went to school with, who we fantasized as being regular people with friends, and parents who acted normal together. (This, of course, was wrong.) We also agreed that our life was “a situation,” and waiting was the hard part. At some point it would all become something else, and it was easier if we simply were patient and made the most of things together.
As I’ve said, Berner had lately come to advertise a more severe temperament and didn’t talk to anyone much and was often sarcastic even to me. I could see my mother’s grave features living in her flat, freckled face—her rounded nose, large, pupil-less eyes with thick eyebrows, large pores in her pimply skin and dark, wiry, heavy hair that started near her forehead. She didn’t smile any more than my mother did, and I once heard my mother say to her, “You don’t want to grow up to be a tall gangly girl with a dissatisfied look on her face.” But I don’t think Berner cared who she would grow up to be. She seemed to live entirely in the present moment, and thoughts about what would happen to her later didn’t displace the feeling that she didn’t like how things were now. She was physically stronger than I was and would sometimes take hold of my wrist with her large hands and rub my skin in opposite directions and make the “Chinese burn,” while she told me that because she was older than I was, I had to do what she said—which I did almost all the time anyway. I was very much unlike her. I mused and fantasized about what would happen later—in high school, about chess victories, and college. It might not have appeared to be true, but Berner was probably more realistic in her skepticism than I was in my own views. It might’ve been better for her, given how her life turned out, to have stayed in Great Falls and married some good-hearted farmer and had a lot of children who she could’ve taught things to, which would’ve rendered her happy and taken the sour look off her young face—which was, after all, just her defense against being innocent. She and my mother kept a silent closeness between them that had nothing to do with me. I accepted and appreciated this closeness for Berner’s sake. I felt she needed it more than I did, since I thought I was better adjusted at the time. I was supposedly close with my father—which was what boys were expected to be, even in our family. But it wasn’t possible to be very close to him. He was away from the house much of the time—first, at the base; and then when that fell away, being cast off in the world, selling then not selling cars, then learning to sell farms and ranches, and eventually middle manning stolen beeves to be trucked by larcenous Indians down to the Great Northern depot, a plan that would be his undoing. All our undoing, finally. In truth, we were never very close, although I loved him as if we were.
It seems possible, I suppose, to look back at our small family as being doomed, as waiting to sink below the churning waves, and being destined for corruption and failure. But I cannot truly portray us that way, or the time as a bad or unhappy time, in spite of it being far out of the ordinary. I can see my father out on the small lawn of our rented, faded mustard-yellow house with white shutters, my tiny mother seated on the porch steps, hugging her knees, wearing her blousy, sailcloth shorts; my father in snappy tan slacks and a sky-blue shirt and a yellow-diamond snakeskin belt and new black cowboy boots he’d bought for himself after his discharge. He is tall and smiling and un-self-aware (although with secrets). My mother’s dense hair is pulled back careless and bushy with a scarf. She is watching him inexpertly putting up a badminton net in our side yard. The ’55 Chevrolet is at the curb in the stalky elm shade unde
r the soft Montana sky. My mother’s small eyes are focused estimatingly, her features pinching into her nose behind her glasses. My sister and I are helping unspool the net—since it’s for us that the badminton is being erected. Suddenly my mother smiles and raises her chin at something he says: “Nothing’s foolproof around me, Neevy,” or “We’re not very good at this,” or “I know how to drop bombs, but not how to put up nets.” “We know that,” she says. Then they both have a laugh. He had his good sense of humor, and so did she, though as I’ve said she rarely felt the impulse to avail herself of it. This was typical of them and all of us at that time. My father went off to work that summer at one place or other. I began to read my book about chess and also about keeping bees, which I’d decided would be my other project in high school because no one else, I thought, would know about bees—which were an interest, I felt, likelier to be found in rural schools where there was FFA or 4-H. My mother had begun reading European novels (Stendhal and Flaubert); and since there was a little Catholic college in Great Falls, she’d begun going out there and attending a summer class once a week. My sister had suddenly, in spite of her severe views of the world and bad temperament, discovered a boyfriend—whom she’d met on the street walking home from the Rexall (which upset my father, though he soon forgot about it). My parents didn’t drink alcohol or fight with each other or to my knowledge have other lovers. My mother may have felt a “physical ennui,” and thought increasingly of leaving. But she always thought more about staying. I remember she read a poem to me at around this time by the great Irish poet Yeats, which had in it the line that said, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” I’ve taught this poem many times in a life of teaching and believe this is how she thought of things: as being imperfect, yet still acceptable. Changing life would’ve discredited life and herself, and brought on too much ruin. This was the child-of-immigrants viewpoint she’d inherited. And while hindsight might conclude the worst about our parents—say, that there was some terrible, irrational, cataclysmic force at work inside them—it’s more true that we wouldn’t have seemed at all irrational or cataclysmic if looked at from outer space—from Sputnik—and would certainly never have thought we were that way. It’s best to see our life and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously to properly understand—the side that was normal and the side that was disastrous. One so close to the other. Any different way of looking at our life threatens to disparage the crucial, rational, commonplace part we lived, the part in which everything makes sense to those on the inside—and without which none of this is worth hearing about.