by Richard Ford
Chapter 6
Even though our father’s new scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad went—at least at first—as he planned it, the story later published in the Tribune clearly disclosed it had been a more complicated scheme than the one he’d conducted at the base. There, the Indians trucked the meat in through the main gate. The guards were alerted to let them pass. They drove straight to the rear of the officers’ club, unloaded the beef, and got paid, possibly by my father, in hard dollars right on the spot. He and the officers’ club manager, a captain named Henley, held back an agreed-to share of the Indians’ money and took home their choice of tenderloins to feed their families. Everybody was satisfied.
The Great Northern Railway transaction, however, had to be different because the Spencer Digby Negro turned out to badly fear and distrust Indians and was also of a skittish nature about his job—a well-paid union job with a high seniority status in the dining car service. This Digby would let the Indians drive their panel truck—which had the sign of a Havre carpet company on its side—to the loading dock at the Great Northern depot and would take delivery of the contraband. But he refused to pay the Indians on the spot—again, for reasons having to do with fearing and distrusting them, and because of needing to check the quality of the meat. Both of these reasons insulted the Indians, who didn’t like doing business with a Negro. An arrangement had to be made, therefore, for our father to come to the depot and receive the money from Digby, but not until a day had passed and Digby had secured the money to pay and had satisfied himself that the meat was of a high enough quality to serve in the dining cars. Digby wanted the two transactions—accepting the beef and paying out the money—kept separate, as if the money wasn’t really for the meat (in case he was caught), and as if my father was the actual provisioner and the Indians only worked for him as laborers. At the heart of schemes like this there’s always something unreasonable, the explanation of which is that human beings are involved.
This alteration in the original air-base scheme put my father into a precarious position. He liked the role of middle man because it made him feel and look competent, and he didn’t see it as precarious (until it was too late). But the new scheme meant that for a day or more the Indians no longer had possession of the beef they’d stolen and butchered at grave risk to themselves, then driven down to Great Falls and delivered in more or less full view—after having already put themselves at risk by cruising through town with a truck full of beef that didn’t belong to them, at a time in history when the Great Falls police would’ve gladly arrested an Indian for no reason, and also generally kept their eyes on any Negroes, since they were then causing trouble down South. In return for these risks, however, the Indians were not able to take prompt possession of the money they were fully entitled to—$100 per beef side (beef was cheap then). And even more perilous in their view, they had to wait conspicuously around town to get the money from my father, who they only partially trusted. Before, they’d trusted the Air Force because one of them had once been an airman, and Indians always tended to trust the government to take care of them because that’s the way it’d always happened. In that way they were not so different from my father.
The danger of the new scheme—an arrangement my father worked out, believing it would please everyone—was that he was in the middle between parties who were both criminals, and who didn’t trust or like each other, but who he himself had decided he could trust, if not actually like. And worse, each time beef was delivered, he immediately owed money to Indians who no one would want to owe money to or be owed money by because they possessed well-respected violent tendencies. Two of them, the Tribune later said, were murderers, and another was a kidnapper. All three had been in Deer Lodge Prison for more than half their lives. Looked at all these years later it is a ridiculous scheme that should never have worked even once. Except it did and is no more ridiculous than robbing a bank.
One day in mid-July my father got up in the morning and told us all he was planning to drive out to Box Elder, Montana, on the highway north toward Havre to inspect a piece of prime ranch land his new company was hoping to sell at a big profit. He wanted my sister and me to go with him, since he said we’d been Air Force brats all our lives and knew nothing about where we lived and spent too much time indoors. In any case, our mother could use a quiet morning to herself.
We drove in the white-and-red Bel Air out Highway 87, leading north and up into the hot, ripening wheat fields in the direction of Havre, which was a hundred miles away. The Highwood Mountains, east of Great Falls, were to our right at an indistinct distance, blue and hazed and more mysterious looking than the way they looked with town as their point of reference. After an hour, we passed Fort Benton where we could see the Missouri River below the highway—the same shining river we saw out our school windows. It was smaller and calmer and headed east along the base of chalk and granite bluffs, on its way (I already knew) to its meeting with the Yellowstone and the White and the Vermilion and the Platte and finally the Mississippi at the border of Illinois. The highway went down and along a creek bottom, then up again onto a bench with more cropland, and different blue-tinted mountains ahead of us—longer and lower than the Highwoods, but just as hazy and timbered and foreign looking. These were the Bear’s Paws, my father announced authoritatively. They were on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, which meant Indians lived there but didn’t own anything outright because they didn’t need to with the government taking up the slack, plus they weren’t competent to own land anyway. He’d done business out here before, he said, and we could drive onto their land without trouble or permission.
We drove up the narrow highway through the wheat until we passed a small dusty town with a grain elevator, then quickly came to another, which was Box Elder—the name of the shady trees on our block. It had a short little main street across some railroad tracks, with a bank and a post office, a grocery, two cafés and a service station, and was surprising to be out there in the middle of nothing. We turned east off the highway onto a narrow dirt and gravel road that headed straight toward the mountains, where the ranch was that my father’s new company hoped to sell. Nothing more than mountain foothills and oceans of wheat lay ahead of us. No houses or trees or people. Ripe wheat stood to the road verges, yellow and thick and rocking in the hot dry breeze that funneled dust through our car windows and left my lips coated. Our father said the Missouri River was to the south of us now. We couldn’t see it because it was down below more bluffs. Lewis and Clark, who we knew about, had come all the way up to here in 1805 and hunted buffalo precisely where we were. However, this was the part of Montana, he said—steering with his left elbow out the window—that resembled the Sahara through a bombardier’s sights, and wasn’t a place where an Alabama native could ever be happy living. He teased Berner and asked if she felt like she was an Alabamian—since he was. She said she didn’t and frowned at me and puckered her lips and made a fish mouth. I told my father I didn’t feel like an Alabamian either, which seemed to amuse him. He said we were Americans, and that was all that mattered. After that we saw a big coyote in the road with a rabbit in its mouth. It paused and looked at our car approaching, then walked into the tall wheat out of sight. We saw what our father said was a golden eagle, poised in the perfectly blue sky, being thwarted by crows wanting to drive it away. We saw three magpies pecking a snake as it hurried to get across the pavement. Our father swerved and ran over it, which made two thump-bumps under the tires and the magpies fly up.
When we’d driven several miles out this unpaved road with our dust storm behind us, the wheat abruptly ended, and dry, fenced, grazed-over grassland took up, with a few skinny cows standing motionless in the ditches as our car went by. My father slowed and honked his horn, which made the cows kick and snort and shit big streams as they heaved out of the way. “Well, pardon us,” Berner said, watching them from the back seat.
After a while, we drove past a single, low unpainted wooden house built off the
road, flat to the bare ground. Visible a ways farther down the road was another one, and a third one you could barely see in the shimmering, weltering distance. They were dilapidated, as if something bad had happened to them. The first house had no front door or panes in its windows, and the back portion of it had fallen in. Parts of car bodies and a metal bed frame and a standing white refrigerator were moved into the front yard. Chickens bobbed and pecked over the dry ground. Several dogs sat on the steps, observing the road. A white horse wearing a bridle was tethered to a wooden post off to the side of the house. Grasshoppers darted up into the hot air the car displaced. Someone had parked a black-painted semi-trailer in the middle of the field behind the house, and beside it was a smaller panel truck that had HAVRE CARPET painted on its side. A couple of skinny boys—one without his shirt—came to the vacant front doorway and watched us drive past. Berner waved at them and one boy waved back.
“Those boys are Indians,” my father said. “This is where they’re living. They’re not as lucky as you two. No electric out here.”
“Why would they live here?” Berner said. She looked out the rear window through the dust at the run-down house and the boys. Nothing about them indicated they were Indians. I knew all Indians didn’t live in teepees and sleep on the ground and wear feathers. No Indians went to the Lewis School that I was aware of. But I knew there were Indians who stayed drunk, and people found them in alleys in winter, frozen to the asphalt. And there were Indians in the sheriff’s office who only handled Indian crimes. I’d thought, though, if you went where Indians lived, they’d look different. These two boys didn’t look any different from me, even though their house was ready to collapse. Where were their parents, I wondered.
“I think you could ask the same question about the Parsons family, couldn’t you?” my father said, as if this was a joke. “What are we doing in Montana? We oughta be in Hollywood. I could be the double for Roy Rogers.” He broke into a song, then. He often sang. He had a mellow speaking voice I liked hearing, but he didn’t have a good singing voice. Berner usually covered her ears. This time he sang, “Home, home on the range, where the goats and pachyderms play.” It was one of his jokes. I was thinking these Indian boys didn’t play chess or have debates, or probably go to school at all, and would never amount to anything.
“I admire Indians,” my father said, once he’d quit singing. Then we were silent.
We drove past the second falling-in house, where there was a doorless black car turned upside down with no tires, or glass in any of its windows. This house’s roof had big holes through the shingles. There were tall lilacs and hollyhocks around the door like at our house, and someone had made a circular pig pen out of car radiators. The pigs’ snouts and ears were visible over the top. Behind the house there was a row of white-painted bee hives that someone in the house was tending. This captured my attention. I already had read my book on bees and was making plans to convince my father to help me build a single hive for the backyard. I knew where to send off for bees in the state of Georgia. Soon, I’d heard on the radio, the Montana State Fair would come to the fairgrounds not far from our house, and I intended to visit the bee exhibit there, where bee apparatus would be on display, and demonstrations about smoking hives and bee apparel and honey harvesting were to be conducted. Keeping bees was similar to chess in my mind. Both were complicated and had rules and required skill and setting goals, and each offered hidden patterns for success that could only be understood with patience and confidence. “Bees unlock the mystery to all things human,” the Bee Sense book—which I’d checked out of the library—had said. All these things that I wanted to learn about, I could’ve easily learned in Scouts if my mother had been willing. But she wasn’t.
A heavy-set, pale-skinned woman wearing shorts and a bathing suit top walked to the front door and shielded her eyes from the sun as we went past.
“We have our Alabama Indians, too,” my father said in a voice intended to make Berner and me think everything out here was completely ordinary in case we thought it wasn’t. “We have the Chickasaw and the Choctaw and your Swamp Bulgarians. They’re all related to these people out here. None of these folks have been treated fairly, of course. But they’ve maintained a dignity and self-respect.” This was hard to see in the houses we passed, though I was impressed the Indians knew about bees, and considered there was more to them than I knew.
“Where’s the ranch you’re going to sell,” I asked.
My father reached across the seat and patted me on my knee. “We passed that a long time ago, son. It didn’t look good to me. You’re observant to remember. I just wanted you children to see some real Indians while we’re out here. You oughta know an Indian when you see one. You live in Montana. They’re part of the landscape.” I wanted to bring up the subject of the State Fair right then, since he was in a good humor, but he was distracted by the Indians and I thought I might sacrifice my opportunity to discuss the subject later.
“Nobody answered about why they live out here,” Berner said. She was sweating and using her damp finger to draw a pattern in the fine road dust on her freckled arm. “They don’t have to. They could live in Great Falls. It’s a free country. It’s not Russia or France.”
It was as if our father had stopped paying attention to us then. We drove down the rutted road another mile until we came close enough to the Bear’s Paw Mountains that I could make out the tree line and scattered patches of scabby snow the sun never reached all summer. It was hot where we were, but if you went up farther, it would be cold. At a certain point along the road, with the dry, wasted landscape running on ahead unchanging, we pulled off between some fenceless fence posts, turned around, and began back the way we’d come—past the broken-down houses on the left, and the Indians, back to Box Elder and onto Highway 87 toward Great Falls. It felt as if nothing had been accomplished coming out there, nothing our father was interested in or worried about or needed to see—nothing having to do with selling or buying a ranch. I had no idea why we’d gone there. My sister and I didn’t discuss it once we got home.
Chapter 7
What happened was that by the first week of August, my father and the Great Northern man—Digby—and my father’s Cree accomplices had conducted three stolen beef transactions that had all gone satisfactorily. Cows were stolen, killed and delivered. Money changed hands. The Indians went away. Everyone was put at their ease. My father believed his recalculated scheme worked well, and didn’t feel precariously in the middle in any way that worried him. He was a man unable not to believe that if things were going well and smoothly, they wouldn’t go well and smoothly forever. Very much like the Indians, who relied on the government, the Air Force had sheltered him from the life most other people faced. And because of what he’d done expertly in the war (mastered the Norden sight, dropped bombs on people he never saw, not gotten killed), he felt that being taken care of was justifiable, which fostered a tendency not to look into things—any things—too closely. Which, with his beef scheme, meant not remembering that middle manning stolen beef carcasses hadn’t finally worked out successfully at the air base. His scheme had caused him, in fact, to lose his captain’s bars and in one way or other had landed him back in civilian life long before he was ready—if he ever would’ve been ready after so much time away.
It’s also possible that our mother, by being studious and aloof, caused him to feel she was observing him and calculating whether some new failure of his was going to be the reason she should leave him. So that despite his apparent success, his optimistic nature, his new fresh start in the civilian world, her private uncertainties accumulated, and eroded his confidence for the “feel” he believed he had for what he was doing. All he wanted was for life to stay on a steady course until school started again and our mother could go back to teaching, leaving him free to learn the farm and ranch business and be able to go on doing the things he wanted to with Digby and the Indians—since it was all for our benefit.
Life a
t this time still felt completely normal to me. I remember in early August, my father insisted we all go down to the Liberty to see Swiss Family Robinson at the Saturday matinee. My father and I both loved it. But our mother insisted Berner and I read the book—which she still had from high school, and which was a great deal less optimistic and romantic than the motion picture. She had begun her class with the Sisters of Providence by early August and came home with more books, and talking about what the nuns said about Senator Kennedy. People in the South, they said, would never let him win; someone would shoot him before election day. (My father assured us that wasn’t true, that the South was sadly misunderstood, but it was true that the pope in Rome would now have a say-so in American life, and that Kennedy’s father was a whiskey baron.) There was more talk about the Space Needle, which our father said he wanted to see and would take us when it was finished. My sister brought her boyfriend home twice during this time, though never inside the house. I liked him. His name was Rudy Patterson. He was a year older and was a Mormon (which I looked up, and Rudy said meant polygamists, among other things), and already went to high school, which made him intensely interesting to me. He was red-headed and raw-boned and tall with big feet, and had a little pale skim of a mustache he was proud of. Once, he and I walked across the street and shot baskets against the backboard the town had installed there. He told me his plan was to leave school soon and go to California and join a band, or else the Marines. He’d already asked Berner if she wanted to go with him or possibly meet him there some time later, and she’d said no—which made Rudy say Berner was tough as nails, which she was. While we played, under the dense, sweet-smelling bonnet of elms and box elders, thick with humming cicadas, Berner had sat on our front porch steps—exactly as our mother had—squinting into the sun, hugging her knees and watching us scrimmage around. She called out, “Don’t you tell him what I said. I don’t want him in on my secrets.” I didn’t know which of us she was talking to—Rudy or me. I didn’t know Berner’s secrets, although I had once thought I knew everything about her because we were twins. But she must’ve had new secrets by then, since she no longer talked to me about private matters and treated me as if I was much younger than she was and as if her life had started in a direction leading her away from mine.