Canada

by Richard Ford

  When we asked why we were doing this cleaning, our mother said it was because when our father came home from his business trip we would possibly be leaving Great Falls and would have to turn the house back over to Bargamian, the owner, who lived in Butte. He had our deposit, which my mother wanted returned. (My father said Bargamian was “one of her tribe.” But our mother said he was Armenian, which was a race of victims.)

  She didn’t say where we might be going. And since we’d heard our father say the same thing on Sunday morning, I believed it might be true— and felt dread about school beginning in two weeks, and whether I’d ever be able to go there.

  Several times in the next days while our father was gone, the phone rang and I would immediately answer it, thinking it was him. But again no one was there. Finally my mother answered it and said, “What is it you want? Who is this?” No one on the other end said anything, and then the line went dead.

  At least four times in the next days, I happened to look out our front window and saw one of two vehicles slowly pass our house. One was the junker red Plymouth that Mouse had driven up in on Sunday. It wasn’t Mouse who drove it this time, but another younger man, not necessarily an Indian. Other times it was a worse-looking car—a brown station wagon, broken down on its springs with a crumpled roof. Several people were in it, including a large woman who I thought was an Indian. Each time, the driver stared at our house but didn’t stop. It didn’t take a genius to understand that these Indians had something to do with why we might be leaving, and also why we had driven out to Box Elder in the days before (to get a closer look at things pertaining to the Indians), and why I felt dread, and possibly why our father was now finding us a new place to live.

  The other remarkable thing that happened when my father was away was that Berner appeared out of her room wearing red lipstick, which my mother made humorous mention of by calling her a “femme fatale” who would soon be headed to New York or Paris to begin her famous acting career. This didn’t faze Berner. She’d un-bunched her hair from the severe, middle-part, brushed-back way she’d kept it, and let it hang straight down toward her shoulders in a messy confusion I didn’t like because it emphasized the flatness of her facial shape and made her freckles seem as if her face was dirty, instead of fresh, the way it always had been even with her pimples. When we were cleaning, I asked why she’d exaggerated her looks in this way. She frowned at me and said it was because “her boyfriend” (Rudy)—who we’d seen little of—had told her she needed to look more like a grown woman if he was going to be interested in her. She told me she was thinking about running away with him, but if I mentioned it to our mother she’d murder me. “It’s driving me crazy to be here,” she said and turned her mouth down. This shocked me, because it had never occurred to me that life with our parents could be intolerable, or that running away could be an option. I didn’t think either was true for me.

  The other thing that went on while Berner and I cleaned the house and our father was driving crazily around the wilds of Montana and North Dakota deciding which bank to rob, was that our mother entered a new, strange state of mind. Scrubbing and airing out the house was certainly one thing. But she also, in my hearing, made several more telephone calls to her parents in Tacoma, not asking them to let her come home, but to provide a place for Berner and me to go live. She spoke to them in the most natural, affectionate voice, as if she and they saw each other once a month instead of never in nearly sixteen years. They would accept Berner, I understood them to say, but not me. A boy was too much. It was just one more thing, however, that made Berner believe she would have to run away—facing a life with two stern, suspicious, uncomprehending old Poles she didn’t know and who possibly wouldn’t like her, but who, as though by accident, happened to be her grandparents.

  The specific train of events by which our mother saw to my welfare and saw to it I didn’t fall into the hands of the State of Montana, I’ll get to eventually, since it’s the important part for me. But for those two days, when we were scouring the house before my father came back on Wednesday night with a bank selected, my mother’s state of mind remains the subject of greatest interest—even after all these years she’s been gone.

  Anyone might think a woman whose husband was possibly losing his mind (or at least part of it), and who was preparing to rob a bank, who’d led his family almost to ruin, who considered it a novel idea to involve his only son in the robbery, who was threatening jail and disaster and the dissolution of everything the two of them understood about life (and a woman who was already thinking of leaving the same man, anyway), you’d think this woman would be desperate for an opportunity to get away, or to involve the authorities to save herself and her children, or would find an iron resolve, would hold her ground, and let nothing go forward and thereby preserve her family by the force of her will. (My mother, as small and disaffected as she was, seemed to have a strong will, even if that turned out not to be true.) But that isn’t how our mother behaved.

  Once the house was as spotless as it would ever get, and once she’d made the calls to her parents and whatever anger toward our father had subsided (because he was gone), she became suddenly—not in soaring spirits, because she was never in soaring spirits, but—unexpectedly tranquil. Which was also not usual. It was as if she felt relieved—for the first time in recent weeks or longer. As if something important had been decided and assigned to its proper place. She laughed with us, teased Berner about becoming a famous movie star, and me becoming a college professor or a chess champion or a bee expert. She expressed views on many different things in the world—things I didn’t know she was aware of and hadn’t discussed with us. Senator Kennedy—who she was not impressed by. The earthquake in Morocco. The Cuban revolution—information she must’ve gotten from the radio, the way I had. She watched TV with us—Douglas Edwards, Restless Gun, Trackdown (shows I watched). She made jokes about the soap operas and other shows that were on.

  Berner and I didn’t talk to her much during these days. We were both participating with her in an awkward, self-conscious manner that didn’t cause us to align against our father, but that respected an unexpressed division that now existed between them that had partly caused him to leave on a “business trip” without saying such things as when he’d be back. (I actually wondered several times, as my fantasy, if he’d gone away to rob a bank.) There didn’t seem to be a way for me to start a conversation about this division—even with my sister—without opening all of it up. So we simply cleaned the house, ate our meals, watched the two channels on TV. I read my chess book, plotted out unworkable opening strategies, looked at beekeeping catalogs, and longed for school to start. Berner, as usual, stayed in her room, listened to her radio, tried on cosmetics, shaped and reshaped her hair, used the long cord to talk privately on the telephone to Rudy, and began (I’m sure) to plot her escape, from which she’d never come back, since very soon there would be nothing to come back to. If our mother, in that short time, expressed a change in how she herself saw the whole world, it would’ve been a change that had been happening for years, and had only suddenly become clear in those two days when our father was away.

  I’ve always believed that how our mother looked must’ve played a part in the way she changed and became tranquil while we waited for my father to come home and take life where it would go. How she looked—her size (the same height as Shirley Temple when she was fifteen), her appearance (rarely smiling, bespectacled, her studious Jewish foreignness), her visible disposition (skeptical, sharp-witted, self-defending, frequently distant)—had always seemed to be involved in everything she thought or said, as if her appearance created her whole self. This may be true of anyone. But everything about her distinguished her in any of the places our family ever lived—which wouldn’t have been true in Poland or Israel or even New York or Chicago, where plenty of people looked and acted like her. Nothing about her ever made her less visible or likelier to fit in. And while I couldn’t have stated it then, I took it
as a given that all things about her (what she told us, what she advised, what she disliked, the things she championed) owed their existence only to that person she was—and not to what others thought of her. Not to the community. Not even to common sense. She never wrote this in her chronicle, but because of how she was, and looked, everything must’ve been a trial for her: driving to teach school at Fort Shaw; the moving and the houses; the unacceptable towns; my father’s jokey, dumbbell Air Force associates with their stupid schemes to forge ahead of the pack; having no friends. As I said, she possessed what she for a time believed was a strong will. And that will must’ve never let her think anything but that, given how separate she was from all that surrounded her (except Berner and me, whom she loved), most of familiar life was worthy only of her disdain. Familiarity, fitting in—because it wasn’t available—weren’t worth her respect. Which is another way of explaining why she didn’t want us to assimilate.

  Why she felt tranquil then (maybe she only felt confirmed)—why she joked with us and teased Berner about her future as an actress, and laughed to say I would be a college professor, and watched TV with us, and talked about The Secret Storm and As the World Turns, and how true they were to life—may just have meant that given how life had cast her apart, what she’d realized was that she endured not a burden, but in fact possessed a great, untapped, years-suppressed longing for change. And that with my father going crazy, and preparing to rob a bank (which she knew about), she may have experienced not desperation or terror or greater alienation (which would’ve been conventional). But freedom. From all the forces that oppressed her. She may have concluded that this freed feeling came directly from the very qualities that isolated her, and that they weren’t a torment but her strength. That would’ve been characteristic of her and of her skeptical state of mind. This may have made her feel better than she had in a long time. It is strange that she would. But she was strange.

  Which doesn’t explain why she didn’t bundle Berner and me onto a train to Tacoma (or Chicago, or Atlanta, or New Orleans), and didn’t let our father come home to an empty house, and have that be what brought him to his senses—if he had any. And it doesn’t explain why, when my father did come home the next day, with his bank picked out and a great humming ebullience for getting going, she decided not to leave then and there, or talk him out of it, or go to the police, or draw a line in the sand, but instead became his accomplice and threw her life away when he threw his. When you think hard on why two reasonably intelligent people decide to rob a bank, and why they remained together after love had begun to evaporate and blow away, there are always reasons like these, reasons that in the light of a later day don’t make any sense at all and have to be invented.

  Chapter 11

  The longer I delay characterizing my father as a born criminal, the more accurate this story will be. He became one, it’s true. But I’m not sure at what point in the chain of events he or anyone or the world would’ve known it. Intention to be a criminal must weigh in these things. And a case can be made that he never had clear intention before he robbed the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore, North Dakota. Possibly he lacked the intention even immediately afterward—and didn’t have it until it dawned on him what might happen to him as a result. To Bev Parsons, in the state of mind he’d descended to, there was something so necessary and also unexceptional about the undertaking that there couldn’t have been any grounds for objecting—which says something not good about him, I know. And since, again, he didn’t consider himself the type of person to commit an armed robbery, actually committing one didn’t immediately change his opinion of himself, and possibly didn’t right up to the moment detectives came to our house, walked around the living room discussing “a trip to North Dakota,” and then told both our parents, almost casually, they would have to have handcuffs put on and go to jail. This may be how many criminals who’re new to their work think about their actions and themselves.

  * * *

  But how do people act when they’re about to climb in their car and drive off to rob a bank? If you’d driven past our house on Wednesday night, noticed our lights burning, seen through the windows my mother in the kitchen cooking dinner, seen the neighbors’ lights on, my father fresh out of the shower, sitting on the front porch steps lacing on his shoes in the cool, humming twilight, the moon high and clear, cars moving beyond the park, his hair wet, smelling of Old Spice and talcum, rehearsing to Berner and me stories of what he’d seen on his “business trip”—the prairie like a great inland sea (“like the Gulf of Mexico”), the northern lights, no mountains, but an abundance of wild animals, the two of us sitting rapt, blissful—would you have thought that there was a man getting ready to commit an armed robbery? No, you wouldn’t. Though admittedly I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

  All the signs, the warnings we think we know about disaster are mostly wrong. A child’s view of them is just as likely to be as good as an adult’s. And might be better. Years ago, I knew a man who hanged himself—a stockbroker with many, many woes and mental problems and a feeling of hopelessness that nothing good could reach. But in the week that led to his terrible moment, which he’d planned to the last detail—his wife all arranged to find him when she came home from a Florida vacation with her girlfriends—the people who knew him said he seemed to have moved the weight of the world off his shoulders, and to be in the most high-flying spirits. He laughed, told jokes, teased people, made plans in a way he hadn’t in anyone’s recent memory. They believed he’d turned a corner, had figured life out, found a path back to the old self—the person they remembered happily and were excited to have back with them. And then that: swinging from the chandelier in the foyer of the house he’d built only two years previous and claimed to love. It’s a mystery how we are. A mystery.

  When my father got home Wednesday night at about eight he was in a buoyant humor. You would’ve thought he’d cinched the best business deal in the world, discovered a gold mine or an oil well or won a lottery. He still had on his Air Force jumpsuit and his grass-stained tennis shoes and hadn’t shaved. He’d brought back his blue bag that had had his gun secretly in it. (I’d gone into his sock drawer during my house-cleaning assignments to satisfy myself that I’d seen what I’d seen. It wasn’t there. He’d had it with him.)

  For a little while after he arrived he strode around our house, talking—talking to our mother in the kitchen, talking to Berner and me, sometimes just talking to himself. He was loose-limbed and relaxed and looked into all the rooms, as if he’d noticed how clean they were. His speaking voice was confident and sounded to me more southern than usual, which was the way he talked when he felt unguarded, or when he told a joke or had a drink. The changing effects of modern life were on his mind: there was a satellite in the sky now that predicted the weather and looked like a star at night. He thought this could be a boon to aeronautical navigation. In Brazil the government had constructed a completely new city right out of the jungle and moved thousands of people there. This would solve racial problems, he thought. We could all buy a new kidney now when our old ones wore out—which was self-evidently good. He’d heard this news on a Canadian radio station in his car. It’d come in clearly because he’d been close to the border during his drive.

  After his shower, as I said, he accompanied Berner and me out onto the front porch at dusk and told us what the prairie looked like—an ocean. We looked up for the satellite circling in the sky, and he said he believed he saw it, though we didn’t. He talked about his growing-up years in the state of Alabama and all the funny things people said and how colorful it was compared to Montana—where people lacked a happy sense of humor and thought being hard-bit and unfriendly were virtues. He asked us both again—because he often asked this—if we felt like we were Alabamians. We both again said we didn’t. He asked me where I felt like I was from. I told him Great Falls. Berner first said nowhere, then she said she was from Mars, and we all laughed. He tal
ked for a while about having dreamed of being a pilot but only qualifying as a bombardier and how disappointed he’d been, but that disappointments were educational and sometimes reversed outcomes were better. He talked about the terrible errors people had made in learning to drop bombs, and what a heavy responsibility it was. Once or twice our mother came outside from the kitchen. He’d brought home two bottles of Schlitz beer, and they’d each drunk one—which they didn’t regularly do. It made them playful, which was how our mother’d become with us while he was gone. She’d put on a pair of white pedal pushers that revealed her thin ankles, some flat cotton shoes, and a pretty green blouse—clothes we didn’t know she owned. She looked like a young girl and smiled more than she normally would’ve and held her beer bottle by its neck and drank it in small swallows. She acted affectionately toward our father and laughed and shook her head at silly things he said. A couple of times she patted him on the shoulder and said he was a card. (As I said, she was a good listener.) Though he didn’t seem any different to me. He was a man in a good humor most of the time.