by Richard Ford
Driving north in the low, late-day sun, Mildred recited to me what she knew about Canada that she felt might prove useful. Canada was owned by England and contained provinces, not states of a union—though there was practically no difference, except Canada only had ten. People mostly spoke English, but in a different way she couldn’t describe, but I’d be aware of it and could learn it. She said they had their own Thanksgiving, but theirs wasn’t on Thursday and wasn’t in November. Canada had fought beside America in the same world war my father had fought in and had gotten involved in it even before we did, due to Canada’s obedience to the Queen of England, and in fact had an air force as good as ours. She said Canada wasn’t an old country like ours and still had a pioneer feel, and nobody there really thought of it as a country, and in fact in some parts people spoke French, and the capital was back east, and nobody respected it the way we did Washington, D.C. She said Canada had dollars for money, but theirs were different colored and were sometimes mysteriously worth more than ours. She said Canada also had its own Indians and treated them better than we treated ours, and Canada was bigger than America, though it was mostly empty and inhospitable and covered with ice much of the time.
I rode along thinking about these things and how they could become true just by passing two huts marooned in the middle of nowhere. I felt better than I had earlier in the day when I didn’t know where I was going. It was as if a crisis had passed or been escaped. What I experienced was relief. I only wished my sister, Berner, had stayed to see it with me.
More wheat fields ran past, and the afternoon air was sweet and cool. I made out individual dust torrents where farmers were operating combines in the distance. Grain trucks sat out on the cut-over ground, waiting to haul the wheat away. Tiny distant figures moved around the trucks as the harvesters emptied loads and the trucks moved off. Once we were out of the hills, there were no landmarks. No mountains or rivers—like the Highwoods or the Bear’s Paw, or the Missouri—that told you where you were. There were even fewer trees. A single low white house with a windbreak and a barn and a tractor could be seen at a distance, then later another one. The course of the sun would be what told you where you were—that and whatever you personally knew about: a road, a fence line, the regular direction the wind came from. There was no feeling, once the hills disappeared behind us, of a findable middle point from which other points could draw a reference. A person could easily get lost or go crazy here, since the middle was everywhere and everything at once.
Mildred told me some things about her brother, Arthur Remlinger. He was American, was thirty-eight years old, and had lived in Canada for several years by his own choosing. He was the only one in her family to go to college, and had hoped to become a lawyer, but for various reasons hadn’t finished his studies and had become disenchanted with America. He lived north of where we were, in the small town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, where he ran a hotel. It was just a coincidence, she said, that she and he lived across the border from each other. She saw him infrequently, which she didn’t consider important. She loved him. The reason her brother was agreeing to take charge of me, she said, was because I was American and had no place to go, and it was a favor to her. He would find things for me to do. He had no children of his own and would be interested in me—and in Berner, too, if she hadn’t run away. He was an unusual man, as I would see. He was cultivated and intelligent. I’d learn many things being around him and would like him.
Mildred decided on another cigarette and expelled smoke from her large nostrils so it rushed out the window. She’d been driving for hours—just to get me away from where I was imperiled. She could only have been exhausted. I tried to picture where we were going—Fort Royal, Saskatchewan. It sounded foreign, and threatening because it was foreign. I could only feature the same prairie all around us, where there was no place for me.
“How long am I going to stay with your brother?” I only said this to make myself say something.
Mildred sat up straighter and gripped the wheel in both fists. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to see. Don’t spend time thinking old gloomy, though.” Her cigarette was in the side of her mouth, and she was talking with the other side. “Your life’s going be a lot of exciting ways before you’re dead. So just pay attention to the present. Don’t rule parts out, and be sure you’ve always got something you don’t mind losing. That’s important.” This advice was not very different from what our father had said to Berner and me the day we didn’t go to the State Fair. I understood it was what adults thought, though it was the opposite of the way our mother saw things. She’d always ruled out a great deal and understood the world only in her own terms. Mildred fattened her cheeks and fanned herself with her hand, which meant she was hot inside her green silky dress. “Does that make sense to you?” She reached across the seat and knocked her soft fist against my knee the way you’d knock on a door. “Does it? Knock, knock?”
“I guess it does,” I said. Though it didn’t really seem to matter what I agreed with. That was the final time Mildred and I talked about my future.
Chapter 41
Charley Quarters climbed down off his truck fender, holding a small metal can I later learned had beer and ice cubes in it. He’d been waiting for us in the town of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan—to drive me and Berner the rest of the way to where Mildred’s brother lived. He was her brother’s all-around man, Mildred said, and she didn’t like him. He was Métis, and was unsavory. Once the hand-off of me was over, she was going to drive back to Great Falls through Lethbridge, Alberta, so as to not attract attention at the border where we’d crossed before. The American border policeman had watched us when we drove through. He would wonder why she came back alone.
Charley Quarters set his can on the truck hood and came back to Mildred’s window and leaned in on his elbows. He looked across at me with an unfriendly grin on his wide lips. I just stared up at the mare’s tails in the west—the sky behind them purple and gold and bright green, turning blue in the high reaches. I tried not to seem afraid, which I was.
Mildred pushed him back with her palm. He had a strange, sour-sweet odor on him I could feel in my nose—from his clothes and possibly his hair. He was small and chesty and dense looking and muscular, with an over-sized head. He wore dirty brown canvas trousers, black rubber boots the trousers were tucked into, and a tattered purple flannel shirt with its elbows out and a pocket torn off. His black greasy hair was clamped in the back with a woman’s rhinestone barrette, and he had slitted blue eyes and big ears. His teeth, when he smiled his unlikable smile, were large and yellow and all in evidence. He looked like a dwarf. I’d seen a picture in my World Book (left behind in Great Falls). But he was taller than a dwarf, though his legs bowed out. He seemed cocky and rough, which I’d heard some dwarfs were.
He reached into Mildred’s car and plucked one of her Tareyton cigarettes out of her pack on the dashboard and put it behind his ear.
“I thought we had two packages in the cargo.” He leered at me again, as if he knew I wouldn’t like being talked about as a cargo. He spoke in spurts.
Mildred said sharply, “You just take care of this one. Or I’ll come up there and find you.”
Charley kept grinning, and she had to push him back again. I wondered if this clipped way of talking was the way Canadians talked. “Does it have to eat?” Charley said.
“No,” Mildred said. “Just get him up there and get him put to bed.”
Two large men in bib overalls and straw farm hats stepped out the door of the hotel across the street. The town was empty and the street shadowy at sundown. The sign over the front door of the hotel said THE COMMERCIAL. Low lights were on inside when the door opened. The two men stood on the sidewalk and talked while they watched us. One of them laughed at something, then they walked to separate pickups, backed away from the curb, and drove slowly in opposite directions. They were Canadians, too.
“Is there something wrong with him?” Charley said, smi
ling as if I amused him.
“He’s just fine.” Mildred reached and clutched my arm and looked at me. “He’s like the rest of us, aren’t you?”
“Is he an orphan?” Charley Quarters said, looking in the back seat at Mildred’s white uniform hung in the window. He reached a hand in and touched it.
I stared straight out the windshield at four tall grain elevators, half in shadows, silhouetted against the lighted sky. Swallows swerved in the twilight. A single lit bulb dangled where the funnel pipe hung in the nearest elevator, a pile of grain illuminated on the ground beneath it. I hadn’t connected this word with orphanage up until then.
Mildred stared right into Charley’s leering face. “He’s got a mother and a father, unlike you. They love him. That’s enough for you to hear about.”
“Love him to death,” Charley said, and stood up straight, backed away into the street, and looked at the sky—blue in the west, dark in the east. The mare’s tails were already faded and there were faint stars. This was the man I was leaving with. In all likelihood I’d be left alone and forgotten.
“Now what I’ll do,” Mildred said this to me then, “is write you in care of my brother. I’ll find out what I can about your folks and send that to you. Remember what I said about not ruling parts out. You’ll be fine. I promise.” She unexpectedly leaned toward me and pulled my face to her mouth, gripped my neck, and kissed me right on my jawbone. She squeezed me hard when I didn’t kiss her back. Cigarettes and the fruity odor inside Mildred’s purse, and cake makeup, and the spearmint she chewed was what she smelled like. Her spongy shoulders were shoved against my ear. “You’ve had a time,” she whispered. “Just ’cause their life got ruined doesn’t mean yours does. This’ll be a start for you. Your sister’s already made hers.”
“I didn’t want a start,” I said, my throat suddenly constricted again—with anger at her just for saying that.
“We don’t always get to choose our starts.” She reached and levered my door open, pushed it back and shoved me in that direction. “Now, go on. We’re putting off the inevitable here. This is an adventure. Don’t be afraid. You’ll be fine. I said so.”
I didn’t feel right saying anything more to her, even if I could’ve. My pillowcase with my possessions packed to go to Seattle was on the back seat floor. I hauled it over, climbed out onto the pavement, and closed the car door. Whatever Mildred had agreed with my mother to do, she’d done now. But what I wanted to do was climb back in the car with her and have her drive us as far away as we could go. Only that wasn’t in my mother’s plan when she could still plan things for me. So I did what I was told to—as much for my mother as any other reason. I stayed a good son to the end of it.
Chapter 42
So did you hear all about me?” Charley Quarters said. We were rattling along through the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We passed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky.
I said I hadn’t heard anything about him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. A lever-action rifle was barrel-down on the seat between us, close to his leg. His truck stank of beer and gasoline and the same strong sour-sweet stinging odor I didn’t recognize. There was an animal carcass in the bed of the truck, but I couldn’t tell what it was. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Charley said. “I’m going to be responsible for you up here. But you’ll look after yourself unless I need you. You have work every day. You sleep in the Overflow House by my trailer. You eat in the hotel. A.R. owns it. You get there and back on your own. Though some days I’ll take you in the Rolls here. And you don’t cause me any trouble.”
Charley had the seat pushed far back so his feet barely touched the pedals, one hand on the wheel, and he was smoking Mildred’s cigarette he’d previously put behind his ear. He was drinking another beer out of a regular can. A deer stood at the edge of the highway, chest-high in the wheat, its green eyes gleaming into the headlights. Charley sawed the wheel toward it, but it moved effortlessly back. “God damn that,” Charley shouted. “I coulda got that one.” He leered at me, as if he was trying to scare me, and it amused him. “How old do you guess I am?” he said, cigarette clenched in his teeth.
“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t answered anything about having duties. I hadn’t expected to have any. I had no idea what I’d see once the sun was up.
“Don’t you give a shit?”
“No,” I said.
“Fifty! But I look younger.” He talked in this clipped way. “You think I’m Indian. I know that already.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“May-tee,” he said. “You don’t know what the fuck that is, do you?”
“No,” I said. Mildred had mentioned Métis, but I didn’t know about it or even how you spelled it.
“It’s the bloodline of the ancient kings.” Charley elevated his blunt chin and let the smoke out the sides of his mouth as he talked. “Cuthbert Grant—all the way back. The line of martyrs.” He snorted in the cold air. “Indians are entirely different. A lot of mental illness there. Too much drinking and inbreeding. They don’t accept us. They want to kill Métis if they get the chance.”
He suddenly stood on the brake. I got my hands to the dashboard just in time. Though I pitched out of my seat onto my knees and my heart started pounding. We were stopped in the bright alley of gravel between the wheat fields. “I need to. You need to?” Charley said. He had the engine killed before I could answer and was out the door, spraddling his legs in front of the truck, in the bright lights. He had his penis already out where I could see him and was pissing a hard stream down onto the dirt, concentrating fiercely. I wanted to. I hadn’t had the nerve to say so to Mildred, though she was a nurse and would’ve seen such things. But I didn’t believe I could do it in front of Charley, on the highway. I could’ve with my father. I was a town boy. So I just sat in the ticking truck, the headlights illuminating Charley and the widening circle of urine on the ground, road dust shifting through the open door, bringing in the lemony piss odor. “What happened to you?” he called out from the road. He made a little gasping sound before he quit. “Did you get kicked out down there? You commit a crime?”
I hated to be staring at him and to see his private part. I said, “No.” I didn’t want to say, My parents got put in jail in Great Falls. My mother didn’t want me to be in an orphanage. She wants me to be here in Canada.
Charley spit into the urine circle, then sucked back, clearing his nose. “Secrets are good,” he said, zipping up. “Up here’s a good place to hide.” Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flicking flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder. Charley didn’t see it. “You know anything about A.R.?” He was still out in the road, talking, staring into the darkness above the cone of headlight. I believed he meant Mildred’s brother.
“Mildred said he was her brother.” I didn’t think he could hear me.
He scuffed his black rubber boots around on the gravel. “You’ll think he’s strange.” He didn’t seem to be doing anything now. “What do you want to be called?”
“Dell,” I said.
“How many years have you got, Dell?”
I knew what that had to mean. “Fifteen,” I said. “Almost sixteen.”
Charley came back to the doorway and climbed up into the driver’s seat, his animal odor accompanying him. “Are you lonely?” He started the truck with a roar. The headlights dimmed then brightened.
“I miss my parents,” I said, “and my s
ister.”
“So where’d she go? Some orphanage?” Charley closed his door and rolled up his window. Mosquitoes were whining around us.
“She ran away,” I said.
“Good for her.” He was silent, his hands on the steering wheel. “You don’t know anything about anything, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Why would anybody take me up here?” Again, what I said was only what I was thinking, as I had with Mildred.
Whatever had intruded into the headlights a moment before fell through again in full view. An owl—a curved, white face, wings extended, thorny feet grasping, its eyes intent on something beyond the light’s edge. Then it was gone. I’d never seen an owl; I’d only heard them from my room at night in Great Falls. But I knew what it was. Again, Charley didn’t seem to notice.
“A.R.’s peculiar. He’s American,” Charley said. “He’s been up here a long time. Maybe he’s lonely for company. I don’t know. Let me feel your hand.”
His tough, hard hand, which was shockingly big, found mine and captured it and squeezed it four or five or six quick successive squeezes. His hand was thick and short-fingered and blunt-nailed and grainy like his canvas pants. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on, squeezing even tighter. “Did that old nursy try to fuck you,” he said, as if he was about to laugh.