Canada

by Richard Ford

  On one occasion, when Mrs. Gedins was busy in the hotel kitchen, I was given a key and sent to the third floor to clean Arthur Remlinger’s rooms—make his bed, clean his toilet, remove his towels and washcloths, wipe the surfaces where dust had sifted out of the old tin ceiling and been blown in under the window sashes.

  His rooms were only three, and surprisingly small for a man who had many belongings and left nothing neat or arranged when he wasn’t there. I made no effort not to examine whatever my eye fell on, and looked further than I should’ve, since I believed I’d likely never know Arthur Remlinger better than I knew him then. Knowing so little and wanting to know more had caused me misgivings in the ways I’ve said. And misgivings can be a source of curiosity as well as suspicion.

  The dark beaded-board walls of Arthur Remlinger’s bedroom and his small sitting room and bathroom were shadowy with the venetian blinds closed and only table lamps lit, and were hung with a variety of unusual things. A large yellowed map of the United States with white pins pressed in at various locations—Detroit, Cleveland, Ohio, Omaha, Nebraska, and Seattle, Washington. No indication was given for what these might relate to. There was an oil painting framed and hung beside the bedroom window, showing—I recognized it—the grain elevator in Partreau, with the prairie stretching off to the north. Remlinger had said this had been painted by Florence in the American Nighthawk fashion—which I hadn’t understood and couldn’t look up because I’d left my “N” World Book volume in Great Falls. Elsewhere on the wall was a framed photograph of four tall boys, young and confident, smiling, hands on their hips, wearing heavy wool suits and wide ties, posed in front of a brick building that had the word Emerson above its wide doors. There was another picture of a thin, fresh-faced, smiling young man with a shock of blond hair (Arthur Remlinger, taken years before—his pale eyes were unmistakable). He was standing with one long arm draped over the shoulders of a slender woman in blousy trousers, who was also smiling—both of them beside what my father called a “ball-cap Ford coupé,” from the ’40s. There was a picture anybody would’ve recognized as a family, standing in a straight line, taken many years before. A large woman with dark hair tied severely back, wearing a shapeless, rough, light-colored dress, was frowning beside a tall big-headed man with heavy brows and deep-set eyes and enormous hands, who was also frowning. An older dark-haired girl with a brazen smile stood beside a tall, skinny boy who I felt was also Arthur Remlinger, and who was wearing a boy’s wool four-button suit with too-short trousers and boots. The girl must’ve been Mildred but was unrecognizable. They were posed with a great sand dune behind them. At the side in the picture was a lake or possibly an ocean.

  In the corner of the musty room was a standing clothes rack with belts and suspenders and bow ties hung on its brass hooks. A closet was stuffed with clothes—heavy suits, tweed jackets, starched shirts, the floor cluttered with large, expensive-looking shoes, some with pale hosiery stuffed inside them. There were women’s clothes as well—a nightgown and slippers and some dresses I assumed were Florence’s. In the bathroom beside Remlinger’s silver monogrammed brush and combs and witch hazel bottle and shaving articles, were jars of cold cream and a hanging rubber water bottle and a shower cap and a blue decorated dish with bobby pins in it.

  On the wall, above the ornamented wooden double bed, were shelves of books—thick blue ones on chemistry and physics and Latin, and leather-bound novels by Kipling and Conrad and Tolstoy, and several volumes with just names on their spines: Napoleon, Caesar, U. S. Grant, Marcus Aurelius. There were also thinner books with titles that said Free Riders, and Captive Passengers, and The Fundamental Right, and Union Bigwigs, and Masters of Deceit, by J. Edgar Hoover, whose name I knew from TV.

  In the shadowy corners of both rooms were tennis and badminton rackets leaned against the wall. There was a record player and a wooden box on the floor beside it containing, I discovered, records by Wagner and Debussy and Mozart. A marble chess board had been placed on top of the record-player cabinet, the chess pieces made of white and black ivory and intricately carved and weighted if you picked them up (which I did). This made me think I could mention playing chess when I saw Arthur Remlinger, and that if I ever knew him better we could play and I could learn new strategies.

  In his tiny parlor there was a heavy, round-arm couch with coarse covering, and two facing straight-back chairs with a low table in between, on which was a half-empty bottle of brandy and two tiny glasses—as if Arthur Remlinger and Florence La Blanc would sit facing each other, drinking and listening to music and talking about books. Opposite the tennis and badminton rackets was a tall wooden perch set beside the shaded window, with a thin brass chain wound around the bar and tied in a knot. There was no sign of a bird.

  On the wall behind the perch, practically invisible in shadows, was a framed brass plaque engraved with the words “Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.” This had no bearing on anything I understood. On a wooden hook beside the plaque was a leather holster with a rig-up of complicated straps and buckles I recognized from gangster movies to be a shoulder holster. Inside it was a short-barreled silver pistol with white grips.

  I, of course, immediately drew the pistol out. (I’d already locked the door closed.) It was unexpectedly heavy to be so small. I looked through the slit behind the cylinder and made out it was loaded with at least five brass-bottom bullets. It was a Smith and Wesson. I didn’t know the caliber. I held the muzzle to my nose in a way I’d also seen in the movies. It smelled like hard metal and the spicy oil used to clean it. The little barrel was slick and shiny. I sighted it out the window at the CP yard, at the rails full of grain cars sitting in the sun. Then I stepped quickly back for fear of being seen. The pistol, I felt, directly pertained to the significance and enterprise I attributed to Arthur Remlinger—more, I felt, than anything else in his rooms did. My father had had his pistol—which I never believed he’d lost, and now believed had been used in a robbery. I didn’t see how by itself it allotted him significance or made him exceptional. The Air Force had given it to him free, after all. But regarding Arthur Remlinger, I did feel this way, and I again experienced the misgiving I’d been feeling—that he was an unknown and unpredictable person. It was a sensation familiar in my mind to feelings about my parents and their robbery and its terrible effect on Berner and me. I couldn’t have said more about what I thought. But the pistol seemed a very definite and dangerous thing. Though Arthur Remlinger didn’t seem to me to be a man who would own a pistol. He seemed too cultivated—which was clearly my error. I wiped the little handles on my shirt to take my finger smudges off and put the pistol back in its holster. I hadn’t cleaned anything in the rooms the way I’d been told to and would have to come back later. But I had the sudden fear of being found out. So that I unlocked the door to the hall, looked out and saw nothing, then quickly went back down the stairs to my other duties.

  Chapter 48

  As colder weather came on, and the sports began arriving at the beginning of October (when Americans were permitted to shoot), Charley said he wanted me to devote all my time to “the goose work.” I’d been in my Partreau shack for a month, although as I said, time didn’t seem to pass or mean much to me—not the way it had two months ago, when school was only weeks away, and the long, slow passage of days was what I wished I could command and defeat the way Mikhail Tal mastered a chess problem.

  I adjusted to my little two-room house better than at first. It was necessary to use the privy—which I did only after assuring myself Charley wasn’t watching me, and then would never stay long. But there was electricity to operate my hot plate and the ceiling ring and to provide some heat. I could no longer wash my face at the pump due to the chill wind. But I brought my water in at night using a bucket, and bathed by employing a tin saucepan I scavenged from a refuse pit, and scoured myself with a washrag and the Palmolive bar I kept in a tobacco ti
n to keep the mice and rats from finding it.

  I’d dragged one of the two cots out from the back room into the kitchen—my only other room. The back room sat on the north side of the shack, and the new cold wind worked in through the stucco and the laths and whistled through the cracked panes, so that that room, which was lightless, became unwelcoming at night. In the kitchen there was an old iron J. C. Wehrle stove with split seams, and I fed this with rotted boards and pieces of broken-off dead timber and caragana twigs gathered on my tours. I washed my clothes and sheets and kitchen utensils at the pump stand and swept the floor with a broom I’d found, and considered myself to have made a good adaptation to circumstances whose duration and direction I didn’t know. I wanted to get my hair cut at the barber shop in Fort Royal—I sometimes saw myself in the bathroom mirrors at the Leonard and knew I was thinner and my hair was too long. But there was no mirror in my shack, and I had little thought at night for how I looked. I only remembered the haircut when I was in bed, and that I should clip my fingernails the way my father did. But then I would forget the next day.

  Several of the cardboard boxes lining the walls in the kitchen I carried into the cold north room and stacked against the window and along the wall to block the cracks and splits opening to the outside. At the drugstore in Fort Royal I bought a purple candle with lavender aroma that I burned at night, because I knew from my mother that lavender promoted sleep and because the shack—cold or warm—smelled of smoke and rot and stale tobacco and human smells from decades of lives lived there. The shack would soon fall down like the rest of Partreau. I knew if I left and came back in a year there would likely be little sign of it.

  In the evenings, when I’d finished my meal and my walk and could tolerate being alone (I never felt my situation was truly tolerable), I would sit on my cot and unfold my chess cloth on my covers, set up my four wobbly ranks of plastic men and plot moves and campaigns against idealized but unspecified opponents. I’d never actually played with anyone but Berner. Arthur Remlinger was who I thought about. My strategies usually entailed brash frontal assaults. I would defeat my opponents with sacrificial attacks in the manner of the same Mikhail Tal, who’d become my hero. The endgame would always be reached with lightning speed due to scant opposition. Other times, I would attempt slow, deceptive feints and retreats (which I didn’t like much), making shrewd comments and observations about what my opponent and I were each doing and what he seemed to be planning—while never divulging my scheme for victory. I did this while listening to the old Zenith, whose light glowed dimly behind its numbers and out of which on the cold, cloudless nights emerged distant voices it seemed to me the wind must’ve blown around the world without respect for borders. Des Moines. Kansas City. WLS in Chicago. KMOX in St. Louis. A scratchy Negro’s voice from Texas. Reverend Armstrong’s voice shouting after God. Men’s voices in what I believed was Spanish. Others I decided were French. And, of course, there were the clear stations from Calgary and Saskatoon, bearing news—the Canadian Bill of Rights, Tommy Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. And place-names—North Battlefield, Esterhazy, Assiniboia—towns I knew nothing about but knew weren’t American. I wondered if I might dial in a station from North Dakota, which wasn’t so far away, and hear about my parents being put on trial. I never found such a station, although sometimes when I lay on my cot in the dark, with the Wehrle ticking, I pretended the American voices I heard were talking to me, and knew about me, and had advice for me if I could only stay awake long enough. This and my lavender candle was the way I went to sleep on many nights.

  On other evenings, I pulled open one or another of the cardboard boxes I hadn’t moved into the north room, and diverted myself with the evidence of all that had happened in the house in the years before I came to be in it. On the prairie, history and memory seemed as alien as the passage of time—as if the citizens of Partreau had disappeared not into the past but into another vivid present—which explained why there was no dignified cemetery, and so much was left behind.

  Arthur Remlinger had remarked to me that he’d lived in my shack in his early days, and many of the boxed possessions were his. In the softened, stale-smelling boxes I found related evidence of what I’d seen in his rooms. In one box marked in pencil with “AR” were thin books and cracked, yellowed magazines bound in cotton twine, from the 1940s. One magazine was called The Free Thinkers. Another was The Deciding Factor. There were two books I’d already seen in the apartment— Captive Passengers and World Analysis. I had no idea what they were or were about. When I pulled out The Free Thinkers, its cover referred to an article inside by an “A. R. Remlinger,” with the title “Anarcho-syndicalism, Immunities and Privileges.” I read the first page of this. It pertained to something called the “Danbury Hatters lesson,” and the “Protestant work ethic,” and went into detail about how workers were not “maximizing their individual freedom.” The back page informed the reader that A. R. Remlinger was “a young Harvard man from the middle west” who was putting his “gold-plated education” to the service of human rights for all men. It was likely Arthur Remlinger had written articles in the other magazines, but I had no interest in opening them.

  Other boxes didn’t bear the “AR” initials, and in these I found life insurance policies and stacks of canceled checks and a Saskatchewan driver’s license for a woman named Esther Magnusson, and collections of yellow pencil stubs bound with rubber bands, and stacks of old pamphlets and a “Milky Way for Britain” war bond brochure, much of it corrupted and nested in by mice. Some of the pamphlets had to do with the “Social Reform Gospel,” and something called the “Royal Templars of Temperance.” There were membership booklets about “Home-makers Clubs,” and bulletins about “Wheat and Women” and the “Grain Growers Guide.” One booklet had to do with “The Canadian League” and stated on its first page that foreign immigrants weren’t shouldering their burden, and soldiers returning from the front should have “first choice of the best jobs.” Inserted in the pages was a black-and-white newspaper picture showing a cross set ablaze and people in white hoods and robes whose faces were covered, standing, facing it. “Moose Jaw, 1927” was written under it in faded ink.

  Another box contained rusted metal film canisters with reels of film inside, but no indication of what the film would show. An American flag was folded on top of the canisters in the fashion my father had demonstrated for Berner and me—“the tricorn.” There were shoe boxes of letters—many addressed to Mr. Y. Leyton in Mossbank, Saskatchewan, and postmarked 1939 and 1940. These were tied with baling twine in tight stacks, some with red American three-cent stamps that bore a picture I recognized as George Washington. I considered it allowable for me to read at least one of these letters, since no one had sent a letter to me in Canada, and reading someone else’s might make me appreciate the presence of others, which my existence in Partreau had all but extinguished. The letter read:

  Dear Son,

  We’re in Duluth, having driven here with your father from the Cities where it was very nice, indeed (very modern). Much warmer there than in ole ice-box Prince Albert, that’s for certain. I don’t know how anyone lives there—and the wind. My goodness. You know plenty, of course, about that. I’m trying to forget most of the Canadian I learned as a child in school—for my sins. Jaqueleen was just saying it’s a pity there has to be a frontier between the two. But I’m not so sure. Someone must think they know best all about it. Tennessee is where I’d happily die.

  I know (or have heard) that you are thinking about the RCN, which is very brave (if you like water). I wish you’d think longer on it. Okay? We have little to gain from a big fight now. The worst could happen. Which of course you are not thinking about. Just a thought from your mum.

  I have a postcard which I’ll send. It shows our “Prince Charming” on his famous train trip to Sask back in ’19 (twenty years ago! Heavens!). You won’t remember. But your dad and your Gram and me stood you up by the tracks in Regina in your little wors
ted suit, and you waved a little Canadian flag. I believe that’s why you’re so patriotic. There’s surely no reason to be otherwise. Take care now. Look for my postcard, which won’t fit into the env. without ruining it. Your dad sends his best to you—which is more than I ever see.

  Love ’n kisses.

  Your Mum

  I dug deeper in the box for the postcard showing “Prince Charming” and who he would’ve been. But near the bottom were only more bound stacks—of Christmas cards and dry newspaper cuttings with pictures of smiling, crew-cut men in hockey uniforms. At the very bottom were several loose picture cards of completely naked women posing beside ornate pedestals with floral arrangements and tables containing books. The women were hefty and smiling as happily as if they were wearing clothes. I’d never seen pictures like these, although I knew from things boys had said in school that they existed. You could buy them from machines at the State Fair. I spent quite a while going carefully over each one and finally put three into my World Book “B” volume, since I knew I’d want to look at them again. I did want to look at them again, and did look at them. I kept them for years.

  Also at the bottom of the box, I found a pair of wire-rim eyeglasses and a plain gold ring. The ring was inside a yellow Bayer aspirin tin that had two worn-smooth aspirins and a charm-bracelet replica of the Eiffel Tower also inside it. I knew a ring was inside before I saw it. Don’t ask me how I knew. It’s probably a wedding ring, I all but said to myself. I understood, of course, that it represented an outcome lost in someone’s past and wasn’t good.

  Most of the boxes I didn’t go through thoroughly. One had Regina newspapers. Another held muddy clothes and shoes the mice had marauded. Another was documents and receipts and totalings for wheat crops and elevator fees and the purchase of a new Waterloo Boy tractor. Another contained stacks of unopened printed matter about the 1948 Saskatchewan election, and pertaining to the CCF and “Social Credit.” I tried to imagine how many people’s or families’ lives were jumbled together here, in my house. Many, many—I thought—as if they had all hoped to come back later from their present and reclaim it, but never had. Or had died. Or had just elected to put that life behind them for a crack at a better one somewhere else.