by Richard Ford
I wondered, however, what Arthur Remlinger had meant when he’d told me Americans could never let a place like Partreau stand. They would burn it as a reproach to progress. But as I heaved the boxes back up against the drafty wall of my kitchen, I decided he was probably correct. My parents, people without real possessions, without permanence, who never owned a house, who carried little with them, and whose few holdings (except for Berner and me) had by then been taken and thrown in the town dump in Great Falls—my parents were people Arthur Remlinger had been referring to, who would’ve cared nothing for Partreau even if they didn’t burn it. They were people running from the past, who didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
Chapter 49
I was now learning many things at once: How to site goose pits where the morning sun didn’t find them too early but would still be high enough on a rise of land that the Sports could see out and be ready when the flights came off the river. I learned to set out the heavy wooden decoys to the right and left of the pits, and to leave a landing space where the geese could look to settle—thinking all was the same as the night before—yet not so far apart as to draw attention to the guns or the white faces of the shooters who were often too eager. Charley said Americans were usually fat or old or both and couldn’t stand the cold, crumbly Regina gumbo in the pits and so were always standing up and climbing out at the wrong moments. Ducks, Charley said—Goldeneyes and pintails and canvasbacks—always swept in first, screaming in on the pits like ghosts out of the dark, low and tilting and pinging. Shooting them, though, spooked the geese, who had good hearing, so that this was discouraged. I myself would need to be careful repositioning decoys, since the Sports shot at whatever they thought they saw or heard. People had been killed. Charley himself had been shot with #2 load and had scars. He permitted loading the guns only on his signal—though there were still “sky busters,” who were the dangerous ones. I was responsible to report to him any Sport who seemed drunk—though all of them would’ve been drinking late in the bar the night before, and I could expect to smell liquor. I had also to report anyone who appeared sick or had trouble walking or moving around or was careless handling his shotgun. Charley would verify the licenses and authorize when shooting started and ended—once the sun was high and the geese could see the ground. And as I already said, I would stay in the truck and glass the birds that fell and crippled off, and keep my tally, since the wardens were always about and would be watching with even more powerful binoculars—dividing the falling geese by the number of hunters and coming to check when the tallies didn’t match. Following which they’d be passing out citations, confiscating guns, seeing who was drunk, fining Charley, but fining Arthur Remlinger the most, and forcing him to pay large sums to avoid closer notice being paid to his in-town operation—the Filipino girls, the gambling den off the side of the dining room, and whatever else he might be up to that the town disapproved of. Arthur Remlinger held the license for the “guide service,” though he himself did no guiding and knew nothing about shooting or geese, and cared nothing. He was the proprietor, did the booking, kept the accounts, put up the Sports in the hotel, and collected their money—part of which he paid to Charley, who remitted a small portion to me. Though it was understood the Sports would hand around tips each day when the shooting was finished, often in U.S. currency, and everybody would be satisfied.
On one of the last warm early October days, after Charley and I had spent the morning scouting and digging pits in fields the geese habitually used, I rode my old bicycle down the highway away from Partreau in the direction of the town of Leader, twenty miles west. I was intent to find the school for wayward girls Mrs. Gedins had talked about. Birdtail was six miles down the hardtop, and I meant to inquire there if I might enroll as a student at some point in the future—possibly winter, when my goose duties were over and I might be on my own. I didn’t understand what a wayward girl was. I thought it might mean a girl who was passing through on her way to someplace else—which I was doing. I also didn’t believe there could be a school only for girls. At least a few boys would have to be permitted, I felt—even in Canada. Mrs. Gedins had told me the school was run by nuns. And from my mother’s experience with the Sisters of Providence, I believed nuns were openhearted, generous women who would see a chance to help me, which was their mission and why they’d give up marriage and a normal life. It shouldn’t matter that I was American. I would not divulge that my mother was Jewish or that she and my father were in jail in North Dakota. Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable. And I was willing to tell one, or many more than one, if it meant I could go to school and not fall further behind.
It was also the case that I’d begun to believe it would be nice to be around girls. Berner, of course, was a girl. But most of our lives we had treated each other as being the same thing because we were twins. That same thing was neither male nor female, but something in between that included us both. Though, of course, that hadn’t lasted. On two occasions, Charley had taken me to the chop-suey restaurant on Main Street. Both times I’d seen the Chinese owner’s children, seated at a shadowy rear table doing their schoolwork. I’d paid special attention to the pretty round-faced daughter who I felt might be my age. Each time she’d noticed me, but hardly allowed it to show. Several times since then, when I was taking my walks around Partreau, or marshaling my chess men alone in my shack, I’d entertained a fantastical thought that we could be friends. She could visit me. We could walk around the empty town together, then play chess. (I felt sure she would know how to play better than I did.) I even fantasized I could help her with homework. There was never anything more in my thoughts than that. I never knew her name or even spoke to her. Our friendship existed only in my mind. These real things could never happen, and didn’t. Being alone made it possible to know this sad fact of life, and yet to imagine that it and much else could be different.
The highway and prairie west of Partreau were no different from the hardtop going east to Fort Royal. Though on my bicycle, it felt new—like a terrain I shared with no one. It was only bare, rolling crop-ground with straw bales scattered to the edge of sight, and black dots, which were oil pumpers, and above it the sparkling skeins of new geese in the sky, and gray-white smoke along the horizon where a farmer was burning ditches.
When I arrived at the Birdtail sign, there was no evidence of a town. The Canadian Pacific passed along beside the highway, as it did in Partreau and Fort Royal. But there was no crossing from when a town had been there, or a caragana break or a windmill or an elevator or foundation squares to mark where houses had stood. Mrs. Gedins, I didn’t believe, would go to the trouble to lie to me. I sat and looked at the sky and all around where there was no school, then decided to ride another mile to the opposite Birdtail sign, if there was one. And when I arrived at it, there was another sign beside it that said “Sisters of the Holy Name School.” An arrow pointed south up a gravel road that met the highway from out of the fields. A Christian cross was painted above the school’s name. At the crest of the hill where the road went up, was an abandoned house, and beyond it the road disappeared off into the blue sky. A school could be any distance. Ten miles. With Charley I’d driven the truck miles and miles over the prairie and seen no sign of where humans lived or ever had lived. Yet for me school was still my important goal. I could ride until a school building was at least in sight and see what I thought of it.
With difficulty I guided my front wheel up the sandy tire track. Charley’s old Higgins wobbled and wiggled over the stones and gravels, and pedaling uphill wasn’t easy. Though as soon as I topped the rise where the vacant house sat, giving a view to miles around, the school or what had to be the school lay straight down the road in plain view at the bottom of the hill’s other side—a large, square redbrick building, with four stories, sitting by itself on a low place on the prairie—not very different from the way Great Falls High School would’ve looked i
f it had been set down there. But I knew the instant I saw the building what “wayward” meant. It meant what Berner and I would’ve been if juvenile authorities had come and taken us. Orphans. Only orphans would be in a place like this.
The wide square of ground the school sat on had been rescued from pasture land beside a narrow dry creek. Wheat grew on the bench above it. Spindly trees were planted on the lawn and there were figures—the wayward girls, I believed—dotting the grass. The sharp October sun—tingly on my sweaty neck—made the school appear barren and still. I almost turned and coasted back to the highway. It would never be a place with big oak trees and a football field and boys my age to accept me—the way I’d almost had it in Great Falls. This would never be what I wanted. It was Canada.
Still, I’d come that far. So I just let the bike coast down the bumpy hill. I guessed it was one o’clock. Two hawks circled slowly high in the sky. As I began to pedal where the road became flat at the level of the school, some of the girls sitting on the grass, talking in ones and twos, and several who were walking the perimeter of the lawn, noticed me. Very few people, I thought, would ride a bicycle all the way to here, since there was nothing to do but go back.
A tall nun in a black gown with a white head covering stood on the school steps, supervising the yard. It was after lunch. She was talking to one of the girls, who was laughing. The nun saw me and began watching me across the distance of the lawn.
Where the school ground bordered the road, a tall barred gate stood by itself with no fence attached—which was strange, since anybody could leave or go that wanted to. Not like what I thought an orphanage was. The road entered the grounds farther on. I could see where cars were parked along the side of the building. The gate’s barred doors were chained and padlocked, and up above them, connecting the brick gateposts, a metal banner with a gold figure of Christ, his arms outstretched, welcomed people through the gate in case it ever opened.
I sat on my bicycle, sweating, though a chill wind ran along the road I’d just coasted down. I would have to struggle into it when I rode back. I didn’t see a boy anywhere inside the gate or even working on the lawn. There would have to be a boy somewhere, I thought. There weren’t places where no boys were wanted or needed.
Two of the girls inside the yard had walked to where I was sitting on my bike outside the gate, just looking in. One was tall and skinny and had a bad complexion and a hard, wrinkled mouth that made her look grown up. The other was ordinary sized, with plain brown hair and a square, not-pretty face, and had one arm that was smaller, though not shorter, than her other one. She had a nice smile, I was glad to see, and she trained it on me through the fence bars. They were both dressed in the same shapeless light blue dresses and white tennis shoes and green ankle socks. HOLY NAME was stitched in white where a breast pocket would’ve been. They were like the clothes my mother had worn in jail the last day I saw her.
“What do you think you’re here to do?” the tall, older-looking girl said in a hard, unfriendly way as if she wanted me to leave. Her long body loosened up when she spoke. She cocked her hip, as if she expected me to say something smart back, like Berner would’ve done.
“I just came out to see the school,” I said and felt conspicuous being there. I was not in America. I had no business coming to a school I knew nothing about. I thought I should probably ride away.
“You’re not allowed in here,” the nice girl with the skinny arm said. She smiled at me again, though I could tell it wasn’t friendly. It was sarcastic. One of her side-front teeth was gone and a space was dark inside her mouth, which ruined her nice smile. Both girls had bitten-down fingernails and scratches on their arms and measly bumps around their mouths, and hair on their legs, like mine. It wouldn’t ever be possible to be friends with them.
Far behind the two girls the tall nun was coming down the front steps from where she’d been standing. Her robes billowed around her ankles in the breeze. Other girls in the yard stood and looked at the three of us at the gate, as if a disturbance was taking place. The nun swung her arms as she came toward us, her long legs striding out. I wanted to leave before I had to have words with her and she called the authorities. Both girls looked around but didn’t seem to care about her. They smiled at each other in a mean, pleased way they’d practiced.
“Do you have some kinda girlfriend?” the older girl said. She put her hands through the bars and waggled her fingers at me. I moved back away from her. The Chinese girl in Fort Royal wouldn’t waggle her fingers at me.
“No,” I said.
“What’s your name?” the smaller girl with the skinny arm said.
I gripped the handlebar and set my foot on the pedal, ready to push off. “Dell,” I said.
“You shoo away! You shoo!” the nun had begun shouting as she came in her long strides over the lawn, a beaded harness around her waist, a big cross swinging side to side, her scrubbed-white face and mouth and eyes and cheeks and forehead tightly enclosed in starched white material. “Shoo away, boy,” she shouted.
The two girls looked around at her again and exchanged cruel looks.
“You man, get away. What do you think you’re doing here?” the nun was shouting. It was as if she thought something awful was about to happen or already had.
“That old whore,” the older girl said and seemed natural saying it.
“We hate her. If she died, we’d like it,” the smaller girl said. She had tiny, narrow, dark eyes, and when she said that, she widened them as if she was shocked by herself.
“Dell’s a monkey’s name where I come from. Shaunavon, Saskatchewan,” the older girl said, unbothered by the nun who was quickly approaching. The girl suddenly reached her long arm farther through the gap in the bars and fastened a terrible grip on my wrist, which I tried to get away from but couldn’t. She began pulling me, while the other girl laughed. I was tipping sideways, my right leg and just my shoe heel holding me up, but beginning to fall.
“Don’t touch them,” the nun was shouting. I wasn’t touching anybody.
“He’s afraid of us,” the smaller girl said and started walking away, leaving the older girl imprisoning me through the bars. She was staring at me, torturing me and liking it. She dug her little stunted fingernails into my wrist skin, as if she wanted to tear it.
“Turn him loose, Marjorie,” the nun shouted, almost to the gate. “He’ll injure you.” She couldn’t move easily because of her heavy skirts.
I was being pulled off my bicycle and up against the bars of the gate. “Stop,” I said. “You don’t need to do this.”
“But I just want to.” Marjorie was pulling me against the bars to do something to me. Beat me up, I thought. She was much stronger than Berner and she was bigger. Her face was calm, but her large blue eyes were trained hard on me, and her jaw muscles were clenched as if she was straining. She was younger than I was. Fourteen, I thought, for some reason. “I want to make a man out of you,” she said. “Or make a mess.”
Then the nun arrived and immediately grabbed Marjorie’s shoulder and pulled her back, though Marjorie kept holding on to me. The nun took hold of the girl’s chin and turned her head to the side away from the gate. “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” she said angrily through her pale, stiffened lips. Her black robes made everything difficult for her. The nun’s eyes worked to me, through the bars. “Why are you here?” she said. Her face was getting red. “You don’t belong here. Get away.” She was also very young. Her face was smooth and clear, even though she was angry. She wasn’t much older than Marjorie or me.
A bell had begun to ring at the school. I was all the way off my old bike but hadn’t yet fallen. Marjorie still had her burning grip on my arm and no expression on her face. With my left hand I pried in under her tough fingers—where gouges were opening in my skin. I forced one finger up and then another one. I didn’t want to hurt her. Then I was loose. I stumbled backward away from her into my bicycle and fell on the gravel and knocked the breath out of myself.
“Who are you?” The nun was glaring down at me through the bars. Her face was scrubbed and shiny and furious. She now had a strong grip on Marjorie’s shoulders. Marjorie had begun smiling at me on the ground, as if I’d done something funny. “What’s your name?” the nun said.
I didn’t want to say anything about myself. I began to get up and raise my bicycle off the gravel.
“His name’s Dell,” Marjorie said. “It’s a monkey’s name.”
“Why are you here?” the nun said, still holding Marjorie’s shoulders.
“I just wanted to go to school.” I felt ridiculous kneeling on the ground, reduced in size by being here.
“It’s not for you.” She had an accent different from anybody else’s I’d ever heard. She spoke fast and spit her words at me. Her dark flat eyes were furious—furious against me. “Where are you living?”
“In Partreau,” I said. “I work in Fort Royal.” All the girls in the school yard were walking toward the front steps, organizing themselves into a line to go inside. Another nun—short and heavy-set—was now at the top of the steps, her hands folded in front of her. Marjorie was still smiling at me through the bars as if I was pathetic.
“I wanted to kiss you,” she said to me dreamily. “You didn’t want to kiss me, though, did you?”
“Go back inside,” the nun said, and turned loose of Marjorie’s shoulders and shoved her away. Marjorie threw her head back and turned dramatically and laughed out loud and began walking to catch up with her friend.