Canada

by Richard Ford

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t want to see you ever here again,” the young nun said through the gate. She shook her head at me and pushed her face forward and glared to make sure I understood. “If you come out to here, I will call the constables. They take you away. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I wanted to say something else but had no idea what it could be. I didn’t know what desperate was, but I felt desperate. The young nun was already walking away, her heavy black gown swaying in the sunlight. I had my bicycle up on its wheels, and got it turned in the gravel. I climbed on and began my ride back up the hill into the wind toward the highway and Partreau.

  Chapter 50

  Florence La Blanc drove out to Partreau in her little pink Metropolitan and left a bulky manila envelope leaned against the door of my shack. It had been sent from America with the words Pass On to Dell Parsons scrawled on the bottom, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. It was just days after I’d gone on my bike to the wayward girls’ school, and the week I was to move from Partreau to Fort Royal because more Sports were arriving. Charley had been told to install one of the Sports onto the other cot in my shack, and it wasn’t thought (by Florence, I learned) “good” for me to sleep alone in a room with a grown stranger. Charley had smirked about this and said the old drunk goose shooters could “get lovey” after midnight. There was a tiny “monk’s mop closet” on the third floor of the Leonard, down the hallway from Remlinger’s rooms. I was given this room to sleep in and the use of the downstairs bathroom with the roughnecks and railroaders, and a white enamel pot for the middle of the night. Charley would collect me in his truck for my goose duties. It was beginning to be colder and windier, and I was happy to quit pedaling to town and sleeping in my drafty cabin and seeing no one. This way, I would be more available, once the goose cleaning was finished, to run errands for the Sports for tips and to hang around the bar at night. If I was busy and had less time by myself, I once again didn’t think about my parents and school and Berner—all of which were important to me, but left me feeling sad as a result.

  I’d had little contact with Florence La Blanc. Charley had told me she owned a greeting card store in The Hat and was a widow and once had been a local beauty who’d been free with her charms when her husband was defending Hong Kong in 1941. She looked after her elderly mother. But she was also an artist and enjoyed drinking in the hotel and playing cards in the gambling room, where she was not supposed to be let in. Everyone liked her. Her arrangement with Arthur Remlinger suited her because he had money and good manners and was handsome, in spite of being private and an American and younger than she was. She went back to The Hat when she got tired of him.

  Periodically, when I was in my shack, I would look out and see Florence with her painter’s easel established at various locations in Partreau—once near the back of town, facing the caraganas through which the oil pumper and the white bee hives were visible. Another time, she stood out on my street painting Charley’s trailer and his Quonset. I was strictly forbidden to intrude on Arthur Remlinger’s privacy. But there’d been no mention about Florence, who’d acted friendly to me at a distance, and I felt I was at liberty to talk to her. Again, no one came to Partreau. I talked to very few people on any given day. I thought she wouldn’t mind. So, when I saw her seated on her wood stool in a brown smock and a soft black cloth hat, painting in the street that ran in front of the empty Partreau post office, I walked over through the weeds and clutter where houses had stood, to see what a person did to paint a true picture—not just paint-by-numbers, which I knew didn’t constitute genuine painting or art.

  When she saw me coming—it was the afternoon she’d left the manila envelope—Florence held up her long paintbrush and waved it back and forth like a metronome. I took this to be a signal that she recognized me—though she kept her eyes on her painting, as if it was important to keep it in view.

  “I left you a mysterious parcel,” she said, not looking at me. “You’re much taller than a month ago. Is that possible?” Florence glanced around at me, smiling. She wasn’t a large woman and had a pretty, frank, widely smiling mouth and a hoarse voice that suggested she enjoyed herself. I could imagine her laughing. Occasionally she and Arthur Remlinger danced in the bar to the jukebox music—I’d observed this. She’d held him stiffly at arm’s length in one of his fine suits, looking grave and performing an awkward box step that made the other customers in the bar laugh and her, too. As I said, she also liked to play cards in what she called “the gambling pit,” in the room next to the bar, where I rarely went. Her short frizzy blond hair had gray streaked through it, and she “carried some weight in her pocket,” as my father said about some women. She must’ve been in her forties, and I could see how she’d been prettier when she was young and thin and reckless and her husband was fighting in the war. Her cheeks had tiny veins in them, which I knew was a sign of a hard life, and her sparkly eyes narrowed when she smiled so they were almost invisible. She didn’t match being Arthur Remlinger’s lady friend in my view, but she was somebody I thought I would like. I was happy she’d noticed me weeks before.

  I stood to the side and behind Florence, so I could see straight on to what she was doing. I’d only seen the painting of the grain elevator in Arthur Remlinger’s rooms, and hadn’t known what “the Nighthawk school” was, or as yet anything about Edward Hopper or how a person could make a design that would be recognizable out of just tubes of paint. I believed you probably had to perform eye exercises like my father did so you could see things very accurately.

  Florence was painting in the middle of Manitoba Street. Her picture was nothing more than the view straight past the vacant post office and a pair of broken-in houses to the backs of the commercial row where I walked and that had been alive when Partreau was a whole town. The sky above the buildings had not been painted in yet and was only empty canvas. The elevator and the wheat fields that rose and widened beyond the train tracks toward the horizon were also still to come. I couldn’t see why this would be a subject for a painting, since it was right there for anybody to see any time, and wasn’t beautiful—nothing like Niagara Falls in the Frederic Church picture, or the flower arrangements my father painted with his numbers kit. But I liked it, which I should’ve said to be courteous. What I did say—and wished I’d chosen something better—was, “Why are you painting that?”

  Wind pushed the dry weeds back and forth. The day was growing gray as the line of a front was closing out the blue sky to the east. Charley’s whirly devices were spinning wildly. Swaying ribbons of geese were hurrying in from the north, catching the last of the sun. It didn’t seem to be a good day for painting.

  “Oh,” Florence said, “I just paint things I like, you know? Things that wouldn’t get to be pretty otherwise.” She was holding her wooden palette with her left thumb stuck through. Knots of different colored paint had been squeezed onto it. She’d mix two or three with her brush tip, and put paint right onto the canvas. What she was painting was exactly what I saw—which I guessed was the American Nighthawk style and seemed a miracle but peculiar. I also didn’t understand what she meant by the post office being pretty in her painting. Since it looked like the post office I could see, it wasn’t pretty at all. “I was never really a painter,” Florence said. “My sister Dinah-Lor was a painter. Before she succumbed to a broken heart. My father was also a painter—in the primitive tradition, since what he really was, was an ice cutter in Souris, Manitoba. Maybe that’s why I’m painting out here on South Manitoba Street.” She turned her plump, round face toward me. Her narrow eyes were brown and sparkling, her short-fingered hands strong and red from being in the chilly wind. “You don’t know where in the world Manitoba even is, do you, Dell? Or what?” She was enjoying herself the way I thought she probably always did.

  “I know what it is,” I said. It was a province. I was pleased she knew my name. But I didn’t know any more about Canada than what Mildre
d and Charley had told me. I was thinking about her saying I was taller. I would’ve been happy to be taller, but I didn’t think a month was a long enough time for that to happen. What I’d mostly felt since I’d been there was smaller.

  “You probably aren’t even aware of what Saskatchewan means,” Florence said, looking over her palette at her painting.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Well. I’m happy to tell you it means ‘the quickly flowing river,’ of which there’s not many where we are here now. It’s in the Cree language, which I don’t personally speak. You just need a map and a history book. You’ll see that Manitoba, where I was born, isn’t even very far from here—in Sputnik terms.” She said Sputnik different from how I’d heard on the radio. She said the long “u” to rhyme with “root,” the way Rudy had said Roosevelt. Spootnik. She went on darkening the white front of the wrecked post office to match what I could see was its actual deteriorated condition. “Otherwise,” she said, “I enjoy doing things outside. And I’m bored, of course. I used to always drive past this little town coming over from The Hat to see Arthur. In our early romantic days. People were still living in one or two of the houses at that time. It somehow just called out to me.” She furrowed her brows at her painting. “Has that happened to you yet in your life? You hear a word forever, then all of a sudden it makes a whole different sense? That happens to me all the time.”

  It had happened to me. It had happened to me with the word criminal. It had always meant one thing. Bonnie and Clyde. Al Capone. The Rosenbergs. Now it meant my parents. I wasn’t going to say that, though. I just said, “Yes. It has.”

  “So. Do you like us up here?” Florence glanced at me for a third time to be certain I was noticing her carefully applying paint to the post office. It pleased her, I thought, to be observed painting. “Canadians always want everybody to like it here. And us—especially to like us.” She made a careful little brush jab at the post office door, then turned her head sideways and looked at it that way. “But. Then when you do like us, we’re suspicious it might be for the wrong reasons. America must be a lot different. I have a feeling nobody much cares down there. I don’t know a lot about it. Doing things for the right reasons is the key to Canada.”

  “I like it,” I said. Though I hadn’t thought about Canada in those specific terms. I assumed I didn’t like it, because I was there against my will—and no one would like that. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave now, since I had no place to go.

  “Well . . .” Florence hunched her shoulders, leaned forward on her stool, holding her palette away from her, and with her short, red-nailed thumb lightly smudged the door of the post office so it looked more like the actual gray door I could see. “That’s good,” she said, concentrating. “It’s no fun to be miserable, I guess.” She leaned back on her stool and stared at what she’d done. “Life’s passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.” She wiped her thumb straight onto her brown smock, which she’d done many times before, then sat up straight on her stool to admire her work. “Is it nice down where you live? Or where you did before? I’ve never been to the States. Never had the time.”

  “I liked my school.” I would’ve liked it, I thought.

  “That’s nice then,” Florence said.

  “Do you know why Mr. Remlinger has me up here?” I asked. I hadn’t expected to say that. But I was relieved to talk to someone who seemed to like me.

  Florence looked around the side of her easel at the empty street leading to the highway, where the second two-a-day Greyhound was just going by. She looked back at her painting, her brush twitching between her thumb and her index finger. Strands of blond hair went up the pale back of her neck and under her soft hat. She had a mole there that I thought her comb would always catch on. “Well.” She was talking as she studied her painting. “Are you worried because he hasn’t paid any attention to you?”

  “Sometimes.” I wished I’d just said yes, since it was true.

  “Well, don’t let that bother you,” Florence said, dipping her brush into a tin can on the pavement at her feet. “People like Arthur don’t naturally connect to the world. You can tell that. He probably hasn’t even noticed he’s ignoring you. He’s very smart. He went to Harvard. He may feel it’s important for you to get adjusted to being by yourself. On the other hand, people are never going to do just what you want them to. He’s doing you a favor. Maybe you’re a novelty to him.” She gave me a mischievous grin and looked up at the clouds. “And I do always loathe a marble sky.” She made a line of X’s in the air, using her brush, as if she could paint the sky over. Then she put her brush back in the tin can and left it.

  The oil pumper was humming away out in the windy wheat field, not far off, its lever arm smoothly sinking and rising—the only unnatural noise in the air. I’d almost stopped hearing it at night, though I went to sleep listening for it.

  I stood behind her and didn’t say anything. Florence leaned and set her palette down on the pavement and opened her wooden painter’s box, which had shiny brass fittings and contained clean brushes and silver tubes of paint, several small knives, some white rags and dark bottles of liquid, plus a deck of red-backed playing cards, a package of Export ‘A’s and a small silver flask. High in the sky, inching toward the east, a speck of an airplane appeared out ahead of the moving clouds, the sun against its wings. My father once had sat me in a Scorpion F-89 fighter at the National Guard base, and let me put on the pilot’s helmet and move the controls and make believe I could fly it. I wondered what a person would see from an airplane here. The world curving away? The Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River? The Cypress Hills, the Saskatchewan River and Fort Royal and Partreau and Great Falls and everything in between? All in one clear view.

  “Arthur told me about the difficulties. Your poor parents and whatnot,” Florence said. She took out one of the dark bottles. Then she dumped the liquid from her tin can right onto Manitoba Street, unscrewed the bottle cap, and poured clear fluid into the can. “You’ll have an interesting life story to tell. Pretty girls’ll like you. We like men with dark pasts. My father was put in jail in Manitoba once. But he didn’t rob anything, I guess.”

  She stuck her brush in the can and waggled it and looked back at her painting in which the post office was the only part that was finished. “On the second other hand, of course,” Florence said, busy with her cleaning up, “maybe Arthur sees himself in you. A purer version. I wouldn’t think so. But men do that. On the fourth hand, people do things and say things and don’t ever know why. Then what they do affects people’s lives, and later on they say they knew all about it but they didn’t. That’s probably why your mother sent you up here. She didn’t know what else to do. So. Here you are. That shouldn’t discourage you. I’m a mother. It happens. How old are you, dear?”

  “Fifteen,” I said.

  “And you have a sister who ran away?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “And what’s her name?”

  “Berner,” I said.

  “I see.” She set her tin can with the brush in it back on the ground, picked up a knife and a cloth out of her painter’s box, and set to scraping the knots of paint off her palette and wiping the paint on the cloth. None of this conversation was like a conversation I’d ever had. Berner’s conversations, wherever she was, were probably like this one, I thought—about why things were the way they were and what you can do about them. Conversations with adults other than a person’s parents had more of an outcome.

  “How do you know Mr. Remlinger?” I asked.

  Florence leaned her scraped palette against the leg of the tripod her canvas sat on, and squeezed her brush tip gently into the white cotton cloth. She knelt on the pavement to perform these acts. I stayed standing beside her. “If I can think back that far.” She smiled up at me. Her cloth hat—which was soft black velvet—had been pushed by the wind back off her forehead. The unfinished painting, still on the easel, was also being
disturbed. “I . . . met Arthur in the bar of the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, in nineteen fifty. I had a French painter boyfriend at that time. A watercolorist. Jean-Paul or Jean-Claude. We’d been to the football, which I always enjoy. But he got furious at me—for something I said—and departed. And Arthur was right there in the bar. He was blond and handsome and refined and well dressed and smart and slightly eccentric for a younger man, but also something of a gentleman and slightly secretive. He had an interesting dramatic quality. And he seemed angry and bored and out of place—a bit of a confusion—which is always attractive to women. He lived down here for some reason and didn’t have any idea what to do about himself. I didn’t quite have my car fare back to The Hat. I could’ve ridden the red bus to Swift Current and switched. But he had a nice car—an Oldsmobile. He didn’t own the hotel then. He only worked there. And that was that. What did I say? Nineteen-fifty? He was twenty-something. I was a bit older. And thinner. My mother was still working at Lepke’s. I had one child still at home—who’s now in Winnipeg. That’s my life story in living color.” She smiled up at me again, and went back to arranging the painting articles in her box, her red fingernails moving among the contents. I tried to gain a clearer picture of Arthur Remlinger from what she’d said and fit it to the man I’d only barely met. But I couldn’t. He didn’t seem distinct to me, even then.

  “I’m moving into Fort Royal soon,” I said, not wanting to say nothing, since I’d asked a question and she’d answered it.

  “Which was my brilliant suggestion,” Florence said, still on her knees. “Arthur thinks you’re fine out here—in your little wickiup. It’s interesting to live all alone out here, I realize. Very romantic. But it won’t be a fit place when the hunters come. I can’t really look out for you, but I can try to be aware of you. Your mother would thank me.”