Canada

by Richard Ford

  The only time I’d met Arthur Remlinger and truly had a word with him, he’d asked me—half joking—if I would like to change my name. I’d told him no, as anyone would’ve—especially me, wanting to cling to who I was and what I knew about myself when those points were in dispute. But in my room under the eave, I felt Arthur Remlinger possibly knew something I hadn’t known. Which was: that if anyone’s mission in the world was to gain experience, it might be necessary, as I’d already thought, to become someone different—even if I didn’t know who, and even if I’d believed, and our mother had taught us, that we were always a faithful version of who we were when we began life. My father, of course, might’ve said that this first person—the person I’d started to be—had stopped making sense and needed to give way to someone who would do better. He had probably thought that about himself by then. Though for him it was too late.

  Chapter 54

  It was following my adjustment to Fort Royal—a town with a genuine life and a consideration for itself—that I moved more into the sphere of Arthur Remlinger, which Florence had indicated to me would occur and I was extremely eager to have happen and couldn’t have said why it hadn’t happened already. In my weeks of living in Partreau, Arthur Remlinger had seemed like a different person each time I made contact with him—which naturally confused me and made me feel even more alone than I would’ve otherwise. One time, he would be friendly and enthusiastic, as if he’d been waiting to tell me something—but never did. Another time, he’d be reserved and awkward and seem to want to get away from me. And still other times he was stiff and superior acting—always costumed in his expensive (and what I thought of as) eastern clothes. To me, he was the most inconsistent person I’d ever met in life. Though it made him fascinating, and made me want him to like me, having never been around strange people, except our mother, and having never found anyone precisely interesting before, except Berner, who more than anything else was like me.

  Once, on what became one of our automotive outings—after I’d moved into the Leonard and begun to see him more, and during which times Remlinger would navigate his Buick at battering speeds over the bumpy highway, declaring on this and that subject that occupied him (Adlai Stevenson, whom he loathed, the deterioration of our natural rights by the forces of syndicalism, his own acute powers of observation, which, he said, should’ve permitted him a life as a famous lawyer)—the Buick all at once crested a dusty rise at a speed of almost ninety. And there on the pavement ahead were six colorful pheasants, wandering carelessly out of the grain to peck at gravels and wheat seeds blown off the trucks en route to the elevator in Leader. I expected him to brake or swerve. I’d been holding the sides of my seat already. But both my hands flew to the dashboard, my feet stood up hard on the car floor, my knees locked in anticipation of the big Buick drifting or skidding or swerving off into the stubble or taking flight and tumbling whatever distance ninety miles an hour would propel us, after which we’d be dead. But Arthur failed to consider the brakes. Nothing in his features even changed. He drove straight through the pheasants—one struck the windshield, two catapulted into the air, a fourth and fifth were transformed into feathers on the highway, a sixth was untouched, barely noticing the car passing. “You see a lot of those birds out here,” he said. He didn’t look at the mirror. I was astonished.

  Later, when we’d cruised through the small town of Leader, Saskatchewan, and parked and gone inside the Modern Café for a sandwich, Arthur fixed me, across the table, with his clear blue eyes, his thin lips together, almost smiling, as if he might be speaking words silently before he said them, but then didn’t smile. He was wearing his brown leather jacket with the fur collar—like the bomber jacket my father had brought back from the war—though Remlinger’s was nicer. He had his green silk handkerchief tucked in his collar as a napkin. His reading glasses dangled on their string against his chest. His blond hair was carefully combed. His bony, manicured fingers with thin hairs on top maneuvered his fork and knife as if his food was of the greatest interest to him. There’d been no reason given for why he’d ignored me for these weeks. Now no reason was going to be given, I assumed, for why he’d stopped. It was just how things were.

  “How long have you been here now, Dell?” Arthur Remlinger said and suddenly beamed at me as if I was someone he realized he liked.

  “Five weeks,” I said.

  “And are you enjoying your work? Getting something out of it?” He spoke in his precise way that involved his mouth moving animatedly, as if each word had a space between itself and the next word, and he enjoyed hearing each one. His voice was unexpectedly nasal coming from such a handsome, refined-seeming man. These were things about him that made him seem old-fashioned, though he wasn’t old.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He tried his fork on the surface of the fried pork chop he’d ordered. “Mildred told me you might be a little unsteady.” He cut down into a small fatty edge and put that in his mouth, the tines of his fork turned down in a way I hadn’t seen anyone eat. He was left-handed—like Berner. “It’s perfectly all right if you are,” he said. “I’m unsteady myself. And I’m easily led—or I once was. We’re all unsteady out here. It’s not natural being here. You and I are alike in that.”

  “I’m not unsteady.” I resented Mildred telling him such a thing, and resented her for knowing it. I didn’t want to be that way.

  “Well.” He looked pleased, which suited his fine features. “You’ve never been alone before, and you’ve had an unlikable experience.”

  There were several people in the café, farmers and townspeople, and two police officers in heavy brown coats with brass buttons, eating at the lunch counter. They noticed us. They knew who Arthur Remlinger was, just as the Mormon woman in the street in Fort Royal had. He was very recognizable.

  I wasn’t supposed to ask questions but was supposed to wait to be told things. But I wanted to know why he’d driven his car through the pheasants and killed them. It’d been so shocking. My father would never have done that, though I thought Charley Quarters would. It hadn’t seemed to linger in Remlinger’s mind. “It’s not a simple chore to live up here,” he said, calmly chewing his fatty meat. “I’ve never liked it. Canadians are isolated and in-grown. Not enough stimulation.” A lock of his blond hair fell across his forehead. He moved it back with his thumb. “The writer Tolstoy—you’ve heard of him”—I’d seen his name on the book shelf—“he paid for peasants to come out here in the last century. I presume, to get rid of them. Some of those people are still here—their ancestors are, anyway. There was a brief civilization. People put on plays and pageants and light operas. There were debating societies, and famous Irish tenors came from Toronto to sing.” His blond eyebrows jumped. He smiled and looked around at the other people in the café and at the policemen. There was a murmur of voices and the noise of silverware on plates that he seemed to like. “Now”—he went on cutting and eating and talking—“we’re returning to the Bronze Age. Which isn’t all bad.” He wiped his lips with his silk handkerchief, fixed his gaze on me again, then turned his head at an angle to indicate he had a question. I saw he had a tiny purple birthmark on his neck in the shape of a leaf. “Do you think you have a clear mind, Dell?”

  I didn’t understand what that meant. Possibly a clear mind was the opposite of unsteady. I wanted to have one. “Yes, sir,” I said. I’d ordered a hamburger and had begun to eat it.

  He nodded and moved his tongue around behind his lips, then cleared his throat. “Living out here produces a fantasy of great certainty.” He smiled again, but the smile slowly faded as he looked at me. “People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades. You’re not inclined to do that, I guess. You’re not in despair, are you?”

  “No, sir.” The word made me think of my mother in her jail cell—smiling and helpless. She’d been in despair.

  Arthur took a sip of his coffee, holding the cup around its rim—not by its little curved handle—blowing on the s
urface before he sipped. “That’s settled then. Despair’s out.” He smiled again.

  I’d been inside Arthur Remlinger’s rooms—seen photographs of him. Seen his books. His chess board. His pistol. He seemed approachable now—a moment when he could be my friend, which was what I’d wanted. I’d never considered asking a person why they were on the earth where they were. It hadn’t been a topic in our family, who’d always moved on someone else’s authority. But I wanted to know that about him even more than I wanted to know about the pheasants, since he seemed more out of place here than even I was, and since I’d become accommodated in spite of everything. We weren’t very much alike, I didn’t think.

  “Why did you ever come out here if you don’t like it?” I asked.

  Remlinger sniffed, took his handkerchief out of his collar and pinched his fine nose with it. He cleared his throat the way his sister, Mildred, had. It was their only resemblance. “Well, a better question would be . . .” He turned and looked out the café window beside us onto the street where his Buick was parked beside the policemen’s Dodge. MODERN had been lettered in reverse on the inside with gold paint. It had begun to snow. Wind pushed a gale of tiny, swarming flakes up the street like fog, swirling a funnel around the cars and trucks that were passing, their headlights turned on at noon. Arthur seemed to forget what he wanted to say—the better question. He was flicking his gold ring with his thumbnail. His mind had attached itself to some other thought.

  He took a package of cigarettes out of his jacket—Export ‘A’s, the same ones Florence smoked. He lit one and blew smoke against the cold plate glass, where it swam against the snowy background. He was feeling a need to say something, to be personable and to act as if he was interested in me and my question. Though what could’ve been more unnatural to him? A fifteen-year-old boy who was completely unknown to him. Possibly it seemed good to him I was American. Possibly he saw himself in me, the way Florence said. But what could it have mattered to a man like him?

  The way Remlinger smoked his cigarette—holding it between the fingers of his left hand in a V, his eyes averted—made him look older, his skin less smooth. His profile was more angular than when he looked straight at me. His neck with the birthmark was thinner. Some vacancy had taken over for a moment. The corners of his thin lips flickered upward beside the V. “You’re the young son of bank robbers and desperadoes,” he said and blew smoke onto the glass away from me. “You don’t want your life just to be about that, and only that, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.” Berner had said that no one ever believed her about our parents, and she was going to quit believing it herself.

  “You want your self to be about other things.” He was speaking very precisely again. “More, ideally.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He licked his lips and raised his chin as if something had just changed again in his thinking. “Do you ever read biographies?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Though I’d only read the thumbnail ones in the World Book. Einstein. Gandhi. Madame Curie. I’d made school reports about them. But he meant real biographies, the thick ones on his book shelf I wasn’t supposed to know about. Napoleon. U. S. Grant. Marcus Aurelius. I wanted to read those, and someday felt I would.

  “My thought is,” Remlinger said, “people who hold a lot inside and have to hold a lot inside should be interested in what great generals do. They always understand what fate’s about.” He seemed pleased and spoke more confidently. “They know plans work out very, very rarely, and failure’s the rule. They know what it is to be unimaginably bored. And they know all about death.” He stared at me inquisitively across the table. The space knitted between his eyebrows. He seemed to want this to be the answer to my question about why he was here. He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express. He wasn’t going to answer my question now.

  Remlinger took his wallet out of his jacket and laid a paper bill on the table top to pay. The bill was red, nothing like American money. He was suddenly eager to go—to get back in the Buick and drive at great speeds over the prairie, hitting whatever he wanted to hit.

  “I don’t like America much,” he said, standing. “We don’t hear a lot about it, up here.” Two people at the counter looked around at him, tall and blond and handsome and peculiar. One of the policemen also turned and looked. Remlinger didn’t notice. “It’s strange to be so close to it,” he said. “I think that all the time.” He meant to America. “A hundred twenty miles. Does it seem very different to you? Up here?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “It seems the same.” It did.

  “Well. That’s good then,” he said. “You’ve adapted already. I suppose that’s why I’m where I am. I’ve adapted. Though I’d love to travel abroad someday. To Italy. I love maps. Do you like maps?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Well. It’s not as if there’s a race we have to win, is there?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  He didn’t say more than that. The idea that he would travel abroad seemed strange. As unusual and out of place as he was, he also seemed to belong there. It was still my childish view that people belonged where I found them. We left the café. I was never there again.

  Chapter 55

  I can’t make what follows next seem reasonable or logical, based on what anyone would believe they knew about the world. However, as Arthur Remlinger said, I was the son of bank robbers and desperadoes, which was his way of reminding me that no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you’re willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from—anything at all can follow anything at all.

  It was the case that Charley Quarters soon related to me significant assertions about Arthur Remlinger—about crimes he’d committed and a desperate flight from authority, about his tendency to violent moods and volatile dispositions that served little notice. Charley was dismissive of him, and felt no loyalty to conceal this information. Remlinger was not a man who prized loyalties, he said, or respected much in the world. Knowing the truth about such a person could never be a bad thing for what it might save you from.

  It was also the case (I couldn’t have formed these words then and knew them only in some uncreated part of myself) that Arthur Remlinger looked on me as he did on everyone—from an inner existence that was only his and bore almost no resemblance to mine. Mine simply wasn’t a fact to him. Whereas his existence was the most immediate and paid for—its primary quality being that it embodied an absence, one he was aware of and badly wanted to fill. (It was obvious from the moment you came near him.) He encountered it over and over, to the point that it was, in his view, the central problem of being himself; and was, in mine, what made him compelling and so inconsistent—this unsuccessful striving to fill an absence. What he wanted (I concluded this later, since he wanted something or I wouldn’t have been there) was proof—from me or by me—that he’d succeeded in filling his absence. He wanted confirmation he’d done it and deserved not to be punished more for the grave errors he’d committed. When he ignored me those weeks I was in Partreau, trying not to believe I’d be alone forever, it was because he wasn’t sure I’d be dependable to give him what he wanted—not until I’d accommodated myself to my own bad circumstances, put my own tragedies enough behind me to entertain his. He needed me to be his “special son”—though only for a moment, since he knew what bad things were coming to him. He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

  I was only fifteen then, and used to believing what people told me—sometimes more than I believed what was in my heart. If I’d been older, if I’d been seventeen and just that much more experienced, if I’d had more than uncreated ideas about the world, I might’ve known that the feelings I was experiencing—being drawn to Remlinger, allowing my feelings for my pa
rents to go below the waves of my thinking—that these feelings signified bad things coming to me as well. But I was too young and too far outside the boundaries of the little I knew. I’d felt something like these sensations at the time my parents planned and committed their robbery—when we’d cleaned the house, and Berner and I had waited for them to come back, and later when I’d been ready to get on the train to Seattle and forget about high school. But I didn’t connect those feelings to my feelings now, or recognize they meant the same thing. I lacked skills for that kind of connecting. Though why do we ever let ourselves be drawn to people no one else would see as good or wholesome, but only as dangerous and unpredictable? I’ve thought over and over, in the years since then, how purely unfortunate it was to have become enmeshed with Arthur Remlinger so soon after my parents were put in prison. Still, it’s something any person needs to do—to recognize the feeling when something around you isn’t good, when there are threats—to remember that you’ve felt this sensation before, and that it means you’re out on some empty expanse all by yourself and you’re exposed, and caution needs to be exerted.

  What I did, of course, instead of exhibiting caution, was let myself be “taken up” by Arthur Remlinger, and by Florence La Blanc, as if being taken up by them was the most natural and logical consequence of my mother sending me away after the calamity of her own bad fortune. It went on for only a brief time. But I entered into it thoroughly, as a child can—since, again, part of me was still a child.

  Chapter 56

  In the early days of October, after I was settled into my tiny closet room in the Leonard, I saw a great deal of Arthur Remlinger—as if I’d suddenly become his favorite boy, and he couldn’t have enough of me. I still performed the duties I’d been assigned, and enjoyed them. I scouted geese with Charley in the evenings, rose at four and transported the Sports out to the dark wheat fields, situated the decoys, made loose talk with the shooters, then took up my position to glass the falling geese.