Canada

by Richard Ford

  However, when I wasn’t occupied with these duties, Arthur Remlinger made a claim for my hours. I was happy about it, since I hadn’t connected the feelings I mentioned before and had no caution (or not enough), and had decided I liked him and found him interesting—a man I felt I could emulate at a later time. As Florence had said, he was educated, had good manners, dressed well, was experienced, was an American, and seemed to like me. And as I said, I’d decided my mother had intended I’d be taken up by strangers and had approved of it as a way to start my life in a new direction.

  Remlinger instructed me to use his first name and not to call him “sir”—which was new to me. He took me to the chop-suey restaurant and taught me to use chopsticks and drink tea. I caught glimpses of the owner’s daughter, but I’d stopped thinking about her or harboring hopes we’d be friends. Other nights I would eat supper in the Leonard dining room with Arthur and Florence. She brought flowers for the table and offered me forward to the other customers as if I was their relation and we had a history together and Arthur was responsible for me. In this sense he did treat me like his son, as if I actually lived in Fort Royal, in the Leonard, and it was an entirely understandable situation that a boy would do that.

  On these occasions, Arthur, dressed in one or another of his handsome tweed suits and polished shoes and a bright tie, spoke more about his highly developed skills as an observer, which he believed suited him for many other walks of life than operating a backwater hotel. He said I should enlarge my own capacities so my future would be assured. He awkwardly produced a small paper notebook with blue-lined pages, which he seemed to have intended for me, and instructed me to keep my thoughts and observations in it, but never to show what I wrote to anyone. If I read it back on a regular basis, he said, I could find out how much was transpiring in the world—“a great deal”—when it might’ve seemed nothing was. In that way, I could appraise and improve the ongoing course of my life. He did this himself, he said.

  During this time, he took me on several more driving expeditions—once to Swift Current to pay a debt, another all the way to Medicine Hat to retrieve Florence when her car had broken down. Another time he drove me bouncing out across the prairie back roads to a clay bluff above the Saskatchewan River, where a hand-pull ferry inched across the stream below. With the heater running in the Buick we watched down the river to where thousands of geese were floating and gabbling on the glistening water and had spread out across the curving banks. White gulls circled in the turbulent air above them. Remlinger’s blond hair was always barbered and neatly combed and sheened and impressive, his glasses dangled around his neck, and he smelled of bay rum. In the car, he smoked and talked about Harvard and what a perfect existence it had been. (I had only a dim idea about Harvard and did not even know it was in Boston.) He talked more about his wish for foreign travel—he was also interested in Ireland and Germany—and sometimes about the four-thousand-mile border to America, which he called “the frontier to the States.” The frontier, he said, was not a natural or logical dividing point, and didn’t exist in nature, and should be done away with. Instead it was made to represent erroneous distinctions preserved for venal interests. He was a vigilant proponent of all things in life being natural and inherent. He quoted Rousseau—that God makes all things good, but man had meddled with them and made them evil. He detested what he called “tyrannical government” and churches and all political parties—particularly the Democrats, which had been my father’s favorite (and mine) due to his affection for President Roosevelt, who Remlinger called “the man in the chair,” or “the crippled man,” and who, he believed, had seduced the country and betrayed it to the Jews and the unions. His blue eyes sparkled when he talked on these subjects. They seemed to make him angry, then angrier. He particularly detested the labor unions, which he called “the false messiahs.” These were the issues he’d written his articles about in the pamphlets and magazines stored in the cardboard boxes in my shack: The Deciding Factor, The Free Thinkers. I mostly didn’t talk when I was with him, only listened, since he asked little or nothing about me—my sister’s name once, where I’d been born, again if I planned to attend college, and how I’d accommodated to my new billet. I didn’t talk about my parents or say that my mother was Jewish. I suppose in the States today, he would be called a radical or a Libertarian, and would be more familiar than he was then on the prairies of Saskatchewan.

  However, none of this talking seemed to make him happy, as if talking and talking was also a burden he was bearing. He talked on and on in his nasal voice with his mouth moving animatedly, his eyes blinking and primarily turned away from me, as if I wasn’t there. Sometimes he was enthusiastic, other times angry—which I felt was his way of accommodating himself to the absence he contained. All of which is to say I sympathized with him (in spite of his bad feelings for Jews) and liked the time I spent with him, though I rarely took part or understood much. He was exotic, as exotic as the place where we were. I had never known anyone who was that, just as I’d never been accustomed to think anyone was interesting.

  During these days I slept well in my bed and felt optimistic about being in Fort Royal. I had little feeling of belonging and little to take part in outside my duties. But I supplied my own sensation of belonging and normality—because that was (and is) my character. I got my hair cut and paid for it with the Canadian money I made in tips. I bathed in the shared bathtub and could see what I looked like in the mirror when I wanted to. I set up my chess men on the dresser top and plotted strategies I’d employ if Remlinger and I ever played. I felt at home in the Leonard and associated with the Sports and the commercial travelers and the oil riggers who stayed after the harvest crews had passed on. I casually fraternized with one of the Filipino girls whose name was Betty Arcenault. She teased me and laughed and told me I reminded her of her younger brother, who was small like I was. I said that I had a taller sister living in California. (Again, I mentioned nothing about my parents.) She hoped to go to California in the future, she said, which was why she rode out from Swift Current to be a “hostess” in the Leonard each night. She was sallow and thin and had dyed yellow hair and smoked cigarettes and barely smiled because of her teeth. She was one of the girls I’d opened a door on and found sitting on the side of a shadowy bed, with a boy asleep beside her. I never considered doing anything with her myself, never had a clear enough picture of what I would do. My only experience of that sort had been with Berner, and I didn’t remember much about it.

  I found I didn’t think about Partreau anymore. I rode to it every morning with Charley Quarters and cleaned geese on the cleaning log in the brittle cold outside the Quonset, across from my shack. But it was as if I’d never been inside there, never walked along the streets or stood beyond the caragana rows and stared toward what I believed was south and wondered if I’d see my parents again. Time closes over events if you don’t know much about time. And as I said, time meant little to me there.

  During these days, Florence La Blanc told me she’d been thinking about a plan for my future. This was at the dining room table, with a white linen tablecloth and folded napkins and silverware she’d brought from Medicine Hat and supplied along with the flowers, to create, she said, an illusion of civilization on the prairie, and because it was Thanksgiving—my first in Canada. If I was in school, as I should be, she said, I’d have the day off. Of course, it didn’t feel like Thanksgiving to me, since it was Monday. But Florence had baked a turkey and dressing and had mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie and brought them in her car, and announced we had to celebrate our shared holiday together.

  There were few diners by then—a salesman and an occasional couple traveling east. The riggers and the railroaders and the Sports all ate in the bar. Remlinger sat and stared away at the large painting on the dining room wall, a tiny bright overhead light pointing down on it. The painting showed a brown bear wearing a red fez, dancing inside a circle of shouting men. The men’s eyes were wild and excited, their mouth
s agape and red, clamoring, their short arms in the air.

  Florence told me, her red cheeks bright, that she’d been thinking on me and my “plight.” In her view I should remain in Fort Royal in Arthur’s care through the fall. I should learn to groom myself better and gain strength, and take more frequent haircuts. Then, before Christmas I should take the bus to Winnipeg and move in with her son Roland, who had a young wife and whose child had died of polio. She’d already spoken to him about me, and he was agreeable to it. He would put me into the St. Paul’s Catholic High School, where few questions would be asked because his wife taught there. If there was a question, she said—smiling at me, her eyes squinted and shining—they would say I was a refugee whose American parents had abandoned him and gone to prison, and I’d made a courageous journey to Canada on my own, and responsible Canadians were now looking after me because I had no other relatives. Canada officials, she said, would never send me back to Montana; and Montana would never be the wiser or care. In any case, she said, it would only be three years until I was eighteen, and these years would pass quickly, and then I could choose a life for myself like any other person. We had that to be thankful for. She never for a moment seemed to consider I would reside with either of my parents again. Though it occurred to me that after three years, if either of my parents were to be released I could find them, and they would certainly want me back. I make this all sound unexceptional now, but it was very strange for my future to be talked about this way and to be in this helpless position in life.

  Remlinger shifted his blue eyes to me as Florence carried on with her plan. He was wearing a handsome black jacket and a purple ascot and as always looked exceptional in the midst of the other roomers in his hotel. He blinked at me and smiled. His thin lips tightened, the dent appeared in his chin. He looked back at the painting of the bear and the clamoring men, as if something had been measured in me, a determination made, after which he’d gone back to thinking about the natural order of the universe, and how man ruined everything God had made perfectly. I didn’t like being looked at this way. I didn’t know what was being measured, or how truthful the measurement could be. This was a part of the sensation I felt, yet had no words for—that something not good was approaching me. I said that I believed Arthur wanted something from me or I wouldn’t have been there—more than an audience, or a witness. What he may also have wanted was to transfer a bad feeling onto me, or else to prove, by my existence, that he was in error ever to feel it in the first place.

  Florence, however, was happy to go on discussing my future and I was happy to think I would have one. She said I should consider becoming a Canadian, and she would give me a book about it. This would fix everything. Canada was better than America, she said, and everyone knew that—except Americans. Canada had everything America ever had, but no one was mad about it. You could be normal in Canada, and Canada would love to have me. She said Arthur had become a Canadian some years before. (He shook his head, touched his blond hair with his fingers and stayed looking away.) I didn’t know this, since Charley had said he was American from Michigan, like me. But it instantly made me feel different about him. Not bad, only different, as if some part of his oddness had lifted off and left him less interesting than when I’d believed he was an American. In a way he seemed less significant. Which may finally be the only real difference between one place on the earth and another: how you think about the people, and the difference it makes to you to think that way.

  Chapter 57

  I wrote a letter to my sister, Berner, during these days. I wrote sitting in my tiny room on my bed, with the square window facing the town, using thin blue paper I’d purchased in the drugstore, and a mechanical pencil I’d found in one of the cardboard boxes in Partreau. I wanted it to be commonplace that Berner and I wrote letters to each other across the great space that separated us, and that where I was at that time wasn’t unusual on the grand scale of things.

  In my letter I told her that I was in Canada, and even though that might seem a long way away from everything, it wasn’t. I had driven to it in a day’s time from Great Falls. I told her I was thinking of becoming a Canadian, which would not be a big change. I would soon be going to school in Winnipeg and having a fine new life. I said that people I had met were interesting. (This word looked very strange in my handwriting.) They had given me a job that had real duties and unique aspects—which I liked and had adjusted to well. I was learning things and liked that. I didn’t mention our parents, as if I didn’t know anything about them, and we could write letters to each other without bringing them in. I also didn’t mention Arthur Remlinger or Florence La Blanc because I didn’t know how to describe them or their positions in my life. I didn’t say I didn’t know where Winnipeg was. I didn’t mention that Florence had referred to my current life as a “plight.” And I didn’t mention the strange feelings I had. I was only partially aware of them and thought they would worry her. I told her I loved her and was glad she was happy, and to say hello to Rudy if she saw him in the park. I would come to see her in San Francisco and be her brother again the first time I had the chance and could take the bus from Winnipeg. I signed the letter and folded it up in its blue envelope, made a plan to go to the post office and send it to the address I had in San Francisco. Then I laid the letter on the wooden dresser top, stood and looked out my window onto the town roofs and the earth stretching like an ocean to the horizon. I thought about what a long, long way away Berner was, and how I hadn’t written anything of any importance, or personal, or about her. She would have a difficult time knowing about me from what I’d said, which was because my situation was not an easy one to describe and might worry anyone. It was not like being at home and going off to school every day, or taking the train to Seattle. It would be better, I thought, to write from Winnipeg when everything was settled, and I was in St. Paul’s School and there would be more to tell that she could take an interest in and be able to understand.

  I took the letter and put it in my pillowcase, which I still had from the morning we were all leaving—Berner, our mother, and me. I thought I would read it later, like the comments and observations Remlinger had told me to write in my little blue-lined notebook, so as to know what life had been like when I was living it. I never wrote in that notebook, and when I left Fort Royal I left it behind.

  Chapter 58

  Charley Quarters told me that the whole story of Arthur Remlinger would be the strangest one I’d ever hear, but I should hear it because boys my age needed to hear the raw truth (unlike what most people preferred), which would help me set strict limits for myself. Good limits would keep me where I belonged in the world. He’d known the raw truth, he said, but had failed to set his limits well enough. Where he was now, living alone in a debased trailer in Partreau, was because of that. Charley always spoke this way—referring to dark events pertaining to himself that he wouldn’t relate in detail, but were understood to be shameful and wretched if a person wanted to be wholesome, which I did. Charley was disreputable and violent and possibly perverted, and I didn’t like him, as I’ve already said. But he had an intelligence. He had boasted to me that he’d tried to be admitted to college but been rejected for being Métis, and for being too smart. I wondered if underneath he hadn’t at least at one time been a boy like me, and if possibly some of that good boy survived somewhere—such as in his willingness to instruct me about limits and the raw truth.

  We were cleaning geese that had been shot that morning—the big feathered pile of them dumped out on the ground beside the railroad tie we used as our cleaning log, just inside the wide-open, arched door of the Quonset. Some of the geese were still swimming their feet, some had their bloody beaks open and working, while we employed our hatchets to strike off their heads and other parts before opening them up with knives and gutting them, then pushing them through Charley’s homemade plucker machine to remove their feathers. It was the day I went into his trailer for the first and only time.

  Inside t
he trailer, I will say, was not like anything I’d ever seen. In some senses it was like my shack for being cramped and airless and rank smelling. But it also contained the entire accumulation of Charley’s life—or as well as I could make out. It was one overheated rectangular room, its windows papered up with cardboard and sealed with masking tape. A black-iron Delmar stove caked with pitch sat in the corner, its chimney pipe cut up through the low ceiling. A filthy blue couch piled with blankets was his bed. There was a terrible jumble of chairs and broken cardboard suitcases, and stacks of dried animal hides Charley was keeping to sell, plus his golfing sticks, a guitar, a small TV that wasn’t plugged in, several spilled-open boxes of birdseed the rats had plundered and cans of food heaped in a corner—kernel corn and tinned fish and Co-Op tea and Vienna sausages and tubes of saltines—and dirty plates and utensils, and Charley’s cosmetics box and a tiny framed mirror and more of his silver whirligigs, their propellers busted and needing fixing, his kindling box and a table fan, a pickle jar with yellow liquid in it, and a pair of boxing gloves hung on the wall. There was an old refrigerator and a standing chest with its drawers pulled out and veneer scabbing off. On top were the books Charley read. The Red River Rebellion was one. CCF and the Métis and The Life of Louis Riel were two others. There were stacks of loose papers on which were written what I thought were Charley’s poems, which I didn’t look closely at. There were framed pictures on the wall. Hitler. Stalin. Rocky Marciano. A man walking a tightrope holding a long pole, high above a river. Eleanor Roosevelt. Benito Mussolini with his jaw jutted out, and beside that, Mussolini strung to a lamppost upside down, his shirt fallen off his belly, with his girlfriend strung up beside him. There was a picture of Charley as a boy, bare-chested, bowlegged, set to throw a javelin, and a picture of an elderly woman looking sternly into the camera, then another of Charley in an army uniform wearing a Hitler mustache, with his arm raised in a Nazi salute. I didn’t recognize all of these at the time. Though I knew Mussolini because I’d seen old newspaper pictures of him, both alive and dead—things my father had saved from the war.