Canada

by Richard Ford

  The stated purpose to my going inside was to bring Charley his curved sharpening stone for his hatchet so he could more easily chop through the goose necks and feet and wings. But I thought he wanted me to see how a life without set limits could look. There was a rotten-egg stink inside, mixed with something sweet and chemical and food related, which were his tanning solvents and also Charley himself—worse inside for being hot and trapped. The smell was almost visible and feel-able—like a wall—even with the trailer’s metal door left open and cold wind entering for the two minutes I was inside. I wanted to get away from it. Sometimes I caught a whiff of it on Charley if I came close to him or the air shifted my way. It seemed to come off his greasy clothes and his dyed hair. It was a feature you’d think no one would ever get used to and that I’d steel myself against it. Though it was a feature I did get used to, so that each time I came around Charley, I was aware of myself smelling him, and would keep smelling him, unnoticed, as if there was an attraction to his smell. It ignited in me, and for a while after that, the need to smell the thing I shouldn’t, taste the taste I knew would disgust me, open my eyes to things others would avert their gaze from—in other words to forget about limits. These attractions, of course, cease when you get older and have done it enough. But they are part of growing up, like learning a flame will burn you, or that water can be too deep, or that you can fall from a high place and not live to tell about it.

  * * *

  Charley maintained a bad opinion about Arthur Remlinger—though he had always kept it to himself. Nonetheless he told me that Remlinger was a dangerous, deceptive, ruthless, chaotic, shameless individual who a person like me needed to be cautious and even fearful of because he was also intelligent and could be flattering and lead a person to peril, which Charley implied had happened to him, though he as usual didn’t specify how. We were working on the goose carcasses. He took his eyes off the railroad tie where we were doing the cleaning and looked out at the empty town of Partreau, as if something had occurred to him about it. He drew a cloud of cigarette smoke down into his lungs, held it, then expelled it in a torrent through his large nostrils. “People” were on their way up here now, he said. “He knows about them. He’s trying to plan out his strategy to save himself.” He meant Remlinger. I should’ve noticed his odder than usual behavior, he said. This is what I needed to be cautious about and not get close to, since his odd behavior could result in dire events I wouldn’t want any part of and would need to set limits against. It was all ridiculous, he said. But that was how very bad things often came about in the world. (I already knew, of course, from my own life—whether I could’ve said it or not—that the implausible often became as plausible as the sun coming up.)

  When Remlinger was a college boy, Charley said, he’d held unpopular views—some of the ones I knew about. He detested the government. He hated political parties. He hated labor unions and the Catholic Church, and other things. He hadn’t been liked by his classmates. He’d written pamphlets for isolationist, war-opposing (some said), pro-German magazines that made his professors suspicious and wish he’d go back home to Michigan. His father—when Arthur was young—had been unjustly fired from his job as a machine operator, and the union had not protected him due to his Adventist pacifist beliefs. This had created a terrible family crisis and left a stain on young Arthur, which resulted in his adopting radical ideas while he was still in high school. His family did not share his views. They’d put their bad luck behind them and moved to a rural setting and begun beet farming. They didn’t understand their son—Artie, he was called—good-looking and articulate, intelligent, destined for a successful life as a lawyer or possibly a politician, and who’d gotten into Harvard on his brilliance. (Charley said the word Harvard as if he knew it very well and had been there. Remlinger, he said, had told all of this to him years before.)

  Each summer Arthur came home from college and was able to find a job in an automobile factory in Detroit, where he would live in a poverty flat while he saved his money to pay his expenses when the school year began again. His family saw little of him during these times, but thought his willingness to work for his college bills was a promising sign for his future.

  But during the summer of his third year—it was 1943—when he was working at his good-paying push-broom job at the Chevrolet factory, Arthur fell into an argument with a union steward who oversaw the work and made sure employees were enrolled—including the ones with summer jobs. Heated words were exchanged about Arthur not joining the union. The steward, Arthur said, knew he was the writer of inflammatory antiunion tracts. (The unions paid attention to such things and had ties to Harvard.) The outcome of the dispute was that Arthur was fired and told he should never expect to find work in the city and should move away.

  This also brought on another calamity, since losing his job meant Arthur would lack the money to pay his college fees. His family had nothing to give him. He was as good as broke and couldn’t pay his rent and was facing the sudden end to his college aspirations. He went to the officials at Harvard and pleaded with them for a scholarship. But because his opinions were known and disapproved of, he was turned away. The doors of Harvard were closed to him, he told Charley, and the remainder of his young life was thrown into turmoil.

  An upheaval overtook him at this point. “A mental breakdown,” Arthur had called it. He became despondent, alienated from his family, would only occasionally talk to his sister, Mildred, who asked him no questions—including how he was supporting himself. In despair, Arthur had begun to find consolation elsewhere and from other people. Those people were in Chicago and upstate New York, and shared his, by now, even more violent antiunion, antichurch, isolationist views. They considered themselves supporters of the right-to-work philosophy and had been involved in confrontations with unions over many decades. Arthur moved himself out of Detroit and went to live with a family in Elmira, New York, and worked on their dairy farm while he regained his mental stability. These farmers were violent people themselves—inspired by hatreds and resentments for wrongs committed against them by unions and by the government. Arthur became more deeply involved in their ideas. And in not very long he was sharing their resentments and their need for vengeance, and became familiar with many dangerous plots and schemes—in particular one to set a bomb in a union hall back in Detroit, a bomb meant to do no one harm, but to emphasize the right-to-work philosophy as being the right one.

  Arthur, still in an agitated state of mind about not being allowed to go back to college, let himself be convinced he should place the bomb—in a trash can behind the union building. He told Charley he should’ve been in a mental hospital and would’ve been if his family could have been in touch with him. His sister was a nurse. Only that hadn’t happened.

  Instead, Arthur drove from Elmira to Detroit, with the dynamite in the trunk of a borrowed car. He delivered the bomb to its intended location, set a crude clock timer, and drove away. But before the bomb could go off—at ten P.M.—the union’s vice president, a Mr. Vincent, returned to the union hall to retrieve his hat, which he’d misplaced. As he was going in by the back door, Arthur’s bomb exploded, and Mr. Vincent was terribly burned. And in a week’s time he died.

  A great manhunt immediately began for the bomber, who no one had seen but who was presumed to be a member of violent groups that did all they could to stifle the unions in America.

  Arthur was mortified to learn he had killed someone—which he’d never intended to do—and also terrified he’d be caught and thrown in jail. It was believed the criminal was from Detroit, but no one suspected twenty-three-year-old Arthur Remlinger. His name was known by the police, who supported the unions, but he was never mentioned. By the time the search for the bomber was under way, Arthur was already back on the farm in Elmira—and had if not publicly renounced his views (he never would completely), had come to his senses enough to know he was now a hunted criminal whose life was spoiled.

  His choices were either to give hi
mself up and take responsibility for what he’d done, and go to jail; or else, he told Charley, to go as far away as he could imagine going—since he wasn’t charged with the crime and wasn’t suspected—and try to believe no one would ever find him and that he could outlive his crime with the passage of time.

  Charley looked at me beside him to see if I was listening. I had stopped cleaning geese to pay close attention—the story was so shocking to me. Charley put a new cigarette between his lips. The blood in the white of his left eye shifted and seemed to swim and shine. He wasn’t wearing lipstick—which he didn’t do around the Sports. But his pocked cheeks contained evidence of rouge that had been smudged in the goose pits, and his eyes still had black around them. He was wearing a black welder’s apron with blood down the front, and he had blood on his arms and hands, and smelled like geese insides. He would’ve been a shocking sight to anyone. It had been blowing bits of hard snow all around where we were working in the Quonset door. Flakes were dissolving in Charley’s hair, making his black hair dye run. My own hands and cheeks were chafed and stinging. Feathers from our cleaning work had blown into the stiff weeds and around Charley’s whirligigs. Mrs. Gedins’ white dog had arrived to nose into the gut box and lick its sides. We burned its contents in the oil drum each day, then Charley would scatter the feet and wings and heads for the coyotes and magpies he liked to shoot.

  Charley raised his thick eyebrows and his fleshy forehead raveled up. “You can hear him talk like that, can’t you? You know? His ‘mental breakdown.’ ‘Mortified.’ His ‘college aspirations.’ Up above everything and everybody?” Charley’s lips curled distastefully. “’Course that’s when he come running up here. Nineteen forty-five. Just when the war got over. He thought—or the people who saw after him and still see after him, thought—that here was the most unreachable place on earth. They’ve found out that isn’t exactly right.” Charley’s big front teeth came uncovered behind his lips. He jigged his cigarette around in his mouth on the tip of his wide tongue, as if this part pleased him. “He has to face his fate now, eh? The other fate was just his first fate. And ’course, he’s scared to death.” Charley looked down at a stiffening goose body on the railroad tie in front of him. He raised his new-honed hatchet and smacked it on the goose’s neck, then swept the head off onto the ground for the dog.

  Efforts were begun by elements among the right-to-work plotters to find a place for Arthur to hide. No one was looking for him. But Arthur thought they eventually would be and couldn’t face the chance of being found. The interests also didn’t feel he’d hold up well, that he was erratic and a threat, and could bring everyone down. Arthur had admitted he didn’t know why someone hadn’t killed him right then and buried him on the farm in Elmira. “Which I would’ve done and not thought about it,” Charley said.

  Instead, Arthur told him, the owner of the Leonard, a small, devious, turbulent man named Herschel Box, who Charley had worked for as a boy, was approached to hide Arthur away in Saskatchewan. Box was an Austrian immigrant, an older man, who shared the dangerous inclinations of the Elmira and Chicago plotters and had volunteered for many disruptive assignments below the border—a house burning in Spokane where a person had been maimed, a ransacking, a beating. Box agreed to take Remlinger because he had a German name, and because Arthur had attended Harvard and Box considered him intelligent.

  Arthur rode the train from Ottawa to Regina in the fall of 1945 and was picked up by Box and driven out to the little shack in Partreau—there were still people living in town, just the way he’d told me—and there he’d begun a new life in Canada.

  Arthur had worked the way I worked, riding a bicycle to town, swamping and running errands for the Sports who Box put up in the hotel and charged fees for shooting. However, he didn’t go in the goose fields or clean birds or dig pits the way I did. Box believed he wasn’t strong enough for rough activity and made him be the room clerk and later the auditor and the night manager, until Box moved away back to Halifax, where he had a daughter and an abandoned wife. Arthur was left the run of the Leonard alone. He told Charley he remitted receipts to Box every week for three years, until Box died and surprisingly willed the Leonard to him, who he’d become fond of, wanted to protect, and had treated like a son. “Not a usual son,” Charley said. “Not one I’d want.”

  Arthur, however, was never satisfied to be where he was—living in Box’s cramped rooms overlooking the prairie, with Box’s green parrot, Samson, occupying a perch in the sitting room, and completely cut off from any life he’d been familiar with, longing to go back to Harvard, constantly fearing strangers were coming to punish him for his “irreparable act” and his “views.” His views were just dreamed up, he said, along with his writings, to make himself stand out to his teachers. He felt he should’ve been able to outlive all that and go on to be a lawyer. “A man had gotten blown to smithereens over it, of course,” Charley said. But that didn’t seem to matter.

  Charley said Arthur had begun to experience dark angers and to suffer depressions about his life unfairly becoming about only one thing—his short career as a murderer; and that there was more to him than that, but no way to change anything or make it good. He’d matured since those early days, he felt. But his maturity wasn’t being allowed to matter. It would’ve been better, Charley said, if he’d been arrested and taken to jail and paid his price, and could be free now and living in America where he belonged, instead of marooned in a wasted little prairie town where people were suspicious of him and disliked him as an “oddment” (Charley’s word, the same as our father’s). The townspeople passed rumors back and forth that he was an eccentric millionaire, or a homosexual, or an outcast who disappeared into America to do someone’s bidding (which wasn’t true); or that foreign interests protected him (which was), or that he was a criminal taking refuge from a mysterious crime. (“Rumors all have some basis, okay?” Charley said.) Though, nobody in Fort Royal cared enough to follow through to the truth. Rumor was better. The town had never accepted old Box—because he offered up lewd young Indian girls, and gambling went on, and noisy drinking, and farm husbands went to the hotel secretly and caroused, and strangers came and went in the night. But they tolerated it because they didn’t want a fuss, and because a town like Fort Royal liked to ignore what it didn’t approve. Once Box left back to the Maritimes, which nobody understood was part of Canada, Charley said (“nobody ever went there”), the town followed suit and tolerated Arthur, who wanted no part of the town to begin with.

  Still he felt “ossified,” Charley said Arthur told him—a word I didn’t know and that made Charley smirk—“vexed and unaccepted” by people he never wanted acceptance from. It made him hate himself and feel desolate and helpless—and fierce regret—that he’d been so young and so panicked back in 1945 as to come all the way out here, and now be completely changed but unable to leave due to the “ossifying” fear of being caught. Going back and facing justice would be too much, Arthur said. He didn’t understand how he could do that, the way he didn’t understand why he couldn’t go back to college—his ticket to propriety his professors had seen their chance to dispossess him of. He was a misfit everywhere and longed to go even farther away. (The “foreign travel” he’d mentioned to me. Italy. Germany. Ireland.) He was almost thirty-nine, though he looked ten years younger with his fine blond hair and unlined skin and clear eyes and good looks. It was as if time had stopped for him, and he’d ceased aging and become only one thing: Arthur Remlinger, in a perpetual present. He told Charley he’d often considered suicide and was a victim of seething night-rages, a chaos-mind that flamed up with no warning (the pheasants he’d bashed through) and that belied his true nature. He’d begun to dress himself up (which he’d never done when he was young), buying dandyish suits from a shop in Boston and having them sent out—giving them to Florence to tailor and mend and launder in Medicine Hat. He sometimes, Charley said—though I’d never observed this—referred to himself as an attorney (as “counselor”),
and other times as an important writer. Charley said Arthur influenced everything around him (never positively), but wasn’t a person who left an impression. Which is what I realized I had experienced as inconsistency. He knew this, and suffered by knowing it and wished to change everything, but couldn’t.

  Charley said he himself would’ve left long ago and never set eyes on Remlinger again, except that the old devil-kraut, Box, had left Arthur aware of some private knowledge about Charley—things from his past that (like Arthur, like my parents and myself) he couldn’t stand to have revealed. Charley said he was “indentured” as long as Remlinger wished him to be—as servant, employee, forced confidant, joke butt, factotum and secret antagonist. It had been fifteen years—the same number of years I’d been alive.

  “He’s getting his hands on you now, I can tell,” Charley said. He’d gathered up a pile of naked, pucker-skinned geese carcasses and begun carrying them back into the shadowy Quonset. “He has a purpose for you in his survival strategy. Unless I’m wrong. And I’m not wrong.”

  His freezer box sat among his stretched, drying animal skins and cans of salts and piles of decoys to be repaired, and his motorcycle and digging implements, and where it smelled like the solvents and tanning chemicals.