by Richard Ford
Did he not think I would tell what I’d seen? I’m sure there was never a moment when he thought I would speak about what I’d seen and participated in—no more than the two Americans would in their poor graves. Some things you just don’t tell. I feel in fact a small satisfaction to realize he knew me at least that well, that ultimately he’d paid some attention to me.
Mildred Remlinger had counseled me to try to include in my thinking as much as I possibly could, and not let my mind focus in an unhealthy way on only one thing, and to always know something I could relinquish. My parents for their part had by turns counseled me in favor of acceptance. (Flexibility was my mother’s word.) In time, I would be able to explain it all to myself—somewhere. Somehow. Possibly to my sister, Berner, who I knew I would see again before I died. Until that time, I would try to mediate among the good counsels I’d been given: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me—and, with these things, to make a life.
Chapter 68
I have always counseled my students to think on the long life of Thomas Hardy. Born, 1840. Died, 1928. To think on all he saw, the changes his life comprehended over such a period. I try to encourage in them the development of a “life concept”; to enlist their imaginations; to think of their existence on the planet not as just a catalog of random events endlessly unspooling, but as a life—both abstract and finite. This, as a way of taking account.
I teach them books that to me seem secretly about my young life—The Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories, The Mayor of Casterbridge. A mission into the void. Abandonment. A figure, possibly mysterious, but finally not. (These books aren’t taught now to high school students in Canada. Who knows why?) My conceit is always “crossing a border”; adaptation, development from a way of living that doesn’t work toward one that does. It can also be about crossing a line and never being able to come back.
Along the way I tell them if not the facts, at least some of the lessons of my long life: that to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen (which will be true of them); and not to hunt too hard for hidden or opposite meanings—even in the books they read—but to look as much as possible straight at the things they can see in broad daylight. In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you’ll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world.
It may not seem precisely natural to them to do this. One of them will often say, “I don’t see what this has to do with us.” I say back, “Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another’s life for your own benefit?” It’s then that I’m tempted to tell them about my young life in its entirety; to tell them teaching is a gesture of serial non-abandonment (of them), the vocation of a boy who loved school. I always feel I have a lot to teach them and not much time—a bad sign. Retirement comes for me at a good moment.
It’s well and long accepted that I’m American, though I’ve been naturalized and have held a passport for thirty-five years. I decades ago married a Canadian girl, fresh from college in Manitoba. I own my house on Monmouth Street in Windsor, Ontario, have taught English at the Walkerville Collegiate Institute since 1981. My colleagues are polite about my forsaken Americanness. Occasionally someone asks if I don’t long to “go back.” I say, Not at all. It’s right there across the river. I can see it. They seem both supportive of my choices (Canadians think of themselves as natural accepters, tolerators, understanders) but also are impatient nearly to the point of resentment that I even had to make a choice. My students, who are seventeen and eighteen, are generally amused by me. They tell me I talk “like a Yank,” even though I don’t, and tell them there’s no difference. I tell them it’s not hard to be a Canadian. Kenyans and Indians and Germans do it with ease. And I had so little training to be American anyway. They want to know if I was a draft dodger long ago. (Why they even know about that, I can’t fathom, since history is not what they study.) I tell them I was a “Canadian conscript,” and Canada saved me from a fate worse than death—which they understand to mean America. Sometimes they jokingly ask me if I changed my name. I assure them I did not. Impersonation and deception, I tell them, are the great themes of American literature. But in Canada not so much.
After a while I don’t chime in anymore. Canada did not save me; I tell them it did only because they want it to be true. If my parents hadn’t done what they did, if they’d survived as parents, my sister and I would’ve both gone along to fine American lives and been happy. They simply didn’t, so we didn’t.
Over the years my wife and I have taken an occasional vacation “down below.” We have no children and represent, in a sense, the end of our respective lines. So we’ve gone only where we’ve wanted: skipping Orlando and Orange County and Yellowstone, tending instead toward the significant historical and cultural sites—Chautauqua, the Pettus Bridge, Concord, and D.C., which Clare considers “a bit much,” but I consider to be fine. I’ve enrolled in summer institutes taught by Harvard professors, visited the Mayo Clinic once, and we’ve often driven down-and-through on our trips back to Manitoba.
I have never been back to Great Falls, but have been told it’s a friendlier town—still a town, not a city—much better than when we lived there in 1960 and I was whisked away forever. None of that—taking me over the border—could happen now, since the towers, and with the border being sealed. It is a long time ago. My parents assume an even smaller place in memory. I often remember Charley Quarters saying to me, as we sat in lawn chairs watching geese, that something “went out” of him when he drove back to Canada from the lower forty-eight. I feel the opposite. Something always feels at peace in me when I come back. If anything goes out, it’s something I want to be out.
On a driving trip to Vancouver we did once stop in the town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan. My wife knows everything about those days and is sympathetic and slightly curious, since I don’t repeat the stories over and over. I told it once when we were young, assuming she should know, and since then have not much revisited it.
Fort Royal itself was scarcely there. The drugstore, the empty library, the empty brick school—all gone. No trace. Two rows of empty buildings, a co-op gas station, a post office, the disused elevator. The train yard was in operation, but seemed smaller. Oddly, the abattoir (called, now, “Custom Prairie Meats”) persisted. And the little Queen of Snows Hotel with a portable sign out front, saying GOOSE SHOOTERS: FALL’S COMING. BOOK YOUR HUNTS! The Leonard itself was among the missing—its space at the edge of town disclosing no sign of it. It was summer—early July—and the harvest hadn’t yet commenced. Most of the town residences were still there, on the short squared streets, many with the Maple Leaf flying—nonexistent fifty years ago. But there seemed to be no place for someone to work. Everyone drove, I supposed, to Swift Current or farther.
Partreau, which we later drove past, was altogether gone. Even the elevator husk. It was as if a great vengeful engine had come through and plowed it under and salted the earth. I drove us out into the wheat fields—the crop thick and undulant. The sky was high and clear blue, the hot wind gusting and dusty and dotted with snapping grasshoppers. Hawks patrolled, lazing in the great warm dome or sitting sentry in a single tree, here and there. I didn’t say so, but I drove us—to the extent memory could lead me—near to the place we buried the Americans. It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither. Instead, it all becomes part of our complex mind to which (if we’re lucky) we can finally assent. The great fields of grain swayed and hissed and shifted colors and bent and lay back against the wind where we stopped our car. I got out and breathed in the rich odors of dust and wheat and something vaguely spoiled—a thin seam only. The Americans lay under their ground, as they would’ve by now, even had they lived on longer. I stood,
hands in my trouser pockets, toes in the dust, and tried to make it all signify, be revelatory, as if I needed that. But I couldn’t. So I walked back to the car, my wife waiting in the heat, watching me curiously. We turned back toward the west and the distant, invisible mountains and left that place forever, once again.
Chapter 69
Last fall, before my sister died, I went to visit her in the Twin Cities. It is only an hour’s flight from Detroit Metro, which we all use as if it were ours. I hadn’t known she was there. In planning a party for my retirement, my students “looked me up” on the computer to find out what they could—something embarrassing or touching; someone who might’ve been looking for me; an old girlfriend, an army buddy, a police warrant. You can’t keep much a secret anymore (though I’ve done better than most). They found a “looking for” message “posted” on some site. It merely said, “Looking for a Dell Parsons. A teacher. Possibly living in Canada. His sister is ill and would like to be in contact. Time is a consideration. Bev Parsons.” A phone number was given.
It was a powerful shock to me to see my father’s name on the sheet of paper the students rather solemnly handed me, wanting me to know they’d had lighter-hearted intentions, but obviously understanding I should see this.
I had never seen my father again, or my mother, once they went away to prison. The day in the Great Falls jail was the last time. There were letters—one or two from Mildred—that found their way to me. One telling me, also shockingly, that my mother had committed suicide in the North Dakota prison for women. (I was by then at St. Paul’s High School, in Winnipeg, and can’t remember much of what I felt.) But there was never anything from him once his prison term was over—if he survived it. I concluded he must’ve felt I was better off wherever I was, and nothing could be gained by revisiting a life that was over long ago. Which I came to believe was true, though it was not that I forgot him. In a previous visit with Berner, in the town of Reno, Nevada, in 1978, she’d told me she believed she’d recognized our father in a service station casino in Jackpot, Nevada, perched on a stool, feeding quarters into a slot machine with what Berner said was a “Mexican girl” sitting beside him. He’d had a mustache. She admitted she sometimes confused this sighting with a man she’d seen in a bar in Baker, Oregon, and who had been alone. “But either way he was still handsome,” she said. “I didn’t speak to him.” Berner was a drinker and such stories from her were not unusual.
But the thought that my father—at age ninety—could be at my sister’s side, seeing her through a bad time, and seeking me out in the world to ask assistance, was tantamount, and surprisingly, to feeling my whole life was not only under assault but in jeopardy of never even having been lived. They were all still there, waiting for me, numinous, obstinate, staring, unerasable. It made me realize how much I’d wanted to erase them, how much my happiness was pinioned to their being gone.
Berner and I had seen each other only three times in the fifty years. These elliptical family relations are possibly more typical in America. I can’t generalize about Canada and Canadians—feeling that I am barely one of them. But we saw a lot of my wife’s parents before they died. We still see a good deal of her sister, in Barrie. Canadians and Americans, however, are alike in so many ways, it’s probably an unfair distinction to insist on.
I’d always felt I should see more of my sister, and if you’d asked me I’d have said I was that kind of brother. But it simply hadn’t happened. Her life turned out to be different from mine. I have had one wife and been a high school teacher and sponsor of chess clubs through my entire working years. Berner had had at least three husbands and unfortunately seemed able to please herself only on the margins of conventional life. I lost track of most of it. She was a hippie until that played out. Then the wife of a policeman, who treated her badly. Then a failed late-in-life college student. Then a waitress in a casino. Then a waitress in a restaurant. Then a nurse’s assistant in a hospice. Another husband was a motorcycle mechanic in Grass Valley, California. No children were involved. And there was more that made her life seem not a good one, though she never said that.
When we visited her in Reno, she was with a man named Wynne Reuther, who said he was related to Walter Reuther. They were both drunk. We ate dinner in a rathskeller place at a casino. Berner, whose freckled skin was puffy and her flat facial features exaggerated, had acquired a sneering, raspy laugh that revealed too much of her tongue. Her narrow gray-green eyes were hawkish and cold. She treated my wife sarcastically and didn’t seem to remember or to take in that we were Canadians. She possessed the same wrangling strangeness that always fascinated me—her “hauteur” our father called it. When we were children, we were always two sides of one coin. But now, at dinner, talking noisily over this Reuther fellow, she seemed to me just another extra human being, in spite of mannerisms and hand gestures and an occasional ghostly “set” to her features that I recognized. Eventually she said that I—not Clare—talked like a Canadian. Which didn’t bother me. She said Canada was “nondescript,” which annoyed Clare. She finally said to me that I’d left my country behind to fend for itself. After that I had a displaced argument with Wynne Reuther—something about Iran—which cut the evening short. The last thing Berner said to me, as we stood in the dark, sweltering, desert car park—Interstate 80 full with its burden of trucks banging above us in the orange sodium lights and the bright casino glow—was: “You gave up a lot. I just hope you know that.” She knew nothing about what she was saying. She’d drunk too much and was bitter about the “substitute life” she’d led instead of the better one she should’ve led if it had all worked out properly—our parents, etc. Of course, she was right. I had given up a great deal, as Mildred told me I’d need to. Only I was satisfied about it and about what I’d gotten in return. “It’s so odd what makes people different,” Clare said, almost whimsically, when we were in the car and all of that was behind us. “Nature doesn’t rhyme her children,” I said, happy to remember the line of Emerson’s, and to have a place for it to fit perfectly. Though what I felt that night was impermanent, incomplete, and sad. I thought it was possible I’d never see Berner again.
I arranged to meet her at the Comfort Inn that is by the huge mall near the airport in the Twin Cities. There was a polite disagreement on the phone over who would come to see who, and once that was settled, whether I would drive to her house in a rental car or she would drive to get me.
“I have to be able to go home when I get tired,” she said on the line to Windsor, her voice sounding worn but positive—as if I wouldn’t be able to take her home when she was ready. She had a small, harsh cough and sounded hoarse. “I’m doing my chemo on Tuesdays,” she said, “so I wear out fast.”
“Is Dad there?” I said. “Bev Parsons” was stitched into my brain. I didn’t want to see him. But if he was alive and looking after her, I didn’t very well see how I could deny it.
“Dad?” Berner sounded incredulous. “Our dad?”
“Bev Parsons,” I said.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” she said. “I forgot. No. I finally decided to jettison my old awful name. Berner.” She said it ruefully. “All those years with that being me. Like bad luck. His name seemed better for me. I always envied it. I could keep my luggage—if I had any.”
“I always liked your name,” I said. “I thought it was distinctive.”
“Good. Then you take it. It’s unoccupied. I’ll will it to you.” She laughed again.
“How sick are you?” Suddenly, because of the telephone, and not being face-to-face, it was as if we were not young, but adults who could ask such questions. Twins of another, better kind.
“Oh my,” she said. “I’m just taking chemo for something to do. I’ve got two months. Maybe. A lymphoma you wouldn’t want. Really.” She breathed audibly into the receiver. A sigh. She’d always sighed, though never resignedly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And we were back being near strangers. Of course, I meant it.
“Well, me too,” she said and seemed in good spirits. “The cure’s all that really hurts. And the cure’s not even a cure. You’d better come on, though. Okay? I want to see you. And give you something.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come next weekend.”
“Are you still Mr. Teacher?” she asked.
“Still till June,” I said. “Then I retire.”
“I’ll have to miss your graduation, I guess.” She laughed the harsh sneering laugh I remembered from the last time, when she’d told me I’d given up a lot.
“She just wants to see if you’ll come.” Clare shook her head resolutely. She was helping me pack a small bag. I intended only to be there a day and a night. “And, of course, you will.”
I said, “If your sister was sick and dying, you’d go.” Our house on Monmouth Street sits beside a small park and has vestigial elms, front and side. Both were in clamorous gold display. It was October, the time you live for at our latitude.
“I would,” she said, and patted me on my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “I love you,” she added. “Whatever she wants, you give it to her.”
“She doesn’t want any more than my coming,” I said. “She wants to give me something.”