Authors: Richard Ford
IN HAVRE—
which did lie at the bottom of a long hill, with the Great Northern yards, a narrow brown river, and a line of rimrock running along the northern side of the highway—Mildred looked at me across the car seat and told me I was too thin and peakèd and was possibly anemic, and I should eat something because I might not run into food the rest of that day. Mildred was a large square-hipped, authoritative woman, with short black curly hair, snapping small dark eyes, red lipstick, a fleshy neck, and powder on her face that masked a bad complexion, though not very well. She and her car both smelled like cigarettes and chewing gum, and her ashtray was full of lipstick butts and matches and spearmint wrappers, though she hadn’t smoked while we were driving. My mother had said Mildred had been afflicted with marriage problems and now lived alone. It was hard for me to see how a man would marry her (though I’d sometimes felt that way about our mother). She was large and wasn’t pretty at all, and was bossy. Mildred wore a green silky dress with little red triangles printed on it and large red beads, and stiff hosiery with heavy black shoes, and seemed uncomfortable dressed that way. In the window behind her on a wire hanger were her white nurse’s costume and cap, which seemed a much more natural thing for her to wear.
In Havre, we drove down the hill to First—which was the main street—and found a sandwich shop across from a bank and the GN depot. We sat at the counter inside, and I ate cold meat loaf and a soft roll with butter and a pickle and lemonade, and felt better. Mildred smoked while I ate and watched me and cleared her throat a lot and talked about having grown up on a beet farm in Michigan and her parents being Seventh Day-ers, and her brother going to Harvard (which I’d heard of), and about how she’d run away with an Air Force boy and “landed” in Montana. The boy eventually transferred, and she’d stayed on in Great Falls, studied nursing, and married another time before figuring out it wasn’t for her—which was when she’d taken Remlinger back as her name. She said she was forty-three, though I’d thought she was sixty or more. At a certain point she turned on her stool and pinched my earlobe and asked if I thought I had a fever or was coming down with something. I didn’t, although I felt anxious about where we were going. She said I should go to sleep in the back seat after lunch, and this was what let me know we weren’t just going to Havre that day but were traveling farther on.
FROM HAVRE
, we drove north, across a wooden railroad viaduct over the tracks and the muddy river and along a narrow highway that angled up the rimrock grade high enough to let me look back to the town, low and dismal and bleak in the baking sunlight. I was farther north than I’d ever been and felt barren and isolated, becoming unreachable. Wherever Berner was, I thought, was better than this. But I couldn’t make myself ask anything because I realized the answer might’ve been something I wouldn’t like, after which I wouldn’t know what to say or do about my life, and would’ve had to face the fact that I’d made a mistake staying and not going with my sister (although she hadn’t asked me).
The land north of Havre was the same as we’d been driving through: dry, unchanging cropland—a sea of golden wheat melting up into the hot unblemished blue sky crossed only by electrical wires. There were very few houses or buildings to signify people lived up there or needed electricity. Low green hills lay far out ahead in the shimmering distance. It was improbable we were going there, since I speculated those hills would be in Canada, which was all that lay ahead of us from my memory of the globe in my room.
Mildred again didn’t talk much—just drove. She did smoke one cigarette, but didn’t like it and tossed it out the vent. Buzzards hung in the sky, curving and motionless. I believed that if a person were to be lost where we were, buzzards would be the only way you’d be found, but you wouldn’t survive.
At a certain point, Mildred took in a deep breath and let it out as if she’d decided something she’d been keeping silent about. She licked her lips and pinched at her nose and cleared her dry throat again.
“I should tell you
some
things now, Dell,” she said, steering with two hands, her stocking feet on the pedals, her black shoes off and pushed aside. She was staring firmly ahead. We’d only passed two cars since Havre. There didn’t seem to be a place visible where we were going. “I’m taking you up to Saskatchewan to live for a little while with my brother, Arthur.” She said this abruptly, as if it wasn’t an enjoyable thing to say. “It won’t have to be this way completely forever. But right now it does. I’m sorry.” She licked her lips again. “It’s what your mother wants. You oughtn’t fault yourself for it. I’m disappointed your sister broke away. You two could’ve made a good team.”
She looked over at me and faintly smiled, her short hair flittering in the hot window breeze. Her teeth weren’t particularly straight and she didn’t smile a lot. I felt as if Berner was actually there beside me and Mildred was addressing us both.
“I don’t want to do that.” I said this with absolute certainty. Mildred’s brother. Canada. I felt sure I didn’t have to do any of that. I had a say-so.
Mildred drove on for a time without speaking, letting the highway plunder on beneath us. Possibly she was thinking, but probably she was just waiting. Finally she said, “Well, if I have to take you back, they’ll arrest me for kidnapping you and put me in jail. Then the one human being who can help you—and who’s not a confirmed criminal, and who’s willing to do your poor mother a last favor’ll be out of reach. They’re looking for you to put you in an orphanage. You better think on that. I’m trying to save you here. I’d have saved your sister if she’d been smarter.”
My throat had already begun tightening, and this tightness screwed right down into my chest and made a pain, and I suddenly couldn’t bring in enough air, even though we were going sixty, and hot wheat fragrance was blasting in the windows. I felt an urge just to shoulder open my door and fling myself out onto the rushing pavement. Which was nothing like me. I wasn’t violent and didn’t do things suddenly. But the black road seemed to be my life shooting away from me at a terrible speed, with no one to stop it. I thought if I could pick myself up and start walking I could get home, even find Berner, wherever she’d gone. My fingers found the door handle, squeezed it, ready to give a pull. Berner had said she hated our parents for lying. But I’d refused to hate them and remained the loyal one who stayed and did what our mother wanted. Which made me the one bad things were happening to now. I couldn’t have said what I was expecting, or what my mother’s plan for me was. She’d explained everything to Mildred and not to me. But I wasn’t expecting this. I felt like I’d been tricked and abandoned, and that my loyalty wasn’t respected, and I was here now with this odd woman, where only the buzzards would find me if I took control over my life. Being young was the worst thing. I knew why Berner had strived to be older and had run away. It was to save herself.
The airlessness in my chest ached the way it does when you drink too-cold water and feel paralyzed. But crying would be the signal of even greater defeat. Mildred would think I was pitiful. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, clutched the warm door handle, then released it and let hot air from outside overcome my tears. I don’t now think it was so much what Mildred had said—that I was being driven to Canada to be put in the care of strangers—as much as it was the accumulation of all that had passed in my life in the last week’s time, and that I’d tried to take control of but failed. Mildred was only trying to help me, and help my mother. How I felt on hearing what I’d heard was more than anything a kind of grief.
“I don’t blame you,” Mildred said finally. She must’ve known I was crying. “It doesn’t give any comfort to know nothing’s your fault. You might like it better if it was.” She adjusted her big legs in her seat, raised her chin and sat forward as if she saw something up the road. I’d stopped crying. “We’re crossing the international border to Canada up here,” she said, settling back in her seat. “I’ll tell ’em you’re my nephew. I’m taking you to Medicine Hat to buy you school clothes. If you want to tell ’em I’m kidnapping you, that’ll be the time.” She pruned her lips. “We’d like to stay out of jail if we can, though.”
Ahead, where the highway was only a pencil line into the distance, two dark low bumps became visible on the horizon, backed by blue sky in which there was not a cloud floating. I wouldn’t have seen the bumps if I hadn’t looked where Mildred was looking. It was Canada there. Indistinguishable. Same sky. Same daylight. Same air. But different. How was it possible I was going to it?
Mildred was scrapping around in her big red patent leather purse on the floor and continuing to drive. The dark bumps quickly materialized into two low, square shapes that were buildings—side by side on a rise of prairie. A car sat beside each one. It had to be where the border started. I didn’t know what happened there. Possibly someone could take me into custody, put me in handcuffs, and send me to an orphanage or back home where there was nothing but an empty house.
“What are you thinking about,” Mildred asked.
I peered ahead at the sky above Canada. No one had ever asked me what I was thinking straight out. It hadn’t mattered in our family what Berner and I were thinking—though we always were.
What have I got to lose?
were the words I said silently, which
was
what I was thinking, though only because they were words I’d heard other people say—in the chess club. I wouldn’t have said them to Mildred. But I was shocked that what I was thinking felt true. What I said was, “How do you know what’s really happening to you?” It was just what I made up to say.
“Oh, you never do.” Mildred had her paper driver’s license in the hand she held the steering wheel with. We were already approaching what were two wooden cabins established side by side. The highway split where it passed them. “There are two different kinds of people in the world,” Mildred said, “well, really, there’re lots of kinds. But at least two are the people who understand you don’t
ever
know; then there’re the ones who think you always do. I’m in the former group. It’s safer.”
A bulky man in a blue uniform stepped outside the wooden hut on the right, which we were approaching. He was fitting a policeman’s hat down onto his head and waving us forward. A red flag I didn’t recognize—but that had a little English flag up in its left corner—fluttered on a pole beside the hut. A sign under the flagpole said
YOU ARE ENTERING CANADA. PORT OF WILLOW CREEK, SASKATCHEWAN
.
The other cabin beside it was the American one. The Stars and Stripes flew over it—though I suspected not the fifty-star one that included Hawaii. A border was two things at once. Going in and going out. I was going out, which felt significant. A smaller hatless man, in a different blue uniform and wearing a badge and a side pistol, stepped out of the American cabin into the breeze. He watched Mildred pull ahead. Possibly he knew about me and was preparing to come arrest us both. I looked straight forward, sat still. For some reason I couldn’t have explained, I wanted us to get across, and felt exhilarated and afraid we might be prevented. Of the two types of people Mildred had mentioned, I must’ve been in the first group also. Otherwise why would I ever be where I was, with everything I’d ever understood disappearing behind me? It wasn’t what I expected to feel. I had waked up in my bed alone, had watched my sister walk away out of my life, possibly forever. My parents were in jail. I had no one to look after me or out for me.
What have I got to lose?
was probably the correct question to be asking. The answer seemed to be
very little
.
T
HE HIGHWAY UP INTO CANADA LAY ACROSS MORE
endless cropland, indistinguishable to my eye from below the border, but with more houses and barns and windmills and evidence of people. The green hills that I’d first seen from north of Havre were, Mildred said, the Cypress Hills. They were like the Alps, she said, set out on the prairie by themselves—an anomaly from when there were glaciers on the plains. They had their own isolated forest and animal life. The people who lived there didn’t like strangers. The towns we passed through, however—Govenlock, Consul, Ravencrag, Robsart—looked like any ordinary towns in Montana. Though I thought if you grew up in a place with such a strange name—including Saskatchewan (a name I’d rarely heard before)—then you’d always feel strange about yourself. Nothing later in life could be as completely normal as it had been for me living in Great Falls.
Driving north in the low, late-day sun, Mildred recited to me what she knew about Canada that she felt might prove useful. Canada was owned by England and contained provinces, not states of a union—though there was practically no difference, except Canada only had ten. People mostly spoke English, but in a different way she couldn’t describe, but I’d be aware of it and could learn it. She said they had their own Thanksgiving, but theirs wasn’t on Thursday and wasn’t in November. Canada had fought beside America in the same world war my father had fought in and had gotten involved in it even before we did, due to Canada’s obedience to the Queen of England, and in fact had an air force as good as ours. She said Canada wasn’t an old country like ours and still had a pioneer feel, and nobody there really thought of it as a country, and in fact in some parts people spoke French, and the capital was back east, and nobody respected it the way we did Washington, D.C. She said Canada had dollars for money, but theirs were different colored and were sometimes mysteriously worth more than ours. She said Canada also had its own Indians and treated them better than we treated ours, and Canada was bigger than America, though it was mostly empty and inhospitable and covered with ice much of the time.
I rode along thinking about these things and how they could become true just by passing two huts marooned in the middle of nowhere. I felt better than I had earlier in the day when I didn’t know where I was going. It was as if a crisis had passed or been escaped. What I experienced was relief. I only wished my sister, Berner, had stayed to see it with me.