Authors: Richard Ford
On other evenings, I pulled open one or another of the cardboard boxes I hadn’t moved into the north room, and diverted myself with the evidence of all that had happened in the house in the years before I came to be in it. On the prairie, history and memory seemed as alien as the passage of time—as if the citizens of Partreau had disappeared not into the past but into another vivid present—which explained why there was no dignified cemetery, and so much was left behind.
Arthur Remlinger had remarked to me that he’d lived in my shack in his early days, and many of the boxed possessions were his. In the softened, stale-smelling boxes I found related evidence of what I’d seen in his rooms. In one box marked in pencil with “AR” were thin books and cracked, yellowed magazines bound in cotton twine, from the 1940s. One magazine was called
The Free Thinkers
. Another was
The Deciding Factor
. There were two books I’d already seen in the apartment—
Captive Passengers
and
World Analysis
. I had no idea what they were or were about. When I pulled out
The Free Thinkers
, its cover referred to an article inside by an “A. R. Remlinger,” with the title “Anarcho-syndicalism, Immunities and Privileges.” I read the first page of this. It pertained to something called the “Danbury Hatters lesson,” and the “Protestant work ethic,” and went into detail about how workers were not “maximizing their individual freedom.” The back page informed the reader that A. R. Remlinger was “a young Harvard man from the middle west” who was putting his “gold-plated education” to the service of human rights for all men. It was likely Arthur Remlinger had written articles in the other magazines, but I had no interest in opening them.
Other boxes didn’t bear the “AR” initials, and in these I found life insurance policies and stacks of canceled checks and a Saskatchewan driver’s license for a woman named Esther Magnusson, and collections of yellow pencil stubs bound with rubber bands, and stacks of old pamphlets and a “Milky Way for Britain” war bond brochure, much of it corrupted and nested in by mice. Some of the pamphlets had to do with the “Social Reform Gospel,” and something called the “Royal Templars of Temperance.” There were membership booklets about “Home-makers Clubs,” and bulletins about “Wheat and Women” and the “Grain Growers Guide.” One booklet had to do with “The Canadian League” and stated on its first page that foreign immigrants weren’t shouldering their burden, and soldiers returning from the front should have “first choice of the best jobs.” Inserted in the pages was a black-and-white newspaper picture showing a cross set ablaze and people in white hoods and robes whose faces were covered, standing, facing it. “Moose Jaw, 1927” was written under it in faded ink.
Another box contained rusted metal film canisters with reels of film inside, but no indication of what the film would show. An American flag was folded on top of the canisters in the fashion my father had demonstrated for Berner and me—“the tricorn.” There were shoe boxes of letters—many addressed to Mr. Y. Leyton in Mossbank, Saskatchewan, and postmarked 1939 and 1940. These were tied with baling twine in tight stacks, some with red American three-cent stamps that bore a picture I recognized as George Washington. I considered it allowable for me to read at least one of these letters, since no one had sent a letter to me in Canada, and reading someone else’s might make me appreciate the presence of others, which my existence in Partreau had all but extinguished. The letter read:
Dear Son,
We’re in Duluth, having driven here with your father from the Cities where it was very nice, indeed (very modern). Much warmer there than in ole ice-box Prince Albert, that’s for certain. I don’t know how anyone lives there—and the wind. My goodness. You know plenty, of course, about that. I’m trying to forget most of the Canadian I learned as a child in school—for my sins. Jaqueleen was just saying it’s a pity there has to be a frontier between the two. But I’m not so sure. Someone must think they know best all about it. Tennessee is where I’d happily die.
I know (or have heard) that you are thinking about the RCN, which is very brave (if you like water). I wish you’d think longer on it. Okay? We have little to gain from a big fight now. The worst could happen. Which of course you are not thinking about. Just a thought from your mum.
I have a postcard which I’ll send. It shows our “Prince Charming” on his famous train trip to Sask back in ’19 (twenty years ago! Heavens!). You won’t remember. But your dad and your Gram and me stood you up by the tracks in Regina in your little worsted suit, and you waved a little Canadian flag. I believe that’s why you’re so patriotic. There’s surely no reason to be otherwise. Take care now. Look for my postcard, which won’t fit into the env. without ruining it. Your dad sends his best to you—which is more than I ever see.
Love ’n kisses.
Your Mum
I dug deeper in the box for the postcard showing “Prince Charming” and who he would’ve been. But near the bottom were only more bound stacks—of Christmas cards and dry newspaper cuttings with pictures of smiling, crew-cut men in hockey uniforms. At the very bottom were several loose picture cards of completely naked women posing beside ornate pedestals with floral arrangements and tables containing books. The women were hefty and smiling as happily as if they were wearing clothes. I’d never seen pictures like these, although I knew from things boys had said in school that they existed. You could buy them from machines at the State Fair. I spent quite a while going carefully over each one and finally put three into my
World Book
“B” volume, since I knew I’d want to look at them again. I did want to look at them again, and did look at them. I kept them for years.
Also at the bottom of the box, I found a pair of wire-rim eyeglasses and a plain gold ring. The ring was inside a yellow Bayer aspirin tin that had two worn-smooth aspirins and a charm-bracelet replica of the Eiffel Tower also inside it. I knew a ring was inside before I saw it. Don’t ask me how I knew.
It’s probably a wedding ring
, I all but said to myself. I understood, of course, that it represented an outcome lost in someone’s past and wasn’t good.
Most of the boxes I didn’t go through thoroughly. One had Regina newspapers. Another held muddy clothes and shoes the mice had marauded. Another was documents and receipts and totalings for wheat crops and elevator fees and the purchase of a new Waterloo Boy tractor. Another contained stacks of unopened printed matter about the 1948 Saskatchewan election, and pertaining to the CCF and “Social Credit.” I tried to imagine how many people’s or families’ lives were jumbled together here, in my house. Many, many—I thought—as if they had all hoped to come back later from their present and reclaim it, but never had. Or had died. Or had just elected to put that life behind them for a crack at a better one somewhere else.
I wondered, however, what Arthur Remlinger had meant when he’d told me Americans could never let a place like Partreau stand. They would burn it as a reproach to progress. But as I heaved the boxes back up against the drafty wall of my kitchen, I decided he was probably correct. My parents, people without real possessions, without permanence, who never owned a house, who carried little with them, and whose few holdings (except for Berner and me) had by then been taken and thrown in the town dump in Great Falls—my parents were people Arthur Remlinger had been referring to, who would’ve cared nothing for Partreau even if they didn’t burn it. They were people running from the past, who didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
I
WAS NOW LEARNING MANY THINGS AT ONCE: HOW TO
site goose pits where the morning sun didn’t find them too early but would still be high enough on a rise of land that the Sports could see out and be ready when the flights came off the river. I learned to set out the heavy wooden decoys to the right and left of the pits, and to leave a landing space where the geese could look to settle—thinking all was the same as the night before—yet not so far apart as to draw attention to the guns or the white faces of the shooters who were often too eager. Charley said Americans were usually fat or old or both and couldn’t stand the cold, crumbly Regina gumbo in the pits and so were always standing up and climbing out at the wrong moments. Ducks, Charley said—Goldeneyes and pintails and canvasbacks—always swept in first, screaming in on the pits like ghosts out of the dark, low and tilting and pinging. Shooting them, though, spooked the geese, who had good hearing, so that this was discouraged. I myself would need to be careful repositioning decoys, since the Sports shot at whatever they thought they saw or heard. People had been killed. Charley himself had been shot with #2 load and had scars. He permitted loading the guns only on his signal—though there were still “sky busters,” who were the dangerous ones. I was responsible to report to him any Sport who seemed drunk—though all of them would’ve been drinking late in the bar the night before, and I could expect to smell liquor. I had also to report anyone who appeared sick or had trouble walking or moving around or was careless handling his shotgun. Charley would verify the licenses and authorize when shooting started and ended—once the sun was high and the geese could see the ground. And as I already said, I would stay in the truck and glass the birds that fell and crippled off, and keep my tally, since the wardens were always about and would be watching with even more powerful binoculars—dividing the falling geese by the number of hunters and coming to check when the tallies didn’t match. Following which they’d be passing out citations, confiscating guns, seeing who was drunk, fining Charley, but fining Arthur Remlinger the most, and forcing him to pay large sums to avoid closer notice being paid to his in-town operation—the Filipino girls, the gambling den off the side of the dining room, and whatever else he might be up to that the town disapproved of. Arthur Remlinger held the license for the “guide service,” though he himself did no guiding and knew nothing about shooting or geese, and cared nothing. He was the proprietor, did the booking, kept the accounts, put up the Sports in the hotel, and collected their money—part of which he paid to Charley, who remitted a small portion to me. Though it was understood the Sports would hand around tips each day when the shooting was finished, often in U.S. currency, and everybody would be satisfied.
ON ONE OF THE LAST
warm early October days, after Charley and I had spent the morning scouting and digging pits in fields the geese habitually used, I rode my old bicycle down the highway away from Partreau in the direction of the town of Leader, twenty miles west. I was intent to find the school for wayward girls Mrs. Gedins had talked about. Birdtail was six miles down the hardtop, and I meant to inquire there if I might enroll as a student at some point in the future—possibly winter, when my goose duties were over and I might be on my own. I didn’t understand what a wayward girl was. I thought it might mean a girl who was passing through on her way to someplace else—which I was doing. I also didn’t believe there could be a school only for girls. At least a few boys would have to be permitted, I felt—even in Canada. Mrs. Gedins had told me the school was run by nuns. And from my mother’s experience with the Sisters of Providence, I believed nuns were openhearted, generous women who would see a chance to help me, which was their mission and why they’d give up marriage and a normal life. It shouldn’t matter that I was American. I would not divulge that my mother was Jewish or that she and my father were in jail in North Dakota. Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable. And I was willing to tell one, or many more than one, if it meant I could go to school and not fall further behind.
It was also the case that I’d begun to believe it would be nice to be around girls. Berner, of course, was a girl. But most of our lives we had treated each other as being the same thing because we were twins. That same thing was neither male nor female, but something in between that included us both. Though, of course, that hadn’t lasted. On two occasions, Charley had taken me to the chop-suey restaurant on Main Street. Both times I’d seen the Chinese owner’s children, seated at a shadowy rear table doing their schoolwork. I’d paid special attention to the pretty round-faced daughter who I felt might be my age. Each time she’d noticed me, but hardly allowed it to show. Several times since then, when I was taking my walks around Partreau, or marshaling my chess men alone in my shack, I’d entertained a fantastical thought that we could be friends. She could visit me. We could walk around the empty town together, then play chess. (I felt sure she would know how to play better than I did.) I even fantasized I could help her with homework. There was never anything more in my thoughts than that. I never knew her name or even spoke to her. Our friendship existed only in my mind. These real things could never happen, and didn’t. Being alone made it possible to know this sad fact of life, and yet to imagine that it and much else could be different.
The highway and prairie west of Partreau were no different from the hardtop going east to Fort Royal. Though on my bicycle, it felt new—like a terrain I shared with no one. It was only bare, rolling crop-ground with straw bales scattered to the edge of sight, and black dots, which were oil pumpers, and above it the sparkling skeins of new geese in the sky, and gray-white smoke along the horizon where a farmer was burning ditches.
When I arrived at the Birdtail sign, there was no evidence of a town. The Canadian Pacific passed along beside the highway, as it did in Partreau and Fort Royal. But there was no crossing from when a town had been there, or a caragana break or a windmill or an elevator or foundation squares to mark where houses had stood. Mrs. Gedins, I didn’t believe, would go to the trouble to lie to me. I sat and looked at the sky and all around where there was no school, then decided to ride another mile to the opposite Birdtail sign, if there was one. And when I arrived at it, there was another sign beside it that said “Sisters of the Holy Name School.” An arrow pointed south up a gravel road that met the highway from out of the fields. A Christian cross was painted above the school’s name. At the crest of the hill where the road went up, was an abandoned house, and beyond it the road disappeared off into the blue sky. A school could be any distance. Ten miles. With Charley I’d driven the truck miles and miles over the prairie and seen no sign of where humans lived or ever had lived. Yet for me school was still my important goal. I could ride until a school building was at least in sight and see what I thought of it.