Authors: Richard Ford
“What is it?” I asked. Faded, ink handwriting was on the top page.
“It’s just her ‘chronicle’—she calls it. Or did. She wrote it in prison when she was first there—looking at the dates. She sent it to Mildred, whose son I happened to meet once. Out west. Mildred sent it to me. A long time ago—whatever degrees of separation that is. She should’ve sent it to you. But mother-daughter must’ve made a difference to her. I guess. There’s nothing in it to disturb anybody. No great revelations. But you can hear her—which is sort of nice. You should have it.” With her two bruised hands she pushed the pages across the table top, inching her martini glass to the side, dampening the edge of the bottom page.
“Thank you,” I said and took possession of the pages.
“She calls it the chronicle of a weak person. Which she was.” Berner bit a flake of dry skin off her lower lip, as if the pages’ contents interested her again, now that she’d handed them over to me. Now that I’d come all this distance to get them. “She says things like, ‘You’re only good if you can do bad and decide not to.’ And, ‘We were a failure at marriage,’ which we all can agree. ‘What makes life better is the essential question.’ And, ‘You can not know your life’s intolerable until you see your way out of it.’ She speculates about leaving Dad long before, and about their holdup. She writes letters to us. And she has some lines of poetry she liked. I memorized them once. ‘. . . Through what crime. Through what fault have I deserved my weakness now?’ She always wanted to be a writer. I’ve read it over the years. It could make me cry. He couldn’t help himself. But she had a lot better sense. At least that’s how I remember her.” Berner shook her head and looked again out at the busy Applebee’s parking lot. “I wish I wasn’t sore at her. Now, especially. I’d like to be like you. You accept everything. It’d make better sense all around.”
“I am, too,” I said—which wasn’t the reply she’d wanted. I was looking at the fine, precise, faded words running minutely along the pale blue line, not in her favorite brown ink.
Berner had begun drumming her fingers on the table top. When I looked at her plain, waiting face, it was without expression, though her jaw muscles were agitating. Her eyes had grown shiny. We looked nothing like each other now in a different way.
“Do you remember Rudy?” She pursed her lips in.
“Yes,” I said.
“Rudy red-head. Rudy Kazoot. My first great love. Isn’t that funny?”
“I danced with him,” I said.
“You did?” Her expression briefly brightened. “Where was I?”
“You were there. We all three danced. It was the day they went to jail.”
I wanted to say her name. For my own sake. Her real name. “Berner,” I said softly.
“That’s my name.” She said this hoarsely, as if someone at the next table had whispered it.
“Do you need anything?” I said. “Is there anything at all I can do for you?”
The crowd on the TV made another swelling roar. People in the restaurant clapped listlessly. She didn’t say anything for a moment, as if the other conversation that had been going continuously in her head, the one we’ll all eventually have, had become irresistible. “You’ve done everything,” she said. “We all try. You try. I try. We all do. What else is there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s right,” which did not seem enough to say.
WE ATE A LITTLE
of our lunch when it came, but not nearly all of it. She wasn’t hungry, and I’d had my breakfast in the hotel. At a given moment, when we’d sat a while with not much to talk about, she said, “I’m not feeling perfect.” She’d gotten restless, sitting. She’d taken her pill. I’d put the pages back in the plastic sack. We were finished.
I went to the bar and paid our bill and helped her up and out to the front door. I couldn’t see how she could drive us anywhere, and I didn’t know her way back home. I asked the hostess to call a taxi, which came more quickly than I imagined it could. We rode silently together in the back seat, with Berner staring out the window at traffic, and me watching out my side. A place I didn’t know. She hadn’t minded leaving her car behind for Ray to get later.
Finally we came to her paved lane of mobile homes with their flags and saplings and snazzy cars and children, and jets rising into the sky not far off. Ray was there inside. He seemed glad to see her back. We shook hands and said our names. I mentioned we’d left the car. He seemed embarrassed and laughed for some reason he was probably sorry about later. He knew what to do, though. Berner seemed to be feeling not good at all and needed help coming up the steps. Ray asked me if I wanted to step in. He said coffee was always on. I said I didn’t, but thanked him. I said I’d call tomorrow. When I said good-bye in through the doorway, where a big TV was going—the game again—Berner turned and smiled and said dreamily, “Okay, dear. Good-bye. It was nice to see you again. Tell them I said hello, will you?”
“I will,” I said. “I love you. Don’t worry.” She didn’t have the dissatisfied look on her face that our mother had hoped she wouldn’t.
I went back to the hotel in the taxi, which had waited. In the morning I flew back to Detroit.
THERE’S LITTLE ELSE
to say. I have that as my satisfaction. I
am
blessed with memory, just as my sister Berner came to be blessed with less of it. Though she was right; it
was
the event of our lives, since it began in our family, and its consequences ran far but never outran their source. The week after Berner died, which was the week after the American Thanksgiving last year, 2010, I said to my students—very unexpectedly: “Do you ever have the odd feeling that you’ve somehow escaped punishment?” We were talking about Hardy again.
The Mayor.
They only stared back at me, perplexed, having recognized I was distracted, and was speaking about myself. I immediately realized it was an alarming thing to say to them. Although one boy, whose family are Kosovars, said yes, he did.
I did not see my sister dead. Though Ray telephoned me politely on the day and called me Dell, and Berner “Bev.” He said they had gotten married the week before. I told him that was wonderful, and thanked him. Not being there didn’t matter, since I don’t believe I deceived her on our visit and that she understood I didn’t. Although in the days after her death I had the odd feeling—a sensation I’d never had—that our father was still alive somewhere, living on at a great age, and might’ve wanted to know about her, and even about me. I purposefully tried to forget that thought, and soon did. It was just a fantasy, having to do with being abandoned once again. Although I myself, now, occasionally have Berner’s dream—the one she wrote about in her letter from San Francisco, fifty years ago: that
I’d
killed someone, and had forgotten it; then the crime had risen up, a terrible specter, and been divulged to everyone I knew. My students. My colleagues. My wife. All of whom were horrified and hated me for it.
Only I hadn’t killed anyone—neither in my dream nor out of it (although I did help bury the two Americans and somewhere have a debt to pay for that).
Our mother’s chronicle was much as Berner said: bits, uncompleted thoughts meant for a later time that never came, her view of the robbery, opinions, rationalizations, trivialities, harsh words about our father. Someone could make a complete story up from it. Again, Ruskin says composition is the arrangement of unequal things. And the contents of her chronicle qualify as unequal things. But at my age I’m uninterested in such a duty, since neither are those things equal any longer to the matter of my own remaining life—as sorry as I am for that to be true.
Though there was one thing she wrote that might’ve been what Berner most wanted me to read and why she gave the pages to me.
“I think,” our mother wrote in her fine hand, in the blue ink she would’ve gotten in prison, and that had grown invisible in places, “that when you’re dying, you probably want it. You don’t fight it. It’s like dreaming. It’s good. Don’t you imagine it feels good? Just giving in to something? No more fighting, fighting, fighting. I’ll worry about this eventually and be sorry. But right now I feel good. A weight’s off of me. Some great weight. Nature does not abhor a vacuum, as it turns out.”
This was dated, Spring 1961. Berner had put a pencil check beside it. It meant something to her. Possibly it will someday mean something to me, something more than the obvious.
SOME DAYS I DRIVE
through the tunnel into Detroit—the city that used to be there, now only acres of vacant lots, with the great glistening buildings along the riverside, like false fronts, a good brave face to our world on the other side. I drive up Jefferson along the river and eventually out into the exurbia toward the Thumb and Port Huron. I always think I’ll drive north to Oscoda, where I was born, see what it is today, the remnants of the air base—of which I would remember nothing. But when I see the great welcoming Blue Water arch, eight hundred and seventy feet back across to Sarnia, I lose my need, as though I was trying to possess something I never had. “You should go, sometime,” my wife says to me. “It’d be interesting. It would help you, put things to rest.” As if I hadn’t done that.
Of course, it’s not lost to me that I live across a border from the place near my birth, and from the place where Arthur Remlinger’s devilment started, and from where the two Americans departed on their way to meet their fates. In a sense, its significance weighs on me, and I’ve thought often that where I live here, now—in the screwy way of things—was meant to be, and that the weight was the weight of consequence. As if I expected to preside over both sides of something. But I simply don’t believe in those ideas. I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life’s passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.
My mother said I’d have thousands of mornings to wake up and think about all this, when no one would tell me how to feel. It’s been many thousands now. What I know is, you have a better chance in life—of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try.
THERE’S NO ONE I’M INDEBTED TO MORE THAN KRISTINA FORD
, for helping me, encouraging me, extending her intelligence, goodwill, and patience to this book’s completion, and for being on the case.
A great many others acted generously toward me and toward this work, none more conspicuously than Dan Halpern, who bet on an old friend. I’m extremely grateful to my dear Amanda Urban, who was my first outside-the-house reader and who has encouraged me forever. I wish to thank, as well, my great friend Janet Henderson, who assisted me inestimably in editing and in reading this book in the early going as well as the late. My thanks, too, to Philip Klay, who volunteered precious time to help me research this book. My thanks to Ellen Lewis, for teaching me about
The Haggadah
. I’m grateful to Scott Sellers and to Louise Dennys, remarkable publishers, whose enthusiasm for this book helped me to finish it. I’m grateful to Alexandra Pringle, my friend for decades, and to Jane Friedman, for their faith in these efforts. I’m grateful as well to Dale Rohrbaugh, who generously dedicated time beyond-the-call, as well as vast goodwill, to seeing this book to completion. I’m grateful to my friends at the University of Mississippi, who welcomed me home and gave me a quiet room in which to finish this novel. I thank my friend Dr. Jeffrey Karnes, at Mayo, for his clear insight into the writer’s peculiar dilemma. And thanks, as well, to Dr. Will Dabbs for his spirited help when it counted—at the end.
Certain books and certain writers, in ways both apparent and less obvious, were instrumental in writing
Canada
. My great friend Dave Carpenter first took me to southwestern Saskatchewan in 1984. My friend Elliott Leyton took me goose hunting there. Guy Vanderhaeghe has written eloquently about the border region of Saskatchewan and Montana, as did the great Wallace Stegner. William Maxwell’s presence will be obvious by any reader. All sparked this book’s conception. I profited by two histories of Saskatchewan,
Saskatchewan: A History
by John H. Archer and
Saskatchewan: A New History
by Bill Waiser. Lynda Shorten’s remarkable book of interviews with native people,
Without Reserve
, taught me much. A constant charm and resource in my revisions was Blake Morrison’s superb memoir
And When Did You Last See Your Father
? I was aided by generous assistance from Rachel Wormsbecher and Lloyd Begley at the Swift Current Museum in Saskatchewan, and from Libby Edelson, and from Laurie McGee, who copyedited the manuscript. My old and dear friend Craig Sterry gave me comfort and a house to write in, in Great Falls. The writer Melanie Little read this book and gave me indispensable and savvy advice about fixing its flaws. Sarah MacLachlan was my advocate from this book’s beginnings. And at the very end, Iris Tupholme and David Kent generously agreed to publish
Canada
, in Canada. I thank you every one. RF
RICHARD FORD
is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include
The Sportswriter
and its sequels,
Independence Day
—the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—and
The Lay of the Land
, as well as the short story collections
Rock Springs
and
A Multitude of Sins
, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford.
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