Authors: Richard Ford
“I admire Indians,” my father said, once he’d quit singing. Then we were silent.
We drove past the second falling-in house, where there was a doorless black car turned upside down with no tires, or glass in any of its windows. This house’s roof had big holes through the shingles. There were tall lilacs and hollyhocks around the door like at our house, and someone had made a circular pig pen out of car radiators. The pigs’ snouts and ears were visible over the top. Behind the house there was a row of white-painted bee hives that someone in the house was tending. This captured my attention. I already had read my book on bees and was making plans to convince my father to help me build a single hive for the backyard. I knew where to send off for bees in the state of Georgia. Soon, I’d heard on the radio, the Montana State Fair would come to the fairgrounds not far from our house, and I intended to visit the bee exhibit there, where bee apparatus would be on display, and demonstrations about smoking hives and bee apparel and honey harvesting were to be conducted. Keeping bees was similar to chess in my mind. Both were complicated and had rules and required skill and setting goals, and each offered hidden patterns for success that could only be understood with patience and confidence. “Bees unlock the mystery to all things human,” the
Bee Sense
book—which I’d checked out of the library—had said. All these things that I wanted to learn about, I could’ve easily learned in Scouts if my mother had been willing. But she wasn’t.
A heavy-set, pale-skinned woman wearing shorts and a bathing suit top walked to the front door and shielded her eyes from the sun as we went past.
“We have our Alabama Indians, too,” my father said in a voice intended to make Berner and me think everything out here was completely ordinary in case we thought it wasn’t. “We have the Chickasaw and the Choctaw and your Swamp Bulgarians. They’re all related to these people out here. None of these folks have been treated fairly, of course. But they’ve maintained a dignity and self-respect.” This was hard to see in the houses we passed, though I was impressed the Indians knew about bees, and considered there was more to them than I knew.
“Where’s the ranch you’re going to sell,” I asked.
My father reached across the seat and patted me on my knee. “We passed that a long time ago, son. It didn’t look good to me. You’re observant to remember. I just wanted you children to see some real Indians while we’re out here. You oughta know an Indian when you see one. You live in Montana. They’re part of the landscape.” I wanted to bring up the subject of the State Fair right then, since he was in a good humor, but he was distracted by the Indians and I thought I might sacrifice my opportunity to discuss the subject later.
“Nobody answered about why they live out here,” Berner said. She was sweating and using her damp finger to draw a pattern in the fine road dust on her freckled arm. “They don’t have to. They could live in Great Falls. It’s a free country. It’s not Russia or France.”
It was as if our father had stopped paying attention to us then. We drove down the rutted road another mile until we came close enough to the Bear’s Paw Mountains that I could make out the tree line and scattered patches of scabby snow the sun never reached all summer. It was hot where we were, but if you went up farther, it would be cold. At a certain point along the road, with the dry, wasted landscape running on ahead unchanging, we pulled off between some fenceless fence posts, turned around, and began back the way we’d come—past the broken-down houses on the left, and the Indians, back to Box Elder and onto Highway 87 toward Great Falls. It felt as if nothing had been accomplished coming out there, nothing our father was interested in or worried about or needed to see—nothing having to do with selling or buying a ranch. I had no idea why we’d gone there. My sister and I didn’t discuss it once we got home.
W
HAT HAPPENED WAS THAT BY THE FIRST WEEK
of August, my father and the Great Northern man—Digby—and my father’s Cree accomplices had conducted three stolen beef transactions that had all gone satisfactorily. Cows were stolen, killed and delivered. Money changed hands. The Indians went away. Everyone was put at their ease. My father believed his recalculated scheme worked well, and didn’t feel precariously in the middle in any way that worried him. He was a man unable not to believe that if things were going well and smoothly, they wouldn’t go well and smoothly forever. Very much like the Indians, who relied on the government, the Air Force had sheltered him from the life most other people faced. And because of what he’d done expertly in the war (mastered the Norden sight, dropped bombs on people he never saw, not gotten killed), he felt that being taken care of was justifiable, which fostered a tendency not to look into things—any things—too closely. Which, with his beef scheme, meant not remembering that middle manning stolen beef carcasses hadn’t finally worked out successfully at the air base. His scheme had caused him, in fact, to lose his captain’s bars and in one way or other had landed him back in civilian life long before he was ready—if he ever would’ve been ready after so much time away.
It’s also possible that our mother, by being studious and aloof, caused him to feel she was observing him and calculating whether some new failure of his was going to be the reason she should leave him. So that despite his apparent success, his optimistic nature, his new fresh start in the civilian world, her private uncertainties accumulated, and eroded his confidence for the “feel” he believed he had for what he was doing. All he wanted was for life to stay on a steady course until school started again and our mother could go back to teaching, leaving him free to learn the farm and ranch business and be able to go on doing the things he wanted to with Digby and the Indians—since it was all for our benefit.
LIFE AT THIS TIME
still felt completely normal to me. I remember in early August, my father insisted we all go down to the Liberty to see
Swiss Family Robinson
at the Saturday matinee. My father and I both loved it. But our mother insisted Berner and I read the book—which she still had from high school, and which was a great deal less optimistic and romantic than the motion picture. She had begun her class with the Sisters of Providence by early August and came home with more books, and talking about what the nuns said about Senator Kennedy. People in the South, they said, would never let him win; someone would shoot him before election day. (My father assured us that wasn’t true, that the South was sadly misunderstood, but it was true that the pope in Rome would now have a say-so in American life, and that Kennedy’s father was a whiskey baron.) There was more talk about the Space Needle, which our father said he wanted to see and would take us when it was finished. My sister brought her boyfriend home twice during this time, though never inside the house. I liked him. His name was Rudy Patterson. He was a year older and was a Mormon (which I looked up, and Rudy said meant polygamists, among other things), and already went to high school, which made him intensely interesting to me. He was red-headed and raw-boned and tall with big feet, and had a little pale skim of a mustache he was proud of. Once, he and I walked across the street and shot baskets against the backboard the town had installed there. He told me his plan was to leave school soon and go to California and join a band, or else the Marines. He’d already asked Berner if she wanted to go with him or possibly meet him there some time later, and she’d said no—which made Rudy say Berner was tough as nails, which she was. While we played, under the dense, sweet-smelling bonnet of elms and box elders, thick with humming cicadas, Berner had sat on our front porch steps—exactly as our mother had—squinting into the sun, hugging her knees and watching us scrimmage around. She called out, “Don’t you tell him what I said. I don’t want him in on my secrets.” I didn’t know which of us she was talking to—Rudy or me. I didn’t know Berner’s secrets, although I had once thought I knew everything about her because we were twins. But she must’ve had new secrets by then, since she no longer talked to me about private matters and treated me as if I was much younger than she was and as if her life had started in a direction leading her away from mine.
WHAT I KNOW
firsthand about bad things—seriously bad things—was that late in the first week of August my father came home one evening, and though I didn’t see him, I knew something unusual was going on in the house. You become sensitized to such things by the sound of a porch door slapping closed too hard, or the thump of someone’s heavy boot heels hitting the floorboards, or the creak of a bedroom door opening and a voice beginning to speak, then that door quickly closing, leaving only muffled noises audible.
It was hot and dry and dusty in our house in midsummer, which affected Berner’s allergies. (It was always drafty and cold in winter.) My mother kept the attic fan turned on and liked to sit in the cool bath in the early evening before she cooked dinner, when pastel light shone in through the tiny, square bathroom window. She burned a sandalwood candle on the toilet top and stayed in until the water was cold. My father had been out of the house, supposedly learning about land sales. But when he got home, he went right into the bathroom where our mother was and started talking in a forceful, animated way. The door closed on what he was saying. But I heard him say, “I’ve bumped into some trouble with this . . .” I didn’t hear the rest. I was in my room reading about bees and listening to my radio. I felt the need to perfect my strategy for getting to the State Fair. We had never gone in the four years we’d been there. My mother saw little reason for it, since she didn’t like the rides or the smells, and Berner wasn’t interested.
My father stayed talking to my mother in the bathroom for a long time. It began to get dark outside, and my sister came out of her room and turned on the lights in the living room, closed the curtains and turned off the attic fan so that the house became still.
In a little while the bathroom door opened and my father said, “I can worry about all this later. Just not now.” My mother said, “Of course. I guess I don’t blame you.” He came to the door of my room, which was open. He was wearing his black Acme boots and a white shirt with arrow-slit pockets and pearl buttons and his rattlesnake belt. He liked to dress well after being in a uniform most of his life. Learning to sell ranches had persuaded him he needed to look like a rancher even if he didn’t know anything about ranches. He asked what I was doing. I told him I was learning about bees and intended to visit the State Fair, which I’d mentioned already. There would be a 4-H tent there, and boys my age would be demonstrating the fine points of beekeeping and honey harvesting. “Sounds like a large-size undertaking to me,” he said. “You have to be careful you don’t get stung to death. Bees gang up on you is what I’ve heard.” He walked down to my sister’s door and asked her about her activities and talked about her fish. My mother came out of the bathroom, looking serious, and wearing a green cloth bathrobe and a towel wrapped around her wet hair. She went in the kitchen dressed that way and began taking food out of the refrigerator. My father went in the kitchen after her and said, “I’ll get this straightened out.” She said something I didn’t hear because she said it in a whisper. Then my father walked out onto the front porch, where it was dark and cooler. The street lights were on. He sat in the swing, which had a thin, popping chain, and rocked to the sound of the cicadas. I heard him saying some things to himself, which made me know he was worried. (He talked to himself often—they both did—as if some conversation couldn’t be shared. There was more of such talking when things bothered them.) Once, as he sat rhythmically swinging, he laughed out loud. In a little while he walked out to the street and got in his car and drove off—I guessed—to try to get whatever was worrying him straightened out.
THE NEXT DAY
was Sunday. Again, we didn’t attend any church. My father kept a big family bible, which had his name written in it, in his dresser drawer. He was officially a Church of Christ member and had been saved years before in Alabama. My mother professed to be an “ethical agnostic,” in spite of being Jewish. Berner said she believed everything and also nothing, which explained why she was the way she was. I believed nothing at all that I can remember, not even what belief meant, other than birds flew and fish swam—things you could demonstrate. Sunday, however, was still a day set aside. All day long no one spoke much or loudly, particularly in the morning. My father watched the TV news and later baseball, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, which he didn’t do on weekdays. My mother read a book, worked on her school plans for the fall, and wrote in her journal, which she’d kept from when she was a teenager. She usually took a long walk by herself after breakfast, up Central Avenue and across the river into town, where nothing was going on and the streets were mostly emptied. Afterward she came home and cooked lunch. I’d designated Sunday as my day for practicing chess moves and learning more of the rules, which the boys in the club had informed me were the keys to everything. If you completely internalized the complex rules, you could then play intuitively and with daring, which was how Bobby Fischer played, even when he was only seventeen—not much older than I was.
Nothing was discussed that Sunday morning about what needed to be “straightened out” the night before and that our parents had spent an hour in the bathroom discussing. I wasn’t aware what time my father got home from wherever he went that night. He was simply there Sunday morning in his Bermudas, watching TV. The telephone rang several times. I answered it twice, but there was no one on the line—which wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Nobody let on anything was peculiar. My mother went on her walk to town. My father watched
Meet the Press
. He was interested in the election and believed Communists were taking over Africa but that Kennedy would prevent it. Berner and I went out into the hot, sunny yard and repositioned the poles of the badminton net to give ourselves more room beside the house to play. It was a pretty, vacant morning. Hollyhocks were blooming against the side of the garage. There was nothing to do in Great Falls.