Canada (48 page)
Authors: Richard Ford
WHAT WAS THE OUTCOME
of it all—two murders? Little, that I personally know about. The Americans’ Chrysler was hidden in Charley’s Quonset, then driven down to the States by Ollie Gedins and one of his cousins, using the Americans’ identification, which no one at the U.S. border would’ve been careful enough to notice (it was Canada, it was 1960). The two Canadians checked themselves into the Hi-line Motel in Havre, Montana, using the names Jepps and Crosley; then quietly disappeared into the Montana night, leaving the car parked in front of the room, and the authorities to search for the men, believing they’d left Canada, gotten into Havre, then mysteriously gone out of sight. It’s possible the RCMP came to the Leonard later on, asking questions, showing photos. No one connected Arthur Remlinger to the deaths, just as they didn’t connect him to the bombing years before. In the case of Jepps and Crosley, buried out on the soon-frozen prairie (the ground had been just soft enough for the holes to be opened), there was never proof their deaths had even occurred. If someone came looking more closely—a wife, a relative up from Detroit—it would’ve been long after the time I’d taken the bus to Winnipeg.
Something certainly must’ve passed through the electrical currents of the Leonard in the days after the murders. Charley Quarters, however, continued taking Sports into the fields each morning. Remlinger continued circulating spiritedly through the dining room and the bar at night. I was forbidden to take part in anything, as if I was no longer trusted. But I was still allowed to eat in the kitchen, and stay in my room, to be at loose ends around the Leonard, or to roam the wintry streets of Fort Royal as I had in the warm days of September. I saw Charley Quarters’ half-ton on the street and in the parking yard behind the hotel. Once I encountered Arthur Remlinger in the lobby where the Americans had registered in. He was reading a letter. He looked up at me in a way he hadn’t ever before. He seemed energetic, as if at that moment he wished to express something to me he also hadn’t expressed—though his face quickly changed and seemed almost stern. “Sometimes, Dell, you have to cause trouble for things to be clear,” he said. “We all deserve a second chance”—which he’d said the night of the murders. What he said didn’t make sense, and I didn’t know what to say back. I’d seen him murder two people. I was beyond words. He put his letter in his coat pocket, and just walked away. I believe that was how he understood shooting two men and burying them in goose pits on the prairie: it was in behalf of a certain clarity he sought, and of relieving his suffering. I tried to understand it and reconcile it with how I felt—which was mortified and ashamed, as if some part of Remlinger’s absence had opened in me. But I never could.
I don’t know what Florence either did or didn’t know about the murders. My private view is that she knew about them, and at the same time didn’t. She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind. So much of life fits into that category. Marriage, for one thing. To do that was consistent with the little I knew about her.
On the fourth day after the murders—the eighteenth of October—Florence came to my room and woke me. She’d brought a pasteboard suitcase with leather latches, and stickers on the side that said
PARIS NEW ORLEANS
and
LAS VEGAS
and
NIAGARA FALLS.
She set this on the dresser and said I couldn’t go the rest of my life with my belongings in a pillowcase. I could return it when I saw her again. She had a bus ticket, which she gave to me, along with a small oil painting she’d made, showing the caragana row at the back of the town of Partreau, the white bee hive boxes beyond, the prairie and blue sky fully painted in. “This is a better view than previous,” she said in a business-like way. “This’ll make you remember things more optimistically. The town is out of sight.” (This, as much as anything, made me think she knew about the murders.) I told her I liked the painting, which I did very much and was astonished to believe it was mine. It was what I should’ve told her about her other painting, and hoped this would compensate. I put my few clothes, my chess pieces, my
Chess Fundamentals
book and my roll-up cloth board, my two
World Book
volumes, the
Building the Canadian Nation
she’d given me, but not my
Bee Sense
book, which I’d given up on—all inside the suitcase. Which made it weighty. Together we walked downstairs, out of the hotel and down the blustery main street of Fort Royal, to the barber shop where I’d gotten my hair cut in those last days, as if I knew something was going to happen to me. We stood inside the glass door, and Florence told me she was putting me on the bus, and I should stay on until Winnipeg—a distance of five hundred miles, which would take until early the next morning. Her son Roland would meet me there. I would live with him and be put in school and taught by the nuns, until things could be “properly sorted out.” It would all be fine and dandy. It was good I was leaving before the winter took its grip on life. There was really no use, she said, in saying more about things. She hugged me and kissed me when the bus arrived—things she’d never done, and that she only did then because she felt sorry for me. She would see me again, she said. I did not say good-bye to anyone but her. It was as if I’d already left some time before and was just catching up with myself. Ideas about parting, in which kind formalities are observed all around, turn out to be an exception in life rather than a rule.
I was, of course, very, very happy to be leaving. When I’d sat in the car after the shootings, and before the removal of the Americans, I’d looked around out Remlinger’s car windows at the Americans’ car and at Partreau, there in the dark and snow, and had decided it was a place made for murders, a place of absence and promises abandoned. I had almost escaped it, I thought, but finally I hadn’t. This, I felt—in my seat on the bus, rolling out of Fort Royal and Saskatchewan—seemed to be my last best chance.
I had very few looking-back thoughts as the bus plowed eastward. I have never been good at that. Events must sink into the ground and percolate up naturally again for me to pay them proper heed. Or else be forgotten. I didn’t for an instant think all the things that had happened to me would color how I thought of my parents and their much smaller crime. Neither did anything enhance my belief that I would ever see them again—though I wanted to. The uses that Remlinger had put me to—to be his audience, then to be his supposed source of interest, then to act the part of his son, then to be his surety, his witness and accomplice—were not things I was glad about. But they hadn’t, for all of it, kept me from climbing the steps on that bus, or kept me from a future I wanted to have.
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.
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.
