Authors: Richard Ford
WHEN MY FATHER
got home Wednesday night at about eight he was in a buoyant humor. You would’ve thought he’d cinched the best business deal in the world, discovered a gold mine or an oil well or won a lottery. He still had on his Air Force jumpsuit and his grass-stained tennis shoes and hadn’t shaved. He’d brought back his blue bag that had had his gun secretly in it. (I’d gone into his sock drawer during my house-cleaning assignments to satisfy myself that I’d seen what I’d seen. It wasn’t there. He’d had it with him.)
For a little while after he arrived he strode around our house, talking—talking to our mother in the kitchen, talking to Berner and me, sometimes just talking to himself. He was loose-limbed and relaxed and looked into all the rooms, as if he’d noticed how clean they were. His speaking voice was confident and sounded to me more southern than usual, which was the way he talked when he felt unguarded, or when he told a joke or had a drink. The changing effects of modern life were on his mind: there was a satellite in the sky now that predicted the weather and looked like a star at night. He thought this could be a boon to aeronautical navigation. In Brazil the government had constructed a completely new city right out of the jungle and moved thousands of people there. This would solve racial problems, he thought. We could all buy a new kidney now when our old ones wore out—which was self-evidently good. He’d heard this news on a Canadian radio station in his car. It’d come in clearly because he’d been close to the border during his drive.
After his shower, as I said, he accompanied Berner and me out onto the front porch at dusk and told us what the prairie looked like—an ocean. We looked up for the satellite circling in the sky, and he said he believed he saw it, though we didn’t. He talked about his growing-up years in the state of Alabama and all the funny things people said and how colorful it was compared to Montana—where people lacked a happy sense of humor and thought being hard-bit and unfriendly were virtues. He asked us both again—because he often asked this—if we felt like we were Alabamians. We both again said we didn’t. He asked me where I felt like I was from. I told him Great Falls. Berner first said nowhere, then she said she was from Mars, and we all laughed. He talked for a while about having dreamed of being a pilot but only qualifying as a bombardier and how disappointed he’d been, but that disappointments were educational and sometimes reversed outcomes were better. He talked about the terrible errors people had made in learning to drop bombs, and what a heavy responsibility it was. Once or twice our mother came outside from the kitchen. He’d brought home two bottles of Schlitz beer, and they’d each drunk one—which they didn’t regularly do. It made them playful, which was how our mother’d become with us while he was gone. She’d put on a pair of white pedal pushers that revealed her thin ankles, some flat cotton shoes, and a pretty green blouse—clothes we didn’t know she owned. She looked like a young girl and smiled more than she normally would’ve and held her beer bottle by its neck and drank it in small swallows. She acted affectionately toward our father and laughed and shook her head at silly things he said. A couple of times she patted him on the shoulder and said he was a card. (As I said, she was a good listener.) Though he didn’t seem any different to me. He was a man in a good humor most of the time.
Berner did tell him when we were still on the porch and cicadas had started working in the trees, that strange people had been driving past our house and there’d been phone calls where no one talked. The people who’d driven past, she believed, were Indians. My father just said, “Oh, those boys are all right. Don’t worry about them. They don’t understand the white man’s ways. They’re fine, though.”
I asked him about the business he’d been prospecting after. He said that was all working out perfectly, but he needed to go back soon to settle things, and maybe I’d go with him this time. We could all go. I asked if what he’d said on Sunday was true—that we might be moving to another town. I was still fretting about school, the chess club, etc., the things I had a stake in. He smiled and said no, we wouldn’t be moving. It was time for our family to settle down and Berner and I should make some friends and live like respectable citizens. He looked forward to success at his job selling ranch property. He’d teach me the tricks of that as soon as he learned them, though I didn’t see how this squared with a new business opportunity. I thought about asking him why he’d taken his pistol on a business trip. But I didn’t because I didn’t think he’d tell me the real reasons. Thinking about it now, none of what he was saying seemed the least bit true to me. I just knew I was supposed to believe it. Children get as good at pretending as adults.
When we ate dinner it was after ten thirty. I was sleepy and not hungry anymore. The telephone rang two more times while we were at the table. One time my father answered and laughed heartily and said he’d call whoever it was later. The other time he stood and listened as if someone was talking seriously to him. When he came back he said, “Nothing, that was nothing. Just a follow-up.”
At the table our mother asked him if he’d noticed anything different about Berner. He certainly had, he said. Her hair looked better and he liked it. She pointed out that Berner was wearing lipstick—which she was, again—and if we didn’t watch out she’d run away to Hollywood or France. My father said Berner could go up to the Sisters of Providence with our mother and arrange to become a nun with a vow of chastity—which made my mother laugh, but not Berner. I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer—or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments about her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim—as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before leading our family to ruin.
I WILL SAY THIS
about our father. All during that night when we were a family, laughing, joking, eating—ignoring what was hanging over us—his features had changed again. When he’d left home two days before, he’d looked fleshy and exhausted. His features had been loose and indistinct and washed out—as if his every step was reluctant and unpracticed. But when he came back that night and strode around the house declaring on what interested him—satellites, South American politics, organ transplants, how all our lives could be better—his features looked sharpened and chiseled. In the grainy light above our supper table, he’d become intent and precise-looking. Our father had small hazel eyes—light brown disks you wouldn’t pay attention to. They would’ve seemed weak eyes because he squinted when he smiled. And since his face was big boned, his eyes were often lost in the overall effect. However, at our dinner table his face now seemed to be
about
his eyes, as if they saw a world they hadn’t before. They gleamed. When he looked at me with these eyes, I at first felt good and positive. But eventually I became uncomfortable. It was as if he was reappraising everything, as when he’d roamed around the rooms in our house two hours before and seemed to be seeing them for the first time, and was taking a new interest in them. It had made the house feel foreign to me, as if he was planning a use for it that it hadn’t had. His eyes made me feel the same way.
During all these years I’ve thought about his eyes, and how they became so different. And since so much was about to change because of him, I’ve thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face. He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was. I’ve seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men—homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter. In their faces—plenty of them were handsome, but ruined—I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves. It’s a theory of destiny and character I don’t like or want to believe in. But it’s there in me like a hard understory. I don’t, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself:
There’s my father. My father is that man. I used to know him.
T
HINGS YOU DID. THINGS YOU NEVER DID. THINGS
you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
After Berner and I had gone to bed on the Wednesday night my father returned, I listened to my parents in the kitchen, talking, laughing, washing dishes. The noise of water running. The clatter of plates and silverware. A cabinet opening and clicking closed. Their softened voices.
“Nobody would ever think . . .” my father said, then I couldn’t hear the rest.
“Do you want to make a family outing out of it?” my mother said. The water went on, then off. It was her more sarcastic voice.
“Nobody would ever think,” he said again. Then my name. “Dell.”
“You’re not. No,” she said.
“Okay.” Dried plates being stacked.
“So, are you happy?” Too loud for me not to hear.
“What’s happy got to do with it?”
“Everything. Absolutely.”
And this was my dream: running out in my pajamas into the kitchen light, where they were standing, looking at me. My tall father—his small eyes still gleaming. My tiny mother in her white pedal pushers and pretty green blouse with green buttons. A face of grave concern. “I’m going,” I say. Fists clenched. Face damp. Heart pounding. My parents begin to recede in my vision, as when you’re sick and fever shrinks the world and distance lengthens. My parents grew smaller and smaller until I was in the harshly lit kitchen alone, and they were at the vanishing point, just about to disappear.
I
SLEPT LATE ON THURSDAY, FROM HAVING BEEN UP
and hearing them move around in the night. Our mother came in my room at eight—her glasses, her face soft and peering, close to my face, her small cool hand touching my bare shoulder. Her breath smelled sweet with Ipana and sour with tea. The door to my room stood open. Our father’s figure passed by it. He was wearing blue jeans and a plain white shirt and his Acmes.
“Your sister’s had breakfast. There’s Cream of Wheat for you.” Her eyes were focused on my face, as if she saw something unexpected there. “We have to go away for a day. We’ll be back tomorrow. It’ll be a good experience for you two to look after things.” Her face was calm. She’d made her mind up on something.
Our father stopped in the doorway, his hair combed and shiny. He was shaved. My room smelled like his talcum. He was very tall in the empty door space.
“You and your sister don’t answer the phone,” he said. “And don’t go anywhere. We’ll be back tomorrow evening. This’ll be good experience for you.”
“Where’re you going?” I gazed up at the sunlight behind him in the living room, my eyes burning from too little sleep.
“I have some more business. I mentioned it,” he said. “I need your mother’s opinion.” He was talking softly, but I could see a vein in his forehead was prominent.
She looked at him—as if she hadn’t heard this before. She was kneeling beside my bed, her fingers lightly on my chest. “That’s right,” she said.
“Can we go with you?” I said.
“We’ll take you next time,” he said.
My dream passed in my mind. I’m going. Shouting. Fists clenched.
“Look after your sister.” He smiled knowingly. “She’s under Colonel Parsons’ jurisdiction here.” He made a joke out of things if he could.
“Are you going to shoot somebody?”
“Oh my God,” my mother said.
My father’s large mouth, which had been smiling, fell open. He squinted—as if a glaring light had been switched on. “Why would you say that?”
“He knows,” my mother said. She stood beside my bed and stared down at me, as if I was to blame for something. I didn’t know anything.
“What do you think you know, Dell?” My father’s smile resumed its activity across his face. He seemed understanding.
“You took your pistol last time.”
He took a step forward into my room. “Oh. People carry guns out here. That’s common. It’s the Wild West. You don’t ever shoot anybody.”
My mother was looking at me steadily. Her small eyes were intent behind her spectacles, as if she was studying me for some sign. She was sweating under her blouse—I smelled it. It was already hot in the house.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“He’s not afraid,” my father said, and stepped out of the doorway and looked toward the clock in the kitchen. “We need to go.” He disappeared into the hall.
My mother continued to stare at me, as if I’d become a person she didn’t completely know.
“Think of some wonderful place you’d like to go, why don’t you?” she said. “I’ll take you there. You and Berner.”
The front screen slapped shut. “He’s under Colonel Parsons’ jurisdiction here,” I heard him say. He was talking to Berner on the porch.
“Moscow,” I said. I’d read in
Chess Master
that great players came from Russia. Mikhail Tal—who was famous for his sacrificing style and terrible stare. Alexander Alekhine—noted for his aggressiveness. I’d looked Moscow up in the
Merriam-Webster
, and then in the
World Book
, and finally on the globe on the dresser in my room. I didn’t know what the Soviet Union was, or why it was different from Russia. Lenin, who my father said played chess, had played a part in it. And Stalin. Men he despised. He said Stalin had put Roosevelt in the grave the same as if he’d shot him.