Authors: Richard Ford
At eleven, the Zion Lutherans, kitty-corner across the street on the side of the park, began clanging their bell as usual and taking in. Cars and pickups arrived as they always did and parked along the curb opposite our house. Families with children walked up to the gray wood building and disappeared inside. I liked watching them from the front porch swing. They were always in good spirits and talked and laughed about subjects that interested them and that I assumed they agreed about. I’d once walked over on a weekday to look in the doors and see whatever there was to see. But the doors were locked and no one was there. The gray clapboard building felt like a store that had gone out of business.
It was just when the Lutherans’ bell had begun ringing that an old car pulled up in front of our house and stopped. I thought the driver—a man—was one of the Lutherans and would get out and go across to the church. But he just sat in the old, crudely painted red Plymouth and smoked a cigarette as if he was waiting on something or someone to start paying attention to him. The car was from back in the ’40s and was muddied up and dented, and for some reason seemed familiar—though I couldn’t have said why. It had its rear side window broken out and its tires didn’t match and one on the back lacked a hubcap. It had been in more than one accident and looked out of place in front of our house, parked behind our father’s Bel Air, which was shiny and clean.
After the man had sat inside smoking for a while—Berner and I watched from the side yard by the badminton net holding our rackets—he looked around at our house and suddenly climbed out, which made the driver’s-side door emit a bang, before he slammed it back.
At almost that same instant my father came out the front door, still in his Bermudas, and went down the concrete walk as if he’d been watching to see if the man would get out. Now that he had, something immediate needed to be done about it.
We both heard our father say, “Okay, whoa. Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa,” as the man came slowly up the walk. “You don’t need to be showing up here now. This is my home,” he said. “This is going to get settled.” Our father laughed at the end of saying that, though nothing seemed funny.
The man just stood on the concrete walk with his chin dramatically lowered, and stared at our father. He didn’t step back when our father approached saying “Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa”; he didn’t offer to shake hands; he didn’t smile as if anything was funny. He was dressed as if he’d come from someplace cold, because he had on heavy maroon woolen trousers and scuffed brown shoes with no socks, and a bright red cardigan over a dirty gray sweatshirt. It was a strange outfit for August.
When he’d stepped up onto the sidewalk, it was clear things hurt in his legs. He had to navigate himself using his shoulders, and his knees pointed in. He wasn’t a large man—not as tall as our father—but he was heavy, as if his bones were cumbersome and awkward to move. He had a great growth of oily black hair tied in the back to make a long ponytail, and thick black-rimmed glasses. His complexion looked orangish and roughed up with acne whelps, and he had a Band-Aid on his neck. He wore a wispy goatee and might’ve been fifty years old, but possibly was younger. He was a stark presence to be in our front yard, since he gave the impression of being unhappy to be there. As far away as Berner and I were standing, by the badminton net, I could smell an odor on the man—a meaty smell and a medicine smell at the same time. After he left, I smelled it on our father.
When the man declined to shake hands or to step back, our father put his hand on the man’s shoulder and stepped close to turn him, and they started talking and walking back toward the Plymouth instead of toward our house. But at a certain point the man took a step sideways off the concrete onto the grass—and away from our father’s grip. He looked away—not toward Berner and me—but away from our father in the other direction, as if he didn’t want to look at him or us. Then he spoke—Berner and I both heard this. “This could turn out real bad for everybody, Cap,” he said. “Cap” was what our father had been called in the Air Force. The man moved his eyes around and focused them on my father. He said something else then, under his breath, as if he knew Berner and I were listening and didn’t want us to hear. After he’d spoken, he crossed his arms, leaned back and set one foot out in front of the other in a way I’d never seen anyone do before. It was as if he wanted to see his own words floating away from him.
Our father began nodding and put both hands in his Bermuda pockets—not saying anything, just nodding. The man began to talk very intently then, and faster. It was muffled, though I could hear the word
you
spoken emphatically, and the word
risk
and the word
brother
. Our father looked down at his rubber sandals and his bare feet and shook his head and said, “No-no-no-no,” as if he was in agreement with what he was hearing, though the words seemed like he wasn’t. Then he said, “That’s not reasonable, I’m sorry,” and “I understand. Well, all right.” Tautness went out of his body at that point, as if he was relieved, or disappointed. Then the man—we later found out his name was Marvin Williams, though he was called “Mouse” and was a Cree Indian—turned away without a concluding word and walked in his painful, shoulder-navigating, knees-in way back to his Plymouth, banged open the door, cranked the motor noisily, and drove off without looking back at our father, leaving him standing on the concrete walk in his shorts and sandals, watching. The Lutherans’ church bell was ringing again—a last call to worship. A man in a light gray suit was closing both front doors. He looked over at our house and waved a hand, but our father didn’t see him.
LATER THAT MORNING
our mother returned from her walk and cooked blinis—our favorite. During the meal our father didn’t say much. He told a joke about a camel that had three humps and said moo. He said Berner and I should learn how to tell jokes, because it would make people like to have us around. Afterward, he and our mother went in their bedroom and closed the door and stayed a very long time—much longer than they’d stayed in the bathroom the previous night. Before our mother got home from her walk, our father had taken off his sandals and played badminton in the yard—us against his one. He cavorted all around, sweating his upper lip and getting out of breath, trying spiritedly to strike the shuttlecock and laughing and having a wonderful time. It was as if things couldn’t be better, and the Indian’s visit hadn’t been about anything important. Berner asked the man’s name, which was when we found out it was Marvin Williams, and that he was a Cree. He was “a businessman,” our father said. He was “honest but demanding.” At one point in our game, he just stood in the warm grassy yard, hands on his hips, smiling, his face red and sweaty. He took a deep breath and said he thought things would soon be better for us all. We might not necessarily be staying in Great Falls but might be experiencing a move to a more promising town he didn’t name—which shocked and instantly worried me, because the start of school was just weeks away and I had made my plans for chess and raising bees and learning a great number of other things. I was happy with the direction things were going—which in retrospect was crazy, because I had no idea about the direction things were going. It was probably, I came to think, in the hours after the Indian, Williams-Mouse, stood in our yard and threatened to kill our father, and possibly kill all of us if he wasn’t paid (which was what I found out he’d said in his menacing, soft voice), that our father began putting together thoughts of needing to do something extraordinary to save us, which turned out to be thoughts about robbing a bank—about which bank to rob, and when, and how he could enlist our mother so he could lessen the likelihood anyone would find out, therefore keeping them out of jail. Which didn’t happen.
L
ATER, WHEN I KNEW THE WHOLE STORY, AS MUCH
as I’d ever know, I found out that the Friday before the Saturday my father talked to my mother when she was in the bathtub, then drove off into the night, the Indians had delivered four butchered Hereford carcasses to Digby at the Great Northern loading dock and had gone away expecting to be paid the next day by our father. Digby had decided that because the stolen beef arrangement worked so seamlessly, he could now take receipt of even more beef, which he would supply to a friend who was the head waiter on another Great Northern train, a concession for which he, Digby, would be well paid. Our father had considered this an excellent development for everyone. But when he went on Saturday night to Digby’s little bungalow in Black Eagle to collect the money—part of which was our father’s for dreaming up the scheme—Digby told him two of the carcasses had arrived in a rancid state (it was summer, and too hot to transport dead meat in an unrefrigerated carpet truck) and weren’t fit to serve to other Indians, much less to dining car passengers luxuriating between Seattle and Chicago. Digby said he wasn’t about to pay our father for meat like that. He’d in fact already had the beeves trucked off and dumped downstream in the Missouri in case anybody—the railroad police, for instance—found him with it, uninspected, without a bill of sale or any explanation for it being in the depot’s cold box.
This was an unwelcome surprise to our father, who told Digby in no uncertain terms that he ought not have taken delivery if the meat was “off.” But since he
had
taken it, the meat and its cost ($400) was his—Digby’s—responsibility.
What our father believed was that Digby, who was a spindly, bug-eyed, little-girlish-voiced character in a bow tie and white jacket, had become frightened of the Indians—whom he already distrusted and who distrusted him—so that his elaborate plan to buy more beef had begun all at once to seem like the bad idea it was. This realization expanded into an even greater fear of being caught and losing his high-paying dining car job. There was other illegal activity, it later came to light, that Digby was embroiled in, for which the Great Falls police would’ve loved to put him in jail. Dining car employees and Pullman porters were known to run strings of girls all along the main line. A girl climbed on in one town, transacted business during the ride, then climbed off the next morning.
Our father didn’t for an instant believe the meat had arrived spoiled. That had never happened before and he saw no reason it ever should. But when he returned to Digby’s house (after he’d counseled with my mother in her bathtub), to again demand his $400, and ready to pound it out of Digby with his fists (which was not like him, except he was desperate), Digby had already left town on the Western Star and was on his way to Chicago, where he had another separate life, leaving our father to contend with the Indians.
Our father was then in the exact predicament he might’ve known he could land in and ought to have taken precautions about. (For example, being present when the meat changed hands would’ve been such a precaution; having an amount of cash in his pocket sufficient to indemnify the sale should something go wrong would’ve been another.) However, all he had in his possession at that moment that could ensure the deal was whatever was left from his monthly Air Force pension, whatever little money our mother had from teaching nine months a year in Fort Shaw, and our Chevrolet. Our parents had nothing set aside for an emergency, which this had become. They had never even had a checking account. They paid for everything with cash.
The next morning—Sunday—Mouse, or Williams, arrived at our house, stood in the yard with my father, and said what he’d said about killing us, a threat our father took very seriously. Williams also stated that he and his associates had incurred greater risk by stealing four cows instead of one, and had gone to much more perilous difficulty in butchering them and transporting them, and had been laughed at by the Negro Digby when they delivered the meat and demanded they be paid $600 instead of the $400 they were originally owed. Williams further told our father that one of his associates was under surveillance by the reservation police specifically due to the cow-stealing scheme, and needed money to make a trip to Wyoming to hide for several months. For which reasons, Williams said, he and his friends were now owed $2,000, and not $600 or the $400 they’d agreed to. Where the $2,000 amount came from he didn’t offer to explain.
Our father wasn’t a man accustomed to being threatened. He was accustomed to getting along well with people, amusing them, being admired for his looks, his nice manners, his southern accent, and for his valiant bombardier’s service in the war. Being threatened with murder exerted a big impact on him. He immediately began to brood and fester about how he could get the money, and quickly came to the extraordinary idea of finding a bank to rob. At that moment, it must’ve seemed better than having the Indians kill him and my mother and Berner and me, better than gathering us all three up, loading us into the Bel Air and abandoning everything in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Other ways of getting the money—borrowing it (he had no credit, his in-laws disliked him, he had no salary and nothing to borrow against), or of coping with the situation, such as by going to the Great Falls police or reasoning with Williams—either didn’t occur to him or, he might’ve felt, would only lead to worse problems. Later, when it might have occurred to him to go to the police and throw himself on their mercy, he’d already decided robbing a bank was a good idea, and that was that.
WHEN MY MOTHER
was in the North Dakota Women’s Penitentiary in Bismarck, where she was imprisoned after her and my father’s trial, she wrote about the next days and the ones preceding them in her chronicle—an account that goes into great detail about what she and my father did. She’d had aspirations to be a poet when she was in college at Walla Walla, and possibly she thought a well-written version of their story would offer a future for her when she got out of prison—which she never did. In her chronicle she is extremely critical of our father and his flaws. She doesn’t excuse herself or plead she was crazy or forced into participating, or even try to explain how she was talked into it. (She does express sorrow about what happened to my sister and me.) In her writing she says she believed she was the person she’d always thought herself to be—reflective, smart, imaginative, possibly alienated and skeptical, conserving, mirthful. (She wasn’t that.) These were the values that caused her never to want Berner and me to assimilate in the places my father’s Air Force job took us. Those places, she felt, would dilute and corrupt what was good and important about us and render us stale and ordinary in terms specific to Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, places she had low regard for and considered unenlightened. She uses these words in the chronicle:
dilute, conserving, alienated, stale, corrupt
. She believed she and my father should never have married—she should’ve seen ahead that they both would’ve been happier if they hadn’t. This was where she wrote about marrying a college professor and having a life as a poet and other such things. She says she definitely should’ve left him the minute the subject of a robbery came up, since she was already considering leaving him. Except what she found out about herself—she wrote—was that while all the ways she knew herself to be (when she looked in the mirror and saw the unusual person she was) were accurate and true, she was also weak. Which she’d never thought before, but was the reason, she believed, she’d married smiling, good-looking, romantic Bev Parsons. (She was pregnant, but she could’ve taken care of that, something even college girls in the ’40s knew how to do.) Being weak was why she hadn’t long ago left Bev and taken us away. These facts now confirmed to her that she was just like anybody else, which led her inexorably (by her demented logic) to robbing a bank. Not that she believed she was a criminal. She never thought that. Her parents hadn’t raised her to be capable of believing such a thing (which may have had to do with being Jewish where there were no Jews, and with preserving a feeling of specialness that didn’t allow adopting other people’s views and cautions, as reasonable as they might’ve been).