Part 1 (1/2)

Canada_a_novel.

Richard Ford.

Chapter 1.

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister's lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank. They weren't strange people, not obviously criminals. No one would've thought they were destined to end up the way they did. They were just regular-although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void the moment they did rob a bank.

My father, Bev Parsons, was a country boy born in Marengo County, Alabama, in 1923, and came out of high school in 1939, burning to be in the Army Air Corps-the branch that became the Air Force. He went in at Demopolis, trained at Randolph, near San Antonio, longed to be a fighter pilot, but lacked the apt.i.tude and so learned bombardiering instead. He flew the B-25s, the light-medium Mitch.e.l.ls, that were seeing duty in the Philippines, and later over Osaka, where they rained destruction on the earth-both on the enemy and undeserving people alike. He was a tall, winning, smiling handsome six-footer (he barely fitted into his bombardier's compartment), with a big square, expectant face and k.n.o.bby cheekbones and sensuous lips and long, attractive feminine eyelashes. He had white s.h.i.+ny teeth and short black hair he was proud of-as he was of his name. Bev. Captain Bev Parsons. He never conceded that Beverly was a woman's name in most people's minds. It grew from Anglo-Saxon roots, he said. ”It's a common name in England. Vivian, Gwen and s.h.i.+rley are men's names there. No one confuses them with women.” He was a nonstop talker, was open-minded for a southerner, had graceful obliging manners that should've taken him far in the Air Force, but didn't. His quick hazel eyes would search around any room he was in, finding someone to pay attention to him-my sister and me, ordinarily. He told corny jokes in a southern theatrical style, could do card tricks and magic tricks, could detach his thumb and replace it, make a handkerchief disappear and come back. He could play boogie-woogie piano, and sometimes would ”talk Dixie” to us, and sometimes like Amos 'n' Andy. He had lost some of his hearing by flying the Mitch.e.l.ls, and was sensitive about it. But he looked sharp in his ”honest” GI haircut and blue captain's tunic and generally conveyed a warmth that was genuine and made my twin sister and me love him. It was also probably the reason my mother had been attracted to him (though they couldn't have been more unsuited and different) and unluckily gotten pregnant from their one hasty encounter after meeting at a party honoring returned airmen, near where he was re-training to learn supply-officer duties at Fort Lewis, in March 1945-when no one needed him to drop bombs anymore. They were married immediately when they found out. Her parents, who lived in Tacoma and were Jewish immigrants from Poland, didn't approve. They were educated mathematics teachers and semiprofessional musicians and popular concertizers in Poznan who'd escaped after 1918 and come to Was.h.i.+ngton State through Canada, and became-of all things-school custodians. Being Jews meant little to them by then, or to our mother-just an old, exacting, constricted conception of life they were happy to put behind them in a land where there apparently were no Jews.

But for their only daughter to marry a smiling, talkative only-son of Scotch-Irish Alabama backwoods timber estimators was never in their thinking, and they soon put it out of their thinking altogether. And while from a distance, it may seem that our parents were merely not made for one another, it was more true that when our mother married our father, it betokened a loss, and her life changed forever-and not in a good way-as she surely must've believed.

My Mother, Neeva Kamper (short for Geneva), was a tiny, intense, bespectacled woman with unruly brown hair, downy vestiges of which ran down her jawline. She had thick eyebrows and a s.h.i.+ny, thin-skinned forehead under which her veins were visible, and a pale indoor complexion that made her appear fragile-which she wasn't. My father jokingly said people where he was from in Alabama called her hair ”Jew hair” or ”immigrant hair,” but he liked it and loved her. (She never seemed to pay these words much attention.) She had small, delicate hands whose nails she kept manicured and s.h.i.+ned and was vain about and gestured with absently. She owned a skeptical frame of mind, was an intent listener when we talked to her, and had a wit that could turn biting. She wore frameless gla.s.ses, read French poetry, often used terms like ”cauchemar” or ”trou de cul,” which my sister and I didn't understand. She wrote poems in brown ink bought through the mail, and kept a journal we weren't permitted to read, and normally had a slightly nose-elevated, astigmatized expression of perplexity-which became true of her, and may always have been true. Before she married my father and quickly had my sister and me, she'd graduated at eighteen from Whitman College in Walla Walla, had worked in a bookstore, featured herself possibly as a bohemian and a poet, and had hoped someday to land a job as a studious, small-college instructor, married to someone different from who she did marry-conceivably a college professor, which would've given her the life she believed she was intended for. She was only thirty-four in 1960, the year these events occurred. But she already had ”serious lines” beside her nose, which was small and pinkish at its tip, and her large, penetrating gray-green eyes had dusky lids that made her seem foreign and slightly sad and dissatisfied-which she was. She possessed a pretty, thin neck, and a sudden, unexpected smile that showed off her small teeth and girlish, heart-shaped mouth, though it was a smile she rarely practiced-except on my sister and me. We realized she was an unusual-looking person, dressed as she typically was in olive-color slacks and baggy-sleeved cotton blouses and hemp-and-cotton shoes she must've sent away to the West Coast for-since you couldn't buy such things in Great Falls. And she only seemed more unusual standing reluctantly beside our tall, handsome, outgoing father. Though it was rarely the case that we went ”out” as a family, or ate in restaurants, so that we hardly noticed how they appeared in the world, among strangers. To us, life in our house seemed normal.

My sister and I could easily see why my mother would've been attracted to Bev Parsons: big, plank shouldered, talkative, funny, forever wanting to please anybody who came in range. But it was never completely obvious why he would take an interest in her-tiny (barely five feet), inward and shy, alienated, artistic, pretty only when she smiled and witty only when she felt completely comfortable. He must've somehow just appreciated all that, sensed she had a subtler mind than his, but that he could please her, which made him happy. It was to his good credit that he looked beyond their physical differences to the heart of things human, which I admired even if it wasn't in our mother to notice.

Still, the odd union of their mismatched physical attributes always plays in my mind as part of the reason they ended up badly: they were no doubt simply wrong for each other and should never have married or done any of it, should've gone their separate ways after their first pa.s.sionate encounter, no matter its outcome. The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became-like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense. A sociologist of those times-the beginning of the '60s-might say our parents were in the vanguard of an historical moment, were among the first who transgressed society's boundaries, embraced rebellion, believed in credos requiring ratification through self-destruction. But they weren't. They weren't reckless people in the vanguard of anything. They were, as I said, regular people tricked by circ.u.mstance and bad instincts, along with bad luck, to venture outside of boundaries they knew to be right, and then found themselves unable to go back.

Though I'll say this about my father: when he returned from the theater of war and from being the agent of whistling death out of the skies-it was 1945, the year my sister and I were born, in Michigan, at the Wurtsmith base in Oscoda-he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecified gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately misunderstanding the world he'd returned home to and having that misunderstanding become his life. Again it must've been that way for millions of boys, although he would never have known it about himself or admitted it was true.

Chapter 2.

Our family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, in 1956, the way many military families came to where they came to following the war. We'd lived on air bases in Mississippi and California and Texas. Our mother had her degree and did subst.i.tute teaching in all those places. Our father hadn't been deployed to Korea, but been a.s.signed to desk jobs at home, in the supply and requisition forces. He'd been allowed to stay in because he'd won combat ribbons, but hadn't advanced beyond captain. And at a certain point-which happened when we were in Great Falls and he was thirty-seven-he decided the Air Force was no longer offering him much of a future and, having put in twenty years, he ought to take his pension and muster out. He felt our mother's lack of social interests and her unwillingness to invite anyone from the base to our house for dinner may have held him back-and possibly he was right. In truth, I think if there'd been someone she admired, she might've liked it. But she never thought there would be. ”It's just cows and wheat out here,” she said. ”There's no real organized society.” In any case, I think our father was tired of the Air Force and liked Great Falls as a place where he thought he could get ahead-even without a social life. He said he hoped to join the Masons.

It was by then the spring of 1960. My sister, Berner, and I were fifteen. We were enrolled in the Lewis (for Meriwether Lewis) Junior High, which was near enough to the Missouri River that from the tall school windows I could see the s.h.i.+ning river surface and the ducks and birds congregated there and could glimpse the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul depot, where pa.s.senger trains no longer stopped, and up to the Munic.i.p.al Airport on Gore Hill, where there were two flights a day, and down the river to the smelter stack and the oil refinery above the falls the city took its name from. I could even, on clear days, see the hazy snowy peaks of the eastern front, sixty miles away, running south toward Idaho and north up to Canada. My sister and I had no idea about ”the west,” except what we saw on TV, or even for that matter about America itself, which we took for granted as the best place to be. Our real life was the family, and we were part of its loose baggage. And because of our mother's growing alienation, her reclusiveness, her feeling of superiority, and her desire that Berner and I not a.s.similate into the ”market-town mentality,” which she believed stifled life in Great Falls, we didn't have a life like most children, which might've involved friends to visit, a paper route, Scouts and dances. If we fit in, our mother felt, it would only increase the chance we'd end up right where we were. It was also true that if your father was at the base-no matter where you lived-you always had few friends and rarely met your neighbors. We did everything at the base-visited the doctor, the dentist, got haircuts, shopped for groceries. People knew that. They knew you wouldn't be where you were for long, so why bother taking the trouble to know you. The base carried a stigma, as if things that went on there were what proper people didn't need to know about or be a.s.sociated with-plus, my mother being Jewish and having an immigrant look, and being in some ways bohemian. It was something we all talked about, as if protecting America from its enemies wasn't decent.

Still, at least in the beginning, I liked Great Falls. It was called ”The Electric City” because the falls produced power. It seemed rough-edged and upright and remote-yet still was a part of the limitless country we'd already lived in. I didn't much like it that the streets only had numbers for names-which was confusing and, my mother said, meant it was a town laid out by pinchpenny bankers. And, of course, the winters were frozen and tireless, and the wind hurtled down out of the north like a freight train, and the loss of light would've made anybody demoralized, even the most optimistic souls.

In truth, though, Berner and I never thought of ourselves as being from anywhere in particular. Each time our family moved to a new place-any of the far-flung locales-and settled ourselves into a rented house, and our father put on his pressed blue uniform and drove off to work at some air base, and my mother commenced a new teaching position, Berner and I would try to think that this was where we'd say we were from if anyone asked. We practiced saying the words to each other on our way to whatever our new school was each time. ”h.e.l.lo. We're from Biloxi, Mississippi.” ”h.e.l.lo. I'm from Oscoda. It's way up in Michigan.” ”h.e.l.lo. I live in Victorville.” I tried to learn the basic things the other boys knew and to talk the way they talked, pick up the slang expressions, walk around as though I felt confident being there and couldn't be surprised. Berner did the same. Then we'd move away to some other place, and Berner and I would try to get situated all over again. This kind of growing up, I know, can leave you either cast out and adrift, or else it can encourage you to be malleable and dedicated to adjusting-the thing my mother disapproved of, since she didn't do it, and held out for herself some notion of a different future, more like the one she'd imagined before she met our father. We-my sister and I-were small players in a drama she saw to be relentlessly unfolding.

As a result, what I began to care greatly about was school, which was the continual thread in life besides my parents and my sister. I never wanted school to be over. I'd spend as much time inside school as I could, poring over books we were given, being around the teachers, breathing in the school odors, which were the same everywhere and like no other. Knowing things became important to me, no matter what they were. Our mother knew things and appreciated them. I wanted to be like her in that way, since I could keep the things I knew, and they would characterize me as being well-rounded and promising-characteristics that were important to me. No matter if I didn't belong in any of those places, I did belong in their schools. I was good at English and history and science and math-subjects my mother was also good at. Each time we picked up and moved, the only fact of life that made moving frightening was that for some reason I wouldn't be allowed to return to school, or I would miss crucial knowledge that could a.s.sure my future and was obtainable nowhere else. Or that we'd go to some new place where there would be no school for me at all. (Guam was once discussed.) I feared I'd end up knowing nothing, have nothing to rely on that could distinguish me. I'm sure it was all an inheritance from my mother's feelings of an unrewarded life. Though it may also have been that our parents, aswirl in the thickening confusion of their own young lives-not being made for each other, probably not physically desiring each other as they briefly had, becoming gradually only satellites of each other, and coming eventually to resent one another without completely realizing it-didn't offer my sister and me enough to hold on to, which is what parents are supposed to do. However, blaming your parents for your life's difficulties finally leads nowhere.

Chapter 3.

When our father took his discharge in the early spring, we were all of us interested in the presidential campaign then going on. They agreed about the Democrats and Kennedy, who'd soon be nominated. My mother said my father liked Kennedy because he imagined a resemblance. My father profoundly disliked Eisenhower for reasons having to do with American bombers being sacrificed to ”softening up Jerry” behind the lines on D-Day, and due to Eisenhower's traitorous silence about MacArthur, who my father revered, and because Ike's wife was known to be ”a tippler.”

He disliked Nixon as well. He was a ”cold fish,” ”looked Italian,” and was a ”war Quaker,” which made him a hypocrite. He also disliked the UN, which he thought was too expensive and allowed Commies like Castro (who he called a ”two-bit actor”) to have a voice in the world. He kept a framed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in our living room on the wall above the Kimball spinet and the mahogany and bra.s.s metronome that didn't work but came with the house. He praised Roosevelt for not letting polio defeat him, for killing himself with work to save the country, for bringing the Alabama backwoods out of the dark ages with the REA, and for putting up with Mrs. Roosevelt who he called ”The First Prune.”

My father maintained a strong ambivalence about being from Alabama. On the one hand, he pictured himself as a ”modern man” and not a ”hill-William,” as he said. He held modern views about many things-such as race, from having worked alongside Negroes in the Air Force. He felt Martin Luther King was a man of principle and Eisenhower's civil rights act was badly needed. He felt the rights of women needed a fairer shake, and that war was a tragedy and a waste he knew about intimately.

On the other hand, when our mother said something slighting about the South-which she often did-he grew broody and declared Lee and Jeff Davis to be ”men of substance,” even though their cause had misled them. Many good things had come from the South, he said, including more than the cotton gin and water skis. ”Perhaps you could name me one,” my mother would say, ”naturally excluding yourself, of course.”

The instant he quit putting on his Air Force blues and going to the base, our father found a job selling new Oldsmobile cars. He felt he'd be a natural at selling. His warm personality-happy, welcoming, congenial, confident, talk-a-blue-streak-would attract strangers and make what other people found difficult easy for him. Customers would trust him because he was a southerner, and southerners were known to be more down to earth than silent westerners. Money would start coming in once the model year ended and the big sales discounts kicked up the values. For his job, he was given a pink-and-gray Oldsmobile Super-88 to use as a demonstrator, which he parked in front of our house on First Avenue SW, where it would serve as good advertising. He took all of us for drives out to Fairfield, toward the mountains, and east toward Lewistown and south in the direction of Helena. ”Orientation-explanatory-performance checks,” he called these day trips-though he knew little of the country in any direction and actually knew very little about cars except how to drive them, which he loved doing. He felt it was easy for an Air Force officer to land a good job and that he should've left the service when the war was over. He would be way ahead now.

With our father out of the Air Force and working, my sister and I believed our life might finally achieve a permanent footing. We'd been in Great Falls four years. My mother caught a ride each school day out to the little town of Fort Shaw, where she taught the fifth grade. She never talked about teaching, but she seemed to like it and sometimes spoke about the other teachers and remarked that they were dedicated people (though she seemed to have little other use for them and would never want them visiting our house any more than people from the base). At the end of the summer I could foresee starting Great Falls High School, where I'd found out there was a chess club and a debating society, and where I could also learn Latin, since I was too small and light to play sports and had no interest in any case. My mother said she expected Berner and me both to go to college, but we would have to go on our wits because there would never be enough money. Though, she said, Berner already had a personality too much like hers to make a good enough impression to get in and should probably just try to marry a college graduate instead. In a p.a.w.n shop on Central Avenue she found several college pennants and tacked these to our walls. They were articles other kids had outgrown. Furman, Holy Cross and Baylor were my three. Rutgers, Lehigh and Duquesne were my sister's. We knew nothing about these schools, of course, including where they were located-though I had pictures in my mind of what they looked like. Old brick buildings with heavy shade trees and a river and a bell tower.

Berner, by this time, had begun not to be so easy to get along with. We had not been in the same cla.s.ses since grade school because it was considered unhealthy for twins to be together all the time-though we'd always helped each other with our schoolwork and done well. She stayed in her room much of the time now, read movie magazines she bought at the Rexall, and Peyton Place and Bonjour Tristesse, which she smuggled home and would not say from where. She watched her fish in her aquarium, and listened to music on the radio and had no friends-which was true of me also. I didn't mind being away from her and having a separate life with my own interests and thoughts about the future. Berner and I were fraternal twins-she was six minutes older-and looked nothing alike. She was tall, bony, awkward, freckled all over-left-handed where I was right-handed-with warts on her fingers, pale gray-green eyes like our mother's and mine, and pimples, and a flat face and a soft chin that wasn't pretty. She had wiry brown hair parted in the middle and a sensuous mouth like our father's, though she had little hair anywhere else-on her legs or arms-and had no chest to speak of, which was true of our mother as well. She usually wore pants and a jumper dress over them that made her look larger than she was. She sometimes wore white lace gloves to cover up her hands. She also had allergies for which she carried a Vicks torpedo inhaler in her pocket, and her room always smelled like Vicks when you came near her door. To me, she resembled a combination of our parents: my father's height and my mother's looks. I sometimes found myself thinking of Berner as an older boy. Other times I wished she looked more like me so she'd be nicer to me, and we could be closer. Though I never wanted to look like her.

I, on the other hand, was smaller and trim with straight brown hair parted wide on the side, and smooth skin with very few pimples-”pretty” features more like our father's, but delicate like our mother. Which I liked, as I liked the way our mother dressed me-in khaki pants and clean, ironed s.h.i.+rts and oxford shoes from the Sears catalog. Our parents made jokes about Berner and me coming from the postman or the milkman and being ”oddments.” Though they only, I felt, meant Berner. In recent months, Berner had become sensitive about how she looked, and acted more and more disaffected-as if something had gone wrong in her life in a short amount of time. At one moment in my memory, she'd been an ordinary, freckle-faced, cute, happy little girl who had a wonderful smile and could make funny faces that had made us all laugh. But she now acted skeptical about life, which made her sarcastic and skillful at spotting my defects, but mostly made her seem angry. She didn't even like her name-which I did like and thought it made her unique.

After my father had sold Oldsmobiles for a month, he was involved in a minor rear-end traffic accident while he was driving too fast in his demonstrator, and was also back on the base where he had no business being. After that, he began to sell Dodges and brought home a beautiful two-tone brown-and-white Coronet hardtop with what was called pushb.u.t.ton drive and electric windows and swivel seats, and also stylish fins, gaudy red tail-lights and a long whipping antenna. This car likewise sat in front of our house for a period of three weeks. Berner and I got in it and played the radio, and my father took us on more drives and we let the air rush in with all four windows down. On several occasions he drove out the Bootlegger Trail and let us drive and taught us to back up and how to turn the wheels correctly for skidding on ice. Unfortunately he didn't sell any Dodges and came to the conclusion that in a place like Great Falls-a rough country town of only fifty thousand, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with frugal Swedes and suspicious Germans, and only a small percentage of moneyed people who might be willing to spend their money on fancy cars-he was in the wrong business. He quit that then and took a job selling and trading used cars on a lot out near the base. Airmen were always in money sc.r.a.pes and getting divorced and being sued and married again and put in jail and needing cash. They bought and traded automobiles as a form of currency. You could make money being the middle man-a position he liked. Plus the airmen would be apt to do business with a former officer, who understood their special problems and didn't look down on them the way other townspeople did.

In the end, he didn't stay long at that job either. Though on two or three occasions he took Berner and me out to the car lot to show us around. There was nothing for us to do there but wander among the rows of cars, in the shattering, hot breeze, under the flapping pennants and the silver flashers-on-wires, gazing at the pa.s.sing base traffic from between the car hoods baking in the Montana sun. ”Great Falls is a used car town, not a new car town,” our father said, standing hands on hips on the steps of the little wooden office where the salesmen waited for customers. ”New cars put everybody in the poorhouse. A thousand dollars is gone the second you drive off the lot.” At about this time-late June-he said he was thinking of taking a driving trip down to Dixie, to see how things looked there, among the ”left backs.” My mother told him this was a trip he'd make on his own and without his children, which annoyed him. She said she didn't want to get close to Alabama. Mississippi had been enough. The Jewish situation was worse than for coloreds, who at least belonged there. In her view, Montana was better because no one even knew what a Jewish person was-which ended their discussion. Our mother's att.i.tude toward being Jewish was that sometimes it was a burden, and other times it distinguished her in a way she accepted. But it was never good in all ways. Berner and I didn't know what a Jewish person was, except our mother was one, which by ancient rules made us officially Jews, which was better than being from Alabama. We should consider ourselves ”non-observant,” or ”deracinated,” she said. This meant we celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and the Fourth of July all the same, and didn't attend a church, which was fine because there wasn't a Jewish one in Great Falls anyway. Someday it might mean something, but it didn't have to be now.

When our father had tried to sell used cars for a month, he came home one day with a used car that he'd bought for himself, and had traded away our '52 Mercury for-a white-and-red '55 Bel Air Chevrolet, bought off the lot where he'd been working. ”A good deal.” He said he'd arranged to begin a new job selling farms and ranch land-something he admitted he knew nothing about but was signed up to take a course on in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the YMCA. The other men in the company would help him. His father had been a timber estimator, so he was confident he had a good feel for things ”out in the wilds”-better than he did for things in town. Plus, when Kennedy was elected in November, a period of buoyancy would dawn, and the first thing people would want to do was buy land. They weren't making more of it, he said, even though there seemed to be a lot of it around there. The percentages in selling used cars, he'd learned, were stacked against anybody but the dealer. He didn't know why he had to be the last person to find these things out. Our mother agreed.

We, of course, didn't know it then, my sister and I, but the two of them must've realized that they'd begun to draw away from each other during this time-after he'd left the Air Force and was supposedly finding himself in the world-and to recognize they saw each other differently, possibly begun to understand that the differences between them weren't going away but were getting larger. All the congested, preoccupying, tumultuous, moving around base after base and raising two children on the fly, years of it, had allowed them to put off noticing what they should've noticed at the beginning-and it was probably more her than him: that what had seemed small had become something she, at least, didn't like now. His optimism, her alienated skepticism. His southernness, her immigrant Jewishness. His lack of education, her preoccupation with it and sense of unfulfillment. When they realized it (or when she did)-again, this was after my father accepted his discharge and forward motion changed-they each began to experience a tension and foreboding peculiar to each of them and not shared by the other. (This was recorded in various things my mother wrote, and in her chronicle.) If things had been allowed to follow the path thousands of other lives follow-the everyday path toward ordinary splitting up-she could've just packed Berner and me up, put us on the train out of Great Falls and headed us to Tacoma, where she was from, or to New York or Los Angeles. If that had happened, each of them would've had a chance at a good life out in the wide world. My father might've gone back to the Air Force, since leaving it had been hard for him. He could've married someone else. She could've returned to school once Berner and I had gone to college. She could've written poems, followed her early aspirations. Fate would've dealt them improved hands.

And yet if they were telling this story, it would naturally be a different one, in which they were the princ.i.p.als in the events that were coming, and my sister and I the spectators-which is one thing children are to their parents. The world doesn't usually think about bank robbers as having children-though plenty must. But the children's story-which mine and my sister's is-is ours to weigh and apportion and judge as we see it. Years later in college, I read that the great critic Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Which means it's for the composer to determine what's equal to what, and what matters more and what can be set to the side of life's hurtling pa.s.sage onward.