Canada by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

was ready to collapse. Where were their parents, I wondered.
    “I think you could ask the same question about the Parsons family, couldn’t you?” my father said, as if this was a joke. “What are we doing in Montana? We oughta be in Hollywood. I could be the double for Roy Rogers.” He broke into a song, then. He often sang. He had a mellow speaking voice I liked hearing, but he didn’t have a good singing voice. Berner usually covered her ears. This time he sang, “Home, home on the range, where the goats and pachyderms play.” It was one of his jokes. I was thinking these Indian boys didn’t play chess or have debates, or probably go to school at all, and would never amount to anything.
    “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