Canada by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

close enough to the Bear’s Paw Mountains that I could make out the tree line and scattered patches of scabby snow the sun never reached all summer. It was hot where we were, but if you went up farther, it would be cold. At a certain point along the road, with the dry, wasted landscape running on ahead unchanging, we pulled off between some fenceless fence posts, turned around, and began back the way we’d come—past the broken-down houses on the left, and the Indians, back to Box Elder and onto Highway 87 toward Great Falls. It felt as if nothing had been accomplished coming out there, nothing our father was interested in or worried about or needed to see—nothing having to do with selling or buying a ranch. I had no idea why we’d gone there. My sister and I didn’t discuss it once we got home.

Chapter 7
    W HAT HAPPENED WAS THAT BY THE FIRST WEEK of August, my father and the Great Northern man—Digby—and my father’s Cree accomplices had conducted three stolen beef transactions that had all gone satisfactorily. Cows were stolen, killed and delivered. Money changed hands. The Indians went away. Everyone was put at their ease. My father believed his recalculated scheme worked well, and didn’t feel precariously in the middle in any way that worried him. He was a man unable not to believe that if things were going well and smoothly, they wouldn’t go well and smoothly forever. Very much like the Indians, who relied on the government, the Air Force had sheltered him from the life most other people faced. And because of what he’d done expertly in the war (mastered the Norden sight, dropped bombs on people he never saw, not gotten killed), he felt that being taken care of was justifiable, which fostered a tendency not to look into things—any things—too closely. Which, with his beef scheme, meant not remembering that middle manning stolen beef carcasses hadn’t finally worked out successfully at the air base. His scheme had caused him, in fact, to lose his captain’s bars and in one way or other had landed him back in civilian life long before he was ready—if he ever would’ve been ready after so much time away.
    It’s also possible that our mother, by being studious and aloof, caused him to feel she was observing him and calculating whether some new failure of his was going to be the reason she should leave him. So that despite his apparent success, his optimistic nature, his new fresh start in the civilian world, her private uncertainties accumulated, and eroded his confidence for the “feel” he believed he had for what he was doing. All he wanted was for life to stay on a steady course until school started again and our mother could go back to teaching, leaving him free to learn the farm and ranch business and be able to go on doing the things he wanted to with Digby and the Indians—since it was all for our benefit.
    LIFE AT THIS TIME still felt completely normal to me. I remember in early August, my father insisted we all go down to the Liberty to see Swiss Family Robinson at the Saturday matinee. My father and I both loved it. But our mother insisted Berner and I read the book—which she still had from high school, and which was a great deal less optimistic and romantic than the motion picture. She had begun her class with the Sisters of Providence by early August and came home with more books, and talking about what the nuns said about Senator Kennedy. People in the South, they said, would never let him win; someone would shoot him before election day. (My father assured us that wasn’t true, that the South was sadly misunderstood, but it was true that the pope in Rome would now have a say-so in American life, and that Kennedy’s father was a whiskey baron.) There was more talk about the Space Needle, which our father said he wanted to see and would take us when it was finished. My sister brought her boyfriend home twice during this time, though never inside the house. I liked him. His name