Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online

yet, I
wanted
to go duck hunting, to go by boat out into the marsh that makes up the vast, brackish tidal land south and east of our city. I had always imagined I’d go with my father when I was old enough. And I
was
old enough now, and had been taught to fire a rifle—though not a shotgun—in my school. Also, when we spoke that day, he didn’t sound to me like some man who was living with another man in St. Louis. He sounded much as he always had in our normal life when I had gone to Jesuit and he had practiced law in the Hibernia Bank building, and we were a family. Something I think about my father—whose name was Boatwright McKendall and who was only forty-one years old at the time—something about him must’ve wanted things to be as they had been before he met his great love, Dr. Carter. Though you could also say that my father just wanted not to have it be that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted; wouldn’t credit that anything he did might be deemed wrong, or be the cause of hard feeling or divorce or terrible scandal such as what sees you expelled from the law firm your family started a hundred years ago and that bears your name; or that you conceivably caused the early death of your own mother from sheer disappointment. And in fact if anything he did
had
caused someone difficulty, or ruined a life, or set someone on a downward course—well, then he just largely ignored it, or agreed to pay money about it, and afterward tried his level best to go on as if the world was a smashingly great place for everyone and we could all be wonderful friends. It was the absence I mentioned before, the skill he had to not be where he exactly was, but yet to seem to be present to any but the most practiced observer. A son, for instance.
    â€œWell, now look-it here, Mr. Buck-a-roo,” my father said over the telephone from—I guessed—St. Louis. Buck is what I was called and still am, to distinguish me from him (our name is the same). And I remember becoming nervous, as if by agreeing to go with him, and to see him for the first time since he’d left from a New Year’s party at the Boston Club and gone away with Dr. Carter—as if by doing these altogether natural things (going hunting) I was crossing a line, putting myself at risk. And not the risk you might think, based on low instinct, but some risk you don’t know exists until you feel it in your belly, the way you’d feel running down a steep hill and at the bottom there’s a deep river or a canyon, and you realize you can’t stop. Disappointment was what I risked, I know now. But I wanted what I wanted and would not let such a feeling stop me.
    â€œI want you to know,” my father said, “that I’ve cleared all this with your mother. She thinks it’s a wonderful idea.”
    I pictured his yellow hair, his handsome, youthful, unlined face talking animatedly into the receiver in some elegant, sunny, high-ceilinged room, beside an expensive French table with some fancy art objects on top, which he would be picking up and inspecting as he talked. In my picture he was wearing a purple smoking jacket and was happy to be doing what he was doing. “Is somebody else going?” I said.
    â€œOh, God no,” my father said and laughed. “Like who? Francis is too refined to go duck hunting. He’d be afraid of getting his beautiful blue eyes put out. Wouldn’t you, Francis?”
    It shocked me to think Dr. Carter was right there in the room with him, listening. My mother, of course, was still listening to me.
    â€œIt’ll just be you and me and Renard Junior,” my father said, his voice going away from the receiver. I heard a second voice then, a soft, cultured voice, say something there where my father was, some possibly ironic comment about our plans. “Oh Christ,” my father said in an irritated voice, a voice I didn’t know any better than I knew Dr.