Canada: A Novel Part 12

The dark beaded-board walls of Arthur Remlinger's bedroom and his small sitting room and bathroom were shadowy with the venetian blinds closed and only table lamps lit, and were hung with a variety of unusual things. A large yellowed map of the United States with white pins pressed in at various locations-Detroit, Cleveland, Ohio, Omaha, Nebraska, and Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton. No indication was given for what these might relate to. There was an oil painting framed and hung beside the bedroom window, showing-I recognized it-the grain elevator in Partreau, with the prairie stretching off to the north. Remlinger had said this had been painted by Florence in the American Nighthawk fas.h.i.+on-which I hadn't understood and couldn't look up because I'd left my "N" World Book volume in Great Falls. Elsewhere on the wall was a framed photograph of four tall boys, young and confident, smiling, hands on their hips, wearing heavy wool suits and wide ties, posed in front of a brick building that had the word Emerson above its wide doors. There was another picture of a thin, fresh-faced, smiling young man with a shock of blond hair (Arthur Remlinger, taken years before-his pale eyes were unmistakable). He was standing with one long arm draped over the shoulders of a slender woman in blousy trousers, who was also smiling-both of them beside what my father called a "ball-cap Ford coupe," from the '40s. There was a picture anybody would've recognized as a family, standing in a straight line, taken many years before. A large woman with dark hair tied severely back, wearing a shapeless, rough, light-colored dress, was frowning beside a tall big-headed man with heavy brows and deep-set eyes and enormous hands, who was also frowning. An older dark-haired girl with a brazen smile stood beside a tall, skinny boy who I felt was also Arthur Remlinger, and who was wearing a boy's wool four-b.u.t.ton suit with too-short trousers and boots. The girl must've been Mildred but was unrecognizable. They were posed with a great sand dune behind them. At the side in the picture was a lake or possibly an ocean.

In the corner of the musty room was a standing clothes rack with belts and suspenders and bow ties hung on its bra.s.s hooks. A closet was stuffed with clothes-heavy suits, tweed jackets, starched s.h.i.+rts, the floor cluttered with large, expensive-looking shoes, some with pale hosiery stuffed inside them. There were women's clothes as well-a nightgown and slippers and some dresses I a.s.sumed were Florence's. In the bathroom beside Remlinger's silver monogrammed brush and combs and witch hazel bottle and shaving articles, were jars of cold cream and a hanging rubber water bottle and a shower cap and a blue decorated dish with bobby pins in it.

On the wall, above the ornamented wooden double bed, were shelves of books-thick blue ones on chemistry and physics and Latin, and leather-bound novels by Kipling and Conrad and Tolstoy, and several volumes with just names on their spines: Napoleon, Caesar, U. S. Grant, Marcus Aurelius. There were also thinner books with t.i.tles that said Free Riders, and Captive Pa.s.sengers, and The Fundamental Right, and Union Bigwigs, and Masters of Deceit, by J. Edgar Hoover, whose name I knew from TV.

In the shadowy corners of both rooms were tennis and badminton rackets leaned against the wall. There was a record player and a wooden box on the floor beside it containing, I discovered, records by Wagner and Debussy and Mozart. A marble chess board had been placed on top of the record-player cabinet, the chess pieces made of white and black ivory and intricately carved and weighted if you picked them up (which I did). This made me think I could mention playing chess when I saw Arthur Remlinger, and that if I ever knew him better we could play and I could learn new strategies.

In his tiny parlor there was a heavy, round-arm couch with coa.r.s.e covering, and two facing straight-back chairs with a low table in between, on which was a half-empty bottle of brandy and two tiny gla.s.ses-as if Arthur Remlinger and Florence La Blanc would sit facing each other, drinking and listening to music and talking about books. Opposite the tennis and badminton rackets was a tall wooden perch set beside the shaded window, with a thin bra.s.s chain wound around the bar and tied in a knot. There was no sign of a bird.

On the wall behind the perch, practically invisible in shadows, was a framed bra.s.s plaque engraved with the words "Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest." This had no bearing on anything I understood. On a wooden hook beside the plaque was a leather holster with a rig-up of complicated straps and buckles I recognized from gangster movies to be a shoulder holster. Inside it was a short-barreled silver pistol with white grips.

I, of course, immediately drew the pistol out. (I'd already locked the door closed.) It was unexpectedly heavy to be so small. I looked through the slit behind the cylinder and made out it was loaded with at least five bra.s.s-bottom bullets. It was a Smith and Wesson. I didn't know the caliber. I held the muzzle to my nose in a way I'd also seen in the movies. It smelled like hard metal and the spicy oil used to clean it. The little barrel was slick and s.h.i.+ny. I sighted it out the window at the CP yard, at the rails full of grain cars sitting in the sun. Then I stepped quickly back for fear of being seen. The pistol, I felt, directly pertained to the significance and enterprise I attributed to Arthur Remlinger-more, I felt, than anything else in his rooms did. My father had had his pistol-which I never believed he'd lost, and now believed had been used in a robbery. I didn't see how by itself it allotted him significance or made him exceptional. The Air Force had given it to him free, after all. But regarding Arthur Remlinger, I did feel this way, and I again experienced the misgiving I'd been feeling-that he was an unknown and unpredictable person. It was a sensation familiar in my mind to feelings about my parents and their robbery and its terrible effect on Berner and me. I couldn't have said more about what I thought. But the pistol seemed a very definite and dangerous thing. Though Arthur Remlinger didn't seem to me to be a man who would own a pistol. He seemed too cultivated-which was clearly my error. I wiped the little handles on my s.h.i.+rt to take my finger smudges off and put the pistol back in its holster. I hadn't cleaned anything in the rooms the way I'd been told to and would have to come back later. But I had the sudden fear of being found out. So that I unlocked the door to the hall, looked out and saw nothing, then quickly went back down the stairs to my other duties.

Chapter 48.

As colder weather came on, and the sports began arriving at the beginning of October (when Americans were permitted to shoot), Charley said he wanted me to devote all my time to "the goose work." I'd been in my Partreau shack for a month, although as I said, time didn't seem to pa.s.s or mean much to me-not the way it had two months ago, when school was only weeks away, and the long, slow pa.s.sage of days was what I wished I could command and defeat the way Mikhail Tal mastered a chess problem.

I adjusted to my little two-room house better than at first. It was necessary to use the privy-which I did only after a.s.suring myself Charley wasn't watching me, and then would never stay long. But there was electricity to operate my hot plate and the ceiling ring and to provide some heat. I could no longer wash my face at the pump due to the chill wind. But I brought my water in at night using a bucket, and bathed by employing a tin saucepan I scavenged from a refuse pit, and scoured myself with a washrag and the Palmolive bar I kept in a tobacco tin to keep the mice and rats from finding it.

I'd dragged one of the two cots out from the back room into the kitchen-my only other room. The back room sat on the north side of the shack, and the new cold wind worked in through the stucco and the laths and whistled through the cracked panes, so that that room, which was lightless, became unwelcoming at night. In the kitchen there was an old iron J. C. Wehrle stove with split seams, and I fed this with rotted boards and pieces of broken-off dead timber and caragana twigs gathered on my tours. I washed my clothes and sheets and kitchen utensils at the pump stand and swept the floor with a broom I'd found, and considered myself to have made a good adaptation to circ.u.mstances whose duration and direction I didn't know. I wanted to get my hair cut at the barber shop in Fort Royal-I sometimes saw myself in the bathroom mirrors at the Leonard and knew I was thinner and my hair was too long. But there was no mirror in my shack, and I had little thought at night for how I looked. I only remembered the haircut when I was in bed, and that I should clip my fingernails the way my father did. But then I would forget the next day.

Several of the cardboard boxes lining the walls in the kitchen I carried into the cold north room and stacked against the window and along the wall to block the cracks and splits opening to the outside. At the drugstore in Fort Royal I bought a purple candle with lavender aroma that I burned at night, because I knew from my mother that lavender promoted sleep and because the shack-cold or warm-smelled of smoke and rot and stale tobacco and human smells from decades of lives lived there. The shack would soon fall down like the rest of Partreau. I knew if I left and came back in a year there would likely be little sign of it.

In the evenings, when I'd finished my meal and my walk and could tolerate being alone (I never felt my situation was truly tolerable), I would sit on my cot and unfold my chess cloth on my covers, set up my four wobbly ranks of plastic men and plot moves and campaigns against idealized but unspecified opponents. I'd never actually played with anyone but Berner. Arthur Remlinger was who I thought about. My strategies usually entailed brash frontal a.s.saults. I would defeat my opponents with sacrificial attacks in the manner of the same Mikhail Tal, who'd become my hero. The endgame would always be reached with lightning speed due to scant opposition. Other times, I would attempt slow, deceptive feints and retreats (which I didn't like much), making shrewd comments and observations about what my opponent and I were each doing and what he seemed to be planning-while never divulging my scheme for victory. I did this while listening to the old Zenith, whose light glowed dimly behind its numbers and out of which on the cold, cloudless nights emerged distant voices it seemed to me the wind must've blown around the world without respect for borders. Des Moines. Kansas City. WLS in Chicago. KMOX in St. Louis. A scratchy Negro's voice from Texas. Reverend Armstrong's voice shouting after G.o.d. Men's voices in what I believed was Spanish. Others I decided were French. And, of course, there were the clear stations from Calgary and Saskatoon, bearing news-the Canadian Bill of Rights, Tommy Douglas's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. And place-names-North Battlefield, Esterhazy, a.s.siniboia-towns I knew nothing about but knew weren't American. I wondered if I might dial in a station from North Dakota, which wasn't so far away, and hear about my parents being put on trial. I never found such a station, although sometimes when I lay on my cot in the dark, with the Wehrle ticking, I pretended the American voices I heard were talking to me, and knew about me, and had advice for me if I could only stay awake long enough. This and my lavender candle was the way I went to sleep on many nights.

On other evenings, I pulled open one or another of the cardboard boxes I hadn't moved into the north room, and diverted myself with the evidence of all that had happened in the house in the years before I came to be in it. On the prairie, history and memory seemed as alien as the pa.s.sage of time-as if the citizens of Partreau had disappeared not into the past but into another vivid present-which explained why there was no dignified cemetery, and so much was left behind.

Arthur Remlinger had remarked to me that he'd lived in my shack in his early days, and many of the boxed possessions were his. In the softened, stale-smelling boxes I found related evidence of what I'd seen in his rooms. In one box marked in pencil with "AR" were thin books and cracked, yellowed magazines bound in cotton twine, from the 1940s. One magazine was called The Free Thinkers. Another was The Deciding Factor. There were two books I'd already seen in the apartment- Captive Pa.s.sengers and World a.n.a.lysis. I had no idea what they were or were about. When I pulled out The Free Thinkers, its cover referred to an article inside by an "A. R. Remlinger," with the t.i.tle "Anarcho-syndicalism, Immunities and Privileges." I read the first page of this. It pertained to something called the "Danbury Hatters lesson," and the "Protestant work ethic," and went into detail about how workers were not "maximizing their individual freedom." The back page informed the reader that A. R. Remlinger was "a young Harvard man from the middle west" who was putting his "gold-plated education" to the service of human rights for all men. It was likely Arthur Remlinger had written articles in the other magazines, but I had no interest in opening them.

Other boxes didn't bear the "AR" initials, and in these I found life insurance policies and stacks of canceled checks and a Saskatchewan driver's license for a woman named Esther Magnusson, and collections of yellow pencil stubs bound with rubber bands, and stacks of old pamphlets and a "Milky Way for Britain" war bond brochure, much of it corrupted and nested in by mice. Some of the pamphlets had to do with the "Social Reform Gospel," and something called the "Royal Templars of Temperance." There were members.h.i.+p booklets about "Home-makers Clubs," and bulletins about "Wheat and Women" and the "Grain Growers Guide." One booklet had to do with "The Canadian League" and stated on its first page that foreign immigrants weren't shouldering their burden, and soldiers returning from the front should have "first choice of the best jobs." Inserted in the pages was a black-and-white newspaper picture showing a cross set ablaze and people in white hoods and robes whose faces were covered, standing, facing it. "Moose Jaw, 1927" was written under it in faded ink.

Another box contained rusted metal film canisters with reels of film inside, but no indication of what the film would show. An American flag was folded on top of the canisters in the fas.h.i.+on my father had demonstrated for Berner and me-"the tricorn." There were shoe boxes of letters-many addressed to Mr. Y. Leyton in Mossbank, Saskatchewan, and postmarked 1939 and 1940. These were tied with baling twine in tight stacks, some with red American three-cent stamps that bore a picture I recognized as George Was.h.i.+ngton. I considered it allowable for me to read at least one of these letters, since no one had sent a letter to me in Canada, and reading someone else's might make me appreciate the presence of others, which my existence in Partreau had all but extinguished. The letter read: Dear Son, We're in Duluth, having driven here with your father from the Cities where it was very nice, indeed (very modern). Much warmer there than in ole ice-box Prince Albert, that's for certain. I don't know how anyone lives there-and the wind. My goodness. You know plenty, of course, about that. I'm trying to forget most of the Canadian I learned as a child in school-for my sins. Jaqueleen was just saying it's a pity there has to be a frontier between the two. But I'm not so sure. Someone must think they know best all about it. Tennessee is where I'd happily die.

I know (or have heard) that you are thinking about the RCN, which is very brave (if you like water). I wish you'd think longer on it. Okay? We have little to gain from a big fight now. The worst could happen. Which of course you are not thinking about. Just a thought from your mum.

I have a postcard which I'll send. It shows our "Prince Charming" on his famous train trip to Sask back in '19 (twenty years ago! Heavens!). You won't remember. But your dad and your Gram and me stood you up by the tracks in Regina in your little worsted suit, and you waved a little Canadian flag. I believe that's why you're so patriotic. There's surely no reason to be otherwise. Take care now. Look for my postcard, which won't fit into the env. without ruining it. Your dad sends his best to you-which is more than I ever see.

Love 'n kisses.

Your Mum I dug deeper in the box for the postcard showing "Prince Charming" and who he would've been. But near the bottom were only more bound stacks-of Christmas cards and dry newspaper cuttings with pictures of smiling, crew-cut men in hockey uniforms. At the very bottom were several loose picture cards of completely naked women posing beside ornate pedestals with floral arrangements and tables containing books. The women were hefty and smiling as happily as if they were wearing clothes. I'd never seen pictures like these, although I knew from things boys had said in school that they existed. You could buy them from machines at the State Fair. I spent quite a while going carefully over each one and finally put three into my World Book "B" volume, since I knew I'd want to look at them again. I did want to look at them again, and did look at them. I kept them for years.

Also at the bottom of the box, I found a pair of wire-rim eyegla.s.ses and a plain gold ring. The ring was inside a yellow Bayer aspirin tin that had two worn-smooth aspirins and a charm-bracelet replica of the Eiffel Tower also inside it. I knew a ring was inside before I saw it. Don't ask me how I knew. It's probably a wedding ring, I all but said to myself. I understood, of course, that it represented an outcome lost in someone's past and wasn't good.

Most of the boxes I didn't go through thoroughly. One had Regina newspapers. Another held muddy clothes and shoes the mice had marauded. Another was doc.u.ments and receipts and totalings for wheat crops and elevator fees and the purchase of a new Waterloo Boy tractor. Another contained stacks of unopened printed matter about the 1948 Saskatchewan election, and pertaining to the CCF and "Social Credit." I tried to imagine how many people's or families' lives were jumbled together here, in my house. Many, many-I thought-as if they had all hoped to come back later from their present and reclaim it, but never had. Or had died. Or had just elected to put that life behind them for a crack at a better one somewhere else.

I wondered, however, what Arthur Remlinger had meant when he'd told me Americans could never let a place like Partreau stand. They would burn it as a reproach to progress. But as I heaved the boxes back up against the drafty wall of my kitchen, I decided he was probably correct. My parents, people without real possessions, without permanence, who never owned a house, who carried little with them, and whose few holdings (except for Berner and me) had by then been taken and thrown in the town dump in Great Falls-my parents were people Arthur Remlinger had been referring to, who would've cared nothing for Partreau even if they didn't burn it. They were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

Chapter 49.

I was now learning many things at once: How to site goose pits where the morning sun didn't find them too early but would still be high enough on a rise of land that the Sports could see out and be ready when the flights came off the river. I learned to set out the heavy wooden decoys to the right and left of the pits, and to leave a landing s.p.a.ce where the geese could look to settle-thinking all was the same as the night before-yet not so far apart as to draw attention to the guns or the white faces of the shooters who were often too eager. Charley said Americans were usually fat or old or both and couldn't stand the cold, crumbly Regina gumbo in the pits and so were always standing up and climbing out at the wrong moments. Ducks, Charley said-Goldeneyes and pintails and canvasbacks-always swept in first, screaming in on the pits like ghosts out of the dark, low and tilting and pinging. Shooting them, though, spooked the geese, who had good hearing, so that this was discouraged. I myself would need to be careful repositioning decoys, since the Sports shot at whatever they thought they saw or heard. People had been killed. Charley himself had been shot with #2 load and had scars. He permitted loading the guns only on his signal-though there were still "sky busters," who were the dangerous ones. I was responsible to report to him any Sport who seemed drunk-though all of them would've been drinking late in the bar the night before, and I could expect to smell liquor. I had also to report anyone who appeared sick or had trouble walking or moving around or was careless handling his shotgun. Charley would verify the licenses and authorize when shooting started and ended-once the sun was high and the geese could see the ground. And as I already said, I would stay in the truck and gla.s.s the birds that fell and crippled off, and keep my tally, since the wardens were always about and would be watching with even more powerful binoculars-dividing the falling geese by the number of hunters and coming to check when the tallies didn't match. Following which they'd be pa.s.sing out citations, confiscating guns, seeing who was drunk, fining Charley, but fining Arthur Remlinger the most, and forcing him to pay large sums to avoid closer notice being paid to his in-town operation-the Filipino girls, the gambling den off the side of the dining room, and whatever else he might be up to that the town disapproved of. Arthur Remlinger held the license for the "guide service," though he himself did no guiding and knew nothing about shooting or geese, and cared nothing. He was the proprietor, did the booking, kept the accounts, put up the Sports in the hotel, and collected their money-part of which he paid to Charley, who remitted a small portion to me. Though it was understood the Sports would hand around tips each day when the shooting was finished, often in U.S. currency, and everybody would be satisfied.

On one of the last warm early October days, after Charley and I had spent the morning scouting and digging pits in fields the geese habitually used, I rode my old bicycle down the highway away from Partreau in the direction of the town of Leader, twenty miles west. I was intent to find the school for wayward girls Mrs. Gedins had talked about. Birdtail was six miles down the hardtop, and I meant to inquire there if I might enroll as a student at some point in the future-possibly winter, when my goose duties were over and I might be on my own. I didn't understand what a wayward girl was. I thought it might mean a girl who was pa.s.sing through on her way to someplace else-which I was doing. I also didn't believe there could be a school only for girls. At least a few boys would have to be permitted, I felt-even in Canada. Mrs. Gedins had told me the school was run by nuns. And from my mother's experience with the Sisters of Providence, I believed nuns were openhearted, generous women who would see a chance to help me, which was their mission and why they'd give up marriage and a normal life. It shouldn't matter that I was American. I would not divulge that my mother was Jewish or that she and my father were in jail in North Dakota. Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable. And I was willing to tell one, or many more than one, if it meant I could go to school and not fall further behind.

It was also the case that I'd begun to believe it would be nice to be around girls. Berner, of course, was a girl. But most of our lives we had treated each other as being the same thing because we were twins. That same thing was neither male nor female, but something in between that included us both. Though, of course, that hadn't lasted. On two occasions, Charley had taken me to the chop-suey restaurant on Main Street. Both times I'd seen the Chinese owner's children, seated at a shadowy rear table doing their schoolwork. I'd paid special attention to the pretty round-faced daughter who I felt might be my age. Each time she'd noticed me, but hardly allowed it to show. Several times since then, when I was taking my walks around Partreau, or marshaling my chess men alone in my shack, I'd entertained a fantastical thought that we could be friends. She could visit me. We could walk around the empty town together, then play chess. (I felt sure she would know how to play better than I did.) I even fantasized I could help her with homework. There was never anything more in my thoughts than that. I never knew her name or even spoke to her. Our friends.h.i.+p existed only in my mind. These real things could never happen, and didn't. Being alone made it possible to know this sad fact of life, and yet to imagine that it and much else could be different.

The highway and prairie west of Partreau were no different from the hardtop going east to Fort Royal. Though on my bicycle, it felt new-like a terrain I shared with no one. It was only bare, rolling crop-ground with straw bales scattered to the edge of sight, and black dots, which were oil pumpers, and above it the sparkling skeins of new geese in the sky, and gray-white smoke along the horizon where a farmer was burning ditches.

When I arrived at the Birdtail sign, there was no evidence of a town. The Canadian Pacific pa.s.sed along beside the highway, as it did in Partreau and Fort Royal. But there was no crossing from when a town had been there, or a caragana break or a windmill or an elevator or foundation squares to mark where houses had stood. Mrs. Gedins, I didn't believe, would go to the trouble to lie to me. I sat and looked at the sky and all around where there was no school, then decided to ride another mile to the opposite Birdtail sign, if there was one. And when I arrived at it, there was another sign beside it that said "Sisters of the Holy Name School." An arrow pointed south up a gravel road that met the highway from out of the fields. A Christian cross was painted above the school's name. At the crest of the hill where the road went up, was an abandoned house, and beyond it the road disappeared off into the blue sky. A school could be any distance. Ten miles. With Charley I'd driven the truck miles and miles over the prairie and seen no sign of where humans lived or ever had lived. Yet for me school was still my important goal. I could ride until a school building was at least in sight and see what I thought of it.

With difficulty I guided my front wheel up the sandy tire track. Charley's old Higgins wobbled and wiggled over the stones and gravels, and pedaling uphill wasn't easy. Though as soon as I topped the rise where the vacant house sat, giving a view to miles around, the school or what had to be the school lay straight down the road in plain view at the bottom of the hill's other side-a large, square redbrick building, with four stories, sitting by itself on a low place on the prairie-not very different from the way Great Falls High School would've looked if it had been set down there. But I knew the instant I saw the building what "wayward" meant. It meant what Berner and I would've been if juvenile authorities had come and taken us. Orphans. Only orphans would be in a place like this.

The wide square of ground the school sat on had been rescued from pasture land beside a narrow dry creek. Wheat grew on the bench above it. Spindly trees were planted on the lawn and there were figures-the wayward girls, I believed-dotting the gra.s.s. The sharp October sun-tingly on my sweaty neck-made the school appear barren and still. I almost turned and coasted back to the highway. It would never be a place with big oak trees and a football field and boys my age to accept me-the way I'd almost had it in Great Falls. This would never be what I wanted. It was Canada.

Still, I'd come that far. So I just let the bike coast down the b.u.mpy hill. I guessed it was one o'clock. Two hawks circled slowly high in the sky. As I began to pedal where the road became flat at the level of the school, some of the girls sitting on the gra.s.s, talking in ones and twos, and several who were walking the perimeter of the lawn, noticed me. Very few people, I thought, would ride a bicycle all the way to here, since there was nothing to do but go back.

A tall nun in a black gown with a white head covering stood on the school steps, supervising the yard. It was after lunch. She was talking to one of the girls, who was laughing. The nun saw me and began watching me across the distance of the lawn.

Where the school ground bordered the road, a tall barred gate stood by itself with no fence attached-which was strange, since anybody could leave or go that wanted to. Not like what I thought an orphanage was. The road entered the grounds farther on. I could see where cars were parked along the side of the building. The gate's barred doors were chained and padlocked, and up above them, connecting the brick gateposts, a metal banner with a gold figure of Christ, his arms outstretched, welcomed people through the gate in case it ever opened.

I sat on my bicycle, sweating, though a chill wind ran along the road I'd just coasted down. I would have to struggle into it when I rode back. I didn't see a boy anywhere inside the gate or even working on the lawn. There would have to be a boy somewhere, I thought. There weren't places where no boys were wanted or needed.

Two of the girls inside the yard had walked to where I was sitting on my bike outside the gate, just looking in. One was tall and skinny and had a bad complexion and a hard, wrinkled mouth that made her look grown up. The other was ordinary sized, with plain brown hair and a square, not-pretty face, and had one arm that was smaller, though not shorter, than her other one. She had a nice smile, I was glad to see, and she trained it on me through the fence bars. They were both dressed in the same shapeless light blue dresses and white tennis shoes and green ankle socks. HOLY NAME was st.i.tched in white where a breast pocket would've been. They were like the clothes my mother had worn in jail the last day I saw her.

"What do you think you're here to do?" the tall, older-looking girl said in a hard, unfriendly way as if she wanted me to leave. Her long body loosened up when she spoke. She c.o.c.ked her hip, as if she expected me to say something smart back, like Berner would've done.

"I just came out to see the school," I said and felt conspicuous being there. I was not in America. I had no business coming to a school I knew nothing about. I thought I should probably ride away.

"You're not allowed in here," the nice girl with the skinny arm said. She smiled at me again, though I could tell it wasn't friendly. It was sarcastic. One of her side-front teeth was gone and a s.p.a.ce was dark inside her mouth, which ruined her nice smile. Both girls had bitten-down fingernails and scratches on their arms and measly b.u.mps around their mouths, and hair on their legs, like mine. It wouldn't ever be possible to be friends with them.

Far behind the two girls the tall nun was coming down the front steps from where she'd been standing. Her robes billowed around her ankles in the breeze. Other girls in the yard stood and looked at the three of us at the gate, as if a disturbance was taking place. The nun swung her arms as she came toward us, her long legs striding out. I wanted to leave before I had to have words with her and she called the authorities. Both girls looked around but didn't seem to care about her. They smiled at each other in a mean, pleased way they'd practiced.

"Do you have some kinda girlfriend?" the older girl said. She put her hands through the bars and waggled her fingers at me. I moved back away from her. The Chinese girl in Fort Royal wouldn't waggle her fingers at me.

"No," I said.

"What's your name?" the smaller girl with the skinny arm said.

I gripped the handlebar and set my foot on the pedal, ready to push off. "Dell," I said.

"You shoo away! You shoo!" the nun had begun shouting as she came in her long strides over the lawn, a beaded harness around her waist, a big cross swinging side to side, her scrubbed-white face and mouth and eyes and cheeks and forehead tightly enclosed in starched white material. "Shoo away, boy," she shouted.

The two girls looked around at her again and exchanged cruel looks.

"You man, get away. What do you think you're doing here?" the nun was shouting. It was as if she thought something awful was about to happen or already had.

"That old wh.o.r.e," the older girl said and seemed natural saying it.

"We hate her. If she died, we'd like it," the smaller girl said. She had tiny, narrow, dark eyes, and when she said that, she widened them as if she was shocked by herself.

"Dell's a monkey's name where I come from. Shaunavon, Saskatchewan," the older girl said, unbothered by the nun who was quickly approaching. The girl suddenly reached her long arm farther through the gap in the bars and fastened a terrible grip on my wrist, which I tried to get away from but couldn't. She began pulling me, while the other girl laughed. I was tipping sideways, my right leg and just my shoe heel holding me up, but beginning to fall.

"Don't touch them," the nun was shouting. I wasn't touching anybody.

"He's afraid of us," the smaller girl said and started walking away, leaving the older girl imprisoning me through the bars. She was staring at me, torturing me and liking it. She dug her little stunted fingernails into my wrist skin, as if she wanted to tear it.

"Turn him loose, Marjorie," the nun shouted, almost to the gate. "He'll injure you." She couldn't move easily because of her heavy skirts.

I was being pulled off my bicycle and up against the bars of the gate. "Stop," I said. "You don't need to do this."

"But I just want to." Marjorie was pulling me against the bars to do something to me. Beat me up, I thought. She was much stronger than Berner and she was bigger. Her face was calm, but her large blue eyes were trained hard on me, and her jaw muscles were clenched as if she was straining. She was younger than I was. Fourteen, I thought, for some reason. "I want to make a man out of you," she said. "Or make a mess."

Then the nun arrived and immediately grabbed Marjorie's shoulder and pulled her back, though Marjorie kept holding on to me. The nun took hold of the girl's chin and turned her head to the side away from the gate. "Wrong, wrong, wrong," she said angrily through her pale, stiffened lips. Her black robes made everything difficult for her. The nun's eyes worked to me, through the bars. "Why are you here?" she said. Her face was getting red. "You don't belong here. Get away." She was also very young. Her face was smooth and clear, even though she was angry. She wasn't much older than Marjorie or me.

A bell had begun to ring at the school. I was all the way off my old bike but hadn't yet fallen. Marjorie still had her burning grip on my arm and no expression on her face. With my left hand I pried in under her tough fingers-where gouges were opening in my skin. I forced one finger up and then another one. I didn't want to hurt her. Then I was loose. I stumbled backward away from her into my bicycle and fell on the gravel and knocked the breath out of myself.

"Who are you?" The nun was glaring down at me through the bars. Her face was scrubbed and s.h.i.+ny and furious. She now had a strong grip on Marjorie's shoulders. Marjorie had begun smiling at me on the ground, as if I'd done something funny. "What's your name?" the nun said.

I didn't want to say anything about myself. I began to get up and raise my bicycle off the gravel.

"His name's Dell," Marjorie said. "It's a monkey's name."

"Why are you here?" the nun said, still holding Marjorie's shoulders.

"I just wanted to go to school." I felt ridiculous kneeling on the ground, reduced in size by being here.

"It's not for you." She had an accent different from anybody else's I'd ever heard. She spoke fast and spit her words at me. Her dark flat eyes were furious-furious against me. "Where are you living?"

"In Partreau," I said. "I work in Fort Royal." All the girls in the school yard were walking toward the front steps, organizing themselves into a line to go inside. Another nun-short and heavy-set-was now at the top of the steps, her hands folded in front of her. Marjorie was still smiling at me through the bars as if I was pathetic.

"I wanted to kiss you," she said to me dreamily. "You didn't want to kiss me, though, did you?"

"Go back inside," the nun said, and turned loose of Marjorie's shoulders and shoved her away. Marjorie threw her head back and turned dramatically and laughed out loud and began walking to catch up with her friend.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I don't want to see you ever here again," the young nun said through the gate. She shook her head at me and pushed her face forward and glared to make sure I understood. "If you come out to here, I will call the constables. They take you away. Do you remember that?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry." I wanted to say something else but had no idea what it could be. I didn't know what desperate was, but I felt desperate. The young nun was already walking away, her heavy black gown swaying in the sunlight. I had my bicycle up on its wheels, and got it turned in the gravel. I climbed on and began my ride back up the hill into the wind toward the highway and Partreau.

Chapter 50.

Florence La Blanc drove out to Partreau in her little pink Metropolitan and left a bulky manila envelope leaned against the door of my shack. It had been sent from America with the words Pa.s.s On to Dell Parsons scrawled on the bottom, in handwriting I didn't recognize. It was just days after I'd gone on my bike to the wayward girls' school, and the week I was to move from Partreau to Fort Royal because more Sports were arriving. Charley had been told to install one of the Sports onto the other cot in my shack, and it wasn't thought (by Florence, I learned) "good" for me to sleep alone in a room with a grown stranger. Charley had smirked about this and said the old drunk goose shooters could "get lovey" after midnight. There was a tiny "monk's mop closet" on the third floor of the Leonard, down the hallway from Remlinger's rooms. I was given this room to sleep in and the use of the downstairs bathroom with the roughnecks and railroaders, and a white enamel pot for the middle of the night. Charley would collect me in his truck for my goose duties. It was beginning to be colder and windier, and I was happy to quit pedaling to town and sleeping in my drafty cabin and seeing no one. This way, I would be more available, once the goose cleaning was finished, to run errands for the Sports for tips and to hang around the bar at night. If I was busy and had less time by myself, I once again didn't think about my parents and school and Berner-all of which were important to me, but left me feeling sad as a result.

I'd had little contact with Florence La Blanc. Charley had told me she owned a greeting card store in The Hat and was a widow and once had been a local beauty who'd been free with her charms when her husband was defending Hong Kong in 1941. She looked after her elderly mother. But she was also an artist and enjoyed drinking in the hotel and playing cards in the gambling room, where she was not supposed to be let in. Everyone liked her. Her arrangement with Arthur Remlinger suited her because he had money and good manners and was handsome, in spite of being private and an American and younger than she was. She went back to The Hat when she got tired of him.

Periodically, when I was in my shack, I would look out and see Florence with her painter's easel established at various locations in Partreau-once near the back of town, facing the caraganas through which the oil pumper and the white bee hives were visible. Another time, she stood out on my street painting Charley's trailer and his Quonset. I was strictly forbidden to intrude on Arthur Remlinger's privacy. But there'd been no mention about Florence, who'd acted friendly to me at a distance, and I felt I was at liberty to talk to her. Again, no one came to Partreau. I talked to very few people on any given day. I thought she wouldn't mind. So, when I saw her seated on her wood stool in a brown smock and a soft black cloth hat, painting in the street that ran in front of the empty Partreau post office, I walked over through the weeds and clutter where houses had stood, to see what a person did to paint a true picture-not just paint-by-numbers, which I knew didn't const.i.tute genuine painting or art.

When she saw me coming-it was the afternoon she'd left the manila envelope-Florence held up her long paintbrush and waved it back and forth like a metronome. I took this to be a signal that she recognized me-though she kept her eyes on her painting, as if it was important to keep it in view.

"I left you a mysterious parcel," she said, not looking at me. "You're much taller than a month ago. Is that possible?" Florence glanced around at me, smiling. She wasn't a large woman and had a pretty, frank, widely smiling mouth and a hoa.r.s.e voice that suggested she enjoyed herself. I could imagine her laughing. Occasionally she and Arthur Remlinger danced in the bar to the jukebox music-I'd observed this. She'd held him stiffly at arm's length in one of his fine suits, looking grave and performing an awkward box step that made the other customers in the bar laugh and her, too. As I said, she also liked to play cards in what she called "the gambling pit," in the room next to the bar, where I rarely went. Her short frizzy blond hair had gray streaked through it, and she "carried some weight in her pocket," as my father said about some women. She must've been in her forties, and I could see how she'd been prettier when she was young and thin and reckless and her husband was fighting in the war. Her cheeks had tiny veins in them, which I knew was a sign of a hard life, and her sparkly eyes narrowed when she smiled so they were almost invisible. She didn't match being Arthur Remlinger's lady friend in my view, but she was somebody I thought I would like. I was happy she'd noticed me weeks before.

I stood to the side and behind Florence, so I could see straight on to what she was doing. I'd only seen the painting of the grain elevator in Arthur Remlinger's rooms, and hadn't known what "the Nighthawk school" was, or as yet anything about Edward Hopper or how a person could make a design that would be recognizable out of just tubes of paint. I believed you probably had to perform eye exercises like my father did so you could see things very accurately.

Florence was painting in the middle of Manitoba Street. Her picture was nothing more than the view straight past the vacant post office and a pair of broken-in houses to the backs of the commercial row where I walked and that had been alive when Partreau was a whole town. The sky above the buildings had not been painted in yet and was only empty canvas. The elevator and the wheat fields that rose and widened beyond the train tracks toward the horizon were also still to come. I couldn't see why this would be a subject for a painting, since it was right there for anybody to see any time, and wasn't beautiful-nothing like Niagara Falls in the Frederic Church picture, or the flower arrangements my father painted with his numbers kit. But I liked it, which I should've said to be courteous. What I did say-and wished I'd chosen something better-was, "Why are you painting that?"

Wind pushed the dry weeds back and forth. The day was growing gray as the line of a front was closing out the blue sky to the east. Charley's whirly devices were spinning wildly. Swaying ribbons of geese were hurrying in from the north, catching the last of the sun. It didn't seem to be a good day for painting.

"Oh," Florence said, "I just paint things I like, you know? Things that wouldn't get to be pretty otherwise." She was holding her wooden palette with her left thumb stuck through. Knots of different colored paint had been squeezed onto it. She'd mix two or three with her brush tip, and put paint right onto the canvas. What she was painting was exactly what I saw-which I guessed was the American Nighthawk style and seemed a miracle but peculiar. I also didn't understand what she meant by the post office being pretty in her painting. Since it looked like the post office I could see, it wasn't pretty at all. "I was never really a painter," Florence said. "My sister Dinah-Lor was a painter. Before she succ.u.mbed to a broken heart. My father was also a painter-in the primitive tradition, since what he really was, was an ice cutter in Souris, Manitoba. Maybe that's why I'm painting out here on South Manitoba Street." She turned her plump, round face toward me. Her narrow eyes were brown and sparkling, her short-fingered hands strong and red from being in the chilly wind. "You don't know where in the world Manitoba even is, do you, Dell? Or what?" She was enjoying herself the way I thought she probably always did.

"I know what it is," I said. It was a province. I was pleased she knew my name. But I didn't know any more about Canada than what Mildred and Charley had told me. I was thinking about her saying I was taller. I would've been happy to be taller, but I didn't think a month was a long enough time for that to happen. What I'd mostly felt since I'd been there was smaller.

"You probably aren't even aware of what Saskatchewan means," Florence said, looking over her palette at her painting.

"I'm not," I said.

"Well. I'm happy to tell you it means *the quickly flowing river,' of which there's not many where we are here now. It's in the Cree language, which I don't personally speak. You just need a map and a history book. You'll see that Manitoba, where I was born, isn't even very far from here-in Sputnik terms." She said Sputnik different from how I'd heard on the radio. She said the long "u" to rhyme with "root," the way Rudy had said Roosevelt. Spootnik. She went on darkening the white front of the wrecked post office to match what I could see was its actual deteriorated condition. "Otherwise," she said, "I enjoy doing things outside. And I'm bored, of course. I used to always drive past this little town coming over from The Hat to see Arthur. In our early romantic days. People were still living in one or two of the houses at that time. It somehow just called out to me." She furrowed her brows at her painting. "Has that happened to you yet in your life? You hear a word forever, then all of a sudden it makes a whole different sense? That happens to me all the time."

It had happened to me. It had happened to me with the word criminal. It had always meant one thing. Bonnie and Clyde. Al Capone. The Rosenbergs. Now it meant my parents. I wasn't going to say that, though. I just said, "Yes. It has."

"So. Do you like us up here?" Florence glanced at me for a third time to be certain I was noticing her carefully applying paint to the post office. It pleased her, I thought, to be observed painting. "Canadians always want everybody to like it here. And us-especially to like us." She made a careful little brush jab at the post office door, then turned her head sideways and looked at it that way. "But. Then when you do like us, we're suspicious it might be for the wrong reasons. America must be a lot different. I have a feeling n.o.body much cares down there. I don't know a lot about it. Doing things for the right reasons is the key to Canada."

"I like it," I said. Though I hadn't thought about Canada in those specific terms. I a.s.sumed I didn't like it, because I was there against my will-and no one would like that. But I wasn't sure I wanted to leave now, since I had no place to go.

"Well . . ." Florence hunched her shoulders, leaned forward on her stool, holding her palette away from her, and with her short, red-nailed thumb lightly smudged the door of the post office so it looked more like the actual gray door I could see. "That's good," she said, concentrating. "It's no fun to be miserable, I guess." She leaned back on her stool and stared at what she'd done. "Life's pa.s.sed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part." She wiped her thumb straight onto her brown smock, which she'd done many times before, then sat up straight on her stool to admire her work. "Is it nice down where you live? Or where you did before? I've never been to the States. Never had the time."