“All right,” I said. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, so I said it again. “All right.”
That was all there was to meeting Arthur Remlinger. As I said, life-changing events can seem not what they are.
Chapter 44
In our mother’s “Chronicle of a Crime Committed by a Weak Person,” she wrote as if Berner and I were present and could read her thoughts the instant she wrote them, and were her confidants who would benefit from what she was thinking. Her chronicle represents to me her truest voice, the one we children never heard, but the voice in which she would’ve expressed herself if she ever fully could’ve—without the limits she’d imposed on life. The same must be true with all parents and their children. You only know a part of each other. Our mother didn’t live a long time in the North Dakota prison. And anyone can tell—true sounding or not—that she was beginning to break apart when she wrote this.
Darlings,
You two have crossed over a national boundary now, which is not like going down the street, you know. It’s a new start, though of course there’s no such thing as a whole new start. [She and Mildred had obviously discussed this.] It’s just the old start put under a new lamp. I know all about that. But you’ll have a chance together in Canada and won’t be blemished more by your father and me. No one will care where you came from or what we did. You won’t stand out. I’ve never been there, but it seems so much like the U.S. Which is good.
I can remember Niagara Falls—looking across them when I was a girl, with my parents. You’ve seen that photograph. Whatever it is that separates people, the falls insisted on it (to me they did, anyway). We don’t discriminate carefully enough, you know, between things that seem alike but are different. You should always do that. Oh, well. You’re going to have thousands of mornings to think about all this. No one will tell you how to feel. You already imagine the world as its opposite, Dell. You told me so. That’s your strength. And, Berner, you have a taste for the unique, so you’ll do fine. My father crossed many borders after Poland, before he got to Tacoma, Washington. He always drew authority from the present. Most definitely.
I’ve discovered a brand-new coldness in me now. It’s not bad to find a cold place in your heart. Artists do this. Maybe it has other names. . . . Strength? Intelligence? I rejected it before—for your father’s sake. Or attempted to. I’m just trying to be helpful to you from here, but am at a disadvantage. I’m sure you understand. . . .
I’ve read this “letter” many times. Each time I’ve realized that she never expected to see either Berner or me again. She knew very well this was the end of the family for all of us. It’s more than sad.
Chapter 45
Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.
The days that followed my first meeting with Arthur Remlinger—August 31, 1960—must not, then, have been lonely days. Were it not that they ended in calamity, they might’ve been seen as full and rich for a boy in my situation—abandoned, everything familiar gone away, no prospects other than the ones I found in front of me.
My work duties at the beginning—before the Sports arrived and the goose shooting began—were all conducted in Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in the Leonard Hotel, the hotel Arthur Remlinger owned. He himself lived in an apartment on the top third floor, with windows that faced the prairie and from which you could see (what I imagined were) hundreds of miles north and west. I was expected to walk to my work each day, or to pedal one of Charley’s falling-apart J. C. Higgins two-wheelers down the highway, where big grain trucks had strewn a golden carpet of wheat chaff along the roadside, beyond which the Canadian Pacific tracks ran parallel, serving the elevators from Leader to Swift Current. On occasional days, Charley would take me in his truck—often with the Swedish woman, Mrs. Gedins, the other Partreau resident, silent and staring out the window—and deliver me to the Leonard, where my work was swamping bedrooms and bathrooms, which paid me three Canadian dollars a day, plus my meals. Mrs. Gedins worked in the kitchen, preparing the food for the hotel dining room. I had half my afternoons to myself and could either pedal the highway back to Partreau, where there was nothing to do, or else stay and be fed early supper with the harvesters and railroaders in the poorly lit dining room and get back after dusk. I was specifically forbidden by Charley to hitchhike the highway. Canadians, he said, didn’t believe in hitchhiking and would assume I was a criminal or else an Indian and would possibly try to run over me. And hitchhiking would make me stand out and attract suspicion and draw the notice of the Mounties, which no one wanted. It was as if Charley himself had something hidden that couldn’t stand a close inspection.
Although I’d never done swamping work, except to help clean our house when our mother required it, I found I could do it. Charley showed me tricks for getting into and out of rooms quickly so I could finish the ones I was assigned—sixteen, plus the two shared bathrooms for each floor used by the roomers, who were oil-rig roughnecks and railroad-gang boys and drummers and custom harvesters from the Maritimes who moved across the prairies each fall. Many of these roomers were young, little older than I was. Many were lonely and homesick, and some were violent and liked to drink and fight. But none ever paid attention to how they’d left a room they’d slept in, or a bathroom where they cleaned themselves and used the toilet. Their tiny bedrooms smelled putrid with their odors—their sweat and filth, and their food and whiskey and the gumbo mud and bottled liniment and tobacco. Down the halls the bathrooms were rank and humid and soapy, and stained from private uses the men also never bothered to clean—as they would’ve in their mothers’ homes. Sometimes I would push open a bedroom door with my bucket and mop and broom and rags and astringents, and there would be one of the boys alone in a room with several beds in it, smoking or staring out the window or reading a bible or a magazine. Or there would be one of the Filipino girls sitting on the bedside alone, and once or twice with no clothes on, and more than once in the bed with one of the roughnecks or some salesman, or with another girl sleeping into the long morning. Each time I said nothing and carefully closed the door and skipped the room that day. The Filipino girls, of course, were not Filipinos, Charley explained to me. They were Blackfoot or Gros Ventre girls Arthur Remlinger had had driven in by taxi from Swift Current or over from Medicine Hat, and who worked in the bar at night and enlivened the atmosphere and made the Leonard more attractive to the customers, since women were not otherwise allowed. Often when I arrived in the morning for work, I would see the Swift Current taxi parked in the alley beside the hotel, its driver sleeping in the front seat or reading a book, waiting for the girls to come out the side door, for the ride home. Charley told me one of the Filipinos was actually a Hutterite girl with a baby and no husband. But I never saw such a girl in the Leonard and doubted Hutterite girls would stoop to that, or that their parents would permit it.
And I don’t mean by this to say that I instantly, perfectly fitted myself into the life in Fort Royal. It was far from that. I knew that my parents were in jail, and that my sister had run away, and I was in all likelihood abandoned among strangers. But it was easier—easier than you would think—to turn my attention away from all that and to live in the present, as Mildred had said, as if each day were its own small existence.
The little town of Fort Royal was a lively place in the early autumn and benefited considerably by comparison to Partreau, where I was made to live, four miles away—a strange, vacant, ghostly residence except for Charley in his trailer and Mrs. Gedins, who rarely acknowledged me. Fort Royal was a small, bustling prairie community on the railroad line and the 32 highway between Leader and Swift Current. It must’ve been little different from the town where my father robbed the bank in North Dakota.
&
nbsp; The Leonard dominated the west end of Main Street and was wood-constructed and three stories and perfectly square and painted white, with a flat roof and rows of empty unadorned windows, and offered a small featureless street entrance opening into a dark reception, a windowless dining room, and a shadowy windowless bar achieved through a narrow corridor to the back. The Leonard had a sign on its roof—which a person couldn’t see from town, but that I could see from down the highway when I rode to work and back. Red neon spelled out LEONARD HOTEL in squat square letters, and beside it was the neon outline of a butler offering a round tray with a martini glass. (I didn’t yet know what a martini was.) It was a strange sight to see from out on the prairie. But I liked seeing it as I came and went. It referred to a world away from where it was, and I was, and yet was there in front of me every day, like a mirage or a dream.
The Leonard, in truth, would not have seemed to be a hotel—compared to the Rainbow in Great Falls, or to fine hotels I’ve since seen. It had little to do with the town. Few town residents ever came there, except for drinkers and ne’er-do-wells and the bad-tempered farmers who Arthur Remlinger leased goose-shooting ground from, and who drank in the bar for free. The Leonard endured the blight of disapproval in Fort Royal, which had at one time been a temperance town. Gambling and girls were available, and most decent people had never been inside.
My duties were always over by two. If I stayed to eat supper at six, that is when I would often see Arthur Remlinger—always well attired, with his lady friend, Florence La Blanc, talking and joking and making himself congenial for the paying customers. I’d been told by Charley that I wasn’t expected to make conversation with Arthur Remlinger—in spite of our first meeting having been agreeable. I wasn’t supposed to ask questions or be conspicuous or even friendly, as if Arthur Remlinger existed in a rare state no one could share. I was a visitor there and was to understand I had no special status or privileges. Occasionally I’d pass Arthur Remlinger in the little reception or going up the stairs where I was sweeping or performing my swamping duties with my bucket and mop, or in the kitchen when I was eating. “All right. There you are, Dell,” he’d say, as if I’d been hiding from him. “Are you managing in your billet where you are?” (Or words like that; I already knew what a billet was from my father.) “Yes, sir,” I’d say. “Let us know if you’re not,” he’d say. “I’m managing all right,” I’d say. “Fine then, fine,” Arthur Remlinger would say and continue on his way. I would not see him, then, for several days.
Though in truth it was a mystery to me why, if he was willing to take charge of me and my welfare, Arthur Remlinger seemed to have no wish to know me—which was significant to a boy my age. He’d seemed good-natured but peculiar when I first met him—as if something had been distracting him. But he seemed even more peculiar now, which I assumed to be how it was to know new people.
On days I stayed in town, whiling hours until I’d get to eat again—following which I’d pedal back tired to Partreau before the dark highway turned treacherous with grain trucks and farm boys beered up for the evening—I often walked about the town of Fort Royal, taking a look at what it contained. I did this both because it was new for me to be alone and not looked after; and also because the little that was there made what I saw more striking, and I’d decided the way not to be forlorn and plagued by morbid thoughts was to investigate and take an interest in things the way someone would whose job was to write about it for the World Book. But, too—which is at the deepest heart of those lonely prairie towns—I took my tours because there was nothing else to do, and choosing to be an investigator conferred a small freedom I’d never known up to then, having lived only with my sister and my parents. And finally, I did it because it was Canada where I was, and I knew nothing about that—how it was different from America, and how it was alike. Both things I wanted to know.
I walked the hard pavement down Main Street in my new dungarees and secondhand Thom McAns, feeling that no one noticed me. I didn’t know Fort Royal’s population, or why a town was there or why anyone lived there, or even why it was called Fort Royal—except possibly because an army outpost might’ve been there in the pioneer time. Its businesses ran on both sides of Main, which was the highway, and there seemed to me just enough of everything to make a town. Grain trucks and farm trucks and tractors passed through the middle every day. There was a barber shop, a combined Chinese laundry and café, a pool hall, a post office with a picture of the Queen on the wall inside, a community hall, two small doctors’ offices, a Sons of Norway, a Woolworth’s, a drugstore, a movie house, six churches (including a Moravian, a Catholic and a Bethel Lutheran), a closed library, an abattoir and an Esso. There was a co-op department store where Charley had bought my pants and underwear and shoes and a coat. There was the Royal Bank, a fire station, a jeweler, a tractor repair and a smaller hotel, the Queen of Snows, with its own licensed bar. There was no school for students, but there’d been one—its square, white frame presence sat across from a tiny, treeless park, furnished with a war monument with men’s names carved in, and a flag and a flagpole. There were ten neat squared-off, unpaved streets of modest white houses where the town residents lived. These had clean lawns, often with a single spruce tree planted and a garden plot, the last petunias blooming in box beds, sometimes the English flag on a pole surrounded by white-painted rocks, or a Catholics’ crèche I identified from Montana. There was also a fenced-in dirt baseball diamond, an ice rink for curling and hockey when the winter came down, a weedy tennis court with no net, and a cemetery, south toward where the fields took up and the town stopped.
On my tours I looked studiously into the jewelry shop window—at the Bulovas and Longines and Elgins, and the tiny diamond engagements and the bracelets and silver services and hearing aids and trays of bright ear bobs. I entered the shadowy drugstore and purchased a small clock for my early wake-ups and breathed the scents of the ladies’ perfumes and sweet soap and the soda fountain water and the sharp odors of chemicals from the back rooms and the customers’ counter. On one afternoon, I stopped in the Chevy agency and inspected the new model they had—a shiny red Impala hardtop my father would’ve valued highly. I sat for a time in its driver’s seat and imagined myself driving fast over the open prairie, just as I’d done when he’d brought a new DeSoto home and parked it in front, and life for Berner and me had been uneventful. A salesman in a yellow bow tie came over and stood by the door, and informed me I could drive the Chevy home if I wanted to, then he laughed and asked me where I was from. I told him I was American, I was visiting my uncle at the Leonard, that my father sold cars in “the States” (a new expression to me). But he didn’t seem interested after that and walked away.
On another day, I walked to the shut-down library and looked in through its thick glass door, down the aisles of empty shelving, the toppled-over chairs, the librarian’s tall desk turned sideways to the door in the gloom. I read the marquee at the movie house, which operated only on weekends and only showed “horse operas.” I explored down the dirt alleys behind town to the switch yard, watched the grain and tanker cars shunting east and west—as I’d also done before in Great Falls—the same gaunt rail riders eyeing me as if they knew me as they slid past in the boxcar doors. I walked past the abattoir, where “killing day” was Tuesday—a handwritten sign said—and a doomed cow stood in the back corral waiting. I passed the Massey-Harris repair where men were back in the dark bay, soldering farm equipment with torches and masks. The cemetery was beyond the town limit, but I didn’t walk to there. I’d never been in a cemetery but didn’t think it could be different in Canada.
It is, of course, very different to walk through a town when you’re a member of a family that’s waiting at home a short distance away—as opposed to being someone who no one’s waiting for or thinking about or wondering what you might be doing or if you’re all right. I did these tours many more times than once that early September, while the weather changed, as it suddenly does there, and the summ
er I’d lived through disappeared, and the prospect of winter arose for me and everyone. Very few people spoke to me, although no one seemed specifically not to speak to me. Almost everyone I passed on the street looked me in my eyes and registered me as seen, certifying, I believed, that a private memory had been made and I should know that. And even if nothing in Fort Royal seemed distinctive to me, I was someone distinctive among people who all knew one another and relied on knowing it. (This was the crucial element my father had failed to understand, and why he’d been caught after he’d robbed the bank in North Dakota.) You could say I performed my tours the way anyone would who was a stranger to a place. But it was a place odd for being in a separate country, and yet didn’t feel or appear so different from what I already knew. If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound, and also attractive to me, so that in the end I liked it.
One woman with her daughter passed me by where I was standing at the drugstore window, doing nothing more than looking wondrously in at the colored vessels and beakers and powders and mortars and pestles and brass scales on display—all items the Rexall in Great Falls had lacked and that made the Fort Royal store seem more serious. The woman turned and came back up the sidewalk and said to me, “Can I help you with something?” She was dressed in a red-and-white flowered dress with a white patent leather belt and matching white patent leather shoes. She didn’t have an accent—I was acute to this because of what Mildred had told me. She was only being friendly, possibly had seen me before, knew I was not from there. I’d never been addressed this way—as a total stranger. Everything about me had always been known to the adults in my life.
“No,” I said. “Thank you.” I was aware that while she didn’t sound different to me, I possibly sounded different from people she was used to hearing. Possibly I looked different, too—though I didn’t think I did.