By now the whole raft was in the air, all of it moving in a slow swirl above me and the lake and everywhere, finding the wind and heading out south in long wavering lines that caught the last sun and turned to silver as they gained a distance. It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: this is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right.
Glen Baxter shot twice more. One he missed, but with the other he hit a goose flying away from him, and knocked it half falling and flying into the empty lake not far from shore, where it began to swim as though it was fine and make its noise.
Glen stood in the stubby grass, looking out at the goose, his gun lowered. “I didn’t need to shoot that one, did I, Les?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the little knoll of land, looking at the goose swimming in the water.
“I don’t know why I shoot ’em. They’re so beautiful.” He looked at me.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
“Maybe there’s nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they’re put on earth for.”
I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great numbers of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.
Glen began to pick up his geese, and I walked down to my two that had fallen close together and were dead. One had hit with such an impact that its stomach had split and some of its inward parts were knocked out. Though the other looked unhurt, its soft white belly turned up like a pillow, its head and jagged bill-teeth, its tiny black eyes looking as they would if they were alive.
“What’s happened to the hunters out here?” I heard a voice speak. It was my mother, standing in her pink dress on the knoll above us, hugging her arms. She was smiling though she was cold. And I realized that I had lost all thought of her in the shooting. “Who did all this shooting? Is this your work, Les?”
“No,” I said.
“Les is a hunter, though, Aileen,” Glen said. “He takes his time.” He was holding two white geese by their necks, one in each hand, and he was smiling. He and my mother seemed pleased.
“I see you didn’t miss too many,” my mother said and smiled. I could tell she admired Glen for his geese, and that she had done some thinking in the car alone. “It was wonderful, Glen,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They were like snow.”
“It’s worth seeing once, isn’t it?” Glen said. “I should’ve killed more, but I got excited.”
My mother looked at me then. “Where’s yours, Les?”
“Here,” I said and pointed to my two geese on the ground beside me.
My mother nodded in a nice way, and I think she liked everything then and wanted the day to turn out right and for all of us to be happy. “Six, then. You’ve got six in all.”
“One’s still out there,” I said, and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.
“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”
Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn’t either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.
“That one’s my mistake there,” Glen Baxter said and grinned. “I shouldn’t have shot that one, Aileen. I got too excited.”
My mother looked out on the lake for a minute, then looked at Glen and back again. “Poor goose.” She shook her head. “How will you get it, Glen?”
“I can’t get that one now,” Glen said.
My mother looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to leave that one,” Glen said.
“Well, no. You can’t leave one,” my mother said. “You shot it. You have to get it. Isn’t that a rule?”
“No,” Glen said.
And my mother looked from Glen to me. “Wade out and get it, Glen,” she said in a sweet way, and my mother looked young then, like a young girl, in her flimsy short-sleeved waitress dress and her skinny, bare legs in the wheatgrass.
“No.” Glen Baxter looked down at his gun and shook his head. And I didn’t know why he wouldn’t go, because it would’ve been easy. The lake was shallow. And you could tell that anyone could’ve walked out a long way before it got deep, and Glen had on his boots.
My mother looked at the white goose, which was not more than thirty yards from the shore, its head up, moving in slow circles, its wings settled and relaxed so you could see the black tips. “Wade out and get it, Glenny, won’t you, please?” she said. “They’re special things.”
“You don’t understand the world, Aileen,” Glen said. “This can happen. It doesn’t matter.”
“But that’s so cruel, Glen,” she said, and a sweet smile came on her lips.
“Raise up your own arms, ‘Leeny,” Glen said. “I can’t see any angel’s wings, can you, Les?” He looked at me, but I looked away.
“Then you go on and get it, Les,” my mother said. “You weren’t raised by crazy people.” I started to go, but Glen Baxter suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder and pulled me back hard, so hard his fingers made bruises in my skin that I saw later.
“Nobody’s going,” he said. “This is over with now.”
And my mother gave Glen a cold look then. “You don’t have a heart, Glen,” she said. “There’s nothing to love in you. You’re just a son of a bitch, that’s all.”
And Glen Baxter nodded at my mother, then, as if he understood something he had not understood before, but something that he was willing to know. “Fine,” he said, “that’s fine.” And he took his big pistol out from against his belly, the big blue revolver I had only seen part of before and that he said protected him, and he pointed it out at the goose on the water, his arm straight away from him, and shot and missed. And then he shot and missed again. The goose made its noise once. And then he hit it dead, because there was no splash. And then he shot it three times more until the gun was empty and the goose’s head was down and it was floating toward the middle of the lake where it was empty and dark blue. “Now who has a heart?” Glen said. But my mother was not there when he turned around. She had already started back to the car and was almost lost from sight in the darkness. And Glen smiled at me then and his face had a wild look on it. “Okay, Les?” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’re limits to everything, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Your mother’s a beautiful woman, but she’s not the only beautiful woman in Montana.” And I did not say anything. And Glen Baxter suddenly said, “Here,” and he held the pistol out at me. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they’ll die. But I’m ready for it right now.” And I did not know what to do then. Though it is true that what I wanted to do was to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop. Only at that moment he looked scared to me, and I had never seen a grown man scared before—though I have seen one since—and I felt sorry for him, as though he was already a dead man. And I did not end up hitting him at all.
A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he’d never seen before—something soft in himself—his life going a way he didn’t like. A woman with a son. Who could blame him there? I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.
My mother had trie
d to see the good side of things, tried to be hopeful in the situation she was handed, tried to look out for us both, and it hadn’t worked. It was a strange time in her life then and after that, a time when she had to adjust to being an adult just when she was on the thin edge of things. Too much awareness too early in life was her problem, I think.
And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn’t lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don’t know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.
Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.
And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn’t see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It’s still half wild out here.”
And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.
“When I first married your father, you know, we lived on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don’t mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.
“No,” I said.
“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don’t feel part of things tonight, I guess.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Do you know where I’d like to go?”
“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with lite, but did not want to show me that.
“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn’t that be something? Would you like that?”
“I’d like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.
“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”
“I didn’t like him too much,” I said. “I didn’t really care.”
“He’ll fall on his face. I’m sure of that,” she said. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t care about Glen Baxter anymore, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”
“Yes,” I said.
And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
“Do you think I’m still very feminine? I’m thirty-two years old now. You don’t know what that means. But do you think I am?”
And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.
And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following publications in which these stories originally appeared: Esquire: “Rock Springs”, 'Winterkill”, “Fireworks” and “Sweethearts”; Anteaeus: “Communist”; The New Yorker: “Optimists” and “Children”; Granta: “Empire” and “Great Falls”; Tri-Quarterly: “Going to the Dogs”.
I wish to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support. And I wish, aswell, to express my thanks to Gary L. Fisketjon and L. Rust Hills for their editorial advice, and for their indispensable encouragement as I wrote these stories.
RF
A Note on the Author
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and most recently The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction.
By the Same Author
NOVELS
A Piece of My Heart
The Ultimate Good Luck
The Sportswriter
Wildlife
Independence Day
The Lay of the Land
Canada
SHORT FICTION
Women with Men: Three Stories
A Multitude of Sins
First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill 1988
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1979, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1987 by Richard Ford
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
These stories first appeared in the following magazines: ‘Going to the Dogs’ (Triquarterly, 1979); ‘Rock Springs’ (Esquire, 1982); ‘Winterkill’ (Esquire, 1983); ‘Fireworks’ (Esquire, 1982); ‘Communist’ (Antaeus, 1984); ‘Sweethearts’ (Esquire, 1986); ‘Empire’ (Granta, 1986); ‘Great Falls’ (Granta, 1987); ‘Children’ (New Yorker, 1987); ‘Optimists’ (New Yorker, 1987)
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Bedford Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408835098
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers
Independence Day
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award
‘The best novel out of America in many years … simply a masterpiece’ John Banville, Guardian
‘It is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself … Eloquently, with awkward grace, in his novels about an ordinary man, Ford has created an extraordinary epic’
The Times
After the disintegration of his family, the ruin of his career and an affair with a much younger woman, Frank Bascombe decides that the surest route to a ‘normal’ American life is to become an estate agent in Haddam, New Jersey. Frank blunders through the suburban citadels of the Eastern Seaboard and avoids engaging in life until the sudden, cataclysmic events of a Fourth-of-July weekend with his son jolt him back.
The sequel to The Sportswriter and the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year, Independence Day is a landmark
in American Literature.
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
A Multitude of Sins
‘Ford’s sheer mastery of the short-story form is jaw-dropping’
Guardian
‘Ten sexy, grown-up stories about marriage and adultery, passion and infidelity, disappointment and revenge. Ford is a smooth master of his art’ Financial Times
With perhaps his fiercest intensity to date, Richard Ford, America’s most unflinching chronicler of modern life, is drawn to amorous relationships inside, out and to the sides of marriage. In these extraordinary stories all human relations, our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.
‘Ford’s is the voice of twentieth-century America; funny, human, sad and real’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Now in its full maturity, his writing rolls and twists with complexities and sadness and humour; his characters may not often have lives they call their own, but his sentences always do’ Observer
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
A Piece of My Heart
‘This is quality writing in the highest American tradition of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck’
The Times
‘Superb … Brutally real and at the same time haunting … One of those rare surprises that come along every few years’
Jim Harrison
Robard Hughes has raced across the country in pursuit of a woman, and Sam Newell is hunting for the missing part of himself. On an uncharted island on the Mississippi, both these godless pilgrims find what they have been searching for in an explosion of shocking violence. The novel that launched the career of one of America’s late-twentieth-century masters, A Piece of My Heart is a tour de force that does justice to Ford’s diverse literary gifts: his unerring eye for detail, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and his sharp understanding of human nature.