Richard Ford: Wildlife

Such a fire could not help changing things, and there was a feeling in Great Falls, some attitude in general, that was like discouragement. There were stories in the paper, wild stories. Indians were said to have set fires to get the jobs putting them out. A man was seen driving a loggers’ road throwing flaming sticks out his truck window. Poachers were to blame. A peak far back in the Marshall Mountains was said to have been struck by lightning a hundred times in an hour. My father heard on the golf course that criminals were fighting the fire, murderers and rapists from Deer Lodge, men who’d volunteered but then slipped away and back to civilized life.

No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn. Too many miles separated us from the fire, too many other towns would have to go first — too much bad luck falling one way. But people wet the roofs of their houses, and no one was allowed to burn ditches. Planes took off every day carrying men to jump into the flames, and west of us smoke rose like thunderheads, as if the fire itself could make rain. When the wind stiffened in the afternoons, we all knew that the fire had jumped a trench line or rushed forward or exploded into some untouched place, and that we were all affected, even if we never saw flames or felt the heat.

I was then beginning the eleventh grade in Great Falls High School and was trying to play football, a game I did not like and wasn’t good at, and tried to play only because my father thought I could make friends by playing. There were days, though, that we sat out football practice because the doctor said smoke would scar our lungs and we wouldn’t feel it. I would go on those days and meet my father at the Wheatland Club — the base course having closed because of the fire danger — and hit practice balls with him late in the day. My father began to work fewer days as the summer went on, and was home more. People did not come to the club because of the smoke and the dryness. He taught fewer lessons, saw fewer of the members he had met and made friends with the spring before. He worked more in the pro shop, sold golf equipment and clothes and magazines, rented carts, spent more time collecting balls along the edge of the river by the willows where the driving range ended.

On an afternoon in late September, two weeks after I had started school and the fires in the mountains west of us seemed to be lasting forever, I went with my father out on the driving range with wire baskets. One man was hitting balls off the practice tee far away and to the left of us. I could hear the thwock of the club, then the hiss as the balls arched out into the twilight and bounced toward us. At home, the night before, he and my mother had talked about the election that was coming. They were Democrats. Both their families had been. But my father said on that night that he was considering the Republicans now. Nixon, he said, was a good lawyer. He was not a personable man, but he would stand up to the labor unions.

My mother laughed at him and put her hands over her eyes as if she didn’t want to see him. ‘Oh, not you, too, Jerry,’ she said. ‘Are you becoming a right-to-work advocate?’ She was joking. I don’t think she cared who he voted for, and they did not talk about politics. We were in the kitchen and food was already set out on the table.

‘Things feel like they’ve gone too far in one direction,’ my father said. He put his hands on either side of his plate. I heard him breathe. He still had on his golf clothes, green pants and a yellow nylon shirt with a red club emblem on it. There had been a railroad strike during that summer, but he had not talked about unions, and I didn’t think it had affected us.

My mother was standing and drying her hands at the sink. ‘You’re a working man, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’ll just remind you of that, though.’

‘I wish we had a Roosevelt to vote for,’ my father said. ‘He had a feel for the country.’

‘That was just a different time then,’ my mother said, and sat down across the metal table from him. She was wearing a blue and white checked dress and an apron. ‘Everyone was afraid then, including us. Everything’s better now. You forget that.’

‘I haven’t forgotten anything,’ my father said. ‘But I’m interested in thinking about the future now.’

‘Well,’ she said. She smiled at him. ‘That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. I’m sure Joe’s glad of it, too.’ And then we ate dinner.

The next afternoon, though, at the end of the driving range by the willows and the river, my father was in a different mood. He had not given a lesson that week, but wasn’t tense, and he didn’t seem mad at anything. He was smoking a cigarette, something he didn’t ordinarily do.

‘It’s a shame not to work in warm weather,’ he said and smiled. He took one of the golf balls out of his basket, drew back and threw it through the willow branches toward the river where it hit down in the mud without a sound. ‘How’s your football going,’ he asked me. ‘Are you going to be the next Bob Waterfield?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I won’t be the next Walter Hagen, either,’ he said. He liked Walter Hagen. He had a picture of him wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a heavy overcoat, laughing at the camera as he teed off someplace where there was snow on the ground. My father kept that picture inside the closet door in his and my mother’s bedroom.

He stood and watched the lone golfer who was driving balls out onto the fairway. We could see him silhouetted. ‘There’s a man who hits the ball nicely,’ he said, watching the man take his club back smoothly, then sweep through his swing. ‘He doesn’t take chances. Get the ball in the middle of the fairway, then take the margin of error. Let the other guy foul up. That’s what Walter Hagen did. The game came naturally to him.’

‘Isn’t it the same with you,’ I asked, because that’s what my mother had said, that my father had never needed to practice.

‘Yes it is,’ my father said, smoking. ‘I thought it was easy. There’s probably something wrong with that.’

‘I don’t like football,’ I said.

My father glanced at me and then stared at the west where the fire was darkening the sun, turning it purple. ‘I liked it,’ he said in a dreamy way. ‘When I had the ball and ran up the field and dodged people, I liked that.’

‘I don’t dodge enough,’ I said. I wanted to tell this to him because I wanted him to tell me to quit football and do something else. I liked golf and would’ve been happy to play it.

‘I wasn’t going to not play golf, though,’ he said, ‘even though I’m probably not cagey enough for it.’ He was not listening to me, now, though I didn’t hold it against him.

Far away at the practice tee I heard a thwock as the lone man drove a ball up into the evening air. There was a silence as my father and I waited for the ball to hit and bounce. But the ball actually hit my father, hit him on the shoulder above the bottom of his sleeve — not hard or even hard enough to cause pain.

My father said, ‘Well. For Christ’s sake. Look at that.’ He looked down at the ball beside him on the ground, then rubbed his arm. We could see the man who’d hit the ball walking back toward the clubhouse, his driver swinging beside him like a walking cane. He had no idea where the balls were falling. He hadn’t dreamed he’d hit my father.

My father stood and watched the man disappear into the long white clubhouse building. He stood for a while as if he was listening and could hear something I couldn’t hear — laughing possibly, or music from far away. He had always been a happy man, and I think he may simply have been waiting for something to make him feel that way again.