Hometown Read Free

you.”
    Border considered the wisdom of this while looking at the television. Most everyone was watching. Someone had found a remote and switched from Desert Shield news to Regis and Kathie Lee. Regis was terrorizing a guest chef. All the women giggled, and the men seemed to be drifting toward naps. Border felt John Farmer’s eyes on him.
    “Morning, Border.” His father’s voice.
    Border turned around and nodded, then resumed staring at the TV.
    “Well, I’ll be whipped,” John Farmer said. “This is your father, I’ll bet.” He looked back and forth between father and son, measured the silence, and chuckled. “Good enough. We’ve got a long, snowy day ahead. Soon I’ll know the story.”
    The Story —
    If I felt like it, Colonel John Farmer, I guess I could tell quite a tale.
    Family stories go back too far to see, so I’d have to say ours began when he ran.
    My father was only nineteen when he ran from the United States to Canada. It was 1970 and he had received his draft induction notice. Vietnam waited. But my dad looked into his soul, or into his gut, and decided he couldn’t do it. He stole money from his parents, stole his mother’s car, and left the country.
    A draft dodger.
    He made his way to Toronto where he found plenty of other dodgers and deserters.
    Still want to smile at him? Clap your hand on his back?
    He found my mother there, too. She’s from the U.S., but she had drifted into Canada, following a guy she thought she loved.
    They met at a party back in 1973. One night in an apartment where dodgers were welcome to crash, someone spun out on bad acid. The trip got violent. Tables turned and glasses broke. People screamed and fled. My mother was unable to get out of the low sofa where she was nursing her baby, my half sister, Dana. She looked up into the mad face of the deranged deserter. She looked up at a knife.
    It was my father who talked him down. In smooth, low tones, he brought the drug-bombed brain back to earth. He took the knife, handed it over to be put away, then took the man outside for a long walk and talk.
    My mother remembered. And a month later when my father came looking for work at the bookstore she managed, she hired him, certain that he was a useful, reliable man.
    They married twelve months later, after I was born.
    Then, a succession of shared apartments with other dodgers and their women and kids. Jobs that never paid much. Toronto, my parents decided, was getting too hard on Americans. Too mean. They moved to Winnipeg and breathed easier on the plains.
    Jimmy Carter became president down in the States and the first thing he did was pardon the draft dodgers. You can come home, he said.
    My father couldn’t. His father had closed the door, hard and fast. My grandmother tried once, secretly, to whisper through to her son and grandson, to the girls she would’ve happily claimed as daughter and granddaughter. But the old man, a twice-wounded World War II veteran, proud, heaved his weight against that door. It stayed closed.
    They lived in Minnesota. Detroit was almost a thousand miles away, and we went there. Dad went to school, became a nurse. My mother worked in bookstores, wrote and read her poems in coffeehouses. She took her turn at school, studied chemistry. She’s never considered herself a scientist, though, always a poet. Over the years her poems became longer, monologues. Her monologues became flamboyant, performance.
    Soon, Detroit was too crowded for them. We moved to Montana, where it was easier to breathe in the mountains.
    Then, Colorado. Then, New Mexico. Now, Minnesota.
    He hasn’t been back in twenty years. Not even for his mother’s funeral four years ago, or for his father’s last summer. His old man died without a will so everything went to my dad and his brother. Maybe it was my grandfather’s way of saying, Come back.
    Or, maybe, bad financial planning.
    Either way, my dad now owns a fully furnished house in Red Cedar, Minnesota. And after