Between Them by Richard Ford

Author:Richard Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

My Mother, In Memory

Edna Akin, 1928

My mother’s name was Edna Akin, and she was born in 1910, in the far northwest corner of Arkansas—Benton County—in a place the location of which I’m not sure of and never have been. Near Decatur or Centerton. A town that may no longer exist. Or not a town at all—just a rural place. That is near the Oklahoma border there, and in 1910 it was a rough country with a frontier feel. Only ten years before, robbers and outlaws had been loose on the landscape. Bat Masterson was still alive then and not long gone from Galena.

I remark on this not because of its susceptibility to romance, or because I think it makes my mother’s life unique, but because it seems like such a long time ago now, and such a far-off and unknowable place; and because it is my mother, whom I knew very well, who links me to that foreignness, that other thing I don’t know much about and never did. This is one quality of our lives with our parents that is often overlooked, and so devalued. Our parents intimately link us, closeted as we are in our lives, to a thing we’re not, forging a joined separateness and a useful mystery, so that even together with them we are also alone.

The act of considering my mother’s life is an act of love. And my incomplete memory of her life should not be thought of as incomplete love. I loved my mother the way a happy child does, thoughtlessly and without doubts. And when I became an adult, and we were adults who knew one another, we regarded each other highly. We could always say “I love you” to clarify our complicated dealings without pausing. That seems perfect to me now and did then.

I have already said that my mother and my father were not a pair for whom history had much to offer. This might’ve had to do with not being rich or with their both being country people and insufficiently educated, or with not being particularly aware of many things. For my mother, history was just small business, forgettable residues—some of them mean. Nothing in her past was heroic or edifying. The Depression—hard times all around—had something to do with that. In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.

About my mother’s early life I don’t know much—for instance, where her father came from. Akin suggests the possibility of Irish Protestants. He was a carter, and my mother spoke of him lovingly, though not at length. “Oh,” she would say, “my daddy was a good man.” And that was that. He died of cancer in the 1930s—but not before my mother had been relegated to him by her mother—almost a waif.

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