Read Online Vintage Ford by Richard Ford - Free Book Online

not exactly duck hunting in the way I’d heard about from my school friends. My father had not even been to bed, and had been up drinking and having a good time. Probably he would’ve preferred staying wherever he’d been, with people who were his friends now.
    â€œWhat important books have you been reading?” my father asked for some reason, from down in the skiff. He looked around as a boat full of hunters and the big black Labrador dog I’d heard barking motored slowly past us down Bayou Baptiste. Their guide had a sealed-beam light he was shining out on the water’s misted surface. They were going to shoot ducks. Though I couldn’t see where, since beyond the opposite bank of the bayou was only a flat black treeless expanse that ended in darkness. I couldn’t tell where ducks might be, or which way the city lay, or even which way east was.
    â€œI’m reading
The Inferno
,” I said, and felt self-conscious for saying “Inferno” on a boat dock.
    â€œOh, that,” my father said. “I believe that’s Mr. Fabrice’s favorite book. Canto Five: those who’ve lost the power of restraint. I think you should read Yeats’s autobiography, though. I’ve been reading it in St. Louis. Yeats says in a letter to his friend the great John Synge that we should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. I think that would be good, don’t you?” My father seemed to be assured and challenging, as if he expected me to know what he meant by these things, and who Yeats was, and Synge. But I didn’t know. And I didn’t care to pretend I did to a drunk wearing a tuxedo and a pink carnation, sitting in a duck boat.
    â€œI don’t know them. I don’t know what those things are,” I said and felt terrible to have to admit it.
    â€œThey’re the perfect balance for life. All I’ve been able to arrange are two, however. Maybe one and a half. And how’s your mother?” My father began buttoning his overcoat.
    â€œShe’s fine,” I lied.
    â€œI understand she’s taken on new household help.” He didn’t look up, just kept fiddling with his buttons.
    â€œShe’s learning to sing,” I said, leaving Dubinion out of it.
    â€œOh well,” my father said, getting the last button done and brushing off the front of his coat. “She always had a nice little voice. A sweet church voice.” He looked up at me and smiled as if he knew I didn’t like what he was saying and didn’t care.
    â€œShe’s gotten much better now.” I thought about going home right then, though of course there was no way to get home.
    â€œI’m sure she has. Now get us going here, Fabree-chay,” my father said suddenly.
    Renard was behind me on the dock. Other boats full of hunters had already departed. I could see their lights flicking this way and that over the water, heading away from where we were still tied up, the soft putt-putts of their outboards muffled by the mist. I stepped down into the boat and sat on the middle thwart. But when Renard scooted into the stern, the boat tilted dramatically to one side just as my father was taking a long, uninterrupted drink out of a pint bottle he’d had stationed between his feet, out of sight.
    â€œDon’t go fallin’ in, baby,” Renard said to my father from the rear of the boat as he was giving the motor cord a strong pull. He had a deep, mellow voice, tinged with sarcasm. “I don’t think nobody’ll pull ya’ll out.”
    My father, I think, didn’t hear him. But I heard him. And I thought he was certainly right.
    I cannot tell you how we went in Renard Junior’s boat that morning, only that it was out into the dark marshy terrain that is the Grand Lake and is in Plaquemines Parish and seems the very end of the earth. Later, when the sun rose and the mist was extinguished, what I saw was a great surface of gray-brown