by Alice Munro
Reminders of my mother in this house are not so easy to locate, although she dominated it for so long with what seemed to us her embarrassing ambitions, and then with her just as embarrassing though justified complaints. The disease she had was so little known then, and so bizarre in its effects, that it did seem to be just the sort of thing she might have contrived, out of perversity and her true need for attention, for bigger dimensions in her life. Attention that her family came to give her out of necessity, not quite grudgingly, but so routinely that it seemed—it sometimes was—cold, impatient, untender. Never enough for her, never enough.
The books that used to lie under beds and on tables all over the house have been corralled by Irlma, chased and squeezed into this front-room bookcase, glass doors shut upon them. My father, loyal to his wife, reports that he hardly reads at all anymore, he has too much to do. (Though he does like to look at the Historical Atlas that I sent him.) Irlma doesn’t care for the sight of people reading because it is not sociable and at the end of it all what has been accomplished? She thinks people are better off playing cards, or making things. Men can do woodworking, women can quilt and hook rugs or crochet or do embroidery. There is always plenty to do.
Contrarily, Irlma honors the writing that my father has taken up in his old age. “His writing is very good excepting when he gets too tired,” she has said to me. “Anyway it’s better than yours.”
It took me a moment to figure out that she was talking about handwriting. That’s what “writing” has always meant around here. The other business was or is called “making things up.” For her they’re joined together somehow and she does not raise objections. Not to any of it.
“It keeps his head working,” she says.
Playing cards, she believes, would do the same. But she doesn’t always have the time to sit down to that in the middle of the day.
My father talks to me about putting siding on the house. “I need a job like that to get me back to the shape I was in a couple of years ago.”
About fifteen months ago he had a serious heart attack.
Irlma sets out coffee mugs, a plate of soda crackers and graham crackers, cheese and butter, bran muffins, baking-powder biscuits, squares of spice cake with boiled icing.
“It’s not a lot,” she says. “I’m getting lazy in my old age.”
I say that will never happen, she’ll never get lazy.
“The cake’s even a mix, I’m shamed to tell you. Next thing you know it’ll be boughten.”
“It’s good,” I say. “Some mixes are really good.”
“That’s a fact,” says Irlma.
—
HARRY CROFTON—who works part-time at the turkey barn where my father used to work—drops in at dinnertime the next day and after some necessary and expected protests is persuaded to stay. Dinnertime is at noon. We are having round steak pounded and floured and cooked in the oven, mashed potatoes with gravy, boiled parsnips, cabbage salad, biscuits, raisin cookies, crab-apple preserves, pumpkin pie with marshmallow topping. Also bread and butter, various relishes, instant coffee, tea.
Harry passes on the message that Joe Thoms, who lives up the river in a trailer, with no telephone, would be obliged if my father would drop by with a sack of potatoes. He would pay for them, of course. He would come and pick them up if he could, but he can’t.
“Bet he can’t,” says Irlma.
My father covers this taunt by saying to me, “He’s next thing to blind, these days.”
“Barely find his way to the liquor store,” Harry says.
All laugh.
“He could find his way there by his nose,” Irlma says. And repeats herself, with relish, as she often does. “Find his way there by his nose!”
Irlma is a stout and rosy woman, with tinted butterscotch curls, brown eyes in which there is still a sparkle, a look of emotional readiness, of being always on the brink of hilarity. Or on the brink of impatience flaring into outrage. She likes to make people laugh, and to laugh herself. At other times she will put her hands on her hips and thrust her head forward and make some harsh statement, as if she hoped to provoke a fight. She connects this behavior with being Irish and with being born on a train.
“I’m Irish, you know. I’m fighting Irish. And I was born on a moving train. I couldn’t wait. Kicking Horse Railway, what do you think of that? Born on a kicking horse you know how to stick up for yourself, and that’s a fact.” Then, whether her listeners reply in kind or shrink back in disconcerted silence, she will throw out a challenging laugh.
She says to Harry, “Joe still got that Peggy-woman living with him?”
I don’t know who Peggy is, so I ask.
“Don’t you mind Peggy?” Harry says reproachfully. And to Irlma, “You bet he has.”
Harry used to work for us when my father had the fox farm and I was a little girl. He gave me licorice whips, out of the fuzzy depths of his pockets, and tried to teach me how to drive the truck and tickled me up to the elastic of my bloomers.
“Peggy Goring?” he says. “Her and her brothers used to live up by the tracks this side of the Canada Packers? Part Indian. Hugh and Bud Goring. Hugh used to work at the creamery?”
“Bud was the caretaker at the Town Hall,” my father puts in.
“You mind them now?” says Irlma with a slight sharpness. Forgetting local names and facts can be seen as deliberate, unmannerly.
I say that I do, though I don’t, really.
“Hugh went off and he never come back,” she says. “So Bud shut the house up. He just lives in the one back room of it. He’s got the pension now but he’s too cheap to heat the whole house all the same.”
“Got a little queer,” my father says. “Like the rest of us.”
“So Peggy?” says Harry, who knows and always has known every story, rumor, disgrace, and possible paternity within many miles. “Peggy used to be going around with Joe? Years back. But then she took off and got married to somebody else and was living up north. Then after a while Joe took off up there too and he was living with her but they got into some big kind of a fight and he went away out west.” He laughs as he has always done, silently, with a great private derision that seems to be held inside him, shuddering through his chest and his shoulders.
“That’s the way they did,” says Irlma. “That’s the way they carried on.”
“So then Peggy went out west chasing after him,” Harry resumes, “and they ended up living together out there and it seems like he was beating up on her pretty bad so finally she got on the train and come back here. Beat her up so bad before she got on the train they thought they’d have to stop and put her in a hospital.”
“I’d like to see that,” Irlma says. “I’d like to see a man try that on me.”
“Yeah, well,” says Harry. “But she must’ve got some money or she made Bud pay her a share on the house because she bought herself the trailer. Maybe she thought she was going to travel. But Joe showed up again and they moved the trailer out to the river and went and got married. Her other husband must’ve died.”
“Married according to what they say,” says Irlma.
“I don’t know,” says Harry. “They say he still thumps her good when he takes the notion.”
“Anybody tried that on me,” Irlma says, “I’d let him have it. I’d let him have it in the you-know-where.”
“Now now,” says my father, in mock consternation.
“Her being part Indian might have something to do with it,” Harry says. “They say the Indians thump their women every once in a while and it makes them love ’em better.”
I feel obliged to say, “Oh, that’s just the way people talk about Indians,” and Irlma—immediately sniffing out some high-mindedness or superiority—says that what people say about the Indians has a lot of truth to it, never mind.
“Well, this conversation is way too stimulating for an old chap like me,” says my father. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while upstairs.”
&nb
sp; —
“HE’S NOT HIMSELF,” Irlma says, after we have listened to my father’s slow steps on the stairs. “He’s been feeling tough two or three days now.”
“Has he?” I say, guilty that I haven’t noticed. He has seemed to me the way he always seems now when a visit brings Irlma and me together—just a bit shaky and apprehensive, as if he had to be on guard, as if it took some energy explaining and defending us, one to the other.
“He don’t feel right,” Irlma says. “I can tell.”
She turns to Harry, who has put on his outdoor jacket.
“Just tell me something before you go out that door,” she says, getting between him and the door to block his way. “Tell me—how much string does it take to tie up a woman?”
Harry pretends to consider. “Big woman or little woman, would that be?”
“Any size woman at all.”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Couldn’t say.”
“Two balls and six inches,” cries Irlma, and some far gurgles reach us, from Harry’s subterranean enjoyment.
“Irlma, you’re a Tartar.”
“I am so. I’m an old Tartar. I am so.”
—
I GO ALONG IN THE CAR with my father, to take the potatoes to Joe Thoms.
“You aren’t feeling well?”
“Not the very best.”
“How aren’t you feeling well?”
“I don’t know. Can’t sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got the flu.”
“Are you going to call the doctor?”
“If I don’t get better I’ll call him. Call him now I’d just be wasting his time.”
Joe Thoms, a man about ten years older than I am, is alarmingly frail and shaky, with long stringy arms, an unshaven, ruined, handsome face, grayed-over eyes. I can’t see how he could manage to thump anybody. He gropes to meet us and take the sack of potatoes, urges us inside the smoky trailer.
“I mean to pay you for these here,” he says. “Just tell me what they’re worth?”
My father says, “Now now.”
An enormous woman stands at the stove, stirring something in a pot.
My father says, “Peggy, this is my daughter. Smells good, whatever you got there.”
She doesn’t respond, and Joe Thoms says, “It’s just a rabbit we got give for a present. No use to talk to her, she’s got her deaf ear to you. She’s deaf and I’m blind. Isn’t that the devil? It’s just a rabbit but we don’t mind rabbit. Rabbit’s a clean feeder.”
I see now that the woman is not so enormous all over. The upper part of the arm next to us is out of proportion to the rest of her body, swollen like a puffball. The sleeve has been ripped out of her dress, leaving the armhole frayed, threads dangling, and the great swelling of flesh exposed and gleaming in the smoke and shadow of the trailer.
My father says, “It can be pretty good all right, rabbit.”
“Sorry not to offer you a shot,” Joe says. “But we don’t have it in the house. We don’t drink no more.”
“I’m not feeling up to it either, to tell you the truth.”
“Nothing in the house since we joined the Tabernacle. Peggy and me both. You hear we joined up?”
“No, Joe. I didn’t hear about that.”
“We did. And it’s a comfort to us.”
“Well.”
“I realize now I spent a lot of my life in the wrong way. Peggy, she realizes it too.”
My father says, “H’m-h’m.”
“I say to myself it’s no wonder the Lord struck me blind. He struck me blind but I see His purpose in it. I see the Lord’s purpose. We have not had a drop of liquor in the place since the first of July weekend. That was the last time. First of July.”
He sticks his face close to my father’s.
“You see the Lord’s purpose?”
“Oh Joe,” says my father with a sigh. “Joe, I think all that’s a lot of hogwash.”
I am surprised at this, because my father is usually a man of great diplomacy, of kind evasions. He has always spoken to me, almost warningly, about the need to fit in, not to rile people.
Joe Thoms is even more surprised than I am.
“You don’t mean to say that. You don’t mean it. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Yes I do.”
“Well you should read your Bible. You should see what all it says in the Bible.”
My father slaps his hands nervously or impatiently on his knees.
“A person can agree or disagree with the Bible, Joe. The Bible is just a book like any other book.”
“It’s a sin to say that. The Lord wrote the Bible and He planned and created the world and every one of us here.”
More hand slapping. “I don’t know about that, Joe. I don’t know. Come to planning the world, who says it has to’ve been planned at all?”
“Well then, who created it?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. And I don’t care.”
I see that my father’s face is not as usual, that it is not agreeable (that has been its most constant expression) and not ill-humored either. It is stubborn but not challenging, simply locked into itself in an unyielding weariness. Something has shut down in him, ground to a halt.
—
HE DRIVES HIMSELF to the hospital. I sit beside him with a washed-out can on my knees, ready to hold it for him if he should have to pull off the road and be sick again. He has been up all night, vomiting often. In between times he sat at the kitchen table looking at the Historical Atlas. He who has rarely been out of the province of Ontario knows about rivers in Asia and ancient boundaries in the Middle East. He knows where the deepest trench is in the ocean floor. He knows Alexander’s route, and Napoleon’s, and that the Khazars had their capital city where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea.
He said he had a pain across his shoulders, across his back. And what he called his old enemy, his gut pain.
About eight o’clock he went upstairs to try to sleep, and Irlma and I spent the morning talking and smoking in the kitchen, hoping that he was doing that.
Irlma recalled the effect she used to have on men. It started early. A man tried to lure her off when she was watching a parade, only nine years old. And during the early years of her first marriage she found herself walking down a street in Toronto, looking for a place she’d heard about, that sold vacuum-cleaner parts. And a man, a perfect stranger, said to her, “Let me give you a piece of advice, young lady. Don’t walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face. People could take that up the wrong way.”
“I didn’t know how I was smiling. I wasn’t meaning any harm. I’d always’ve rather smiled than frowned. I was never so flabbergasted in my life. Don’t walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face.” She leans back in her chair, opens her arms helplessly, laughs.
“Hot stuff,” she says. “And didn’t even know it.”
She tells me what my father has said to her. He has said that he wished that she’d always been his wife, and not my mother.
“That’s what he said. He said I was the one what would have suited him. Should’ve got me the first time.”
And that’s the truth, she says.
—
WHEN MY FATHER came downstairs he said he felt better, he had slept a little and the pain was gone, or at least he thought it was going. He could try to eat something. Irlma offered a sandwich, scrambled eggs, applesauce, a cup of tea. My father tried the cup of tea, and then he vomited and kept vomiting bile.
But before he would leave for the hospital he had to take me out to the barn and show me where the hay was, how to put it down for the sheep. He and Irlma keep two dozen or so sheep. I don’t know why they do this. I don’t think they make enough money on the sheep for the work that is created to be worthwhile. Perhaps it is just reassuring to have some animals around. They have Buster of course, but he is not exactly a farm animal. The sheep provide chores, farm work still to be done, the kind of wor
k they have known all their lives.
The sheep are still out to pasture, but the grass they get has lost some of its nourishment—there have been a couple of frosts—so they must have the hay as well.
—
IN THE CAR I sit beside him holding the can and we follow slowly that old, usual route—Spencer Street, Church Street, Wexford Street, Ladysmith Street—to the hospital. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same—nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.
Not for my father. He has lived here and nowhere else. He has not escaped things by such use.
—
TWO SLIGHTLY STRANGE THINGS happen when I take my father into the hospital. They ask me how old he is, and I say immediately, “Fifty-two,” which is the age of a man I am in love with. Then I laugh and apologize and run to the bed in the Emergency Ward where he is lying, and ask him if he is seventy-two or seventy-three. He looks at me as if the question bewilders him too. He says, “Beg your pardon?” in a formal way, to gain time, then is able to tell me, seventy-two. He is trembling slightly all over, but his chin is trembling conspicuously, just the way my mother’s did. In the short time since he has entered the hospital some abdication has taken place. He knew it would, of course—that is why he held off coming. The nurse comes to take his blood pressure and he tries to roll up his shirtsleeve but is not able—she has to do it for him.
“You can go and sit in the room outside,” the nurse says to me. “It’s more comfortable there.”
The second strange thing: It happens that Dr. Parakulam, my father’s own doctor—known locally as the Hin-doo doctor—is the doctor on call in the Emergency Ward. He arrives after a while and I hear my father making an effort to greet him in an affable way. I hear the curtains being pulled shut around the bed. After the examination Dr. Parakulam comes out and speaks to the nurse, who is now busy at the desk in the room where I am waiting.