by Alice Munro
That happened, more or less. The commune disintegrated. The goats disappeared. Some of the women moved to town, cut their hair, put on makeup, and got jobs as waitresses or cashiers to support their children. The Toronto man put the place up for sale, and after about a year it was sold for more than ten times what he had paid for it. A young couple from Ottawa bought it. They have painted the outside a pale gray with oyster trim, and have put in skylights and a handsome front door with carriage lamps on either side. Inside, they’ve changed it around so much that I’ve been told I’d never recognize it.
I did get in once, before this happened, during the year that the house was empty and for sale. The company I work for was handling it, and I had a key, though the house was being shown by another agent. I let myself in on a Sunday afternoon. I had a man with me, not a client but a friend – Bob Marks, whom I was seeing a lot at the time.
“This is that hippie place,” Bob Marks said when I stopped the car. “I’ve been by here before.”
He was a lawyer, a Catholic, separated from his wife. He thought he wanted to settle down and start up a practice here in town. But there already was one Catholic lawyer. Business was slow. A couple of times a week, Bob Marks would be fairly drunk before supper.
“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s where I was born. Where I grew up.” We walked through the weeds, and I unlocked the door.
He said that he had thought, from the way I talked, that it would be farther out.
“It seemed farther then.”
All the rooms were bare, and the floors swept clean. The woodwork was freshly painted – I was surprised to see no smudges on the glass. Some new panes, some old wavy ones. Some of the walls had been stripped of their paper and painted. A wall in the kitchen was painted a deep blue, with an enormous dove on it. On a wall in the front room, giant sunflowers appeared, and a butterfly of almost the same size.
Bob Marks whistled. “Somebody was an artist.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” I said, and turned back to the kitchen. The same woodstove was there. “My mother once burned up three thousand dollars,” I said. “She burned three thousand dollars in that stove.”
He whistled again, differently. “What do you mean? She threw in a check?”
“No, no. It was in bills. She did it deliberately. She went into town to the bank and she had them give it all to her, in a shoebox. She brought it home and put it in the stove. She put it in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.”
“What are you talking about?” said Bob Marks. “I thought you were so poor.”
“We were. We were very poor.”
“So how come she had three thousand dollars? That would be like thirty thousand today. Easily. More than thirty thousand today.”
“It was her legacy,” I said. “It was what she got from her father. Her father died in Seattle and left her three thousand dollars, and she burned it up because she hated him. She didn’t want his money. She hated him.”
“That’s a lot of hate,” Bob Marks said.
“That isn’t the point. Her hating him, or whether he was bad enough for her to have a right to hate him. Not likely he was. That isn’t the point.”
“Money,” he said. “Money’s always the point.”
“No. My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love.”
“Some people would consider it lunacy.”
I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.
I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.
“It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,” I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?” I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.
Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”
That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigtails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.
I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the other walls – a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.
“I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened, sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.
I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came too, and a little shower of dried plaster.
“Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words hippie or commune and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that – it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”
IN THE CAR, on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before – the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodies pressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bush we passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crêpe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.
“A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”
“I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”
“Speaking of money,” said Beryl – though nobody actually had been – “do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California – you can’t lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”
All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.
“That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I get?”
“And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.
But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”
My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”
“From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”
“We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”
Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and put it in the stove and burned it.
My father turned around and faced the roa
d ahead.
I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress.At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.
“So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”
My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”
“You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”
“The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”
“That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”
“He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”
My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”
“Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”
“Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.
Gratitude not felt by all.
“Don’t you pretend this isn’t the craziest thing you ever heard of,” Beryl shouted into the front seat. “Don’t you pretend you don’t think so! Because it is, and you do. You think just the same as me!”
MY FATHER DID not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn’t appear so. He did not know about it – it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence’s Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others – he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room – the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top – and there is the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene,but not crazy. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.
How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it. But I have stopped telling that story. I never told it to anyone again after telling it to Bob Marks. I don’t think so. I didn’t stop just because it wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. I stopped because I saw that I had to give up expecting people to see it the way I did. I had to give up expecting them to approve of any part of what was done. How could I even say that I approved of it myself? If I had been the sort of person who approved of that, who could do it, I wouldn’t have done all I have done – run away from home to work in a restaurant in town when I was fifteen, gone to night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into the real-estate office, and finally become a licensed agent. I wouldn’t be divorced. My father wouldn’t have died in the county home. My hair would be white, as it has been naturally for years, instead of a color called Copper Sunrise. And not one of these things would I change, not really, if I could.
Bob Marks was a decent man – good-hearted, sometimes with imagination. After I had lashed out at him like that, he said, “You don’t need to be so tough on us.” In a moment, he said, “Was this your room when you were a little girl?” He thought that was why the mention of the sexual shenanigans had upset me.
And I thought it would be just as well to let him think that. I said yes, yes, it was my room when I was a little girl. It was just as well to make up right away. Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later. I wonder if those moments aren’t more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.
MILES CITY, MONTANA
MY FATHER CAME across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned. There were several men together, returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body. The men were muddy and exhausted, and walked with their heads down, as if they were ashamed. Even the dogs were dispirited, dripping from the cold river. When they all set out, hours before, the dogs were nervy and yelping, the men tense and determined, and there was a constrained, unspeakable excitement about the whole scene. It was understood that they might find something horrible.
The boy’s name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-colored now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter. His face was turned in to my father’s chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud.
I don’t think so. I don’t think I really saw all this. Perhaps I saw my father carrying him, and the other men following along, and the dogs, but I would not have been allowed to get close enough to see something like mud in his nostril. I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it. I see his face unaltered except for the mud – Steve Gauley’s familiar, sharp-honed, sneaky-looking face – and it wouldn’t have been like that; it would have been bloated and changed and perhaps muddied all over after so many hours in the water.
To have to bring back such news, such evidence, to a waiting family, particularly a mother, would have made searchers move heavily, but what was happening here was worse. It seemed a worse shame (to hear people talk) that there was no mother, no woman at all – no grandmother or aunt, or even a sister – to receive Steve Gauley and give him his due of grief. His father was a hired man, a drinker but not a drunk,an erratic man without being entertaining, not friendly but not exactly a troublemaker. His fatherhood seemed accidental, and the fact that the child had been left with him when the mother went away, and that they continued living together, seemed accidental. They lived in a steep-roofed, gray-shingled hillbilly sort of house that was just a bit better than a shack – the father fixed the roof and put supports under the porch, just enough and just in time – and their life was held together in a similar manner; that is, just well enough to keep the Children’s Aid at bay. They didn’t eat meals together or cook for each other, but there was food. Sometimes the father would give Steve money to buy food at the store, and Steve was seen to buy quite sensible things, such as pancake mix and macaroni dinner.
I had known Steve Gauley fairly well. I had not liked him more often than I had liked him. He was two years older than I was. He would hang around our place on Saturdays, scornful of whatever I was doing but unable to leave me alone. I couldn’t be on the swing without him wanting to try it, and if I wouldn’t give it up he came and pushed me so that I went crooked. He teased the dog. He got me into trouble – deliberately and maliciously, it seemed to me afterwards – by daring me to do things I wouldn’t have thought of on my own: digging up the potatoes to see how big they were when they were still only the size of marbles, and pushing over the stacked firewood to make a pile we could jump off. At school, we never spoke to each other. He was solitary, though not tormented. But on Saturday mornings, when I saw his thin, self-possessed figure sliding through the cedar hedge, I knew I was in for something and he would decide what. Sometimes it was all right. We pretended we were cowboys who had to tame wild horses. We played in the pasture by the river, not far from the place where Steve drowned. We were horses and riders both, screaming and neighing and bucking and waving whips of tree branches beside a little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario.
The funeral was held in our house. There was not enough room at Steve
’s father’s place for the large crowd that was expected because of the circumstances. I have a memory of the crowded room but no picture of Steve in his coffin, or of the minister, or of wreaths of flowers. I remember that I was holding one flower, a white narcissus, which must have come from a pot somebody forced indoors, because it was too early for even the forsythia bush or the trilliums and marsh marigolds in the woods. I stood in a row of children, each of us holding a narcissus. We sang a children’s hymn, which somebody played on our piano: “When He Cometh, When He Cometh, to Make Up His Jewels.” I was wearing white ribbed stockings, which were disgustingly itchy, and wrinkled at the knees and ankles. The feeling of these stockings on my legs is mixed up with another feeling in my memory. It is hard to describe. It had to do with my parents. Adults in general but my parents in particular. My father, who had carried Steve’s body from the river, and my mother, who must have done most of the arranging of this funeral. My father in his dark-blue suit and my mother in her brown velvet dress with the creamy satin collar. They stood side by side opening and closing their mouths for the hymn, and I stood removed from them, in the row of children, watching. I felt a furious and sickening disgust. Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults. The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power. The breath, the coarseness, the hairiness, the horrid secretions. But this was more. And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it. There was no release, as when I would finally bend and pick up a stone and throw it at Steve Gauley. It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste – a thin, familiar misgiving.
