The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  He wasn’t going to say that the person was Nancy, not because Nancy was a woman but because Eddy was apt to regard anything Nancy said or did with such mesmerized delight that you would never be able to get an opinion out of him. It was not easy to get opinions out of him in any case.

  “It’s a big engine,” Eddy said. “It’s a V-8 350. It’s a Chevy engine.”

  Colin didn’t say he knew this already. “Is it too big?” he said. “Is it a danger?”

  “It is a bit big.”

  “Have you seen them put this kind of an engine in this kind of body before?

  “Oh, yeah. I seen them do everything.”

  “Would it cause an accident, like this person said?”

  “Hard to say.”

  After most people say that, they go on and tell you what it is that is hard to say. Not Eddy.

  “Would it be sure to break the universal?”

  “Oh, not sure,” said Eddy agreeably. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “It might?”

  “Well.”

  “Should I say anything to Ross?”

  Eddy chuckled nervously. “Sylvia don’t take it too well when you say anything to Ross.”

  Colin had not been into the spiked punch. He and Ross and the half-dozen other boys did not go that close to the heart of the party. They ignored the party, staying on the fringes of it, drinking only out of cans—cans of Coca-Cola and Orange that somebody had brought and left beside the back steps. They ate potato chips that were provided, but did not bother with the food set out on tables that required plates or forks. They did not pay attention to what the adults were doing. A few years ago, they would have been hanging around watching everything, with the idea, mostly, of making fun of and disrupting it. Now they would not give that world—the world of adults, at the party or anywhere else—credit for existing.

  Things that belonged to adults were another story. Those were still interesting, and in the cars parked along the black lane they found plenty. Tools, shovels, last winter’s chains, boots, some traps. Torn raincoats, a blanket, magazines with dirty pictures. A gun.

  The gun was lying along the back seat of an unlocked car. It was a hunting rifle. There was no question that they would have to lift it out, look at it and comment on it in a knowledgeable way, aim it at imaginary birds.

  Some said to be careful.

  “It isn’t loaded.”

  “How do you know?”

  Colin never heard how that boy knew. He was thinking howRoss must not get his hands on this gun, or, loaded or not, it would explode. To prevent such a thing happening, Colin grabbed it himself, and what happened then he absolutely did not know, or remember, ever. He didn’t remember pointing the gun. He couldn’t have pointed it. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger, because that was what he couldn’t have done. He couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He couldn’t remember the sound of a shot but only the knowledge that something had happened—the knowledge you have when a loud noise wakes you out of sleep and just for a moment seems too distant and inevitable to need your attention.

  Screams and yells broke on his ears at this same time. One of the screams came from Ross, which should have told Colin something. (Do people shot dead usually scream?) Colin didn’t see Ross fall. What he did see—and always remembered—was Ross lying on the ground, on his back, with his arms flung out, a dark stain spilled out from the top of his head.

  That could not actually have been there—was there a puddle?

  Not despising the world or help of adults anymore, one or two boys raced down the lane to Sylvia’s house, yelling, “Ross is shot! Colin shot him! Ross! He’s shot! Colin shot him! Ross! Colin! Ross!”

  By the time they made the people sitting around the table in the back yard understand this—some had heard the shot but thought of firecrackers—and by the time the first men, running down the lane, came to the scene of the tragedy, Ross was sitting up, stretching his arms, with a sly, abashed look on his face. The boys who hadn’t run to get help had seen him stir, and thought he must be alive but wounded. He wasn’t wounded at all. The bullet hadn’t come near him. It had hit the shed a little way down the lane, a shed where an old man sharpened skates in the wintertime. Nobody was hurt.

  Ross claimed he had been knocked out, or knocked over, by the sound of the shot. But everybody, knowing Ross, believed or suspected that he had put on an act on purpose, on the spur of the moment. The gun was lying in the grass by the side of the lane, where Colin had thrown it. None of the boys had picked it up; nobody wanted to touch it or be associated with it, though it was clear to them now that everything must come out—how they took it from the car when they had no business to, how they were all to blame.

  But Colin chiefly. Colin was to blame. And he had run.

  That was the cry, after the first commotion about Ross.

  “What happened? Ross, are you all right? Are you hit? Where is the gun? Are you really all right? Where did you get the gun? Why did you act like you were shot? Are you sure you’re not shot? Who shot the gun? Who? Colin!”

  “Where is Colin?”

  Nobody even remembered the direction he had gone in. Nobody remembered seeing him go. They called, but there was no answer. They looked along the lane to see if he might be hiding. The constable got into the police car, and other people got into their cars, and they drove up and down the strets, even drove a few miles out onto the highway to see if they could catch him running away. No sign of him. Sylvia went into the house and looked in the closets and under the beds. People were wandering around, bumping into each other, shining flashlights into bushes, calling for Colin.

  Then Ross said he knew the place to look.

  “Down at the Tiplady Bridge.”

  This was an iron bridge of the old-fashioned kind spanning the Tiplady River. It had been left in place though a new, concrete bridge had been built upriver, so that the widened highway now bypassed that bit of town. The road leading down to the old bridge was closed off to cars and the bridge itself declared unsafe, but people swam or fished off it, and at night cars bumped around the ROAD CLOSED sign to park. The pavement there was broken up, and the streetlight had burned out and not been replaced. There were rumors and jokes about this light, implying that members of the council were among those who parked, and preferred darkness.

  The bridge was only a couple of blocks from Sylvia’s house. The boys ran ahead, not led but followed by Ross, who took a thoughtful pace. Sylvia stuck close to him and told him to get a move on. She was wearing high heels and a teal-blue sheath dress, too tight across the hips, which hampered her.

  “You better be right,” she said, confused now about which son she was most angry at. She hadn’t had time to recover from Ross’s not being shot when she had to wonder if she would ever see Colin again. Some party guests were drunk or tactless enough to wonder out loud if he could have jumped into the Tiplady River.

  The constable stuck his head out of the car and told them to remove the roadblock. Then he drove through and shone his headlights on the bridge.

  The top of the bridge did not show up very well in this light, but they could see somebody sitting there.

  “Colin!”

  Colin had climbed up and settled on the iron girders. He was there.

  “Colin! I can’t believe you did that!” Sylvia yelled up at him. “Come on down off that bridge!”

  Colin didn’t move. He seemed dazed. He was, in fact, so blinded by the lights of the police car that he couldn’t have climbed down if he had wanted to.

  Now the constable ordered him, and others ordered him. He wouldn’t budge. In the midst of the orders and reproaches, it struck Sylvia that of course he didn’t know that Ross wasn’t dead.

  “Colin, your brother isn’t shot!” she called to him. “Colin! Your brother is alive here beside me! Ross is alive!”

  Colin didn’t answer but she thought she saw his head move, as if he was peering down.

  “Get those stupid li
ghts off him,” she said to the constable, who was a sort of boyfriend. “Turn the lights on Ross if you want to turn them on something.”

  “Why don’t we stand Ross out in the lights?” the constable said. “Then we can turn them off and let the boy climb down.

  “Okay, Colin,” the constable called out. “We’re going to show you Ross standing here—he isn’t hurt or anything!”

  Sylvia pushed Ross into the light.

  “Open your mouth, for crying out loud,” she said. “Tell your brother you’re alive.”

  Colin was helping Glenna clean up. He thought about what his mother had said, about plastic dishes and tablecloths that you could just scoop up and throw in the garbage. There was not a chance in a million that Glenna would ever do that. His mother understood nothing about Glenna, nothing at all.

  Now Glenna was exhausted, having created a dinner party more elaborate than necessary that nobody but herself could appreciate.

  No, that was wrong. He appreciated, even if he didn’t understand the necessity. Every step she took him away from his mother’s confusion, he appreciated.

  “I don’t know what to say to Ross,” he said.

  “What about?” said Glenna.

  She was so tired, he thought, that she had forgotten what Nancy told her. He found himself thinking of the night before their wedding. Glenna had five bridesmaids, chosen for their size and coloring rather than particular friendship, and she had made all their dresses to a design of her own. She made her wedding dress as well, and all the gloves and headdresses. The gloves had sixteen little covered buttons each. She finished them at nine-thirty the night before the wedding. Then she went upstairs, looking very white. Colin, who was staying in the house, went up to see how she was and found her weeping, still holding some scraps of colored cloth. He couldn’t get her to stop, and called her mother, who said, “That’s just the way she is, Colin. She overdoes things.”

  Glenna sobbed and said, among other things, that she saw no use in being alive. The next day, she was angelically pretty, showing no ravages, drinking in praise and wishes for her happiness.

  This dinner wasn’t likely to have worn her out as much as the bridesmaids’ outfits, but she had reached the stage where she had a forbidding look, a harsh pallor, as if there were a lot of things that she might call in question.

  “He is not going to want to go hunting for another engine,” Colin said. “How can he afford one? He owes Sylvia for that one. Anyway, he wants a big engine. He wants the power.”

  Glenna said, “Does it make that much difference?”

  “It makes a difference. In the pickups and the power. Sure. An engine like that makes a difference.”

  Then he saw that she might not have meant that. She might not have meant “Does the engine make a difference?” She might have meant “If it’s not this, it’ll be something else.”

  (She sat on the grass; she polished the caps. She sniffed at the door panels. She said, “Let Lynnette choose the color.”)

  She might have meant “Why don’t we just let it go?”

  Colin shook the garbage down in the plastic bag and tied it at the neck. “I don’t want you and Lynnette riding around with him, if there’s anything like that.”

  “Colin, I wouldn’t,” said Glenna, in a gentle, amazed voice. “Do you think I ever would ride with him in that car or let Lynnette ride with him? I never would.”

  He took the garbage out and she began to sweep the floor. When he came back, she said, “I just thought of something. I thought, Soon I’ll be sweeping the black and white tiles and I won’t even be able to picture what these old boards look like. We won’t be able to remember. We should take some pictures so we can remember what we’ve done.”

  Then she said, “I think Nancy sort of dramatizes sometimes. I mean it about me and Lynnette. But I think she overdramatizes.”

  Glenna had surprised him, in fact, with the way she could picture things. The house, each of its rooms, in its finished state. She had placed the furniture they hadn’t yet bought; she had chosen the colors in accordance with a northern or southern exposure, morning or evening light. Glenna could hold in her mind an orderly succession of rooms, an arrangement that was ordained, harmonious, and, by her, completely understood.

  A problem wouldn’t just thrust itself on Glenna, and throw her into doubts and agonies. Solutions were waiting like a succession of rooms. There was a way she would see of dealing with things without talking or thinking about them. And all her daily patience and sweetness wouldn’t alter that way, or touch it.

  At first, with the lights and the hollering, his only idea was that they had come to blame him. That didn’t interest him. He knew what he had done. He hadn’t run away and cut down here and climbed the bridge in the dark so that they couldn’t punish him. He was not afraid; he wasn’t shivering with the shock. He sat on the narrow girders and felt how cold the iron was, even on a summer night, and he himself was cold, but still calm, with all the jumble of his life, and other people’s lives in this town, rolled back, just like a photograph split and rolled back, so it shows what was underneath all along. Nothing. Ross lying on the ground with a pool around his head. Ross silenced, himself a murderer. Still nothing. He wasn’t glad or sorry. Such feelings were too puny and personal; they did not apply. Later on, he found out that most people, and apparently his mother, believed he had climbed up here because he was in a frenzy of remorse and was contemplating throwing himself into the Tiplady River. That never occurred to him. In a way, he had forgotten the river was there. He had forgotten that a bridge was a structure over a river and that his mother was a person who could order him to do things.

  No, he hadn’t forgotten those things so much as grasped how silly they were. How silly it was that he should have a name and it should be Colin, and that people should be shouting it. It was silly, in a way, even to think that he had shot Ross, though he knew he had. What was silly was to think in these chunks of words. Colin. Shot. Ross. To see it as an action, something sharp and separate, an event, a difference.

  He wasn’t thinking of throwing himself into the river or of anything else he might do next, or of how his life would progress from this moment. Such progress seemed not only unnecessary but impossible. His life had split open, and nothing had to be figured out anymore.

  They were telling him Ross wasn’t dead.

  He isn’t dead, Colin.

  You never shot him.

  It was a hoax.

  It was Ross playing a joke.

  Ross’s joke.

  You never shot anybody, Colin. Gun went off but nobody was hurt.

  See, Colin. Here he is.

  Here’s Ross. He ain’t dead.

  “I ain’t dead, Colin!”

  “Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? He said he ain’t dead!”

  So now you can come on down.

  Now you can come down.

  Colin. Come on down.

  That was when everything started to go back to being itself again. He saw Ross unwounded, unmistakably himself, lit up by car lights. Ross risen up, looking cheerful and slightly apprehensive, but not really apologetic. Ross, who seemed to caper even when he was standing still, and to laugh out loud even when he was working hard at keeping his mouth shut.

  The same.

  Colin felt dizzy, and sick with the force of things coming back to life, the chaos and emotion. It was as painful as fiery blood pushing into frozen parts of your body. Doing as he was told, he started to climb down. Some people clapped and cheered. He had to concentrate to keep from slipping. He was weak and cramped from sitting up there. And he had to keep himself from thinking, too suddenly, about what had just missed happening.

  He knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.

  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.