The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  Violet came home every weekend when she was at high school, and told her sisters about Latin and basketball, and looked after the house as before. But when she went away to Ottawa, she stayed until Christmas. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope were big enough by then to take care of the house, but whether they did or not was another matter. Dawn Rose was actually big enough to be starting high school, but she had failed her last year at the local school and was repeating it. She and Bonnie Hope were in the same class.

  When Violet came home for the Christmas holidays, she had changed a great deal. But she thought it was everything and everybody else that had changed.

  She wanted to know if they had always talked this way. What way? With an accent. Weren’t they doing it on purpose, to sound funny? Weren’t they saying “youse” on purpose, to sound funny?

  She had forgotten where some things were kept, and was astonished to find the frying pan under the stove. She took a dislike to the dog, Tigger, who was allowed to stay in the house now that he was getting old. She said he smelled, and that the couch blanket was full of dog hairs.

  She said the parlor smelled moldy and the walls needed papering.

  But it was her sisters themselves who got the full force of her surprise and displeasure. They had grown since the summer. Dawn Rose was a big stout girl now, with loose breasts jiggling inside her dress, and a broad red face whose childish expression of secretiveness had changed to a look that seemed stupid and stubborn. She had developed womanly smells, and she did not wash. Bonnie Hope was still childish in body, but her frizzy red hair was never combed out properly and she was covered with fleabites that she got from playing with the barn cats.

  Violet hardly knew how to go about cleaning these two up. The worst was that they had become rebellious, looked at each other and snickered when she talked to them, avoided her, were mulish and silent. They acted as if they had some idiotic secret.

  And so they did, they had a secret, but it did not come out until quite a while later, not until after the events of the next summer, and then indirectly, with Bonnie Hope telling some girls who told another who told another, and others getting to hear about it, then a neighbor woman, who finally told Violet.

  In late fall of that year—the year Violet went away to normal school—Dawn Rose had begun to menstruate. She was so affronted by this development that she went down to the creek and sat in the cold water, resolved to get the bleeding stopped. She took off her shoes and stockings and underpants and sat there, in the shallow, icy water. She washed the blood out of her underpants and wrung them out and put them on wet. She didn’t catch cold, she didn’t get sick, and she didn’t menstruate again all year. The neighbor woman said that such a procedure could have affected her brain.

  “Driving all that bad blood back into her system, it could have.”

  Violet’s only pleasure that Christmas was in talking about her boyfriend, whose name was Trevor Auston. She showed her sisters his picture. It was cut from a newspaper. He wore his clerical collar.

  “He looks like a minister,” said Dawn Rose, snickering.

  “He is. That picture’s from when he was ordained. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

  Trevor Auston was handsome. He was a dark-haired young man with narrowed eyes and a perfect nose, a chin flung up in the air, and a thin-lipped, confident, even gracious smile.

  Bonnie Hope said, “He must be old, to be a minister.”

  “He just got to be a minister,” said Violet. “He’s twenty-six. He isn’t an Anglican minister, he’s a United Church minister,” she said, as if that made a difference. And to her it did. Violet had changed churches in Ottawa. She said that at the United church there was a lot more going on. There was a badminton club—both she and Trevor played—and a drama club, as well as skating parties, tobogganing parties, hayrides, socials. It was at a Halloween social in the church basement, bobbing for apples, that Violet and Trevor first met. Or first talked, because Violet of course had noticed him before in church, where he was the assistant minister. He said that he had noticed her, too. And she thought that maybe he had. A group of girls from the normal school all went to that church together, partly on Trevor’s account, and they played a game, trying to catch his eye. When everybody was standing up singing the hymns, they stared at him, and if he looked back they dropped their eyes at once. Waves of giggles would spread along the row. But Violet sang right back at him as if her eyes had just lit on him by accident:

  “Rise up, oh men of God

  And gird your armour on—”

  Locked eyes during the hymn-singing. The virile hymns of the old Methodists and the scourging psalms of the Presbyterians had come together in this new United Church. The ministry then, in that church, attracted vigorous young men intent on power, not too unlike the young men who went into politics. A fine voice and a good profile did no harm.

  Locked eyes. Kisses at the door of Violet’s boarding house. The cool, nicely shaved, but still slightly bristling and foreign male cheek, the decent but promising smell of talc and shaving lotion. Soon enough they were slipping into the shadows beside the doorway, pressing together through their winter clothing. They had to have serious talks about self-control, and these talks were in themselves inflammatory. They became more and more convinced that if they were married, they would be having the kind of pleasures that nearly make you faint when you think about them.

  Soon after Violet got back from her Christmas holidays, they became engaged. Then they had other things to think about and look forward to besides sex. A responsible and important sort of life lay ahead of them. They were asked to dinner as an engaged couple, by older ministers and rich and powerful members of the congregation. Violet had made herself one good dress, a cranberry wool serge with box pleats—a great improvement over the Roman-striped crêpe creation.

  At those dinners, they had tomato juice to start with. Pitchers of iced water sat on the tables. No one in that church could touch alcoholic beverages. Even their Communion wine was grape juice. But there were great roasts of beef or pork, or turkeys, on silver platters, roasted potatoes and onions and slatherings of gravy, then rich cakes and pies and divinely molded puddings with whipped cream. Eating was not a sin. Cardplaying was a sin, except for a specially created Methodist card game called Lost Heir; dancing was a sin for some, and moviegoing was a sin for some, and going to any kind of entertainment except a concert of sacred music for which one did not pay was a sin for all on Sundays.

  This was a change for Violet after the easygoing Anglicanism of her childhood, and the rules—if there were any rules—at home. She wondered what Trevor would say if he could see King Billy downing his tot of whiskey every morning before he started out to do the chores. Trevor had spoken of going home with her to meet her family, but she had been able to put him off. They could not go on Sunday because of his church services, and they could not go during the week because of her classes. She tried to push the idea of home out of her mind for now.

  The strictness of the United Church might have been something to get used to, but the feelings of purpose and importance about it, the briskness and energy, were very agreeable to Violet. It was as if the ministers and top parishioners all had jobs in some thriving and important company. The role of a minister’s wife she could see as hard and challenging, but that did not discourage her. She could see herself teaching Sunday school, raising money for missions, leading in prayer, sitting nicely dressed in the front pew listening to Trevor, tirelessly pouring tea out of a silver pot.

  She didn’t plan to spend the summer at home. She would visit for a week, once her exams were over, then work for the summer in the church office in Ottawa. She had applied for a teaching job in Bell’s Corners, close by. She meant to teach for one year, then get married.

  The week before exams were due to start, she got a letter from home. It was not from King Billy or Aunt Ivie—they didn’t write letters—but from the woman on the next farm, the owner of the sewing machine. He
r name was Annabelle Wrioley and she took some interest in Violet. She had no daughter of her own. She used to think that Violet was a terror, but now she thought she was a go-getter.

  Annabelle said she was sorry to bother Violet at this time, but thought she should be told. There was trouble at home. What the trouble was she didn’t like to say in a letter. If Violet could see her way to coming home on the train, she could go to town and meet her. She and her husband had a car now.

  So Violet came home on the train.

  “I have to tell you straight out,” said Annabelle. “It’s your father. He’s in danger.”

  Violet thought she meant that King Billy was sick. But it wasn’t that. He had been getting strange letters. Terrible letters. They were threats on his life.

  What was in those letters, Annabelle said, was disgusting beyond belief.

  Out at home, it looked as if all daily life had been suspended. The whole family was frightened. They were afraid to go to the back pasture to get the cows, afraid to go to the far end of the cellar, or to the well or toilet after dark. King Billy was a man willing even now to get into a fight, but he was unnerved by the idea of an unknown enemy waiting to pounce. He could not walk from the house to the barn without whirling around to see if there was anybody behind him. When he milked the cows, he turned them around in their stalls so that he could be in a corner where nobody could sneak up on him. Aunt Ivie did the same.

  Aunt Ivie went around the house with a stick, beating on cupboard doors and the tops of chests and trunks and saying, “If you’re in there, you better stay in there until you suffocate to death! You murderer!”

  The murderer would have to be a midget, Viole said, to be hiding in any of those places.

  Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope were staying home from school, although it was the time of year when they should have been preparing to write the entrance examinations. They were afraid to get undressed at night, and their clothes were all wrinkled and sour-smelling.

  Meals were not being cooked. But the neighbors brought food. There seemed to be always some visitor sitting at the kitchen table, a neighbor, or even someone not well known to the family who had heard about their trouble and come from a distance. The dishes were being washed in cold water if they were washed at all, and the dog was the only one interested in cleaning up the floor.

  King Billy had been sitting up all night to keep watch. Aunt Ivie barricaded herself behind the bedroom door.

  Violet asked about the letters. They were brought out, spread for her inspection on the oilcloth of the table, as they had been spread before all the neighbors and visitors.

  Here was the letter that had come first, in the regular mail. Then the one that came second, also through the mail. After that the notes were found in different places around the farm.

  On top of a cream can in the stable.

  Tacked to the barn door.

  Wrapped around the handle of the milk pail that King Billy used every day.

  Some argument started up about just which note was found in which place.

  “What about the postmark?” Violet cut in. “Where are the envelopes of the ones that came in the mail?”

  They didn’t know. They didn’t know where the envelopes had got to.

  “I want to see where they were posted from,” said Violet.

  “Don’t make no difference where it was posted from seeing he knows right where to find us,” Aunt Ivie said. “Anyway, he don’t post them now. He sneaks up here after dark and leaves them. Sneaks right around here after dark and leaves them—he knows where to find us.”

  “What about Tigger?” said Violet. “Didn’t he bark?”

  No. But Tigger was getting too old now to be much of a watchdog. And with all the visitors coming and going he had practically given up barking altogether.

  “He likely wouldn’t bark if he seen all the hosts of hell coming in at the gate,” King Billy said.

  The first note told King Billy that he might as well sell off all his cows. He was a marked man. He would never live to cut the hay. He was as good as dead.

  That had sent King Billy to the doctor. He took it that there might be something wrong with him that could be read in his face. But the doctor thumped him and listened to his heart and shone a light in his eyes and charged him two dollars and told him he was sound.

  What a fool ignoramus you were to go to the doctor, the next letter said. You could have saved your two-dollar bill to wipe your dirty old arse. I never told you that you were going to die of any disease. You are going to be killed. That is what is going to happen to you. You aren’t safe no matter how good your health is. I can come in your house at night and slit your throat. I can shoot you from behind a tree. I can sneak up from behind and throw a rope around you and strangle you and you will never even see my face, so what do you think of that?

  So it wasn’t a fortune-teller or somebody who could read the future. It was an enemy, who planned to do the job himself.

  I wouldn’t mind killing your ugly wife and your stupid kids while I’m at it.

  You ought to be thrown down the toilet hole head first. You bowlegged stupid rotten pig. You ought to have your things cut off with a razor blade. You are a liar, too. All those fights you said you won are a lie.

  I could stick a knife in you and catch your blood in a bowl and make a blood pudding. I would feed it to the pigs.

  How would you like a red-hot poker in your eye?

  When she finished reading, Violet said, “The thing to do is to show these to the police.”

  She had forgotten that the police did not exist out here in that abstract, official way. There was a policeman, but he was in town, and furthermore King Billy had had a run-in with him last winter. According to King Billy’s story, a car driven by Lawyer Boot Lomax had skidded into King Billy’s cutter at an intersection, and Lomax had summoned the policeman.

  “Arrest that man for failing to stop at an intersection!” shouted Boot Lomax (drunk), waving his hand in its big fur-lined glove.

  King Billy jumped up on the hard, heaped-up snow and readied his fists. “Ain’t no brass buttons going to put the cuffs on me!”

  It was all talked out in the end, but just the same it would be bad policy to go to that policeman.

  “He’s going to have it in for me, no matter. Could be even him is writing them.”

  But Aunt Ivie said it was that tramp. She remembered a bad-looking tramp who had come to the door years ago, and when she gave him a piece of bread he didn’t say thank you. He said, “Haven’t you got any bologna?”

  King Billy thought more likely it could be a man he had hired once to help with the hay. The man quit after a day and a half because he couldn’t stand working in the mow. He said he had nearly choked to death up there on the dust and the hayseeds, and he wanted fifty cents extra for the damage to his lungs.

  “I’ll give you fifty cents!” King Billy yelled at him. He jabbed at the air with a pitchfork. “Come over here and you’ll get your fifty cents!”

  Or could it be somebody settling an old score, one of those fellows he had kicked off the train long ago? One of those fellows from further back than that, that he had cleaned up on at the dance?

  Aunt Ivie recalled a boy who had thought the world of her when she was young. He had gone out West but might have come back, and just heard that she was married.

  “After all this time to come ragin’ after you?” King Billy said. “That’s not what I’d call likely!”

  “He thought the world of me, just the same.”

  Violet was studying the notes. They were printed in pencil, on cheap lined paper. The pencil strokes were dark, as if the writer kept bearing down hard. There was no rubbing out or problem with the spelling—for instance, of a word like “ignoramus.” There was an understanding of sentences and capital letters. But how much could that tell you?

  The door was bolted at night. The blinds were drawn down to the sills. King Billy laid the shotgun on the table an
d set a glass of whiskey beside it.

  Violet dashed the whiskey into the slop pail. “You don’t need that,” she said.

  King Billy raised his hand to her—though he was not a man to strike his wife or his children.

  Violet backed off but went on talking. “You don’t need to stay awake. I’ll stay awake. I’m fresh and you’re tired. Go on, Papa. You need to sleep, not drink.”

  After some arguing, this was agreed on. King Billy made Violet show him that she knew how to use the shotgun. Then he went off to sleep in the parlor, on the hard couch there. Aunt Ivie had already pushed the dresser against the bedroom door and it would take too much yelling and explaining to get her to push it away.

  Violet turned up the lamp and got the ink bottle from the shelf and started writing to Trevor to tell him what the trouble was. Without boasting, just telling what was happening, she let him see how she was taking over and calming people down, how she was prepared to defend her family. She even told about throwing out the whiskey, explaining that it was due to the strain on his nerves that her father had thought of resorting to whiskey in the first place. She did not say that she was afraid. She described the stillness, darkness, and loneliness of the early-summer night. And to someone who had been living in a town or city, it was very dark and lonely—but not so still, after all. Not if you were listening for something. It was full of faint noises, distant and nearby, of trees lifting and stirring and animals shifting and feeding. Lying outside the door, Tigger made the noise once or twice that meant he was dreaming about barking.

  Violet signed her letter Your loving and longing future wife, then added, with all my heart. She turned the lamp down and raised a window blind and sat there keeping watch. In her letter, she had said that the countryside looked lovely now with the buttercups blooming along the roads, but as she sat watching to see if any moving shape detached itself from the bulging shadows in the yard, and listening for soft footsteps, she thought that she really hated the country. Parks were nicer for grass and flowers, and the trees along the streets in Ottawa were as fine as you could ask for. Order prevailed there, and some sort of intelligence. Out here was emptiness, rumor, and absurdity. What would the people who had asked her to dinner think if they could see her sitting here with a shotgun in front of her?