The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  Suppose the intruder, the murderer, did come up the steps? She would have to shoot at him. Any wound from a shotgun would be terrible, that close. There would be a court case and her picture would be in the papers. HILLBILLY SQUABBLE.

  If she didn’t hit him, it would be worse.

  When she heard a thump, she was on her feet, with her heart pounding. Instead of picking up the gun, she had pushed it away. She had thought the sound was on the porch, but when she heard it again she knew it was upstairs. She knew, too, that she had been asleep.

  It was only her sisters. Bonnie Hope had to go outside to the toilet.

  Violet lit the lantern for them. “You didn’t need to both get up,” she said. “I could have gone with you.”

  Bonnie Hope shook her head and pulled on Dawn Rose’s hand. “I want her,” she said.

  This fright seemed to be making them into near imbeciles. They would not look at Violet. Could they even remember the days when they had, and she had instructed and spoiled them, and tried to make them pretty?

  “Why can’t you wear your nightgowns?” Violet said sadly, and closed the door. She sat by the gun until they came back and went to bed. Then she lit the stove and made coffee, because she was afraid of falling asleep again.

  When she saw the sky getting light, she opened the door. The dog stood up, shivered all over, and went to drink from the plugged dishpan by the pump. The yard was surrounded by white mist. Between the house and the barn was a rocky hump of land, and the rocks were dark with the dampness of night. What was their farm but a few acres of shallow soil scattered in among rubbly hills and swamp? What folly to think you could settle in there and live a life and raise a family.

  On the top step was an out-of-place object—a neat, glistening horse bun. Violet looked for a stick to push it off with, then saw the piece of paper underneath.

  Don’t think your stuck-up slut of a daughter can help you. I see you all the time and I hate her and you. How would you like to get this rammed down your throat?

  He must have put it here during the last hour of the night, while she was drinking her coffee at the kitchen table. He could have looked in through the window and seen her. She ran to wake her sisters to ask if they had seen anything when they went out, and they said no, nothing. They had gone down those steps and back up with the lantern, and there was nothing. He had put it there since.

  One thing this told Violet that she was glad of. Aunt Ivie could have had nothing to do with it. Aunt Ivie had been shut up in her room all night. Not that Violet really thought that her mother was spiteful enough or crazy enough to do such a thing. But she knew what people said. She knew there would be people now saying they were not too surprised about what was going on here. They would just be saying that certain people attract peculiar troubles, that in the vicinity of certain people things are more likely to happen.

  Violet worked all day at cleaning up. Her letter to Trevor lay on the dresser. She never got down to the mailbox with it. People dropped in, and it was the same as yesterday—the same talk, the same suspicions and speculations. The only difference was that there was the new note to show.

  Annabelle brought them fresh bread. She read the note and said, “It just makes me sick to my stomach. So close, too. You could’ve almost heard him breathing, Violet. Your nerves must be about shot.”

  “There’s not nobody can realize it,” said Aunt Ivie proudly. “What us up here are going through.”

  “Anybody even steps on this place after dark,” King Billy said, “from now on he’s likely to get shot. And that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  After they had eaten supper, and milked, and turned out the cows, Violet took her letter down to the mailbox for the mailman to pick up in the morning. She set the pennies on top of it for the stamp. She climbed up on the bank behind the mailbox and sat down.

  Nobody went by on the road. The days were at their longest now; the sun was just going down. A killdeer went cheeping by with a wing dragging, trying to get her to follow. Its eggs must be somewhere close by. Killdeers laid their eggs practically on the road, right on the gravel, then had to spend their time trying to lure people away.

  She was getting as bad as King Billy, thinking she sensed somebody behind her. She tried not to look around, but couldn’t stop herself. She jumped up and turned, all at once, and saw a streak of red hair caught by the low sun, behind a juniper bush.

  It was Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope.

  “What are you doing there, trying to scare me?” Violet said bitterly. “Aren’t all of us scared enough already? I can see you! What do you think you’re doing?”

  They came out, and showed her what they had been doing—picking the wild strawberries.

  Between the time she first saw the streak of red hair and the time she saw the red strawberries in their hands, Violet knew. But she would never get it out of them unless she coaxed and pleaded, and seemed to admire and sympathize. Maybe not even then.

  “Can’t I have a berry?” she said.” Are you mad at me? I know your secret.

  “I know,” she said. “I know who wrote those letters. I know it was you. You played a good trick on them, didn’t you?”

  Bonnie Hope’s face started twitching. She clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip. Dawn Rose’s face didn’t change at all. But Violet saw her fist close on the berries she had picked. Red juice oozed out between Dawn Rose’s fingers. Then she seemed to decide that Violet was on her side—or that she didn’t care—and she smiled. This smile, or grin, was one that Violet thought she would never forget. It was innocent and evil, like the smile of some trusted person turned or revealed to be an enemy in a dream. It was the smile of chubby little Dawn Rose, her sister, and the grin of a cold, sly, full-grown, slatternly, bad-hearted stranger.

  It was all Dawn Rose’s doing. That came out. It all came out now. Dawn Rose had written all the letters and figured out where to put them, and Bonnie Hope had not done anything but stand by and keep her mouth shut. The first two letters were posted from town. The first time was when Dawn Rose had been taken to town to see the doctor for her earache. The second was when they had gone along with Annabelle for the ride. (Annabelle found a reason to go to town almost every day, now that she had the car.) Both times it had been easy to get to the post office. Then Dawn Rose had started putting the notes in other places.

  Bonnie Hope was giggling faintly. Then she started to hiccup, and next to sob.

  “Be quiet!” said Violet. “It wasn’t you!”

  Dawn Rose did not show any such signs of fright or remorse. She cupped her hands to her face to eat the squashed berries. She didn’t even ask if Violet was going to tell. And Violet didn’t ask her why she had done it. Violet thought that if she did ask, point-blank, Dawn Rose would probably say that she had done it for a joke. That would be bad enough. But what if she didn’t say anything?

  After her sisters had gone upstairs that night, Violet told King Billy that he wouldn’t have to sit up anymore.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Get Mother out here and I’ll tell you.” She was conscious of saying “Mother” instead of “Aunt Ivie” or even “Mama.”

  King Billy banged on the bedroom door. “Move that stuff away and get out here! Violet wants you!”

  Violet let up the window shades and unbolted and opened the door. She stood the shotgun in the corner.

  Her news took a long time to sink in. Both parents sat with their shoulders slumped and their hands on their knees and looks of deprivation and bewilderment on their faces. King Billy seemed to comprehend first.

  “What’s she got against me?” he said.

  That was all he kept saying, and all he ever could say when he thought about it.

  “What do you think she could’ve had against me?”

  Aunt Ivie got up and put on her hat. She felt the night air coming in through the screen door.

  “People get their laugh on us now,” she said.

  “Don’t tell them,”
said Violet. (As if that would be possible.)“Don’t tell them anything. Let it die down.”

  Aunt Ivie rocked herself on the couch, in her felt hat and dismal nightgown and rubber boots. “They’ll say we got a queer streak in this family now, for sure.”

  Violet told her parents to go to bed, and they went, as if they were the children. Though she hadn’t been to bed last night, and her eyes felt as they had been rubbed with sandpaper, she was sure she could never sleep herself. She got down all the letters that Dawn Rose had written from their place behind the clock, and folded them without looking at them and put them in an envelope. She wrote a note and put it in with them, and addressed the envelope to Trevor.

  We have found out who wrote these, her note said. It was my sister. She is fourteen years old. I don’t know if she is crazy, or what. I don’t know what I should do. I want you to come and get me and take me away. I hate it here. You can see what her mind is like. I can’t sleep here. Please if you love me come and get me and take me away.

  She took this envelope down to the mailbox in the dark, and put in the pennies for the stamp. She had actually forgotten the other letter and the pennies already there. It seemed as if that letter had gone off days before.

  She lay down on the hard parlor couch. In the dark, she couldn’t see the picture that she used to think so powerful, so magical. She tired to remember the feeling it had given her. She fell asleep very soon.

  Why did Violet do this? Why did she send those ugly letters to Trevor, and put such a note in with them? Did she really want to be rescued, told what to do? Did she want his help with the problem of Dawn Rose—his prayers, even? (Since this whole thing began, Violet hadn’t given a thought to praying, or involving God in any way.)

  She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgment had deserted her. That was all.

  The day after those letters were collected, Violet herself was standing by the mailbox in the morning. She wanted to get a ride into town with the mailman, so that she could catch the one-o’clock train to Ottawa.

  “You folks got some bad business going on?” the mailman said. “Some bad business with your daddy?”

  “That’s all right,” said Violet. “That’s all over.”

  She knew that mail posted here was delivered in Ottawa the next day. There were two deliveries, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If Trevor was out all day—and he usually was—his letters would be left waiting for him on the hall table of the house where he boarded, the house of a minister’s widow. The front door was usually left unlocked. Violet could get to the letters before he did.

  Trevor was at home. He had a bad summer cold. He was sitting in his study with a white scarf wrapped like a bandage around his throat.

  “Don’t come near me, I’m full of germs,” he said as Violet crossed the room toward him. From his tone of voice, you would have thought she was.

  “You forgot to leave the door open,” he said. The door of the study had to be left open when Violet was in there, so that the minister’s widow would not be scandalized.

  Spread out on his desk, among his books and sermon notes, were all the smudged, creased, disgraceful letters that Dawn Rose had written.

  “Sit down,” said Trevor, in a tired, croaking voice. “Sit down, Violet.”

  So she had to sit in front of his desk, like some unhappy parishioner, some poor young woman who had got into trouble.

  He said that he was not surprised to see her. He had thought she might show up. Those were his words. “Show up.”

  “You were going to tear them up if you got here first,” he said.

  Yes. Exactly.

  “So I would never have known,” he said.

  “I would have told you someday.”

  “I doubt it,” said Trevor, in his miserable croaking voice. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, but I doubt it,” in an attempt to be kinder, more patient, more ministerial.

  They talked from midafternoon until dark. Trevor talked. He rubbed the outside of his throat to keep his voice going. He talked until his throat was quite raw, stopped for a rest, and talked again. He didn’t say a single thing that Violet couldn’t have predicted, from the moment when he first raised his eyes to her. From the moment when he said, “Don’t come near me.”

  And in the letter that she received from him, a few days later—in which he said the final things he couldn’t quite bring himself to say to her face—there was also not one word she didn’t know ahead of time. She could have written it for him. (All the letters written by Dawn Rose were enclosed.)

  A minister, unfortunately, is never quite free to love and choose for himself. A minister’s wife must be someone who doesn’t bring with her any problem that might distract her husband and deflect him from serving God and his congregation. A minister’s wife also must not have anything in her background or connections that would ever give rise to gossip or cause a scandal. Her life is often difficult, and it is necessary that she should have the very best of physical and mental health, with no hereditary taint or weakness, in order to undertake it.

  All this came out with a great deal of repetition and enlargement and sidetracking, and in the middle of it they had some sort of wrangle about bringing Dawn Rose to see some doctors here, getting her put away somewhere. Trevor said that Dawn Rose was obviously a very deranged sort of person.

  But instead of feeling that she wanted the problem of Dawn Rose solved for her by Trevor, Violet now seemed to feel that she had to protect Dawn Rose against him.

  “Couldn’t we ask God to cure her?” she said.

  She knew by his look that he thought she was being insolent. It was up to him to mention God, not her. But he said calmly that it was through doctors and treatment that God cured people. Through doctors and treatment and laws and institutions. That was how God worked.

  “There is a kind of female insanity that strikes at that age,” he said. “You know what I mean. She hates men. She blames them. That’s obvious. She has an insane hatred of men.”

  Later, Violet wondered if he had been trying to keep a door open for her then. If she had agreed to Dawn Rose’s banishment, would he have broken off their engagement? Perhaps not. Though he tried to sound so superior and sensible, he, too, was probably feeling desperate.

  Several times he had to say the same thing to her. “I won’t talk to you, I can’t talk to you, unless you stop crying.”

  The minister’s widow came in and asked if they wanted supper. They said no, and she went away, disapproving. Trevor said he couldn’t swallow. When it was getting dark, they went out. They walked down the street to a drugstore, and ordered two milkshakes, and a chicken sandwich for Violet. The chicken felt like bits of wood in her mouth. They walked on to the Y.W.C.A., where she could get a room for the night. (The room at her boarding house was being held for her, but she couldn’t face going there.) She said she would catch the early-morning train.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Trevor. “We could have breakfast. My voice is gone now.”

  It was. He was whispering.

  “I’ll pick you up,” he whispered. “I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty.”

  But never touched, again, his mouth or his cool cheek to hers.

  The early train left at ten to eight, and Violet was on it. She planned to write to the woman at the boarding house and to the church office where she had meant to work. She would not write her examinations. She could not stay in Ottawa another day. Her head ached horribly in the morning sunlight. This time, she really had not closed her eyes all night. When the train began to move, it was as if Trevor was being pulled away from her. More than Trevor. Her whole life was being pulled away from her—her future, her love, her luck, and her hopes. All that was being pulled off like skin, and hurt as much, and left her raw and stinging.

  Did she despise him, then? If she did, she didn’t know it. That wasn’t something she could know about. If he had
come after her, she would have gone back to him—gladly, gladly. Until the last minute, she hoped that he would come running onto the station platform. He knew when the early train left. He might wake up, and know what she was doing, and come after her. If he had done that, she would have given in about Dawn Rose; she would have done anything he wanted.

  But he hadn’t come after her, he hadn’t come. No face was his; she couldn’t bear to look at anybody.

  At moments like this, thought Violet, it must be at moments like this that people do the things you hear about, and read about in the newspapers. The things you try to imagine, or try not to imagine. She could imagine it, she could feel what it would be like. The quick sunny flight, then the smack of the gravelly bank. Drowning yourself would be pleasanter, but would require a firmer purpose. You’d have to keep wanting it, still wanting it, hugging the water, gulping it down.

  Unless you jumped from a bridge.

  Could this be Violet? Could she be the person thinking these thoughts, reduced to such possibilities, her life turned upside down? She felt as if she was watching a play, and yet she was inside it, inside the play; she was in crazy danger. She closed her eyes and prayed rapidly—that, too, part of the play, but real: the first time in her life, she thought, that she had really prayed.

  Deliver me. Deliver me. Restore me to my rightful mind. Please. Please hurry. Please.

  And what she afterward believed that she learned on this train trip, which took less than two hours altogether, was that prayers are answered. Desperate prayers are answered. She would believe that she had never had an inkling before of what prayers could be, or the answers could be. Now something settled on her in the train, and bound her. Words settled on her, and were like cool, cool cloths, binding her.