by Alice Munro
Dane didn’t know right away that she had fallen. He was too busy in the kitchen.
Luckily, paper in heaps or bundles doesn’t catch fire as readily as most people think it does. Dane was more afraid of the curtains catching, or the dry paint behind the stove. Violet wasn’t anything like the careful housekeeper she used to be, and the walls were greasy. He brought the scatter rug down on the flames that were shooting up from the stove, then remembered the fire extinguisher that he himself had bought for Violet and insisted she keep on the kitchen counter. He went stumbling around the room with the fire extinguisher, chasing flaming birds that fell down as bits of charred paper. He was impeded by the piles of paper on the floor. But the curtains didn’t catch. The wall behind the stove had broken out in paint blisters, but it didn’t catch either. He kept at the chase, and in five minutes, maybe less, he had the fire out. Just the bits of burned paper, dirty moth wings, were lying over everything—a mess.
When he saw Violet on the ground between the rosebushes, he thought the worst. He was afraid she had had a stroke, or a heart attack, or at the very least broken her hip in the fall. But she was conscious, struggling to push herself up, groaning. He got hold of her, and lifted her. With many grunts and exclamations of dismay coming from them both, he helped her to the back steps and set her down.
“What’s this blood on you?” he said. Her arms were smeared with dirt and blood.
“It’s from the roses,” Violet said. He knew then, by her voice, that there was nothing broken in her.
“The roses scratched me something fierce,” she said. “Dane, you’re a terrible sight. You’re a terrible sight, you’re all black!”
Tears and sweat ran together down his face. He put his hand up to his cheek, and it came away black. “Smoke,” he said.
She was so calm that he thought perhaps she had had a tiny stroke, a loss of memory, just enough to let her mind skip over the fire. But she hadn’t.
“I didn’t even use any coal oil,” she said. “Dane, I didn’t use coal oil or anything. What would make it flare up like that?”
“It wasn’t a wood stove, Aunt Violet. It was on top of the gas burners.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“You must have thought you were burning papers in the wood stove.”
“I must have. What a thing to do. And you came and put it out.”
He was trying to pick the black bits of paper out of her hair, but they disintegrated under his fingers. They fell to smaller bits, and were lost.
“I have you to thank,” said Violet.
“What we ought to do now,” he said, “is take you over to the hospital, just to make sure you’re all right. You could have a rest for a few days while we see about cleaning up the kitchen. Would that be all right?”
She made some groaning but peaceable sound that meant yes.
“Then maybe you’d like to come out and stay with us for a while.”
He would talk to Theo that night; they would have to manage something.
“You’d have to watch me that I didn’t burn the place down.”
“That’s all right.”
“Oh, Dane. It’s no joke.”
Violet died in the hospital, the third night, without any warning. A delayed reaction, perhaps. Shock. Dane burned all the papers in the back-yard incinerator. She never told him to; she never mentioned what she had been doing. She never mentioned the girls again, or anything that had happened that summer. He just felt that he should finish what she had started. He planned, as he burned, what he would say to those girls, but by the time he finished, he thought he was being too hard on them—they had brought her happiness, as much as trouble.
While they were still sitting on the back steps, in the hot, thinly clouded early afternoon, with the green wall of corn in front of them, Violet had touched her scratches and said, “These remind me.”
“I should put some Dettol on them,” said Dane.
“Sit still. Do you think there is any kind of infection that hasn’t run its course through my veins by now?”
He sat still, and she said, “You know, Wyck and I were friends, Dane, a long, long time before we were able to get married?”
“Yes.”
“Well, these scratches remind me of the way we met, to be friends the way we were, because of course we knew each other by sight. I was driving my first car, the V-8 that you wouldn’t remember, and I ran it off the road. I ran it into a bit of a ditch and I couldn’t get out. So I heard a car coming, and I waited, and then I couldn’t face it.”
“You were embarrassed you’d run off the road?”
“I was feeling badly. That was why I’d run off the road. I was feeling badly for no reason, or just a little reason. I couldn’t face anybody, and I ran off into the bushes and right away I got stuck. I turned and twisted and couldn’t get loose, and the more I turned the more I got scratched. I was in a light summer dress. But the car stopped anyway. It was Wyck. I never told you this, Dane?”
No.
“It was Wyck driving someplace by himself. He said, stay still there, and he came over and started pulling the berry canes and branches off me. I felt like a buffalo in a trap. But he didn’t laugh at me—he didn’t seem the least surprised to find a person in that predicament. I was the one who started laughing. Seeing him going round so dutiful in his light-blue summer suit.”
She ran her hands up and down her arms, tracing the scratches with her fingertips, patting them.
“What was I just talking about?”
“When you were caught in the bushes, and Wyck was working you out.”
She patted her arms rapidly and shook her head and made that noise in her throat, of impatience or disgust. Annhh.
She sat up straight and said, in a clear, but confiding voice, “There is a wild pig running through the corn.”
“And you were laughing,” Dane said, as if he hadn’t heard that.
“Yes,” said Violet, nodding several times and struggling to be patient. “Yes. We were.”
CIRCLE OF PRAYER
Trudy threw a jug across the room. It didn’t reach the opposite wall; it didn’t hurt anybody, it didn’t even break.
This was the jug without a handle—cement-colored with brown streaks on it, rough as sandpaper to the touch—that Dan made the winter he took pottery classes. He made six little handleless cups to go with it. The jug and the cups were supposed to be for sake, but the local liquor store doesn’t carry sake. Once, they brought some home from a trip, but they didn’t really like it. So the jug Dan made sits on the highest open shelf in the kitchen, and a few odd items of value are kept in it. Trudy’s wedding ring and her engagement ring, the medal Robin won for all-round excellence in Grade 8, a long, two-strand necklace of jet beads that belonged to Dan’s mother and was willed to Robin. Trudy won’t let her wear it yet.
Trudy came home from work a little after midnight; she entered the house in the dark. Just the little stove light was on—she and Robin always left that on for each other. Trudy didn’t need any other light. She climbed up on a chair without even letting go of her bag, got down the jug, and fished around inside it.
It was gone. Of course. She had known it would be gone.
She went through the dark house to Robin’s room, still with her bag over her arm, the jug in her hand. She turned on the overhead light. Robin groaned and turned over, pulled the pillow over her head. Shamming.
“Your grandmother’s necklace,” Trudy said. “Why did you do that? Are you insane?”
Robin shammed a sleepy groan. All the clothes she owned, it seemed, old and new and clean and dirty, were scattered on the floor, on the chair, the desk, the dresser, even on the bed itself. On the wall was a huge poster showing a hippopotamus, with the words underneath “Why Was I Born So Beautiful?” And another poster showing Terry Fox running along a rainy highway, with a whole cavalcade of cars behind him. Dirty glasses, empty yogurt containers, school notes, a Tampax still in its wrapper, the stuffed sn
ake and tiger Robin had had since before she went to school, a collage of pictures of her cat Sausage, who had been run over two years ago. Red and blue ribbons that she had won for jumping, or running, or throwing basketballs.
“You answer me!” said Trudy. “You tell me why you did it!”
She threw the jug. But it was heavier than she’d thought, or else at the very moment of throwing it she lost conviction, because it didn’t hit the wall; it fell on the rug beside the dresser and rolled on the floor, undamaged.
You threw a jug at me that time. You could have killed me.
Not at you. I didn’t throw it at you.
You could have killed me.
Proof that Robin was shamming: She started up in a fright, but it wasn’t the blank fright of somebody who’d been asleep. She looked scared, but underneath that childish, scared look was another look—stubborn, calculating, disdainful.
“It was so beautiful. And it was valuable. It belonged to your grandmother.”
“I thought it belonged to me,” said Robin.
“That girl wasn’t even your friend. Christ, you didn’t have a good word to say for her this morning.”
“You don’t know who is my friend!” Robin’s face flushed a bright pink and her eyes filled with tears, but her scornful, stubborn expression didn’t change. “I knew her. I talked to her. So get out!”
Trudy works at the Home for Mentally Handicapped Adults. Few people call it that. Older people in town still say “the Misses Weir’s house,” and a number of others, including Robin—and, presumably, most of those her age—call it the Half-Wit House.
The house has a ramp now for wheelchairs, because some of the mentally handicapped may be physically handicapped as well, and it has a swimming pool in the back yard, which caused a certain amount of discussion when it was installed at taxpayers’ expense. Otherwise the house looks pretty much the way it always did—the white wooden walls, the dark-green curlicues on the gables, the steep roof and dark screened side porch, and the deep lawn in front shaded by soft maple trees.
This month, Trudy works the four-to-midnight shift. Yesterday afternoon, she parked her car in front and walked up the drive thinking how nice the house looked, peaceful as in the days of the Misses Weir, who must have served iced tea and read library books, or played croquet, whatever people did then.
Always some piece of news, some wrangle or excitement, once you get inside. The men came to fix the pool but they didn’t fix it. They went away again. It isn’t fixed yet.
“We don’t get no use of it, soon summer be over,” Josephine said.
“It’s not even the middle of June, you’re saying summer’ll be over,” Kelvin said. “You think before you talk. Did you hear about the young girl that was killed out in the country?” he said to Trudy.
Trudy had started to mix two batches of frozen lemonade, one pink and one plain. When he said that, she smashed the spoon down on the frozen chunk so hard that some of the liquid spilled over.
“How, Kelvin?”
She was afraid she would hear that a girl was dragged off a country road, raped in the woods, strangled, beaten, left there. Robin goes running along the country roads in her white shorts and T-shirt, a headband on her flying hair. Robin’s hair is golden; her legs and arms are golden. Her cheeks and limbs are downy, not shiny—you wouldn’t be surprised to see a cloud of pollen delicately floating and settling behind her when she runs. Cars hoot at her and she isn’t bothered. Foul threats are yelled at her, and she yells foul threats back.
“Driving a truck,” Kelvin said.
Trudy’s heart eased. Robin doesn’t know how to drive yet.
“Fourteen years old, she didn’t know how to drive,” Kelvin said. “She got in the truck, and the first thing you know, she ran it into a tree. Where was her parents? That’s what I’d like to know. They weren’t watching out for her. She got in the truck when she didn’t know how to drive and ran it into a tree. Fourteen. That’s too young.”
Kelvin goes uptown by himself; he hears all the news. He is fifty-two years old, still slim and boyish-looking, well-shaved, with soft, short, clean dark hair. He goes to the barbershop every day, because he can’t quite manage to shave himself. Epilepsy, then surgery, an infected bone-flap, many more operations, a permanent mild difficulty with feet and fingers, a gentle head fog. The fog doesn’t obscure facts, just motives. Perhaps he shouldn’t be in the Home at all, but where else? Anyway, he likes it. He says he likes it. He tells the others they shouldn’t complain; they should be more careful, they should behave themselves. He picks up the soft-drink cans and beer bottles that people have thrown into the front yard—though of course it isn’t his job to do that.
When Janet came in just before midnight to relieve Trudy, she had the same story to tell.
“I guess you heard about that fifteen-year-old girl?”
When Janet starts telling you something like this, she always starts off with “I guess you heard.” I guess you heard Wilma and Ted are breaking up, she says. I guess you heard Alvin Stead had a heart attack.
“Kelvin told me,” Trudy said. “Only he said she was fourteen.”
“Fifteen,” Janet said. “She must’ve been in Robin’s class at school. She didn’t know how to drive. She didn’t even get out of the lane.”
“Was she drunk?” said Trudy. Robin won’t go near alcohol, or dope, or cigarettes, or even coffee, she’s so fanatical about what she puts into her body.
“I don’t think so. Stoned, maybe. It was early in the evening. She was home with her sister. Their parents were out. Her sister’s boyfriend came over—it was his truck, and he either gave her the keys to the truck or she took them. You hear different versions. You hear that they sent her out for something, they wanted to get rid of her, and you hear she just took the keys and went. Anyway, she ran it right into a tree in the lane.”
“Jesus,” said Trudy.
“I know. It’s so idiotic. It’s getting so you hate to think about your kids growing up. Did everybody take their medication okay? What’s Kelvin watching?”
Kelvin was still up, sitting in the living room watching TV.
“It’s somebody being interviewed. He wrote a book about schizophrenics,” Trudy told Janet.
Anything he comes across about mental problems, Kelvin has to watch, or try to read.
“I think it depresses him, the more he watches that kind of thing,” Janet said. “Do you know I found out today I have to make five hundred roses out of pink Kleenex for my niece Laurel’s wedding? For the car. She said I promised I’d make the roses for the car. Well, I didn’t. I don’t remember promising a thing. Are you going to come over and help me?”
“Sure,” said Trudy.
“I guess the real reason I want him to get off the schizophrenics is I want to watch the old Dallas,” said Janet. She and Trudy disagree about this. Trudy can’t stand to watch those old reruns of Dallas, to see the characters, with their younger, plumper faces, going through tribulations and bound up in romantic complications they and the audience have now forgotten all about. That’s what’s so hilarious, Janet says; it’s so unbelievable it’s wonderful. All that happens and they just forget about it and go on. But to Trudy it doesn’t seem so unbelievable that the characters would go from one thing to the next thing—forgetful, hopeful, photogenic, forever changing their clothes. That it’s not so unbelievable is the thing she really can’t stand.
Robin, the next morning, said, “Oh, probably. All those people she hung around with drink. They party all the time. They’re self-destructive. It’s her own fault. Even if her sister told her to go, she didn’t have to go. She didn’t have to be so stupid.”
“What was her name?” Trudy said.
“Tracy Lee,” said Robin with distaste. She stepped on the pedal of the garbage tin, lifted rather than lowered the container of yogurt she had just emptied, and dropped it in. She was wearing bikini underpants and a T-shirt that said “If I Want to Listen to an Asshole
, I’ll Fart.”
“That shirt still bothers me,” Trudy said. “Some things are disgusting but funny, and some things are more disgusting than funny.”
“What’s the problem?” said Robin. “I sleep alone.”
Trudy sat outside, in her wrapper, drinking coffee while the day got hot. There is a little brick-paved space by the side door that she and Dan always called the patio. She sat there. This is a solar-heated house, with big panels of glass in the south-sloping roof—the oddest-looking house in town. It’s odd inside, too, with the open shelves in the kitchen instead of cupboards, and the living room up some stairs, looking out over the fields at the back. She and Dan, for a joke, gave parts of it the most conventional, suburban-sounding names—the patio, the powder room, the master bedroom. Dan always had to joke about the way he was living. He built the house himself—Trudy did a lot of the painting and staining—and it was a success. Rain didn’t leak in around the panels, and part of the house’s heat really did come from the sun. Most people who have the ideas, or ideals, that Dan has aren’t very practical. They can’t fix things or make things; they don’t understand wiring or carpentry, or whatever it is they need to understand. Dan is good at everything—at gardening, cutting wood, building a house. He is especially good at repairing motors. He used to travel around getting jobs as an auto mechanic, a small-engines repairman. That’s how he ended up here. He came here to visit Marlene, got a job as a mechanic, became a working partner in an auto-repair business, and before he knew it—married to Trudy, not Marlene—he was a small-town businessman, a member of the Kinsmen. All without shaving off his nineteen-sixties beard or trimming his hair any more than he wanted to. The town was too small and Dan was too smart for that to be necessary.
Now Dan lives in a townhouse in Richmond Hill with a girl named Genevieve. She is studying law. She was married when she was very young, and has three little children. Dan met her three years ago when her camper broke down a few miles outside of town. He told Trudy about her that night. The rented camper, the three little children hardly more than babies, the lively little divorced mother with her hair in pigtails. Her bravery, her poverty, her plans to enter law school. If the camper hadn’t been easily fixed, he was going to invite her and her children to spend the night. She was on her way to her parents’ summer place at Pointe au Baril.
