by Alice Munro
My sister and I went out into the station, which was like a street with its lighted shops and like a church with its high curved roof and great windows at each end. It was full of the thunder of trains hidden, it seemed, just behind the walls, and an amplified voice, luxuriant, powerful, reciting place names that could not quite be understood. I bought a movie magazine and my sister bought chocolate bars with the money we had been given. I was going to say to her, “Give me a bite or I won’t show you the way back,” but she was so undone by the grandeur of the place, or subdued by her dependence on me, that she broke off a piece without being asked.
Late in the afternoon we got on the Ottawa train. We were surrounded by soldiers. My sister had to sit on my mother’s knee. A soldier sitting in front of us turned around and joked with me. He looked very much like Bob Hope. He asked me what town I came from, and then he said, “Have they got the second story on there yet?” in just the sharp, unsmiling, smart-alecky way that Bob Hope would have said it. I thought that maybe he really was Bob Hope, travelling around incognito in a soldier’s uniform. That did not seem unlikely to me. Outside of my own town—this far outside it, at least—all the bright and famous people in the world seemed to be floating around free, ready to turn up anywhere.
Aunt Dodie met us at the station in the dark and drove us to her house, miles out in the country. She was small and sharp-faced and laughed at the end of every sentence. She drove an old square-topped car with a running board.
“Well, did Her Majesty show up to see you?”
She was referring to the legal secretary, who was in fact her sister. Aunt Dodie was not really our aunt at all but our mother’s cousin. She and her sister did not speak.
“No, but she must have been busy,” said my mother neutrally.
“Oh, busy,” said Aunt Dodie. “She’s busy scraping the chicken dirt off her boots. Eh?” She drove fast, over washboard and potholes.
My mother waved at the blackness on either side of us. “Children! Children, this is the Ottawa Valley!”
IT WAS no valley. I looked for mountains, or at least hills, but in the morning all it was was fields and bush, and Aunt Dodie outside the window holding a milk pail for a calf. The calf was butting its head into the pail so hard it slopped the milk out, and Aunt Dodie was laughing and scolding and hitting it, trying to make it slow down. She called it a bugger. “Greedy little bugger!”
She was dressed in her milking outfit, which was many-layered and -colored and ragged and flopping like the clothes a beggarwoman might wear in a school play. A man’s hat without a crown was shoved—for what purpose?—on her head.
My mother had not led me to believe we were related to people who dressed like that or who used the word bugger. “I will not tolerate filth,” my mother always said. But apparently she tolerated Aunt Dodie. She said they had been like sisters when they were growing up. (The legal secretary, Bernice, had been older and had left home early.) Then my mother usually said that Aunt Dodie had had a tragic life.
Aunt Dodie’s house was bare. It was the poorest house I had ever been in, to stay. From this distance, our own house—which I had always thought poor, because we lived too far out of town to have a flush toilet or running water, and certainly we had no real touches of luxury, like Venetian blinds—looked very comfortably furnished, with its books and piano and good set of dishes and one rug that was bought, not made out of rags. In Aunt Dodie’s front room there was one overstuffed chair and a magazine rack full of old Sunday-school papers. Aunt Dodie lived off her cows. Her land was not worth farming. Every morning, after she finished milking and separating, she loaded the cans in the back of her pickup truck and drove seven miles to the cheese factory. She lived in dread of the milk inspector, who went around declaring cows tubercular, we understood, for no reason but spite, and to put poor farmers out of business. Big dairy interests paid him off, Aunt Dodie said.
The tragedy in her life was that she had been jilted. “Did you know,” she said, “that I was jilted?” My mother had said we were never to mention it, and there was Aunt Dodie in her own kitchen, washing the noon dishes, with me wiping and my sister putting away (my mother had to go and have her rest), saying “jilted” proudly, as somebody would say “Did you know I had polio?” or some such bad important disease.
“I had my cake baked,” she said. “I was in my wedding dress.”
“Was it satin?”
“No, it was a nice dark-red merino wool, because of it being a late-fall wedding. We had the minister here. All prepared. My, dad kept running out to the road to see if he could see him coming. It got dark, and I said, ‘Time to go out and do the milking!’ I pulled off my dress and I never put it back on. I gave it away. Lots of girls would’ve cried, but me, I laughed.”
My mother telling the same story said, “When I went home two years after that, and I was staying with her, I used to wake up and hear her crying in the night. Night after night.”
“There was I
Waiting at the church,
Waiting at the church,
Waiting at the church.
And when I found
He’d left me in the lurch,
Oh, how it did upset me.”
Aunt Dodie sang this at us, washing the dishes at her round table covered with scrubbed oilcloth. Her kitchen was as big as a house, with a back door and a front door; always a breeze blew through. She had a homemade icebox, such as I had never seen, with a big chunk of ice in it that she would haul in a child’s wagon from the ice-house. The ice-house itself was remarkable, a roofed dugout where ice cut from the lake in winter lasted the summer, in sawdust.
“Of course it wasn’t,” she said, “in my case, it wasn’t the church.”
ACROSS the fields from Aunt Dodie on the next farm lived my mother’s brother, Uncle James, and his wife, Aunt Lena, and their eight children. That was the house where my mother had grown up. It was a bigger house with more furniture but still unpainted outside, dark gray. The furniture was mostly high wooden beds, with feather ticks and dark carved headboards. Under the beds were pots not emptied every day. We visited there but Aunt Dodie did not come with us. She and Aunt Lena did not speak. But Aunt Lena did not speak much to anybody. She had been a sixteen-year-old girl, straight out of the backwoods, said my mother and Aunt Dodie (which left you to wonder, Where was this?), when Uncle James married her. At this time, she would have been married ten or twelve years. She was tall and straight, flat as a board front and back—even though she would bear her ninth child before Christmas—darkly freckled, with large dark slightly inflamed eyes, animal’s eyes. All the children had got those, instead of Uncle James’ mild blue ones.
“When your mother was dying,” said Aunt Dodie, “oh, I can hear her. Don’t touch that towel! Use your own towel! Cancer, she thought you could catch it like the measles. She was that ignorant.”
“I can’t forgive her.”
“And wouldn’t let any of the kids go near her. I had to go over myself and give your mother her wash. I saw it all.”
“I can never forgive her.”
Aunt Lena was stiff all the time with what I now recognize as terror. She would not let her children swim in the lake for fear they would drown, she would not let them go tobogganing in winter for fear they would fall off the toboggan and break their necks, she would not let them learn to skate for fear they would break their legs and be crippled for life. She beat them all the time for fear they would grow up to be lazy, or liars, or clumsy people who broke things. They were not lazy but they broke things anyway; they were always darting and grabbing; and, of course, they were all liars, even the little ones, brilliant, instinctive liars who lied even when it was not necessary, just for the practice, and maybe the pleasure, of it. They were always telling and concealing, making and breaking alliances; they had the most delicate and ruthless political instincts. They howled when they were beaten. Pride was a luxury they had discarded long ago, or never considered. If you did not howl for A
unt Lena, when would she ever stop? Her arms were as long and strong as a man’s, her face set in an expression of remote unanswerable fury. But five minutes, three minutes, afterwards, her children would have forgotten. With me, such a humiliation could last for weeks, or forever.
Uncle James kept the Irish accent my mother had lost and Aunt Dodie had halfway lost. His voice was lovely, saying the children’s names. Mar-ie, Ron-aid, Ru-thie. So tenderly, comfortingly, reproachfully he said their names, as if the names, or the children themselves, were jokes played on him. But he never held them back from being beaten, never protested. You would think all this had nothing to do with him. You would think Aunt Lena had nothing to do with him.
The youngest child slept in the parents’ bed until a new baby displaced it.
“He used to come over and see me,” Aunt Dodie said. “We used to have some good laughs. He used to bring two, three of the kids but he quit that. I know why. They’d tell on him. Then he quit coming himself. She lays down the law. But he gets it back on her, doesn’t he?”
AUNT DODIE did not get a daily paper, just the weekly that was published in the town where she had picked us up.
“There’s a mention in here about Allen Durrand.”
“Allen Durrand?” said my mother doubtfully.
“Oh, he’s a big Holstein man now. He married a West.”
“What’s the mention?”
“It’s the Conservative Association. I bet he wants to get nominated. I bet.”
She was in the rocker, with her boots off, laughing. My mother was sitting with her back against a porch post. They were cutting up yellow beans, to can.
“I was thinking about the time we gave him the lemonade,” Aunt Dodie said, and turned to me. “He was just a French Canadian boy then, working here for a couple of weeks in the summer.”
“Only his name was French,” my mother said. “He didn’t even speak it.”
“You’d never know now. He turned his religion too, goes to St. John’s.”
“He was always intelligent.”
“You bet he is. Oh, intelligent. But we got him with the lemonade.
“You picture the hottest possible day in summer. Your mother and I didn’t mind it so much, we could stay in the house. But Allen had to be in the mow. You see they were getting the hay in. My dad was bringing it in and Allen was spreading it out. I bet James was over helping too.”
“James was pitching on,” my mother said. “Your dad was driving, and building the load.”
“And they put Allen in the mow. You’ve no idea what a mow is like on that kind of a day. It’s a hell on earth. So we thought it would be a nice idea to take him some lemonade—No. I’m getting ahead of myself. I meant to tell about the overalls first.
“Allen had brought me these overalls to fix just when the men were sitting down to dinner. He had a heavy pair of old suit pants on, and a work shirt, must have been killing him, though the shirt I guess he took off when he got in the barn. But he must’ve wanted the overalls on because they’d be cooler, you know, the circulation. I forget what had to be fixed on them, just some little thing. He must have been suffering bad in those old pants just to bring himself to ask, because he was awful shy. He’d be—what, then?”
“Seventeen,” my mother said.
“And us two eighteen. It was the year before you went away to Normal. Yes. Well, I took and fixed his pants, just some little thing to do to them while you served up dinner. There I was sitting in the corner of the kitchen at the sewing machine when I had my inspiration, didn’t I? I called you over. Pretended I was calling you to hold the material straight for me. So’s you could see what I was doing. And neither one of us cracked a smile or dared look sideways at each other, did we?”
“No.”
“Because my inspiration was to sew up his fly!
“So then, you see, a little bit on in the afternoon, with them out to work again, we got the idea for the lemonade. We made two pailfuls. One we took out to the men working in the field; we yelled to them and set it under a tree. And the other we took up to the mow and offered it to him. We’d used up every lemon we had, and even so it was weak. I remember we had to put vinegar in. But he wouldn’t’ve noticed. I never saw a person so thirsty in my life as him. He drank by the dipperful, and then he just tipped up the pail. Drank it all down. Us standing there watching. How did we keep a straight face?”
“I’ll never know,” my mother said.
“Then we took the pail and made for the house and waited about two seconds before we came sneaking back. We hid ourselves up in the granary. That was like an oven too. I don’t know how we stood it. But we climbed up on the sacks of feed and each found ourselves a crack or knothole or something to look through. We knew the corner of the barn the men always peed in. They peed down the shovel if they were upstairs. Down in the stable I guess they peed in the gutter. And soon enough, soon enough, he starts strolling over in that direction. Dropped his fork and starts strolling over. Puts his hand up to himself as he went. Sweat running down our faces from the heat and the way we had to keep from laughing. Oh, the cruelty of it! First he was just going easy, wasn’t he? Then thinking about it I guess the need gets stronger; he looked down wondering what was the matter, and soon he’s fairly clawin’ and yankin’ every which way, trying all he can to get himself free. But I’d sewed him up good and strong. I wonder when it hit him what’d been done?”
“Right then, I’d think. He was never stupid.”
“He never was. So he must’ve put it all together. The lemonade and all. The one thing I don’t guess he ever thought of was us hid up in the granary. Or else would he’ve done what he did next?”
“He wouldn’t have,” said my mother firmly.
“I don’t know, though. He might’ve been past caring. Eh? He just finally went past caring and gave up and ripped down his overalls altogether and let ’er fly. We had the full view.”
“He had his back to us.”
“He did not! When he shot away there wasn’t a thing we couldn’t see. He turned himself sideways.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, I do. I haven’t seen so many similar sights that I can afford to forget.”
“Dodie!” said my mother, as if at this too-late point to issue a warning. (Another thing my mother quite often said was “I will never listen to smut.”)
“Oh, you! You didn’t run away yourself. Did you? Kept your eye to the knothole!”
My mother looked from me to Aunt Dodie and back with an unusual expression on her face: helplessness. I won’t say she laughed. She just looked as if there was a point at which she might give up.
The onset is very slow and often years may pass before the patient or his family observes that he is becoming disabled. He shows slowly increasing bodily rigidity, associated with tremors of the head and limbs. There may be various tics, twitches, muscle spasms, and other involuntary movements. Salivation increases and drooling is common. Scientifically the disease is known as paralysis agitans. It is also called Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy. Paralysis agitans affects first a single arm or leg, then the second limb on the same side and finally those on the other side. The face begins to lose its customary expressiveness and changes slowly or not at all with passing moods. The disease is typically one of elderly people, striking mostly persons in their sixties and seventies. No recoveries are recorded. Drugs are available to control the tremor and excess salivation. The benefits of these, however, are limited. [Fishbein, Medical Encyclopedia.]
My mother, during this summer, would have been forty-one or forty-two years old, I think, somewhere around the age that I am now.
Just her left forearm trembled. The hand trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm. She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm still by stiffening it against her body.
UNCLE JAMES drank porter after supper. He let me taste it, black and bitter. Here was a new
contradiction. “Before I married your father,” my mother had told me, “I asked him to promise me that he would never drink, and he never has.” But Uncle James, her brother, could drink without apologies.
On Saturday night we all went into town. My mother and my sister went in Aunt Dodie’s car. I was with Uncle James and Aunt Lena and the children. The children claimed me. I was a little older than the oldest of them, and they treated me as if I were a trophy, someone for whose favor they could jostle and compete. So I was riding in their car, which was high and old and square-topped, like Aunt Dodie’s. We were coming home, we had the windows rolled down for coolness, and unexpectedly Uncle James began to sing.
He had a fine voice, of course, a fine sad, lingering voice. I can remember perfectly well the tune of the song he sang, and the sound of his voice rolling out the black windows, but I can remember only bits of the words, here and there, though I have often tried to remember more, because I liked the song so well.
“As I was a-goen over Kil-i-kenny Mountain …”
I think that was the way it started.
Then further along something about pearly, or early, and Some take delight in—various things, and finally the strong but sad-sounding line:
“But I take delight in the water of the barley.”
There was silence in the car while he was singing. The children were not squabbling and being hit, some of them were even falling asleep. Aunt Lena, with the youngest on her knee, was an unthreatening dark shape. The car bounced along as if it would go forever through a perfectly black night with its lights cutting a frail path; and there was a jackrabbit on the road, leaping out of our way, but nobody cried out to notice it, nobody broke the singing, its booming tender sadness.
