by Alice Munro
My father passed the Entrance with high honors and went on to the Continuation School in the town of Blyth. Continuation Schools offered four years of high school, without the final year called Upper School, or Fifth Form—you would have to go to a larger town for that. It looked as if he was on his way.
During his first week at Continuation School my father heard the teacher read a poem.
Liza Grayman Ollie Minus.
We can make Eliza blind.
Andy Parting, Lee Beehinus.
Foo Prince in the Sansa Time.
He used to recite this to us as a joke, but the fact was, he did not hear it as a joke. Around the same time, he went into the stationery store and asked for Signs Snow Paper.
Signs Snow Paper.
Science notepaper.
Soon he was surprised to see the poem written on the blackboard.
Lives of Great Men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime.
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the Sands of Time.
He had not hoped for such reasonable clarification, would not have dreamed of asking for it. He had been quite willing to give the people at the school the right to have a strange language or logic. He did not ask for them to make sense on his terms. He had a streak of pride which might look like humility, making him scared and touchy, ready to bow out. I know that very well. He made a mystery there, a hostile structure of rules and secrets, far beyond anything that really existed. He felt nearby the fierce breath of ridicule, he overestimated the competition, and the family caution, the country wisdom, came to him then: stay out of it.
In those days people in town did generally look upon the people from the country as more apt to be slow-witted, tongue-tied, uncivilized, than themselves, and somewhat more docile in spite of their strength. And farmers saw people who lived in towns as having an easy life and being unlikely to survive in situations calling for fortitude, self-reliance, hard work. They believed this in spite of the fact that the hours men worked at factory jobs or in stores were long and the wages low, in spite of the fact that many houses in town had no running water or flush toilets or electricity. But the people in town had Saturday or Wednesday afternoons and the whole of Sundays off and that was enough to make them soft. The farmers had not one holiday in their lives. Not even the Scots Presbyterians; cows don’t recognize the Sabbath.
The country people when they came into town to shop or to go to church often seemed stiff and shy and the town people did not realize that this could actually be seen as a superior behavior. I’m-not-going-to-let-any-of-them-make-a-fool-out-of-me behavior. Money would not make much difference. Farmers might maintain their proud and wary reserve in the presence of citizens whom they could buy and sell.
My father would say later that he had gone to Continuation School too young to know what he was doing, and that he should have stayed there, he should have made something out of himself. But he said this almost as a matter of form, not as if he cared very much. And it wasn’t as if he had run off home at the first indication that there were things he didn’t understand. He was never very clear about how long he had stayed. Three years and part of the fourth? Two years and part of the third? And he didn’t quit suddenly—it was not a matter of going to school one day and staying away the next and never showing up again. He just began to spend more and more time in the bush and less and less time at school, so that his parents decided there was not much point in thinking about sending him to a larger town to do his Fifth Form, not much hope of university or the professions. They could have afforded that—though not easily—but it was evidently not what he wanted. And it could not be seen as a great disappointment. He was their only son, the only child. The farm would be his.
There was no more wild country in Huron County then than there is now. Perhaps there was less. The farms had been cleared in the period between 1830 and 1860, when the Huron Tract was being opened up, and they were cleared thoroughly. Many creeks had been dredged—the progressive thing to do was to straighten them out and make them run like tame canals between the fields. The early farmers hated the very sight of a tree and admired the look of open land. And the masculine approach to the land was managerial, dictatorial. Only women were allowed to care about landscape and not to think always of its subjugation and productivity. My grandmother, for example, was famous for having saved a line of silver maples along the lane. These trees grew beside a crop field and they were getting big and old—their roots interfered with the ploughing and they shaded too much of the crop. My grandfather and my father went out one morning and made ready to cut the first of them down. But my grandmother saw what they were doing from the kitchen window and she flew out in her apron and harangued and upbraided them so that they finally had to take up the axes and the crosscut saw and leave the scene. The trees stayed and spoiled the crop at the edge of the field until the terrible winter of 1935 finished them off.
But at the back of the farms the farmers were compelled by law to leave a woodlot. They could cut trees there both for their own use and to sell. Wood of course had been their first crop—rock elm went for ships’ timbers and white pine for the ships’ masts, until hardly any rock elm or white pine remained. Now there was protection decreed for the poplar and ash and maple and oak and beech, the cedar and hemlock that were left.
Through the woodlot—called the bush—at the back of my grandfather’s farm ran the Blyth Creek, dredged a long time ago when the farm was first cleared. The earth dredged out then made a high, hummocky bank on which thick clumps of cedars grew. This was where my father started trapping. He eased himself out of school and into the life of a fur-trapper. He could follow the Blyth Creek for many miles in either direction, to its rising in Grey Township or to the place where it flows into the Maitland River which flows into Lake Huron. In some places—most particularly in the village of Blyth—the creek became public for a while, but for much of its length it ran through the backs of farms, with the bush on either side, so that it was possible to follow it and be hardly aware of the farms, the cleared land, the straight-laid roads and fences—it was possible to imagine that you were out in the forest as it was a hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that.
My father had read a lot of books by this time, books he found at home and in the Blyth Library and in the Sunday School Library. He had read books by Fenimore Cooper and he had absorbed the myths or half-myths about wilderness that most of the country boys around him knew nothing about, since few of them were readers. Most boys whose imaginations were lit up by the same notions as his would live in cities. If they were rich enough they would travel north every summer with their families, they would go on canoe trips and later on fishing and hunting trips. If their families were truly rich they would navigate the rivers of the Far North with Indian guides. People eager for this experience of the wilderness would drive right through our part of the country without noticing there was one bit of wilderness there.
But farm boys from Huron County, knowing hardly anything about this big deep country of the Precambrian Shield and the wild rivers, nevertheless were drawn—some of them were, for a time—drawn to the strips of bush along the creeks, where they fished and hunted and built rafts and set traps. Even if they hadn’t read a word about that sort of life they might make their forays into it. But they soon gave it up to enter upon the real, heavy work of their lives, as farmers.
And one of the differences between farmers then and now was that in those days nobody expected recreation to play any regular part in the farming life.
My father, being a farm boy with that extra, inspired or romantic perception (he would not have cared for those words), with a Fenimore Cooper–cultivated hunger, did not turn aside from these juvenile pursuits at the age of eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Instead of giving up the bush, he took to it more steadily and seriously. He began to be talked about and thought about more as a trapper than as a young farmer. And as a solitary
and slightly odd young man, though not a person who was in any way feared or disliked. He was edging away from the life of a farmer, just as he had edged away earlier from the idea of getting an education and becoming a professional man. He was edging towards a life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he didn’t want so much better than what he wanted.
A life in the bush, away from the towns, on the edge of the farms—how could it be managed?
Even here, where men and women mostly took whatever was cut out for them, some men had managed it. Even in this tamed country there were a few hermits, a few men who had inherited farms and didn’t keep them up, or who were just squatters come from God knows where. They fished and hunted and travelled around, were gone and came back, were gone and never came back—not like the farmers who whenever they left their own localities went in buggies or sleighs or more often now by car, bound on definite errands to certain destinations.
He was making money from his trapline. Some skins could bring him as much as a fortnight’s work on a threshing gang. So at home they could not complain. He paid board, and he still helped his father when it was necessary. He and his father never talked. They could work all morning cutting wood in the bush, and never say a word, except when they had to speak about the work. His father was not interested in the bush except as a woodlot. It was to him just like a field of oats, with the difference that the crop was firewood.
His mother was more curious. She walked back to the bush on Sunday afternoons. She was a tall upright woman with a stately figure, but she still had a tomboy’s stride. She would bunch up her skirts and expertly swing her legs over a fence. She was knowledgeable about wildflowers and berries and she could tell you the name of any bird from its song.
He showed her the snares where he caught fish. That made her uneasy, because the fish could be caught in the snares on a Sunday, just as on any other day. She was very strict about all Presbyterian rules and observances, and this strictness had a peculiar history. She had not been brought up as a Presbyterian at all, but had led a carefree childhood and girlhood as a member of the Anglican Church, also known as the Church of England. There were not many Anglicans in that part of the country and they were sometimes thought of as next thing to Papists—but also as next door to freethinkers. Their religion often seemed to outsiders to be all a matter of bows and responses, with short sermons, easy interpretations, worldly ministers, much pomp and frivolity. A religion to the liking of her father, who had been a convivial Irishman, a storyteller, a drinker. But when my grandmother married she had wrapped herself up in her husband’s Presbyterianism, becoming fiercer than many who were brought up in it. She was a born Anglican who took on the Presbyterian righteousness-competition just as she was a born tomboy who took on the farm-housewife competition, with her whole heart. People might have wondered, did she do this for love?
My father and those who knew her well did not think so. She and my grandfather were mismatched, though they didn’t fight. He thoughtful, silent; she spirited, sociable. No, not for love but for pride’s sake she did what she did. Not to be outdone or criticized in any way. And not to have anybody say that she regretted a decision that she had made, or wanted anything that she couldn’t have.
She stayed friends with her son in spite of the Sunday fish, which she wouldn’t cook. She took an interest in the animal skins he showed her, and heard how much he got for them. She washed his smelly clothes, whose smell was as much from the fish bait he carried as from the pelts and guts. She could be exasperated but tolerant with him as if he was a much younger son. And perhaps he did seem younger to her, with his traps and treks along the creek, and his unsociability. He never went after girls, and gradually lost touch with his childhood friends who were doing so. She did not mind. His behavior might have helped her to bear a disappointment that he had not gone on in school, he was not going to become a doctor or a minister. Maybe she could pretend that he might still do that, the old plans—her plans for him—being not forgotten but just postponed. At least he was not just turning into a silent farmer, a copy of his father.
As for my grandfather, he passed no opinion, did not say whether he approved or disapproved. He maintained his air of discipline and privacy. He was a man born in Morris, settled in to be a farmer, a Grit and a Presbyterian. Born to be against the English Church and the Family Compact and Bishop Strachan and saloons; to be for universal suffrage (but not for women), free schools, responsible government, the Lord’s Day Alliance. To live by hard routines, and refusals.
My grandfather diverged a little—he learned to play the fiddle, he married the tall temperamental Irish girl with eyes of two colors. That done, he withdrew, and for the rest of his life was diligent, orderly, and quiet. He too was a reader. In the winter he managed to get all his work done—and well done—and then he would read. He never talked about what he read, but the whole community knew about it. And respected him for it. That is an odd thing—there was a woman too who read, she got books from the library all the time, and nobody respected her in the least. The talk was always about how the dust grew under her beds and her husband ate a cold dinner. Perhaps it was because she read novels, stories, and the books my grandfather read were heavy. Heavy books, as everybody remembered, but their titles are not remembered. They came from the library, which at that time contained Blackstone, Macauley, Carlyle, Locke, Hume’s History of England. What about An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding? What about Voltaire? Karl Marx? It’s possible.
Now—if the woman with the dustballs under the beds had read the heavy books, would she have been forgiven? I don’t believe so. It was women who judged her, and women judged women more harshly than they did men. Also, it must be remembered that my grandfather got his work done first—his woodpiles were orderly and his stable shipshape. In no point of behavior did his reading affect his life.
Another thing said of my grandfather was that he prospered. But prosperity was not pursued, or understood, in those days, quite in the way it is now. I remember my grandmother saying, “When we needed something done—when your father went into Blyth to school and needed books and new clothes and so on—I would say to your grandfather, well we better raise another calf or something to get a bit extra.” So it would seem that if they knew what to do to get that bit extra, they could have had it all along.
That is, in their ordinary life they were not always making as much money as they could have made. They were not stretching themselves to the limit. They did not see life in those terms. Nor did they see it in terms of saving at least a part of their energies for good times, as some of their Irish neighbors did.
How, then? I believe they saw it mostly as ritual. Seasonal and inflexible, very much like housework. To try to make more money, for an increase in status or so that life could become easier, might have seemed unbecoming.
A change in outlook from that of the man who went to Illinois. Maybe a lingering influence from that setback, on his more timid or thoughtful descendants.
This must have been the life my father saw waiting for him—a life that my grandmother, in spite of her own submission to it, was not altogether sorry to see him avoid.
There is one contradiction here. When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions. My grandfather owned the first car on the Eighth Line of Morris. It was a Gray-Dorrit. And my father in his teens had a crystal set, something that all boys wanted. Of course, he may have paid for it himself.
He may have paid for it with his trapping money.
The animals my father trapped were muskrats, mink, marten, now and then a bobcat. Otter, weasels, foxes. Muskrats he trapped in the spring because their fur stays prime until about the end of April. All the others were at their best from the end of October on into winter. The white weasel does not attain its purity until around the tenth of December. He went out on snowshoes. He built up deadfalls, with a figure 4 trigger, set so the boards and branches fell onto the muskrat or mink
. He nailed weasel traps to trees. He nailed boards together to make a square box trap working on the same principle as a deadfall—something less conspicuous to other trappers. The steel traps for muskrats were staked so the animal would drown, often at the end of a sloping cedar rail. Patience and foresight and guile were necessary. For the vegetarians he set out tasty bits of apple and parsnip; for the meat-eaters, such as mink, there was delectable fish bait mixed by himself and ripened in a jar in the ground. A similar meat mix for foxes was buried in June or July and dug up in the fall; they sought it out to roll upon, revelling in the pungency of decay.
Foxes interested him more and more. He followed them away from the creeks to the little rough sandy hills that are found sometimes between bush and pasture—they love the sandy hills at night. He learned to boil his traps in water and soft maple bark to kill the smell of metal. Such traps were set out in the open with a sifting of sand over them.
How do you kill a trapped fox? You don’t want to shoot him, because of the wound left in the pelt and the blood smell spoiling the trap.
You stun him with the blow of a long, strong stick, and then put your foot on his heart.
Foxes in the wild are usually red. But occasionally a black fox will occur among them as a spontaneous mutation. He had never caught one. But he knew that some of these had been caught elsewhere and bred selectively to increase the show of white hairs along the back and tail. Then they were called silver foxes. Silver-fox farming was just beginning in Canada.
In 1925 my father bought a pair, a male silver fox and a female, and built a pen for them beside the barn. At first they must have seemed just another kind of animal being raised on the farm, something more bizarre than the chickens or the pigs or even the banty rooster, something rare and showy as peacocks, interesting for visitors. When my father bought them and built the pen for them it might even have been taken as a sign that he meant to stay, to be a slightly different farmer from most, but still a farmer.
