Lives of Girls and Women (17 page)

But my father was wrong. Uncle Benny with his grinning pessimism, his mournful satisfied predictions, was right. Major broke out of captivity, during the early morning hours. The barn door was shut but he tore some wire netting from a window that had no glass in it, and jumped out, and raced to Potter's to take up again his lately-discovered pleasures. He was home by breakfast, but the broken rope and window and the dead sheep in Potter's pasture were there to tell the story.

We were at breakfast. My father had spent the night in town. Uncle Benny phoned him and told him, and my father when he came back to the table said, “Owen. We have to get rid of Major.”

Owen began to quiver but he did not say a word. My father in a few words told about the breakout and the dead sheep.

“Well he's an old dog,” said my mother with false heartiness. “He's an old dog and he's had a good life and who knows what's
going to happen to him now anyway, all the diseases and miseries of old age.”

“He could come and live here,” said Owen weakly. “Then he wouldn't know where a sheep was.”

“A dog like that can't live in town. And no guarantee he wouldn't get back at it anyway.”

“Think of him tied up in town, Owen,” said my mother reproachfully.

Owen got up and left the table without saying anything else. My mother did not call him back to say
Excuse me
.

I was used to things being killed. Uncle Benny went hunting, and trapping muskrats, and every fall my father killed foxes and sold the pelts for our livelihood. Throughout the year he killed old and crippled or simply useless horses for the foxes' food. I had had two bad dreams about this, both some time ago, that I still remembered. Once I dreamed that I went down to my father's meat house, a screened shed beyond the barn where in summer he kept parts of skinned and butchered horses hanging on hooks. The shed was in the shade of a crabapple tree; the screens would be black with flies. I dreamed that I looked inside and found, not unexpectedly, that what he really had hanging there were skinned and dismembered human bodies. The other dream owed something to English history, which I had been reading about in the encyclopedia. I dreamed my father had set up an ordinary, humble block of wood on the grass outside the kitchen door, and was lining us up—Owen and my mother and me—to cut off our heads.
It won't hurt,
he told us, as if that was all we had to be afraid of,
it'll all be over in a minute
. He was kind and calm, reasonable, tiredly persuasive, explaining that it was all somehow for our own good. Thoughts of escape struggled in my mind like birds caught in oil, their wings out, helpless. I was paralyzed by this reasonableness, the arrangements so simple and familiar and taken-for-granted, the reassuring face of insanity.

In the daytime I was not so frightened as these dreams would suggest. It never bothered me to go past the meat house, or to hear the gun go off. But when I thought of Major being shot, when I pictured my father loading the gun unhurriedly, ritualistically as he
always did and calling Major who would not suspect anything, being used to men with guns, and the two of them walking past the barn, my father looking for a good spot—I did see again the outline of that reasonable, blasphemous face. It was the deliberateness I dwelt on, deliberate choice to send the bullet into the brain to stop the systems working—in this choice and act, no matter how necessary and reasonable, was the assent to anything. Death was made possible. And not because it could not be prevented but because it was what was wanted—
wanted,
by all those adults, and managers, and executioners, with their kind implacable faces.

And by me? I did not want it to happen, I did not want Major to be shot, but I was full of a tense excitement as well as regret. That scene of execution which I imagined, and which gave me such a flash of darkness—was that altogether unwelcome? No. I dwelt on Major's trustfulness, his affection for my father—whom he did like, in his self-possessed way, as much as he could like anybody—his half-blind cheerful eyes. I went upstairs to see how Owen was taking it.

He was sitting on the bedroom floor fooling with some jacks. He was not crying. I had vague hopes that he might be persuaded to make trouble, not because I thought it would do any good, but because I felt the occasion demanded it.

“If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?” said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

“You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't.”

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, “
Pray
. How do you do it? Start now!”

“You can't pray,” I said, “about a thing like that.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not
going to stop my father going out and getting in the car and driving out the Flats Road and getting his gun and calling, “Major! Here, Major—” Praying would not alter that.

God
would not alter it. If God was on the side of goodness and mercy and compassion, then why had he made these things so difficult to get at? Never mind saying,
so they will be worth the trouble;
never mind all that. Praying for an act of execution not to take place was useless simply because God was not interested in such objections; they were not His.

Could there be God not contained in the churches' net at all, not made manageable by any spells and crosses, God real, and really in the world, and alien and unacceptable as death? Could there be God amazing, indifferent, beyond faith?

“How do you do it?” said Owen stubbornly. “Do you have to get down on your knees?”

“It doesn't matter.”

But he had already knelt down, and clenched his hands at his sides. Then not bowing his head he screwed up his face with strong effort.

“Get up, Owen!” I said roughly. “It's not going to do any good. It won't work, it doesn't work, Owen get up, be a good boy, darling.”

He swiped at me with his clenched fists, not taking time out to open his eyes. With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh. Seeing somebody have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing somebody chop a finger off.

Do missionaries ever have these times, of astonishment and shame?

Changes and Ceremonies

Boys' hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous birthright, like Arthur's sword snatched out of the stone, in the Grade Seven Reader. Girls' hate, in comparison, seemed muddled and tearful, sourly defensive. Boys would bear down on you on their bicycles and cleave the air where you had been, magnificently, with no remorse, as if they wished there were knives on the wheels. And they would say anything.

They would say softly, “Hello hooers.”

They would say, “Hey where's your fuckhole?” in tones of cheerful disgust.

The things they said stripped away freedom to be what you wanted, reduced you to what it was they saw, and that, plainly, was enough to make them gag. My friend Naomi and I told each other, “Don't let on you heard,” since we were too proud to cross streets to avoid them. Sometimes we would yell back, “Go and wash out your mouth in the cow trough, clean water's too good for you!”

After school Naomi and I did not want to go home. We looked at advertisements for the movie that was showing at the Lyceum Theatre and the brides in the Photographer's window and then we went to the Library, which was a room in the Town Hall. On the windows on one side of the main door of the Town Hall were letters that read LAD ES REST RO M. On the other side they read PUBL C RE DING ROOM. The missing letters were never replaced. Everybody had learned to read the words without them.

There was a rope beside the door; it hung down from the bell under the cupola and the browned sign beside it said: PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE $100. Farmers' wives sat in the windows of the Ladies Rest Room, in their kerchiefs and galoshes, waiting for their husbands to come and get them. There was seldom anybody in the Library except the Librarian, Bella Phippen, deaf as a stone and lame in one leg from polio. The Council let her be Librarian because she could never have managed a proper job. She stayed most of the time in a sort of nest she had made behind the desk, with cushions, afghans, biscuit tins, a hot plate, a teapot, tangles of pretty ribbon. Her hobby was making pincushions. They were all the same: a kewpie doll on top dressed in this ribbon, which made a hoop skirt over the actual pincushion. She gave one to every girl who got married in Jubilee.

Once I asked her where to find something and she crawled around the desk and limped heavily along the shelves and came back with a book. She handed it to me, saying in the loud lonely voice of the deaf, “There is a lovely book.”

It was
The Winning of Barbara Worth
.

The Library was full of books like that. They were old, dull blue and green and brown books with slightly softened, slightly loosened, covers. They would often have a frontispiece showing a pale water-coloured lady in some sort of Gainsborough costume, and underneath some such words as these:

Lady Dorothy sought seclusion in the rose garden, the better to ponder the import of this mysterious communication. (p. 112)

Jeffrey Farnol. Marie Corelli.
The Prince of the House of David
. Lovely, wistful, shabby old friends. I had read them, didn't read them any more. Other books I knew so well by their spines, knew the curve of every letter in their titles, but had never touched them, never pulled them out.
Forty Years a Country Preacher. The Queen's Own in Peace and War
. They were like people you saw on the street day after day year after year, but never knew more than their faces; this could happen even in Jubilee.

I was happy in the Library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds—this was a comfort to me. It was the opposite with Naomi; so many books weighed on her, making her feel oppressed and suspicious. She used to read—girls' mystery books—
but had outgrown the habit. This was the normal thing in Jubilee; reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over. It persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man.

So to keep Naomi quiet, while I looked at books, I would find her something to read that she would never have believed could be in a book at all. She sat on the little stepladder Bella Phippen never used and I brought her the fat green
Kristin Lavransdatter
. I found the place where Kristin has her first baby, hour after hour, page after page, blood and agony, squatting on the straw. I felt a slight sadness, handing this over. I was always betraying someone or somebody; it seemed the only way to get along. This book was not a curiosity to me. No; when I had wanted to live in the eleventh century, even to have a baby in the straw, like Kristin—provided I lived of course— and particularly to have a lover like Erlund, just such a flawed and dark and lonely horseback rider.

After Naomi had read it she came to find me and ask, “Did she have to get married?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Because if a girl has to get married, she either dies having it, or she nearly dies, or else there is something the matter with it. Either a harelip or clubfoot or it isn't right in the head. My mother has seen it.”

I didn't argue, though I didn't believe it, either. Naomi's mother was a practical nurse. On her authority—or what Naomi claimed was her authority—I had heard that babies born with cauls will turn out to be criminals, that men had copulated with sheep and produced little shrivelled woolly creatures with human faces and sheep's tails, which died and were preserved in bottles somewhere, and that crazy women had injured themselves in obscene ways with coathangers. I believed or did not believe these things according to the buoyancy or fearfulness of the mood I was in. I did not like Naomi's mother; she had a brassy hectoring voice and pale protruding eyes—like Naomi's—and she had asked me whether my periods had started yet. But anybody who will go into birth and death, who will undertake to
see and deal with whatever is there—a hemorrhage, the meaty after-birth, awful dissolution—anybody who does that will have to be listened to, no matter what news they bring.

“Is there a part in the book where they do it?”

Anxious to justify literature in Naomi's eyes—like a minister trying hard to show how religion can be practical, and fun—I hunted around and found the part where Kristin and Erlund took shelter in the barn. But it did not satisfy her.

“Is that supposed to be telling that they do it?”

I pointed out Kristin's thought.
Was this ill thing the thing that was
sung of in all the songs?

It was getting dark when we came out and farmers' sleighs were heading out of town. Naomi and I caught a ride on one going out Victoria Street. The farmer was wrapped up in a muffler and a great fur cap. He looked like a helmeted Norseman. He turned and swore at us to get off, but we hung on, bloated with cheerful defiance like criminals born with cauls; we hung on with the rim of the sleigh cutting into our stomachs and our feet spraying snow, until we reached the corner of Mason Street, and there we flung off into a snowbank. When we collected our books and got our breath back we shouted at each other.

“Get off you bugger!”

“Get off you bugger!”

We both hoped and feared that somebody would hear our language in the street.