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“Go home,” Russell was hissing into my ear. He spun me around towards the door.
“Go on home,” he said angrily, or at least with an urgency like anger. As if I’d been a dog following him, or one of his little sisters, who had no right to be here.
Perhaps he said that too in a whisper, perhaps not. With the noise that the horses and Miriam made together, it wouldn’t have mattered. He gave me one strong and untender push, then turned towards the stable and hollered, “Don’t shoot, it’s me… Hey Miriam. It’s me.”
“I know you’re there-”
“It’s me. It’s Russ.” He had run to the front of the haymow.
“Who’s up there? Russ? Is that you? Russ?”
There must have been a ladder going down to the stable. I heard Russell’s voice descending. He sounded bold but shaky, as if he was not quite sure that Miriam would not start shooting again.
“It’s just me. I come in the top way.”
“I heard somebody,” said Miriam disbelievingly.
“I know. It was me. I just come in to see Lou. How her leg was.”
“It was you? ”
“Yeah. I told you.”
“You were up in the mow.”
“I come in by the top door.”
He sounded more in control now. He was able to ask a question of his own.
“How long you been in here?”
“I just came in now. I was in the house and suddenly it hit me, there’s something wrong at the barn.”
“What’d you fire off the gun for? You could’ve killed me.”
“If anybody was in here I wanted to give them a scare.”
“You could’ve waited. You could’ve yelled first. You could’ve killed me.”
“It never crossed my mind it was you.”
Then Miriam McAlpin cried out again, as if she’d just spotted a new intruder.
“I could’ve killed you. Oh, Russ. I never thought. I could’ve shot you.”
“Okay. Calm down,” Russell said. “You could’ve but you didn’t.”
“You could be shot now and I’d be the one that did it.”
“You didn’t.”
“What if I had, though? Jesus. Jesus. What if I had?”
She was weeping and saying something like this over and over, but in a muffled voice, as if something was stuffed into her mouth.
Or as if she was being held, pressed against something, somebody, that could comfort and quiet her.
Russell’s voice, swelling with mastery, soothing.
“Okay. Yeah. So okay, honey. Okay.”
That was the last thing I heard. What a strange word to speak to Miriam McAlpin. Honey. The word he’d used to me, during our bouts of kissing. Commonplace enough, but then it had seemed something I could suck up, a sweet mouthful like the stuff itself. Why would he say it now, when I wasn’t anywhere near him? And in just the same way. Just the same.
Into the hair, against the ear, of Miriam McAlpin.
I had been standing by the door. I had been afraid that the noise of opening it might be heard below in spite of the disturbance the horses were still making. Or else I had not really understood that my presence here was unwanted, my part was over. Now I had to get out. I didn’t care if they heard. But I don’t suppose they did. I pulled the door shut, then ran down the gangway and along the street. I would have gone on ru
I didn’t see Russell again. He did become a soldier. He was not killed in the war, and I don’t think he continued in the Salvation Army. The summer after all this had happened I saw his wife-a girl I had known by sight in high school. She had been a couple of years ahead of me, and had dropped out to work in the creamery. She was with Mrs. Craik and she was heavily pregnant. They were looking through a bargain bin outside Stedman’s store, one afternoon. She looked disconsolate and plain-maybe that was the effect of her pregnancy, though I had thought her plain enough before. Or at least insignificant and shy. She still looked shy, though hardly insignificant. Her body seemed abject but amazing, grotesque. And a thrill of sexual envy, of longing, went through me, at the sight of her and the thought of how she had got that way. Such submission, such necessity.
At some time after he came home from the war Russell took up carpentry and through that work he became a contractor, building houses for the ever-growing subdivisions around Toronto. I know that much because he appeared at a high-school reunion, apparently quite prosperous, joking about how he didn’t have any right to be there, since he had never even gone to high school. Report of this came to me from Clara, who had kept in touch.
Clara said that his wife was blonde now, rather fat, wearing a bare-backed sundress. A bun of blonde hair stuck up above the hole in the crown of her sunhat. Clara had not talked to them and so she was not actually sure whether this was the same wife or a new one.
It was probably not the same wife, though it may have been. Clara and I talked about how reunions occasionally reveal how those who seemed most secure have been somewhat diminished or battered by life, and those who were at the fringes, who seemed to droop and ask pardon, have blossomed. So that might have happened with the girl I had seen in front of Stedman’s.
Miriam McAlpin stayed on at the horse barn until it burned down. I don’t know the reason, it could have been the usual one-damp hay, spontaneous combustion. All of the horses were saved, but Miriam was hurt, and after that she lived on a disability pension.
Everything was normal when I got home that evening. This was the summer when my brother and sister had learned to play solitaire, and played it at every opportunity. They were sitting now at either end of the dining-room table, nine and ten years old and grave as an old couple, the cards spread out in front of them. My mother had already gone to bed. She spent many hours in bed, but she never seemed to sleep as other people did, she just dozed for short periods of the day and night, maybe got up and drank tea or sorted out a drawer. Her life had stopped being securely co
She called from bed to ask if I had had a nice supper at Clara’s, and what did I have for dessert?
“Cottage pudding,” I said.
I thought that if I said any part of the truth, if I said “pie,” I would immediately betray myself. She did not care, she only wanted a bit of conversation, but I was not able to supply it. I tucked the quilt in around her feet, as she asked me to, and went downstairs and into the living room, where I sat on the low stool in front of the bookcase and took out a book. I sat there squinting at the print in the dim light that still came in the window beside me, until I had to rise and turn on the lamp. Even then I didn’t settle myself in a chair to be comfortable but continued to sit hunched on the stool, filling my mind with one sentence after another, slamming them into my head just so I would not have to think about what had happened.
I don’t know which book it was that I had picked up. I had read them all before, all the novels in that bookcase. There were not many. The Sun Is My Undoing. Gone with the Wind. The Robe. Sleep in Peace. My Son, My Son. Wuthering Heights. The Last Days of Pompeii. The selection did not reflect any particular taste, and in fact my parents often could not say how a certain book came to be there-whether it had been bought or borrowed or whether somebody had left it behind.
It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom. Not Edgar Linton, not Ashley Wilkes. Not one of them companionable or kind.