Traveller_Levin's Blog

Fathers

Alice Munro

On Friday morning last, Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost his life due to electrocution. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It had happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging brass socket while standing on the wet floor in a neighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull. For some reason that nobody could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots.

All over the countryside that spring, there was a sound that would soon disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already, if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who already had tractors could not get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring plowing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be varying degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn't hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls were saying on their inland flights, or decipher the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could probably tell when the farmers were swearing.

With one man, it was all swearing. It didn't matter which words he was using. He could have been saying "butter and eggs" or "afternoon tea" and the spirit would have been the same. As if he were boiling over with bitter rage, with loathing.

His name was Bunt Newcombe, and he had the first farm on the highway that curved southwest from town. Bunt was probably a nickname given to him at school, for going around with his head lowered, ready to bump and shove anybody aside. A boyish name, when you thought about it, not well matched to his behavior, his reputation as a grown man.

People sometimes wondered what could be the matter with him. He wasn't poor, after all—he had two hundred acres of decent land, and a banked barn with a peaked silo, and a drive shed, and a square red brick house, though the house, like the man himself, had a look of bad temper. There were dark-green blinds pulled most or all of the way down on the windows, no curtains visible, and a scar along the front wall where the porch had been torn away. The front door must, at one time, have opened onto that porch, which no steps had been built to replace; now it opened three feet above weeds and rubble.

Bunt Newcombe was not a drunk. Nor was he a gambler—he was too careful of his money for that. But he was mean in both senses of the word, and he seemed to have been born that way. He mistreated his horses, and it goes without saying that he mistreated his family. In the winter he took his milk cans to town on his sleigh just at that time of the morning when everybody was going to school, and he didn't slow down, as other farmers did, to give you a ride. He picked up the whip instead.

Mrs. Newcombe was never with him, on the sleigh or in the car. She walked to town, wearing old fashioned galoshes even when the weather got warm, and a long drab coat and a scarf over her hair. She mumbled hello but never looked at you, and sometimes turned her head away, not speaking at all. I think she was missing some teeth. That was more common then than now, and it was more common also for people to make plain their state of mind, in their speech and dress and gestures, so that everything about them said, "I know how I should look and behave and nobody can say otherwise," or, "I don't care— things have gone too far with me, and you can think what you like."

Nowadays, Mrs. Newcombe might be seen as a serious case, terminally depressed, and her husband, with his brutish ways, might be looked on with concern and compassion as someone who needed help. In those days, they were just taken as they were and allowed to live out their lives without a thought of intervention—regarded, in fact, as a source of interest and entertainment. Some people were born to make others miserable, and some let themselves in for being made miserable, and that was all there was to it.

The Newcombes had five daughters, then one son. The girls' names were April, Corinne, Gloria, Susannah, and Dahlia. I thought these names fanciful and lovely, and I would have liked the daughters' looks to match them—as if they were the beautiful children of an ogre in a fairy tale. April and Corinne had been gone from home for some time, so I had no way of knowing what they looked like. Gloria was married and had dropped from view, as married girls did. Susannah worked in the hardware store, and she was a stout girl, not at all pretty, but quite normal-looking—not cowed like her mother or brutal like her father.

Dahlia was a couple of years older than I was. She was the first member of the family to go to high school. She was sturdy and handsome, though not my idea of an ogre's daughter, with rippling yellow hair and a sweetly pining expression. Her hair was brown, her shoulders square, her breasts firm and high. She got quite respectable marks and was notably good at games, particularly basketball.

During my first few months of high school, I found myself walking part of the way to school with her. We had lived our lives within shouting distance of each other, you might say, but the school districts were divided in such a way that I had always gone to the town elementary school while the Newcombes had gone to a country school, farther out along the highway. But now that we were both going to the high school we would usually meet where our roads joined, and if either of us saw the other coming we would wait. Walking together did not mean that we became particular friends. It was just that it would have seemed odd to walk singly when we were going the same way and to the same place. I don't know what we talked about. I have an idea that there were long periods of silence, which were not disagreeable.

One morning Dahlia didn't appear, and I went on alone. In the cloakroom at school, she said to me, "I won't be coming in that way from now on, because I'm staying in town now. I'm staying at Gloria's."

And we hardly spoke again until one day in early spring—that time I was talking about, with the trees bare but reddening, and the crows and the seagulls busy, and the farmers hollering to their horses. She caught up to me as we were leaving school. She said, "You going right home?" I said yes, and she started to walk beside me.

I asked her if she was living at home again, and she said, "Nope. Still at Gloria's."

When we had walked a bit farther, she said, "I'm just going along out there to see what's what."

Over the winter, she had shone as the best player on the basketball team, and the team had nearly won the county championship. It gave me a feeling of distinction to be walking with her. She must have started high school with all the business of her family dragging behind her, but now she had been allowed, to an extent, to slip free of that. The independence of spirit, the faith you had to have in your body, to become an athlete won respect and discouraged anybody who would think of tormenting you. She was well dressed, too—she had very few clothes but they were quite all right, not like the matronly hand-me-downs that country girls often wore, or the homemade outfits my mother labored at for me. I remember ared turtleneck sweater she often wore, and a pleated Royal Stewart skirt. Maybe Gloria and Susannah thought of her as the representative and pride of the family and had pooled some of their slight resources to dress her handsomely.

We were out of town before she spoke again.

"I got to keep track of what my old man is up to," she said. "He better not be beating up on Raymond." Raymond. That was the brother.

"Does he beat up on him?" I said. I felt as if I had to pretend to know less about her family than I—and everybody—actually did.

"Yeah. Some," she said. "Raymond used to get off better than the rest of us, but now he's the only one left, I wonder."

I said, "Did he beat you?" I tried to sound as if I felt this was an everyday and not even very interesting matter.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "Before I got away the last time, it looked like he was going to brain me with the shovel. And I was yelling at him, 'Come on. Come on, let's see you kill me. Then you'll get hung.' Yeah. But then I thought, O.K., but I wouldn't get the satisfaction of seeing him. Hung. I hate him," she said, in the same breezy but formidable tone. "If somebody told me he was drowning in the river, I would go and stand on the bank and cheer."

"What if he takes after you now?"

"I don't mean him to see me. I just mean to spy on him."

When we came to the division of our roads, she said, "Come on with me. I'll show you how I spy."

We walked across the bridge and looked through the cracks between the planks at the high-flowing river.

"In the wintertime, I used to come out after dark and get right up at the kitchen windows, but it stays light too late now to do that," she said. "What I wanted was for him to see the boot marks in the snow and know there was somebody had been spying on him and go out of his mind."

I asked whether he had a shotgun.

"Sure," she said. "Same story. Shoots me and gets hung and goes to Hell. Don't worry—he's not going to see us."

Before we were in sight of the Newcombes' buildings, we climbed a bank on the opposite side of the road, where there was a thick growth of sumac bordering a planted windbreak of spruce.

Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright came from Chicago, where they had both worked as window dressers for a department store. The store had closed down or had decided that it didn't need so many windows dressed—whatever had happened, they had lost their jobs and come here, to live in Mrs. Eddy's house and try to set up a wallpapering business.

They had a daughter, Frances, who was a year younger than I was. She was small and thin and she got out of breath easily, because she had asthma. On my first day in grade five, Mr. Wainwright came out and stopped me on the road, with Frances lagging behind him. He asked me if I would take Frances to school and show her where the grade-four classroom was, and if I would be her friend, because she didn't know anybody yet or where anything was. Frances was all dolled up in a very short checked cotton dress with a flounce around the skirt and a matching hair ribbon.

Soon it became understood that I would walk to school with Frances and walk home with her afterward. We both carried our lunches to school, but as I had not expressly been asked to eat lunch with her I never did. Very few students lived far enough away to eat lunch at the school, but there happened to be one girl in my own class who did. Her name was Wanda Louise Palmer, and her parents owned and lived in the dance hall to the south of town. She and I ate together and formed a friendship of sorts, which was based mostly on avoiding Frances. We ate in the girls' basement, behind a barricade of broken old desks that were heaped up in a corner. As soon as we finished, we'd sneak out and leave the school grounds to walk around the nearby streets or go downtown and look in store windows. Wanda Louise should have been an interesting companion, because of her life at the dance hall, but she was so apt to lose track of what she was telling me (but not to stop talking) that she was actually very boring. All we really had in common was our bond against Frances, and our desperate stifled laughter when we peered through the desks and saw her looking for us. After a while, she didn't do that anymore; she ate her lunch alone.

I would like to think that it was Wanda Louise who pointed her out to our classmates, when we stood inline ready to march into the schoolroom, as the girl we were always trying to avoid. But I could have been the one who did that, and certainly I went along with the joke, and was glad to be on the side of those doing the giggling and excluding. Living on the outskirts of town, as I did, and being easily embarrassed yet a showoff, as I improbably was, I could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated, never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me.

The hair ribbons became part of it. Just to go up to Frances and say, "I love your hair ribbon. Where did you get it?" and have her say, in innocent bewilderment, "In Chicago," was a lasting source of glee. For awhile, "in Chicago," or just "Chicago," became the answer to everything. "Where did you go after school yesterday?" "Chicago." Or "Where did your sister get her hair waved?" "Oh, in Chicago." Some girls got into fits of laughing that were like hiccups; some feared that they were going to be sick.

How much Frances was aware of, I don't know. She may have thought that there was some special place where girls in my class always went to have lunch. She may not have understood what the giggling was about. She never asked about it.

She tried to hold my hand crossing the street, but I pulled away and told her not to. She said she always used to hold Sadie's hand, when Sadie walked her to school in Chicago. "But that was different," she said. "There aren't any street-cars here."

One day, she offered me a cookie left over from her lunch. I refused, so as not to feel an inconvenient obligation. "Go on," she said. "My mother put it in for you."

Then I understood. Her mother put in this extra cookie, this treat, for me to eat when we had our lunches together. She had never told her mother that I didn't show up at lunchtime and she couldn't find me. She must have been eating the extra cookie herself, but now the dishonesty was bothering her. So every day from then on she offered it, almost at the last minute, as if she were embarrassed, and every day I accepted.

We began to have a little conversation on our walks, starting when we were almost clear of town. We were both interested in movie stars. She had seen far more movies than I had—in Chicago, you could see movies every afternoon, and Sadie used to take her—but I walked past our theatre and looked at the stills every time the picture changed, so I knew something about them, too. And I had one movie magazine at home, which a visiting cousin had left. It had pictures of Deanna Durbin's wedding in it, so we talked about that, and about what we wanted our own weddings to be like—the bridal gowns and the bridesmaids' dresses and the flowers and the going-away outfits. The same cousin had given me a present—a "Ziegfeld Girl" cutout book. Frances had seen the "Ziegfeld Girl" movie, and we talked about which Ziegfeld girl we would like to be. She chose Judy Garland because she could sing, and I chose Hedy Lamarr because she was so beautiful.

"My father and mother used to sing in the Light Opera Society," she said. "They sang in 'The Pirates of Penzance.' "

Lightopra society. Pirazapenzanze. I filed those words away but could not ask what they meant. If her mother came out to greet us, she might ask if I could come in and play. I always said I had to go straight home. 

Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Wainwright asked me if I could come to have supper the next Sunday. She said it would be a little thank-you party and a farewell party, now that they were going away. I was on the point of saying that I didn't think my mother would let me, but when I heard the word "farewell" I saw the invitation in a different light. The burden of Frances would be lifted, no further obligation would be involved, and no intimacy enforced. Mrs. Wainwright said that she had written a little note to my mother, since they didn't have a phone.

My mother would have liked it better if I had been asked to some town girl's house, but she said yes. She, too, took it into account that the Wainwrights were moving away.

"I don't know what they were thinking of," she said. "Anybody who can afford wallpapering here does it themselves."

"Where are you going?" I asked Frances.

"Burlington."

"Where's that?"

"It's in Canada, too. We're going to stay with my aunt and uncle, but we'll have our own toilet upstairs and our sink and a hot plate. My dad's going to get a better job."

"What doing?"

"I don't know."

Their Christmas tree was in a corner. The front room had only one window, and if they had put the tree there it would have blocked off all the light. It was not a big or well-shaped tree but it was smothered in tinsel, gold and silver beads, and beautiful intricate ornaments. In another corner of the room was a parlor stove, a woodstove, in which the fire seemed to have been recently lit. The air was still cold and heavy with the forest smell of the tree. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wainwright was very confident about the fire. First one and then the other kept fiddling with the damper and timidly reaching in with the poker and patting the pipe to see if it was getting hot or, by any chance, too hot. The wind was fierce that day, and sometimes blew the smoke down the chimney.

That was no matter to Frances and me. On a card table set up in the middle of the room there was a Chinese-checker board, ready for two people to play, and a stack of movie magazines. I fell upon them at once. I had never imagined such a feast. It made no difference that they were not new and that some had been looked through so often they were almost falling apart. Frances stood beside my chair, interfering with my pleasure a little by telling me what was just ahead and what was in a magazine I hadn't opened yet. This was obviously her idea and I had to be patient with her—the magazines were her property, and if she had taken it into her head to remove them I would have been more grief-stricken than when my father drowned the kittens I had found in the barn.

Frances was wearing an outfit that could have come out of one of those magazines—a party dress of deep-red velvet with a white lace collar and a black ribbon threaded through the lace. Her mother's dress was exactly the same, and they both had their hair done the same way—a roll in front and long in the back. Frances's hair was thin and fine and, what with her excitement and her jumping around to show me things, the roll was already coming undone.

It was getting dark in the room. There were wires sticking out of the ceiling, but no bulbs. Mrs. Wainwright brought in a lamp with a long cord that plugged into the wall. The light shone through the pale-green glass of a lady's skirt.

"That's Scarlett O'Hara," Frances said. "Daddy and I gave it to Mother for her birthday. "We never got around to the Chinese checkers, and in time the board was removed. We shifted the magazines to the floor. A piece of lace—not a real tablecloth—was laid across the table. Dishes followed. Evidently, Frances and I were to eat in here, by ourselves. Both parents were involved in laying the table—Mrs. Wainwright wearing a fancy apron over her red velvet and Mr. Wainwright in shirtsleeves and a silk-backed vest.

When everything was set up, we were called over. I had expected Mr. Wainwright to leave the serving of the food to his wife—in fact, I had already been very surprised to see him hovering with knives and forks—but now he pulled out our chairs and announced that he was our waiter. When he was that close, I could smell him, and hear his breathing, which sounded eager, like a dog's. His smell was of talcum and lotion, suggesting an innocent intimacy that made me think of a baby's fresh diapers.

"Now, my lovely young ladies," he said. "I am going to bring you some champagne."

He brought a pitcher of lemonade and filled our glasses. I was alarmed, until I took a sip of it—I knew that champagne was an alcoholic drink. We never had such drinks in our house, and neither did anybody I knew. Mr. Wainwright watched me taste it and seemed to guess my feelings.

"Is that all right? Not worried now?" he said. "All satisfactory to your ladyship?"

Then he made a bow.

"Now," he said. "What would you care for, to eat?" He reeled off a list of unfamiliar things—all I recognized was venison, which I certainly had never tasted. The list ended up with sweetbreads. Frances giggled and said, "We'll have sweetbreads, please. And potatoes."

I expected the sweetbreads to be like their name—some sort of bun with jam or brown sugar, but couldn't see why that would come with potatoes. What arrived, however, were small pads of meat wrapped in crisp bacon, and little potatoes with their skins on, which had been rolled in hot butter and crisped in the pan. Also thin sticks of carrot with a slightly candied flavor. Those I could have done without, but I had never eaten potatoes so delicious or meat so tender. All I wished was for Mr. Wainwright to stay in the kitchen instead of hanging around us pouring out lemonade and asking if everything was to our liking.