“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves,” Alice Munro writes. “But we do—we do it all the time.”
At first, it was not too bad. Her eyes only rarely turned up into her head in a wandering way, and the soft down from an oversupply of saliva was just visible around her lips. She could get dressed in the mornings with some help, and she was able to do occasional chores around the house. She held on to some strength in herself for a surprisingly long time.
Several times, she told me a story that had to do with the house that now belonged to the war veteran named Waitey Streets—the man who marvelled at the length of time I had to stay in school. The story was not about him but about someone who had lived in that house long before he did, a crazy old woman named Mrs. Netterfield. Mrs. Netterfield had had her groceries delivered, as we all did, after ordering them over the phone.
Why did my mother decide to leave her washing and wringing out in order to look at the driveway? She was not expecting any company. My father wasn’t late. Possibly she had asked him to get something at the grocery store, something she needed for whatever she was making for supper, and she was wondering if he would be home in time for her to make it. She was a fairly fancy cook in those days—more so, in fact, than her mother-in-law and the other women in my father’s family thought necessary.
But now she was not thinking of friendliness or decency. Now she was running out the kitchen door to grab me out of my baby carriage. She left the carriage and the covers where they were and ran back into the house, locking the kitchen door behind her. The front door she did not need to worry about—it was always locked.
There was no decent knock on the door. No pushing at the chair, either. No banging or rattling. My mother was in a hiding place by the dumbwaiter, hoping against hope that the quiet meant that the woman had changed her mind and gone home. I don’t know when my mother first told me this story, but it seems to me that that was where the earlier versions stopped—with Mrs. Netterfield pressing her face and hands against the glass while my mother hid. But in later versions there was an end to just looking. Impatience or anger took hold and then the rattling and the banging came. No mention of yelling. The old woman may not have had the breath to do it. Or perhaps she forgot what it was she’d come for, once her strength ran out.
“The lines I am enclosing were written from memories of that old hillside,” she said. “If they are worthy of a little space in your time-honoured paper, I thank you.”Are blossoms wild and gay—
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