Dane believes that he has one memory of Violet – his mother’s sister – from a time before his mother died. He remembers very little from that far back. He hardly remembers his mother. He has one picture of his mother standing in front of the mirror at the kitchen sink, tucking her red hair under a navy-blue straw hat. He remembers a bright red ribbon on the hat. She must have been getting ready to go to church. And he can see a swollen leg, of a dull-brown colour, that he associates with her last sickness. But he doubts if he ever saw that. Why would her leg be such a colour? He must have heard people talking about it. He heard them say that her leg was as big as a barrel.

He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding which she set outside in the snow, to keep it cool. (None of the farmhouses had a refrigerator in those days.) Then it snowed, the snow covered the pudding-dish, which sank from sight. Dane remembers Violet tramping around in the snowy yard after dark, calling, ‘Pudding, pudding, here pudding!’ as if it was a dog. Himself laughing immoderately, and his mother and father laughing in the doorway, and Violet elaborating the performance, stopping to whistle.

Not long after his mother died, his grandmother died – the one who lived with Violet, and wore a black hat, and called the hens in what sounded exactly like their own language – a tireless crooning and clucking. Then Violet sold the farm and moved to town, where she got a job with Bell Telephone. That was during the Second World War, when there was a shortage of men, and Violet soon became manager. There was some feeling that she should have stepped down when the war was over, given the job back to some man who had a family to support. Dane recalls hearing somebody say that – a woman, maybe one of his father’s sisters, saying that it would have been the gracious thing to do. But his father said no, Violet did right. He said Violet had spunk.

Instead of the dull, draped, beaded dresses that married women – mothers – wore, Violet wore skirts and blouses. She wore all-round pleated skirts of lively plaid, navy-blue or grey gabardine, with wonderful blouses of ivory satin, ruffled white georgette, pink or yellow or silvery rayon crêpe. The colour of her good coat was royal purple, and it had a silver fox collar. Her hair was not finger-waved, or permanented, but done up in a thick, dark, regal-looking roll. Her complexion was powdered, delicately pink, like the large sea-shell she owned and would let Dane listen to. Dane knows now that she dressed, and looked, like a certain kind of businesswoman, professional woman, of those days. Stylish but ladylike, shapely though not exactly slender, neither matronly nor girlish. What he took to be so remarkable, and unique, was not really so. This was the truth he discovered about most things as he got older. Just the same, his memory protects her – from any sense of repetition, or classification, or from being in any way diminished.

In town Violet lived in an apartment over the Royal Bank. You had to go up a long closed-in flight of stairs. The long windows in the living-room were called french doors. They opened out on to two tiny balconies with waist-high railings of wrought-iron. The walls were painted, not papered. They were a pale green. Violet bought a new sofa and chair upholstered in a rich moss-green fabric, and a coffee-table with a glass tray that fitted over the wooden top. The curtains were called drapes, and had pull-cords. As they closed over the windows a pattern of shiny cream-coloured leaves rippled out across the dull cream background. There was no ceiling-light – just floor-lamps. In the kitchen there were knotty-pine cupboards and a knotty-pine breakfast nook. Another flight of steps – these were open and steep – led down to a little hedged-in backyard, which only Violet had the use of. It was as tidily enclosed, as susceptible to arrangement and decoration, as any living-room.

During the first two years he went to high school in town, Dane visited Violet fairly often. He stayed overnight in the apartment when the weather was stormy. Violet made him up a bed on the moss-green sofa. He was a skinny, ravenous, red-headed boy in those days – nobody can credit the skinniness now – and Violet fed him well. She made him hot chocolate with whipped cream to drink at bedtime. She served him creamed chicken in tart shells, and layer cakes, and something called gravel pie, which was made with maple syrup. She ate one piece, and he ate the rest. This was a great change from the rough-and-ready meals at home, with his father and the hired man. Violet told him stories about her own childhood on the farm, with his mother and the other sister who lived out in Edmonton now, and their mother and father, whom she called characters. Everybody was a character in those stories, everything was shaped to be funny.

She had bought a record-player, and she played records for him, asking him to choose his favourite. His favourite was the record she got as a bonus when she joined a record club that would introduce her to classical music. It was The Birds, by Respighi. Her favourite was ‘Kenneth McKellar Singing Sacred and Secular Songs’.

She didn’t come out to the farm any more. Dane’s father, when he stopped to pick Dane up, never had time for a cup of coffee. Perhaps he was afraid to sit down in such an elegant apartment in his farm clothes. Perhaps he still held a little grudge against Violet for what she had done at church.

Violet had made a choice there, right at the beginning of her town life. The church had two doors. One door was used by country people – the reason for this originally being that it was nearer to the drive-shed – and the other by town people. Inside, the pattern was maintained – town people on one side of the church, country people on the other. There was no definable feeling of superiority or inferiority involved – that was just the way it was. Even country people who had retired and moved to town made a point of not using the town door, though that might mean going out of their way, walking right past it, to the country door.

Violet’s move, and her job, certainly made her a town person. But when she first came to that church, Dane and his father were the only people in it that she knew. Choosing the country side would have shown loyalty, and a certain kind of pride, a foregoing of privilege. (For it was true that most of the elders and ushers and Sunday-school teachers were chosen from the town side, just as most of the fancy hats and fashionable ladies’ outfits appeared over there.) Choosing the town side – which was what Violet did – showed an acceptance of status, perhaps even a wish for more.

Dane’s father teased her on the sidewalk afterwards.

‘You like the company over there?’

‘It just seemed handier,’ Violet said, pretending not to know what he was talking about. ‘I don’t know about the company. I think some fellow had a dead cigar in his pocket.’

Dane wished so much that Violet hadn’t done that. It wasn’t that he wanted anything serious to happen between Violet and his father – for instance, marriage. He couldn’t imagine that. He just wanted them to be on the same side, so that could be his side.

On an afternoon in June, when he had finished writing one of his exams, Dane went around to Violet’s apartment to get a book he had left there. He was allowed to use the apartment to study in while she was at work. He would open the french doors and let the smell of the burst-open countryside in, all rank and flowering and newly ploughed and manured. Dust came in too, but he always thought he could wipe that up before she got home. He walked around and around in the pale bright living-room, tamping down chunks of information, feeling lordly. Everything in the room got bits of whatever he was learning attached to it. There was a dark picture of a dead king and some stately ladies that he would always look at, memorizing poetry. The ladies reminded him in a strange way of Violet.

He hadn’t known whether Violet would be home, because her afternoon off varied from week to week. But he heard her voice as he came up the stairs.

‘It’s me,’ he called, and waited for her to come out of the kitchen and ask about his exam.

Instead she called back to him, ‘Dane! Dane, I wasn’t expecting you! Come and have coffee with us!’

She introduced him to the two people in the kitchen, a man and wife. The Tebbutts. The man was standing by the counter and the woman was sitting in the breakfast nook. Dane knew the man by sight. Wyck Tebbutt, who sold insurance. He was supposed to have been a professional baseball player, but that would have been a long time ago. He was a trim, small, courteous man, always rather nattily dressed, with a deft athlete’s modest confidence.

Violet didn’t ask Dane anything about his exam, but went on fussing about getting the coffee ready. First she got out breakfast cups, then rejected them, got down her good china. She spread a cloth on the breakfast-nook table. There was a faint scorch-mark on it, from the iron.

‘Well, I’m mortified!’ said Violet, laughing.

Wyck Tebbutt laughed too.

‘So you should be, so you should be!’ he said.

Violet’s nervous laugh, and her ignoring him, displeased Dane considerably. She had been in town for several years now, and she had made several changes in herself, which he seemed to be just now noticing all together. Her hair was not done up in a roll any more, it was short and curled. And its dark brown colour was not the same as it used to be. Now it had a rich, dull look, like chocolate fudge. Her lipstick was too heavy, too bright a red, and the grain of her skin had coarsened. Also, she had put on a lot of weight, especially around the hips. The harmony of her figure was spoiled – it almost looked as if she was wearing some kind of cage or contraption under her skirt.

As soon as his coffee was poured, Wyck Tebbutt said that he would just take his cup down into the yard, because he wanted to see how those new rose-bushes were getting on.

‘Oh, I think they’ve got some kind of a bug!’ said Violet, as if the fact delighted her. ‘I’m afraid they have, Wyck!’

All this time the wife was talking, and she went right on, hardly noticing that her husband had left. She talked to Violet and even to Dane, but she was really just talking into the air. She talked about her appointments with the doctor, and the chiropractor. She said that she had a headache that was like red-hot irons being clamped on her temples. And she had another kind of shooting pain down the side of her neck that was like hundreds of needles being driven into her flesh. She wouldn’t allow a break, she was like a helpless little talking-machine set up in a corner of the breakfast-nook, her large sad eyes going blank as soon as they fixed on you.

This was the sort of person, this was the sort of talk, that Violet was good at imitating.

And now she was deferring. She was listening, or pretending to listen, to this woman, with an interest the woman didn’t even notice or need. Was it because the husband had walked out, did Violet feel a concern about his rudeness to his wife? She did keep glancing down into the backyard.

‘I just have to see what Wyck thinks about that bug,’ she said, and she was off, down the back steps, at what seemed like a heavy and undignified trot.

‘All they are interested in is their money,’ the wife said.

Dane got up to get himself more coffee. He stood at the stove, and lifted the coffee-pot enquiringly while she talked.

‘I shouldn’t have drunk the amount I already have,’ she said. ‘Not with ninety per cent of my stomach scar tissue.’

Dane looked down at her husband and Violet, who were leaning together over the young rose-bushes. No doubt they were talking about the roses, and bugs, and bug-killer and blight. Nothing so crude as a touch would occur. Wyck, holding his coffee-cup, delicately lifted one leaf, then another, with his foot. Violet’s look travelled down obediently to the leaf held against his polished shoe.

It would be wrong to say that Dane understood anything right then. But he forgot the woman who was talking and the coffee-pot he was holding. He felt a secret, a breath of others’ intimacy. Something he didn’t want to know about, but would have to.

Not so long afterwards he was with his father on the street, and he saw Wyck coming towards them. His father said, ‘Hello, Wyck,’ in a certain calm respectful voice men use to greet other men they don’t know – or perhaps don’t want to know – too well. Dane had veered off to look into the hardware store window.

‘Don’t you know Wyck Tebbutt?’ his father said. ‘I thought you might’ve run into him at Violet’s.’

Then Dane felt it again – the breath he hated. He hated it more now, because it was all around him. It was all around him, if even his father knew.

He didn’t want to understand the extent of Violet’s treachery. He already knew that he would never forgive her.

Now Dane is a broad-shouldered ruddy man with the worn outlines of a teddy bear and a beard that is almost entirely grey. He has grown to look more and more like his mother. He is an architect. He went away from home to college, and for a long time he lived and worked in other places, but he came back several years ago, and is kept busy now restoring the churches and town halls and business blocks and houses that were considered eyesores at the time he left. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house his father was born and died in, a 150-year-old stone house that he and Theo have gradually brought back to something like its original style.

He lives with Theo, who is a social worker.

When Dane first told Wyck and Violet (he has forgiven her – them – long ago) that somebody named Theo was moving in with him, Wyck said, ‘I take that to mean you finally turned up a serious girl-friend.’

Violet didn’t say anything.

‘A man friend,’ Dane said gently. ‘It isn’t easy to tell, from the name.’

‘Well. That’s him’s and your business,’ Wyck said affably. The only sign he gave that he might be shaken was in saying ‘him’s’ and not noticing.

‘Theo. Yes,’ said Violet. ‘That is hard to tell.’

This was in the little two-bedroom house on the edge of town, which Violet moved to after she retired from the phone company. Wyck had moved in with her after his wife died, and they were able to marry. The house was one of a row of very similar houses, strung out along a country road in front of a cornfield. Wyck’s things were moved in on top of Violet’s, and the low-ceilinged rooms seemed crowded, the arrangement temporary and haphazard. The moss-green sofa looked bulky and old-fashioned, under an afghan made by Wyck’s wife. A large black velvet painting, belonging to Wyck, took up most of one living-room wall. It depicted a bull and a bullfighter. Wyck’s old sporting trophies and the silver tray presented to him by the insurance company sat on the mantel beside Violet’s old shell and tippling Scotsman.

All those dust-catchers, Violet called them.

But she kept Wyck’s things there even after Wyck himself was gone. He died during the Grey Cup game, at the end of November. Violet phoned Dane, who listened to her at first with his eyes on the television screen.

‘I went down to the church,’ Violet said. ‘I took some things down for the rummage sale, and when I got back, as soon as I opened the door I said, “Wyck,” and he didn’t answer. I saw the back of his head in a funny position. It was bent towards the arm of his chair. I went around in front of him and turned off the television.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Dane. ‘Aunt Violet? What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, he’s dead,’ said Violet, as if Dane had been questioning it. ‘He would have to be dead to let me turn off the football game.’ She spoke in a loud emphatic voice with an unnatural joviality – as if she was covering up some embarrassment.

When he drove into town he found her sitting on the front step.

‘I’m a fool,’ she said – her voice still jarring, loud and bright.

Theo said later than many old people were like that, when someone close to them died.

‘They get past grief,’ he said. ‘Or it’s a different kind.’

All winter Violet seemed to be all right, driving her car when the weather permitted, going to church, going to the Senior Citizens’ Club to play cards. Then just when the hot months were starting and you’d think she would most enjoy getting out, she announced to Dane that she didn’t intend to drive any more.

He thought the trouble might be with her eyesight. He suggested an appointment to see if she needed stronger glasses.

‘I see well enough,’ she said. ‘My trouble is not being sure of what I see.’

What did she mean by that?

‘I see things I know aren’t there.’

How did she know they were not there?

‘Because I still have enough sense that I can tell. My brain gets the message through and tells me that’s ridiculous. But what if it doesn’t get through all the time? How am I going to know? I can get my groceries delivered. Most old people get their groceries delivered. I am an old person. They are not going to miss me that much, at the supermarket.’

But Dane knew how much she enjoyed going to the supermarket, and he thought that he or Theo would have to try to get her there once a week. That was where she got the special strong coffee that Wyck had drunk, and she usually liked to look at the smoked meats and back bacon – both favourite things of Wyck’s – though she seldom bought any.

‘For instance,’ said Violet. ‘The other morning I saw King Billy.’

‘You saw my grand-daddy?’ Dane said, laughing. ‘Well. How was he?’

‘I saw King Billy the horse,’ said Violet shortly. ‘I came out of my room and there he was poking his head in at the dining-room window.’

She said she had known him right away. His familiar, foolish, dapple-grey head. She told him to go on, get out of there, and he lifted his head over the sill and moved off in a leisurely kind of way. Violet went on into the kitchen to start her breakfast, and then several things occurred to her.

King Billy the horse had been dead for about sixty-five years.

That couldn’t have been the milkman’s horse, either, because milkmen hadn’t driven horses since around 1950. They drove trucks.

No. They didn’t drive anything, because milk was not delivered any more. It didn’t even come in bottles. You picked it up at the store, in cartons or in plastic bags.

There was glass in the dining-room window that had not been broken.

‘I was never especially fond of that horse, either,’ said Violet. ‘I was never un-fond of it, but if I had my choice of anything or anyone I wanted to see that’s gone – it wouldn’t be that horse.’

‘What would it be?’ said Dane, trying to keep the conversation on a light level, though he wasn’t at all happy about what he heard. ‘What would be your choice?’

But Violet made an unpleasant sound – a balky sort of grunt, annhh – as if his question angered and exasperated her. A look of deliberate, even ill-natured, stupidity – the visual equivalent of that grunt – passed over her face.

It happened that a few nights later Dane was watching a television programme about people in South America – mostly women – who believe themselves to be invaded and possessed, from time to time and in special circumstances, by spirits. The look on their faces reminded him of that look on Violet’s. The difference was that they courted this possession, and he was sure Violet didn’t. Nothing in her wanted to be overtaken by this helpless and distracted, dull and stubborn old woman, with a memory or imagination out of control, bulging at random through the present scene. Trying to keep that old woman in check was bound to make her short-tempered. In fact he had seen her – now he remembered, he had seen her tilt her head to the side and give it a quick slap, as people do to get rid of a buzzing, an unwelcome presence.

A week or so further into the summer, she phoned him.

‘Dane. Did I tell you about this pair I see, going by my house?’

‘Pair of what, Aunt Violet?’

‘Girls. I think so. Boys don’t have long hair any more, do they? They’re dressed in army clothes, it looks like, but I don’t know whether that means anything. One is short and one is tall. I see them go by this house and look at it. They walk out the road and back.’

‘Maybe they’re collecting bottles. People do.’

‘They don’t have anything to put bottles in. It’s this house. They have some interest in it.’

‘Aunt Violet? Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I know, I ask myself too. But they’re not anybody I’ve ever known. They’re not anybody I know that’s dead. That’s something.’

He thought he should get around to see her, find out what was going on. But before he got there, she phoned again.

‘Dane. I just wanted to tell you. About those girls I noticed walking by the house. They are girls. They’re just dressed up in army outfits. They came and knocked on my door. They said they were looking for a Violet Thorns. I said there was no such person living here, and they looked very downcast. Then I said there was a Violet Tebbutt, and would she do?’

She seemed in high spirits. Dane was busy, he had a meeting with some town councillors in half an hour. He also had a toothache. But he said, ‘You were right then. So who are they?’

‘That’s the surprise,’ said Violet. ‘They are not just any girls. One of them is your cousin. I mean, the daughter of your cousin. Donna Collard’s daughter. Do you know who I’m talking about? Your cousin Donna Collard? Her married name is McNie.’

‘No,’ said Dane.

‘Your Aunt Bonnie Hope, out in Edmonton, she was married to a man named Collard, Roy Collard, and she had three daughters. Elinor and Ruth and Donna. Now do you know who I mean?’

‘I never met them,’ he said.

‘No. Well, Donna Collard married a McNie, I forget his first name, and they live in Prince George, British Columbia, and this is their daughter. Heather. This is their daughter Heather that has been walking past my house. The other girl is her friend. Gillian.’

Dane didn’t say anything for a minute, and Violet said, ‘Dane? I hope you don’t think that I’m confused about this?’

He laughed. He said, ‘I’ll have to come around and see them.’

‘They are very polite and good-hearted,’ said Violet, ‘in spite of how they might look.’

He was fairly sure that these girls were real, but everything was slightly out of focus to him at the time (he had a low-grade fever, though he didn’t know it yet, and eventually would have to have a root-canal job done on his tooth). He actually thought that he should ask around town, to find out if anybody else had seen them. When he did get around to doing this, some time later, he found out that a couple of girls of that description had been staying at the hotel, that they owned a beaten-up blue Datsun but walked a lot, in town and out, and were generally thought to be women’s libbers. People didn’t think much of their outfits, but they didn’t cause any trouble, except for getting into some sort of argument with the exotic dancer at the hotel.

In the meantime, he had heard a lot from Violet. She phoned him at home, when his mouth was so sore he could hardly talk, and said it was too bad he wasn’t feeling well – otherwise he could have got to meet Heather and Gillian.

‘Heather is the tall one,’ Violet said. ‘She has long fair hair and a narrow build. If she resembles Bonnie Hope at all it is in her teeth. But Heather’s teeth suit her face better and they are beautifully white. Gillian is a nice-looking sort of girl with curly hair and a tan. Heather has that fair skin that burns. They wear the same sort of clothes, you know, the army pants and work shirts and boys’ boots, but Gillian always has a belt on and her collar turned up and on her it looks like more of a style. Gillian is more confident but I think Heather is more intelligent. She is the one more genuinely interested.’

‘What in?’ said Dane. ‘What are they, anyway – students?’

‘They’ve been to university,’ Violet said. ‘I don’t know what they were studying. They’ve been to France and Mexico. In Mexico they stayed on an island that was called the Isle of Women. It was a women-ruled society. They belong to a theatre and they make up plays. They make up their own plays, they don’t take some writer’s plays or do plays that have been done before. It’s all women, in this theatre. They made me a lovely supper, Dane, I wish you could have been here. They made a salad with artichoke hearts in it.’

‘Violet sounds as if she’s on drugs,’ said Dane to Theo. ‘She sounds as if they’ve got her spinning.’

When he could talk again he called her.

‘What are those girls interested in, Aunt Violet? Are they interested in old china and jewellery and things?’

‘They are not,’ said Violet crossly. ‘They are interested in family history. They are interested in our family and what I can remember about what it was like. I had to tell them what the reservoir was on a stove.’

‘What would they want to know that for?’

‘Oh. They have some idea. They have some idea about doing a play.’

‘What do they know about plays?’

‘Didn’t I tell you, they’ve acted in plays? They’ve made up their own plays and acted in them, in this women’s theatre.’

‘What sort of play are they going to make up?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll do it. They’re just interested in what it was like.’

‘That’s all the style, now,’ Dane said. ‘To be interested in that.’

‘They’re not just letting on to be, Dane. They really are.’

But he thought that she didn’t sound so buoyant, this time.

‘You know they change all the names,’ she said. ‘When they do make up a play, they change all the names and places. But I think they just like finding out about things, and talking. They’re not all that young, but they seem young, they’re so curious. And light-hearted.’

‘Your face looks different,’ said Dane to Violet, when he finally got to visit her again. ‘Have you lost weight?’

Violet said, ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

Dane had lost twelve pounds himself but she did not notice. She seemed cheerful, but agitated. She kept getting up and sitting down, looking out of the window, moving things around for no reason on the kitchen counter.

The girls had gone.

‘They’re not coming back?’ said Dane.

Yes, they were. Violet thought they were coming back. She didn’t know just when.

‘They’re off to find their island, I guess,’ said Dane. ‘Their island ruled by women.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Violet. ‘I think they’ve gone to Montreal.’

Dane didn’t like to think that he could be made to feel so irritable and suspicious by two girls he hadn’t even met. He was almost ready to blame it on the medication he still had to take for his tooth. There was a sense he had of something concealed from him – all around him, but concealed, a tiresome, silly, malicious sort of secret.

‘You’ve cut your hair,’ he said. That was why her face looked different.

‘They cut it. They said it was a Joan of Arc style.’ Violet smiled ironically, much as she used to, and touched her hair. ‘I told them I hoped I wouldn’t end up burned at the stake.’

She held her head in her hands, and rocked back and forth.

‘They’ve tired you,’ Dane said. ‘They’ve tired you, Aunt Violet.’

‘It’s going through all that,’ said Violet. She jerked her head towards the back bedroom. ‘It’s what I have to get to work on, in there.’

In Violet’s back bedroom there were boxes of papers, and an old hump-backed trunk that had belonged to her mother. Dane thought that it was full of papers, too. Old high school notes, teachers’ college notes, report cards, records and correspondence from her years with the phone company, minutes of meetings, letters, postcards. Anything that had writing on it she had probably kept.

She said that all these papers had to be sorted out. It had to be done before the girls got back. There were things she had promised them.

‘What things?’

‘Just things.’

Were they coming back soon?

Violet said yes. She expected so, yes. As she thought of this, her hands were patting and rubbing at the table-top. She took a bite of a cookie, and crumbled what was left of it. Dane saw her sweep the crumbs into her hand and put them in her coffee.

‘That’s what they sent,’ she said, and pushed in front of him a card he had noticed, that was propped against her sugar-bowl. It was a home-made card with childishly crayoned violets on it, and red hearts. She seemed to intend that he should read it, so he did.

‘Thank you a million, million times for your help and openness. You have given us a wonderful story. It is a classic story of anti-patriarchal rage. Your gift to us, can we give it to others? What is called Female Craziness is nothing but centuries of Frustration and Oppression. The part about the creek is wonderful just by itself and how many women can identify!’

Across the bottom, in capitals, had been written: LONGING TO SEE DOCUMENTS, PLEASE NEXT TIME, LOVE AND GRATITUDE.

‘What is all this about?’ said Dane. ‘Why do you have to sort things out for them? Why can’t they just go through the whole mess and find what they want for themselves?’

‘Because I am so ashamed,’ said Violet vehemently. ‘I don’t want anybody to see.’

He told her there was nothing, nothing, to be ashamed of.

‘I shouldn’t have used the word mess. It’s just that you’ve accumulated a lot, over the years. Some of it is probably very interesting.’

‘There is more to it than anybody knows! And I am the one has to deal with it!’

‘Anti-patriarchal rage,’ said Dane, taking up the card again. ‘What do they mean by that?’ He wondered why they used capitals for ‘Female Craziness’ and ‘Frustration’ and ‘Oppression’.

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Violet. ‘I’ll just tell you. You don’t know what I’ve got to contend with. There’s things that are not so nice. I went in there and opened up that old trunk to have a look at what was inside, and what do you think I found, Dane? It was full of filth. Horse manure. Set out in rows. On purpose.’

When Dane told Theo this, Theo smiled, then said, ‘I’m sorry. What did she say then?’

‘I told her I’d go and look at it and she said she’d cleaned it all out.’

‘Yes. Well. It looks as if something snapped, doesn’t it? I thought I could see it coming.’

Dane remembered the other thing she’d said but he didn’t mention it, it didn’t matter.

‘That’s a disgusting trick, isn’t it?’ she’d said harshly. ‘That’s the trick of a stunted mind!’

Violet’s front door was standing open at noon the next day, when Dane drove down her road, heading out of town. He didn’t usually take this route. That he did today was not surprising, considering how much Violet had been on his mind in the last several hours.

He must have come in the door just as the flames started up in the kitchen. He saw their light ahead of him on the kitchen wall. He ran back there, and caught Violet heaping papers on top of the gas stove. She had turned on the burners.

Dane grabbed a scatter-rug from the hall to shield himself, so that he could turn off the gas. Burning papers flew into the air. There were heaps of paper all over the floor, some papers still in boxes. Violet was evidently intending to burn it all.

‘Oh, Jesus, Aunt Violet!’ Dane was yelling. ‘Jesus, Jesus, what are you doing! Get out of here! Get out!’

Violet was standing in the middle of the room, rooted there, like a big bark stump, with scraps of fiery paper flying all around her.

‘Get out!’ Dane yelled, and turned her around, and pushed her towards the back door. Then all of a sudden her speed was as extraordinary as her stillness had been. She ran or lurched to the door, opened it, and crossed the back porch. Instead of going down the steps, she went off the edge – falling head first into some rose-bushes that Wyck had planted there.

Dane didn’t know right away that she had done that. He was too busy in the kitchen.

Luckily, paper in heaps or bundles doesn’t catch fire as readily as most people think it does. Dane was more afraid of the curtains catching, or the dry paint behind the stove. Violet wasn’t anything like the careful housekeeper she used to be, and the walls were greasy. He brought the scatter-rug down on the flames that were shooting up from the stove, then remembered the fire-extinguisher that he himself had bought for Violet and insisted she keep on the kitchen counter. He went stumbling around the room with the fire-extinguisher, chasing flaming birds that fell down as bits of charred paper. He was impeded by the piles of paper on the floor. But the curtains didn’t catch. The wall behind the stove had broken out in paint-blisters, but it didn’t catch. He kept at the chase, and in five minutes, maybe less, he had the fire out. Just the bits of burned paper, dirty moth-wings, were lying over everything – a mess.

When he saw Violet on the ground between the rose-bushes he thought the worst. He was afraid she had had a stroke, or a heart attack, or at the very least broken her hip in the fall. But she was conscious, struggling to push herself up, groaning. He got hold of her, and lifted her. With many grunts and exclamations of dismay coming from them both, he helped her to the back steps and set her down.

‘What’s this blood on you?’ he said. Her arms were smeared with dirt and blood.

‘It’s from the roses,’ Violet said. He knew then, by her voice, that there was nothing broken in her.

‘The roses scratched me something fierce,’ she said. ‘Dane, you’re a terrible sight. You’re a terrible sight, you’re all black!’

Tears and sweat ran together down his face. He put his hand up to his cheek, and it came away black.

‘Smoke,’ he said.

She was so calm that he thought perhaps she had had a tiny stroke, a loss of memory, just enough to let her mind skip over the fire. But she hadn’t.

‘I didn’t even use any coal-oil,’ she said. ‘Dane, I didn’t use coal-oil or anything. What would make it flare up like that?’

‘It wasn’t a wood-stove, Aunt Violet. It was on top of the gas burners.’

‘Oh, Lord.’

‘You must have thought you were burning papers in the wood-stove.’

‘I must have. What a thing to do. And you came and put it out.’

He was trying to pick the black bits of paper out of her hair, but they disintegrated under his fingers, they fell to smaller bits, and were lost.

‘I have you to thank,’ said Violet.

‘What we ought to do now,’ he said, ‘is take you over to the hospital, just to make sure you’re all right. You could have a rest for a few days while we see about cleaning up the kitchen. Would that be all right?’

She made some groaning but peaceable sound that meant yes.

‘Then maybe you’d like to come out and stay with us for a while.’

He would talk to Theo that night, they would have to manage something.

‘You’d have to watch me, that I didn’t burn the place down.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Oh, Dane. It’s no joke.’

Violet died in the hospital, the third night, without any warning. A delayed reaction, perhaps. Shock. Dane burned all the papers in the backyard incinerator. She never told him to, she never mentioned what she had been doing. She never mentioned the girls again, or anything that had happened that summer. He just felt that he should finish what she had started. He planned, as he burned, what he would say to those girls, but by the time he finished he thought he was being too hard on them – they had brought her happiness, as much as trouble.

While they had been still sitting on the back steps, in the hot, thinly-clouded, early afternoon, with the green wall of corn in front of them, Violet had touched her scratches and said, ‘These remind me.’

‘I should put some Dettol on them,’ said Dane.

‘Sit still. Do you think there is any kind of infection that hasn’t run its course through my veins, by now?’

He sat still, and she said, ‘You know Wyck and I were friends, Dane, a long, long time, before we were able to get married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, these remind me of the way we met, to be friends the way we were, because of course we knew each other by sight. I was driving my first car, the V-8, that you wouldn’t remember, and I ran it off the road. I ran it into a bit of a ditch and I couldn’t get out. So I heard a car coming, and I waited, and then I couldn’t face it.’

‘You were embarrassed you’d run off the road?’

‘I was feeling badly. That was why I’d run off the road. I was feeling badly for no reason, or just a little reason. I couldn’t face anybody, and I ran off into the bushes and right away I got stuck. I turned and twisted and couldn’t get loose and the more I turned the more I got scratched. I was in a light summer dress. But the car stopped anyway. It was Wyck. I never told you this, Dane?’

No.

‘It was Wyck driving someplace, by himself. He said, stay still there, and he came over and started pulling the berry canes and branches off me. I felt like a buffalo in a trap. But he didn’t laugh at me, he didn’t seem the least surprised, to find a person in that predicament. I was the one who started laughing. Seeing him going round so dutiful, in his light-blue summer suit.’

She ran her hands up and down her arms, tracing the scratches with her fingertips, patting them.

‘What was I just talking about?’

‘When you were caught in the bushes, and Wyck was working you out.’

She patted her arms rapidly and shook her head and made that noise in her throat of impatience, or disgust. Annhh.

She sat up straight and said in a clear brazen voice, ‘There is a wild pig running through the corn.’

‘And you were laughing,’ Dane said, as if he hadn’t heard that.

‘Yes,’ said Violet, nodding several times, and struggling to be patient. ‘Yes. We were.’