Violet’s mother – Aunt Ivie – had three little boys, three baby boys, and she lost them. Then she had the three girls. Perhaps to console herself for the bad luck she had already suffered, on a rocky farm in a back corner of Turnberry Township – or perhaps to make up, ahead of time, for a lack of motherly feelings – she gave the girls the fanciest names she could think of: Opal Violet, Dawn Rose, and Bonnie Hope. She may not have thought of those names as anything but temporary decorations. Violet wondered – did her mother ever picture her daughters having to drag such names around sixty or seventy years later, when they were heavy, faded women? She may have thought her girls were going to die, too.

Lost meant that somebody died. She lost them, meant, they died. Violet knew that. Nevertheless she imagined Aunt Ivie her mother wandering into a swampy field, which was the waste ground on the far side of the barn, a twilight place full of coarse grass and alder bushes. There Aunt Ivie, in the mournful light, mislaid her baby children. Violet would slip down the edge of the barnyard to the waste ground, then cautiously enter it. She would stand hidden by the red-stemmed alder and nameless thorn-bushes (it always seemed to be some damp desolate time of year when she did this – late fall or early spring) and she would let the cold water cover the toes of her rubber boots. She would contemplate getting lost. Lost babies. The water welled up through the tough grass. Further in, there were ponds and sink-holes. She had been warned. She shuffled on, watching the water creep up on her boots. She never told them. They never knew where she went. Lost.

The parlour was the other place that she could sneak to by herself. The window-blinds were down to the sills, the air had a weight and thickness, as if it was cut in a block that exactly filled the room. In certain fixed places could be found the flushed, spiky shell with the roar of the sea caught inside it, the figure of the little kilted Scotsman holding a glass of amber liquid which would tilt but never spill, a fan made entirely out of glossy black feathers, a plate which was a souvenir of Niagara Falls and showed the same picture as the Shredded Wheat box. And a framed picture on the wall which affected Violet so intensely that she couldn’t look at it when she first came into the room. She had to work her way around to it, keeping it always in a corner of her vision. It showed a king with his crown on, and three tall, queenly looking ladies in dark dresses. The king was asleep, or dead. They were all on the shore of the sea, with the boat waiting, and there was something coming out of this picture into the room – a smooth, dark wave of unbearable sweetness and sorrow. That seemed a promise to Violet, it was connected with her future, her own life, in a way she couldn’t explain or think about. She couldn’t even look at the picture if there was anybody else in the room. But in that room there seldom was anybody else.

Violet’s father was called King Billy, King Billy Thorns, though William was not in his name. There was also a horse called King Billy, a dapple-grey horse that was their driver, hitched to the cutter in winter-time and the buggy in summer. (They didn’t own a car until Violet was grown up, and bought one, in the 1930s.)

The name King Billy was usually connected with the Parade, the Orange Walk, on the Twelfth of July. A man chosen to be King Billy, wearing a cardboard crown and a raggedy purple cloak, would ride at the head of the Parade. He was supposed to ride a white horse, but sometimes a dapple-grey was the best that could be found. Violet never knew if the horse, or her father, or both, had figured in this parade, either separately or together. Confusion abounded, in the world as she knew it, and adults as often as not resented being asked to set it straight.

But she did know that her father, at one time in his life, had worked on a train up north, that ran through the wild bush where bears were. Loggers would ride this train on the weekends, coming out of the bush to get drunk, and if they got too rambunctious on the way back, King Billy would stop the train and kick them off. No matter where the train was at the time. In the middle of the wilderness – no matter. He kicked them off. He was a fighter. He had got that job because he was a fighter.

Another story, from further back in his life. He had gone to a dance, when he was a young man, up near Hespeler where he came from. Some other young fellows who were there had insulted him, and he had to take their insults, because he did not know a thing about fighting. But after that he got some lessons, from an old prizefighter, a real one, who was living in Owen Sound. Another night, another dance – the same thing as before. The same kind of insults. Except that this time King Billy lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.

Lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.

No more insults of that kind, anywhere up in that country.

(The insults had to do with being a bastard. He didn’t say so, but Violet figured it out from her mother’s muttering. ‘Your daddy didn’t have no people,’ Aunt Ivie said, in her dark, puzzled, grudging way. ‘He never did. He just didn’t have no people at all.’)

Violet was five years older than her sister Dawn Rose, and six years older than Bonnie Hope. Those two were thick as thieves, but mainly docile. They were redheads, like King Billy. Dawn Rose was chubby and ruddy and broad-faced. Bonnie Hope was small-boned and big-headed, with hair that grew at first in wisps and patches, so that she looked like a wobbly young bird. Violet was dark-haired and tall for her age, and strong like her mother. She had a long handsome face and dark blue eyes that looked at first to be black. Later on, when Trevor Auston was in love with her, he had some nice things to say about the colour of her eyes matching up with her name.

Violet’s mother as well as her father had an odd name, being called Aunt Ivie most of the time even by her own children. That was because she was the youngest of a large family. She had plenty of people, though they didn’t often come to see her. All the old or precious things in the house – those things in the parlour, and a certain hump-backed trunk, and some tarnished spoons – came from Aunt Ivie’s family, who had a farm on the shores of Arran Lake. Aunt Ivie had stayed there so long, unmarried, that her nieces’ and nephews’ name for her became everybody’s name, and her daughters too chose it over Mama.

Nobody ever thought she would marry. She said so herself. And when she did marry the little bold red-headed man who looked so odd beside her, people said she didn’t seem to stand the change too well. She lost those first boy babies, and she didn’t take too happily to the responsibility of running a house. She liked to work outside, hoeing in the garden or splitting wood, as she had always done at home. She milked the cows and cleaned out the stable and took care of the hens. It was Violet, getting older, who took over the housework.

By the time she was ten years old, Violet had become quite house-proud and dictatorial, in a sporadic way. She would spend all Saturday scouring and waxing, then yell and throw herself on the couch and grind her teeth in a rage when people tracked in mud and manure on their shoes.

‘That girl will grow up, and she won’t have nothing but stumps in her mouth, and serve her right for her temper,’ Aunt Ivie said – as if she was talking about some neighbour child.

Aunt Ivie was usually the one who had tracked in the mud and ruined the floor.

Another Saturday there would be baking, and making up recipes. One whole summer Violet was trying to invent a drink like Coca-Cola, which would be famous and delicious and make them a fortune. She tried out on herself and her sisters all sorts of combinations of berry juice, vanilla, bottled fruit essences and spices. Sometimes they were all off in the long grass in the orchard, throwing up. The younger girls usually did what Violet told them to, and believed what she said. One day the butcher’s man arrived to buy the young calves, and Violet told Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope that sometimes the butcher’s man was not satisfied with the meat on the calves, and went after juicy little children, to make them into steaks and chops and sausages. She told this out of the blue and for her own amusement, as far as she could recall later on when she told these things as stories. The little girls tried to hide themselves in the haymow and King Billy heard their commotion and chased them out. They told what Violet had said and King Billy said they should be smacked for swallowing such nonsense. He said he was a man with a mule for a wife and a hooligan daughter running his house. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope ran to confront Violet.

‘Liar, liar! Butchers don’t chop up children! You told a lie, liar!’

Violet, who was cleaning out the stove at the time, said nothing. She picked up a pan of ashes – warm but fortunately not hot – and dumped it on their heads. They knew enough not to tell a second time. They ran outside and rolled in the grass and shook themselves like dogs, trying to get the ashes out of their hair and ears and eyes and underwear. Down in a corner of the orchard they started their own playhouse, with pulled grass heaped up for seats and bits of broken china for dishes. They vowed not to tell Violet about it.

But they couldn’t keep away from her. She put their hair up in rags to curl it, she dressed them in costumes made from old curtains, she painted their faces, using concoctions of berry juice and flour and stove polish. She found out about the playhouse and had ideas for furnishing it that were superior to theirs. Even on the days when she had no time for them at all, they had to watch what she was doing. She was painting a design of red roses on the black and threadbare kitchen linoleum. She was cutting a scalloped edge on all the old green window-blinds, for elegance.

It did seem as if ordinary family life had been turned upside-down at their place. At other farms it would usually be the children you would see first, as you came up the lane – children playing, or doing some chore. The mother would be hidden in the house. Here, it was Aunt Ivie you would see, pulling up the potatoes or just prowling around the yard or the chicken-run, wearing rubber boots and a man’s felt hat and a dingy assortment of sweaters, skirt, droopy slip and apron, and wrinkled, spattered stockings. It was Violet who ruled in the house, Violet who decided when and if to pass out the pieces of bread and butter and corn syrup. It was as if King Billy and Aunt Ivie had not quite understood how to go about making an ordinary life, even if they had meant to.

But the family got along. They milked the cows and sold the milk to the cheese factory and raised the calves for the butcher and cut the hay. They were members of the Anglican Church, though they didn’t often attend, owing to the problems of getting Aunt Ivie cleaned up. They did go sometimes to the card parties in the schoolhouse. Aunt Ivie could play cards, and she would remove her apron and felt hat to do so, though she wouldn’t change her boots. King Billy had some reputation as a singer, and after the card-playing people would try to get him to entertain. He liked to sing songs he had learned from the loggers, that were never written down. He sang with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, resolutely.

‘On the Opeongo Line I drove a span of bays,
One summer once upon a time for Hooligan and Hayes,
Now that them bays is dead and gone and grim old age is mine,
I’m dreamin’ that I’m teamin,’ on the Opeongo Line.’

Who was Hooligan? Who was Hayes?

‘Some outfit,’ said King Billy, expansive from the singing.

Violet went to high school in town, and after that to teachers’ college in Stratford. People wondered where King Billy got the money. If he still had some put by from his railway pay, that meant he had got some money from Aunt Ivie’s family, when he took her off their hands and bought the farm. King Billy said he didn’t grudge Violet an education, he thought being a teacher would suit her. But he didn’t have anything extra for her. Before she started at high school she went across the fields to the next farm, carrying a piece of Roman-striped crepe she had found in the trunk. She wanted to learn to use the sewing-machine, so that she could make herself a dress. And so she did, though the neighbour woman said it was the oddest-looking outfit for a schoolgirl that she ever hoped to see.

Violet came home every weekend when she was at high school, and told her sisters about Latin and basketball, and looked after the house as before. But when she went away to Stratford, she stayed until Christmas. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope were big enough by then to take care of the house, but whether they did or not was another matter. Dawn Rose was actually big enough to be starting high school, but she had failed her last year at the local school and was repeating it. She and Bonnie Hope were in the same class.

When Violet did come home, in the Christmas holidays, she had changed a great deal. But she thought it was everything and everybody else that had changed.

She wanted to know if they had always talked this way. What way? With an accent. Weren’t they doing it on purpose, to sound funny? Weren’t they saying ‘youse’ on purpose, to sound funny?

She had forgotten where some things were kept, and was astonished to find the frying-pan under the stove. She took a dislike to the dog, Tigger, who was allowed to stay in the house now that he was getting old. She said he smelled, and that the couch-blanket was full of dog-hairs.

She said the parlour smelled mouldy and the walls needed papering.

But it was her sisters themselves who got the full force of her surprise and displeasure. They had grown since the summer. Dawn Rose was a big stout girl now, with loose breasts jiggling inside her dress, and a broad red face whose childish expression of secretiveness had changed to a look that seemed stupid and stubborn. She had developed womanly smells, and she did not wash. Bonnie Hope was still childish in body, but her frizzy red hair was never combed out properly and she was covered with flea-bites that she got from playing with the barn cats.

Violet hardly knew how to go about cleaning these two up. The worst was that they had become rebellious, looked at each other and snickered when she talked to them, avoided her, were mulish and silent. They acted as if they had some idiotic secret.

And so they did, they had a secret, but it did not come out until quite a while later, not until after the events of the next summer, and then indirectly, with Bonnie Hope telling some girls who told another who told another, and mothers getting to hear about it, then a neighbour woman, who finally told Violet.

In the late fall of that year – the year Violet went away to teachers’ college – Dawn Rose had begun to menstruate. She was so affronted by this development that she went down to the creek and sat in the cold water, resolved to get the bleeding stopped. She took off her shoes and stockings and underpants and sat there in the shallow, icy water. She washed the blood out of her underpants and wrung them out and put them on wet. She didn’t catch cold, she didn’t get sick, and she didn’t menstruate again all year. The neighbour woman said that such a procedure could have affected her brain. ‘Driving all that bad blood back into her system, it could have.’

Violet’s only pleasure that Christmas was in talking about her boyfriend, whose name was Trevor Auston. She showed her sisters his picture.

It was cut from a newspaper. He wore his clerical collar.

‘He looks like a minister,’ said Dawn Rose, snickering.

‘He is. That picture’s from when he was ordained. Don’t you think he’s handsome?’

Trevor Auston was handsome. He was a dark-haired young man with narrowed eyes and a perfect nose, a chin flung up in the air and a thin-lipped, confident, even gracious smile.

Bonnie Hope said, ‘He must be old, to be a minister.’

‘He just got to be a minister,’ said Violet. ‘He’s twenty-six. He isn’t an Anglican minister, he’s a United Church minister,’ she said, as if that made a difference. And to her, it did. Violet had changed churches in Stratford. She said that at the United Church there was a lot more going on. There was a badminton club – both she and Trevor played – and a drama club, as well as skating parties, tobogganing parties, hayrides, socials. It was at a Hallowe’en social in the church basement, bobbing for apples, that Violet and Trevor first met. Or first talked, because Violet of course had noticed him before in church, where he was the assistant minister. He said that he had noticed her, too. And she thought that maybe he had. A group of girls from the teachers’ college all went to that church together, partly on Trevor’s account, and they played a game, trying to catch his eye. When everybody was standing up singing the hymns they stared at him, and if he looked back they dropped their eyes at once. Waves of giggles would spread along the row. But Violet sang right back at him as if her eyes had just lit on him by accident.

Rise up oh men of God
And gird your armour on–

Locked eyes, during the hymn-singing. The virile hymns of the old Methodists, the scourging psalms of the Presbyterians, had come together in this new United Church. The ministry then, in that church, attracted vigorous young men intent on power, not too unlike the young men who went into politics. A fine voice and a good profile did no harm.

Locked eyes. Kisses at the door of Violet’s boarding-house. The cool, nicely shaved, but still slightly bristling and foreign male cheek, the decent but promising smell of talc and shaving-lotion. Soon enough they were slipping into the shadows beside the doorway, pressing together through their winter clothing. They had to have serious talks about self-control, and these talks were in themselves inflammatory. They became more and more convinced that if they were married, they would be having the kind of pleasures that nearly make you faint when you think about them.

Soon after Violet got back from her Christmas holidays, they became engaged.

Then they had other things to think about and look forward to, besides sex. A responsible and important sort of life lay ahead of them. They were asked to dinner as an engaged couple by older ministers and rich and powerful members of the congregation. Violet had made herself one good dress, a cranberry wool serge with box pleats – a great improvement over the Roman-striped crêpe creation.

At those dinners, they had tomato juice to start with. Pitchers of iced water sat on the tables. No one in that church could touch alcoholic beverages. Even their communion wine was grape juice. But there were great roasts of beef or pork, or turkeys, on silver platters, roasted potatoes and onions and slatherings of gravy, then rich cakes and pies and divinely moulded puddings with whipped cream. Eating was not a sin. Card-playing was a sin, except for a specially created Methodist card-game called Lost Heir, dancing was a sin for some, and movie-going was a sin for some, and going to any kind of entertainment, except a concert of sacred music for which one did not pay was a sin for all on Sundays.

This was a change for Violet, after the easy-going Anglicanism of her childhood, and the rules – if there were any rules – at home. She wondered what Trevor would say, if he could see King Billy downing his tot of whisky every morning, before he started out to do the chores. Trevor had spoken of going home with her to meet her family, but she had been able to put him off. They could not go on Sunday because of his church services, and they could not go during the week because of her classes. She tried to push the idea of home out of her mind for now.

The strictness of the United Church might have been something to get used to, but the feeling of purpose and importance there was about it, the briskness and energy, were very agreeable to Violet. It was as if the ministers and top parishioners all had jobs in some thriving and important company. The role of a minister’s wife she could see as hard and challenging, but that did not discourage her. She could see herself teaching Sunday school, raising money for missions, leading in prayer, sitting nicely dressed in the front pew listening to Trevor, tirelessly pouring tea out of a silver pot.

She didn’t plan to spend the summer at home. She would visit for a week, once her exams were over, then work for the summer in the church office in Stratford. She had applied for a teaching job in Sebringville, close by. She meant to teach for one year, then get married.

The week before exams were due to start, she got a letter from home. It was not from King Billy or Aunt Ivie – they didn’t write letters – but from the woman on the next farm, the owner of the sewing-machine. Her name was Annabelle Wrioley and she took some interest in Violet. She had no daughter of her own. She used to think that Violet was a terror, but now she thought she was a go-getter.

Annabelle said she was sorry to bother Violet at this time, but thought she should be told. There was trouble at home. What the trouble was she didn’t like to say in a letter. If Violet could see her way to coming home on the train, she could go to town and meet her. She and her husband had a car now.

So Violet came home on the train.

‘I have to tell you straight out,’ said Annabelle. ‘It’s your father. He’s in danger.’

Violet thought she meant that King Billy was sick, but it wasn’t that.

He had been getting strange letters. Terrible letters. They were threats on his life.

What was in those letters, Annabelle said, was disgusting beyond belief.

Out at home, it looked as if all daily life had been suspended. The whole family was frightened. They were afraid to go to the back pasture to get the cows, afraid to go to the far end of the cellar, or to the well or the toilet after dark. King Billy was a man willing even now to get into a fight, but he was unnerved by the idea of an unknown enemy, waiting to pounce. He could not walk from the house to the barn without whirling around to see if there was anybody behind him. When he milked the cows he turned them around in their stalls so that he could be in a corner, where nobody could sneak up on him. Aunt Ivie did the same.

Aunt Ivie went around the house with a stick, beating on cupboard doors and the tops of chests and trunks and saying, ‘If you’re in there, you better stay in there until you suffocate to death! You murderer!’

The murderer would have to be a midget, Violet said, to be hiding in any of those places.

Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope were staying home from school, although it was the time of year when they should have been preparing to write the entrance examinations. They were afraid to get undressed at night, and their clothes were all wrinkled and sour-smelling.

Meals were not being cooked. But the neighbours brought food. There seemed to be always some visitor sitting at the kitchen table, a neighbour, or even someone not well-known to the family, who had heard about their trouble and come from a distance. The dishes were being washed in cold water if they were washed at all, and the dog was the only one interested in cleaning up the floor.

King Billy had been sitting up all night to keep watch. Aunt Ivie barricaded herself behind the bedroom door.

Violet asked about the letters. They were brought out, spread for her inspection on the oilcloth of the table, as they had been spread before all the neighbours and visitors.

Here was the letter that had come first, in the regular mail. Then the one that came second, also through the mail. After that the notes were found in different places around the farm.

On top of a cream can in the stable.

Tacked to the barn door.

Wrapped around the handle of the milk pail that King Billy used every day.

Some argument started up as to just which note was found in which place.

‘What about the postmark?’ Violet cut in. ‘Where are the envelopes of the ones that came in the mail?’

They didn’t know. They didn’t know where the envelopes had got to.

‘I want to see where they were posted from,’ said Violet.

‘Don’t make no difference where it was posted from seeing he knows right where to find us,’ Aunt Ivie said. ‘Anyway he don’t post them now, he sneaks up here after dark and leaves them. Sneaks right around here after dark and leaves them, he knows where to find us.’

‘What about Tigger?’ said Violet. ‘Didn’t he bark?’

No. But Tigger was getting too old now to be much of a watchdog. And with all the visitors coming and going he had practically given up barking altogether.

‘He likely wouldn’t bark if he seen all the hosts of hell coming in at the gate,’ King Billy said.

The first note told King Billy that he might as well sell off all his cows. He was a marked man. He would never live to cut the hay. He was as good as dead.

That had sent King Billy to the doctor. He took it that there might be something wrong with him, that could be read in his face. But the doctor thumped him and listened to his heart and shone a light in his eyes and charged him two dollars and told him he was sound.

‘What a fool ignoramus you were to go to the doctor,’ the next letter said.

You could have saved your two-dollar bill to wipe your dirty old arse. I never told you that you were going to die of any disease. You are going to be killed. That is what is going to happen to you. You aren’t safe no matter how good your health is. I can come in your house at night and slit your throat. I can shoot you from behind a tree. I can sneak up from behind and throw a rope around you and strangle you and you will never even see my face, so what do you think of that?

So it wasn’t a fortune-teller or somebody who could read the future. It was an enemy, who planned to do the job himself.

I wouldn’t mind killing your ugly wife and your stupid kids while I’m at it. You ought to be thrown down the toilet-hole head first. You bow-legged stupid rotten pig. You ought to have your thing cut off with a razor-blade. You are a liar too. All those fights you said you won are a lie. I could stick a knife in you and catch your blood in a bowl and make a blood pudding. I would feed it to the pigs. How would you like a red-hot poker in your eye?

When she finished reading, Violet said, ‘The thing to do is to show these to the police.’

She had forgotten that the police did not exist out here in that abstract, official way. There was a policeman, but he was in town, and furthermore King Billy had had a run-in with him last winter. According to King Billy’s story a car driven by Lawyer Boot Lomax had skidded into King Billy’s cutter at a junction, and Lomax had summoned the policeman.

‘Arrest that man for failing to stop at an intersection!’ shouted Boot Lomax (drunk), waving his hand in its big fur-lined glove.

King Billy jumped up on the hard heaped-up snow and readied his fists.

‘Ain’t no brass buttons going to put the cuffs on me!’

It was all talked out in the end, but just the same it would be bad policy to go to that policeman.

‘He’s going to have it in for me, no matter. Could be even him is writing them.’

But Aunt Ivie said it was that tramp. She remembered a bad-looking tramp who had come to the door years ago, and when she gave him a piece of bread he didn’t say thank-you. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any baloney?’

King Billy thought more likely it could be a man he had hired once to help with the hay. The man quit after a day and a half because he couldn’t stand working in the mow. He said he had nearly choked to death up there on the dust and the hayseeds and he wanted fifty cents extra for the damage to his lungs.

‘I’ll give you fifty cents!’ King Billy yelled at him. He jabbed at the air with a pitchfork. ‘Come over here and you’ll get your fifty cents!’

Or could it be somebody settling an old score, one of those fellows he had kicked off the train long ago? One of those fellows from further back than that, that he had cleaned up on at the dance?

Aunt Ivie recalled a boy who had thought the world of her when she was young. He had gone out west but might have come back, and just heard that she was married.

‘After all this time to come ragin’ after you?’ King Billy said. ‘That’s not what I’d call likely!’

‘He thought the world of me, just the same.’

Violet was studying the notes. They were printed, in pencil, on cheap lined paper. The pencil strokes were dark, as if the writer kept bearing down hard. There was no rubbing-out or problem with the spelling – for instance of a word like ‘ignoramus’. There was an understanding of sentences and capital letters. But how much could that tell you?

The door was bolted at night. The blinds were drawn down to the sills. King Billy laid the shotgun on the table and set a glass of whisky beside it.

Violet dashed the whisky into the slop-pail.

‘You don’t need that,’ she said.

King Billy raised his hand to her – though he was not a man to strike his wife or his children.

Violet backed off but went on talking.

‘You don’t need to stay awake. I’ll stay awake. I’m fresh and you’re tired. Go on, Papa. You need to sleep, not drink.’

After some arguing this was agreed on. King Billy made Violet show him that she knew how to use the shotgun. Then he went off to sleep in the parlour, on the hard couch there. Aunt Ivie had already pushed the dresser against the bedroom door and it would take too much yelling and explaining to get her to push it away.

Violet turned up the lamp and got the ink-bottle from the shelf and started writing to Trevor, to tell him what the trouble was. Without boasting, just telling what was happening, she let him see how she was taking over and calming people down, how she was prepared to defend her family. She even told about throwing out the whisky – explaining that it was due to the strain on his nerves that her father had thought of resorting to whisky in the first place. She did not say that she was afraid. She described the stillness, darkness and loneliness of the early summer night. And to someone who had been living in a town or city, it was very dark and lonely – but not so still, after all. Not if you were listening for something. It was full of faint noises, distant and nearby, of trees lifting and stirring and animals shifting and feeding. Lying outside the door, Tigger made the noise once or twice that meant he was dreaming about barking.

Violet signed her letter ‘your loving and longing future wife,’ then added, ‘with all my heart’. She turned the lamp down and raised a window-blind and sat there, keeping watch. In her letter she had said that the countryside looked lovely now with the buttercups blooming along the roads, but as she sat watching to see if any moving shape detached itself from the bulging shadows in the yard, and listening for soft footsteps, she thought that she really hated the country. Parks were nicer for grass and flowers, and the trees along the streets in Stratford were as fine as you could ask for. Order prevailed there, and some sort of intelligence. Out here was emptiness, rumour and absurdity. What would the people who had asked her to dinner think, if they could see her sitting here with a shotgun in front of her?

Suppose the intruder, the murderer, did come up the steps? She would have to shoot at him. Any wound from a shotgun would be terrible, that close. There would be a court case and her picture would in the papers. HILLBILLY SQUABBLE.

If she didn’t hit him it would be worse.

When she heard a thump she was on her feet, with her heart pounding. Instead of picking up the gun she had pushed it away. She had thought the sound was on the porch, but when she heard it again she knew it was upstairs. She knew too that she had been asleep.

It was only her sisters. Bonnie Hope had to go outside to the toilet.

Violet lit the lantern for them.

‘You didn’t need to both get up,’ she said. ‘I could have gone with you.’

Bonnie Hope shook her head and pulled on Dawn Rose’s hand.

‘I want her,’ she said.

This fright seemed to be making them into near-imbeciles. They would not look at Violet. Could they even remember the days when they had trusted her, and she had instructed and spoiled them, and tried to make them pretty?

‘Why can’t you wear your nightgowns?’ Violet said sadly, and unbolted the door. She sat by the gun until they came back and went to bed.

She lit the coal-oil stove to boil water for coffee, because she was afraid of falling asleep again.

When she saw the sky getting light, she opened the door. The dog stood up, shivered all over, and went to drink from the old rag-plugged dishpan by the pump. The yard was surrounded by white mist. Between the house and the barn was a rocky hump of land, and the rocks were dark with the dampness of night. What was their farm but a few pockets of shallow soil scattered in among rubbly hills and swamp? What a place to think you could settle in, and live a life, and raise a family.

On the top step was an out-of-place object – a neat, glistening bun of horse-manure. Violet looked for a stick to push it off with – then saw the folded paper underneath.

Don’t think your stuck-up slut of a daughter can help you. I see you all the time and I hate her and you. How would you like to get this rammed down your throat?

He must have put it here during the last hour of the night, while she was drinking her coffee at the kitchen table. He could have looked in through the window, and seen her. She ran to wake her sisters to ask if they had seen anything when they went out, and they said no, nothing. They had gone down those steps and back up with the lantern, and there was nothing. He had put it there since.

One thing this told Violet, that she was glad of. Aunt Ivie could have had nothing to do with it. Aunt Ivie had been shut up in her room all night. Not that Violet really thought that her mother was spiteful enough or crazy enough to do such a thing. But she knew what people said. She knew there would be people now, saying they were not too surprised about what was going on here. They would not be blaming Aunt Ivie, they wouldn’t go that far. They would just be saying that certain people attract peculiar troubles, that in the vicinity of certain people things are more likely to happen.

Violet worked all day at cleaning up. Her letter to Trevor lay on the dresser. She never got down to the mailbox with it. People dropped in, and it was the same as yesterday – the same talk, the same suspicions and speculations. The only difference was that there was the new note to show.

Annabelle brought them fresh bread. She read the note and said, ‘It just makes me sick to my stomach. So close, too. You could’ve almost heard him breathing, Violet. Your nerves must be about shot.’

‘There’s not nobody can realize it,’ said Aunt Ivie proudly. ‘What us up here are going through.’

‘Anybody even steps on this place after dark,’ King Billy said, ‘from now on he’s likely to get shot. And that’s all I’ve got to say.’

After they had eaten supper, and milked and turned out the cows, Violet took her letter down to the mailbox for the mailman to pick up in the morning. She set the pennies on top of it for the stamp. She climbed up on the bank behind the mailbox, and sat down.

Nobody went by on the road. The days were at their longest now, the sun was just going down. A killdeer went cheeping by with a wing dragging, trying to get her to follow. Its eggs must be somewhere close by. Killdeers laid their eggs practically on the road, right on the gravel, then had to spend their time trying to lure people away.

She was getting as bad as King Billy, thinking she sensed somebody behind her. She tried not to look around, but couldn’t stop herself. She jumped up and turned, all at once, and saw a streak of red hair caught by the low sun, behind a juniper bush.

It was Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope.

‘What are you doing there, trying to scare me?’ Violet said bitterly. ‘Aren’t all of us scared enough already? I can see you! What do you think you’re doing?’

They came out, and showed her what they had been doing – picking the wild strawberries.

Between the time she first saw the streak of red hair, and the time she saw the red strawberries in their hands, Violet knew.

But she would never get it out of them unless she coaxed and pleaded, and seemed to admire and sympathize. Maybe not even then.

‘Can’t I have a berry?’ she said. ‘Are you mad at me? I know your secret.’

‘I know,’ said Violet. ‘I know who wrote those letters. I know it was you. You played a good trick on them, didn’t you?’

Bonnie Hope’s face started twitching. She clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip. Dawn Rose’s face didn’t change at all. But Violet saw her fist close on the berries she had picked. Red juice oozed out between Dawn Rose’s fingers. Then she seemed to decide that Violet was on her side – or that she didn’t care – and she smiled. This smile, or grin, was one that Violet thought she would never forget. It was innocent and evil, like the smile of some trusted person turned, or revealed to be, an enemy, in a dream. It was the smile of chubby little Dawn Rose, her sister, and the grin of a cold, sly, full-grown, slatternly, bad-hearted stranger.

It was all Dawn Rose’s doing. That came out. It all came out, now. Dawn Rose had written all the letters and figured out where to put them, and Bonnie Hope had not done anything but stand by and keep her mouth shut. The first two letters were posted from town. The first time was when Dawn Rose had been taken to town to see the doctor for her earache. The second was when they had gone along with Annabelle for the ride. (Annabelle found a reason to go to town almost every day, now that she had the car.) Both times it had been easy to get to the Post Office. Then Dawn Rose had started putting the notes in other places.

Bonnie Hope was giggling faintly. Then she started to hiccup, and to sob.

‘Be quiet!’ said Violet. ‘It wasn’t you!’

Dawn Rose did not show any such signs of fright or remorse. She cupped her hands to her face to eat the squashed berries. She didn’t even ask if Violet was going to tell. And Violet didn’t ask her why she had done it. Violet thought that if she did ask, point-blank, Dawn Rose would probably say that she had done it for a joke. That would be bad enough. But what if she didn’t say anything?

After her sisters had gone upstairs that night, Violet told King Billy that he wouldn’t have to sit up any more.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Get Mother out here and I’ll tell you.’

She was conscious of saying ‘Mother’ instead of ‘Aunt Ivie’ or even ‘Mama’.

King Billy banged on the bedroom door.

‘Move that stuff away and get out here! Violet wants you!’

Violet let up the window-blinds and unbolted and opened the door. She stood the shotgun in the corner.

Her news took a long time to sink in. Both parents sat with their shoulders slumped and their hands on their knees and looks of deprivation and bewilderment on their faces. King Billy seemed to comprehend first.

‘What’s she got against me?’ he said.

That was all he kept saying, and all he ever could say when he thought about it.

‘What do you think she could’ve had against me?’

Aunt Ivie got up, and put on her hat. She felt the night air coming in through the screen-door.

‘People get their laugh on us, now,’ she said.

‘Don’t tell them,’ said Violet. (As if that would be possible.) ‘Don’t tell them anything. Let it die down.’

Aunt Ivie rocked herself on the couch, in her felt hat and dismal night-gown and rubber boots. ‘They’ll say we got a queer streak in this family now, for sure.’

Violet told her parents to go to bed, and they went, as if they were the children. Though she hadn’t been to bed last night, and her eyes felt as if they had been rubbed with sandpaper, she was sure she could never sleep herself. She got down all the letters that Dawn Rose had written from their place behind the clock, and folded them without looking at them and put them in an envelope. She wrote a note and put it in with them, and addressed the envelope to Trevor.

‘We have found out who wrote these,’ her note said. ‘It was my sister. She is fourteen years old. I don’t know if she is crazy, or what. I don’t know what I should do. I want you to come and get me and take me away. I hate it here. You can see what her mind is like. I can’t sleep here. Please if you love me come and get me and take me away.’

She took this envelope down to the mailbox in the dark, and put in the pennies for the stamp. She had actually forgotten the other letter and the pennies already there. It seemed as if that letter had gone off days before.

She lay down on the hard parlour couch. In the dark she couldn’t see that picture that she used to think so powerful, so magical. She tried to remember the feeling it had given her. She fell asleep very soon.

Why did Violet do this, why did she send those ugly letters to Trevor, and put such a note in with them? Did she really want to be rescued, told what to do? Did she want his help with the problem of Dawn Rose, his prayers even? (Since this whole thing began Violet hadn’t given a thought to praying, or involving God in any way.)

She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgement had deserted her. That was all.

The day after those letters were collected, Violet herself was standing by the mailbox in the morning. She wanted to get a ride into town with the mailman, so that she could catch the one o’clock train to Stratford.

‘You folks got some bad business going on?’ the mailman said. ‘Some bad business with your daddy?’

‘That’s all right,’ said Violet. ‘That’s all over.’

She knew that mail posted here was delivered in Stratford the next day. There were two deliveries, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If Trevor was out all day – and he usually was – his letters would be left waiting for him on the hall table of the house where he boarded, the house of a minister’s widow. The front door was usually left unlocked. Violet could get to the letters before he did.

Trevor was at home. He had a bad summer cold. He was sitting in his study with a white scarf wrapped like a bandage around his throat.

‘Don’t come near me, I’m full of germs,’ he said, as Violet crossed the room towards him.

From his tone of voice, you would have thought she was.

‘You forgot to leave the door open,’ he said.

The door of the study had to be left open when Violet was in there, so that the minister’s widow would not be scandalized.

Spread out on his desk, among his books and sermon notes, were all the smudged, creased, disgraceful letters that Dawn Rose had written.

‘Sit down,’ said Trevor, in a tired, croaking voice. ‘Sit down, Violet.’

So she had to sit in front of his desk like some unhappy parishioner, some poor young woman who had got into trouble.

He said that he was not surprised to see her. He had thought she might show up. Those were his words. Show up.

‘You were going to tear them up if you got here first,’ he said.

Yes. Exactly.

‘So I would never have known,’ he said.

‘I would have told you someday.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Trevor in his miserable croaking voice. Then he cleared his throat and repeated, ‘I doubt it,’ in an attempt to be kinder, more patient.

They talked from mid-afternoon until dark. Trevor talked. He rubbed the outside of his throat to keep his voice going. He talked until his throat was quite raw, stopped for a rest, and talked again. He didn’t say a single thing that Violet couldn’t have predicted, from the moment when he first raised his eyes to her. From the moment when he said, ‘Don’t come near me.’

And in the letter which she received from him, a few days later – in which he said the final things he couldn’t quite bring himself to say to her face – there was also not one word she didn’t know ahead of time. She could have written it for him. (All the letters written by Dawn Rose were enclosed.) A minister, unfortunately, is never quite free to love and choose for himself. A minister’s wife must be someone who doesn’t bring with her any problem which might distract her husband and deflect him from serving God and his congregation. A minister’s wife also must not have anything in her background or connections which would ever give rise to gossip or cause a scandal. Her life is often difficult, and it is necessary that she should have the very best of physical and mental health, with no hereditary taint or weakness, in order to undertake it.

All this came out with a great deal of repetition and enlargement and side-tracking, and in the middle of it they had some sort of wrangle about bringing Dawn Rose to see some doctors here, getting her put away somewhere.

Trevor said that Dawn Rose was obviously a very deranged sort of person.

But instead of feeling that she wanted the problem of Dawn Rose solved for her, by Trevor, Violet now seemed to feel that she had to protect Dawn Rose against him.

‘Couldn’t we ask God to cure her?’ she said.

She knew by his look that he thought she was being insolent. It was up to him to mention God, not her. But he said calmly that it was through doctors and treatment that God cured people. Through doctors and treatment and laws and institutions. That was how God worked.

‘There is a kind of female insanity that strikes at that age,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean. She hates men. She blames them. That’s obvious. She has an insane hatred of men.’

Later, Violet wondered if he had been trying to keep a door open for her then. If she had agreed to Dawn Rose’s banishment, would he have broken off their engagement? Perhaps not. Though he tried to sound so superior and sensible, he too was probably feeling desperate.

Several times he had to say the same thing to her.

‘I won’t talk to you, I can’t talk to you, unless you stop crying.’

The minister’s widow came in and asked if they wanted supper. They said no, and she went away, disapproving. Trevor said he couldn’t swallow. When it was getting dark, they went out. They walked down the street to a drugstore and ordered two milkshakes, and a chicken sandwich for Violet. The chicken felt like bits of wood in her mouth. They walked on to the YWCA where she could get a room for the night. (The room at her boarding-house was being held for her, but she couldn’t face going there.) She said she would catch the early-morning train.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Trevor. ‘We could have breakfast. My voice is gone now.’

It was. He was whispering.

‘I’ll pick you up,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty.’

But never touched, again, his mouth or his cool cheek to hers.

The early train left at ten to eight, and Violet was on it. She planned to write to the woman at the boarding-house and to the church office where she had meant to work. She would not write her examinations. She could not stay in Stratford another day. Her head ached horribly in the morning sunlight. This time she really had not closed her eyes all night. When the train began to move it was as if Trevor was being pulled away from her. More than Trevor. Her whole life was being pulled away from her – her future, her love, her luck and her hopes. All that was being pulled off like skin, and hurt as much, and left her raw and stinging.

Did she despise him, then? If she did, she didn’t know it. That wasn’t something she could know about. If he had come after her, she would have gone back to him – gladly, gladly. Until the last minute she hoped that he would come running on to the station platform. He knew when the early train left. He might wake up, and know what she was doing, and come after her. If he had done that she would have given in about Dawn Rose, she would have done anything he wanted.

But he hadn’t come after her, he hadn’t come, no face was his, she couldn’t bear to look at anybody.

At moments like this, thought Violet, it must be at moments like this that people do the things you hear about, and read about in the newspapers. The things you try to imagine, or try not to imagine. She could imagine it, she could feel what it would be like. The quick sunny flight, then the smack of the gravelly bank. Drowning yourself would be pleasanter, but would require a firmer purpose. You’d have to keep wanting it, still wanting it, hugging the water, gulping it down.

Unless you jumped from a bridge.

Could this be Violet, could she be the person thinking these thoughts, reduced to such possibilities, her life turned upside down? She felt as if she was watching a play, and yet she was inside it, inside the play, she was in crazy danger. She closed her eyes and prayed rapidly – that too part of the play, but real: the first time in her life, she thought, that she had really prayed.

Deliver me. Deliver me. Restore me to my rightful mind. Please. Please hurry. Please.

And what she afterwards believed that she learned, on this train trip which took less than two hours altogether, was that prayers are answered. Desperate prayers are answered. She would believe that she had never had an inkling before of what prayers could be, or the answers could be. Now something settled in her in the train, and bound her. Words settled on her, and were like cool, cool cloths, binding her.

It was not your purpose to marry him.

It was not the purpose of your life.

Not to marry Trevor. Not the purpose of your life.

Your life has a purpose, and you know what it is.

To look after them. All of them, all of your family, and Dawn Rose in particular. To look after all of them, and Dawn Rose in particular.

She was looking out of the window, understanding this. The sun shone on the feathery June grass and the buttercups and toadflax and all the raggedy countryside that she would never care for, and the word that came into her mind was, golden.

A golden opportunity.

What for?

You know what for. To give in. To give up. Care for them. Live for others.

That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as well, and all her ideas of what her life should be. The weight, the pain, the humiliation would all go, magically. And she could still be chosen. She could be like the June grass that the morning light passed through, and lit up like pink feathers or streaks of sunrise cloud.

People said that King Billy was never the same after his scare. Never really. They said that he got old, withered visibly. But he had been old, fairly old, when it all happened. He was a man who hadn’t married till he was over forty.

He went on milking the cows, getting back and forth to the barn, through a few more hard winters, then died of pneumonia.

Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope had gone to live in town by that time. They didn’t go to high school. They got jobs in the shoe factory. Bonnie Hope became reasonably pretty and sociable, and she caught the eye of a salesman named Collard. They were married, and moved to Edmonton. Bonnie Hope had three daughters. She wrote proper letters home.

Dawn Rose’s looks and manners improved, too. She was known in the shoe factory as a hard worker, a person not to be crossed, and one who could tell some good jokes if she was in the mood for it. She married, too – a farmer named Kemp, from the southern part of the county. No strange behaviour, or queerness, or craziness ever surfaced in her again. She was said to have a blunt way with her – that was all. She had a son.

Violet went on living with Aunt Ivie on the farm. She had a job in the Municipal Telephone Office. She bought a car, so that she could drive back and forth to work. Couldn’t she have managed to write her teacher’s examinations another year? Perhaps so. Perhaps not. When she gave up, she gave up. She didn’t believe in trying to get back. She was good at her job.

Aunt Ivie still prowled the yard and the orchard, looking for where some hens might have hidden their eggs. She wore her hat and her boots. She tried to remember to scrape her boots off at the door, so that Violet wouldn’t throw a tantrum.

But Violet never did that any more.

One afternoon when she was off work, Violet drove over to see Dawn Rose. They were friendly, Dawn Rose’s husband liked Violet, there was no reason not to arrive unexpectedly. She found the doors of the house open. It was a warm summer day. Dawn Rose, who was very stout now, but gentler and more cheerful-looking, came out on the porch and said that it wasn’t a good day for visiting, she was varnishing the floors. And indeed this was so – Violet could smell the varnish. Dawn Rose didn’t offer lemonade or ask Violet to sit down on the porch. Just that day she was too busy.

Her little timid-looking fat son, who had the odd name of Dane, came up and clung to her legs. He usually liked Violet, but today he made strange.

Violet drove away. She didn’t know, of course, that in a year Dawn Rose would be dead, of a blood clot resulting from chronic phlebitis. It wasn’t Dawn Rose she was thinking of, but herself, as she drove along a low stretch of road with trees and thick brush on either side, and heard a voice say, ‘Her life is tragic.’

‘Her life is tragic,’ the voice said clearly and without any special emotion, and Violet, as if blinded, ran the car right off the road. There wasn’t much of a ditch at all, but the ground there was boggy, she couldn’t get out of it. She walked around and looked at where her wheels were, then stood by the car, waiting for somebody to come along and give her a shove.

But when she did hear a car coming, she knew she didn’t want to be found. She couldn’t bear to be. She ran from the road into the woods, into the brush, and she was caught. She was caught, then, by berry-bushes, little hawthorns. Held fast. Hiding because she didn’t want to be seen, if her life was tragic.