I said this almost casually, trying to sound moderately interested, not in any way horrified.

She gave a snort. "Are you kidding? Before I got away the last time he tried to brain me with the shovel."

After we had walked a bit farther, she said, "Yeah, and I just told him to come on. Come on, let"s see you kill me. Let"s see you, then you"ll get hung. But then I took off, because I thought yeah, sure, but then I wouldn"t get the satisfaction of seeing him. Hung."

She laughed. I said encouragingly, "Do you hate him?"

"Sure I hate him," she said, with not much more expression than if she had said that she hated sausages. "If somebody told me that he was drowning in the river I would go and stand on the bank and cheer."

There was no way to comment about this. But I said, "What if he takes after you now?"

"He"s not going to see me. I"m just going to spy on him."

When we came to the division of our roads she said almost cheerfully, "You want to come with me? You want to see how I do my spying?"

We walked across the bridge with our heads soberly bowed, looking through the cracks between the planks at the high-flowing river. I was full of alarm and admiration.

"I used to come out here in the winter," she said. "I used to get right up against the kitchen windows when it was dark out. Now it stays light too late. And I used to think, he"ll see the boot marks in the snow and know there was somebody had been spying on him and that"ll drive him crazy."

I asked whether her father had a shotgun.

"Sure," she said. "So what if he comes out and shoots me? He shoots me and he gets hung and goes to h.e.l.l. Don"t worry-he"s not going to see us."

Before we were in sight of the Newcombes" buildings we climbed a bank on the opposite side of the road, where there was a thick growth of sumac bordering a planted windbreak of spruce. When Dahlia began to walk in a crouch, ahead of me, I did the same. And when she stopped I stopped.

There was the barn, and the barnyard, full of cows. I realized, once we stopped making our own noise among the branches, that we had been hearing the trampling and bawling of the cows all along. Unlike most farmsteads, the Newcombes" did not have a lane. House and barn and barnyard were all right along the road.

There wasn"t enough fresh gra.s.s for cows to be out to pasture yet-the low places in the pastures were still mostly underwater-but they were let out of the stable to exercise before the evening milking. From behind our screen of sumac, we could look across the road and down at them as they jostled each other and blundered around in the muck, uneasy and complaining because of their full udders. Even if we snapped a branch, or spoke in normal voices, there was too much going on over there for anybody to hear us.

Raymond, a boy about ten years old, came around the corner of the barn. He had a stick but he was just tapping the cows" rumps with it, pushing them and saying, "So-boss, so-boss," in an easygoing rhythm and urging them towards the stable door. It was the sort of mixed herd most farms had at that time. A black cow, a rusty-red cow, a pretty golden cow that must have been part Jersey, others splotched brown and white and black and white in all sorts of combinations. They still had their horns, and that gave them a look of dignity and ferocity which cows have now lost.

A man"s voice, Bunt Newcombe"s voice, called from the stable.

"Hurry up. What"s the holdup? Do you think you"ve got all night?"

Raymond called back, "Okay. O-kay." The tone of his voice did not indicate anything to me, except that he didn"t seem scared. But Dahlia said quietly, "Yah. He"s giving him lip. Good for him."

Bunt Newcombe came out of another door of the stable. He was wearing overalls and a greasy barn smock, instead of the buffalo coat I thought of as his natural costume, and he moved with an odd swing of one leg.

"b.u.m leg," Dahlia said, in the same quiet but intensely satisfied voice. "I heard Belle kicked him but I thought it was too good to be true. Too bad it wasn"t his head."

He was carrying a pitchfork. But it seemed he meant no harm to Raymond. All he used the fork for was to pitch manure out of that doorway, while the cows were driven in at the other.

Perhaps a son was abhorred less than his daughters?

"If I had a gun I could get him now," Dahlia said. "I should do it while I"m still young enough so"s I"m not the one that ends up hung."

"You"d go to jail," I said.

"So what? He runs his own jail. Maybe they"d never catch me. Maybe they"d never even know it was me."

She couldn"t mean what she was saying. If she had any such intentions wouldn"t it be crazy of her to tell me about them? I could betray her. I would not intend to, but somebody might get it out of me. Because of the war I often thought of what it would be like to be tortured. How much could I stand? At the dentist"s, when he hit a nerve, I had thought, if a pain like that went on and on unless I betrayed where my father was hiding with the Resistance, what would I do?

When the cows were all inside and Raymond and his father had shut the stable doors we walked, still bent, back through the sumacs and once out of sight we climbed down to the road. I thought that Dahlia might say now that the shooting part was only kidding, but she didn"t. I wondered why she had not said anything about her mother, about being worried for her mother as she had been for Raymond. Then I thought that she probably despised her mother, for what her mother had put up with and what she had become. You would have to show some spirit to make the grade with Dahlia. I wouldn"t have wanted her to know that I was afraid of the horned cows.

We must have said good-bye when she took the route back to town, to Gloria"s house, and I turned onto our dead-end road. But perhaps she just walked on and left me. I kept thinking about whether she could really kill her father. I had a strange idea that she was too young to do that-as if killing somebody was like driving a car or voting or getting married, you had to be a certain age to manage it. 1 also had some idea-though I would not have known how to express it-that killing wouldn"t be any relief to her, hating him having got to be such a habit. I understood that she had taken me along with her not to confide in me or because I was anything like an intimate friend-she just wanted somebody to see her hating him.

On our road there had been at one time perhaps a dozen houses. Most were small cheap rental houses-until you got to our house, which was more of an ordinary farmhouse on a small farm. Some of those houses were on the floodplain of the river, but a few years ago, during the Depression, they had all had people living in them. Then the war jobs, all sorts of jobs, had taken these families away. Some of the houses had been carted elsewhere to serve as garages or chicken sheds. A couple of those left were empty, and the rest were mostly occupied by old people-the old bachelor who walked into town every day to his blacksmith shop, the old couple who used to have a grocery store and still had an Orange Crush sign in the front window, another old couple who bootlegged and buried their money, it was said, in quart sealers in the backyard. Also the old women left on their own. Mrs. Currie. Mrs. Home. Bessie Stewart.

Mrs. Currie raised dogs who raced about barking insanely all day in a wire pen, and at night were taken inside her house which was partly built into the bank of a hill, and must have been very dark and smelly. Mrs. Home raised flowers, and her tiny house and yard in the summer were like an embroidery sampler-clematis vines, rose of Sharon, every sort of rose and phlox and delphinium. Bessie Stewart dressed smartly and went uptown in the afternoons to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee in the Paragon Restaurant. Though unmarried, she was said to have a Friend.

One empty house had been occupied by, and still belonged to, a Mrs. Eddy. For a short while, years ago-that is, four or five years before I ever met Dahlia, a long time in my life-some people named Wainwright had lived in that house. They were related to Mrs. Eddy and she was letting them live there, but she wasn"t living with them. She had already been taken away to wherever she was taken. It was called Care.

Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright came from Chicago, where they had both worked as window dressers for a department store. The store had closed down or it had been decided that it didn"t need so many windows dressed-whatever had happened, they had lost their jobs and come here to live in Mrs. Eddy"s house and try to set up a wallpapering business.

They had a daughter, Frances, who was a year younger than I was. She was small and thin and she got out of breath easily, because she had asthma. On the first day of my being in Grade Five, Mrs. Wainwright came out and stopped me on the road, with Frances lagging behind her. She asked me if I would take Frances to school and show her where the Grade Four room was, and if I would be her friend, because she didn"t know anybody yet or where anything was.

Mrs. Wainwright stood talking to me, right out on the road, in a silky light-blue wrapper. Frances was all dolled up in a very short checked cotton dress with a flounce around the skirt and a matching checked hair ribbon.

Soon it became understood that I would walk to school with Frances and walk home with her afterwards. We both carried our lunches to school, but I had not expressly been asked to eat lunch with her so I never did.

There was one other girl in the school who lived far enough away to have to bring her lunch. Her name was Wanda Louise Palmer, and her parents owned and lived in the dance hall to the south of town. She and I had always eaten together, but we had never thought of ourselves as friends. Now, however, a kind of friendship was formed. It was all based on avoiding Frances. Wanda and I ate in the girls" bas.e.m.e.nt, behind a barricade of broken old desks that were heaped up in a corner. As soon as we were finished we sneaked out and left the school grounds to walk around the nearby streets or go downtown and look in store windows. Wanda should have been an interesting companion because of living at the dance hall, but she was so apt to lose track of what she was telling me (though not to stop talking) that she was very boring. All we really had was our bond against Frances, and our desperate held-in laughter when we peered through the desks and saw her looking for us.

After a while she didn"t do that anymore, she ate her lunch upstairs in the cloakroom, alone.

I would like to think that it was Wanda who pointed Frances out, when we stood in line ready to march into the cla.s.sroom, as the girl we were always trying to avoid. But I could have been the one who did that, and certainly I went along with the joke, and was glad to be on the side of those who maintained the business of raised eyebrows and bitten lips and suppressed-but not quite suppressed-giggles. Living out at the end of that road as I did, and being easily embarra.s.sed, yet a show-off, as I improbably was, I could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated. I could never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me.

The hair ribbons became part of it. Just to go up to Frances and say, "I love your hair ribbon, where did you get it?" and have her say, in innocent bewilderment, "In Chicago," was a lasting source of pleasure. For a while, "In Chicago," or just "Chicago," became the answer to everything.

"Where did you go after school yesterday?"

"Chicago."

"Where did your sister get her permanent?"

"Oh, in Chicago."

Some girls would clamp their mouths down on the very word, and their chests would heave, or they would pretend to have hiccups till they were half sick.

I didn"t avoid walking home with Frances, though I certainly let it be known that I didn"t choose to do that, but did it only because her mother had asked it of me. How much of this special very feminine persecution she was aware of, I don"t know. She may have thought there was some place where girls of my cla.s.s always went to have lunch, and that I just went on doing that. She may never have understood what the giggling was about. She never asked about it. She tried to hold my hand, crossing the street, but I pulled away and told her not to.

She said she always used to hold Sadie"s hand, when Sadie walked her to school in Chicago.

"But that was different," she said. "There aren"t any streetcars here."

One day she offered me a cookie left over from her lunch. I refused, so as not to feel any inconvenient obligation.

"Go on," she said. "My mother put it in for you."

Then I understood. Her mother put in this extra cookie, this treat, for me to eat when we had our lunches together. She had never told her mother that I didn"t show up at lunchtime, and that she could not find me. She must have been eating the extra cookie herself, but now the dishonesty was bothering her.

So every day from then on she offered it, almost at the last minute as if she was embarra.s.sed, and every day I accepted.

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

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

Lightopra-sussciety. Pirazapenzanze. I filed those words away but would not ask what they meant. If she had said them at school, in front of others, they would have been irresistible ammunition.

When her mother came out to greet us-kissing Frances h.e.l.lo as she had kissed her good-bye-she might ask if I could come in and play. I always said I had to go straight home.

Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Wainwright asked me if I could come to have supper the next Sunday. She said it would be a little thank-you party and a farewell party, now that they were going away. I was on the point of saying that I didn"t think my mother would let me, but when I heard the word farewell I saw the invitation in a different light. The burden of Frances would be lifted, no further obligation would be involved and no intimacy enforced. Mrs. Wainwright said that she had written a little note to my mother, since they didn"t have a phone.

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

"I don"t know what they were thinking of, coming here," she said. "Anybody who can afford to wallpaper is going to do it themselves."

"Where are you going?" I asked Frances.

"Burlington."

"Where"s that?"

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

"What doing?"

"I don"t know."

Their Christmas tree was in a corner. The front room had only one window and if they had put the tree there it would have blocked off all the light. It was not a big or well-shaped tree, but it was smothered in tinsel and gold and silver beads and beautiful intricate ornaments. In another corner of the room was a parlor stove, a woodstove, in which the fire seemed just recently to have been lighted. The air was still cold and heavy, with the forest smell of the tree.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wainwright was very confident about the fire. First one and then the other kept fiddling with the damper and daringly reaching in with the poker and patting the pipe to see if it was getting hot, or by any chance too hot. The wind was fierce that day-sometimes it blew the smoke down the chimney.

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

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

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

"That"s Scarlett O"Hara," Frances said. "Daddy and I gave it to Mother for her birthday."

We never got around to the Chinese checkers and in time the board was removed. We shifted the magazines to the floor. A piece of lace-not a real tablecloth-was laid across the table. Dishes followed. Evidently Frances and I were to eat in here, by ourselves. Both parents were involved in laying the table-Mrs. Wainwright wearing a fancy ap.r.o.n over her red velvet and Mr. Wainwright in shirtsleeves and silk-backed vest.

When everything was set up we were called to the table. I had expected Mr. Wainwright to leave the serving of the food to his wife-in fact I had been very surprised to see him hovering with knives and forks-but now he pulled out our chairs and announced that he was our waiter. When he was that close I could smell him, and hear his breathing. His breathing sounded eager, like a dog"s, and his smell was of talc.u.m and lotion, something that reminded me of fresh diapers and suggested a repulsive intimacy.

"Now my lovely young ladies," he said. "1 am going to bring you some champagne."

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

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

He made a bow.

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

I expected the sweetbreads to be like their name-some sort of bun with jam or brown sugar, but couldn"t see why that would come with potatoes. What arrived, however, were small pads of meat wrapped in crisp bacon, and little potatoes with their skins on, that had been rolled in hot b.u.t.ter and crisped in the pan. Also carrots cut in thin sticks and having a slightly candied flavor. The carrots I could have done without, but I had never tasted potatoes so delicious or meat so tender. All I wished was for Mr. Wainwright to stay in the kitchen instead of hovering around us pouring out lemonade and asking if everything was to our liking.

Dessert was another wonder-a satin vanilla pudding with a sort of lid on it of golden-brown baked sugar. Tiny cakes to go with it, iced on all sides with very dark, rich chocolate.

I sat replete, when not a lick nor a crumb was left. I looked at the fairy-tale tree with the ornaments that could have been miniature castles, or angels. Drafts came in around the window and moved the branches a little, causing the showers of tinsel to wave and the ornaments to turn slightly to show new points of light. Full of this rich and delicate food, I seemed to have entered a dream in which everything I saw was potent and benign.

One of the things I saw was the firelight, a dull rusty glow up in the pipe. I said to Frances, without alarm, "I think your pipe"s on fire."

She called out in a spirit of party excitement, "Pipe"s on fire," and in came Mr. Wainwright, who had finally retired to the kitchen, and Mrs. Wainwright close behind him.

Mrs. Wainwright said, "Oh G.o.d, Billy. What do we do?"

Mr. Wainwright said, "Close off the draft, I guess." His voice was squeaky and scared, unfatherly.

He did that, then yelped and shook his hand, which must have got burnt. Now they both stood and looked at the red pipe, and she said shakily, "There"s something you"re supposed to put on it. What is it?-baking soda." She ran to the kitchen and came back with the box of baking soda, half weeping. "Right on the flames!" she cried. Mr. Wainwright was still rubbing his hand on his trousers so she wrapped her ap.r.o.n round her own hand and used the stove lifter and scattered the powder on the flames. There was a spitting sound as they began to die down and smoke rose into the room.

"Girls," she said. "Girls. Maybe you better run outside." She was really crying now.

I remembered something from a similar crisis at home.

"You could wrap wet towels round the pipe," I said.

"Wet towels," she said. "That sounds like a good idea. Yes."

She ran to the kitchen, where we heard her pumping water. Mr. Wainwright followed her, shaking his burned hand in front of him, and both returned with towels dripping. The towels were wrapped around the pipe, and as soon as they began to heat up and dry others were put in their place. The room began to fill up more and more with smoke. Frances started coughing.

"Get some air," said Mr. Wainwright. It took him a while, with his good hand, to wrench open the unused front door, letting fly the bits of old newspapers and rotten rags that had been stuffed around it. There was a snowdrift outside, a white wave lapping at the room.

"Throw snow on the fire," said Frances, still sounding jubilant between coughs, and she and I picked up armfuls of snow and threw them at the stove. Some hit what was left of the fire and some missed and melted and ran into the puddles that the drip from the towels had already made on the floor. I would never have been allowed to make such a mess at home.

In the midst of these puddles, the danger over and the room growing frigid, stood Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright with their arms around each other, laughing and commiserating.

"Oh your poor hand," said Mrs. Wainwright. "And I wasn"t the least bit sympathetic about it. I was so afraid the house was going to burn down." She tried to kiss the hand, and he said, "Ouch, ouch." He too had tears in his eyes, from the smoke or the pain.

She patted him on the arms and shoulders and down lower, even on his b.u.t.tocks, saying, "Poor poor baby," and things of that sort, while he made a pouty face and kissed her with a great smack on the mouth. Then with his good hand he squeezed her behind.

It looked as if this fondling could go on for some time.

"Shut the door, it"s freezing," cried Frances, all red from coughing and happy excitement. If she meant for her parents to do this, they took no notice but went on with the appalling behavior that did not seem to embarra.s.s her or even to be worth her notice. She and I got hold of the door and pushed it against the wind that was whipping up over the drift and blowing more snow into the house.

I did not tell about any of this at home, though the food and the ornaments and the fire were so interesting. There were the other things I could not describe and that made me feel off-balance, slightly sick, so that somehow I did not like to mention any of it. The way the two adults put themselves at the service of two children. The charade of Mr. Wainwright as the waiter, his thick soapy-white hands and pale face and wings of fine glistening light-brown hair. The insistence-the too-closeness-of his soft footsteps in fat plaid slippers. Then the laughing, so inappropriate for adults, following a near disaster. The shameless hands and the smacking kiss. There was a creepy menace about all of this, starting with the falsity of corralling me to play the role of little friend-both of them had called me that-when I was nothing of the kind. To treat me as good and guileless, when I was not that either.

What was this menace? Was it just that of love, or of loving-ness? If that was what it was, then you would have to say that I had made its acquaintance too late. Such slopping-over of attention made me feel cornered and humiliated, almost as if somebody had taken a peep into my pants. Even the wonderful unfamiliar food was suspect in my memory. The movie magazines alone escaped the taint.