The Progress of Love (31 page)

This was a change for Violet after the easygoing 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 whiskey 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 feelings of purpose and importance 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 Ottawa. She had applied for a teaching job
in Bell’s Corners, 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 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, Viole 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 neighbors brought food. There seemed to be always some visitor sitting at the kitchen table, a neighbor, 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 neighbors 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 about 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.

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 an intersection, 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 bologna?”

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 whiskey beside it.

Violet dashed the whiskey 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 parlor, 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 whiskey, explaining that it was due to the strain on his nerves that her father had thought of resorting to whiskey 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 Ottawa were as fine as you could ask for. Order prevailed there, and some sort of intelligence. Out here was emptiness, rumor, 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 be 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, and she had instructed and spoiled them, and tried to make them pretty?

“Why can’t you wear your nightgowns?” Violet said sadly,
and closed the door. She sat by the gun until they came back and went to bed. Then she lit the stove and made 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 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 acres of shallow soil scattered in among rubbly hills and swamp? What folly to think you could settle in there and live a life and raise a family.

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