A hope of something final, terrifying

I found a slot of free time last night at 12:05 am (what has life come to) and so decided to sit down and read what would turn out to be one of the most memorable short stories I've read in a long time. Alice Munro's Images. It is narrated in the same voice of the girl (Del Jordan) from Walker Brothers Cowboy, and when reading it is not only 16-year-old me who chews away at the pages but also my innocuous 6-year-old self who emerges to nibble at each sentence.

Del's mother is ill, her father has returned to his teasing ways, and "the fact of death" survives the sweltering room like a "lump of magic ice;" our narrator attributes all this to the coming of Mary McQuade, Del's father's cousin and the practical nurse attending to Del's sick mother. Thus despite "all the life going on" there is death, its presence acute and fearful to Del until the end of the story.

When Del's father takes her into the woods, hunting muskrats, Del is conscious of not only her father's "uncompromising, even brutal"side but also the "fact of death." And indeed, when a hatchet-bearing man advances upon her father, she is suddenly aware of the possibility of his death -

All my life I had known there was a man like this, and he was behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative, with blazing hair and burned out, Orphan Annie eyes.

- but the man, Joe, turns out to be an old acquaintance of her father's and the threat of death passes.


The word death is not mentioned alone in the story (always the fact of death; it is a fact, "nothing but the truth") although its presence and power - whereas imagined by Del to be exercised by McQuade, or intended by the Silases threatening Joe - permeates it

By the end of the story, Del - like she was in Walker Brothers Cowboy - does not completely understand what has happened but is nonetheless left with an imprint of the memory, permanent as an image, and realizes that her fears are "based on nothing but the truth." And so she is eventually no longer afraid of McQuade or "the fact of death."

It is a lovely story of childhood innocuousness,  inadequately summarised above because so much emotion is woven into it that the story cannot be solidified in linear plot but only read and reread the feeling melds into the words to produce an image.

People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying.

It was the ending that REALLY got me:

Like children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who had discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after — like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

So perhaps one could call this story a mini bildungsroman.

"Time," says Nora bitterly. "Will you come by ever again?"

The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive — old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.

I originally planned to read J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians but settled for the work of another Nobel laureate instead - Alice Munro's Selected Stories. I did this for two reasons - the first being that I won't be able to take my time with the former (school life is throwing assessments my way), and the second being I haven't read short stories in ages. Why not Munro, whose collections I've often glimpsed on bookshelves but never read?

I've just read the first story (twice), Walker Brothers Cowboy. A sense of leaving permeates the opening  lines as our narrator and her father (Ben) make their way down a "long, shabby sort of street" towards the Lake, leaving her mother and brother at home, one "sewing under the dining-room light" and one "in bed [...in a] little screened porch."  

They are in "Tuppertown, an old town on [...] an old grain port," where tramps hang around the docks bordering "ancient, rusty, wallowing" grain boats. Such decrepit, decaying imagery works with the feeling of 'letting go' to unfold the enigma of a crack-of-dawn sentiment, harking back to a bygone time. And the past indeed trails behind the characters throughout the story, even presenting itself in front of them when Ben takes his children - our narrator and her brother - to visit Nora (a woman of his past) and her blind mother, taking a detour from his regular salesman trip as the 'Walker Brothers Man.'

It is clear from Nora's cheerful yet aggressive tone that news of Ben's marriage and job as the Walker Brothers Man is a long leap from who he was in their shared past, and as Nora drinks whisky and urgest Ben to dance she attempts to rekindle their history. Nora "whirls [...our narrator] around in" a dance, dragging her too into that enigmatic past. 

Although our narrator initially regarded the trip with a childish "rising hope of adventure," she is offered a glimpse of her father's youth and at the end -unlike her innocuous brother- cannot shake off an acute awareness of the gone yet ever 'present' past.   

As Updike wrote in the NY Times Book Review - "Munro is an implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet." Indeed. I look forward to reading and rereading the next 27 stories in this anthology. 

I pretend to remember far less than I do, wary of being trapped into sympathy or any unwanted emotion.

So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.