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Nettles

Alice Munro

　　1 In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny's house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
　　2 Years afterward, driving around in the hills northeast of Toronto with another man, I looked for the house. I tried to locate the road it was on, but I never succeeded. It had probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it, a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place.
　　3 In the countryside where I lived as a child, wells would occasionally go dry in the summer. Our well was deeper than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our penned animals-my father raised silver foxes and mink-so one day the well-driller arrived with impressive equipment and began the work of extending the hole down, down, deep into the earth until the water was found in the rock. From that time on we could pump out pure cold water no matter what the time of year and no matter how dry the weather. There was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it, on a burning day, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparkling like black diamonds.
　　4 The well-driller was a man named Mike McCallum. He lived in the Clark Hotel, in the town close to our farm. He had come there in the spring and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. Then he would move on.
　　5 Mike McCallum had a son who lived with him in hotel rooms or boarding houses, wherever he was working, and who went to whatever school was at hand. His name was Mike McCallum, too. He was nine and I was eight.
　　6 His father drove a dark-red truck that was always muddy or dusty. Mike and I climbed into the cab when it rained, and the rain washed down the windows and made a racket like stones on the roof. The smell was of men-their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks. Also of damp longhaired dog, because we took my dog, Ranger, in with us. One day when Ranger was with us he chased a skunk, and the skunk turned and sprayed him. My mother had to stop whatever she was doing and drive into town and get several large tins of tomato juice, and Mike persuaded Ranger to get into a tub and we poured the tomato juice over him and brushed it into his hair. It looked as if we were washing him in blood.
　　7 Our farm was small-nine acres. It was small enough for me to have explored every part of it. Each of the trees on the place had an attitude and a presence-the elm looked serene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pits on the river flats had their distinct character.
　　8 The river in August was almost as much a stony road as it was a watercourse. Mike and I took off our shoes and waded-jumping from one bare, bone-white rock to another, slipping on the scummy rocks below the surface, and plowing through mats of flat-leafed water lilies, trapping our legs in their snaky roots.
　　9 I went to the country school beyond our farm, but Mike had been going to the town school since spring and town boys were not strangers to him. There were girls farther up on the bank. They might have followed the boys out from town-pretending not to follow-or the boys might have come along after them, intending some harassment, but somehow when they had all got together, this game had taken shape. It was a game of war. The boys had divided themselves into two armies that fought each other from behind barricades made of tree branches and water weeds. The chief weapons were balls of clay, about the size of baseballs. You squeezed and patted the sticky clay into as hard a ball as you could make, and there had to be a great many of these balls, because they were good for only one throw.
　　10 The girls as well as the boys were divided into two sides. Each girl had her own pile of balls and was working for particular soldiers, and when a soldier fell wounded he would call out a girl's name, so that she could drag him away and dress his wounds as quickly as possible. I made weapons for Mike, and mine was the name he called. There was a keen alarm when the cry came, a wire zinging through your whole body, a fanatic feeling of devotion. When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes. He lay limp and still while I pressed slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and-pulling out his shirt-to his pale tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button.
　　11 Nobody won. The game disintegrated, after a long while, in arguments and mass resurrections. We tried to get some of the clay off us, on the way home, by lying down flat in the river water. Our shorts and shirts were filthy and dripping.
　　12 One morning, of course, the job was all finished, the well capped, the pump reinstated, the fresh water marvelled at. And the truck did not come. There were two fewer chairs at the table for the noon meal. Mike and I had barely looked at each other during those meals. He liked to put ketchup on his bread. His father talked to my father, and the talk was mostly about wells, accidents, water tables. A serious man. All work, my father said. Yet he-Mike's father-ended nearly every speech with a laugh. The laugh had a lonely boom in it, as if he were still down the well.
　　13 It turned out that this job was the last one that the well-driller had to do in our part of the country. He had other jobs lined up elsewhere, and he wanted to get to them as soon as he could, while the good weather lasted. Living as he did, in the hotel, he could just pack up and be gone. And that was what he had done. I must have known that Mike would be leaving. Future absence I accepted-it was just that I had no idea, until Mike disappeared, of what absence could be like. How all my own territory would be altered, as if a landslide had gone through it and skimmed off all meaning except loss of Mike.
　　14 One day weeks afterward, I was standing by the door of the shoe store while my mother tried on shoes, and I heard a woman running past the store call, "Mike!" I was suddenly convinced that this woman must be Mike's mother. I was now running out of the store-thinking only that in another minute I would see him.
　　15 The woman had caught up with a boy about five years old. A common name. A stupid flat-faced child with dirty blond hair. My heart was beating in big thumps, like howls happening in my chest.
　　16 Sunny had met my bus in Uxbridge that summer of 1979. She was a bright-faced woman, with silvery brown curly hair caught back by unmatched combs on either side of her face. Even when she put on weight-which she had done-she looked not matronly but majestically girlish.
　　17 She swept me into her life as she had always done, telling me that she had thought she was going to be late, because Claire had got a bug in her ear that morning and had had to be taken to the hospital to have it flushed out. Then the dog threw up on the kitchen step. Johnston was making the boys clean it up because they had wanted a dog.
　　18 "So suppose we go someplace nice and quiet and get drunk and never go back there?" she said. "We have to, though. Johnston invited a friend whose wife and kids are away in Ireland, and they want to go and play golf."
　　19 Sunny and I had been friends in Vancouver years before. Our pregnancies had dovetailed, so that we had managed with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk-about our marriages, our fights, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, our forgone ambitions. We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, with the woman's mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and "The Cocktail Party."
　　20 Now we had both moved away from Vancouver. But Sunny had moved with her husband and her children and her furniture, in the normal way and for the usual reason-her husband had got another job. And I had moved for the newfangled reason that was approved of only in some special circles-leaving husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except, of course, the children, who were to be parcelled about), in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame.
　　21 I lived now on the second floor of a house in Toronto. The people downstairs had come from Trinidad a dozen years earlier. All up and down the street, the old brick houses were occupied by olive- or brownish-skinned people who spoke English in a way that was unfamiliar to me and who filled the air day and night with the smell of their spicy-sweet cooking. I was happy with all this-it made me feel as if I had made a true change, a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage. But it was too much to expect of my daughters-who were ten and twelve years old-that they should feel the same way. They had come to me at the beginning of the summer holidays, supposedly to stay for the whole two months. They found the smells of the street sickening and the noise frightening.
　　22 For a while they did not complain. The older one said to the younger one, "Let Mom think we're happy. Or she'll feel bad."
　　23 At last a blowup. Accusations, confessions of misery, the younger wailing, "Why can't you just live at home?" and the older telling her bitterly, "Because she hates Dad."
　　24 I phoned my husband-who asked me nearly the same question and provided, on his own, nearly the same answer. I changed the tickets and helped my children pack and took them to the airport. When I came back, alone, I gathered up all reminders of them and stuffed them into a garbage bag. And I did more or less the same thing every time I thought of them: I snapped my mind shut. There were miseries I could bear-those connected with men. And other miseries-those connected with children-that I could not.
　　25 I went back to living as I had lived before they came. I stopped cooking breakfast and went out every morning to get coffee and fresh rolls at the Italian deli. Back home, I would sit and write for hours at a wooden table under the windows of a former sunporch. Outside the windows, as it got dark, the back-yard parties would begin, with music and shouting and provocations that later might develop into fights, and I would be frightened, not of any hostility but of a kind of nonexistence.
　　26 In one of these moods, I phoned Sunny, and got the invitation to spend the weekend in the country.
　　27 "It's beautiful here," I said. But the country we were driving through meant nothing to me. The hills were a series of green bumps, some with cows. There were low concrete bridges over weed-covered streams. Hay was harvested in a new way, rolled up and left in the fields.
　　28 "Wait till you see the house, "Sunny said. "It's squalid."
　　29 She did not ask me-was it delicacy or disapproval?-about my new life. I would have told her lies, anyway, or half lies. It was hard to make the break but it had to be done. I miss the children terribly but there is always a price to be paid. I am learning to leave a man free and to be free myself. I am learning to take sex lightly, which is hard for me because that's not the way I started out and I'm not young, but I am learning.
　　30 The bricks of the house showed a scar where a veranda had been torn away. Sunny's boys were tromping around in the yard. The three-year-old girl born since I'd last seen Sunny, came running out of the kitchen door and then halted, surprised at the sight of a stranger.
　　31 Sunny picked her up and I took up my overnight bag and we walked into the kitchen, where Mike McCallum was spreading ketchup on a piece of bread.
　　32 "It's you," we said, almost on the same breath. We laughed, I rushed toward him and he moved toward me. We shook hands.
　　33 "I thought it was your father, " I said.
　　34 Johnston came into the kitchen with the golf bags, and greeted me, and told Mike to hurry up, and Sunny said, "They know each other, honey. They knew each other. Of all things."
　　35 "When we were kids, " Mike said.
　　36 Johnston said," Really? That's remarkable."
　　37 Mike and I were still looking at each other and laughing-we seemed to be making it clear to each other that this discovery that Sunny and Johnson might think remarkable was to our way of thinking really more of a miracle.
　　38 All afternoon while the men were gone I was full of happy energy. I made a peach pie for our supper and read to Claire so that she would settle down for her nap.
　　39 The things Mike remembered were different from the things I remembered. We both remembered the clay cannonballs, and the war. We were washing the dishes together, so that we could talk all we wanted without being rude.
　　40 At some point I told him that I had separated from my husband, and I was living in Toronto. I said that my children had been with me for a while but were now on a holiday with their father.
　　41 He told me that he lived in Kingston, but had not been there very long. He had met Johnston recently, through his work. He was, like Johnston, a civil engineer. His wife was an Irish girl, born in Ireland but working in Canada when he met her. She was a nurse. Right now she was back in Ireland, visiting her family. She had the kids with her.
　　42 "How many kids?"
　　43 "Three."
　　44 When the dishes were finished we went into the front room and offered to play Scrabble with the boys. One game-then it was supposed to be bedtime. But they persuaded us to start another round. Johnston told the boys to pack up the game and they obeyed. But Gregory thought of asking to see the stars. "This is the only place we can ever see them," he said. "At home it's all the lights and crap."
　　45 "Watch it," his father said. But then we all went outside and looked at the sky. We looked for the Pilot Star, close beside the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper. If you could see that one, Johnston said, then your eyesight was good enough to get you into the Air Force.
　　46 Mike was standing a little ahead of me and to one side. He was actually closer to Sunny than he was to me. Nobody was behind us, and I wanted to brush against him-just lightly and accidentally against his arm or shoulder. Then if he didn't stir away-out of courtesy, taking my touch for a genuine accident?-I wanted to lay a finger against his bare neck. Was that what he would have done, if he had been standing behind me? Was that what he would have been concentrating on, instead of the stars? I had the feeling, however, that he was a scrupulous man, he would refrain.
　　47 He had slept in the guest bedroom the night before but tonight he'd moved downstairs to the fold-out sofa in the front room. Sunny had given him fresh sheets rather than unmaking and making up again the bed he had left for me.
　　48 "He's pretty clean," she said. "And after all he's an old friend."
　　49 Lying in those same sheets did not make for a peaceful night. I knew that he wouldn't come to me, no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the house of his friends. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of myself as a woman who was faithful to the person who she was sleeping with at any given time. My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. All night-or at least whenever I woke up-the crickets were singing outside my windows. At first I thought it was birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noise.
　　50 Everybody was invited to bunch the next morning, at the house of some neighbors who had a swimming pool. Mike said that he thought he would rather just go round the golf course, if that would be O.K.
　　51 Sunny said, "Sure," and looked at me. I said, "Well, I don't know if I-" and Mike said, "You don't play golf, do you?"
　　52 "No."
　　53 "Still. You could come and caddy for me."
　　54 Johnston warned us before we left that there was a prediction of rain. Mike said that we'd take our chances. I liked his saying "we" and I liked riding beside him, in the wife's seat. I felt a pleasure in the idea of us as a couple-a pleasure that I knew was as light-headed as an adolescent girl's. The notion of being a wife beguiled me, just as if I had never been one.
　　55 I said I supposed that Ireland was beautiful.
　　56 "Parts of it are really bare. Bare rock."
　　57 "Did your wife grow up there? Does she have that lovely accent?"
　　58 "You'd think she did, if you heard her. But when she goes back there, they tell her she's lost it. They tell her she sounds just like an American. American's what they always say-they don't bother with Canadian."
　　59 "And your kids-I guess they don't sound Irish at all?"
　　60 "Nope."
　　61 "What are they, anyway-boys or girls?"
　　62 "Two boys and a girl."
　　63 I had an urge now to tell him about the contradictions, the griefs and necessities of my life. I said, "I miss my kids."
　　64 But he said nothing. No sympathetic word, no encouragement. It might be that he thought it unseemly to talk of our partners or our children, under the circumstances.
　　65 Soon after that we pulled into the parking lot beside the clubhouse. He got out and went into the office to pay the visitor's fee.
　　66 I had never been on a golf course. I had seen the game being played on television, once or twice and never by chance and I had an idea that some of the clubs were called irons and that the course itself was called the links. When I told him this, Mike said, "Maybe you're going to be awfully bored."
　　67 "If I am, I'll go for a walk."
　　68 That seemed to please him. He laid the weight of his warm hand on my shoulder and said, "You would, too."
　　69 My ignorance did not matter-of course, I did not really have to caddy-and I was not bored. All there was for me to do was to follow him around and watch him.
　　70 Walking, we hardly talked at all. At some point, Mike looked along the length of the course, to where the clouds had changed color, becoming dark blue instead of white, and he said without particular alarm or disappointment, "Here comes our weather." He began methodically to pack up and fasten his bag.
　　71 We were then about as far away as we could be from the clubhouse. Birds were wheeling about overhead in an agitated, indecisive way. The tops of the trees were swaying and there was a sound-it seemed to be above us-like the sound of a wave full of stones, crashing on the beach. Mike said, "O.K., then. We better get in here," and took my hand and hurried us across the mown grass into bushes and the tall weeds that grew between the course and the river.
　　72 The bushes right at the edge of the grass looked impenetrable, but close up there were little openings, the narrow paths that animals or people looking for golf balls had made. The ground sloped slightly downward, and we could see a bit of the river. The water was steel gray, and looked to be rolling. Between it and us there was a meadow of weeds, all in bloom-goldenrod, jewelweed with its red-and-yellow bells, and what I thought were flowering nettles with pinkish-purple clusters, and wild asters. Even the most frail-stemmed, delicate-looking plants had grown up almost as high as, or higher than, our heads. When we stopped and looked up through them we could see something coming, from the direction of the midnight clouds. It was the real rain, coming at us behind the splatter we were getting. It looked as if a large portion of the sky had detached itself and was bearing down, bustling and resolute, taking a not quite recognizable but animate shape. Curtains of rain-not veils but really thick and wildly slapping curtains-were driven ahead of it. We could see them distinctly, when all we were feeling were light, lazy drops. It was almost as if we were looking through a window, and not quite believing that the window would shatter, until it did, and rain and wind hit us, all together, and my hair was lifted and fanned out above my head. I felt as if my skin might do that next.
　　73 I tried to turn around then-I had an urge that I had not felt before, to run out of the bushes and head for the clubhouse. But I could not move. It was hard enough to stand up---out in the open the wind would have knocked you down at once.
　　74 Stooping, butting his head through the weeds and against the wind, Mike got around in front of me, all the time holding on to my arm. Then he faced me, with his body between me and the storm. He said something, right into my face, but I couldn't hear him. He had hold of both my arms now, and he worked his hands down to my wrists and held them tight. He pulled me down-both of us staggering, the moment we tried to make any change of position-so that we were crouched close to the ground. So close together that we could not look at each other-we could only look down at the crushed plants and our soaked shoes, and the miniature rivers already breaking up the earth around our feet. Then he released my wrists and clamped his hands on my shoulders. His touch was still one of restraint more than comfort.
　　75 We remained like this until the wind passed over. That could not have been more than five minutes, perhaps only two or three. Rain still fell, but now it was ordinary heavy rain. He took his hands away, and we stood up, shakily. Our shirts and slacks were stuck fast to our bodies. We tried to smile, but had hardly the strength for it. Then we kissed and pressed together briefly. This was more of a ritual, a recognition of survival rather than of our bodies' inclinations. Our lips slid against each other, slick and cool, and the pressure of the embrace made us slightly chilly, as fresh water was squished out of our clothing.
　　76 Every minute, the rain grew lighter. We made our way unsteadily through the half-flattened weeds, then between the thick and drenching bushes. Big tree branches had been hurled all over the golf course. The rain had almost stopped, and air brightened. I felt the heat of the sun strike my shoulders before I looked up into its festival light.
　　77 I stood still and took a deep breath. Now was the time, when we were soaked and safe and confronted with radiance. Now something had to be said.
　　78 "There's something I didn't mention to you."
　　79 His voice surprised me, like the sun. But in the opposite way. It had a weight to it, a warning-determination edged with apology.
　　80 "About our youngest boy," he said. "Our youngest boy was killed last summer."
　　81 Oh.
　　82 "He was run over," he said. "I was the one ran over him. Backing out of our driveway."
　　83 I stopped again. He stopped with me. Both of us stared ahead.
　　84 "His name was Brian. He was three. The thing was, I thought he was upstairs in bed. The others were still up, but he'd been put to bed. Then he'd got up again. I should have looked, though. I should have looked more carefully."
　　85 I thought of the moment when he got out of the car. The noise he must have made. The moment when the child's mother came running out of the house.
　　86 He started walking again, entering the parking lot. I walked a little behind him. And I did not say anything-not one kind, common, helpless word. We had passed right by that.
　　87 He didn't say, It was my fault and I'll never get over it. I'll never forgive myself. But I do as well as I can. Or, My wife forgives me, but she'll never get over it, either.
　　88 I knew all that. I knew now that he was a person who had hit rock bottom. A person who knew-as I did not know, did not come near knowing-exactly what rock bottom was. He and wife knew that together and it bound them, as something like that would either break you apart or bind you, for life. Not that they would live at rock bottom. But they would share a knowledge of it-that cool, empty, locked, and central space.
　　89 "Sunny and Johnston don't know about it, " he said. "None of the people know, that we met since we moved. It seemed as if it might work better that way. Even the other kids-they don't hardly ever mention him. Never mention his name."
　　90 I was not one of the people among whom they would make their new, hard, normal life. I was a person who knew-that was all. A person he had, on his own, who knew.
　　91 While we were driving back, Mike and I both noticed, and spoke about, a prickling, an itch or burning, on our bare forearms, the backs of our hands, and around our ankles. Places that had not been protected by our clothing when we crouched in the weeds. I remembered the nettles. But those plants with the big pinkish-purple flowers are not nettles. I have since discovered that they are called joe-pye weed. The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines.
　　92 Sitting in Sunny's farmhouse kitchen, we told about our adventure and revealed our rashes. Sunny knew what to do for us. On an earlier weekend the boys had gone down into the weedy field behind the barn and come back covered with welts and blotches. Cold compresses were prescribed and antihistamine lotion, and pills. There was still part of a bottle of lotion left and there were some pills, too.
　　93 The children thought it was funny to see us sitting there with our feet in basins, our arms and hands clumsy with their wrappings of thick cloths. Claire especially was delighted with the sight of our naked, foolish, adult feet. Mike wriggled his long toes for her, and she broke into fits of alarmed giggles.
　　94 Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn't. Love that was not usable, that knew its place. Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal.
　　95 I never asked Sunny for news of him or got any, during all the years of our dwindling friendship.

　　(From The New Yorker, February 21&28, 2000)

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