Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro’s “The Time of Death,” a story she wrote in 1953 and first published in the
Canadian Forum
in 1956. It is the earliest of her stories included in
Dance of the Happy Shades
. As Laidlaw wrote, it was to him “queer stuff.” “The Time of Death” tells a stark story, one that begins “Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on.” This is Lower Town Wingham – or a place very like it – and the story takes place in very late, very grey, very stark autumn, as the first snow of winter impends. The whole of “The Time of Death” emerges from its first word: “Afterwards.” Leona Parry’s nine-year-old daughter, Patricia, whom her mother “had singing in public since she was three years old,” was left to look after her younger sister and two brothers while her mother went to a neighbour’s to sew her cowgirl outfit – Patricia was singing with the Maitland Valley entertainers. Once her mother is gone, Patricia looks around their slovenly house and says that “it never gets cleaned up like other places.” Pronouncing furtherthat she is “going to clean this place up,” Patricia gets her brothers and sister to help her. She sets already hot water to boil on the stove to scrub the floor and in the central unseen accident, her youngest brother Benny, eighteen months old and “stupid,” is scalded to death.
    Though there is a glimpse of Benny’s mortal injuries, Munro’s focus is on the effects of the accident on others: on the women who have gathered to help and to mourn – Munro makes their personal distaste toward the Parrys, especially Leona, and their way of living, quite evident; on the men, largely unseen, staying outside, sharing a bottle as solace; and most especially on Leona, who has scorned Patricia for what she did, refusing to have anything to do with her. For her part, Patricia seems to have no reaction as she immerses herself in the social activities surrounding the funeral proceedings and ignores her mother and her censure. Once these rituals are over, November arrives, the first snow has still not fallen. Leona eventually reconciles with Patricia (“What’s life? You gotta go on,” she tells a friend), but still “Patricia did not cry.” Benny had been “the only stupid thing [Patricia] did not hate.”
    Patricia’s delayed reaction comes as the story ends with the reappearance of Old Brandon, the scissors-sharpener “who came along the road sometimes.” Benny had had a special name for him, “Bram.” “Benny remembered him, and ran out to meet him when he came.” Seeing him again coming along the road while she is out playing during that first week of November, the snow still not there, Patricia begins screaming and cannot be controlled: “They thought she must be having some kind of fit … you’d think she’d gone off her head.” The story ends: “The snow came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the houses and the pine trees, falling in big flakes at first and in smaller and smaller flakes that did not melt on the hard furrows, the rock of earth.” 2
    However “queer,” “The Time of Death” is a powerful story, one rooted in Munro’s home place. She told Jill Gardiner in June 1973, “When I first started writing, setting meant more to me than people. This was really what I was writing about.… At first I think I was just overwhelmed by a
place
, and the story was almost … a contrived illustration of whatever this meant to me.” In “The Time of Death” theplace, especially through the impending, delayed snow, confirms this comment. Yet Munro extends the characters in their setting to create what she told Boyle was the “positively Gothic” atmosphere of Lower Town Wingham, Huron County, Ontario. Munro also sees the story as “a kind of imitation Southern story … I was writing like the people I admired” – and though she does not name these admired writers here, leading candidates include Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and James Joyce in “The Dead.”
    Seen within the contexts of Munro’s developing reputation, “The Time of Death” is a singular story. Although any casual scan of the
Wingham Advance-Times
during the 1930s and 1940s yields accounts of similar horrific accidents, one Lower Town family angrily identified its own history in Benny’s death. One male