Dear Life

respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war.
    He said, “Not altogether.”
    “You’d remember altogether if you went to Bishop Strachan. You’d have had it rammed down your throat. English history, anyway.”
    She said that Stephen had been a hero. A man of honor, far too good for his times. He was that rare person who wasn’t all out for himself or looking to break his word the moment it was convenient to do so. Consequently and finally he was not a success.
    And then Matilda. She was a straight descendant of William the Conqueror and as cruel and haughty as you might expect. Though there might be people stupid enough to defend her because she was a woman.
    “If he could have finished it would have been a very fine novel.”
    Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn’t just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books alreadyin existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school.
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Huckleberry Finn
, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.
    What puzzled him, though he didn’t intend to let on, was why anybody would want to sit down and do another one, in the present. Now.
    A tragedy, said Belle briskly, and Jackson didn’t know if it was her father she was talking about or the people in the book that had not got finished.
    Anyway, now that this room was livable his mind was on the roof. No use to fix up a room and have the state of the roof render it unlivable again in a year or two. He had managed to patch it so that it would do her a couple of more winters, but he could not guarantee more than that. And he still planned to be on his way by Christmas.
    The Mennonite families on the next farm ran to older girls, and the younger boys he had seen were not strong enough yet to take on heavier chores. Jackson had been able to hire himself out to them, during the fall harvest. He had been brought in to eat with the others and to his surprise found that the girls behaved giddily as they served him, they were not at all mute as he had expected. The mothers kept an eye on them, he noticed, and the fathers kept an eye on him. He was pleased to know that he could satisfy both sets of parents. They could see that nothing was stirring with him. All safe.
    And of course with Belle not a thing had to be spoken of.She was—he had found this out—sixteen years older than he was. To mention it, even to joke about it, would spoil everything. She was a certain kind of woman, he a certain kind of man.
    The town where they shopped, when they needed to, was called Oriole. It was in the opposite direction from the town where he had grown up. He tied up the horse in the United Church shed there, since there were of course no hitching posts left on the main street. At first he was leery of the hardware store and the barbershop. But soon he understood something about small towns which he should have realized just from growing up in one. They did not have much to do with each other, unless it was for games run off in the ballpark or the hockey arena, where all was a fervent made-up sort of hostility. When they needed to shop for something their own stores could not supply they went to a city. The same when they wanted to consult a doctor other than the ones their own town could offer. He didn’t run into anybody familiar, and nobody showed a curiosity about him, though they might look twice at the horse. In the winter months, not even that, because the back roads were not plowed and people taking their milk to the creamery or eggs to the grocery had to make do with horses, just as he and Belle did.
    Belle always stopped to see what movie was on though she had no intention of going to see any of them. Her knowledge of movies and movie stars was intensive but came from some years back, something like Matilda and Stephen. For instance she could tell you who Clark Gable was married to in real life before he became Rhett Butler.
    Soon Jackson was going to get his hair cut when he needed to and buying his tobacco when he had run out. He smoked now like a farmer, rolling his own and never lighting up indoors.
    Secondhand cars didn’t become available for a while, but when they did, with