Friend of My Youth

dominate the countryside for the next hundred years are just beginning to be built—and mean-looking log houses, and every four or five miles a ragged little settlement with a church and school and store and a blacksmith shop. A raw countryside just wrenched from the forest, but swarming with people. Every hundred acres is a farm, every farm has a family, most families have ten or twelve children. (This is the country that will send out wave after wave of settlers—it’s already starting to send them—to northern Ontario and the West.) It’s true that you can gather wildflowers in spring in the woodlots, but you’d have to walk through herds of horned cows to get to them.
    IV
    The Gypsies have departed
.
    Their camping-ground is bare
.
    Oh, boldly would I bargain now
    At the Gypsy Fair
.
    Almeda suffers a good deal from sleeplessness, and the doctor has given her bromides and nerve medicine. She takes the bromides, but the drops gave her dreams that were too vivid and disturbing, so she has put the bottle by for an emergency. She told the doctor her eyeballs felt dry, like hot glass, and her joints ached. Don’t read so much, he said, don’t study; get yourself good and tired out with housework, take exercise. He believes that her troubles would clear up if she got married. He believes this in spite of the fact that most of his nerve medicine is prescribed for married women.
    So Almeda cleans house and helps clean the church, she lends a hand to friends who are wallpapering or getting ready for a wedding, she bakes one of her famous cakes for the Sunday-school picnic. On a hot Saturday in August, she decides to make some grape jelly. Little jars of grape jelly will make fine Christmas presents, or offerings to the sick. But she started late in the day and the jelly is not made by nightfall. In fact, the hot pulp has just been dumped into the cheesecloth bag to strain out the juice. Almeda drinks some tea and eats a slice of cake with butter (a childish indulgence of hers), and that’s all she wants for supper. She washes her hair at the sink and sponges off her body to be clean for Sunday. She doesn’t light a lamp. She lies down on the bed with the window wide open and a sheet just up to her waist, and she does feel wonderfully tired. She can even feel a little breeze.
    When she wakes up, the night seems fiery hot and full of threats. She lies sweating on her bed, and she has the impressionthat the noises she hears are knives and saws and axes—all angry implements chopping and jabbing and boring within her head. But it isn’t true. As she comes further awake, she recognizes the sounds that she has heard sometimes before—the fracas of a summer Saturday night on Pearl Street. Usually the noise centers on a fight. People are drunk, there is a lot of protest and encouragement concerning the fight, somebody will scream, “Murder!” Once, there was a murder. But it didn’t happen in a fight. An old man was stabbed to death in his shack, perhaps for a few dollars he kept in the mattress.
    She gets out of bed and goes to the window. The night sky is clear, with no moon and with bright stars. Pegasus hangs straight ahead, over the swamp. Her father taught her that constellation—automatically, she counts its stars. Now she can make out distinct voices, individual contributions to the row. Some people, like herself, have evidently been wakened from sleep. “Shut up!” they are yelling. “Shut up that caterwauling or I’m going to come down and tan the arse off yez!”
    But nobody shuts up. It’s as if there were a ball of fire rolling up Pearl Street, shooting off sparks—only the fire is noise; it’s yells and laughter and shrieks and curses, and the sparks are voices that shoot off alone. Two voices gradually distinguish themselves—a rising and falling howling cry and a steady throbbing, low-pitched stream of abuse that contains all those words which Almeda associates with danger and depravity and foul smells and disgusting sights. Someone—the person crying out, “Kill me! Kill me now!”—is being beaten. A woman is being beaten. She keeps crying, “Kill me! Kill me!” and sometimes her mouth seems choked with blood. Yet there is something taunting and triumphant about her cry. There is something theatrical about it. And the people around are calling out, “Stop it! Stop that!” or “Kill her! Kill her!” in a frenzy, as if at the theatre or a sporting match or a prizefight. Yes,