Friend of My Youth

thinks Almeda, she has noticed that before—it is always partly a charade with these people; there is a clumsy sort of parody, an exaggeration, a missedconnection. As if anything they did—even a murder—might be something they didn’t quite believe but were powerless to stop.
    Now there is the sound of something thrown—a chair, a plank?—and of a woodpile or part of a fence giving way. A lot of newly surprised cries, the sound of running, people getting out of the way, and the commotion has come much closer. Almeda can see a figure in a light dress, bent over and running. That will be the woman. She has got hold of something like a stick of wood or a shingle, and she turns and flings it at the darker figure running after her.
    “Ah, go get her!” the voices cry. “Go baste her one!”
    Many fall back now; just the two figures come on and grapple, and break loose again, and finally fall down against Almeda’s fence. The sound they make becomes very confused—gagging, vomiting, grunting, pounding. Then a long, vibrating, choking sound of pain and self-abasement, self-abandonment, which could come from either or both of them.
    Almeda has backed away from the window and sat down on the bed. Is that the sound of murder she has heard? What is to be done, what is she to do? She must light a lantern, she must go downstairs and light a lantern—she must go out into the yard, she must go downstairs. Into the yard. The lantern. She falls over on her bed and pulls the pillow to her face. In a minute. The stairs, the lantern. She sees herself already down there, in the back hall, drawing the bolt of the back door. She falls asleep.
    She wakes, startled, in the early light. She thinks there is a big crow sitting on her windowsill, talking in a disapproving but unsurprised way about the events of the night before. “Wake up and move the wheelbarrow!” it says to her, scolding, and she understands that it means something else by “wheelbarrow”—something foul and sorrowful. Then she is awake and sees that there is no such bird. She gets up at once and looks out the window.
    Down against her fence there is a pale lump pressed—a body.
    Wheelbarrow
.
    She puts a wrapper over her nightdress and goes downstairs. The front rooms are still shadowy, the blinds down in the kitchen. Something goes
plop, plup
, in a leisurely, censorious way, reminding her of the conversation of the crow. It’s just the grape juice, straining overnight. She pulls the bolt and goes out the back door. Spiders have draped their webs over the doorway in the night, and the hollyhocks are drooping, heavy with dew. By the fence, she parts the sticky hollyhocks and looks down and she can see.
    A woman’s body heaped up there, turned on her side with her face squashed down into the earth. Almeda can’t see her face. But there is a bare breast let loose, brown nipple pulled long like a cow’s teat, and a bare haunch and leg, the haunch showing a bruise as big as a sunflower. The unbruised skin is grayish, like a plucked, raw drumstick. Some kind of nightgown or all-purpose dress she has on. Smelling of vomit. Urine, drink, vomit.
    Barefoot, in her nightgown and flimsy wrapper, Almeda runs away. She runs around the side of her house between the apple trees and the veranda; she opens the front gate and flees down Dufferin Street to Jarvis Poulter’s house, which is the nearest to hers. She slaps the flat of her hand many times against the door.
    “There is the body of a woman,” she says when Jarvis Poulter appears at last. He is in his dark trousers, held up with braces, and his shirt is half unbuttoned, his face unshaven, his hair standing up on his head. “Mr. Poulter, excuse me. A body of a woman. At my back gate.”
    He looks at her fiercely. “Is she dead?”
    His breath is dank, his face creased, his eyes bloodshot.
    “Yes. I think murdered,” says Almeda. She can see a little of his cheerless front hall. His hat on a chair. “In the night I woke up. I heard a racket down on Pearl Street,” she says, straggling to keep her voice low and sensible. “I could hear this—pair. I could hear a man and a woman fighting.”
    He picks up his hat and puts it on his head. He closes andlocks the front door, and puts the key in his pocket. They walk along the boardwalk and she sees that she is in her bare feet. She holds back what she feels a need to say next—that she is responsible, she could have run out with a lantern, she could have