Friend of My Youth

still had Men’s, Ladies’, and Children’s Wear, Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes, Draperies, Housewares, Furniture.
    Murray strolled by to have a look at the looker. He found her penned behind rows of cellophaned shirts. Barbara. She wastall and well developed, as his father in a lowered and regretful voice had said. Her thick black hair did not curl or lie flat—it sprang up like a crest from her wide white forehead. Her eyebrows were thick and black as well, and glossy. Murray found out later that she put Vaseline on them, and plucked out the hairs that would have met above her nose.
    Barbara’s mother had been the mainstay of a back-country farm. When she died, the family migrated to Shawtown, which was a rackety half-rural settlement on the edge of Walley. Barbara’s father did odd jobs, and her two brothers had got into trouble with cars and breaking and entering. One later disappeared. The other married a managing sort of girl and settled down. It was that one who was coming into the store at this time and hanging around, on the pretext of visiting Barbara.
    “Watch out for him,” Barbara told the other clerks. “He’s a jerk, but he knows how to stick things to his fingers.”
    Hearing about this, Murray was impressed by her lack of family feeling. He was an only child, not spoiled but favored, and he felt himself bound by many ties of obligation, decency, and love. As soon as he got home from college, he had to go around greeting all the people who worked in the store, most of whom he’d known since childhood. He had to chat and smile on the streets of Walley, affable as a crown prince.
    Barbara’s brother was caught with a pair of socks in one pocket and a package of curtain hooks in the other.
    “What do you think he wanted the curtain hooks for?” Murray asked Barbara. He was anxious to make a joke of this, showing her how nothing was held against her on her brother’s account.
    “How should I know?” said Barbara.
    “Maybe he needs counselling,” said Murray. He had taken some sociology courses, because he had hoped at one time to become a United Church minister.
    Barbara said, “Maybe he needs to be hanged.”
    Murray fell in love with her then, if he was not in lovealready. Here is a noble girl, he thought. A bold black-and-white lily out of the Swamp Irish—Lorna Doone with a rougher tongue and a stronger spine. Mother won’t like her, he thought. (About that he was entirely right.) He was happier than he’d been at any time since he lost his faith. (That was an unsatisfactory way of putting it. It was more as if he’d come into a closed-off room or opened a drawer and found that his faith had dried up, turned to a mound of dust in the corner.)
    He always said that he made up his mind at once to get Barbara, but he used no tactics beyond an open display of worship. A capacity for worship had been noticeable in him all through his school days, along with his good nature and a tendency to befriend underdogs. But he was sturdy enough—he had enough advantages of his own—that it hadn’t got him any serious squelching. Minor squelches he was able to sustain.
    Barbara refused to ride on a float as the Downtown Merchants’ contestant for the Queen of the Dominion Day Parade.
    “I absolutely agree with you,” said Murray. “Beauty contests are degrading.”
    “It’s the paper flowers,” said Barbara. “They make me sneeze.”
    Murray and Barbara live now at Zeigler’s Resort, twenty-five miles or so northwest of Walley. The land here is rough and hilly. The farmers abandoned it around the turn of the century and let it go back to bush. Murray’s father bought two hundred acres of it and built a primitive cabin and called the place his hunting camp. When Murray lost the store in Walley, and the big house and the little house on the lot behind the store, he came up here with Barbara and their two small children. He drove a school bus to get some cash income, and worked all the rest of the time building eight new cabins and renovating the one that was there, to serve as the lodge and as living quarters for his family. He learned carpentry, masonry, wiring, plumbing. Hecut down trees and dammed the creek and cleaned the creek bed and trucked in sand, to make a swimming pond and a beach. For obvious reasons (as he says), Barbara handled the finances.
    Murray says that his is a common story. Does it deserve to be called a classic? “My great-grandfather got the business going. My