Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

were also strange names, more properly belonging to an animal and a flower; were those the names their parents called them? They struck Mr. Lougheed as having got here without parents, without any experience of highchairs or tricycles or wagons; they seemed to have sprung up, armed as they were, from the earth. No doubt that was how they thought of themselves.
    He had come into the house one day and the downstairs apartment door had been open. Somebody might have just run out. In the back of the hall—in full view though, not under the stairs—were two figures tangled up with each other. Rex and Calla. The girl was in a long skirt as usual and she seemed to be down on all fours, squawking and struggling as if she had been pushed. The skirt was thrown up over her head, she was half trapped and muffled in its cloth. Mr. Lougheed saw no more than a crescent of spongy flesh, her hindquarters, and that quickly covered by the boy, mounting. Awareness of Mr. Lougheed’s presence was presumably what caused him to let out a yap—of glee as well as amazement—and to fall forward so that both he and the girl collapsed, their essential connection probably broken for the time being; their voices joined, however, in laughter that seemed to Mr. Lougheed not only unashamed but full of derision. He was apparently the one to be laughed at, for having witnessed, for being shocked at, their copulation.
    He was not shocked, he wished to tell them. When a boy going to school, to what was called the Stone School on the Fifth Line of Killop Township, he had been part of the paying audience of a show put on by one of the Brewer boys and his younger sister. It took place in the entryway to the boys’ toilet, a foul place. It was not simulated. Nobody needed to think they had invented this business.
    But if not shocked, what was he? His heart pounded, he felt a gloomy congestion in his head. In his own room, he had to sit down. Their laughter would be heard by him for some time. He imagined their hairy parts driving together, with independent swollen ferocity and squashing noises, ending in that laughter. Like animals. No, he took that back. Animals went about their business without calling attention to it, and with gravity. What he objected to, he had said to Eugene, what he objected to in this generation, if that was what it was, was that they could not do a thing without showing off. Why all this yawping about everything, he asked. They could not grow a carrot without congratulating themselves on it.
    For example. There was a little store on the way downtown that he had got into the habit of visiting because he liked the sight of the bins along the sidewalk, filled with lumpy vegetables with a bit of the dirt still clinging to them. These reminded him of the vegetables in the stores when he was a child, and in the cellar of his own house. But the young people in the store, with their long wild hair and Indian headbands and their costumes of striped overalls and underwear with holes (what was that but a costume? No farmer in his right mind, no matter how poor, would appear in town in such a get-up), and their lilting, pious discussions of gardening and food, had disturbed him so much that he had stopped going in. They took too much praise on themselves. Bread had been baked before, turnips had been harvested before. This was artificial, in some way it was more artificial than the supermarkets.
    “I think they’re more boring than artificial,” Eugene said reasonably. “Like early Christians. They would have been boring.”
    “They won’t last. Their farming will fail.”
    “Possibly. But some people build their practical lives on a philosophy and are very successful. Hutterites. Mennonites.”
    “They have a different mentality,” said Mr. Lougheed. He was not unaware of how he sounded—stubborn, querulous, old.
    Now, when Eugene came all the way out of his meditating he stood up and stretched himself and asked if Mr. Lougheed would like some tea. Mr. Lougheed said yes. Eugene plugged in the electric kettle and moved about the room tidying things up. His room was neatly kept. He slept on a mattress on the floor, but he put sheets on it and the sheets were clean, he took them to the laundromat. His books were on plank-and-brick shelves or stacked on the floor and windowsills. He had hundreds of books, nearly all paperbacks, they were the chief thing in the room. Mr. Lougheed often gazed at their titles, with a sense of awe and