Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

doing this very long when a window was wrenched up and a loud, unladylike, in fact alcoholic, voice called out to him.
    “This is Musgrave property!”
    That was Miss Musgrave, who was crazy, but in a familiar way. In his drugstore days he had known ladies like her, coming in with their lipstick crooked and their hats too, diddling with their prescriptions, wheedling, lying, taking offense. Miss Musgrave was long dead now and he almost missed such familiar craziness. He was left with the present crew, and it was beyond him, always beyond him, to judge whether they were crazy or not. Even Eugene. Most of all Eugene.
    People had argued with him that he ought to move out of here. Why did he not? He did not like apartment buildings, he said, he did not like heights, did not want the bother of moving. There was more to it than that. Whatever he learned here, he was not sorry to have learned. He listened to his contemporaries talking and he thought that their brains would crack like eggs, if they knew one-tenth of what there was to know. He could not finally regret having seen the performance of Rex and Calla, or having read the newspaper that Rover sold, and had thrust at him one day for a joke. He read every word of it though the blurred type hurt his eyes. The bad type, the spelling, some blotched, possibly obscene drawings, as well as the needs admitted to in the want ads and an editorial which disagreed with the city council—referred to throughout as shit-artists and ass-holes—worried him along the same sore and exasperated nerve; but he kept on, with an odd apprehension of a message that could flash out almost too quick for the eye to catch it, like some commercials he had heard about on television.
    But this performance of Eugene’s was one thing he did not mean to watch. It offended him too much, it made him too uneasy. He made his breakfast, which was as usual two slices of brown toast, a boiled egg and tea. He did not hear Eugene, and supposed he had gone out earlier. While he ate he remembered a feeling he had had in the back yard, while he was holding the bird and thinking of the chiffon-hatted lady and the field of mustard and his parents. He had been remembering something else, from that, and now he could tell that he had been remembering his dream. He knew that he must have dreamed it again last night, and he seemed to have no choice but to sit and try to see which part of it he could call to mind.
    This dream, which he had dreamed on and off since middle age, had its start in a real incident that had happened when he was a child, and living on the farm, with his older brother Walter and his sister Mary who was to die of diphtheria when she was eighteen. In the middle of the night he had heard the phone ringing, three long rings. Each family along the road had its own number of rings—their own, which Mr. Lougheed still remembered, was two longs and two shorts—but three long rings was a general alert, a signal for everyone on the line to pick up their phone. Mr. Lougheed’s father, in the kitchen directly below the boys’ bedroom, shouted into the phone. He never did accept the principle of the telephone, and seemed to rely on the strength of his voice to carry over whatever distance was necessary. With the shouting they were all roused and came down to see their father putting on his boots and jacket—the time of year was May, springtime, but the nights were still cool—and, though Mr. Lougheed could not remember what was said, he knew that his father had told them something about where he was going and that his brother Walter asked and received permission to go along, just as he himself asked and was refused, on the grounds that he was too young and could not keep up.
    They were going to chase a mad boy, a young man, really, nineteen or twenty years old, who had lived on the next line of the township. Mr. Lougheed could not recall what information his father gave out about this boy beyond his name, which was Frank McArter. Frank McArter was the youngest of a large, poor, decent family of Catholics. He had been taken away from home for a while after a series of fits but had returned cured, and was living there quietly taking care of his old parents, now that his brothers and sisters were gone. Mr. Lougheed did not think his father mentioned at the time that the reason all the men were called out to track down Frank McArter was that earlier that evening, probably before dark (and before milking,