Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

not looking at anything. What was he thinking? It bothered me to wonder. I didn’t like to think of him being still there, underneath, looking out, through all the things, the stupidity and ugliness, that had been put onto him and accepted by him and were so firmly believed in it would not matter now if they were really there at all. I did not think that he was like me, I did not go that far, I was just afraid of him in a way it had not occurred to me to be afraid before.
    His eyes were the color of a cat’s. They were round, clear, close together.
    I opened my scribbler in the middle, so that I could detach a page without tearing anything, and I passed this back to him along with a sharpened pencil. He did not reach to take them. I laid them on his desk. He did not thank me or take any notice, but I saw later that he was at least using the pencil on the paper—whether to copy from the board or draw pictures or just make wire-rolls of O’s, I have no idea.
    That was the mistake, the thing that brought me to his attention, as well as the accident—no accident, it seemed to me!—of our living on the same road. I needed to be taught a lesson. He may have thought that. For presumption. For condescension. Or he may have seen the glimmer of a novel, interesting, surprising weakness.

    The snowbanks were high, the road went like a tunnel between. Under the fresh snow were boulders of old snow, hard and gray. Ribbons of dog urine ran down by the shoveled paths. Stump Troy’s drive was kept plowed, and for whose convenience, asked Robina. She asked most things in a voice that already knew the answer. I walked with a knife in my pocket, a paring knife stolen from Robina’s kitchen. I took my mitten off to touch it. Hidden by the snowbank, in his father’s driveway, once a week, twice a week, I never knew when, Howard Troy was waiting for me. He would step out as if to go in front of me, to block me in the narrow road.
    Fuck
    You want to fuck
    I walked past him with my head down and my breath drawn, just like somebody walking through a wall of flame. It was important not to look at him, not to hurry, and to feel the blade. I never thought that he could come after me. If he did not move at once, he would not move at all. Danger was in the aura of the word.
    All that’s beyond explaining now. I hear young children saying lazily, “What the fuck?” as they ride past on their bicycles. I hear a father yelling, “Get the fucking lawn mower off the drive!” It used to be a word that could be thrown against you, that could bring you to an absolute stop. Humiliation was promised, but was perhaps already there, was contained in the hearing, the being stopped, having to acknowledge. Shame could choke you. I mean that. Not at the moment when the whole point was to keep safe and get past but later, what quantities of greasy shame, what indigestible bad secrets. The vulnerability which is in itself a shame. We are shamefully made.
    I would never have told anybody, never asked anybody’s help. I would have borne any danger, risked any violence, or final indignity, rather than repeat, or admit what was said to me. I saw this as being out of reach of all help, all authority. I believed of course that this could only be said to me, that Howard Troy would understand how he could threaten me, that it was a sign. And so it had to be concealed and blotted out, stamped out, quick, quick, but I could never get it all, the knowledge, the memory, it was running underground and spurting out at another place in my mind.

    Robina used to take me home with her. We walked through the bush, behind where the airport is now, a mile, or maybe a mile and a half, to that little farm with stone-piles in the middle of the fields. We went in the wintertime, too, and Robina showed me what she said were wolf tracks. She knew of a case where a baby had been put in a sleigh, with a dog to pull it, and the dog had heard wolves howling, in the bush, and taken off to join them, with the baby still attached. Then when the dog got to where the wolves were it turned wolf too, and they all together pulled the baby out and ate it.
    Walking through the bush Robina increased in authority, or took on authority of another kind than she had in my mother’s kitchen, where she went under the inadequate altogether misleading title of maid. Her tall flat body seemed to loosen, to swing like a door on its hinges, controlled, but dangerous if you got in the way. She was