The Progress of Love

keep wanting it, still wanting it, hugging the water, gulping it down.
    Unless you jumped from a bridge.
    Could this be Violet? Could she be the person thinking these thoughts, reduced to such possibilities, her life turned upside down? She felt as if she was watching a play, and yet she was inside it, inside the play; she was in crazy danger. She closed her eyes and prayed rapidly—that, too, part of the play, but real: the first time in her life, she thought, that she had really prayed.
    Deliver me. Deliver me. Restore me to my rightful mind. Please. Please hurry. Please.
    And what she afterward believed that she learned on this train trip, which took less than two hours altogether, was that prayers are answered. Desperate prayers are answered. She would believe that she had never had an inkling before of what prayers could be, or the answers could be. Now something settled on her in the train, and bound her. Words settled on her, and were like cool, cool cloths, binding her.
    It was not your purpose to marry him.
    It was not the purpose of your life.
    Not to marry Trevor. Not the purpose of your life.
    Your life has a purpose, and you know what it is.
    To look after them. All of them, all of your family, and Dawn Rose in particular. To look after all of them, and Dawn Rose in particular .
    She was looking out the window, understanding this. The sun shone on the feathery June grass and the buttercups and toadflax and the old smooth rocks, on all the ragged countryside that she would never care for, and the word that came into her mind was “golden.”
    A golden opportunity.
    What for?
    You know what for. To give in. To give up. Care for them. Live for others.
    That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as well, and all her ideas of what her life should be, the weight, thepain, the humiliation would all go magically. And she could still be chosen. She could be like the June grass that the morning light passed through, and lit up like pink feathers or streaks of sunrise cloud. If she prayed enough and tried enough, that would be possible.
    People said that King Billy was never the same after his scare. Never really. They said that he got old, withered visibly. But he had been old, fairly old, when it all happened. He was a man who hadn’t married till he was over forty. He went on milking the cows, getting back and forth to the barn through a few more hard winters, then died of pneumonia.
    Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope had gone to live in town by that time. They didn’t go to high school. They got jobs in the shoe factory. Bonnie Hope became reasonably pretty and sociable, and she caught the eye of a salesman named Collard. They were married, and moved to Edmonton. Bonnie Hope had three daughters. She wrote proper letters home.
    Dawn Rose’s looks and manners improved, too. She was known in the shoe factory as a hard worker, a person not to be crossed, and one who could tell some good jokes if she was in the mood for it. She married, too—a farmer named Kemp, from the southern part of the county. No strange behavior or queerness or craziness ever surfaced in her again. She was said to have a blunt way with her—that was all. She had a son.
    Violet went on living with Aunt Ivie on the farm. She had a job in the municipal telephone office. She bought a car, so that she could drive back and forth to work. Couldn’t she have managed to write her teacher’s examinations another year? Perhaps so. Perhaps not. When she gave up, she gave up. She didn’t believe in trying to get back. She was good at her job.
    Aunt Ivie still prowled the yard and the orchard, looking for where some hens might have hidden their eggs. She wore her hat and her boots. She tried to remember to scrape her boots off at the door, so that Violet wouldn’t throw a tantrum.
    But Violet never did that anymore.
• • •
    One afternoon when she was off work, Violet drove over to see Dawn Rose. They were friendly—Dawn Rose’s husband liked Violet—there was no reason not to arrive unexpectedly.
    She found the doors of the house open. It was a warm summer day. Dawn Rose, who was very stout now, came out on the porch and said that it wasn’t a good day for visiting, she was varnishing the floors. And indeed this was so—Violet could smell the varnish. Dawn Rose didn’t offer lemonade or ask Violet to sit down on the porch. Just that day she was too