The Progress of Love

wilderness—no matter. He kicked them off. He was a fighter. He had got that job because he was a fighter.
    Another story, from further back in his life. He had gone to a dance, when he was a young man, up on the Snow Road, where he came from. Some other young fellows who were there had insulted him, and he had to take their insults because he did not know a thing about fighting. But after that he got some lessons from an old prizefighter, a real one, who was living in Sharbot Lake. Another night, another dance—the same thing as before. The same kind of insults. Except that this time King Billy lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.
    Lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.
    No more insults of that kind anywhere up in that country.
    No more.
    (The insults had to do with being a bastard. He didn’t say so, but Violet figured it out from her mother’s muttering. “Your daddy didn’t have no people ,” Aunt Ivie said, in her dark, puzzled, grudging way. “He never did. He just didn’t have no people at all.”)
    Violet was five years older than her sister Dawn Rose, and six years older than Bonnie Hope. Those two were thick as thieves, but mainly docile. They were redheads, like King Billy. Dawn Rose was chubby and ruddy and broad-faced. Bonnie Hope was small-boned and big-headed, with hair that grew at first in wisps and patches, so that she looked like a wobbly young bird. Violet was dark-haired, and tall for her age, and strong like her mother. She had a long, handsome face and dark blue eyes that looked at firstto be black. Later on, when Trevor Auston was in love with her, he had some nice things to say about the color of her eyes matching up with her name.
    Violet’s mother, as well as her father, had an odd name, being called Aunt Ivie most of the time even by her own children. That was because she was the youngest of a large family. She had plenty of people, though they didn’t often come to see her. All the old or precious things in the house—those things in the parlor, and a certain humpbacked trunk, and some tarnished spoons—came from Aunt Ivie’s family, who had a farm on the shores of White Lake. Aunt Ivie had stayed there so long, unmarried, that her nieces’ and nephews’ name for her became everybody’s name, and her daughters, too, chose it over Mama.
    Nobody ever thought she would marry. She said so herself. And when she did marry the little bold redheaded man who looked so odd beside her, people said she didn’t seem to stand the change too well. She lost those first boy babies, and she didn’t take too happily to the responsibility of running a house. She liked to work outside, hoeing in the garden or splitting wood, as she had always done at home. She milked the cows and cleaned out the stable and took care of the hens. It was Violet, getting older, who took over the housework.
    By the time she was ten years old, Violet had become quite house-proud and dictatorial, in a sporadic way. She would spend all Saturday scouring and waxing, then yell and throw herself on the couch and grind her teeth in a rage when people tracked in mud and manure.
    “That girl will grow up, and she won’t have nothing but stumps in her mouth, and serve her right for her temper,” Aunt Ivie said, as if she was talking about some neighbor child. Aunt Ivie was usually the one who had tracked in the mud and ruined the floor.
    Another Saturday there would be baking, and making up recipes. One whole summer, Violet was trying to invent a drink like Coca-Cola, which would be famous and delicious and make them a fortune. She tried out on herself and her sisters all sorts of combinationsof berry juice, vanilla, bottled fruit essences, and spices. Sometimes they were all off in the long grass in the orchard, throwing up. The younger girls usually did what Violet told them to, and believed what she said. One day, the butcher’s man arrived to buy the young calves, and Violet told Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope that sometimes the butcher’s man was not satisfied with the meat on the calves and went after juicy little children to make them into steaks and chops and sausages. She told this out of the blue and for her own amusement, as far as she could recall later on when she made things into stories. The little girls tried to hide themselves in the haymow and King Billy heard their commotion and chased them out. They told what Violet had said and King Billy said they should be smacked for