Read Online Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro - Free Book Online Page A

wheel and thinks what a hard time she would have describing what he looks like. At a distance—in the car, waiting for her—he’s always been a bright blur, his presence a relief and a promise. Close up, he’s been certain separate areas—silky or toughened skin, wiry hair or shaved prickles, smells that are unique or shared with other men. But it’s chiefly an energy, a quality of his self that she can see in his blunt, short fingers or the tanned curve of his forehead. And even to call it energy is not exact—it’s more like the sap of him, rising from the roots, clear and on the move, filling him to bursting. That’s what she has set herself to follow—the sap, the current, under the skin, as if that were the one true thing.
    If she turned sideways now, she would see him for what he is—that tanned curved forehead, the receding fringe of curly brown hair, heavy eyebrows with a few gray hairs in them, deep-set light-colored eyes, and a mouth that enjoys itself, rather sulky and proud. A boyish man beginning to age—though he still feels light and wild on top of her, after Cornelius’s bulk settling down possessively, like a ton of blankets. A responsibility, Brenda feels then. Is she going to feel the same about this one?
    Neil turns the car around, he points it ready to drive back, and it’s time for her to get out and go across to the van. He takes his hands off the wheel with the engine running, flexes his fingers, then grabs the wheel hard again—hard enough, you’d think, to squeeze it to pulp. “Christ, don’t get out yet!” he says. “Don’t get out of the car!”
    She hasn’t even put a hand on the door, she hasn’t made a move to leave. Doesn’t he know what’s happening? Maybe you need the experience of a lot of married fights to know it. To know that what you think—and, for a while, hope—is the absolute end for you can turn out to be only the start of a new stage, a continuation. That’s what’s happening, that’s what has happened. He has lost some of his sheen for her; he may not get it back. Probably the same goes for her, with him. She feels his heaviness and anger and surprise. She feels that also in herself. She thinks that up till now was easy.

Meneseteung

    I
    Columbine, bloodroot
,
    And wild bergamot
,
    Gathering armfuls
,
    Giddily we go
.
    Offerings
the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author’s full name underneath: Almeda Joynt Roth. The local paper, the
Vidette
, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex—or for their predictable conjuncture. In the front of the book is a photograph, with the photographer’s name in one corner, and the date: 1865. The book was published later, in 1873.
    The poetess has a long face; a rather long nose; full, sombre dark eyes, which seem ready to roll down her cheeks like giant tears; a lot of dark hair gathered around her face in droopy rolls and curtains. A streak of gray hair plain to see, although she is, in this picture, only twenty-five. Not a pretty girl but the sort of woman who may age well, who probably won’t get fat. She wearsa tucked and braid-trimmed dark dress or jacket, with a lacy, floppy arrangement of white material—frills or a bow—filling the deep V at the neck. She also wears a hat, which might be made of velvet, in a dark color to match the dress. It’s the untrimmed, shapeless hat, something like a soft beret, that makes me see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity, in this young woman, whose long neck and forward-inclining head indicate as well that she is tall and slender and somewhat awkward. From the waist up, she looks like a young nobleman of another century. But perhaps it was the fashion.
    “In 1854,” she writes in the preface to her book, “my father brought us—my mother, my sister Catherine, my brother William, and me—to the wilds of Canada West (as it