The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [18]
“Not you,” I said. “You ran away.” “I didn’t run far.”
IN THEIR OLD AGE the aunts rented the farm, but continued to live on it. Some got cataracts in their eyes, some got arthritis, but they stayed on and looked after each other, and died there, all except the last one, Aunt Lizzie, who had to go to the County Home. They lived a long time. They were a hardier clan, after all, than the Chaddeleys, none of whom reached seventy. (Cousin Iris died within six months of seeing Alaska.) I used to send a card at Christmas, and I would write on it: to all my aunts, love and a Merry Christmas. I did that because I could not remember which of them were dead and which were alive. I had seen their gravestone when my mother was buried. It was a modest pillar with all their names and dates of birth on it, a couple of dates of death filled in (Jennet, of course, and probably Susan), the rest left blank. By now more dates would be finished.
They would send me a card too. A wreath or a candle on it, and a few sentences of information.
A good winter so far, not much snow. We are all well except Clara’s eyes not getting any better. Best wishes of the Season.
I thought of them having to go out and buy the card, go to the Post Office, buy the stamp. It was an act of faith for them to write and send those sentences to any place as unimaginable as Vancouver, to someone of their own blood leading a life so strange to them, someone who would read the card with such a feeling of bewilderment and unexplainable guilt. It did make me guilty and bewildered to think that they were still there, still attached to me. But any message from home, in those days, could let me know I was a traitor.
In the hospital, I asked my father if any of his sisters had ever had a boyfriend.
“Not what you could call that. No. There used to be a joke about Mr. Black. They used to say he built his shack there because he was sweet on Susan. I don’t think so. He was just a one-legged fellow that built a shack down in a corner of the field across the road, and he died there. All before my time. Susan was the oldest, you know, she was twenty or twenty-one years old when I was born.”
“So, you don’t think she had a romance?”
“I wouldn’t think so. It was just a joke. He was an Austrian or some such thing. Black was just what he was called, or maybe he called himself. She wouldn’t have been let near him. He was buried right there under a big boulder. My father tore the shack down and used the lumber to build our chicken-house.”
I remembered that, I remembered the boulder. I remembered sitting on the ground watching my father who was fixing fence-posts. I asked him if this could be a true memory.
“Yes it could. I used to go out and fix the fences when the old man was sick in bed. You wouldn’t have been very big.”
“I was sitting watching you, and you said to me, do you know what that big stone is? That’s a gravestone. I don’t remember asking you whose. I must have thought it was a joke.”
“No joke. That would be it. Mr. Black was buried underneath there. That reminds me of another thing. You know I told you, how the grandmother and the little boys died? They had the three bodies in the house at the one time. And they had nothing to make the shrouds out of but the lace curtains they had brought from the old country. I guess it would be a hasty business when it was cholera and in the summer. So that was what they buried them in.”
“Lace curtains.”
My father looked shy, as if he had given me a present, and said brusquely, “Well, that’s the kind