Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online Page B

Christmas. He was homesick. He bought presents for his father and his sisters. A watch was what he got for the old man. That and his ticket took every cent he had.
    A few days after Christmas he was out in the barn, putting down hay, and his father came looking for him.
    â€œHave you got any money?” his father wanted to know.
    My father said he hadn’t.
    â€œWell, do you think then me and your sisters are going to spend all summer and fall looking up the arseholes of cows, for you to come home and sponge off us in the winter?”
    That was the second time my father left home.
    He shook with laughter in the hospital bed, telling me. “Looking up the arseholes of cows!”
    Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow.

    â€œIt was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That’s the peasant thinking for you.”
    â€œMaybe Tolstoy would agree with them,” I said. “Gandhi too.” “Drat Tolstoy and Gandhi. They never worked when they were young.”
    â€œMaybe not.”
    â€œBut it’s a wonder how those people had the courage once, to get them over here. They left everything. Turned their backs on everything they knew and came out here. Bad enough to face the North Atlantic, then this country that was all wilderness. The work they did, the things they went through. When your great-grandfather came to the Huron Tract he had his brother with him, and his wife and her mother, and his two little kids. Straightaway his brother was killed by a falling tree. Then the second summer his wife and her mother and the two little boys got the cholera, and the grandmother and both the children died. So he and his wife were left alone, and they went on clearing their farm and started up another family. I think the courage got burnt out of them. Their religion did them in, and their upbringing. How they had to toe the line. Also their pride. Pride was what they had when they had no more gumption.”
    â€œNot you,” I said. “You ran away.” “I didn’t run far.”
    I N 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 whichwere 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