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remembers, "I did not understand or care. I only wanted, but did not dare,
to touch the stiff soaked body, a fact of death." Then, this experience is
succeeded by another when they encounter a paranoid neighbor who
comes at them waving an axe. Terror subsides, the madman is soothed and
reassured, they visi t him in his filthy shack before returning home, the
child vowed to silence. "Like the children in fairy stories who have seen
their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that
our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh
from marvelous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility
and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after-like them, dazed
and powerful with secrets, I never said another word." Is this a story, some
readers will ask? Yes indeed, and a powerful one, in which the fact of death
is met and contained in a young mind.
A mother's image is a powerful presence in a number of Munro's best
stories, persisting in memory as the representative of a view of life the
daughter has rejected-a view based on literal religion, optimism,
Victorian sentimentality. Yet the narrator is never sure that her own ver–
sion of experience is a convincing replacement for these. "Friend of My
Youth" is the story of a story twice removed, that of a friend her mother
had made when she was a young school teacher in the Ottawa valley. She
had boarded with two sisters, one of whom married the other's fiancee;
the jilted girl continued to live and keep house for the couple until her sis–
ter died. When the man both of them loved then married his wife's nurse
instead of his sister-in-law, the narrator's mother saw her friend as a saint–
ly martyr to selflessness. But the narrator has her own ideas. She calls her
mother's heroine a "Presbyterian witch" made evil by "turning away from
sex." In "The Progress of Love," another-or perhaps the same-narrator
ponders old family stories, like the one that her grandmother had wanted
to hang herself to punish her husband for his infidelity. Standing on a chair
wi th the noose around her neck she had sent her little girl-the narrator's
mother-to fetch her husband. But, years later, another version of the
events is offered by the narrator's aunt; the suicide attempt had been a fake,
the rope had only been thrown, without being tied, over the beam. Yet the
writer-narrator understands in her post-modernist way that truth and sto–
ries may be indistinguishable. She admits that she herself cannot resist
fictionizing a family legend about
her
mother-how the grown and mar–
ried woman who had been the child messenger in the first story burned
the three thousand dollars that finally came to her as a legacy from her
father. Imagining the scene, the story-teller pictures her own father stand–
ing by respectfully, supportively, as the bills were tossed one by one into
the stove. It does not matter that he will later say he had known nothing
about his wife's grand gesture. "It is hard for me to believe that I made that
