MILLICENT BELL
427
adulthood, surely a favorite fiction situation but never shown more fresh–
ly. To see how this proves so, read "Walker Brothers Cowboy," the earliest
story in this book, a tale of the Depression, of a child's ride through the
scruffy countryside with her door-to-door salesman father, and their visit,
almost by accident, at the house of one of his old girlfriends. Or "The
Turkey Season." In this story a sort ofJoycean epiphany comes to the four–
teen-year-old who has worked for a few vacation weeks as a turkey gutter.
Herb Abbott, the forenun, shows her how to take out the slippery entrails
"quickly and buoyantly," and wins her regard, perhaps even her sexual
interest, as he has already won the interest of the older women in the work
crew. Then something happens which she hardly understands; a new work–
er, a swaggering, vulgar youngster befriended by Herb, is suddenly fired by
the boss because he has behaved offensively to one of the women and per–
haps revealed that he is homosexual. The young girl thinks suddenly as she
watches Herb-was he ashamed that he had not stood up for Brian? She
cannot be sure if she understands that the man who has aroused her youth–
ful feelings is someone who loves men more than women. She only feels
the attraction he exercises, the awakening he has effected by the impossi–
ble prospect of intimacy with him. These are stories of classic form. Yet
even in these Munro suggests that there is something both alluring and
baffling, something uncertain in life. As father and child ride along in
"Walker Brothers Cowboy," they pass through "a landscape which has an
enchantment in it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are
looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you
will never know, with a\1 kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot
Imagme."
