#62 A HOUSE WITH SHARED MEMORIES
AUTHOR ALICE MUNRO & MY GREAT GRANDPARENTS
This week Canadian author Alice Munro, aged 92, died. In 2013, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for being "a master of the contemporary short story".
"Author's Value went beyond the awards she won" Toronto Star, May 15, 2024 https://torontostarreplica.pressreader.com/article/281565180862261.
"Munro found a rich world in Ontario" Toronto Star. May 15, 2024. https://torontostarreplica.pressreader.com/article/281767044325173.
"Alice Munro immortalized Huron County's tiny towns and inhabitants. It's changed but slowly" Toronto Star, May 15 2024. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/alice-munro-immortalized-huron-countys-tiny-towns-and-inhabitants-its-changed-but-slowly/article_366dc1aa-12dd-11ef-9eff-97380a959374.html
Although I am not related to Alice Munro, I feel a very special connection as she grew up in Lower Wingham in the farmhouse originally built by my Netterfield great-great grandparents. Alice often wrote about growing up on this farm and about life in a small town.
Some of Alice Munro's stories are set in a fictional Netterfield Township. And she wrote this short story about a Mrs. Netterfield (undoubtably my great-great Grandmother Huldah Netterfield). Huldah and William had eight children, including twin daughters born in 1875. One of these girls died at age 1, but the other. Emma, eventually moved to Oregon and wrote poetry as a hobby
"A Childhood Visitation" by Alice Munro A short story in Alice Munro Dear Life. Toronto: Douglas Gibson Books, 2012
Our house was of a decent size. We didn’t know exactly when it had
been built but it had to be less than a century old, because 1858 was the year
the first settler had stopped at a place called Bodmin—which had now
disappeared—built himself a raft and come down the river to clear trees from
the land that later became a whole village. That early village soon had a
sawmill and a hotel and three churches and a school, the same school that was
my first, and so dreaded by me. Then a bridge was built across the river, and
it began to dawn on people how much more convenient it would be to live over on
the other side, on higher ground, and the original settlement dwindled away to
the disreputable, and then just peculiar, half-village that I have spoken of.
Our house would
not have been one of the first houses in that early settlement, because it was
covered with brick, and they were all just wood, but it had probably gone up
not long afterward. It turned its back on the village, facing west across
slightly down sloping fields to the hidden curve where the river made what was
called the Big Bend. Beyond the river was a patch of dark evergreen trees,
probably cedar but too far away to tell.
Sometimes
my mother and I talked, mostly about her younger days. I seldom objected now to
her way of looking at things. Even her quavery voice, which surfaced especially
when she spoke about how sacred sex was because it brought us little children,
was something I could now endure or pass over.
Several
times, she told me a story that had to do with the house that now belonged to
the war veteran named Waitey Streets—the man who marvelled at the length of
time I had to stay in school. The story was not about him but about someone who
had lived in that house long before he did, a crazy old woman named Mrs.
Netterfield. Mrs. Netterfield had had her groceries delivered, as we all did,
after ordering them over the phone. One day, my mother said, the grocer forgot
to put in her butter, or she forgot to order it, and when the delivery boy was
opening the back of the truck she noticed the mistake and became upset. But she
was prepared, in a way. She had her hatchet with her and she raised it as if to
punish the grocery boy—though, of course, it wasn’t his fault—and he ran up to
the driver’s seat and pulled off without even closing the back doors.
Some things
about this story were puzzling, though I didn’t think about them at the time
and neither did my mother. How could the old woman have been sure already that
the butter was missing? And why would she have been equipped with a hatchet
before she even knew there was any fault to find? Did she carry it with her, in
case of provocations in general? My mother told me that Mrs. Netterfield was
said to have been a lady when she was younger.
There was
another story about Mrs. Netterfield that had more interest because it featured
me and took place in our house.
It was a
beautiful day in the fall. I had been set out to sleep in my baby carriage on
the little patch of new lawn. My father was away for the afternoon—perhaps
helping out his father on the old farm, as he sometimes did—and my mother was
doing some clothes washing at the sink. For a first baby there was a lot of
knitwear, ribbons, things to be washed carefully by hand in soft water. There
was no window in front of my mother as she washed and wrung things out at the
sink. To get a look outside, you had to cross the room to the north window.
That gave you a view of the driveway, which led from the mailbox to the house.
Why did my
mother decide to leave her washing and wringing out in order to look at the
driveway? She was not expecting any company. My father wasn’t late. Possibly
she had asked him to get something at the grocery store, something she needed
for whatever she was making for supper, and she was wondering if he would be
home in time for her to make it. She was a fairly fancy cook in those days—more
so, in fact, than her mother-in-law and the other women in my father’s family
thought necessary. When you looked at the cost, as they would say.
Or it may
have had nothing to do with supper but have involved a pattern he was picking
up, or a piece of material for a new dress she wanted to make for herself.
She never
said afterward why she had done it.
Misgivings
about my mother’s cooking were not the only problem with my father’s family.
There must have been some discussion about her clothes, too. I think of how she
used to wear an afternoon dress, even if she was only washing things at the
sink. She took a half-hour nap after the noon meal and always put on a
different dress when she got up. When I looked at photographs later on, I
thought that the fashions of the time had not been becoming to her, or to
anybody. The dresses were shapeless, and bobbed hair did not suit my mother’s
full, soft face. But this would not have been the objection of my father’s
female relatives, who lived close enough to keep tabs on her. Her fault was
that she did not look like what she was. She did not look as if she had been
brought up on a farm, or as if she intended to remain on one.
She did not
see my father’s car coming down the lane. Instead, she saw the old woman, Mrs.
Netterfield. Mrs. Netterfield must have walked over, from her own house. The
same house where, much later on, I would see the one-armed man who teased me,
and just the one time his bob-haired wife, at the pump. The house from which,
long before I knew anything about her, the crazy woman had pursued the delivery
boy with a hatchet, on account of some butter.
My mother
must have seen Mrs. Netterfield at least a few times before she noticed her
walking down our lane. Maybe they had never spoken. It’s possible, though, that
they had. My mother might have made a point of it, even if my father had told
her that it was not necessary. It might even lead to trouble, was what he
probably would have said. My mother had sympathy for people who were weird, as
long as they were decent.
But now she
was not thinking of friendliness or decency. Now she was running out the
kitchen door to grab me out of my baby carriage. She left the carriage and the
covers where they were and ran back into the house, locking the kitchen door
behind her. The front door she did not need to worry about—it was always
locked.
But there
was a problem, wasn’t there, with the kitchen door? As far as I know, it never
had a proper lock. There was just a custom, at night, of pushing one of the
kitchen chairs against that door and tilting it with the chair back under the
doorknob, in such a way that anybody pushing it to get in would have made a
dreadful clatter. A fairly haphazard way of maintaining safety, it seems to me,
and not in keeping, either, with the fact that my father had a revolver in the
house, in a desk drawer. Also, as was natural in the house of a man who
regularly had to shoot horses, there was a rifle and a couple of shotguns.
Unloaded, of course.
Did my
mother think of any weapon, once she had got the doorknob wedged in place? Had
she ever picked up a gun, or loaded one, in her life?
Did it
cross her mind that the old woman might just be paying a neighborly visit? I
don’t think so. There would have been a difference in the walk, a determination
in the approach of the woman coming down the lane.
It is possible that my mother
prayed, but she did not mention it.
She knew
that there was an investigation of the blankets in the carriage, because, just
before she pulled down the kitchen-door blind, she saw one of those blankets
being flung out to land on the ground. After that, she did not try to get the
blinds down on any other window, but stayed with me in her arms where she could
not be seen.
There was
no decent knock on the door. No pushing at the chair, either. No banging or
rattling. My mother was in a hiding place by the dumbwaiter, hoping against
hope that the quiet meant that the woman had changed her mind and gone home.
Not so. She
was walking around the house, taking her time, and stopping at every downstairs
window. The storm windows, of course, were not on yet. She could press her face
against every pane of glass. The blinds were all up as high as they could go,
because of the fine day. The woman was not very tall, but she did not have to
stretch to see inside.
How did my
mother know this? It was not as if she were running around with me in her arms,
hiding behind one piece of furniture after another, peering out, distraught
with terror, to see the staring eyes and maybe a wild grin.
She stayed
by the dumbwaiter. What else could she do?
There was
the cellar, of course. The windows were too small for anybody to get through
them. But there was no inside hook on the cellar door. And it would have been
more horrible, somehow, to be trapped down there in the dark, if the woman did
finally push her way into the house and came down the cellar steps.
There was
also the upstairs, but to get there my mother would have had to cross the big
room—that big room where the beatings would take place in the future, but which
was not so bad after the stairs were closed in.
I don’t
know when my mother first told me this story, but it seems to me that that was
where the earlier versions stopped—with Mrs. Netterfield pressing her face and
hands against the glass while my mother hid. But in later versions there was an
end to just looking. Impatience or anger took hold and then the rattling and
the banging came. No mention of yelling. The old woman may not have had the
breath to do it. Or perhaps she forgot what it was she’d come for, once her
strength ran out.
Anyway, she
gave up; that was all she did. After she had made her tour of the windows and
doors, she went away. My mother finally got the nerve to look around and
concluded that Mrs. Netterfield had gone somewhere else.
She did
not, however, take the chair away from the doorknob until my father came home.
I don’t
mean to imply that my mother spoke of this often. It was not part of the
repertoire that I got to know and, for the most part, found interesting: her
struggle to get to high school; the school where she taught, in Alberta, and
where the children arrived on horseback; the friends she had at Normal School;
the innocent tricks that were played.
I could
always make out what she was saying. I was her interpreter when other people
couldn’t, and sometimes I was full of misery when I had to repeat elaborate
phrases or what she thought were jokes, and I could see that people were dying
to get away.
The
visitation of old Mrs. Netterfield, as she called it, was not something I was
ever required to talk about. But I must have known about it for a long time. I
remember asking her at some point if she knew what had become of the woman
afterward.
“They took
her away,” she said. “She wasn’t left to die alone.”
After I was
married, and had moved to Vancouver, I still got the weekly paper that was
published in the town where I grew up. I think somebody, maybe my father and
his second wife, made sure that I had a subscription. Often, I barely looked at
it, but one time, when I did, I saw the name Netterfield. It was not the name
of someone who was living in the town at present but had apparently been the
maiden name of a woman in Portland, Oregon, who had written a letter to the
paper. This woman, like me, still had a subscription to her home-town paper,
and she had written a poem about her childhood there.
I know a grassy
hillside
Above a river
clear
A place of peace
and pleasure
A memory very
dear—
There
were several verses, and as I read I began to understand that she was talking
about the same river flats that I had thought belonged to me.
“The
lines I am enclosing were written from memories of that old hillside,” she
said. “If they are worthy of a little space in your time-honoured paper, I
thank you.”
The sun upon the
river
With ceaseless
sparkles play
And over on the
other bank
Are blossoms
wild and gay—
That was
our bank. My bank. Another verse was about a stand of maples. I believe she was
remembering it wrong—they were elms, which had all died of Dutch Elm disease by
then.
The rest of
the letter made things clearer. The woman said that her father—his name had
been Netterfield—had bought a piece of land from the government in 1883, in
what was later called the Lower Town. The land ran down to the Maitland River.
Across the
Iris-bordered stream
The shade of
maples spread
And, on the
river’s watery field,
White geese, in
flocks are fed
She had
left out, just as I would have done, the way the spring got muddied up and
soiled all around by horses’ hooves. And manure.
In fact, I had made up some poems myself, of a very similar nature, though they were lost now, and maybe had never been written down. Verses that commended Nature, then were a bit hard to wind up. I would have composed them right around the time that I was being so intolerant of my mother, and my father was whaling the unkindness out of me. Or beating the tar out of me, as people would cheerfully say back then.
This woman said that she was
born in 1876. She had spent her youth, until she was married, in her father’s
house. It was where the town ended and the farmlands began, and it had a sunset
view.
Our house.
Is it
possible that my mother never knew this, never knew that our house was where
the Netterfield family had lived and that the old woman was looking in the
windows of what had been her own house?
It is
possible. In my old age, I have become interested enough to bother with
records, and the tedious business of looking things up, and I have found that
several different families owned that house between the time that the
Netterfields sold it and the time that my parents moved in. You might wonder
why it had been disposed of, when that woman still had years to live. Had she
been left a widow, short of money? Who knows? And who was it who came and took
her away, as my mother said? Perhaps it was her daughter, the same woman who
wrote poems and lived in Oregon. Perhaps that daughter, grown and distant, was
who she was looking for in the baby carriage. Just after my mother had grabbed
me up, as she said, for dear life.
The
daughter lived not so far away from me, in my adult life. I could have written
to her, maybe visited. If I had not been so busy with my own young family and
my own invariably torn-up writing, if I had not been so severe, in any case,
toward such literary efforts and sentiments as hers. But she might not have
been happy to hear what I would have told her. The person I would really have
liked to talk to then was my mother, who was no longer available.
P.S. While Huldah did lose an infant twin daughter, I can find no evidence to support any more of Alice's short story. When William died in 1904, the farm was sold to a Homuth relative and Huldah would live with her daughters in Wingham and in North Dakota. Huldah died in North Dakota in 1918 of Spanish flu, shortly after she arrived for a visit with her youngest daughter, Emma. Alice Munro's parents bought the Huron County farm in 1927, so the dates in this story are confusing and don't seem to jive. Nonetheless, it's great to have this special connection to an amazing Canadian writer,
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