royal beatings

royal beating. that was flo’s promise. you are going to get one royal beating.

the word royal lolled on flo’s tongue, took on trappings. rose had a need to picture things, topursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking thisthreat to heart she pondered: how is a beating royal? she came up with a tree-lined avenue, acrowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. someone knelt, and the bloodcame leaping out like banners. an occasion both savage and splendid. in real life they didn’tapproach such dignity and it was only flo who tried to supply the event with some high air ofnecessity and regret. rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.

her father was king of the royal beatings. those flo gave never amounted to much; they werequick cuffs and slaps dashed off while her attention remained elsewhere. you get out of my road,she would say. you mind your own business. you take that look off your face.

they lived behind a store in hanratty, ontario. there were four of them: rose, her father, flo,rose’s young half brother brian. the store was really a house, bought by rose’s father andmother when they married and set up here in the furniture and upholstery repair business. hermother could do upholstery. from both parents rose should have inherited clever hands, a quicksympathy with materials, an eye for the nicest turns of mending, but she hadn’t. she was clumsy,and when something broke she couldn’t wait to sweep it up and throw it away.

her mother had died. she said to rose’s father during the afternoon, “i have a feeling that is sohard to describe. it’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.” she died before night,she had a blood clot on her lung. rose was a baby in a basket at the time, so of course could notremember any of this. she heard it from flo, who must have heard it from her father. flo camealong soon afterwards, to take over rose in the basket, marry her father, open up the front room tomake a grocery store. rose, who had known the house only as a store, who had known only flofor a mother, looked back on the sixteen or so months her parents spent here as an orderly, fargentler and more ceremonious time, with little touches of affluence. she had nothing to go on butsome egg cups her mother had bought, with a pattern of vines and birds on them, delicately drawnas if with red ink; the pattern was beginning to wear away. no books or clothes or pictures of hermother remained. her father must have got rid of them, or else flo would. flo’s only story abouther mother, the one about her death, was oddly grudging. flo liked the details of a death: thethings people said, the way they protested or tried to get out of bed or swore or laughed (some didthose things), but when she said that rose’s mother mentioned a hard-boiled egg in her chest shemade the comparison sound slightly foolish, as if her mother really was the kind of person whomight think you could swallow an egg whole.

her father had a shed out behind the store, where he worked at his furniture repairing andrestoring. he caned chair seats and backs, mended wicker-work, filled cracks, put legs back on, allmost admirably and skillfully and cheaply. that was his pride: to startle people with such finework, such moderate, even ridiculous charges. during the depression people could not afford topay more, perhaps, but he continued the practice through the war, through the years of prosperityafter the war, until he died. he never discussed with flo what he charged or what was owing.

after he died she had to go out and unlock the shed and take all sorts of scraps of paper and tornenvelopes from the big wicked-looking hooks that were his files. many of these she found werenot accounts or receipts at all but records of the weather, bits of information about the garden,things he had been moved to write down.

ate new potatoes 25th june. record.

dark day, 1880’s, nothing supernatural.

clouds of ash from forest fires.

aug 16, 1938. giant thunderstorm in evng. lightning str pres. church, turberrytwp. will of god?

scald strawberries to remove acid.

all things are alive. spinoza.

flo thought spinoza must be some new vegetable he planned to grow, like broccoli or eggplant.

he would often try some new thing. she showed the scrap of paper to rose and asked, did sheknow what spinoza was? rose did know, or had an idea-she was in her teens by that time-butshe replied that she did not. she had reached an age where she thought she could not stand toknow any more, about her father, or about flo; she pushed any discovery aside withembarrassment and dread.

there was a stove in the shed, and many rough shelves covered with cans of paint and varnish,shellac and turpentine, jars of soaking brushes and also some dark sticky bottles of coughmedicine. why should a man who coughed constantly, whose lungs took in a whiff of gas in thewar (called, in rose’s earliest childhood, not the first, but the last, war) spend all his daysbreathing fumes of paint and turpentine? at the time, such questions were not asked as often asthey are now. on the bench outside flo’s store several old men from the neighborhood satgossiping, drowsing, in the warm weather, and some of these old men coughed all the time too.

the fact is they were dying, slowly and discreetly, of what was called, without any particularsense of grievance, “the foundry disease.” they had worked all their lives at the foundry in town,and now they sat still, with their wasted yellow faces, coughing, chuckling, drifting into aimlessobscenity on the subject of women walking by, or any young girl on a bicycle.

from the shed came not only coughing, but speech, a continual muttering, reproachful orencouraging, usually just below the level at which separate words could be made out. slowingdown when her father was at a tricky piece of work, taking on a cheerful speed when he was doingsomething less demanding, sandpapering or painting. now and then some words would breakthrough and hang clear and nonsensical on the air. when he realized they were out, there would bea quick bit of coverup coughing, a swallowing, an alert, unusual silence.

“macaroni, pepperoni, botticelli, beans-”

what could that mean? rose used to repeat such things to herself. she could never ask him. theperson who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same,though they seemed to occupy the same space. it would be the worst sort of taste to acknowledgethe person who was not supposed to be there; it would not be forgiven. just the same, she loiteredand listened.

the cloud-capped towers, she heard him say once.

“the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces.”

that was like a hand clapped against rose’s chest, not to hurt, but astonish her, to take herbreath away. she had to run then, she had to get away. she knew that was enough to hear, andbesides, what if he caught her? it would be terrible.

this was something the same as bathroom noises. flo had saved up, and had a bathroom put in,but there was no place to put it except in a corner of the kitchen. the door did not fit, the wallswere only beaverboard. the result was that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shiftingof a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. they were allfamiliar with each other’s nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in theirintimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements. and they were all most prudish people. so noone ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. the person creating thenoises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.

they lived in a poor part of town. there was hanratty and west hanratty, with the river flowingbetween them. this was west hanratty. in hanratty the social structure ran from doctors anddentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in west hanrattyit ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casualbootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. rose thought of her own family as straddlingthe river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. west hanratty was where the store was andthey were, on the straggling tail end of the main street. across the road from them was ablacksmith shop, boarded up about the time the war started, and a house that had been anotherstore at one time. the salada tea sign had never been taken out of the front window; it remainedas a proud and interesting decoration though there was no salada tea for sale inside. there wasjust a bit of sidewalk, too cracked and tilted for roller-skating, though rose longed for roller skatesand often pictured herself whizzing along in a plaid skirt, agile and fashionable. there was onestreet light, a tin flower; then the amenities gave up and there were dirt roads and boggy places,front-yard dumps and strange-looking houses. what made the houses strange-looking were theattempts to keep them from going completely to ruin. with some the attempt had never beenmade. these were gray and rotted and leaning over, falling into a landscape of scrub hollows, frogponds, cattails and nettles. most houses, however, had been patched up with tarpaper, a few freshshingles, sheets of tin, hammered-out stovepipes, even cardboard. this was, of course, in the daysbefore the war, days of what would later be legendary poverty, from which rose would remembermostly low-down things-serious-looking anthills and wooden steps, and a cloudy, interesting,problematical light on the world.

there was a long truce between flo and rose in the beginning. rose’s nature wasgrowing like a prickly pineapple, but slowly, and secretly, hard pride and skepticism overlapping,to make something surprising even to herself. before she was old enough to go to school, andwhile brian was still in the baby carriage, rose stayed in the store with both of them-flo sittingon the high stool behind the counter, brian asleep by the window; rose knelt or lay on the widecreaky floorboards working with crayons on pieces of brown paper too torn or irregular to be usedfor wrapping.

people who came to the store were mostly from the houses around. some country people cametoo, on their way home from town, and a few people from hanratty, who walked across the bridge.

some people were always on the main street, in and out of stores, as if it was their duty to bealways on display and their right to be welcomed. for instance, becky tyde.

becky tyde climbed up on flo’s counter, made room for herself beside an open tin of crumblyjamfilled cookies.

“are these any good?” she said to flo, and boldly began to eat one. “when are you going togive us a job, flo?”

“you could go and work in the butcher shop,” said flo innocently.

“you could go and work for your brother.”

“roberta?” said becky with a stagey sort of contempt. “you think i’d work for him?” herbrother who ran the butcher shop was named robert but often called roberta, because of his meekand nervous ways. becky tyde laughed. her laugh was loud and noisy like an engine bearingdown on you.

she was a big-headed loud-voiced dwarf, with a mascot’s sexless swagger, a red velvet tam, atwisted neck that forced her to hold her head on one side, always looking up and sideways. shewore little polished high-heeled shoes, real lady’s shoes. rose watched her shoes, being scared ofthe rest of her, of her laugh and her neck. she knew from flo that becky tyde had been sick withpolio as a child, that was why her neck was twisted and why she had not grown any taller. it washard to believe that she had started out differently, that she had ever been normal. flo said she wasnot cracked, she had as much brains as anybody, but she knew she could get away with anything.

“you know i used to live out here?” becky said, noticing rose. “hey! what’s-your-name!

didn’t i used to live out here, flo?”

“if you did it was before my time,” said flo, as if she didn’t know anything.

“that was before the neighborhood got so downhill. excuse me saying so. my father built hishouse out here and he built his slaughter-house and we had half an acre of orchard.”

“is that so?” said flo, using her humoring voice, full of false geniality, humility even. “thenwhy did you ever move away?”

“i told you, it got to be such a downhill neighborhood,” said becky. she would put a wholecookie in her mouth if she felt like it, let her cheeks puff out like a frog’s. she never told any more.

flo knew anyway, as who didn’t. everyone knew the house, red brick with the veranda pulledoff and the orchard, what was left of it, full of the usual outflow-car seats and washing machinesand bedsprings and junk. the house would never look sinister, in spite of what had happened in it,because there was so much wreckage and confusion all around.

becky’s old father was a different kind of butcher from her brother according to flo. a bad-tempered englishman. and different from becky in the matter of mouthiness. his was never open.

a skinflint, a family tyrant. after becky had polio he wouldn’t let her go back to school. she wasseldom seen outside the house, never outside the yard. he didn’t want people gloating. that waswhat becky said, at the trial. her mother was dead by that time and her sisters married. just beckyand robert at home. people would stop robert on the road and ask him, “how about your sister,robert? is she altogether better now?”

“yes.”

“does she do the housework? does she get your supper?”

“yes.”

“and is your father good to her, robert?”

the story being that the father beat them, had beaten all his chil dren and beaten his wife aswell, beat becky more now because of her deformity, which some people believed he had caused(they did not understand about polio). the stories persisted and got added to. the reason thatbecky was kept out of sight was now supposed to be her pregnancy, and the father of the childwas supposed to be her own father. then people said it had been born, and disposed of.

“what?”

“disposed of,” flo said. “they used to say go and get your lamb chops at tyde’s, get them niceand tender! it was all lies in all probability,” she said regretfully.

rose could be drawn back-from watching the wind shiver along the old torn awning, catch inthe tear-by this tone of regret, caution, in flo’s voice. flo telling a story-and this was not theonly one, or even the most lurid one, she knew-would incline her head and let her face go softand thoughtful, tantalizing, warning.

“i shouldn’t even be telling you this stuff.”

more was to follow.

three useless young men, who hung around the livery stable, got together - or were gottogether, by more influential and respectful men in town-and prepared to give old man tyde ahorsewhipping, in the interests of public morality. they blacked their faces. they were providedwith whips and a quart of whiskey apiece, for courage. they were: jelly smith, a horse-racer and adrinker; bob temple, a ballplayer and strongman; and hat nettleton, who worked on the towndray, and had his nickname from a bowler hat he wore, out of vanity as much as for the comiceffect. (he still worked on the dray, in fact; he had kept the name if not the hat, and could often beseen in public-almost as often as becky tyde-delivering sacks of coal, which blackened hisface and arms. that should have brought to mind his story; but didn’t. present time and past, theshady melodramatic past of flo’s stories, were quite separate, at least for rose. present peoplecould not be fitted into the past. becky herself, town oddity and public pet, harmless andmalicious, could never match the butcher’s prisoner, the cripple daughter, a white streak at thewindow: mute, beaten, impregnated. as with the house, only a formal connection could be made.)the young men primed to do the horsewhipping showed up late, outside tyde’s house, aftereverybody had gone to bed. they had a gun, but they used up their ammunition firing it off in theyard. they yelled for the butcher and beat on the door; finally they broke it down. tyde concludedthey were after his money, so he put some bills in a handkerchief and sent becky down with them,maybe thinking those men would be touched or scared by the sight of a little wrynecked girl, adwarf. but that didn’t content them. they came upstairs and dragged the butcher out from underhis bed, in his nightgown. they dragged him outside and stood him in the snow. the temperaturewas four below zero, a fact noted later in court. they meant to hold a mock trial but they could notremember how it was done. so they began to beat him and kept beating him until he fell. theyyelled at him, butcher’s meat! and continued beating him while his nightgown and the snow hewas lying in turned red. his son robert said in court that he had not watched the beating. beckysaid that robert had watched at first but had run away and hid. she herself had watched all theway through. she watched the men leave at last and her father make his delayed bloody progressthrough the snow and up the steps of the veranda. she did not go out to help him, or open the dooruntil he got to it. why not? she was asked in court, and she said she did not go out because she justhad her nightgown on, and she did not open the door because she did not want to let the cold intothe house.

old man tyde then appeared to have recovered his strength. he sent robert to harness thehorse, and made becky heat water so that he could wash. he dressed and took all the money andwith no explanation to his children got into the cutter and drove to belgrave where he left thehorse tied in the cold and took the early morning train to toronto. on the train he behaved oddly,groaning and cursing as if he was drunk. he was picked up on the streets of toronto a day later,out of his mind with fever, and was taken to a hospital, where he died. he still had all the money.

the cause of death was given as pneumonia.

but the authorities got wind, flo said. the case came to trial. the three men who did it allreceived long prison sentences. a farce, said flo. within a year they were all free, had all beenpardoned, had jobs waiting for them. and why was that? it was because too many higher-ups werein on it. and it seemed as if becky and robert had no interest in seeing justice done. they wereleft well-off. they bought a house in hanratty. robert went into the store. becky after her longseclusion started on a career of public sociability and display.

that was all. flo put the lid down on the story as if she was sick of it. it reflected no good onanybody.

“imagine,” flo said.

flo at this time must have been in her early thirties. a young woman. she wore exactly thesame clothes that a woman of fifty, or sixty, or seventy, might wear: print housedresses loose atthe neck and sleeves as well as the waist; bib aprons, also of print, which she took off when shecame from the kitchen into the store. this was a common costume at the time, for a poor thoughnot absolutely poverty-stricken woman; it was also, in a way, a scornful deliberate choice. floscorned slacks, she scorned the outfits of people trying to be in style, she scorned lipstick andpermanents. she wore her own black hair cut straight across, just long enough to push behind herears. she was tall but fine-boned, with narrow wrists and shoulders, a small head, a pale, freckled,mobile, monkeyish face. if she had thought it worthwhile, and had the resources, she might havehad a black-and-pale, fragile, nurtured sort of prettiness; rose realized that later. but she wouldhave to have been a different person altogether; she would have to have learned to resist makingfaces, at herself and others.

rose’s earliest memories of flo were of extraordinary softness and hardness. the soft hair, thelong, soft, pale cheeks, soft almost invisible fuzz in front of her ears and above her mouth. thesharpness of her knees, hardness of her lap, flatness of her front.

when flo sang:

oh the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette treesand the soda-water fountain …rose thought of flo’s old life before she married her father, when she worked as a waitress inthe coffee shop in union station, and went with her girl friends mavis and irene to centre island,and was followed by men on dark streets and knew how payphones and elevators worked. roseheard in her voice the reckless dangerous life of cities, the gum-chewing sharp answers.

and when she sang:

then slowly, slowly, she got up

and slowly she came nigh him

and all she said, that she ever did say,

was young man i think, you’re dyin’!

rose thought of a life flo seemed to have had beyond that, earlier than that, crowded andlegendary, with barbara allen and becky tyde’s father and all kinds of old outrages and sorrowsjumbled up together in it.

the royal beatings. what got them started?

suppose a saturday, in spring. leaves not out yet but the doors open to the sunlight. crows.

ditches full of running water. hopeful weather. often on saturdays flo left rose in charge of thestore- it’s a few years now, these are the years when rose was nine, ten, eleven, twelve-whileshe herself went across the bridge to hanratty (going uptown they called it) to shop and seepeople, and listen to them. among the people she listened to were mrs. lawyer davies, mrs.

anglican rector henley-smith, and mrs. horse-doctor mckay. she came home and imitatedthem at supper: their high-flown remarks, their flibberty voices. monsters, she made them seem; offoolishness, and showiness, and self-approbation.

when she finished shopping she went into the coffee shop of the queen’s hotel and had asundae. what kind? rose and brian wanted to know when she got home, and they would bedisappointed if it was only pineapple or butterscotch, pleased if it was a tin roof, or black andwhite. then she smoked a cigarette. she had some ready-rolled, that she carried with her, so thatshe wouldn’t have to roll one in public. smoking was the one thing she did that she would havecalled showing off in anybody else. it was a habit left over from her working days, from toronto.

she knew it was asking for trouble. once the catholic priest came over to her right in the queen’shotel, and flashed his lighter at her before she could get her matches out. she thanked him but didnot enter into conversation, lest he should try to convert her.

another time, on the way home, she saw at the town end of the bridge a boy in a blue jacket,apparently looking at the water. eighteen, nineteen years old. nobody she knew. skinny, weaklylooking, something the matter with him, she saw at once. was he thinking of jumping? just as shecame up even with him, what does he do but turn and display, holding his jacket open, also hispants. what he must have suffered from the cold, on a day that had flo holding her coat collartight around her throat.

when she first saw what he had in his hand, flo said, all she could think of was, what is hedoing out here with a baloney sausage?

she could say that. it was offered as truth; no joke. she maintained that she despised dirty talk.

she would go out and yell at the old men sitting in front of her store.

“if you want to stay where you are you better clean your mouths out!”

saturday, then. for some reason flo is not going uptown, has decided to stay home and scrubthe kitchen floor. perhaps this has put her in a bad mood. perhaps she was in a bad mood anyway,due to people not paying their bills, or the stirring-up of feelings in spring. the wrangle with rosehas already commenced, has been going on forever, like a dream that goes back and back intoother dreams, over hills and through doorways, maddeningly dim and populous and familiar andelusive. they are carting all the chairs out of the kitchen preparatory to the scrubbing, and theyhave also got to move some extra provisions for the store, some cartons of canned goods, tins ofmaple syrup, coal-oil cans, jars of vinegar. they take these things out to the woodshed. brian whois five or six by this time is helping drag the tins.

“yes,” says flo, carrying on from our lost starting-point. “yes, and that filth you taught tobrian.”

“what filth?”

“and he doesn’t know any better.”

there is one step down from the kitchen to the woodshed, a bit of carpet on it so worn rosecan’t ever remember seeing the pattern. brian loosens it, dragging a tin.

“two vancouvers,” she says softly.

flo is back in the kitchen. brian looks from flo to rose and rose says again in a slightly loudervoice, an encouraging sing-song, “two vancouvers-”

“fried in snot!” finishes brian, not able to control himself any longer.

“two pickled arseholes-” “-tied in a knot!”

there it is. the filth.

two vancouvers fried in snot!

two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!

rose has known that for years, learned it when she first went to school. she came home andasked flo, what is a vancouver?

“it’s a city. it’s a long ways away.” “what else besides a city?”

flo said, what did she mean, what else? how could it be fried, rose said, approaching thedangerous moment, the delightful moment, when she would have to come out with the wholething.

“two vancouvers fried in snot! / two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!”

“you’re going to get it!” cried flo in a predictable rage. “say that again and you’ll get a goodclout!”

rose couldn’t stop herself. she hummed it tenderly, tried saying the innocent words aloud,humming through the others. it was not just the words snot and arsehole that gave her pleasure,though of course they did. it was the pickling and tying and the unimaginable vancouvers. shesaw them in her mind shaped rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. the tumble of reason; thespark and spit of craziness.

lately she has remembered it again and taught it to brian, to see if it has the same effect on him,and of course it has.

“oh, i heard you!” says flo. “i heard that! and i’m warning you!” so she is. brian takes thewarning. he runs away, out the wood- shed door, to do as he likes. being a boy, free to help ornot, involve himself or not. not committed to the household struggle. they don’t need himanyway, except to use against each other, they hardly notice his going. they continue, can’t helpcontinuing, can’t leave each other alone. when they seem to have given up they were really justwaiting and building up steam.

flo gets out the scrub pail and the brush and the rag and the pad for her knees, a dirty red rubberpad. she starts to work on the floor. rose sits on the kitchen table, the only place left to sit,swinging her legs. she can feel the cool oilcloth, because she is wearing shorts, last summer’stight faded shorts dug out of the summer-clothes bag. the smell a bit moldy from winter storage.

flo crawls around underneath, scrubbing with the brush, wiping with the rag. her legs are long,white and muscular, marked all over with blue veins as if somebody had been drawing rivers onthem with an indelible pencil. an abnormal energy, a violent disgust, is expressed in the chewingof the brush at the linoleum, the swish of the rag.

what do they have to say to each other? it doesn’t really matter. flo speaks of rose’s smart-aleck behavior, rudeness and sloppiness and conceit. her willingness to make work for others, herlack of gratitude. she mentions brian’s innocence, rose’s corruption. oh, don’t you think you’resomebody, says flo, and a moment later, who do you think you are? rose contradicts and objectswith such poisonous reasonableness and mildness, displays theatrical unconcern. flo goes beyondher ordinary scorn and self-possession and becomes amazingly theatrical herself, saying it was forrose that she sacrificed her life. she saw her father saddled with a baby daughter and she thought,what is that man going to do? so she married him, and here she is, on her knees.

at that moment the bell rings, to announce a customer in the store. because the fight is on, roseis not permitted to go into the store and wait on whoever it is. flo gets up and throws off herapron, groaning-but not communicatively, it is not a groan whose exasperation rose is allowedto share-and goes in and serves. rose hears her using her normal voice.

“about time! sure is!”

she comes back and ties on her apron and is ready to resume. “you never have a thought foranybody but your own-self! you never have a thought for what i’m doing.”

“i never asked you to do anything. i wished you never had. i would have been a lot better off.”

rose says this smiling directly at flo, who has not yet gone down on her knees. flo sees thesmile, grabs the scrub rag that is hanging on the side of the pail, and throws it at her. it may bemeant to hit her in the face but instead it falls against rose’s leg and she raises her foot andcatches it, swinging it negligently against her ankle.

“all right,” says flo. “you’ve done it this time. all right.”

rose watches her go to the woodshed door, hears her tramp through the woodshed, pause in thedoorway, where the screen door hasn’t yet been hung, and the storm door is standing open,propped with a brick. she calls rose’s father. she calls him in a warning, summoning voice, as ifagainst her will preparing him for bad news. he will know what this is about.

the kitchen floor has five or six different patterns of linoleum on it. ends, which flo got fornothing and ingeniously trimmed and fitted together, bordering them with tin strips and tacks.

while rose sits on the table waiting, she looks at the floor, at this satisfying arrangement ofrectangles, triangles, some other shape whose name she is trying to remember. she hears flocoming back through the woodshed, on the creaky plank walk laid over the dirt floor. she isloitering, waiting, too. she and rose can carry this no further, by themselves.

rose hears her father come in. she stiffens, a tremor runs through her legs, she feels them shiveron the oilcloth. called away from some peaceful, absorbing task, away from the words running inhis head, called out of himself, her father has to say something. he says, “well? what’s wrong?”

now comes another voice of flo’s. enriched, hurt, apologetic, it seems to have beenmanufactured on the spot. she is sorry to have called him from his work.

would never have done it, if rose was not driving her to distraction. how to distraction? withher back-talk and impudence and her terrible tongue. the things rose has said to flo are such that,if flo had said them to her mother, she knows her father would have thrashed her into the ground.

rose tries to butt in, to say this isn’t true.

what isn’t true?

her father raises a hand, doesn’t look at her, says, “be quiet.” when she says it isn’t true, rosemeans that she herself didn’t start this, only responded, that she was goaded by flo, who is now,she believes, telling the grossest sort of lies, twisting everything to suit herself. rose puts aside herother knowledge that whatever flo has said or done, whatever she herself has said or done, doesnot really matter at all. it is the struggle itself that counts, and that can’t be stopped, can never bestopped, short of where it has got to, now.

flo’s knees are dirty, in spite of the pad. the scrub rag is still hanging over rose’s foot.

her father wipes his hands, listening to flo. he takes his time. he is slow at getting into thespirit of things, tired in advance, maybe, on the verge of rejecting the role he has to play. he won’tlook at rose, but at any sound or stirring from rose, he holds up his hand.

“well we don’t need the public in on this, that’s for sure,” flo says, and she goes to lock thedoor of the store, putting in the store window the sign that says “back soon,” a sign rose madefor her with a great deal of fancy curving and shading of letters in black and red crayon. when shecomes back she shuts the door to the store, then the door to the stairs, then the door to thewoodshed.

her shoes have left marks on the clean wet part of the floor. “oh, i don’t know,” she says now,in a voice worn down from its emotional peak. “i don’t know what to do about her.” she looksdown and sees her dirty knees (following rose’s eyes) and rubs at them viciously with her barehands, smearing the dirt around.

“she humiliates me,” she says, straightening up. there it is, the explanation. “she humiliatesme,” she repeats with satisfaction. “she has no respect.”

“i do not!”

“quiet, you!” says her father.

“if i hadn’t called your father you’d still be sitting there with that grin on your face! what otherway is there to manage you?”

rose detects in her father some objections to flo’s rhetoric, some embarrassment andreluctance. she is wrong, and ought to know she is wrong, in thinking that she can count on this.

the fact that she knows about it, and he knows she knows, will not make things any better. he isbeginning to warm up. he gives her a look. this look is at first cold and challenging. it informsher of his judgment, of the hopelessness of her position. then it clears, it begins to fill up withsomething else, the way a spring fills up when you clear the leaves away. it fills with hatred andpleasure. rose sees that and knows it. is that just a description of anger, should she see his eyesfilling up with anger? no. hatred is right. pleasure is right. his face loosens and changes andgrows younger, and he holds up his hand this time to silence flo.

“all right,” he says, meaning that’s enough, more than enough, this part is over, things canproceed. he starts to loosen his belt.

flo has stopped anyway. she has the same difficulty rose does, a difficulty in believing thatwhat you know must happen really will happen, that there comes a time when you can’t drawback.

“oh, i don’t know, don’t be too hard on her.” she is moving around nervously as if she hasthoughts of opening some escape route. “oh, you don’t have to use the belt on her. do you have touse the belt?”

he doesn’t answer. the belt is coming off, not hastily. it is being grasped at the necessary point.

all right you. he is coming over to rose. he pushes her off the table. his face, like his voice, isquite out of character. he is like a bad actor, who turns a part grotesque. as if he must savor andinsist on just what is shameful and terrible about this. that is not to say he is pretending, that he isacting, and does not mean it. he is acting, and he means it. rose knows that, she knows everythingabout him.

she has since wondered about murders, and murderers. does the thing have to be carriedthrough, in the end, partly for the effect, to prove to the audience of one-who won’t be able toreport, only register, the lesson-that such a thing can happen, that there is nothing that can’thappen, that the most dreadful antic is justified, feelings can be found to match it?

she tries again looking at the kitchen floor, that clever and comforting geometrical arrangement,instead of looking at him or his belt. how can this go on in front of such daily witnesses-thelinoleum, the calendar with the mill and creek and autumn trees, the old accommodating pots andpans?

hold out your hand!

those things aren’t going to help her, none of them can rescue her.

they turn bland and useless, even unfriendly. pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleumcan leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.

at the first, or maybe the second, crack of pain, she draws back. she will not accept it. she runsaround the room, she tries to get to the doors. her father blocks her off. not an ounce of courageor of stoicism in her, it would seem. she runs, she screams, she implores. her father is after her,cracking the belt at her when he can, then abandoning it and using his hands. bang over the ear,then bang over the other ear. back and forth, her head ringing. bang in the face. up against thewall and bang in the face again. he shakes her and hits her against the wall, he kicks her legs. sheis incoherent, insane, shrieking. forgive me! oh please, forgive me!

flo is shrieking too. stop, stop!

not yet. he throws rose down. or perhaps she throws herself down. he kicks her legs again.

she has given up on words but is letting out a noise, the sort of noise that makes flo cry, oh, whatif people can hear her? the very last-ditch willing sound of humiliation and defeat it is, for itseems rose must play her part in this with the same grossness, the same exaggeration, that herfather displays, playing his. she plays his victim with a self-indulgence that arouses, and maybehopes to arouse, his final, sickened contempt.

they will give this anything that is necessary, it seems, they will go to any lengths.

not quite. he has never managed to really injure her, though there are times, of course, whenshe prays that he will. he hits her with an open hand, there is some restraint in his kicks.

now he stops, he is out of breath. he allows flo to move in, he grabs rose up and gives her apush in flo’s direction, making a sound of disgust. flo retrieves her, opens the stair door, shovesher up the stairs.

“go on up to your room now! hurry!”

rose goes up the stairs, stumbling, letting herself stumble, letting herself fall against the steps.

she doesn’t bang her door because a gesture like that could still bring him after her, and anyway,she is weak. she lies on the bed. she can hear through the stovepipe hole flo snuffling andremonstrating, her father saying angrily that flo should have kept quiet then, if she did not wantrose punished she should not have recommended it. flo says she never recommended a hidinglike that.

they argue back and forth on this. flo’s frightened voice is growing stronger, getting itsconfidence back. by stages, by arguing, they are being drawn back into themselves. soon it’s onlyflo talking; he will not talk any more. rose has had to fight down her noisy sobbing, so as to listento them, and when she loses interest in listening, and wants to sob some more, she finds she can’twork herself up to it. she has passed into a state of calm, in which outrage is perceived ascomplete and final. in this state events and possibilities take on a lovely simplicity. choices aremercifully clear. the words that come to mind are not the quibbling, seldom the conditional.

never is a word to which the right is suddenly established. she will never speak to them, she willnever look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them. she will punish them;she will finish them. encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curiouscomfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility.

suppose she dies now? suppose she commits suicide? suppose she runs away? any of thesethings would be appropriate. it is only a matter of choosing, of figuring out the way. she floats inher pure superior state as if kindly drugged.

and just as there is a moment, when you are drugged, in which you feel perfectly safe, sure,unreachable, and then without warning and right next to it a moment in which you know the wholeprotection has fatally cracked, though it is still pretending to hold soundly together, so there is amoment now-the moment, in fact, when rose hears flo step on the stairs-that contains for herboth present peace and freedom and a sure knowledge of the whole down-spiraling course ofevents from now on.

flo comes into the room without knocking, but with a hesitation that shows it might haveoccurred to her. she brings a jar of cold cream. rose is hanging on to advantage as long as shecan, lying face down on the bed, refusing to acknowledge or answer.

“oh come on,” flo says uneasily. “you aren’t so bad off, are you? you put some of this on andyou’ll feel better.”

she is bluffing. she doesn’t know for sure what damage has been done. she has the lid off thecold cream. rose can smell it. the intimate, babyish, humiliating smell. she won’t allow it nearher. but in order to avoid it, the big ready clot of it in flo’s hand, she has to move. she scuffles,resists, loses dignity, and lets flo see there is not really much the matter.

“all right,” flo says. “you win. i’ll leave it here and you can put it on when you like.”

later still a tray will appear. flo will put it down without a word and go away. a large glass ofchocolate milk on it, made with vita-malt from the store. some rich streaks of vita-malt aroundthe bottom of the glass. little sandwiches, neat and appetizing. canned salmon of the first qualityand reddest color, plenty of mayonnaise. a couple of butter tarts from a bakery package, chocolatebiscuits with a peppermint filling. rose’s favorites, in the sandwich, tart and cookie line. she willturn away, refuse to look, but left alone with these eatables will be miserably tempted, roused andtroubled and drawn back from thoughts of suicide or flight by the smell of salmon, the anticipationof crisp chocolate, she will reach out a finger, just to run it around the edge of one of thesandwiches (crusts cut off!) to get the overflow, get a taste. then she will decide to eat one, forstrength to refuse the rest. one will not be noticed. soon, in helpless corruption, she will eat themall. she will drink the chocolate milk, eat the tarts, eat the cookies. she will get the malty syrupout of the bottom of the glass with her finger, though she sniffles with shame. too late.

flo will come up and get the tray. she may say, “i see you got your appetite still,” or, “did youlike the chocolate milk, was it enough syrup in it?” depending on how chastened she is feeling,herself. at any rate, all advantage will be lost. rose will understand that life has started up again,that they will all sit around the table eating again, listening to the radio news. tomorrow morning,maybe even tonight. unseemly and unlikely as that may be. they will be embarrassed, but ratherless than you might expect considering how they have behaved. they will feel a queer lassitude, aconvalescent indolence, not far off satisfaction.

one night after a scene like this they were all in the kitchen. it must have been summer, or atleast warm weather, because her father spoke of the old men who sat on the bench in front of thestore.

“do you know what they’re talking about now?” he said, and nodded his head towards the storeto show who he meant, though of course they were not there now, they went home at dark.

“those old coots,” said flo. “what?”

there was about them both a geniality not exactly false but a bit more emphatic than wasnormal, without company.

rose’s father told them then that the old men had picked up the idea somewhere that whatlooked like a star in the western sky, the first star that came out after sunset, the evening star, wasin reality an airship hovering over bay city, michigan, on the other side of lake huron. anamerican invention, sent up to rival the heavenly bodies. they were all in agreement about this,the idea was congenial to them. they believed it to be lit by ten thousand electric light bulbs. herfather had ruthlessly disagreed with them, pointing out that it was the planet venus they saw,which had appeared in the sky long before the invention of an electric light bulb. they had neverheard of the planet venus.

“ignoramuses,” said flo. at which rose knew, and knew her father knew, that flo had neverheard of the planet venus either. to distract them from this, or even apologize for it, flo put downher teacup, stretched out with her head resting on the chair she had been sitting on and her feet onanother chair (somehow she managed to tuck her dress modestly between her legs at the sametime), and lay stiff as a board, so that brian cried out in delight, “do that! do that!”

flo was double-jointed and very strong. in moments of celebration or emergency she would dotricks.

they were silent while she turned herself around, not using her arms at all but just her stronglegs and feet. then they all cried out in triumph, though they had seen it before.

just as flo turned herself rose got a picture in her mind of that airship, an elongated transparentbubble, with its strings of diamond lights, floating in the miraculous american sky.

“the planet venus!” her father said, applauding flo. “ten thousand electric lights!”

there was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happiness, in the room.

years later, many years later, on a sunday morning, rose turned on the radio. this waswhen she was living by herself in toronto.

well sir.

it was a different kind of a place in our day. yes it was.

it was all horses then. horses and buggies. buggy races up and down the main street on thesaturday nights.

“just like the chariot races,” says the announcer’s, or interviewer’s, smooth encouraging voice.

i never seen a one of them.

“no sir, that was the old roman chariot races i was referring to.

that was before your time.”

musta been before my time. i’m a hunerd and two years old. “that’s a wonderful age, sir.”

it is so.

she left it on, as she went around the apartment kitchen, making coffee for herself. it seemed toher that this must be a staged interview, a scene from some play, and she wanted to find out what itwas. the old man’s voice was so vain and belligerent, the interviewer’s quite hopeless andalarmed, under its practiced gentleness and ease. you were surely meant to see him holding themicrophone up to some toothless, reckless, preening centenarian, wondering what in god’s namehe was doing here, and what would he say next?

“they must have been fairly dangerous.”

what was dangerous?

“those buggy races.”

they was. dangerous. used to be the runaway horses. used to be a plenty of accidents. fellowswas dragged along on the gravel and cut their face open. wouldna matter so much if they wasdead. heh.

some of them horses was the high-steppers. some, they had to have the mustard under their tail.

some wouldn step out for nothin. that’s the thing it is with the horses. some’ll work and pull tillthey drop down dead and some wouldn pull your cock out of a pail of lard. hehe.

it must be a real interview after all. otherwise they wouldn’t have put that in, wouldn’t haverisked it. it’s all right if the old man says it. local color. anything rendered harmless anddelightful by his hundred years.

accidents all the time then. in the mill. foundry. wasn’t the precautions.

“you didn’t have so many strikes then, i don’t suppose? you didn’t have so many unions?”

everybody taking it easy nowadays. we worked and we was glad to get it. worked and was glad toget it.

“you didn’t have television.”

didn’t have no t.v. didn’t have no radio. no picture show.

“you made your own entertainment.”

that’s the way we did.

“you had a lot of experiences young men growing up today will never have.”

experiences.

“can you recall any of them for us?”

i eaten groundhog meat one time one winter you wouldna cared for it. heh.

there was a pause, of appreciation, it would seem, then the announcer’s voice saying that theforegoing had been an interview with mr. wilfred nettleton of hanratty, ontario, made on hishundred and second birthday, two weeks before his death, last spring. a living link with our past.

mr. nettleton had been interviewed in the wawanash county home for the aged.

hat nettleton.

horsewhipper into centenarian. photographed on his birthday, fussed over by nurses, kissed nodoubt by a girl reporter. flash bulbs popping at him. tape recorder drinking in the sound of hisvoice. oldest resident. oldest horsewhipper. living link with our past.

looking out from her kitchen window at the cold lake, rose was longing to tell somebody. itwas flo who would enjoy hearing. she thought of her saying imagine! in a way that meant shewas having her worst suspicions gorgeously confirmed. but flo was in the same place hatnettleton had died in, and there wasn’t any way rose could reach her. she had been there evenwhen that interview was recorded, though she would not have heard it, would not have knownabout it. after rose put her in the home, a couple of years earlier, she had stopped talking. shehad removed herself, and spent most of her time sitting in a corner of her crib, looking crafty anddisagreeable, not answering anybody, though she occasionally showed her feelings by biting anurse.