trapped into sympathy or any unwanted emotion.
My mother has headaches. She often has to lie down. She lies on my
brother's narrow bed in the little screened porch, shaded by heavy branches.
'I look up at that tree and I think I am at home,' she says.
'What you need,' my father tells her, 'is some fresh air and a drive in the
country.' He means for her to go with him, on his Walker Brothers route.
That is not my mother's idea of a drive in the country.
'Can I come?'
'Your mother might want you for trying on clothes.'
'I'm beyond sewing this afternoon,' my mother says.
'I'll take her then. Take both of them, give you a rest.'
Wha t is there about us that people need to be given a rest from? Never
mind. I am glad enough to find my brother and make him go to the toilet and
get us both into the car, our knees unscrubbed, my hair unringleted. My father
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2718 / ALICE MUNRO
brings from the house his two heavy brown suitcases, full of bottles, and sets them on the back seat. He wears a white shirt, brilliant in the sunlight, a tie, light trousers belonging to his summer suit (his other suit is black, for funerals, and belonged to my uncle before he died), and a creamy straw hat. His sales- man's outfit, with pencils clipped in the shirt pocket. He goes back once again, probably to say goodbye to my mother, to ask her if she is sure she doesn't want to come, and hear her say, 'No. No thanks, I'm better just to lie here with my eyes closed.' The n we are backing out of the driveway with the rising hope of adventure, just the little hope that takes you over the bump into the street, the hot air starting to move, turning into a breeze, the houses growing less and less familiar as we follow the shortcut my father knows, the quick way out of town. Yet what is there waiting for us all afternoon but hot hours in stricken farmyards, perhaps a stop at a country store and three ice-cream cones or bottles of pop, and my father singing? Th e one he made up about himself has a title?'The Walker Brothers Cowboy'?and it starts out like this:
Old Ned Fields, he now is dead, So I am ridin' the route instead. . . .
Who is Ned Fields? The man he has replaced, surely, and if so he really is dead; yet my father's voice is mournful-jolly, making his death some kind of nonsense, a comic calamity. 'Wisht I was back on the Rio Grande,J plungin' through the dusky sand.' My father sings most of the time while driving the car. Even now, heading out of town, crossing the bridge and taking the sharp turn onto the highway, he is humming something, mumbling a bit of a song to himself, just tuning up, really, getting ready to improvise, for out along the highway we pass the Baptist Camp, the Vacation Bible Camp, and he lets loose:
Wher e are the Baptists, where are the Bapists, where are all the Baptists today? They're down in the water, in Lake Huron water, with their sins all a-gittin' washed away.
My brother takes this for straight truth and gets up on his knees trying to see down to the Lake. 'I don't see any Baptists,' he says accusingly. 'Neither do I, son,' says my father. 'I told you, they're down in the Lake.'
No roads paved when we left the highway. We have to roll up the windows because of dust. Th e land is flat, scorched, empty. Bush lots at the back of the farms hold shade, black pine-shade like pools nobody can ever get to. We bum p up a long lane and at the end of it what could look more unwelcoming, more deserted than the tall unpainted farmhouse with grass growing uncut right up to the front door, green blinds down, and a door upstairs opening on nothing but air? Man y houses have this door, and I have never yet been able to find out why. I ask my father and he says they are for walking in your sleep. What? Well, if you happen to be walking in your sleep and you want to step outside. I am offended, seeing too late that he is joking, as usual, but my brother says sturdily, 'If they did that they would break their necks.'
The 1930s. How much this kind of farmhouse, this kind of afternoon seem
4. A large river that begins in Colorado and flows south, becoming the border between Mexico and the United States.
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WALKER BROTHERS COWBOY / 271 9
to me to belong to that one decade in time, just as my father's hat does, his bright flared tie, our car with its wide running board (an Essex, and long past its prime). Cars somewhat like it, many older, none dustier, sit in the farmyards. Some are past running and have their doors pulled off, their seats removed for use on porches. No living things to be seen, chickens or cattle. Except dogs. There are dogs lying in any kind of shade they can find, dreaming, their lean sides rising and sinking rapidly. They get up when my father opens the car door, he has to speak to them. 'Nice boy, there's a boy, nice old boy.' They quiet down, go back to their shade. He should know how to quiet animals, he has held desperate foxes with tongs around their necks. On e gentling voice for the dogs and another, rousing, cheerful, for calling at doors. 'Hello there, missus, it's the Walker Brothers man and what are you out of today?' A door opens, he disappears. Forbidden to follow, forbidden even to leave the car, we can just wait and wonder what he says. Sometimes trying to make my mother laugh, he pretends to be himself in a farm kitchen, spreading out his sample case. 'Now then, missus, are you troubled with parasitic life? Your children's scalps, I mean. All those crawly little things we're too polite to mention that show up on the heads of the best of families? Soap alone is useless, kerosene is not too nice a perfume, but I have here?' Or else, 'Believe me, sitting and driving all day the way I do I know the value of these fine pills. Natural relief. A problem commo n to old folks too, once their days of activity are over?How about you, Grandma?' He would wave the imaginary box of pills under my mother's nose and she would laugh finally, unwillingly. 'He doesn't say that really, does he?' I said, and she said no of course not, he was
too muc h of a gentleman.
One yard after another, then, the old cars, the pumps, dogs, views of gray barns and falling-down sheds and unturning windmills. Th e men, if they are working in the fields, are not in any fields that we can see. Th e children
