Vintage Munro by Alice Munro Page A

brothers were long gone.
    I knew I was not being reasonable, but I had the feeling that I’d rather see the farm suffer outright neglect—I’d sooner see it in the hands of hoodlums and scroungers—than see that rainbow on the barn, and some letters that looked Egyptian painted on the wall of the house. That seemed a mockery. I even disliked the sight of those people when they came to town—the men with their hair in ponytails, and with holes in their overalls that I believed were cut on purpose, and the women with long hair and no makeup and their meek, superior expressions. What do you know about life, I felt like asking them. What makes you think you can come here and mock my father and mother and their life and their poverty? But when I thought of the rainbow and those letters, I knew they weren’t trying to mock or imitate my parents’ life. They had displaced that life, hardly knowing it existed. They had set up in its placethese beliefs and customs of their own, which I hoped would fail them.
    That happened, more or less. The commune disintegrated. The goats disappeared. Some of the women moved to town, cut their hair, put on makeup, and got jobs as waitresses or cashiers to support their children. The Toronto man put the place up for sale, and after about a year it was sold for more than ten times what he had paid for it. A young couple from Ottawa bought it. They have painted the outside a pale gray with oyster trim, and have put in skylights and a handsome front door with carriage lamps on either side. Inside, they’ve changed it around so much that I’ve been told I’d never recognize it.
    I did get in once, before this happened, during the year that the house was empty and for sale. The company I work for was handling it, and I had a key, though the house was being shown by another agent. I let myself in on a Sunday afternoon. I had a man with me, not a client but a friend—Bob Marks, whom I was seeing a lot at the time.
    “This is that hippie place,” Bob Marks said when I stopped the car. “I’ve been by here before.”
    He was a lawyer, a Catholic, separated from his wife. He thought he wanted to settle down and start up a practice here in town. But there already was one Catholic lawyer. Business was slow. A couple of times a week, Bob Marks would be fairly drunk before supper.
    “It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s where I was born. Where I grew up.” We walked through the weeds, and I unlocked the door.
    He said that he had thought, from the way I talked, that it would be farther out.
    “It seemed farther then.”
    All the rooms were bare, and the floors swept clean. Thewoodwork was freshly painted—I was surprised to see no smudges on the glass. Some new panes, some old wavy ones. Some of the walls had been stripped of their paper and painted. A wall in the kitchen was painted a deep blue, with an enormous dove on it. On a wall in the front room, giant sunflowers appeared, and a butterfly of almost the same size.
    Bob Marks whistled. “Somebody was an artist.”
    “If that’s what you want to call it,” I said, and turned back to the kitchen. The same wood stove was there. “My mother once burned up three thousand dollars,” I said. “She burned three thousand dollars in that stove.”
    He whistled again, differently. “What do you mean? She threw in a check?”
    “No, no. It was bills. She did it deliberately. She went into town to the bank and she had them give it all to her, in a shoebox. She brought it home and put it in the stove. She put it in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.”
    “What are you talking about?” said Bob Marks. “I thought you were so poor.”
    “We were. We were very poor.”
    “So how come she had three thousand dollars? That would be like thirty thousand today. Easily. More than thirty thousand today.”
    “It was her legacy,” I said. “It was what she got from her father.