"The tickets for me and you to Montreal - like I told you - I go to them all - you'll get to see a real city." He tapped the tickets and looked up at her with a strange smile, a smile that said he knew he was using deceit and could not help it.

"You come with me - see how the other half lives, eh?"

She shook her head, and he lingered in silence with the smell of autumn snow in the air. Finally he went away, slapping the tickets at the wind.

The next day there was a dusting of snow on the lane. Rudy came to the house in early afternoon and entered the side door near the back stairs.

He took off his black pointed cowboy boots, straightened his socks, and went inside. With his boots off he was one half inch shorter than my mother, but weighed eighty pounds more. He wore red pants with a wide belt, and a blue shirt with a pink tie.

My mother was vacuuming the den and was startled by him. She told him that if he needed to talk to Mr. McVicer he would have to wait, for Leo had gone on his annual hunting trip.

Mother smiled. "Maybe you could come back Saturday."

"Maybe," Rudy said. "You don't have a drink for an old friend, do you?"

"Oh no - I'm sorry."

Mom stopped vacuuming as he came toward her, and tried to think of something lighthearted and kind to say. He walked straight to her - and touched her cheek.

When he touched her cheek in the room filled with the drab furniture of the generations gone by and the bits of squalid light that lay against the rear window, she backed away, tripped on the vacuum. Her skirt came up to her waist, and her panties were visible.

He pulled her to her feet, and he felt under her panties and fumbled his hand against her crotch hair, trying to penetrate with his finger. His eyes were closed, but when he opened them he saw that hers were terrified.

"I have to go home -" she cried, "I do - I want to go home - I have to, please, Mr. Bellanger - please sir - you do not understand - I love Sydney, please sir - I have hurt myself."

"How can you love Sydney?" he said. "I mean - you wanted this -"

He realized she was mortified, but he couldn't stop, because her legs were moving against him. And quite unexpectedly, he shuddered against her right leg.

The air had the faint smell of cleaning detergent. She looked so small, terrified, and countrylike. Not the kind of person he had imagined going to Montreal with, as he had when he walked to the house.

She went to a chair and sat down, with her eyes cast toward the rug, some blood behind her ear. The worst object of indictment against him was her brown paper lunch bag that she had not yet opened, sitting on the dining-room table.

"You better not tell," he said.

He pulled his boots on the wrong feet and fled the house. He staggered down the drive where he had walked in sweet anticipation a few minutes before.

He leaned against a spruce tree and tried to think. He knew if she told he would be fired, Gladys would leave him, and he would be left with nothing.

Now he smelled her sex on his fingers and felt the blood drain from his face.

He ran back to the store like a child.

He went into the store and closed the green door blind, locked the door, and in the back, near a barrel of McIntosh apples, began to shake.

He hadn't intended this at all. But hadn't she led him on? Yes - for why would she go to Polly's with him? And how many people he knew saw her there? And how many drinks did he buy her? And how many men had she led on at Polly's as well? They had all looked at her - she wanted them too. He could have witnesses lined up - he would need help! And wasn't her husband a worthless example of a human being, robbing and setting fires (oh, he remembered that)! The two of them were, really. And their children, who he had seen at church; one a saucy-faced boy, the other a scrawny pink-eyed albino! Yes - they were depraved, ignorant people who did such ignorant things, everyone knew!

No - his story would have to be that she tried something and he had told her he was married that she then laughed in his face - and then demanded money! Yes - demanded money!

The phone rang in Rudy Bellanger's house the next morning at eight-fifteen. His wife answered.

"It's Daddy," she said.

When he came to the phone he was trying to think of how he could extricate himself from this terrible feeling, as much as from the situation itself.

"How did you make out hunting - you get a deer?" Rudy asked.

"Rudy, what happened here?" Leo said, calm. "Were you in the house -?"

"I - don't know -"

There was a long pause.

"Well, damnit, were you in the house or not?"

"No - of course not."

"Was anyone hanging around the house?"

"Just Elly - maybe Sydney - I don't know."

"Well there you go - we were robbed of five hundred dollars - right from the drawer upstairs. So that's why."

"What's why?" Rudy asked.

"That's why Elly phoned in sick, Rudy, and said she wanted to quit. Get down here - I want to decide how I'm going to handle this. I mean, she must have been put up to it - by him, damnit - I've treated them decently - more than that - fuck."

He banged down the receiver in Rudy's ear, but Rudy's hand hung on to his phone, because he had never heard Leo say that word.

TEN.

My mother heard about the robbery just after noon hour and went to see my father on the bridge. It was a black, cold day. The snow had balked in the morning, but now it seemed certain to snow in the afternoon. Clouds hung over the woods, and the road already glittered with hoarfrost. All was silent, as it is in the country in late fall.

She looked ashamed, made attempts to look into Dad's eyes but could not.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Mr. McVicer's house has been robbed of money. Mr. McVicer phoned."

"You weren't at work?"

"No - I didn't go to work today."

"Why?"

Mother looked at him quickly and said nothing. Then she looked toward the flat ice just skimming the river. "I felt bad," she said.

"What's wrong?" Sydney bit his huge leather mitten off and then felt her cheek. His glasses were fogged, and at the best of times he could hardly see things close up. She grabbed his hand and kissed it and smiled.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Why - what has happened?"

"I must go to Mr. McVicer's house - will you come with me? - I don't want to go there alone."

"Certainly. We'll go now." And he took off his safety helmet and told an already irascible Mr. Porier where he was going.

They started walking to the southeast, turning down an old chip-sealed road toward the shore as tiny dartlike snowflakes fell out of the winter sky and numbed their faces. A huge buck, whose doe had been shot by Mathew Pit two days before, stood far up the dirt side road, watching them. Autumn followed them at a distance, but they told her to go home and wait. She watched them walk together toward our destiny.

The bay was not yet frozen, yet most of the properties, being summer cottages, were boarded for the winter, and the bushes entwined in burlap sacks. Wind whined through the trees along the shore road and up in the old man's yard, while the long narrow drive glistened with black ice. As Elly got closer she took ever smaller steps.

"What's wrong?" Sydney asked again.

"I don't know if I can do it - go see Mr. McVicer."

My mother trembled. Smoke came from the chimney on the east side of the house and broke and scattered, and small rotted leaves twirled into the air from time to time, like a dance of lost children.

"Please take my hand," she said.

"Elly," my father whispered, "what have you done? Did you take some money?"

Elly, a blue tam pulled down to her forehead, hiding her eyes, looked at Sydney as if she was questioning his question. She pushed her hat up and sniffed, and shook her head mournfully, as if she was about to cry.

"I took no money," she said.

He took her hand and they went to the door.

My mother had thought about this all morning. She had not had much luck in her life.

If she spoke of yesterday's incident, Rudy would deny it, and there was a good chance McVicer would think it nothing more than a ruse to cover what she had actually done, which was take his money from the upstairs drawer.

Of course she had taken nothing. What held more power over her lack of resolve was the fact that Sydney was even more gullible than she. So she had never told him about her progressively uncomfortable conversations or how Rudy disliked him; how he had subtly mocked Sydney in front of the people at Polly's because Sydney would be ashamed if he knew. And she did not want him to be ashamed. My dad would never ask for help, but he was enormously grateful to both McVicer and Rudy.

Because of this my mother had lied, had told Sydney that Rudy was interested in him and impressed that he read books and wanted to go to university. To change this story now would seem opportunistic because of the theft. Every moment she had failed to speak the truth, to save my father's feelings, went against her now, when truth spoken sooner might have saved her from this accusation.

To explain anything about her meeting with Rudy, and Rudy's assault, would seem nothing more than a face-saving alibi. Worse, an alibi that hurt and damaged the reputation of a man Sydney believed was being kind to them. A man who was married to poor sick Gladys, and lived in a fifteen-room house.

So it was clear: she should have told Sydney the night before. When he had kissed her at supper he knew something was wrong and had asked her what was the matter. But she was too humiliated to tell him.

Now the robbery fit like a key into tumblers in some terrible Pandora's box, and prodded by her silence made her, by everything she had done or refused to say since five-thirty the day before, culpable.

When my parents got to the house Rudy was sitting in the den. He wore his gold cufflinks and watch, his small sapphire ring. His fingers were short and white, his fingernails clean and manicured.

He glanced at my mother, smiled piteously, and glanced away. For her part, her eyes were downcast, her tam still on her head, half covering her eyes, and her small nose was reddened from the walk. She kept admonishing herself for having gone to Polly's Restaurant. When McVicer looked at her, her smile hopelessly affirmed her guilty state. His eyes were penetrating. He had been a decorated officer in the Second World War.

Tossing some piled-up mail aside, Leo asked them what had happened to his money in the drawer. To show how important this was, he had not changed his clothes. He still wore his hunting boots, hunting vest, and humphrey pants, dotted with specks of blood.

The old house took on various shades of light as the wind blew, and seemed to Elly to smell of guns and fly rods and rubber boots.

"Where's the money?" Leo asked.

"I don't know," my mother said, looking at the floor - a floor she had been vacuuming when last in the house. She looked at the creases the vacuum cleaner had made. At the midpoint in the rug was the very spot the vacuum cleaner had been turned off. After Rudy left yesterday she had gone into the washroom for a second, washed the blood away, had come out, in a daze, and couldn't finish the vacuuming. Thinking of this, she glanced Rudy's way and saw that he was looking at that exact same spot on the rug. Their eyes met and she looked quickly at the floor again.

Although Leo cared for her, he was more than willing to admit a disappointment in trusting her. He had known her family well. Her adoptive father, old Mr. Brown, was a hump back whose shirts were bought at his store. Each year her mother picked fiddleheads and strawberries and he allowed her to pick them on his property.

Finally he turned away from Mom and rubbed his hands together. "You can't tell me what you did with the five hundred dollars," Leo said.

"No," my mother whispered, shaking her head. Her legs trembled. She was going to say "No, because I didn't take it," but she'd already said she hadn't taken it.

"It wouldn't be nice for a married woman to have to talk to the police, would it."

"No," my mother whispered, looking up quickly, tears flooding her eyes.

"Nor would it be too nice if I fired Sydney - well, why shouldn't I?" Leo said in his strong river accent, which always comes to people here in the midst of deep emotion.

But by now my mother couldn't speak. She only shook in spasms, her left foot leaning on her right foot, a stance she had had since a child, whenever people at the orphanage were angry at her.

"Tell them you didn't do it," Sydney said.

Still she only cried, because of the kindness Leo and Sydney were trying to show her. Sometimes in the afternoon Leo had told her to stop working and sit with him and drink a cup of tea. He would talk about his wife, of how she had to go to the hospital, of how the world was changing and men acting like women and women acting like men.

Now she felt she had betrayed him and those nice cups of tea. A stern and practical old man, but one who nonetheless cared very much for her. Sydney was laughed at by Mathew Pit, tormented by Mathew's sister, Cynthia, and Elly had tried to protect him by telling him that Rudy was impressed by him. It may have been the worst miscalculation of her life.

Leo spun around to Sydney. "Perhaps you did it for her - yesterday about five o'clock?"

"Oh no," my mother said, trying to wipe her eyes. "No," she said. "He didn't - he couldn't - he never could - I did."

Sydney said nothing. The wind blew fiercely.

"You did?" Rudy said, astonished.

"I - I don't know if I did or didn't," Mother said.

"I - could have you prosecuted. One phone call." Leo paused. "But you have children - it's the children I think of - not you. Sydney, I will not take Elly's money - but you will work on the bridge until you pay the five hundred back - you will pay it back. You have been a problem on this road before, Sydney - stole money from the church -and boxes of smelts and blamed it on others - and said things about people when they tried to help you. Well - and Ms. Whyne - Elly - Diedre Whyne, do you remember her? She advised you not to go off marrying Sydney. How do I know? I know because I am a friend of her father - she is my goddaughter - she cared that much for you - she wanted you to go off to school, didn't she, and get an education -she tried very hard with you -"

My mother nodded hopelessly.

"But you didn't go off to school, you got married to Sydney - now look at the trouble you're in - you never took advice - we knew you were slow - at church - we knew, we helped you - let you do things for the Catholic Women's League and help at the picnics - we all liked you. Oh, I sometimes think Ms. Whyne has very hard ideas - but her father is a friend and I trust her. Has she asked to see you recently? Last week didn't she want to talk to you?"

Again mother nodded.