The geographic home of Alice Munro's fiction is southwestern Ontario, Canada, the plug of land nearly surrounded by three of the Great Lakes--by Lake Huron on the north and west, by Lake Erie on the south, and, on the east, by the western end of Lake Ontario. The metropolis of Toronto sits like a sentinel near the northwest corner of Lake Ontario, and a line drawn southwesterly from Toronto to Windsor, next to Detroit, Michigan, passes through or near several pretty substantial towns--Cambridge, Kitchener, London. But north of that line--Munro territory--is thinly populated farm country. She was born in 1931 at Wingham, sometimes, as in "Boys and Girls," called in her fiction Jubilee; it's about 55 miles northwest of Kitchener. Her father was a fox farmer. The first sentence of "Boys and Girls" is, "My father was a fox farmer." Those collecting autobiographical tidbits might also notice that the name of the girl narrator's younger brother, Laird, seems a version of the author's birth name, Alice Laidlaw.
"Boys and Girls" was one of the stories in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968. If you know one thing about Munro, it's probably that she recently won the Nobel Prize--in 2013, when she was getting too old and frail to spend the cash award. Though I'm not a reliable guide on these things, my sense is that her Nobel-worthy reputation rests more on stories from the middle and latter part of her career. There is a view that she just kept getting better and better. Her stories tended to get longer, and began exhibiting what reviewers and scholars have called "complex architecture," including preeminently big jumps in time as a story of maybe 40 or more pages shows a character at different stages in life but not in the order of young-older-old. The themes and settings changed, too. Later stories are less apt to be set in and around Jubilee, and more apt to concern older women alone in the world. The successful author may have become a bit more cosmopolitan. The earlier stories are almost always set in rural and small-town southwestern Ontario. They are not anything like "technically innovative." A recurring theme, or maybe I should say "situation," is--feeling the inadequacy of labels but here goes--female coming-of-age tale. "Boys and Girls" is one of these.
The title: sounds like something a kindergarten teacher would say several times a day, with a faint accent of myth--"male and female He created them." The second sentence is an amplification of the first, the declaration that the narrator's father is a fox farmer:
That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their furs were prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders.
Munro's prose can go on and on without ever really calling attention to itself, but it seems hard to ignore here the emphatic fall of monosyllabic verbs. You want to know about fox farming? Killed--skinned--sold. The narrator doesn't let on that she is aware of any irony, but she proceeds to describe the calendars depicting "treacherous northern rivers" and "plumed adventurers" that these fur companies gave her father. The calendars were hung by the kitchen door. Meanwhile in the whitewashed cellar, on a work table illuminated by a bare hundred-watt bulb, her father skinned the foxes, removing the pelt so that it was inside-out, then tediously scraped away "little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat." The slippery and rat-like fox carcasses were put in a sack and buried at the dump. Once, Henry Bailey, the playful hired man, had taken a swing at the narrator with a full sack. Her mother had not liked that. She tells us that her mother disliked the pelting operation, not without reason, for the whole house smelled of fox--which smell, however, the narrator found "reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles."
The story at first may not seem to be about anything more than the details of the fox farm operation. The narrator describes them with a kind of subdued Dickensian relish--where the foxes lived, how their cages were arranged, how they were fed, what they were fed, the chores she performed, her superiority as a farmhand to her younger brother Laird. All the details convey her keen interest and love, but it wouldn't be right to say we learn of this only through indirection or inference. Her desire to please her father, a somewhat mysterious man, is intense:
Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions. Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride. One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired man." I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.
"Could of fooled me," said the salesman. "I thought it was only a girl."
And a page later this blunt, soaring assessment:
It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.
Ritualistically. In my father's service. These phrases, evocative of religious sublimity and sacred rites, seem oddly elevated for the topic of fox farming. I think maybe they're supposed to seem odd, like the lying calendar pictures that contrast with killed-skinned-sold, the table lit by the bare bulb, and the bag filled with slippery carcasses that gets buried at the dump. The drama in the largely incident-free story relates to the resolution of these opposing things.
One of the things the foxes eat is horsemeat. When neighbors have a horse no longer useful for farm work, they sell it cheaply to the narrator's father, who kills it, butchers it, feeds it to the foxes. When a horse is available, it makes sense to buy it now, even if the need isn't immediate, since it doesn't cost much to keep the horse alive for a week or a month or half a season. And so it happens that for awhile the narrator's family is keeping two horses. Notwithstanding their short life expectancies, they name them: the male is called Mack and the mare they call Flora. Mack is old and easy to handle whereas Flora is spirited--it seems she was available not on account of her age but because a farmer had gotten a tractor. I said the story is largely incident-free, but toward the end these two horses get killed. It's practically the only two things that happen in the story. All the rest is description and incidental detail--atmospherics, you might say. The narrator sees the first horse get killed and plays a part two weeks later when the second is killed.
Mack is the first to go. One day the narrator guesses what's going to happen and she hustles herself and Laird into the barn, so that they can watch. Laird looks out through a crack between boards and the narrator finds a knothole "that gave me the view I wanted--a corner of the barnyard, the gate, part of the field," and then:
My father came in sight carrying the gun. Henry was leading Mack by the halter. He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled cigarettes for my father and himself. While this was going on Mack nosed around in the old, dead grass along the fence. Then my father opened the gate and they took Mack through. Henry led Mack away from the path to a patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear. Mack again began searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found. My father walked away in a straight line, and stopped at a short distance which seemed to suit him. Henry was walking away from Mack too, but sideways, still negligently holding on to the halter. My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.
I set this down because I know for sure I can't adequately describe it. The first sentence establishes the narrator's telescopic view through the knothole and suggests a peculiar intensity of vision. What she'll see is lifted out of ordinary experience. Things begin to happen--things that have a strong ritualistic aspect, like the men preparing to smoke. Their movements and actions function to accomplish the task safely, but, through the knothole, they register in her consciousness like a liturgy. Though she had before ascribed the phrase ritualistically important to her father's work, the ritual she now observes repels her. You can tell from the way it naturally occurs to her to describe what she sees. Laird would not apply "negligently" to Henry's grip on the halter. She thinks her father stops short "at a distance which seemed to suit him" because, to her, it seems like more negligence. And the horse nosing around for a tuft of grass in the seconds before being shot.
Two weeks later it's Flora's turn. This time the narrator has no intention of watching. Once is enough. In the days since Mack was shot, she has reflected, while combing her hair in a mirror and wondering whether she'd be pretty, on what she'd seen, "the easy, practiced way my father raised the gun." She and her brother are playing up by the house when they hear wild whinnying down by the barn. They run to see what's happening. The spirited Flora has broken away from Henry, gotten out of the barn, and is running free in their large, L-shaped field. The gate at the far end is open. Her father yells for her to race to the end of the field and shut the gate. She runs very fast, ahead of Laird, and gets to the gate before Flora, and also before her father gets to the bend in the L to see. Instead of shutting the gate, she opens it wide and the horse escapes. She can't explain to herself why she does this. It's a useless gesture, worse than useless since Flora won't really get away and it's a waste of her busy father's time to have to go after her in the truck. Sure enough, that afternoon the truck rolls back into the yard with a big tarpaulin spread over the back. At dinner, in the house, over bowls of steaming and overcooked vegetables, Laird tells what she'd done and she cries. Her father makes "a curt sound of disgust" but excuses her with the same dismissive phrase that the feed salesman had used--"She's only a girl." The last line of the story is:
I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.
Probably "Boys and Girls" is not among Munro's very best stories, but it's been attractive to me ever since I first had to read it in a college class on the short story. I wish now I could remember the form in which the teacher got the text for us. I don't recall ever seeing "Boys and Girls" in an anthology. Maybe he just made copies for us out of his own edition of Dance of the Happy Shades. It seems that even way back in the late 70s there would have been other Munro stories to assign, and that he must therefore have really wanted us to read "Boys and Girls." One possible reason, because I think it applies to me now and so it could have applied to him then, is that loving her stories makes you curious about her, and one senses that in "Boys and Girls" the fictive draperies might not be too heavily embroidered. In a detail that seems extraneous, the narrator goes with a friend to a show in Jubilee in the interval between the two horse shootings. She reports having a good time, and the name of the friend, Judy Canova, is dropped into the story, the only mention of this girl, and I kind of wonder if young Alice Laidlaw didn't have a friend with a similar name with whom she went to shows in Wingham, the closest town to the fox farm on which she grew up in southwestern Ontario.
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