“You on your way home?” she said. “Me too. I used to ride with Reddy, but he’s got too late leaving. What do you do, take the tram?”

I said yes, and Mary said, “Oh I can show you the other way and you can save your money. The bush road.”

She took me up a narrow but passable track looking down on the town, then running through the woods and past the sawmill.

“This is the way Reddy goes,” she said. “It’s higher up but shorter when you turn down at the San.”

We passed the sawmill, and beneath us, some ugly cuts in the woods and a few shacks, apparently inhabited because they had woodpiles and clotheslines and rising smoke. From one of them a big wolfish dog ran out with a great display of barking and snarling.

“You shut your face,” yelled Mary. In no time she had packed and flung a snowball which caught the animal between the eyes. It whirled around and she had another snowball ready to catch it in the rump. A woman in an apron came out and yelled, “You could of killed him.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I’ll get my old man after you.”

“That’ll be the day. Your old man can’t hit a shithouse.”

The dog followed at a distance, with some insincere threatening.

“I can take care of any dog, don’t worry,” Mary said. “I bet I could take care of a bear if we ran into one.”

“Don’t bears tend to hibernate at this time of year?”

I had been quite scared by the dog but affected carelessness.

“Yeah, but you never know. One came out early and it got into the garbage down at the San. My mom turned around and there it was. Reddy got his gun and shot it.

“Reddy used to take me and Anabel out on the sled, and sometimes other kids too and he had a special whistle that scared off bears. It was pitched too high for the ears of humans.”

“Really. Did you see it?”

“It wasn’t that kind. I meant one he could do with his mouth.”

I thought of the performance in the classroom.

“I don’t know, maybe that was just to keep Anabel from getting scared he said that. She couldn’t ride, he had to pull her on a toboggan. I’d go right behind her and sometimes I’d jump on the toboggan and he’d say what’s the matter with this thing, it weighs a ton. Then he’d try to turn around quick and catch me, but he never did. And he’d ask Anabel what makes it so heavy what did you have to eat for breakfast, but she never told. If there was other kids I wouldn’t do it. It was best when just me and Anabel went. She was the best friend I ever will have.”

“What about those girls at the school? Aren’t they friends?”

“I just hang around with them when there’s nobody else. They’re nothing.

“Anabel and me had our birthdays in the same month. June. Our eleventh birthday Reddy took us down the lake in a boat. He taught us swimming. Well, me. He always had to hold Anabel though, she couldn’t really learn. Once he went swimming way out by himself and we filled his shoes up with sand. And then our twelfth birthday we couldn’t go anywhere like that, but we went to his house and had a cake. She couldn’t eat even a little piece of it, so he took us in his car and we threw pieces out the window and fed the seagulls. They were fighting and screaming like mad. We were laughing ourselves crazy and he had to stop and hold Anabel so she wouldn’t have a hemorrhage.

“And after that,” she said, “after that I wasn’t allowed to see her anymore. My mom never wanted me anyway to hang around with kids that had TB. But Reddy talked her into it, he said he’d stop it when he had to. So he did and I got mad. But she wouldn’t have been any fun anymore she was too sick. I’d show you her grave but there isn’t anything to mark it yet. Reddy and me are going to make something when he gets time. If we’d’ve gone straight along on the road instead of turning down where we did we would have come to her graveyard. It’s just for people that don’t have anybody to come and take them home.”

By this time we were down on level ground approaching the San.

She said, “Oh I almost forgot,” and brought out a fistful of tickets.

“For Valentine’s Day. We’re putting on this play at the school and it’s called Pinafore. I got all these to sell and you can be my first sale. I’m in it.”

I was right about the house in Amundsen being where the doctor lived. He took me there for supper. The invitation seemed to come rather on the spur of the moment when he met me in the hall. Perhaps he had an uneasy memory of saying we would get together to talk about teaching ideas.

The evening he proposed was the one for which I had bought a ticket for Pinafore. I told him that and he said, “Well I did too. It doesn’t mean we have to show up.”

“I sort of feel as if I’d promised her.”

“Well. Now you can sort of unpromise her. It will be dreadful, believe me.”

I did as he told me, though I did not see Mary, to tell her. I was waiting where he had instructed me to be, on the open porch outside the front door. I was wearing my best dress of dark green crepe with the little pearl buttons and the real lace collar, and had rammed my feet into suede high-heeled shoes inside my snow boots. I waited past the time mentioned—worried, first, that Matron would come out of her office and spot me, and second, that he would have forgotten all about it.

But then he came along, buttoning up his overcoat, and apologized.

“Always a few bits and bobs to clear up,” he said, and led me under the bright stars around the building to his car. “Are you steady?” he said, and when I said yes—though I wondered about the suede shoes—he did not offer his arm.

His car was old and shabby as most cars were in those days. It didn’t have a heater. When he said we were going to his house I was relieved. I could not see how we would manage with the crowd at the hotel and I had hoped not to make do with the sandwiches at the café.

In the house, he told me not to take off my coat until the place was warmed up a bit. He got busy at once making a fire in the woodstove.

“I’m your janitor and your cook and your server,” he said. “It’ll soon be comfortable here and the meal won’t take me long. Don’t offer to help, I prefer to work alone. Where would you like to wait? If you want to you could look over the books in the front room. It shouldn’t be too unbearable in there with your coat on. The house is heated with stoves throughout and I don’t heat up a room if it isn’t in use. The light switch is just inside the door. You don’t mind if I listen to the news? It’s a habit I’ve got into.”

I went into the front room, feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to, leaving the kitchen door open. He came and closed it, saying, “Just until we get a bit of warmth in the kitchen,” and went back to the somberly dramatic, almost religious voice of the CBC, giving out the news of this last year of the war. I had not been able to hear that voice since I left my grandparents’ apartment and I rather wished that I could have stayed in the kitchen. But there were quantities of books to look at. Not just on bookshelves but on tables and chairs and windowsills and piled on the floor. After I had examined several of them I concluded that he favored buying books in batches and probably belonged to several book clubs. The Harvard Classics. The Histories of Will and Ariel Durant—the very same that could be found on my grandfather’s shelves. Fiction and poetry seemed in short supply, though there were a few surprising children’s classics.

Books on the American Civil War, the South African War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Julius Caesar. Explorations of the Amazon and the Arctic. Shackleton Caught in the Ice. Franklin’s Doom, The Donner Party, The Lost Tribes: Buried Cities of Central Africa, Newton and Alchemy, Secrets of the Hindu Kush. Books suggesting someone anxious to know, to possess great scattered lumps of knowledge. Perhaps not someone whose tastes were firm and exacting.