The turkeys, Steve Gauley, a young girl: drownings.
(In my memory of this story, only one of these stood out: wrongly, as it turned out.)
Re-reading “Miles City, Montana” reveals the intricate layering of Alice Munro’s stories, the multiple threats of drowning and its actual occurrence.
One. Then the next. They settle.
Subtly, so that it really seems to be about the turkeys (recalling “The Turkey Season”, but although there are similarites, the farms have different owners) and the other details.
Yet, the story begins with memory. “My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned.”
The narrator can describe the boy in detail, “like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter”. But she states in only the third paragraph: “I don’t think I really saw all this.”
That is what happens with memory: it is unreliable but it presses onward.
What does this mean, for a story which is assembled from memories?
The narrator discusses what she might have been allowed to get close enough to see, what she must have heard somebody saying when they were referring to what she had not seen herself, and what it would and would not have been like, had she actually seen the child’s face. She is not discussing facts, but maybes.
What we assemble as memory: it is imagination with deliberate, rational construction imposed as a foundation, with emotional impact colouring the re-creation throughout.
In essence, memory is fiction. And, yet — and, so — “Miles City, Montana” is rooted in memory.
The story is positioned in time so that the narrator is not only recalling this drowning from her childhood, but she is recalling another event from her years as a young wife and mother of two girls, looking back at both events from later in time still, from a point at which she has been long divorced from her husband, the girls’ father.
Even if memory is fiction, it is of paramount importance: memory stacked upon memory.
First, reaching back to the furthest event she recounts, it “seemed a worse shame (to hear people talk) that there was no mother, no woman at all – no grandmother or aunt, or even a sister – to receive Steve Gauley and give him his due of grief.”
But there is something else, something she remembers later, an intense disgust and anger that she remembers feeling towards adults, beginning at that time.
“It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste – a thin, familiar misgiving.”
In both of these instances, there are parallels in later situations which beg the readers to consider a string of questions: is a death in which a mother grieves less shameful? in what ways (if any) can a father legitimately grieve the loss of a child? is the parent-child relationship inherently characterized by anger?
But the reader cannot forget that the narrator has just stated that she does not trust her own memory, so all of these ideas and emotions surrounding these situations are unreliable as well.
It seems likely that this anger and disgust is something that she has imprinted upon this early memory, something she has imagined and re-visioned, just as she created the sight of the boy’s body after he had drowned.
Steve Gauley’s father “was the only grownup that I let off the hook. He was the only one I didn’t see giving consent. He couldn’t prevent anything, but he wasn’t implicated in anything, either — not like the others, saying the Lord’s Prayer in their unnaturally weighted voices, oozing religion and dishonor.”
No other grownup, not even the narrator, has been let off the proverbial hook.
Certainly not her husband, Andrew, who is no longer her husband when the narrator tells this story. Not in an everyday way — they argued about everything from lettuce on sandwiches to weightier issues of responsibility — and not in a lasting way either.
“And finally – finally – racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leap-frogged over them. We declared them liars.”
What does this say of the progress of love? It immediately recalls the grudges from the title story and the knowledge that this marriage will end in divorce some years later directly challenges the idea of progress. “Andrew and I didn’t forget things. We took umbrage.”
In my memory of this story, it was about one specific drowning, but my memory was wrong; the plot does not unfold as I remembered it unfolding, and I must question my reader’s memory, just as the narrator questions her own memories.
“Miles City, Montana” is not so much a story about drowning. One could argue that it is about memory. One could argue that it is about marriage. One could argue that it is about survival. One could argue that it is about whatever you imagine it to be about.
“There’s something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn’t there? Something shameful. Laying your finger on the wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit of what it’s like, then pulling back.”
Munro puts the reader’s finger on the wire in every single story, does she not?
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work to date. She is one of my MRE authors. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. This story is the fourth in The Progress of Love, with next Thursday reserved for “Fits”.
Note: There are spoilers in the comments below.
[…] This risk is not averted. Kent falls through. And so begins a story about the pitfalls of parenting, which recalls the much-anthologized “Miles City, Montana”. […]
Leaving a comment to add this snippet from Sheila Munro’s Lives of Mothers & Daughters (2001): “When I first read the story I marvelled at my mother’s ability to capture my character. Yes, that was me; except for physical appearances I felt I was Cynthia and Jenny was Meg. And I thought, how could she know I was like that, ‘too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be,’ and so terribly sensitive to criticism, and how could she not want to change that? It is hard to accept that she could recreate me in fiction exactly the way I really was, without understanding the psychological angle, without knowing how I felt. She must have known.”
I’m about half way through The Progress of Love, and this is my favourite story so far. I think the narrator has some sort of survivor guilt – why did her child live, while another died? What *was* that impulse that made her check on the girls? I was anticipating the drowning and when it didn’t happen, it was almost more disconcerting than if it had – it felt like it was supposed to happen but then didn’t.
I just reread “Chance” from Runaway over the weekend and was reminded of the comment that you made ages ago about this story, about what happens when one survives/escapes and another does not; in “Chance”, too, there is something which does not happen (but in my memory of the story, I remember something culminating) and with this story I remembered there being a second drowning too. These are such wonderful stories: I’m glad you enjoyed them too.
I think you have summed it up perfectly in your paragraph beginning “”Miles City, Montana” is not so much a story about drowning. One could argue that it is a story about memory.” Or, as you continue, “about marriage” or “about survival” or, and this is my favorite, “about whatever you imagine it to be about.” One of the other topics I imagined is “parenting” with possible separate categories for “motherhood” and “fatherhood” and there was also some self-analysis as part of the memories. Munro takes the reader in a number of different directions and poses a number of questions as she does so. I also found the topic of childhood perspectives on adulthood worth noting. They reminded me strongly of some of what Carrie Snyder has written in The Juliet Stories. The narrator in Miles City says “Children sometimes have an excess of disgust concerning adults” and later on concludes that she “was understanding that they[parents] were implicated” and that “They gave consent to the death of children and to my [her] death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children – they had made me[her].” The final paragraph summed it up quite neatly I felt and did so without attempting to offer any answers. Yes indeed, Munro does put the reader’s finger on the wire. Thanks for pulling this together so neatly for me.
This story didn’t provide me with a strong chuckle but I did love the fact that at mid-point or thereabouts the narrator informs us that she hasn’t “seen Andrew for years” and wonders if he “still insists on lettuce”. A fine use of detail.
Definitely the parenting parts too: I found it interesting to compare the responses between the events, between the fathers, considering the mothers (for Steve Gauley, the absence of a mother)…so much to think about and wonder at. Great observation linking Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories particularly given one of the plot developments.
Oh, the lettuce! I kept chuckling over that, too, because I was also reading Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies and the men periodically have to call home to check on details for their wives’ shopping lists. At one point, a man says he needs to call because he can’t remember if his wife needed cabbage or lettuce, and Jack declares confidently that they never want cabbage, they always want lettuce! Andrew would have approved.