SOURCE: "The Stories," in Sinclair Ross: A Reader's Guide, Thunder Creek Publishing, 1981, pp. 3-27.

[In the following excerpt, Mitchell surveys the major themes of Ross's short fiction. ]

The short stories of Sinclair Ross are worth examining first because of what they tell us about his craft and moral purpose. As a group, the 16 stories published indicate his development as a prose writer, and provide some key insights to the world of psychological violence he depicts in his longer fictions. On the whole, the stories are simpler and more precise—although Ross himself is inclined to see them as "apprentice" works of fiction.

When his first story, "No Other Way," was published in the English magazine Nash's in 1934, Ross wrote, "I am now starting to work on short stories, hoping gradually to build up a better technique without the cramping grind that writing a novel after hours demands." At that time, he was working for the bank in Winnipeg and had written two novels which he described as "failures."

The stories from Ross's "early" period, roughly 1935 to 1945, are his most successful—that is, during the time when he was giving them close artistic attention. He virtually stopped writing short stories after 1950.

Most of the stories have a remarkably similar pattern: a direct narrative simplicity and lack of stylistic excess.

Occasionally, there is a first-person narrator. The characters are usually simple people, either rural or small-town; "sophisticates" never appear, even peripherally. Ross's technique of characterization, however, is never simple. It shows a careful accretion of physical and psychological detail through the course of a well-plotted story. His pieces are, in other words, models of the "classic" story, and show much similarity to the stories of James Joyce and Stephen Crane. Ross's particular strength is the use of external forces, such as weather and landscape, to create symbolic patterns around the internal lives of his characters; he also shows a highly developed eye for the significantly vivid detail in a commonplace world.

Except for "No Other Way," Ross's stories have been published in small Canadian magazines, and it was many years before they were widely available or read. They are unusual in Canadian fiction, in that the best of them achieve an exhilarating fusion of the classic elements of short fiction: character, plot and theme. By not fearing to rig out a strong plot—a "populist" rather than literary approach—Ross has succeeded while many of his more "polished" contemporaries have already faded from view.

It has taken a long time for Sinclair Ross's fiction to be appreciated, no doubt in part because he is averse to interviews and publicity—but also because his very qualities of simplicity, directness and a thematic concern with "ordinary" people, have placed his work below the dignity of Canadian academics and critics. History is the final judge of literature, however—and it is a rare anthology of Canadian stories these days that does not include at least one of his stories.

In 1968, nine of the stories were selected by the editors of McClelland and Stewart to be published in paperback, the first time any of them would appear in book form. This followed the successful paperback reprint of As For Me and My House, in 1957—sixteen years after its first publication. This selection of stories for inclusion is curious, as some of those omitted are superior, but perhaps the unifying principle of The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories is simply one of agricultural setting. All of these stories take place on farms, and the characters are all rural.

As these nine are the only stories generally available to readers, I will examine them first. They can—for the purpose of discussion—be divided into two groups. The strongest stories are in the first group, one marked by an intense conflict between husband and wife—that is, a sexual conflict. This is a theme which dominated Ross's first story ("No Other Way"); elements of it appear in nearly all his written works.

In each of these stories, the husband is a wheat farmer. He is usually tight-lipped and physically powerful, almost brutal. As an archetype, he could be seen as a slave of the earth-goddess Demeter, toiling to satisfy the demands of his farm and crops. The wife is generally characterized as sensitive and refined, often well-educated. She is subjected to a life of suffering and emotional deprivation in this harsh existence of rural isolation, fearing that worldly and cultural pleasures will be denied to her forever.

While these stories are not specifically located, it appears obvious that Ross has drown on his observations of Saskatchewan during the "Dirty Thirties."

"A Field of Wheat" is one of Sinclair Ross's finest achievements and illustrates this thematic conflict perfectly. John and Martha (surnames are rarely given in any of Ross's stories) live with their children, Annabelle and Joe, on a farm somewhere in the Great Plains. From the number of crop failures they have suffered, the period could be assumed to be the 1930s. There are no other characters, and their world becomes reduced to one of the simplest elements: family, animals, farm, weather. They are in conflict with the universe, and among themselves, but it is this starkness of detail which provides the story with its beauty. There is no attempt to provide social history, or any kind of documentary realism. The effect is to give us a microcosm of suffering mankind, caught in the grinding wheels of a universe beyond understanding or control.

John has never been to school himself; he knew what it meant to go through life with nothing but his muscles to depend upon; and that was it, dread that Annabelle and Joe would be handicapped as he was, that was what had darkened him, made him harsh and dour. That was why he breasted the sun and dust a frantic, dogged fool, to spare them, to help them to a life that offered more than sweat and debts. Martha knew. He was a slow, inarticulate man, but she knew. Sometimes it even vexed her, brought a wrinkle of jealousy, his anxiety about the children, his sense of responsibility where they were concerned. He never seemed to feel that he owed her anything, never worried about her future. She could sweat, grow flat-footed and shapeless, but that never bothered him.

The girl Annabelle is the repository of Martha's dreams. In the coming winter she will, perhaps, take music lessons. "The farm was no place to bring her up. Running wild and barefoot, what would she be like in a few years? Who would ever want to marry her but some stupid country lout?" Martha is terrified that her daughter will follow her own pattern, despite a real love she has for her husband.

Martha's dream of the future is, naturally, centred on the crop of wheat, "the best crop of wheat John had ever grown," and she goes continually out to the field to examine its progress. It is three hundred acres of dreams: "Beautiful, more beautiful than Annabelle's poppies, than her sunsets. Theirs—all of it."

However, on the mid-summer day when the story is set, there is an oppressive atmosphere building in the air. The children are quarrelling around her feet in the hot kitchen, and when she suddenly looks outside, "there was no sky, only a gulf of blackness. . . . Above, almost overhead, a heavy, hard-lined bank of cloud swept its way across the sun-white blue in august, impassive fury."

Martha screams at the children to stay inside as the hail storm suddenly strikes. The description of the storm is one of the most effective passages Ross has written, opening with:

a sharp, crunching blow on the roof, its sound abruptly dead, sickening, like a weapon that has sunk deep into flesh. Wildly she shook her hands, motioning Annabelle back to the window, and started for the stairs. Again the blow came; then swiftly a stuttered dozen of them.

She reached the kitchen just as John burst in. With their eyes screwed up against the pommelling roar of the hail they stared at each other. They were deafened, pinioned, crushed. His face was a livid blank, one cheek smeared with blood where a jagged stone had struck him. Taut with fear, her throat aching, she turned away and looked through Joe's legs again. It was like a furious fountain, the stones bouncing high and clashing with those behind them. They had buried the earth, blotted out the horizon; there was nothing but their crazy spew of whiteness.

The effect of the storm is catastrophic; it breaks the windows and invades the house, heaping hailstones on the beds and floors. The dog Nipper is forgotten outside and "beaten lifeless." When it subsides, Martha and John walk out to their field of wheat:

Nothing but the glitter of sun on hailstones. Nothing but their wheat crushed into little rags of muddy slime. Here and there an isolated straw standing bolt upright in headless defiance. Martha and John walked to the far end of the field. There was no sound but their shoes slipping and rattling on the pebbles of ice. Both of them wanted to speak, to break the atmosphere of calamity that hung over them, but the words they could find were too small for the sparkling serenity of wasted field. Even as waste it was indomitable. It tethered them to itself, so that they could not feel or comprehend. It had come and gone, that was all; before its tremendousness and havoc they were prostrate. They had not yet risen to cry out or protest.

Up to this point the story, though well-written, is fairly conventional and, it might be said, typically Canadian in its grim presentation of the power of nature. Ross, however, is more concerned with the human dynamics of this archetypal family. Martha, devastated, whimpers that she cannot go on any longer. John pleads with her to put on a brave front for the sake of the children, which she does, though vowing to herself she will leave the farm. Unable to take the strain, she runs to the stable to "unloose the fury that clawed within her, strike back a blow for the one that had flattened her." Her intention is to attack her husband, but she cannot find him at first; and when she does, she is startled to find him "pressed against one of the horses," sobbing in private anguish. It is a shock to her, "the strangest, most frightening moment in her life. He had always been so strong and grim; had just kept on as if he couldn't feel, as if there were a bull's hide over him, and now he was beaten." Like an intruder she creeps away, an unwilling witness to his humiliation.

The story concludes on a curious note of triumph and hope, when Annabelle cries to her mother, "Look at the sky!"

Withdrawn now in the eastern sky the storm clouds towered, gold-capped and flushed in the late sunlight, high still pyramids of snowiness and shadow. And one that Annabelle pointed to, apart, the farthest away of them all, this one in bronzed slow splendour spread up mountains high to a vast, plateau-like summit.

Martha hurries indoors to prepare a "good supper" for John, with the peas she had picked before the storm. The image of the gold-capped clouds towering in the east suggests that life will go beyond this stormy moment in their lives, despite the terrible burden of defeat and despair, which threatens to crush their hopes. Martha's faith in self, at least, is somehow renewed—and a story drenched in pathos somehow becomes a parable of existential hope.

"The Lamp at Noon," another dust-bowl story, is considerably bleaker. This time, the external force is the shrieking wind. For three days it has hurled dust at a struggling young farm couple, Paul and Ellen. Again, the storm symbolizes the conflict between man and wife, or at least the suffocating blast of circumstances which threatens Ellen's equilibrium. A former school-teacher, she has been struggling against deep emotional depression, perhaps a result of her recent birth-giving as much as farm life. It is the isolation which abrades her nerves, but she focuses her bitterness on the helpless Paul.

The story begins at noon on the third day of the dust storm. Even at noon, the obscuring dust has brought on such darkness that Ellen must light their kitchen lamp. The description of the farm quickly becomes more universal:

In dim, fitful outline the stable and oat granary still were visible; beyond, obscuring fields and landmarks, the lower of the dust clouds made the farmyard seem an isolated acre, poised aloft above a sombre void. At each blast of wind, it shook, as if to topple and spin hurtling with the dust-reel into space.

Alone with the baby inside the claustrophobic shack, she recalls her recent arguments with Paul, bitter exchanges of angry words which neither of them understands. When he finally comes in for lunch, the quarrel picks up where it left off, as she pleads with her husband to give up the futile struggle against the wind.

The lamp between them threw strong lights and shadows on their faces. Dust and drought, earth that betrayed alike his labour and his faith, to him the struggle had given sternness, an impassive courage. Beneath the whip of sand his youth had been effaced.

He sat staring at the lamp without answering, his mouth sullen. It seemed indifference now, as if he were ignoring her, and stung to anger again she cried, "Do you ever think what my life is? .. . I'm still young—I wasn't brought up this way."

"You're a farmer's wife now. It doesn't matter what you used to be, or how you were brought up. You get enough to eat and wear. Just now that's all I can do. I'm not to blame that we've been dried out five years."

As the storm intensifies its violence around them, Paul refuses to sympathize, seeing her hysteria as female weakness. Finally his preoccupation with the waiting farmwork overwhelms any need for talk, and "with a jerk" he frees his smock from her clutch.

Like John in "A Field of Wheat," he goes to the stable to find comfort in the company of his work-horse. Even there, the walls "creaked and sawed as if the fingers of a giant hand were tightening to collapse them; the empty loft sustained a pipelike cry that rose and fell but never ended." As in so much of Sinclair Ross's fiction, the external world seems alive with malignant rage. Once alone, however, Paul becomes filled with remorse for his cruelty, seeing his wife's face in front of him with "its staring eyes and twisted suffering."

As the afternoon wears on, the storm gradually expires and Paul returns to the house. "But she was gone.. . . The door was open, the lamp blown out, the crib empty. The dishes from their meal at noon were still on the table." Terrified, he stumbles for hours through the piles of dirt around their farm until he finds her "crouched against a drift of sand as if for shelter, her hair in matted strands around her neck and face, the child clasped tightly in her arms."

The baby is dead, suffocated either by her frantic arms or by the dust. The horror is that Ellen does not realize that the child is dead, and her eyes show only "an immobile stare." Although the storm is over and she whispers "tomorrow will be fine," the conclusion is one of unrelieved despair, so that Ellen's final utterance is tragically ironic. For this couple there is no tomorrow. Yet Ross is careful to assign no blame to either of the characters; like the unnamed baby, they are victims of their own frailty.

"Not By Rain Alone" is a story in two parts, called "Summer Thunder" and "September Snow." These were originally published separately (the latter section two years before the former) in Queen's Quarterly, where most of Ross's stories first appeared. They were unified in the collection with slight revisions, to greatly enhanced effect. The cycle of the seasons and years becomes—like the storms of the other stories—a symbol of the changing lives of the central characters, Will and Eleanor.

In "Summer Thunder," Will is a bachelor farmer, very poor and fighting a drought. He hopes to marry Eleanor, the daughter of a wealthy neighbour, but they are thwarted by the "still, brassy, pitiless" weather. His farm is full of stones which appear every spring as fast as he can clear them, the frost heaving "another litter from the bitch-like earth." His black mare Bess is beginning "to sag a little now," and his shack is a "stench of heat and a sickening drone of flies." All in all, a rather unattractive proposition for Eleanor. "At the best they would grub along painfully, grow tired and bitter, indifferent to each other. It was the way of the land."

The couple meets in the field to look at their hopeless crop, but they determine to marry after harvest in the fall. As they talk the distant thunder grows closer,

like tumbling stones. . . . flare after flare of lightning lit the clouds, yellow and soft like the flickerings of a lamp; and they saw what dark and threatening clouds they were, yet how they still hung in the distance, as if at a pause, uncertain of their way.

In "September Snow" a year later, the couple is married. Eleanor is pregnant, and, with a snowstorm coming, she does not want Will to go out into the fields at night to collect his cattle. Yet the cattle must be brought in, or they will be lost, so he goes into the storm. When he finds them, huddled against a fence, they prove impossible to drive back against the wind. When Will loses his temper and strikes his horse Bess, she jerks away and disappears into the night.

Will sets out walking back to the farm, sometimes "backwards, sometimes with one shoulder thrust out, his head tilted, the way a swimmer meets a wave." Finally he can go no further and seeks refuge in a straw-stack. As though trying to reverse his child's impending birth, Will attempts to escape from the world back into the womb-like warmth.

He tunnelled into it, lengthwise, feet first, kicking and burrowing until he could stretch his legs. And now the warmth was real, but wide awake from the effort it had cost him to pull out the straw he began to think of Eleanor, and to feel troubled and even guilty because he was lying here comfortable and idle. . . . She would be waiting for him, pacing through the house. . . . afraid he might be lost. Sometimes a woman did queer things when she was expecting a baby. She might even start out to look for him, or try to make her way to a neighbour's.

Panic stricken, he tries the storm once again, but is driven back by a wind "like a needled wall." Surrendering to its fury, he retreats into the warm shelter of the stack and dozes until morning. When he wakes, the storm is over, and the world has become "colourless and blank, without balance or orientation." He trudges home, anticipating a quarrel with his wife.

The house, however, is empty except for an invasion of snow "mounded right across the kitchen, curled up like a wave against the far wall, piled on table and chairs. Even on the stove—" He finds Eleanor on the bed, "her face twisted into a kind of grin, the forehead shining as if the skullbones were trying to burst through the skin." She dies in the process of childbirth; the cattle wander home by themselves. Eleanor's death has been completely absurd, and Will must live a future knowing that his devotion to the farm has killed her. Yet once again, there is at the conclusion of this utterly bleak scene a curious trumpet-note of hope:

They talked to him about the baby, somebody held it up for him to see, but he went to the door and stood blinking at the glitter of the sun. .. . It was like a spring day, warm and drowsy... . There was a hushed, breathless silence, as if sky and snow and sunlight were self-consciously poised, afraid to wrinkle or dishevel their serenity. Then through it, a faint, jagged little saw of sound, the baby started to cry. He felt a twinge of recognition. He seemed to be listening to the same plaintiveness and protest that had been in Eleanor's voice of late. An impulse seized him to see and hold his baby; but just for a minute longer he stood there, looking out across the sun-spangled snow, listening.

What is Will listening for? What does he wish to hear? The voice of God, providing an explanation for this cruel joke? Why should he, of all men, be made to suffer in this sharp exchange of life and death? As in all of Sinclair Ross's stories, there are no answers. Man simply must go on. The new generation is at hand, maintaining the cycle, just as Will himself has taken on the endless toil of moving rocks from his parents' harsh land. Here is a Sisyphean parable indeed.

The sexual conflict in these stories, obviously, is not of the conventional boy-meets-girl, man-takes-mistress variety. Here the sexual roles are very basically defined. The male is the physical half of the human animal, imbued with grim determination to provide and compete. The female is the spiritual half, trying to make sense of it all, victimized by her physical weakness just as the man is victimized by his lack of "common sense." The source of Ross's vision lies as much in the ancient mythology of Egypt as it does in Canadian geography. The primal conflict is demonstrated most brilliantly in Ross's finest story, "The Painted Door," a piece which has been anthologized dozens of times but was virtually unknown for years after its first publication in 1939.

Here again, we have John, "a slow, unambitious man, content with his farm and cattle, naively proud of Ann. He had been bewildered by it once, her caring for a dullwitted fellow like him." They have no children, and like the other doomed couples, they toil out their lives in the same vast and lonely land.

John's father lives a few miles away and needs help in the middle of winter. Ann is terrified of being alone, with a blizzard threatening, but John promises he will return no matter how bad the storm gets. His promises, it is assumed, are absolutely reliable. But to allay her fears, he says he will ask Steven, their neighbour, to drop by for a visit.

As the day wears on, Ann paints the kitchen woodwork to keep her mind off the weather and solitude. Like the other women, she reflects on their long years of drudgery to pay off the mortgage, their sacrifice to a future that will never arrive. Painting onward, accompanied by the ominous ticking of her clock, the silence grows unbearable. She thaws the frost on the window to see the storm beginning, its drifts

swift and snakelike little tongues of snow. .. . It was as if all across the yard the snow were shivering awake—roused by the warnings of the wind to hold itself in readiness for the impending storm. . . . Before her as she watched a mane of powdery snow reared up breast-high against the darker background of the stable, tossed for a moment angrily, and then subsided again as if whipped down to obedience and restraint. But another followed, more reckless and impatient than the first. Another reeled and dashed itself against the window where she watched. Then ominously for a while there were only the angry little snakes of snow. The wind rose, creaking the troughs that were wired beneath the eaves.... All around her it was gathering; already in its press and whimpering there strummed a boding of eventual fury. Again she saw a mane of snow spring up, so dense and high this time that all the sheds and stables were obscured.

The sustained intensity in the description of the blizzard is one of the most effective passages in Ross's canon. He is, of course, describing the storm within Ann—complete with deft touches of sexual imagery—as well as the one which assaults from without. The elements rage like demons, threatening her soul as they do the walls of the house with "sharp, savage blows." For relief, she keeps turning to the stove to warm herself—that is, to the domestic hearth. But gradually she begins to doubt that John will return through this ferocious storm. She goes outside to feed the animals in the stable and encounters the blizzard head-on:

A gust of wind spun her forward a few yards, then plunged her headlong against a drift that in the dense white whirl lay invisible across her path. For nearly a minute she huddled still, breathless and dazed. The snow was in her mouth and nostrils, inside her scarf and up her sleeves. . . . The wind struck from all sides, blustering and furious. It was as if the storm had discovered her, as if all its forces were concentrated upon her extinction. . . . Suddenly [with] a comprehension so clear and terrifying that it struck all thoughts of the stable from her mind, she realized in such a storm her puniness.

She retreats back to the house, shortly before Steven arrives to calm her hysteria. She collapses against him, "hushed by a sudden sense of lull and safety." Steven is a swaggering opportunist who exploits Ann's loneliness and seduces her, after convincing her that John could not possibly travel through such a storm.

As she lies in bed with Steven asleep beside her, Ann has a frightening nightmare in which a great shadow

struggled towards her threateningly, massive and black and engulfing all the room. Again and again it advanced, about to spring, but each time a little whip of light subdued it to its place. . . . Still she cowered, feeling that gathered there was all the frozen wilderness, its heart of terror and invincibility.

In this world where sexual infidelity is more than a sin, but approaches the vilest evil, she is tormented with a vision of John standing at the bedroom doorway, gazing on her transgression. As she looks on the sleeping Steven, "half-smiling still, his lips relaxed in the conscienceless complacency of his achievement," she knows she was wrong to see anything in his smooth appearance that was preferable to her rough, unshaven—and entirely faithful—John. To make it up to him, she resolves, "John was the man. With him lay all the future."

It is already too late, however, John is found in the morning a mile away, clutching the wire on the fence past the house. It appears he missed the house, returning in the storm, and got caught up in the wire. Later, when left alone with his corpse, Anne sees a "little smear of paint" on the palm of his hand, paint he could only have gotten from the bedroom door as he watched his own nightmare in the bedroom. He has killed himself in the storm, rather than return to a home he could no longer tolerate.

The ending employs an unexpected twist of plot, yet its impact is totally convincing. Ann is left as Will was, facing an indescribably tormented future of guilt, for her one lapse of conviction. It is a tough moral world that Ross's characters occupy.

The second group of stories in The Lamp at Noon shows a slightly different perspective. They reveal an element in Sinclair Ross's writing which appears, so far, only in the stories. This is the story seen from a child's point of view, though often narrated by the child grown-adult. Here the themes are less tragic—though never whimsical—as the child learns how to deal with the confusing adult world of farm life. The horse as both character and symbol is important in all of Ross's work, but there is an especially strong link in this group of stories between child and horse.

For example, in "The Outlaw," a 13-year-old unnamed boy has two loves which dominate his life: Millie Dickson, a sweet little thing "from town," and Isabel, his "beautiful but dangerous" pony. It is a touching and often funny triangle, for Millie comes to the farm one day and taunts the boy into riding the "outlaw" horse, against the specific commands of his parents. He has already fantasized riding Isabel to the school house to impress Millie, "whose efforts to be loyal to me were always defeated by my lack of verve and daring."

In a moment of heroic exhilaration, he gallops across the fields—a horseman at last, among the strawstacks "luminous and clear as drops of gum on fresh pine lumber"—before Isabel throws him off head-first into a snowdrift, almost at the feet of her watching rival. Millie is wickedly amused at the punishment which will follow—but it never comes. His father is pleased after all at his daring, and silences the mother's disapproval. "Now, in their peculiar parental idiom, they had just given their permission, and Isabel and the future were all mine. Isabel and Millie Dickson."

"Circus in Town" is probably the lightest story in the collection, concerning an 11-year-old girl, Jenny, who is denied the circus because of the family's poverty. Worse, she must endure her parents' recurring bickering over finances, making her feel "exasperated and guilty that there should be a quarrel about it, her father looking so frightened and foolish, her mother so savage and red." Jenny flees with her bright circus poster to the barn loft—another womb-like sanctuary of privacy and innocence—where she proceeds to enjoy the circus in her fantasies: "All night long she wore her purple tights and went riding Billie round and round the pasture in them. A young, fleet-footed Billie. Caparisoned in blue and gold and scarlet, silver bells on reins and bridle—neck arched proudly to the music of the band." Like most of these sad children, Jenny fights to retain her sense of beauty and romance by retreating inward, away from the cruel world of practical adulthood.

A much more densely plotted story is "The Runaway," a tale of moral justice in the Faulkerian mode. Here a boy tells of the conflict between his father, a rather unsuccessful farmer, and Luke Taylor, a highly successful breeder of "Black Diamond" horses, and a man with a reputation for sharp dealing. When Father acquires a team of Black Diamonds, over Mother's objections, they are horrified to discover they own a "balky" team—that is, a team which, at unpredictable moments, refuses to move. Father is completely humiliated on Main Street when the Diamonds "instead of springing away with flying manes and foaming mouths, striking sparks of envy and wonder from the heart of every beholder, simply stood there, chewed their bits and trembled."

Father, a Christian optimist, keeps hoping to change them, but loses control of himself when he is further goaded by Luke Taylor. (Taylor is described in generally Satanic terms, especially by Mother). Father finally employs Luke's taunting suggestion and builds a fire under the balky team while they are hitched to a straw stack. Frightened, the horses pull the strawrack over the fire and take off for home—not to their new home, but to Luke Taylor's big hip-roofed barn. They gallop off with "terror in their hearts, hitched to a load of fire," while the boy chases behind on his pony Gopher.

Like a pair of rebellious black imps, the Diamonds set Luke's barn on fire. The herd of Diamonds inside all balk when the boy tries to remove them; Luke runs into the barn as the floor of the burning loft collapses. "You sow the wind and you reap whirlwind," Mother comments knowingly, while Father continues to dream of a pair of Black Diamond colts "[the] prettiest horses a man ever set eyes on."

The most unusual story in the collection is "One's a Heifer," a mysterious tale which pits a young boy of thirteen against one of the most sinister and crudely appealling characters in Canadian fiction, Arthur Vickers.

Vickers runs "a poor, shiftless-looking place" a few miles distant from the boy's uncle's farm. They meet when the boy is out late searching for some stray cattle. Vickers denies seeing them, although he is extremely evasive about a closed box-stall in his ramshackle barn. Nonetheless, he invites the boy to stay for supper and a game of checkers in his crude bachelor's shack. "The table in the centre was littered with tools and harness. On a rusty cookstove were two big steaming pots of bran. .. . At the end opposite the bed, weasel and coyote skins were drying. There were guns and traps on the wall. .. . In a corner squatted a live owl with a broken wing." In explanation, Vickers, say, "You get careless, living alone like this. It takes a woman anyway."

A little later, however, he reveals he had a woman there a few weeks the previous summer, "but it didn't last. Just a cow she was—just a big stupid cow—and she wanted to stay on. . . . I had to send her home."

All the time, the boy is plotting how he can slip out to the barn, round up his uncle's yearlings and start the long trek home. He decides to accept Vickers' invitation to stay overnight, and they get involved in a series of checker games which Vickers transparently allows the boy to win. "Sometimes I used to ask her to play," he says, "but I had to tell her every move to make. If she didn't win she'd upset the board and go off and sulk." Eventually Vickers begins talking about the girl, who wanted to marry him, or at least stay on with him in the shack. Vickers could not be trapped so easily, especially by an inferior checkerplayer.

His "glassy, cold" eyes are deeply disturbing to the young narrator, filling him with "a vague and overpowering dread." Pretending to sleep, the boy is distracted by Vickers, who remains sitting at the checker-board,

staring fixedly across the table as if he had a partner sitting there. His hands were clenched in front of him, there was a sharp, metallic glitter in his eyes. . . . then suddenly wrenching himself to action he hurled the checkers with such vicious fury that they struck the wall and clattered back across the room.

When Vickers finally goes to sleep, the boy has a nightmare in which he goes to the stable, with the owl "sitting over the door with his yellow eyes like a pair of lanterns. The calves, he told me, were in the other stall with the sick colt. I looked and they were there all right, but Tim [his horse] came up and said it might be better not to start for home till morning. .. . I agreed, realizing now that it wasn't the calves I was looking for after all, and that I still had to see inside the stall that was guarded by the owl."

In the morning, Vickers is very tense, and the boy employs a trick to get into the mysterious stall to find his calves. Vickers returns and grabs him violently by the throat, then knocks him down to the floor. "But it wasn't the blow that frightened me. It was the fierce wild light in his eyes."

When he finally makes his escape on his horse, by lashing Vickers across the face with the reins, he gets home to discover that the calves had come home by themselves. Vickers didn't have them in the stall at all, and we are left to conclude that Vickers kept the corpse of the "stupid cow" in there. It is not indicated how or when this nightmare will end, either for Vickers or for the boy.

"Cornet at Night" is probably Ross's most popular story, widely anthologized and adapted to a short film. It is the most optimistic in the collection, despite the theme of intense sexual conflict. The Dicksons represent the same family again: a hard-working father, a cultured, even Puritan mother. Tommy, the boy, is sent into town to hire a man to help with the harvest, against his mother's wishes.

"But Monday's his music lesson day—and when will we have another teacher like Miss Wiggins who can teach him music too?"

"A dollar for lessons and the wheat shelling! When I was his age I didn't even get to school."

"Exactly," my mother scored, "and look at you today. Is it any wonder I want him to be different?"

Like the other children, Tommy is the battleground for his parents' obsessions. He is torn between his is father, who is demanding and surly, and his mother, who makes him wear "knicker corduroys" and practise hymns on the piano.

However, a compromise is wrung, and Tommy is sent with Rock, the plodding reliable work-horse, to hire a hand. Mr. Dickson wants "somebody big and husky"; Mrs. Dickson wants one who looks clean. On his first solo flight to town, even with Rock, Tommy is ecstatic. "For a farm boy is like that. Alone with himself and his horse he cuts a fine figure. He is the measure of the universe. . . . His horse never contradicts."

In town, however, it is very different, and his "little bubble of self-importance" is soon burst. On an impulse, he selects from the candidates a young well-dressed man with slender hands, "almost a girl's hands, yet vaguely with their shapely quietness they troubled me, because, however slender and smooth, they were yet hands to be reckoned with, strong with a strength that was different from the rugged labour-strength I knew."

The young man, named Phil, turns out to be a musician who has never worked on a farm before. He is a disaster, and even Mrs. Dickson is contemptuous. Mr. Dickson attempts to blame her for Tommy's misjudgement: "It's your fault—you and your nonsense about music lessons. If you'd listen to me sometimes, and try to make a man of him."

Completely shattered, Tommy is compensated that night when Phil plays his cornet in the bunk-house.

. . . when they came the notes were piercing, golden as the cornet itself, and they gave life expanse that it had never known before. They floated up against the night, and each for a moment hung there clear and visible. Sometimes they mounted poignant and sheer. Sometimes they soared and then, like a bird alighting, fell and brushed earth again.

The next day, after failing miserably in the fields, Phil is cast back again into the stream of unemployment just as Tommy comes home from school. Moved by the mysterious outburst of music, his mother shows some sympathy for the haggard Phil, giving him "a box of lunch and some ointment for his sunburn." "My father looked uncomfortable, feeling, no doubt, that we were all unjustly blaming everything on him. It's like that on a farm. You always have to put the harvest first."

This is what Tommy learns, apparently, although the parents' bickering continues long after Phil has gone. Mrs. Dickson says the misfortune came about as retribution for her husband harvesting on Sunday. It is back to painful piano marches and a life of brutal toil, but Tommy has transcended for one moment into the world of the spirit. He concludes, "A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once."

The uncollected stones show many of the same themes. "No Other Way," Ross's first story, is a somewhat melodramatic account of Hatty Glenn, an unfortunate farm wife who tends cattle and turnips while her husband runs off to town to dally with the undertaker's wife. She is humiliated on the one occasion when she insists on going with him to a dance. She contemplates killing herself as "an ugly, crabbed old woman," but when the endless farmwork demands her presence, she once again takes up her burdens for "there was no other way."

It is apparent, then, that even in his first story, Sinclair Ross was depicting his farm characters as existential anti-heroes, winding the plot around the battle of the sexes. This is again demonstrated in "Nell," a later story that is, if possible, even more depressing. Nell is a "tall, spare, rawboned woman" who struggles in resentment over her husband's Saturday night jaunt to town. He plays poker in the back of the poolroom while she maintains her vigil in the general store, finally walking home with her son Tommy and a bottle of ketchup she had purchased especially for her husband's enjoyment.

It is hard to understand why "A Day with Pegasus" was not included in The Lamp at Noon, as it is not only a superior story, but is remarkable for its positive outlook. For once, the farm family is harmonious and prosperous. The emphasis is on romantic fantasy, rather than despair.

Peter Parker is a young boy with a vivid imagination, in the process of being shackled by a prosaic school teacher. Inspired by a new colt he has been given by his father, he writes a school composition about rodeos and a fictitious cowboy friend named Slim. Miss Kinley is outraged at the "lies" and demands that he writes a "true" composition on how he spent the previous Saturday planting potatoes.

At home again, Peter recovers his dignity with the companionship of his colt, and retreats to the barn loft to gaze at the prairie, lit by the setting sun:

For a few miles it fell gently, then with a long slow swell slipped over the horizon. There was a state of mind, a mood, a restfulness, in which one could skim along this curve of prairie floor and, gathering momentum from the downward swing, glide up again and soar away from earth. He succeeded now, borne by a whitelimbed steed again. And as they soared the mystery was not solved, but gradually absorbed, a mystery still but intimate, a heartening gleam upon the roof of life to let him see its vault and spaciousness.

This "magic crystal globe" of transcending imagination is a key motif in Sinclair Ross's writing that lies as a counter-balance to the harsh and stringent realism of the psychic conflicts he otherwise explores. Treated here with thematic purity, it puts "A Day with Pegasus" in a class by itself.

Two stories which derive from Ross's army experiences during World War Two appeared in magazines just after the war, "Barrack Room Fiddle Tune" and "Jug and Bottle." These may be surviving fragments from an abandoned novel which Ross has said he was working on during the war years "about a young soldier from Manitoba." "Barrack Room Fiddle Tune" is a slight tale about a group of soldiers who destroy the fiddle of a pathetic character because he torments them with his awful playing. "Jug and Bottle" is a far more substantial morality tale, rather Conradian in structure and density. Of all of Ross's stories, it is the most remote from his prairie landscape. It resists summarizing, being essentially a character study of Private Coulter, an ungainly man, a misfit who keeps trying to kill himself for unexplained reasons. The narrator finds himself keeping the man alive, becoming friendly with him, and finally assuming responsibility for his life. Gradually, it evolves that Coulter has previously married an invalid girl out of pity. When she did not die as expected, he could not keep up his false mask of love and now he is tormenting himself with guilt.

Gradually, the narrator realizes that he has put himself in a similar position, that Coulter "had a special claim on me, as if sympathizing with him in his misfortune was my special job." He attempts to back out of the friendship, avoiding him because there is a difference "between helping a man through a tough spot, and turning yourself into a crutch for him to lean on permanently."

The conclusion is complicated, but effective. Coulter's estranged wife dies; the narrator agrees finally to meet him at an English pub called The Jug and Bottle. Too late, he discovers that the name is simply the description of a pub entrance, and he waits at the door of the wrong pub. As a result, Coulter has slashed his wrists and died, his burden of guilt unrelieved. Now the narrator must carry Coulter's burden.

Another later story is "Saturday Night," about a young man who is painfully pursuing a Saturday night date in his old home town with a girl who had charmed him the week before. But his illusion of great romance is shattered; when he finally tracks her down, she is out with a fancy rival. The point of the story is his recovery from the disappointment—the rhythm of life going on with or without him.

The most recently published (1972) of Ross's stories, "The Flowers that Killed Him," is also his most experimental in structure. If anything, however, it is even more somber than his rural stories. Were it not for the odd twist of plot at its conclusion, it would not be recognized as a story by the same author.

The narrative technique is rather sophisticated, as the story is told by a young boy who is obviously disturbed by something he does not reveal. His two friends—13-yearolds like himself—have recently been sexually assaulted and murdered. Together they were known as "the inseparables," although the other boys had come from deprived backgrounds, and were considered outcasts.

The narrator's father is the town's school principal, known as "Old Creeper" because of his fascination with plants and flowers. It is the father who brought the boys together, and when the narrator discovers that his father is the murderer—through a complex series of plot turns and character revelations—he is revolted. His father had used him like a piece of bait to bring the other boys into his reach. He waits until his father comes out onto the balcony of their apartment building, "because to reach one of the boxes you've got to lean out over the railing and stretch." When he does, the boy pushes him over, hurtling him five floors down onto the pavement and a broken milk bottle the son has placed there in preparation—"to be sure that nobody, even after they'd straightened him out and washed off the blood and makeup, would notice the scratches that had been there before he hit the pavement."

It is a particularly gruesome and gothic story, combining the outraged innocence evident in Ross's earlier work with the demands of magazines for more sophisticated material and techniques. If nothing else, it proves Sinclair Ross's continuing adaptability as a writer, and that his ability to write short fiction has not waned over the years.