Friend of My Youth by Munro Alice

Author:Munro, Alice [Munro, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

What Austin wants Karin to do is clear everything out. Even his books, his old typewriter, the pictures of his wife and children. His son lives in Denver, his daughter in Montreal. He has written to them, he has talked to them on the phone, he has asked them to claim anything they want. His son wants the dining-room furniture, which a moving-truck will pick up next week. His daughter said she didn’t want anything. (Karin think she’s apt to reconsider; people always want something.) All the furniture, books, pictures, curtains, rugs, dishes, pots, and pans are to go to the Auction Barn. Austin’s car will be auctioned as well, and his power mower and the snowblower his son gave him last Christmas. These will be sold after Austin leaves for Hawaii, and the money is to go to Lazarus House. Austin started Lazarus House when he was a minister. Only he didn’t call it that; he called it Turnaround House. But now they have decided—Brent Duprey has decided—it would be better to have a name that is more religious, more Christian.

At first Austin was just going to give them all these things to use in or around the House. Then he thought that it would be showing more respect to give them the money, to let them spend it as they liked, buying things they liked, instead of using his wife’s dishes and sitting on his wife’s chintz sofa.

“What if they take the money and buy lottery tickets with it?” Karin asks him. “Don’t you think it’ll be a big temptation to them?”

“You don’t get anywhere in life without temptations,” Austin says, with his maddening little smile. “What if they won the lottery?”

“Brent Duprey is a snake.”

Brent has taken over the whole control of Lazarus House, which Austin started. It was a place for people to stay who wanted to stop drinking or some other way of life they were in; now it’s a born-again sort of place, with nightlong sessions of praying and singing and groaning and confessing. That’s how Brent got hold of it—by becoming more religious than Austin. Austin got Brent to stop drinking; he pulled and pulled on Brent until he pulled him right out of the life he was leading and into a new life of running this House with money from the church, the government, and so on, and he made a big mistake, Austin did, in thinking he could hold Brent there. Brent once started on the holy road went shooting on past; he got past Austin’s careful quiet kind of religion in no time and cut Austin out with the people in his own church who wanted a stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity. Austin was shifted out of Lazarus House and the church at about the same time, and Brent bossed the new minister around without difficulty. And in spite of this, or because of it, Austin wants to give Lazarus House the money.

“Who’s to say whether Brent’s way isn’t closer to God than mine is, after all?” he says.

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