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Unit 4 Nettles
第四單元 蕁麻
Alice Munro
艾麗絲·蒙羅
In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny's house near Uxbridge, Ontario, an saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
1979年的夏天，我來到好朋友賽妮在安大略省的阿克斯布里奇的家中度假。在她家的廚房，我見到了他一在灶臺旁正忙于做番茄醬三明治。
Years afterward, driving around in the hills northeast of Toronto with another man, I looked for the house. I tried to locate the road it was on, but I never succeeded. It had probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it, a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place.
幾年后，我坐在另一個男子的車?yán)飮@著多倫多東北部的山區(qū)，尋找那幢房子。我試著找到它所在的街道，但從未成功過。那房子可能已經(jīng)被推倒。在我拜訪過他們的幾年后，賽妮和她的丈夫就把房子賣掉了。因為它離他們在渥太華的住處太遠(yuǎn)，不便作為夏天度假之地。
In the countryside where I lived as a child: wells would occasionally go dry in the summer. Our well was deeper than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our penned animals—my father raised silver fores and mink—so one day the well-driller arrived with impressive equipment and began the work of extending the hole down, down, deep into the earth until the water was found in the rock. From that time on we could pump out pure cold water no matter what the time of year and no matter how dry the weather. There was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it, on a burning day, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparkling like black diamonds.
在我兒時所在的鄉(xiāng)下，夏天井水偶爾干涸。盡管我家的井比大多數(shù)人家的要深些，但是父親圈養(yǎng)的銀狐、水貂需要大量的供水量。所以有一天掘井人帶著讓人難忘的掘井設(shè)備，開始了他的工作——擴(kuò)充井深一直到有水的地方。從那時起，無論任何季節(jié)或者無論天氣有多干燥，我們都能用泵搖出純凈冰涼的地下水。在水泵上掛有一個錫制的杯子，在灼熱的天氣，我用它來喝水的時候，我就想象著水流過黑色巖石時有如耀眼的黑寶石。
The well-driller was a man named Mike McCallum. He lived in the Clark Hotel, in the town close to our farm. He had come there in the spring and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. Then he would move on.
掘井人名叫邁克·麥卡樂姆。他住在一家叫克拉克的旅館里，離我們農(nóng)場很近。他春天就已經(jīng)來到這兒，并要住到把這附近能找到的活兒都干完才離開，然后會繼續(xù)到別處去。
Mike McCallum had a son who lived with him in hotel rooms or boarding houses, wherever he was working, and who went to whatever school was at hand. His name was Mike McCallum, too. He was nine and I was eight.
邁克有一個兒子，他和父親一起住在旅館或寄宿公寓。父親在哪工作，他就會就近上學(xué)讀書。他也叫邁克·買卡樂姆。那時他9歲，我8歲。
