“Yes, it’s my mother I’m thinking of,” the narrator writes in the penultimate paragraph, just before the white space. She’s had us thinking of her mother story-long, “my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor, saying with such astonishing lighthearted forgiveness, Oh, I knew you’d come someday . . .”

Those sentences are more or less the register in which most of the story is told, the register of repression, of understatement, of avoidance. And yet the speaker knows that there is a ferocity at its center. In the story’s final paragraph, she finally connects it, logically but surprisingly, to an origin story removed from the present story not only by centuries but also by an ocean:

The Cameronians, I have discovered, are or were an uncompromising remnant of the Covenanters—those Scots who in the seventeenth century bound themselves, with God, to resist prayer books, bishops, any taint of popery or interference by the King. Their name comes from Richard Cameron, an outlawed, or “field,” preacher, soon cut down. The Cameronians—for a long time they have preferred to be called the Reformed Presbyterians—went into battle singing the seventy-fourth and seventy-eighth Psalms. They hacked the haughty Bishop of St. Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body. One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world.

And of course this is the larger true thing the story has become in memory for the speaker. In an earlier Munro story, the ending might have come sooner, in the neighborhood of sentences that now appear a few pages before what is now the ending, such as: “My mother had grown up in a time and a place where sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die of it. So she honored the decency, the prudery, the frigidity, that might protect you.”

But Munro’s choice to end the story with the “Cameronians” paragraph means that the speaker—and, by extension, the writer—has begun to see her story as more than merely a story about one person’s local situation. The world of the story, the house in rural Ontario, all these people, all their social codes, and all their manufactured trouble are manifestations of the sweep and purl of history. Because no white people in Ontario came from Ontario. They came from some other place in Europe, and the people who live in the house at center of this story came from Scotland, and although perhaps almost all of them have forgotten in a daily way the seventeenth century story of the Cameronians, that story forms the baseline for understanding everything about why they do what they do to one another, why they think how they think, why they are who they are, and why such ferocity lies unexplained in the way it does, just beneath the surface of daily life. The story of the Cameronians is origin story and inheritance, and it is only the brevity of memory that attends to the human lifespan that causes people in a community to forget who they are because of who they were, and it takes a special teller to reframe it. I’d daresay it’s a revolutionary reframing, because why, one might ask, ought I continue in all the conditions of my life, in all my choices, to be beholden to the power of the seventeenth century minister who, while rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world?