by Alice Munro
Grace stared at him with her mouth open. Sounds of the washing machine filled the house.
“Yes, there is,” she said. “You wait here.”
“She’s overwhelmed,” the minister said. “It’s not that she means to be rude.”
Grace came back with a load of books.
“These here,” she said. “He had them out of the Library. I don’t want to have to pay fines on them. He went every Saturday night so I guess they are due back tomorrow. I don’t want to get in trouble about them.”
“I’ll look after them,” Arthur said. “I’d be glad to.”
“I just don’t want to get in any trouble about them.”
“Mr. Doud was saying about taking care of the funeral,” the minister said to her, gently admonishing. “Everything including the stone. Whatever you want on the stone.”
“Oh, I don’t want anything fancy,” Grace said.
On Friday morning last there occurred in the sawmill operation of Douds Factory a particularly ghastly and tragic accident. Mr. Jack Agnew, in reaching under the main shaft, had the misfortune to have his sleeve caught by a setscrew in an adjoining flunge, so that his arm and shoulder were drawn under the shaft. His head in consequence was brought in contact with the circular saw, that saw being about one foot in diameter. In an instant the unfortunate young man’s head was separated from his body, being severed at an angle below the left ear and through the neck. His death is believed to have been instantaneous. He never spoke or uttered a cry so it was not any sound of his but by the spurt and shower of his blood that his fellow-workers were horribly alerted to the disaster.
This account was reprinted in the paper a week later for those who might have missed it or who wished to have an extra copy to send to friends or relations out of town (particularly to people who used to live in Carstairs and did not anymore). The misspelling of “flange” was corrected. There was a note apologizing for the mistake. There was also a description of a very large funeral, attended even by people from neighboring towns and as far away as Walley. They came by car and train, and some by horse and buggy. They had not known Jack Agnew when he was alive, but, as the paper said, they wished to pay tribute to the sensational and tragic manner of his death. All the stores in Carstairs were closed for two hours that afternoon. The hotel did not close its doors but that was because all the visitors needed somewhere to eat and drink.
The survivors were a wife, Grace, and a four-year-old daughter, Lillian. The victim had fought bravely in the Great War and had only been wounded once, not seriously. Many had commented on this irony.
The paper’s failure to mention a surviving father was not deliberate. The editor of the paper was not a native of Carstairs, and people forgot to tell him about the father until it was too late.
The father himself did not complain about the omission. On the day of the funeral, which was very fine, he headed out of town as he would have done ordinarily on a day he had decided not to spend at Douds. He was wearing a felt hat and a long coat that would do for a rug if he wanted to take a nap. His overshoes were neatly held on his feet with the rubber rings from sealing jars. He was going out to fish for suckers. The season hadn’t opened yet, but he always managed to be a bit ahead of it. He fished through the spring and early summer and cooked and ate what he caught. He had a frying pan and a pot hidden out on the riverbank. The pot was for boiling corn that he snatched out of the fields later in the year, when he was also eating the fruit of wild apple trees and grapevines. He was quite sane but abhorred conversation. He could not altogether avoid it in the weeks following his son’s death, but he had a way of cutting it short.
“Should’ve watched out what he was doing.”
Walking in the country that day, he met another person who was not at the funeral. A woman. She did not try to start any conversation and in fact seemed as fierce in her solitude as himself, whipping the air past her with long fervent strides.
The piano factory, which had started out making pump organs, stretched along the west side of town, like a medieval town wall. There were two long buildings like the inner and outer ramparts, with a closed-in bridge between them where the main offices were. And reaching up into the town and the streets of workers’ houses you had the kilns and the sawmill and the lumberyard and storage sheds. The factory whistle dictated the time for many to get up, blowing at six o’clock in the morning. It blew again for work to start at seven and at twelve for dinnertime and at one in the afternoon for work to recommence, and then at five-thirty for the men to lay down their tools and go home.
Rules were posted beside the time clock, under glass. The first two rules were:
ONE MINUTE LATE IS FIFTEEN MINUTES PAY. BE PROMPT.
DON’T TAKE SAFETY FOR GRANTED. WATCH OUT
FOR YOURSELF AND THE NEXT MAN.
There had been accidents in the factory and in fact a man had been killed when a load of lumber fell on him. That had happened before Arthur’s time. And once, during the war, a man had lost an arm, or part of an arm. On the day that happened, Arthur was away in Toronto. So he had never seen an accident—nothing serious, anyway. But it was often at the back of his mind now that something might happen.
Perhaps he did not feel so sure that trouble wouldn’t come near him, as he had felt before his wife died. She had died in 1919, in the last flurry of the Spanish flu, when everyone had got over being frightened. Even she had not been frightened. That was nearly five years ago and it still seemed to Arthur like the end of a carefree time in his life. But to other people he had always seemed very responsible and serious—nobody had noticed much difference in him.
In his dreams of an accident there was a spreading silence, everything was shut down. Every machine in the place stopped making its customary noise and every man’s voice was removed, and when Arthur looked out of the office window he understood that doom had fallen. He never could remember any particular thing he saw that told him this. It was just the space, the dust in the factory yard, that said to him now.
The books stayed on the floor of his car for a week or so. His daughter Bea said, “What are those books doing here?” and then he remembered.
Bea read out the titles and the authors. Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the Northwest Passage, by G. B. Smith. What’s Wrong with the World?, G. K. Chesterton. The Taking of Quebec, Archibald Hendry. Bolshevism: Practice and Theory, by Lord Bertrand Russell.
“Bol-shev-ism,” Bea said, and Arthur told her how to pronounce it correctly. She asked what it was, and he said, “It’s something they’ve got in Russia that I don’t understand so well myself. But from what I hear of it, it’s a disgrace.”
Bea was thirteen at this time. She had heard about the Russian Ballet and also about dervishes. She believed for the next couple of years that Bolshevism was some sort of diabolical and maybe indecent dance. At least this was the story she told when she was grown up.
She did not mention that the books were connected with the man who had had the accident. That would have made the story less amusing. Perhaps she had really forgotten.
The Librarian was perturbed. The books still had their cards in them, which meant they had never been checked out, just removed from the shelves and taken away.
“The one by Lord Russell has been missing a long time.”
Arthur was not used to such reproofs, but he said mildly, “I am returning them on behalf of somebody else. The chap who was killed. In the accident at the factory.”
The Librarian had the Franklin book open. She was looking at the picture of the boat trapped in the ice.
“His wife asked me to,” Arthur said.
She picked up each book separately, and shook it as if she expected something to fall out. She ran her fingers in between the pages. The bottom part of her face was working in an unsightly way, as if she was chewing at the inside of her cheeks.
“I guess he just took them home as he felt like it,” Arthur said.
“I’m sorry?” she sai
d in a minute. “What did you say? I’m sorry.”
It was the accident, he thought. The idea that the man who had died in such a way had been the last person to open these books, turn these pages. The thought that he might have left a bit of his life in them, a scrap of paper or a pipe cleaner as a marker, or even a few shreds of tobacco. That unhinged her.
“No matter,” he said. “I just dropped by to bring them back.”
He turned away from her desk but did not immediately leave the Library. He had not been in it for years. There was his father’s picture between the two front windows, where it would always be.
A. V. Doud, founder of the Doud Organ Factory and Patron of this Library. A Believer in Progress, Culture, and Education. A True Friend of the Town of Carstairs and of the Working Man.
The Librarian’s desk was in the archway between the front and back rooms. The books were on shelves set in rows in the back room. Green-shaded lamps, with long pull cords, dangled down in the aisles between. Arthur remembered years ago some matter brought up at the Council Meeting about buying sixty-watt bulbs instead of forty. This Librarian was the one who had requested that, and they had done it.
In the front room, there were newspapers and magazines on wooden racks, and some round heavy tables, with chairs, so that people could sit and read, and rows of thick dark books behind glass. Dictionaries, probably, and atlases and encyclopedias. Two handsome high windows looking out on the main street, with Arthur’s father hanging between them. Other pictures around the room hung too high, and were too dim and crowded with figures for the person down below to interpret them easily. (Later, when Arthur had spent many hours in the Library and had discussed these pictures with the Librarian, he knew that one of them represented the Battle of Flodden Field, with the King of Scotland charging down the hill into a pall of smoke, one the funeral of the Boy King of Rome, and one the Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
He sat down at one of the reading tables, where he could look out the window. He picked up an old copy of the National Geographic, which was lying there. He had his back to the Librarian. He thought this the tactful thing to do, since she seemed somewhat wrought-up. Other people came in, and he heard her speak to them. Her voice sounded normal enough now. He kept thinking he would leave, but did not.
He liked the high bare window full of the light of the spring evening, and he liked the dignity and order of these rooms. He was pleasantly mystified by the thought of grown people coming and going here, steadily reading books. Week after week, one book after another, a whole life long. He himself read a book once in a while, when somebody recommended it, and usually he enjoyed it, and then he read magazines, to keep up with things, and never thought about reading a book until another one came along, in this almost accidental way.
There would be little spells when nobody was in the Library but himself and the Librarian.
During one of these, she came over and stood near him, replacing some newspapers on the rack. When she finished this, she spoke to him, with a controlled urgency.
“The account of the accident that was printed in the paper—I take it that was more or less accurate?”
Arthur said that it was possibly too accurate.
“Why? Why do you say that?”
He mentioned the public’s endless appetite for horrific details. Ought the paper to pander to that?
“Oh, I think it’s natural,” the Librarian said. “I think it’s natural to want to know the worst. People do want to picture it. I do myself. I am very ignorant of machinery. It’s hard for me to imagine what happened. Even with the paper’s help. Did the machine do something unexpected?”
“No,” Arthur said. “It wasn’t the machine grabbing him and pulling him in, like an animal. He made a wrong move or at any rate a careless move. Then he was done for.”
She said nothing, but did not move away.
“You have to keep your wits about you,” Arthur said. “Never let up for a second. A machine is your servant and it is an excellent servant, but it makes an imbecile master.”
He wondered if he had read that somewhere, or had thought it up himself.
“And I suppose there are no ways of protecting people?” the Librarian said. “But you must know all about that.”
She left him then. Somebody had come in.
The accident was followed by a rush of warm weather. The length of the evenings and the heat of the balmy days seemed sudden and surprising, as if this were not the way winter finally ended in that part of the country, almost every year. The sheets of floodwater shrank magically back into the bogs, and the leaves shot out of the reddened branches, and barnyard smells drifted into town and were wrapped in the smell of lilacs.
Instead of wanting to be outdoors on such evenings, Arthur found himself thinking of the Library, and he would often end up there, sitting in the spot he had chosen on his first visit. He would sit for half an hour, or an hour. He looked at the London Illustrated News, or the National Geographic or Saturday Night or Collier’s. All of these magazines arrived at his own house and he could have been sitting there, in the den, looking out at his hedged lawns, which old Agnew kept in tolerable condition, and the flower beds now full of tulips of every vivid color and combination. It seemed that he preferred the view of the main street, where the occasional brisk-looking new Ford went by, or some stuttering older-model car with a dusty cloth top. He preferred the Post Office, with its clock tower telling four different times in four different directions—and , as people liked to say, all wrong. Also the passing and loitering on the sidewalk. People trying to get the drinking fountain to work, although it wasn’t turned on till the First of July.
It was not that he felt the need of sociability. He was not there for chat, though he would greet people if he knew them by name, and he did know most. And he might exchange a few words with the Librarian, though often it was only “Good evening” when he came in, and “Good night” when he went out. He made no demands on anybody. He felt his presence to be genial, reassuring, and, above all, natural. By sitting here, reading and reflecting, here instead of at home, he seemed to himself to be providing something. People could count on it.
There was an expression he liked. Public servant. His father, who looked out at him here with tinted baby-pink cheeks and glassy blue eyes and an old man’s petulant mouth, had never thought of himself so. He had thought of himself more as a public character and benefactor. He had operated by whims and decrees, and he had got away with it. He would go around the factory when business was slow, and say to one man and another, “Go home. Go on home now. Go home and stay there till I can use you again.” And they would go. They would work in their gardens or go out shooting rabbits and run up bills for whatever they had to buy, and accept that it couldn’t be otherwise. It was still a joke with them, to imitate his bark. Go on home! He was their hero more than Arthur could ever be, but they were not prepared to take the same treatment today. During the war, they had got used to the good wages and to being always in demand. They never thought of the glut of labor the soldiers had created when they came home, never thought about how a business like this was kept going by luck and ingenuity from one year to the next, even from one season to the next. They didn’t like changes—they were not happy about the switch now to player pianos, which Arthur believed were the hope of the future. But Arthur would do what he had to, though his way of proceeding was quite the opposite of his father’s. Think everything over and then think it over again. Stay in the background except when necessary. Keep your dignity. Try always to be fair.
They expected all to be provided. The whole town expected it. Work would be provided just as the sun would rise in the mornings. And the taxes on the factory raised at the same time rates were charged for the water that used to come free. Maintenance of the access roads was now the factory’s responsibility instead of the town’s. The Methodist Church was requesting a hefty sum to build the new Sunday school. The town h
ockey team needed new uniforms. Stone gateposts were being erected for the War Memorial Park. And every year the smartest boy in the senior class was sent to university, courtesy of Douds.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Expectations at home were not lacking either. Bea was agitating to go away to private school and Mrs. Feare had her eye on some new mixing apparatus for the kitchen, also a new washing machine. All the trim on the house was due to be painted this year. All that wedding-cake decoration that consumed paint by the gallon. And in the midst of this what had Arthur done but order himself a new car—a Chrysler sedan.
It was necessary—he had to drive a new car. He had to drive a new car, Bea had to go away to school, Mrs. Feare had to have the latest, and the trim had to be as fresh as Christmas snow. Else they would lose respect, they would lose confidence, they would start to wonder if things were going downhill. And it could be managed, with luck it could all be managed.
For years after his father’s death, he had felt like an impostor. Not steadily, but from time to time he had felt that. And now the feeling was gone. He could sit here and feel that it was gone.
He had been in the office when the accident happened, consulting with a veneer salesman. Some change in noise registered with him, but it was more of an increase than a hush. It was nothing that alerted him—just an irritation. Because it happened in the sawmill, nobody would know about the accident immediately in the shops or in the kilns or in the yard, and work in some places continued for several minutes. In fact Arthur, bending over the veneer samples on his desk, might have been one of the last people to understand that there had been an intervention. He asked the salesman a question, and the salesman did not answer. Arthur looked up and saw the man’s mouth open, his face frightened, his salesman’s assurance wiped away.
Then he heard his own name being called—both “Mr. Doud!” as was customary and “Arthur, Arthur!” by such of the older men as had known him as a boy. Also he heard “saw” and “head” and “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”