by Alice Munro
Here Marian pushed back her chair so abruptly that it almost fell over. She got up and began to show them just what Mr. Siddicup had done. She lurched and crouched and banged her hands to her head, though she did not dislodge her hat. In front of the sideboard, in front of the silver tea service presented to Lawyer Stephens in appreciation of his many years’ work for the Law Society, she put on this display. Her husband held his coffee cup in both hands and kept his deferential eyes on her by an effort of will. Something flashed in his face—a tic, a nerve jumping in one cheek. She was watching him in spite of her antics, and her look said, Hold on. Be still.
Lawyer Stephens, as far as Maureen could see, had not glanced up at all.
He did like that, Marian said, reseating herself. He did like that, and because she had not been feeling well herself, she got the idea that perhaps he was in pain.
Mr. Siddicup. Mr. Siddicup. Are you trying to tell me your head hurts? Do you want me to get you a pill? Do you want me to take you to the doctor?
No answer. He wouldn’t stop for her. Ah, ahh.
In his stumbling around he found himself at the pump. They had running water in the house now, but still used the pump outside and filled Bounder’s dish at it. When Mr. Siddicup took note of what it was, he got busy. He went to work on the handle and pumped it up and down like crazy. There wasn’t any cup to drink from, like there used to be. But as soon as water came he stuck his head under. It splashed and stopped, because he had quit pumping. Back he went and pumped again, and stuck himself under again, and on like that, pumping and dousing, letting it pour over his head and face and shoulders and chest, soaking himself and still, when he could, making some noise. Bounder was excited and ran around bumping into him and letting out barks and whines in sympathy.
That’s enough, you two! Marian yelled at them. Let go that pump! Let go and settle down!
Only Bounder listened to her. Mr. Siddicup had to keep on till he got himself so drenched and blinded he couldn’t find the pump handle. Then he stopped. And he lifted one arm up, he lifted and pointed, back in the general direction of the bush and the river. He was pointing and making his noises. At the time, that didn’t make any sense to her. She didn’t think about it till later. Then he quit that and just sat down on the well cover, soaked and shivering, with his head in his hands.
Maybe it’s something simple after all, she thought. Complaining because there isn’t a cup.
If it’s a cup you want, I’ll go and get you one. No need to carry on like a baby. You stay there, I’ll go and get you a cup.
She headed back to the kitchen and got a cup. And she had another idea. She fixed him up some graham crackers, with butter and jam. That was a kid’s treat, graham crackers, but it was a thing old people liked, too, she remembered from her mother and daddy.
Back to the door she went and pushed it open with her hands full. But there was no sign of him. Nobody in the yard but Bounder, looking the way he did when he knew he’d made a fool of himself.
Where did he go, Bounder? Which way did he go?
Bounder was ashamed and fed up and wouldn’t give any sign. He slunk off to his place in the house shade, in the dirt, by the foundations.
Mr. Siddicup! Mr. Siddicup! Come see what I got for you!
All silent as the dead. And her head was pounding. She started eating the crackers herself but she shouldn’t have—a couple of bites and she wanted to puke.
She took two more pills and went back upstairs. The windows up and blinds down. She wished now they’d bought a fan when the sale was on at Canadian Tire. But she slept without one, and when she woke it was nearly dark. She could hear the mower—he, her husband, was out finishing the grass at the side of the house. She went down to the kitchen and saw that he had cut up some cold potatoes and boiled an egg and pulled green onions to make a salad. He was not like some men—a hopeless case in the kitchen waiting for the woman to get out of a sickbed and make him a meal. She picked at the salad but couldn’t eat. One more pill and up the stairs and dead to the world till morning.
We better get you to the doctor, he said then. He phoned them up at work. I got to take my wife to the doctor.
Marian said, What if she just boiled a needle and he could lance it? But he could not stand to hurt her, and anyway he was afraid he might do something wrong. So they got in the truck and drove in to see Dr. Sands. Dr. Sands was out, they had to wait. Other people waiting told them the news. Everybody was amazed they didn’t know. But they hadn’t had the radio on. She was the one who always turned it on and she couldn’t stand the noise, the way she felt. And they hadn’t noticed any groups of men, anything peculiar, on the road.
Dr. Sands fixed the boil but he didn’t lance it. His way of dealing with a boil was to strike it a sharp blow, knock it on the head, when you thought he was just looking at it. There! he said, that’s less fuss than the needle and not so painful overall because you didn’t have time to get in a sweat. He cleaned it out and put the dressing on and said she’d soon be feeling better.
And so she was, but sleepy. She was so useless and foggy in the head that she went back to bed and slept till her husband came up around four o’clock with a cup of tea. It was then she thought of those girls, coming in with Miss Johnstone on Saturday morning, wanting a drink. She had lots of Coca-Cola and she gave it to them in flowered glasses, with ice cubes. Miss Johnstone would only take water. He let them play with the hose, they jumped around and squirted each other and had a great time. They were trying to skip the streams of water, and they were a bit on the wild side when Miss Johnstone wasn’t looking. He had to practically wrestle the hose away from them, and give them a few squirts of water to make them behave.
She was trying to picture which girl it was. She knew the minister’s daughter and Dr. Sands’ daughter and the Trowells—with their little sheep eyes you would know a Trowell anywhere. But which of the others? She recalled one who was very noisy and jumping up trying to get the hose even when he took it away, and one was doing cartwheels and one was a skinny pretty little thing with blond hair. But maybe she was thinking of Robin Sands—Robin had blond hair. She asked her husband that night did he know which one, but he was worse than she was—he didn’t know people here and couldn’t separate out any of them.
Also she told him about Mr. Siddicup. It all came back to her now. The way he was upset, the pumping, the way he pointed. It bothered her what that could mean. They talked about it and wondered about it and got themselves into a state of wondering so they hardly got any sleep. Until she finally said to him, Well, I know what we have to do. We have to go and talk to Lawyer Stephens.
So they got up and came as soon as they could.
“Police,” said Lawyer Stephens now. “Police. Who should gone to see.”
The husband spoke. He said, “We didn’t know if we should ought to do that or not.” He had both hands on the table, fingers spread, pressed down, pulling at the cloth.
“Not accusation.” Lawyer Stephens said. “Information.”
He had talked in that abbreviated way even before his stroke. And Maureen had noticed, long ago, how just a few words of his, spoken in no very friendly tone—spoken, in fact, in a tone of brusque chastisement—could cheer people up and lift a weight off them.
She had been thinking of the other reason why the women stopped going to visit Mr. Siddicup. They didn’t like the clothes. Women’s clothes, underwear—old frayed slips and brassières and worn-out underpants and nubbly stockings, hanging from the backs of chairs or from a line above the heater, or just in a heap on the table. All these things must have belonged to his wife, of course, and at first it looked as if he might be washing and drying them and sorting them out, prior to getting rid of them. But they were there week after week, and the women started to wonder: Did he leave them lying around to suggest things? Did he put them on himself next to his skin? Was he a pervert?
Now all that would come out, they’d chalk that up against him.
; Pervert. Maybe they were right. Maybe he would lead them to where he’d strangled or beat Heather to death in a sexual fit, or they would find something of hers in his house. And people would say in horrid, hushed voices that no, they weren’t surprised. I wasn’t surprised, were you?
Lawyer Stephens had asked some question about the job at Douglas Point, and Marian said, “He works in Maintenance. Every day when he comes out he’s got to go through the check for X-rays, and even the rags he cleans off his boots with, they have to be buried underground.”
When Maureen shut the door on the pair of them and saw their shapes wobble away through the pebbled glass, she was not quite satisfied. She climbed three steps to the landing on the stairs, where there was a little arched window. She watched them.
No car was in sight, or truck or whatever they had. They must have left it parked on the main street or in the lot behind the Town Hall. Possibly they did not want it to be seen in front of Lawyer Stephens’ house.
The Town Hall was where the Police Office was. They did turn in that direction, but then they crossed the street diagonally and, still within Maureen’s sight, they sat down on the low stone wall that ran around the old cemetery and flower plot called Pioneer Park.
Why should they feel a need to sit down after sitting in the dining room for what must have been at least an hour? They didn’t talk, or look at each other, but seemed united, as if taking a rest in the midst of hard shared labors.
Lawyer Stephens, when in a reminiscing mood, would talk about how people used to rest on that wall. Farm women who had to walk into town to sell chickens or butter. Country girls on their way to high school, before there was any such thing as a school bus. They would stop and hide their galoshes and retrieve them on the way home.
At other times he had no patience with reminiscing.
“Olden times. Who wants ’em back?”
Now Marian took out some pins and carefully lifted off her hat. So that was it—her hat was hurting her. She set it in her lap, and her husband reached over. He took it away, as if anxious to take away anything that might be a burden to her. He settled it in his lap. He bent over and started to stroke it, in a comforting way. He stroked that hat made of horrible brown feathers as if he were pacifying a little scared hen.
But Marian stopped him. She said something to him, she clamped a hand down on his. The way a mother might interrupt the carrying-on of a simple-minded child—with a burst of abhorrence, a moment’s break in her tired-out love.
Maureen felt a shock. She felt a shrinking in her bones.
Her husband came out of the dining room. She didn’t want him to catch her looking at them. She turned around the vase of dried grasses that was on the window ledge. She said, “I thought she’d never get done talking.”
He hadn’t noticed. His mind was on something else.
“Come on down here,” he said.
Early in their marriage Maureen’s husband had mentioned to her that he and the first Mrs. Stephens gave up sleeping together after Helena, the younger child, was born. “We’d got our boy and our girl,” he said, meaning there was no need to try for more. Maureen did not understand then that he might intend some similar cutoff for her. She was in love when she married him. It was true that when he first put his arm around her waist, in the office, she thought he must believe that she was headed for the wrong door and was redirecting her—but that was a conclusion she came to because of his propriety, not because she hadn’t longed to feel his arm there. People who thought she was making an advantageous, though kindly, marriage, would have been amazed at how happy she was on her honeymoon—and that was in spite of having to learn to play bridge. She knew his power—the way he used it and the way he held it back. He was attractive to her—never mind his age, ungainliness, nicotine stains on his teeth and fingers. His skin was warm. A couple of years into the marriage she miscarried and bled so heavily that her tubes had been tied, to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. After that the intimate part of her life with her husband came to an end. It seemed that he had been mostly obliging her, because he felt that it was wrong to deny a woman the chance to have a child.
Sometimes she would pester him a little and he would say, “Now, Maureen. What’s all this about?” Or else he would tell her to grow up. “Grow up” was an injunction that he had picked up from his own children, and had continued to use long after they had dropped it, in fact long after they had moved away from home.
His saying that humiliated her, and her eyes would fill with tears. He was a man who detested tears above all things.
And now, she thought, wouldn’t it be a relief to have that state of affairs back again! For her husband’s appetite had returned—or an entirely new appetite had developed. There was nothing now of the rather clumsy ceremony, the formal fondness, of their early times together. Now his eyes would cloud over and his face would seem weighed down. He would speak to her in a curt and menacing way and sometimes push and prod her, even trying to jam his fingers into her from behind. She did not need any of that to make her hurry—she was anxious to get him into the bedroom as soon as possible, afraid that he might misbehave elsewhere. His old office had been made into a downstairs bedroom with a bathroom adjoining it, so that he would not have to climb the stairs. At least that room had a lock, so Frances could not burst in. But the phone might ring, Frances might have to come looking for them. She might stand outside the door and then she would have to hear the noises—Lawyer Stephens’ panting and grunting and bullying, the hiss of disgust with which he would order Maureen to do this or that, his pounding of her right at the end and the command he let out then, a command that perhaps would be incoherent to anybody but Maureen but that would still speak eloquently, like lavatory noises, of his extremity.
“Ta’ dirty! Ta’ dirty!”
This came from a man who had once shut Helena in her room for calling her brother a shitty bastard.
Maureen knew enough words, but it was difficult for her in her shaken state to call up just which ones might suit, and to utter them in a tone that would be convincing. She did try. She wanted above all else to help him along.
Afterward he fell into the brief sleep that seemed to erase the episode from his memory. Maureen escaped to the bathroom. She did the first cleanup there and then hurried upstairs to replace some clothing. Often at these times she had to hang onto the bannisters, she felt so hollow and feeble. And she had to keep her mouth closed not on any howls of protest but on a long sickening whimper of complaint that would have made her sound like a beaten dog.
Today she managed better than usual. She was able to look into the bathroom mirror, and move her eyebrows, her lips and jaws, around to bring her expression back to normal. So much for that, she seemed to be saying. Even while it was going on she had been able to think of other things. She had thought about making a custard, she thought about whether they had enough milk and eggs. And right through her husband’s rampage she thought of the fingers moving in the feathers, the wife’s hand laid on top of the husband’s, pressing down.
So of Heather Bell we will sing our song,
As we will till our day is done.
In the forest green she was taken from the scene
Though her life had barely begun.
“There is a poem already made up and written down,” Frances said. “I’ve got it here typed out.”
“I thought I’d make a custard,” said Maureen.
How much had Frances heard of what Marian Hubbert had said? Everything, probably. She sounded breathless with the effort of keeping all that in. She held up the typed lines in front of Maureen’s face and Maureen said, “It’s too long, I don’t have time.” She started to separate the eggs.
“It’s good,” Frances said. “It’s good enough to be put to music.”
She read it through aloud. Maureen said, “I have to concentrate.”
“So I guess I got my marching orders,” said Frances, and went to do the sunroom.
/> Then Maureen had the peace of the kitchen—the old white tiles and high yellowed walls, the bowls and pots and implements familiar and comforting to her, as probably to her predecessor.
What Mary Johnstone told the girls in her talk was always more or less the same thing and most of them knew what to expect. They could even make prepared faces at each other. She told them how Jesus had come and talked to her when she was in the iron lung. She did not mean in a dream, she said, or in a vision, or when she was delirious. She meant that He came and she recognized Him but didn’t think anything was strange about it. She recognized Him at once, though he was dressed like a doctor in a white coat. She thought, Well, that’s reasonable—otherwise they wouldn’t let Him in here. That was how she took it. Lying there in the iron lung, she was sensible and stupid at once, as you are when something like that hits you. (She meant Jesus, not the polio.) Jesus said, “You’ve got to get back up to bat, Mary.” That was all. She was a good Softball player, and He used language that He knew she would understand. Then He went away. And she hugged onto Life, the way He had told her to.
There was more to follow, about the uniqueness and specialness of each of their lives and their bodies, which led of course into what Mary Johnstone called “plain talk” about boys and urges. (This was where they did the faces—they were too abashed when she was going on about Jesus.) And about liquor and cigarettes and how one thing can lead to another. They thought she was crazy—and she couldn’t even tell that they had smoked themselves half sick last night. They reeked and she never mentioned it.
So she was—crazy. But everybody let her talk about Jesus in the hospital because they thought she was entitled to believe that.
But suppose you did see something? Not along the line of Jesus, but something? Maureen has had that happen. Sometimes when she is just going to sleep but not quite asleep, not dreaming yet, she has caught something. Or even in the daytime during what she thinks of as her normal life. She might catch herself sitting on stone steps eating cherries and watching a man coming up the steps carrying a parcel. She has never seen those steps or that man, but for an instant they seem to be part of another life that she is leading, a life just as long and complicated and strange and dull as this one. And she isn’t surprised. It’s just a fluke, a speedily corrected error, that she knows about both lives at the same time. It seemed so ordinary, she thinks afterward. The cherries. The parcel.