by Alice Munro
The kitchen door was wide open. Callie had been cleaning the stovepipes. Now she had them all in place again, and was cleaning the stove. She was polishing the black part of it with waxed bread papers and the trim with a clean rag. The stove was a wonderful sight, like black marble set with silver, but Callie herself was smudged from head to foot. Even her eyelids were black. She was singing “My Darling Nellie Grey,” and she made it go very fast, to help with the polishing.
“Oh, my darling Nellie Grey,
They have taken you away,
And I’ll never see my darling anymore.”
Miss Kernaghan sat at the table, drinking a cup of hot water. Besides her rheumatism, she was troubled with indigestion. Creaks came from her joints, and powerful rumbles, groans, and even whistles, from her deep insides. Her face took no notice.
“You boys,” she said. “What have you been doing?”
“Walking,” said Edgar.
“You aren’t doing your stunts anymore.”
Sam said, “The ground’s too wet.”
“Sit down,” said Miss Kernaghan.
Sam could hear Edgar’s shaky breathing. His own stomach felt very heavy, as if all work on the mass of doughnuts—he had eaten all but one of them—had ceased. Could Callie have told? She didn’t look up at them.
“I never told you boys how Callie was born,” Miss Kernaghan said. And she started right in to tell them.
“It was in the Queen’s Hotel in Stratford. I was staying there with my friend Louie Green. Louie Green and I ran a millinery shop. We were on our way to Toronto to get our spring trim. But it was winter. In fact, it was a blizzard blowing. We were the only ones for supper. We were coming out of the dining room afterwards and the hotel door blew open and in came three people. It was the driver that worked for the hotel, that met the trains, and a woman and a man. The man and the driver were hanging on to the woman and hauling her between them. She was howling and yelling and she was puffed up to a terrible size. They got her on the settee, but she slid off it onto the floor. She was only a girl, eighteen or nineteen years old. The baby popped right out of her on the floor. The man just sat down on the settee and put his head between his legs. I was the one had to run and call for the hotelkeeper and his wife. They came running and their dog running ahead of them, barking. Louie was hanging on to the banisters afraid she might faint. Everything happening at once.
“The driver was French-Canadian, so he had probably seen a baby born before. He bit the cord with his teeth and tied it up with some dirty string out of his pocket. He grabbed a rug and stuffed it up between her legs. Blood was coming out of her as dark as fly poison—it was spreading across the floor. He yelled for somebody to get snow, and the husband, or whatever he was, he never even lifted his head. It was Louie ran out and got her hands full, and when the driver saw what a piddling little bit she brought he just swore at her and threw it down. Then he kicked the dog, because it was getting too interested. He kicked it so hard it landed across the room and the hotel woman was screaming it was killed. I picked the baby up and wrapped it in my jacket. That was Callie. What a sickly-looking thing. The dog wasn’t killed at all. The rugs were soaked with blood and the Frenchman swearing a blue streak. She was dead but she was still bleeding.
“Louie was the one wanted us to take her. The husband said he would get in touch but he never did. We had to get a bottle and boil up milk and corn syrup and make her a bed in a drawer. Louie let on to be very fond of her, but within a year Louie got married and went to live in Regina and has never been back. So much for fond.”
Sam thought that this was all most probably a lie. Nevertheless it had a terrible effect on him. Why tell them this now? Truth or lies didn’t matter, or whether someone had kicked a dog or bled to death. What mattered was Miss Kernaghan’s cold emphasis as she told this, her veiled and surely unfriendly purpose, her random ferocity.
Callie hadn’t stopped work for one word of the story. She had subdued but not entirely given up her singing. The kitchen was full of light in the spring evening, and smelled of Callie’s harsh soaps and powders. Sam had sometimes before had a sense of being in trouble, but he had always known exactly what the trouble was and what the punishment would be, and he could think his way past it. Now he got the feeling that there was a kind of trouble whose extent you couldn’t know and punishments you couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t even Miss Kernaghan’s ill will they had to fear. What was it? Did Edgar know? Edgar could feel something being prepared—a paralyzing swipe. He thought it had to do with Callie and a baby and what they had done. Sam had a sense of larger implications. But he had to see that Edgar’s instincts were right.
On Saturday morning, they walked through the back streets to the station. They had left the house when Gallie went to do the weekend shopping, pulling a child’s wagon behind her for the groceries. They had taken their money out of the bank. They had wedged a note in their door that would drop out when the door was opened: “We have gone. Sam. Edgar.”
The words “We have gone” had been typed the day before at the college by Sam, but their names were signed by hand. Sam had thought of adding “Board paid till Monday” or “Will write to parents.” But surely Miss Kernaghan would know that their board was paid till Monday and saying they would write to their parents would be a tip-off that they hadn’t just gone home. “We have gone” seemed foolish, but he was afraid that if they didn’t leave something there would be an alarm and a search.
They left behind the heavy, shabby books they intended to sell at the end of term—Accounting Practice, Business Arithmetic—and put what clothes they could into two brown-paper bags.
The morning was fine and a lot of people were out-of-doors. Children had taken over the sidewalks for ball-bouncing, hopscotch, skipping. They had to have their say about the stuffed paper bags.
“What’ve you got in them bags?”
“Dead cats,” said Edgar. He swung his bag at a girl’s head.
But she was bold. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Sell them to the Chinaman for chop-cat-suey,” said Edgar in a threatening voice.
So they got past and heard the girl chanting behind them, “Chop-cat-suey! Chop-cat-suey! Eat-it-pooey!” Nearer the station, these groups of children thinned out, vanished. Now it was boys twelve or thirteen—some of the same boys who had hung around the skating rink—who were loitering near the platform, picking up cigarette butts, trying to light them. They aped manly insolence and would not have been caught dead asking questions.
“You boys given yourself plenty of time,” said the station agent. The train did not go till half past twelve, but they had timed their getaway according to Callie’s shopping. “You know where you’re going in the city? Anybody going to meet you?”
Sam was not prepared for this, but Edgar said, “My sister.”
He did not have one.
“She live there? You going to stay at her place?”
“Her and her husband’s,” said Edgar. “She’s married.”
Sam could see what was coming next.
“What part of Toronto they live in?”
But Edgar was equal. “North part,” he said. “Doesn’t every city have a north part?” The station agent seemed about satisfied. “Hang on to your money,” he told them.
They sat on the bench facing the board fence across the tracks, holding their tickets and their brown bags. Sam was counting up in his head how much money they had to hang on to. He had been to Toronto once with his father when he was ten years old. He remembered some confusion about a streetcar. They tried to get on at the wrong door, or get off at the wrong door. People shouted at them. His father muttered that they were all damn fools. Sam felt that he had to hold himself ready for a great assault, try to anticipate the complexities ahead so they wouldn’t take him by surprise. Then something came into his head that was like a present. He didn’t know where it came from. The Y.M.C.A. They could go to the Y.M.C.A. and stay there that n
ight. It would be late in the afternoon when they got in. They would first get something to eat, then ask somebody the way to the Y.M.C.A. Probably they could walk.
He told Edgar what they would do. “Then tomorrow we’ll walk around and get to know the streets and find out where is the cheapest place to eat.”
He knew that Edgar would accept any plan at the moment. Edgar had no notion yet of Toronto, in spite of that unexpected invention of a sister and a brother-in-law. Edgar was sitting here on the bench at the station, full of the idea of the train coming in and of their getting on. The blast of the whistle, the departure—the escape. Escape like an explosion, setting them free. He never saw them getting off the train, with their paper bags, in a banging, jarring, crowded, utterly bewildering new place. But Sam felt better now that he had a starting plan. If one good idea could occur to him out of the blue, why not another?
After a while, other people began to gather, waiting for the same train. Two ladies dressed up to go shopping in Stratford. Their varnished straw hats showed that it was getting close to summer. An old man in a shiny black suit carrying a cardboard box secured with twine. The boys who hung around and didn’t go anywhere were nevertheless getting ready for the train’s arrival—sitting all together at the end of the platform, dangling their legs. A couple of dogs were patrolling the platform in a semi-official way, sniffing at a trunk and some waiting parcels, sizing up the baggage cart, even looking down the tracks as if they knew as well as anybody else which direction the train was coming from.
As soon as they heard the whistle blowing for the crossroads west of town, Sam and Edgar got up and stood at the edge of the platform. When the train arrived, it seemed a very good sign that they had chosen to stand in the exact spot at which the conductor stepped down, carrying the little step. After he had spent an interminable time assisting a woman with a baby, a suitcase, and two small children, they were able to get on. They went ahead of the ladies in summer hats, the man with the box, and whoever else had lined up. They didn’t once look behind. They walked to the end of the almost empty car and chose to sit where they could face each other, on the side of the train that looked out on the board fence, not on the platform. The same board fence they had been staring at for over three-quarters of an hour. They had to sit there for two or three minutes while there was the usual commotion outside, important-sounding shouts, and the conductor’s voice crying, “Board!” in a way that transformed the word from a human sound to a train sound. Then the train began to move. They were moving. They each had one arm still around a brown bag and a ticket held in the other hand. They were moving. They watched the boards of the fence to prove it. They left the fence behind altogether and were passing through the diminished outskirts of the town—the back yards, back sheds, back porches, apple trees in bloom. Lilacs straggling by the tracks, gone wild.
While they were looking out the window, and before the town was entirely gone, a boy sat down in the seat across the aisle from them. Sam’s impression was that one of those boys loitering on the platform had slipped onto the train, or somehow connived to get a free ride, perhaps out to the junction. Without really looking, he got an idea of the way the boy was dressed—too shabbily and carelessly to be going on any real trip. Then he did look, and he saw that the boy was holding a ticket, just as they were.
On the winter nights when they walked to the skating rink, they had not often looked at each other. Under the streetlights, they had watched their turning shadows on the snow. Inside the rink, the artificial moon altered colors and left some areas in near darkness. So the clothes this boy was wearing did not send any immediate message across the aisle. Except that they were not the kind of clothes usually worn on a trip. Rubber boots, heavy breeches with stains of oil or paint on them, a windbreaker torn under one arm and too warm for the day, a large, unsuitable cap.
How had Callie got past the station agent in that outfit? The same station agent who looked Sam and Edgar over so inquisitively, who wanted to know where they were planning to stay and who was meeting them, had let this absurd and dirty and ragged pretend-boy buy a ticket (to Toronto—Callie was guessing, and she guessed right) and walk out onto the platform without one word, one question. This contributed to the boys’ feeling, when they recognized her, that she was exercising powers that didn’t fall far short of being miraculous. (Maybe Edgar, in particular, felt this.) How had she known? How had she got the money? How was she here?
None of it was impossible. She had come back with the groceries and gone up to the attic. (Why? She didn’t say.) She had found the note and guessed at once they hadn’t gone home to the farm and weren’t hitchhiking on the highway. She knew when the train left. She knew two places it went to—Stratford and Toronto. She stole the money for her ticket from the metal box under the hymn books in the piano bench. (Miss Kernaghan, of course, did not trust banks.) By the time she got to the station and was buying her ticket, the train was coming in and the station agent had a lot of things to think about, no time to ask questions. There was a great deal of luck involved—lucky timing and lucky guessing every step of the way—but that was all. It was not magic, not quite.
Sam and Edgar had not recognized the clothes, and there was no particular movement or gesture that alerted them. The boy Callie sat looking out the window, head partly turned away from them. Sam would never know exactly when he first knew it was Callie, or how the knowledge came to him, and whether he looked at Edgar or simply knew that Edgar knew the same thing he did and at the same time. This was knowledge that seemed to have simply leaked out into the air and to be waiting there to be absorbed. They passed through a long cut, with grassy banks fresh on either side, and crossed the Cedar Bush Bridge—the same bridge where boys from town dared each other to climb down and cling to the supports under the ties while the train passed over their heads. (Would Callie have done that if they had dared her?) By the time they were across this bridge, they both knew that it was Callie sitting across from them. And each of them knew the other knew.
Edgar spoke first. “Do you want to move over with us?”
Callie got up and moved across the aisle, sitting down beside Edgar. She had her boy’s look on—a look not so sly or quarrelsome as her usual look. She was a good-humored boy, more or less, with reasonable expectations.
It was Sam she spoke to. “Don’t you mind riding backwards?”
Sam said no.
Next, she asked them what they had in the bags, and they both spoke at once.
Edgar said, “Dead cats.”
Sam said, “Lunch.”
They didn’t feel as if they were caught. Right away they had understood that Callie hadn’t come to bring them back. She was joining them. In her boy’s clothes, she reminded them of the cold nights of luck and cunning, the plan that went without a hitch, the free skating, speed and delight, deception and pleasure. When nothing went wrong, nothing could go wrong, triumph was certain, all their moves timely. Callie, who had got herself on this train with stolen money and in boy’s clothes, seemed to lift threats rather than pose them. Even Sam stopped thinking about what they would do in Toronto, whether their money would last. If he had been functioning in his usual way, he would have seen that Callie’s presence was bound to bring them all sorts of trouble once they descended into the real world, but he was not functioning that way and he did not see anything like trouble. At the moment, he saw power—Callie’s power, when she wouldn’t be left behind—generously distributed to all of them. The moment was flooded—with power, it seemed, and with possibility. But this was just happiness. It was really just happiness.
That was how Sam’s story—which had left some details and reasons out along the way—always ended. If he was asked how things went from there, he might say, “Well, it was a little more complicated than we expected, but we all survived.” Meaning, specifically, that the Y.M.C.A. clerk, who was eating an egg-and-onion sandwich, did not take two minutes to figure out that there was something wrong about Callie.
Questions. Lies, sneers, threats, phone calls. Abducting a minor. Trying to sneak a girl into the Y.M.C.A. for immoral purposes. Where are her parents? Who knows she’s here? Who gave her permission? Who takes responsibility? A policeman on the scene. Two policemen. A full confession and a phone call, and the station agent remembers everything. He remembers lies. Miss Kernaghan has already missed the money and promises no forgiveness. Never wants to lay eyes on. A foundling born in a hotel lobby, parents probably not married, taken in and sheltered, ingratitude, bad blood. Let that be a lesson. Disgrace in plenty, even if Callie isn’t a minor.
Meaning, further, that they all went on living, and many things happened. He himself, even in those first confused and humiliating days in Toronto, got the idea that a place like this, a city, with midday shadows in its deep, narrow downtown streets, its seriously ornamented offices, its constant movement and jangling streetcars, could be the place for him. A place to work and make money. So he stayed on, stayed at the Y.M.C.A., where his crisis—his and Edgar’s and Callie’s—was soon forgotten and something else happened next week. He got a job, and after a few years saw that this wasn’t really the place to make money; the West was the place to make money. So he moved on.
Edgar and Callie went home to the farm with Edgar’s parents. But they did not stay there long. Miss Kernaghan found she could not manage without them.
Callie’s store is in a building she and Edgar own. The variety store and a hairdressing place downstairs, their living quarters upstairs. (The hairdressing place is where the grocery used to be—the same grocery where Sam and Edgar used to buy jam tarts. “But who wants to hear about that?,” Callie says. “Who wants to hear about the way things used to be?”)
Sam’s idea of good taste has been formed by his wife’s grays and whites and blues and straight lines and single vases. Callie’s place upstairs is stunning. Gold brocade draped to suggest a large window where no window is. Gold plushy carpet, rough white plaster ceiling sparkling with stars. One wall is a dull-gold mirror in which Sam sees himself crisscrossed by veins of black and silver. Lights hang from chains, in globes of amber glass.