I come out of my front gate, I bump into old Sanders next door, we have a chat… Shift the point at which I emerge by ever so little, and I do not meet Sanders, we do not have a word about the cricket club dinner, he does not offer to drop over later with his Black & Decker and fix that shelf for me.
I cross the street, looking first to right and left, a lorry passes, I alight upon the pavement opposite.
I cross the street, not looking, first to right and left; the lorry driver’s concentration lapses for a second, I am so much meat under his wheels.
Some bloke is gunned down in Sarajevo. In another country, evil is bred. And then and then and then… A tired voice comes from a crackling wireless: there is war. “May God bless you all,” he says.
A trigger jams. Elsewhere, a mad house-painter dies young of polio. And then, and then, and then… 3rd September 1939 is a fine day, sunshine with a hint of showers.
Oh well of course you say, any fool can play those games. Intriguing but unproductive. We inhabit, after all, a definite world; facts are facts. The sequence of my life, of your life, of the public life.
Listen, then. I went up to the pill-box this evening – the wartime pill-box on the top.
The pill-box is on the brow of the hill and faces square down the lane. I take my time getting up there; it’s a steep pull up and the outlook’s half the point of the walk. I have a rest at the first gate, and then at the end by the oak, and again at the gate to Clapper’s field. You get the view from there: the village down below you and the fields reaching away to the coast and the sea hanging at the edge of the green, a long grey smear with maybe a ship or two and on clear days the white glimmer of the steelworks over on the Welsh coast.
It was sited to cover anything coming up and heading on over the hill. Heading for the main road – that would have been the idea, I suppose. It would have had the village covered, too, and a good part of the valley. Very small it looks now, stuck there at the edge of the field: barely room for a couple of blokes inside. I never know why it’s not been taken away – much longer and it’ll be a historical monument I daresay and they’ll slap a protection order on it. The field is rough grazing and always has been so I suppose no one’s felt any great call to get rid of it. Dalton’s field, it is; from time to time you find he’s stashed some cattle feed away in the pill-box, or a few bags of lime. It comes in handy for the village lads, too, always has done: get your girl up there, nice bit of shelter… I’ve made use of it that way myself in my time. Back in – oh, forty-seven or thereabouts. Yes, forty-seven, that spring it rained cats and dogs and there was flooding right left and centre. Rosie Parks, black curly hair and an answer to everything. Lying in there with the rain coming down in spears outside; “You lay off, Keith Harrison, I’m telling you…”, “Ah, come on, Rosie…” Giggle giggle.
The rain started this evening when I was at the oak, just a sprinkle, and by the time I got to the top it was coming down hard and looked set in for a while so I ducked down into the pill-box to sit it out.
I was thinking about the past, in a vague kind of way – the war, being young. Looking out from inside the pill-box you see the countryside as a bright green rectangle, very clear, lots of detail, like a photo. And I’ve got good eyesight anyway, even at fifty-seven, just about a hundred per cent vision. I could see the new houses they’ve put up on the edge of the village and I was thinking that the place has changed a lot since I was a boy, and yet in other ways it hasn’t. The new estate, the shop, cars at every door, telly aerials, main drainage; but the same names, by and large, same families, same taste to the beer, same stink from Clapper’s silage in hot weather.
I can see the house where I was born, from the pill-box. And the one I live in now. The churchyard, where my parents are, God bless ’em. The recreation ground beside the church hall where we used to drill in 1941; those of us left behind, too old like Jim Blockley at sixty-odd, too young like me at seventeen-and-a-half, too wonky like the postmaster with his bronchitis, too valuable like the farmers and the doctor.
I can see the road, too – the road that takes me daily to work. Ten miles to Scarhead to try to drum a bit of sense and a bit of knowledge into forty fifteen-year-old heads. Full cycle. Back then, mine was the empty head, the bloke at the blackboard was… was old Jenkins, Jenks. It’s not been a mistake, coming back. I’d always thought I’d like to. The day I saw the advert, in the Times Ed. Supp., I knew at once I’d apply. Yes, I thought, that’s it, that’s for me, end up back at home, why not? I’ve always thought of it as home, down here, wherever I’ve been – Nottingham, up in the north-east, London. Not that it’s local boy made good, exactly. Teaching’s a tidy enough occupation, they reckon down here, but not high-flying. Farmers do a sight better. I don’t drive a Jag, like Tim Matlock who was in my class at the grammar and farms up on the county border now. Not that I care tuppence.
I lit a pipe to keep the midges off; the rain was coming down harder than ever. It looked as though I might have to pack in the rest of my walk. I opened the newspaper: usual stuff, miners reject pay offer, Middle East talks, rail fares up.
When I heard the first voice I thought there was someone outside in the field – some trick of the acoustics, making it sound as though it were in the pill-box.
“They’re bloody coming!” he said.
And then another bloke, a young one, a boy, gave a sort of grunt. You knew, somehow, he was on edge. His voice had that crack to it, that pitch of someone who’s keyed up, holding himself in. Shit-scared.
“Can I have a look, Mr Barnes? Oh God – I see them. Heading straight up.”
How can I put it? Describe how it was. The words that come to mind are banal, clichés: eery, unearthly, uncanny.
They were there, but they were not. They were in the head, but yet were outside it. There were two men, an old and a younger, who spoke from some other dimension; who were there with me in the pill-box and yet also were not, could not be, had never been.
Listen again.
“Give me them field-glasses… They’ve set Clapper’s barn on fire. There’s more tanks on the Scarhead road – six, seven… They’ll be at the corner in a few minutes now, son.”
And the young chap speaks again. “O.K.,” he says. “O.K., I’m ready.”
The voices, you understand, are overlaid by other noises, ordinary noises: the rain on the roof of the pill-box, sheep, a tractor in the lane. The tractor goes past but the voices don’t take a blind bit of notice. The old bloke tells the other one to pass him another clip of ammo. “You all right, son?” he says, the boy answers that he is all right. There is that high sharp note in his voice, in both their voices.
There is a silence.
And then they come back.
“I can see him now. Armoured car. Two.”
“O.K. Yes. I’ve got them.”
“Hold it. Hold it, son…”
“Yes. Right…”
“Hold it. Steady. When they get to the oak.”
“O.K., Mr Barnes.”
And everything is quiet again. A quiet you could cut with a knife. The inside of the pill-box is tight-strung, waiting; it is both a moment in time and a time that is going on for ever, will go on for ever. I drop my tobacco tin and it clatters on the concrete floor but the sound does not break that other quiet, which, I now realise, is somewhere else, is something else.
The old bloke says, “Fire!”
And then they are both talking together. There is no other sound, nothing, just their voices. And the rain.
The boy says, “I got him, my God. I got him!” and the other one says, “Steady. Re-load now. Steady. Wait till the second one’s moving again. Right. Fire!”
“We hit him!”
“He’s coming on…”
“Christ there’s another behind!”
“Bastards! Jerry bastards!”
And the boy cries, “That’s for my dad! And that’s for my mum! Come on then, bloody come on then…”
“S
teady, son. Hold it a minute, there’s a…”
“What’s he doing, Christ he’s…”
“He’s got a grenade. Keep on firing, for God’s sake. Keep him covered.”
And suddenly they go quiet. Quite quiet. Except that just once the old bloke says something. He says, “Don’t move, Keith, keep still, I’m coming over, I…”
He says, “Keith?”
And there is nothing more.
I went on sitting there. The quietness left the inside of the pill-box, that other quietness. The tractor came back down the lane again. The rain stopped. A blackbird started up on the roof of the pill-box. Down in the valley there was a patch of sunlight slap on the village; the church very bright, a car windscreen flashing, pale green of the chestnuts in the pub car park.
I knew, now, that from the first moment there’d been something about that young chap’s voice. The boy.
Mr Barnes. Joe Barnes worked the manor farm in the war. He left here some time ago, retired to Ilfracombe; he died a year or two back.
I was in his platoon, in 1941. I’ve not thought of him in years. Couldn’t put a face to him, now. He died of cancer in a nursing-home in Ilfracombe. Didn’t he?
Or.
Or he died in a pill-box up on the hill above the village, long ago. Him and a boy called Keith. In which case the pill-box is no longer there nor I take it the village nor the whole bloody place at least not in any way you or I could know it.
No young fellow called Keith ever put his hand up the skirt of Rosie Parks in that pill-box, nor did another bloke, a fifty-seven year old teacher of English, walk up that way of an evening for a smoke and a look at the view.
I came out, filled my pipe, looked down at the village. All right, yes, I thought to myself – interesting, the imaginative process. The mind churning away, putting pictures to a line of thought. I dozed off in there.
Later I knew I did not imagine it. I heard it. Heard them. So what do you make of that? Eh? What can anyone make of it? How, having glimpsed the possibility of the impossible, can the world remain as steady as you had supposed?
Suppose that the writer of a story were haunted, in the mind, for ever, by all those discarded alternatives, by the voices of all those assorted characters. Forced to preserve them always as the price of creative choice.
Then suppose, by the same token, that just once in a while it is given to any one of us to experience the inconceivable. To push through the barrier of what we know into the heady breathtaking unbearable ozone of what we cannot contemplate. Did that happen to me? In the pill-box on the hill on a summer Monday evening, with the world steady under my feet and the newspaper in my hand, telling me what’s what, how the world is, where we are?
Miles City, Montana
Alice Munro
Alice Munro (b. 1931) is a Canadian short story writer and winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honours her complete body of work. She has been awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction three times, the Giller Prize twice and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Fiction. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for her collection The Love of a Good Woman.
My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned. There were several men together, returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body. The men were muddy and exhausted, and walked with their heads down, as if they were ashamed. Even the dogs were dispirited, dripping from the cold river. When they all set out, hours before, the dogs were nervy and yelping, the men tense and determined, and there was a constrained, unspeakable excitement about the whole scene. It was understood that they might find something horrible.
The boy’s name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-colored now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter. His face was turned in to my father’s chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud.
I don’t think so. I don’t think I really saw all this. Perhaps I saw my father carrying him, and the other men following along, and the dogs, but I would not have been allowed to get close enough to see something like mud in his nostril. I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it. I see his face unaltered except for the mud – Steve Gauley’s familiar, sharp-honed, sneaky-looking face – and it wouldn’t have been like that; it would have been bloated and changed and perhaps muddied all over after so many hours in the water.
To have to bring back such news, such evidence, to a waiting family, particularly a mother, would have made searchers move heavily, but what was happening here was worse. It seemed a worse shame (to hear people talk) that there was no mother, no woman at all – no grandmother or aunt, or even a sister – to receive Steve Gauley and give him his due of grief. His father was a hired man, a drinker but not a drunk, an erratic man without being entertaining, not friendly but not exactly a troublemaker. His fatherhood seemed accidental, and the fact that the child had been left with him when the mother went away, and that they continued living together, seemed accidental. They lived in a steep-roofed, gray-shingled hillbilly sort of house that was just a bit better than a shack – the father fixed the roof and put supports under the porch, just enough and just in time – and their life was held together in a similar manner; that is, just well enough to keep the Children’s Aid at bay. They didn’t eat meals together or cook for each other, but there was food. Sometimes the father would give Steve money to buy food at the store, and Steve was seen to buy quite sensible things, such as pancake mix and macaroni dinner.
I had known Steve Gauley fairly well. I had not liked him more often than I had liked him. He was two years older than I was. He would hang around our place on Saturdays, scornful of whatever I was doing but unable to leave me alone. I couldn’t be on the swing without him wanting to try it, and if I wouldn’t give it up he came and pushed me so that I went crooked. He teased the dog. He got me into trouble – deliberately and maliciously, it seemed to me afterward – by daring me to do things I wouldn’t have thought of on my own: digging up the potatoes to see how big they were when they were still only the size of marbles, and pushing over the stacked firewood to make a pile we could jump off. At school, we never spoke to each other. He was solitary, though not tormented. But on Saturday mornings, when I saw his thin, self-possessed figure sliding through the cedar hedge, I knew I was in for something and he would decide what. Sometimes it was all right. We pretended we were cowboys who had to tame wild horses. We played in the pasture by the river, not far from the place where Steve drowned. We were horses and riders both, screaming and neighing and bucking and waving whips of tree branches beside a little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario.
The funeral was held in our house. There was not enough room at Steve’s father’s place for the large crowd that was expected because of the circumstances. I have a memory of the crowded room but no picture of Steve in his coffin, or of the minister, or of wreaths of flowers. I remember that I was holding one flower, a white narcissus, which must have come from a pot somebody forced indoors, because it was too early for even the forsythia bush or the trilliums and marsh marigolds in the woods. I stood in a row of children, each of us holding a narcissus. We sang a children’s hymn, which somebody played on our piano: “When He Cometh, When He Cometh, to Make Up His Jewels.” I was wearing white ribbed stockings, which were disgustingly itchy, and wrinkled at the knees and ankles. The feeling of these stockings on my legs is mixed up with another feeling in my memory. It is hard to describe. It had to do with my parents. Adults in general but my parents in particular. My father, who had carried Steve’s body from the river, and my mother, who must have done most of the arranging of this funeral. My father in his dark-blue suit and my mother in her brown velvet dress with the creamy satin collar. They stood side by side opening and closing their mouths for the hymn, and I stood
removed from them, in the row of children, watching. I felt a furious and sickening disgust. Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults. The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power. The breath, the coarseness, the hairiness, the horrid secretions. But this was more. And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it. There was no release, as when I would finally bend and pick up a stone and throw it at Steve Gauley. It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste – a thin, familiar misgiving.
Twenty years or so later, in 1961, my husband, Andrew, and I got a brand-new car, our first – that is, our first brand-new. It was a Morris Oxford, oyster-colored (the dealer had some fancier name for the color) – a big small car, with plenty of room for us and our two children. Cynthia was six and Meg three and a half.
Andrew took a picture of me standing beside the car. I was wearing white pants, a black turtleneck, and sunglasses. I lounged against the car door, canting my hips to make myself look slim.
“Wonderful,” Andrew said. “Great. You look like Jackie Kennedy.” All over this continent probably, dark-haired, reasonably slender young women were told, when they were stylishly dressed or getting their pictures taken, that they looked like Jackie Kennedy.
Andrew took a lot of pictures of me, and of the children, our house, our garden, our excursions and possessions. He got copies made, labelled them carefully, and sent them back to his mother and his aunt and uncle in Ontario. He got copies for me to send to my father, who also lived in Ontario, and I did so, but less regularly than he sent his. When he saw pictures he thought I had already sent lying around the house, Andrew was perplexed and annoyed. He liked to have this record go forth.
That summer, we were presenting ourselves, not pictures. We were driving back from Vancouver, where we lived, to Ontario, which we still called “home,” in our new car. Five days to get there, ten days there, five days back. For the first time, Andrew had three weeks’ holiday. He worked in the legal department at B. C. Hydro.
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