by Alice Munro
The river curved, I lost my sense of direction. In the traps we found more rats, released them, shook them and hid them in the sack, replaced the bait. My face, my hands, my feet grew cold, but I did not mention it. I could not, to my father. And he never told me to be careful, to stay away from the edge of the water; he took it for granted that I would have sense enough not to fall in. I never asked how far we were going, or if the trapline would ever end. After a while there was a bush behind us, the afternoon darkened. It did not occur to me, not till long afterwards, that this was the same bush you could see from our yard, a fan-shaped hill rising up in the middle of it with bare trees in wintertime that looked like bony little twigs against the sky.
Now the bank, instead of willows, grew thick bushes higher than my head. I stayed on the path, about halfway up the bank, while my father went down to the water. When he bent over the trap, I could no longer see him. I looked around slowly and saw something else. Further along, and higher up the bank, a man was making his way down. He made no noise coming through the bushes and moved easily, as if he followed a path I could not see. At first I could just see his head and the upper part of his body. He was dark, with a high bald forehead, hair long behind the ears, deep vertical creases in his cheeks. When the bushes thinned I could see the rest of him, his long clever legs, thinness, drab camouflaging clothes, and what he carried in his hand, gleaming where the sun caught it—a little axe, or hatchet.
I never moved to warn or call my father. The man crossed my path somewhere ahead, continuing down to the river. People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. All my life I had known there was a man like this and he was behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative, electrified against the dark noon sky, with blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Annie eyes. The man slipped down through the bushes to my father. And I never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst.
My father did not know. When he straightened up, the man was not three feet away from him and hid him from me. I heard my father’s voice come out, after a moment’s delay, quiet and neighborly.
“Hello, Joe. Well. Joe. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
The man did not say a word, but edged around my father giving him a close look. “Joe, you know me,” my father told him. “Ben Jordan. I been out looking at my traps. There’s a lot of good rats in the river this year, Joe.”
The man gave a quick not-trusting look at the trap my father had baited.
“You ought to set a line out yourself.”
No answer. The man took his hatchet and chopped lightly at the air.
“Too late this year, though. The river is already started to go down.”
“Ben Jordan,” the man said with a great splurt, a costly effort, like somebody leaping over a stutter.
“I thought you’d recognize me, Joe.”
“I never knew it was you, Ben. I thought it was one them Silases.”
“Well I been telling you it was me.”
“They’s down here all the time choppin’ my trees and pullin’ down my fences. You know they burned me out, Ben. It was them done it.”
“I heard about that,” my father said.
“I didn’t know it was you, Ben. I never knew it was you. I got this axe, I just take it along with me to give them a little scare. I wouldn’t of if I’d known it was you. You come on up and see where I’m living now.”
My father called me. “I got my young one out following me today.”
“Well you and her both come up and get warm.”
We followed this man, who still carried and carelessly swung his hatchet, up the slope and into the bush. The trees chilled the air, and underneath them was real snow, left over from winter, a foot, two feet deep. The tree trunks had rings around them, a curious dark space like the warmth you make with your breath.
We came out in a field of dead grass, and took a track across it to another, wider field where there was something sticking out of the ground. It was a roof, slanting one way, not peaked, and out of the roof came a pipe with a cap on it, smoke blowing out. We went down the sort of steps that lead to a cellar, and that was what it was—a cellar with a roof on. My father said, “Looks like you fixed it up all right for yourself, Joe.”
“It’s warm. Being down in the ground the way it is, naturally it’s warm. I thought, What is the sense of building a house up again, they burned it down once, they’ll burn it down again. What do I need a house for anyways? I got all the room I need here, I fixed it up comfortable.” He opened the door at the bottom of the steps. “Mind your head here. I don’t say everybody should live in a hole in the ground, Ben. Though animals do it, and what an animal does, by and large it makes sense. But if you’re married, that’s another story.” He laughed. “Me, I don’t plan on getting married.”
It was not completely dark. There were the old cellar windows, letting in a little grimy light. The man lit a coal-oil lamp, though, and set it on the table.
“There, you can see where you’re at.”
It was all one room, an earth floor with boards not nailed together, just laid down to make broad paths for walking, a stove on a sort of platform, table, couch, chairs, even a kitchen cupboard, several thick, very dirty blankets of the type used in sleighs and to cover horses. Perhaps if it had not had such a terrible smell—of coal oil, urine, earth, and stale heavy air—I would have recognized it as the sort of place I would like to live in myself, like the houses I made under snowdrifts, in winter, with sticks of firewood for furniture, like another house I had made long ago under the veranda, my floor the strange powdery earth that never got sun or rain.
But I was wary, sitting on the dirty couch, pretending not to look at anything. My father said, “You’re snug here, Joe, that’s right.” He sat by the table, and there the hatchet lay.
“You should of seen me before the snow started to melt. Wasn’t nothing showing but a smokestack.”
“Nor you don’t get lonesome?”
“Not me. I was never one for lonesome. And I got a cat, Ben. Where is that cat? There he is, in behind the stove. He don’t relish company, maybe.” He pulled it out, a huge, gray tom with sullen eyes. “Show you what he can do.” He took a saucer from the table and a mason jar from the cupboard and poured something into the saucer. He set it in front of the cat.
“Joe, that cat don’t drink whisky, does he?”
“You wait and see.”
The cat rose and stretched himself stiffly, took one baleful look around, and lowered his head to drink.
“Straight whisky,” my father said.
“I bet that’s a sight you ain’t seen before. And you ain’t likely to see it again. That cat’d take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don’t get no milk, he’s forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”
“Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”
The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap, and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.
“Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”
“It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but he brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the colored stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.
“It’s them Silases botherin’ me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won’t ever quit b
otherin’ me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin’ for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”
“Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”
The man groaned and shook his head. “They never will stop. No. They never will stop.”
“Just try not paying any attention to them, they’ll tire out and go away.”
“They’ll burn me in my bed. They tried to before.”
My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open.
MY FATHER set me down. “You’re woken up now. Stand up. See. I can’t carry you and this sack full of rats both.”
We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish-brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of gray barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small.
“Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing.
It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind.
“That’s no more’n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we’ll see the light in the dining room where your momma is.”
On the way I said, “Why did he have an axe?”
“Now listen,” my father said. “Are you listening to me? He don’t mean any harm with that axe. It’s just his habit, carrying it around. But don’t say anything about it at home. Don’t mention it to your momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it. You and me aren’t, but they might be. And there is no use of that.”
After a while he said, “What are you not going to mention about?” and I said, “The axe.”
“You weren’t scared, were you?”
“No,” I said hopefully. “Who is going to burn him and his bed?”
“Nobody. Less he manages it himself like he did last time.”
“Who is the Silases?”
“Nobody,” my father said. “Just nobody.”
“WE FOUND the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wisht we could’ve brought him home.”
“We thought you’d fell in the Wawanash River,” said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks.
“Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no-man’s-land beyond the bush.”
“Him!” said Mary like an explosion. “He’s the one burned his house down, I know him!”
“That’s right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You’d be as cozy as a groundhog, Mary.”
“I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right.” She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough.
“A man that’d do a thing like that ought to be locked up.”
“Maybe so,” my father said. “Just the same I hope they don’t get him for a while yet. Old Joe.”
“Eat your supper,” Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. “Look at her,” she said. “Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she’s been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?”
“Not a drop,” said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
“ANYWAY, HE KNOWS how to fascinate the women,” said Et to Char. She could not tell if Char went paler, hearing this, because Char was pale in the first place as anybody could get. She was like a ghost now, with her hair gone white. But still beautiful, she couldn’t lose it.
“No matter to him the age or the size,” Et pressed on. “It’s natural to him as breathing, I guess. I only hope the poor things aren’t taken in by it.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Char said.
The day before, Et had taken Blaikie Noble up on his invitation to go along on one of his tours and listen to his spiel. Char was asked too, but of course she didn’t go. Blaikie Noble ran a bus. The bottom part of it was painted red and the top part was striped, to give the effect of an awning. On the side was painted: LAKESHORE TOURS, INDIAN GRAVES, LIMESTONE GARDENS, MILLIONAIRE’S MANSION, BLAIKIE NOBLE, DRIVER, GUIDE. Blaikie had a room at the hotel, and he also worked on the grounds, with one helper, cutting grass and clipping hedges and digging the borders. What a comedown, Et had said at the beginning of the summer when they first found out he was back. She and Char had known him in the old days.
So Et found herself squeezed into his bus with a lot of strangers, though before the afternoon was over she had made friends with a number of them and had a couple of promises of jackets needing letting out, as if she didn’t have enough to do already. That was beside the point, the thing on her mind was watching Blaikie.
And what did he have to show? A few mounds with grass growing on them, covering dead Indians, a plot full of odd-shaped, grayish-white, dismal-looking limestone things—farfetched imitations of plants (there could be the cemetery, if that was what you wanted)—and an old monstrosity of a house built with liquor money. He made the most of it. A historical discourse on the Indians, then a scientific discourse on the Limestone. Et had no way of knowing how much of it was true. Arthur would know. But Arthur wasn’t there; there was nobody there but silly women, hoping to walk beside Blaikie to and from the sights, chat with him over their tea in the Limestone Pavilion, looking forward to having his strong hand under their elbows, the other hand brushing somewhere around the waist when he helped them down off the bus (“I’m not a tourist,” Et whispered sharply when he tried it on her).
He told them the house was haunted. The first Et had ever heard of it, living ten miles away all her life. A woman had killed her husband, the son of the millionaire, at least it was believed she had killed him.
“How?” cried some lady, thrilled out of her wits.
“Ah, the ladies are always anxious to know the means,” said Blaikie, in a voice like cream, scornful and loving. “It was a slow—poison. Or that’s what they said. This is all hearsay, all local gossip.” (Local my foot, said Et to herself.) “She didn’t appreciate his lady friends. The wife didn’t. No.”
He told them the ghost walked up and down in the garden, between two rows of blue spruce. It was not the murdered man who walked, but the wife, regretting. Blaikie smiled ruefully at the busload. At first Et had thought his attentions were all false, an ordinary commercial flirtation, to give them their money’s worth. But gradually she was getting a different notion. He bent to each woman he talked to—it didn’t matter how fat or scrawny or silly she was—as if there was one thing in her he would like to find. He had a gentle and laughing but ultimately serious, narrowing look (was that the look men finally had when they made love, that Et would never see?) that made him seem to want to be a deep-sea diver diving down, down through all the emptiness and cold and wreckage to discover the one thing he had set his heart on, s
omething small and precious, hard to locate, as a ruby maybe on the ocean floor. That was a look she would like to have described to Char. No doubt Char had seen it. But did she know how freely it was being distributed?
CHAR AND ARTHUR had been planning a trip that summer to see Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, but they did not go. Arthur suffered a series of dizzy spells just at the end of school, and the doctor put him to bed. Several things were the matter with him. He was anemic, he had an irregular heartbeat, there was trouble with his kidneys. Et worried about leukemia. She woke at night, worrying.
“Don’t be silly,” said Char serenely. “He’s overtired.”
Arthur got up in the evenings and sat in his dressing gown. Blaikie Noble came to visit. He said his room at the hotel was a hole above the kitchen, they were trying to steam-cook him. It made him appreciate the cool of the porch. They, played the games that Arthur loved, schoolteacher’s games. They played a geography game, and they tried to see who could make the most words out of the name Beethoven. Arthur won. He got thirty-four. He was immensely delighted.
“You’d think you’d found the Holy Grail,” Char said.
They played “Who Am I?” Each of them had to choose somebody to be—real or imaginary, living or dead, human or animal—and the others had to try to guess it in twenty questions. Et got who Arthur was on the thirteenth question. Sir Galahad.
“I never thought you’d get it so soon.”
“I thought back to Char saying about the Holy Grail.”
“My strength is as the strength often” said Blaikie Noble, “because my heart is pure. I didn’t know I remembered that.”
“You should have been King Arthur,” Et said. “King Arthur is your namesake.”
“I should have. King Arthur was married to the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Ha,” said Et. “We all know the end of that story.”