by Alice Munro
Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.
Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not popular)—that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls’ dormitory. Be accommodating to anybody who wants to suck you dry, even if they know nothing about who you are.
She looked straight at this man and did not smile. He saw her resolve, there was a twitch of alarm in his face.
“Good book you got there? What’s it about?”
She was not going to say that it was about ancient Greece and the considerable attachment that the Greeks had to the irrational. She would not be teaching Greek, but was supposed to be teaching a course called Greek Thought, so she was reading Dodd again to see what she could pick up. She said, “I do want to read. I think I’ll go to the observation car.”
And she got up and walked away, thinking that she shouldn’t have said where she was going, it was possible that he might get up and follow her, apologizing, working up to another plea. Also, that it would be cold in the observation car, and she would wish that she had brought her sweater. Impossible to go back now to get it.
The wraparound view from the observation car, at the back of the train, seemed less satisfying to her than the view from the sleeping-car window. There was now always the intrusion of the train itself, in front of you.
Perhaps the problem was that she was cold, just as she had thought she would be. And disturbed. But not sorry. One moment more and his clammy hand would have been proffered—she thought that it would have been either clammy or dry and scaly—names would have been exchanged, she would have been locked in. It was the first victory of this sort that she had ever managed, and it was against the most pitiable, the saddest opponent. She could hear him now, chewing on the words chum around. Apology and insolence. Apology his habit. And insolence the result of some hope or determination breaking the surface of his loneliness, his hungry state.
It was necessary but it hadn’t been easy, it hadn’t been easy at all. In fact it was more of a victory, surely, to stand up to someone in such a state. It was more of a victory than if he had been slick and self-assured. But for a while she would be somewhat miserable.
There were only two other people sitting in the observation car. Two older women, each of them sitting alone. When Juliet saw a large wolf crossing the snowy, perfect surface of a small lake, she knew that they must see it too. But neither broke the silence, and that was pleasing to her. The wolf took no notice of the train, he did not hesitate or hurry. His fur was long, silvery shading into white. Did he think it made him invisible?
While she was watching the wolf, another passenger had arrived. A man, who took the seat across the aisle from hers. He too carried a book. An elderly couple followed—she small and sprightly, he large and clumsy, taking heavy disparaging breaths.
“Cold up here,” he said, when they were settled.
“Do you want me to go get your jacket?”
“Don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother.”
“I’ll be all right.”
In a moment the woman said, “You certainly do get a view here.” He did not answer, and she tried again. “You can see all round.”
“What there is to see.”
“Wait till we go through the mountains. That’ll be something. Did you enjoy your breakfast?”
“The eggs were runny.”
“I know.” The woman commiserated. “I was thinking, I should just have barged into the kitchen and done them myself.”
“Galley. They call it a galley.”
“I thought that was on a boat.”
Juliet and the man across the aisle raised their eyes from their books at the same moment, and their glances met, with a calm withholding of any expression. And in this second or two the train slowed, then stopped, and they looked elsewhere.
They had come to a little settlement in the woods. On the one side was the station, painted a dark red, and on the other a few houses painted the same color. Homes or barracks, for the railway workers. There was an announcement that there would be a stop here for ten minutes.
The station platform had been cleared of snow, and Juliet, peering ahead, saw some people getting off the train to walk about. She would have liked to do this herself, but not without a coat.
The man across the aisle got up and went down the steps without a look around. Doors opened somewhere below, bringing a stealthy stream of cold air. The elderly husband asked what they were doing here, and what was the name of this place anyway. His wife went to the front of the car to try to see the name, but she was not successful.
Juliet was reading about maenadism. The rituals took place at night, in the middle of winter, Dodd said. The women went up to the top of Mount Parnassus, and when they were, at one time, cut off by a snowstorm, a rescue party had to be sent. The would-be maenads were brought down with their clothes stiff as boards, having, in all their frenzy, accepted rescue. This seemed rather like contemporary behavior to Juliet, it somehow cast a modern light on the celebrants’ carrying-on. Would the students see it so? Not likely. They would probably be armed against any possible entertainment, any involvement, as students were. And the ones who weren’t so armed wouldn’t want to show it.
The call to board sounded, the fresh air was cut off, there were reluctant shunting movements. She raised her eyes to watch, and saw, some distance ahead, the engine disappearing around a curve.
And then a lurch or a shudder, a shudder that seemed to pass along the whole train. A sense, up here, of the car rocking. An abrupt stop.
Everybody sat waiting for the train to start again, and nobody spoke. Even the complaining husband was silent. Minutes passed. Doors were opening and closing. Men’s voices calling, a spreading feeling of fright and agitation. In the club car, which was just below, a voice of authority—maybe the conductor’s. But it was not possible to hear what he was saying.
Juliet got up and went to the front of the car, looking over the tops of all the cars ahead. She saw some figures running in the snow.
One of the lone women came up and stood beside her.
“I felt there was something going to happen,” the woman said. “I felt it back there, when we were stopped. I didn’t want us to start up again, I thought something was going to happen.”
The other lone woman had come to stand behind them.
“It won’t be anything,” she said. “Maybe a branch across the tracks.”
“They have that thing that goes ahead of the train,” the first woman told her. “It goes on purpose to catch things like a branch across the tracks.”
“Maybe it had just fallen.”
Both women spoke with the same north-of-England accent and without the politeness of strangers or acquaintances. Now that Juliet got a good look at them she saw that they were probably sisters, though one had a younger, broader face. So they travelled together but sat separately. Or perhaps they’d had a row.
The conductor was mounting the stairs to the observation car. He turned, halfway up, to speak.
“Nothing serious to worry about, folks, it seems like we hit an obstacle on the track. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll get going again as soon as we can, but we could be here a little while. The steward tells me there’s going to be free coffee down here in a few minutes.”
Juliet followed him down the stairs. She had become aware, as soon as she stood up, that there was a problem of her own which would make it necessary for her to go back to her seat and her travelling case, whether the man she snubbed was still there or not. As she made her way through the cars she met other people on the move. People were pressing against the windows on one side of the train, or they had halted between the cars, as if they expected the doors to open. Juliet had no time to ask que
stions, but as she slid past she heard that it might have been a bear, or an elk, or a cow. And people wondered what a cow would be doing up here in the bush, or why the bears were not all asleep now, or if some drunk had fallen asleep on the tracks.
In the dining car people were sitting at the tables, whose white cloths had all been removed. They were drinking the free coffee.
Nobody was in Juliet’s seat, or in the seat across from it. She picked up her case and hurried along to the Ladies. Monthly bleeding was the bane of her life. It had even, on occasion, interfered with the writing of important three-hour examinations, because you couldn’t leave the room for reinforcements.
Flushed, crampy, feeling a little dizzy and sick, she sank down on the toilet bowl, removed her soaked pad and wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in the receptacle provided. When she stood up she attached the fresh pad from her bag. She saw that the water and urine in the bowl was crimson with her blood. She put her hand on the flush button, then noticed in front of her eyes the warning not to flush the toilet while the train was standing still. That meant, of course, when the train was standing near the station, where the discharge would take place, very disagreeably, right where people could see it. Here, she might risk it.
But just as she touched the button again she heard voices close by, not in the train but outside the toilet window of pebbled glass. Maybe train workers walking past.
She could stay till the train moved, but how long would that be? And what if somebody desperately wanted in? She decided that all she could do was to put down the lid and get out.
She went back to her own seat. Across from her, a child four or five years old was slashing a crayon across the pages of a coloring book. His mother spoke to Juliet about the free coffee.
“It may be free but it looks like you have to go and get it yourself,” she said. “Would you mind watching him while I go?”
“I don’t want to stay with her,” the child said, without looking up.
“I’ll go,” said Juliet. But at that moment a waiter entered the car with the coffee wagon.
“There. I shouldn’t’ve complained so soon,” the mother said. “Did you hear it was a b-o-d-y?”
Juliet shook her head.
“He didn’t have a coat on even. Somebody saw him get off and walk on up ahead but they never realized what he was doing. He must’ve just got round the curve so the engineer couldn’t see him till it was too late.”
A few seats ahead, on the mother’s side of the aisle, a man said, “Here they come back,” and some people got up, from Juliet’s side, and stooped to see. The child stood up too, pressed his face to the glass. His mother told him to sit down.
“You color. Look at the mess you made, all over the lines.”
“I can’t look,” she said to Juliet. “I can’t stand to look at anything like that.”
Juliet got up and looked. She saw a small group of men tramping back towards the station. Some had taken off their coats, which were piled on top of the stretcher that a couple of them were carrying.
“You can’t see anything,” a man behind Juliet said to a woman who had not stood up. “They got him all covered.”
Not all of the men who proceeded with their heads lowered were railway employees. Juliet recognized the man who had sat across from her up in the observation car.
After ten or fifteen minutes more, the train began to move. Around the curve there was no blood to be seen, on either side of the car. But there was a trampled area, a shovelled mound of snow. The man behind her was up again. He said, “That’s where it happened, I guess,” and watched for a little while to see if there was anything else, then turned around and sat down. The train, instead of speeding to make up for lost time, seemed to be going more slowly than previously. Out of respect, perhaps, or with apprehension about what might lie ahead, around the next curve. The headwaiter went through the car announcing the first seating for lunch, and the mother and child at once got up and followed him. A procession began, and Juliet heard a woman who was passing say, “Really?”
The woman talking to her said softly, “That’s what she said. Full of blood. So it must have splashed in when the train went over—”
“Don’t say it.”
A little later, when the procession had ended and the early lunchers were eating, the man came through—the man from the observation car who had been seen outside walking in the snow.
Juliet got up and quickly pursued him. In the black cold space between the cars, just as he was pushing the heavy door in front of him, she said, “Excuse me. I have to ask you something.”
This space was full of sudden noise, the clanking of heavy wheels on the rails.
“What is it?”
“Are you a doctor? Did you see the man who—”
“I’m not a doctor. There’s no doctor on the train. But I have some medical experience.”
“How old was he?”
The man looked at her with a steady patience and some displeasure.
“Hard to say. Not young.”
“Was he wearing a blue shirt? Did he have blondish-brown-colored hair?”
He shook his head, not to answer her question but to refuse it.
“Was this somebody you knew?” he said. “You should tell the conductor if it was.”
“I didn’t know him.”
“Excuse me, then.” He pushed open the door and left her.
Of course. He thought she was full of disgusting curiosity, like many other people.
Full of blood. That was disgusting, if you liked.
She could never tell anybody about the mistake that had been made, the horrid joke of it. People would think her exceptionally crude and heartless, were she ever to speak of it. And what was at one end of the misunderstanding—the suicide’s smashed body—would seem, in the telling, to be hardly more foul and frightful than her own menstrual blood.
Never tell that to anybody. (Actually she did tell it, a few years later, to a woman named Christa, a woman whose name she did not yet know.)
But she wanted very much to tell somebody something. She got out her notebook and on one of its ruled pages began to write a letter to her parents.
We have not yet reached the Manitoba border and most people have been complaining that the scenery is rather monotonous but they cannot say that the trip has been lacking in dramatic incident. This morning we stopped at some godforsaken little settlement in the northern woods, all painted Dreary Railway Red. I was sitting at the back of the train in the Observation Car, and freezing to death because they skimp on the heat up there (the idea must be that the scenic glories will distract you from your discomfort) and I was too lazy to trudge back and get my sweater. We sat around there for ten or fifteen minutes and then started up again, and I could see the engine rounding a curve up ahead, and then suddenly there was a sort of Awful Thump …
She and her father and her mother had always made it their business to bring entertaining stories into the house. This had required a subtle adjustment not only of the facts but of one’s position in the world. Or so Juliet had found, when her world was school. She had made herself into a rather superior, invulnerable observer. And now that she was away from home all the time this stance had become habitual, almost a duty.
But as soon as she had written the words Awful Thump, she found herself unable to go on. Unable, in her customary language, to go on.
She tried looking out the window, but the scene, composed of the same elements, had changed. Less than a hundred miles on, it seemed as if there was a warmer climate. The lakes were fringed with ice, not covered. The black water, black rocks, under the wintry clouds, filled the air with darkness. She grew tired watching, and she picked up her Dodd, opening it just anywhere, because, after all, she had read it before. Every few pages she seemed to have had an orgy of underlining. She was drawn to these passages, but when she read them she found that what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seemed obscure and unsettlin
g.
… what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice …
The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.
She woke and saw the same man, the man she had followed and pestered between the cars, sitting across from her.
“You were sleeping.” He smiled slightly at what he had said. “Obviously.”
She had been sleeping with her head hanging forward, like an old woman, and there was a dribble at the corner of her mouth. Also, she knew she must get to the Ladies Toilet at once, hoping there was nothing on her skirt. She said “Excuse me” (just what he had last said to her) and took up her case and walked away with as little self-conscious haste as she could manage.
When she came back, washed and tidied and reinforced, he was still there.
He spoke at once. He said that he wanted to apologize.
“It occurred to me I was rude to you. When you asked me—”
“Yes,” she said.
“You had it right,” he said. “The way you described him.”
This seemed less an offering, on his part, than a direct and necessary transaction. If she did not care to speak he might just get up and walk away, not particularly disappointed, having done what he’d come to do.
Shamefully, Juliet’s eyes overflowed with tears. This was so unexpected that she had no time to look away.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
She nodded quickly, several times, sniffled wretchedly, blew her nose on the tissue she eventually found in her bag.