by Alice Munro
And I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage. Except for Walter’s journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention.
The sighting of Fife from Castle Rock is related by Hogg, so it must be true.
THOSE TRAVELLERS lie buried—all but one of them—in the graveyard of Boston Church, in Esquesing, in Halton County, almost within sight, and well within sound, of Highway 401 north of Milton, which at that spot may be the busiest road in Canada.
The church—built on what was once the farm of Andrew Laidlaw—is of course named for Thomas Boston. It is built of blackened limestone blocks. The front wall rises higher than the rest of the building—rather in the style of the false fronts on old-fashioned main streets—and it has an archway on top of it, rather than a tower—for the church bell.
Old James is here. In fact he is here twice, or at least his name is, along with the name of his wife, born Helen Scott, and buried in Ettrick in the year 1800. Their names appear on the same stone that bears the names of Andrew and Agnes. But surprisingly, the same names are written on another stone that looks older than others in the graveyard—a darkened, blotchy slab such as you are more apt to see in the churchyards of the British Isles. Anyone trying to figure this out might wonder if they carried it across the ocean, with the mother’s name on it, waiting for the father’s to be added—if it was perhaps an awkward burden, wrapped in sacking and tied with stout cord, borne by Walter down into the hold of the ship.
But why would someone have taken the trouble to have the names also added to those on the newer column above Andrew and Agnes’s grave?
It looks as if the death and burial of such a father was a matter worth recording twice over.
Nearby, close to the graves of her father and her brother Andrew and her sister-in-law Agnes, is the grave of Little Mary, married after all and buried beside Robert Murray, her husband. Women were scarce and so were prized in the new country. She and Robert did not have any children together, but after Mary’s early death he married another woman and by her he had four sons who lie here, dead at the ages of two, and three, and four, and thirteen. The second wife is there too. Her stone says Mother. Mary’s says Wife.
And here is the brother James who was not lost to them, who made his way from Nova Scotia to join them, first in York and then in Esquesing, farming with Andrew. He brought a wife with him, or found her in the community. Perhaps she helped with Agnes’s babies before she started having her own. For Agnes had a great number of pregnancies, and raised many children. In a letter written to his brothers Robert and William in Scotland, telling of the death of their father, in 1829 (a cancer, not much pain until near the end, though it eat away a great part of his cheek and jaw), Andrew mentions that his wife has been feeling poorly for the past three years. This may be a roundabout way of saying that during those years she bore her sixth, seventh, and eighth child. She must have recovered her health, for she lived into her eighties.
ANDREW GAVE the land that the church is built on. Or possibly sold it. It is hard to measure devoutness against business sense. He seems to have prospered, though he spread himself less than Walter. Walter married an American girl from Montgomery County in New York State. Eighteen when she married him, thirty-three when she died after the birth of her ninth child. Walter did not marry again, but farmed successfully, educated his sons, speculated in land, and wrote letters to the government complaining about his taxes, also objecting to the township’s participation in a proposed railway—the interest being squandered, he says, for the benefit of capitalists in Britain.
Nevertheless it is a fact that he and Andrew supported the British governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, who was surely representing those capitalists, against the rebellion led by their fellow Scot, William Lyon Mackenzie, in 1837. They wrote to the governor a letter of assiduous flattery, in the grand servile style of their times. Some of their descendants might wish this not to be true, but there is not much to be done about the politics of our relatives, living or dead.
And Walter was able to take a trip back to Scotland, where he had himself photographed wearing a plaid and holding on to a bouquet of thistles.
On the stone commemorating Andrew and Agnes (and Old James and Helen) there appears also the name of their daughter Isabel, who like her mother Agnes died an old woman. She has a married name, but there is no further sign of her husband.
Born at Sea.
And here also is the name of Andrew and Agnes’s firstborn child, Isabel’s elder brother. His dates as well.
Young James was dead within a month of the family’s landing at Quebec. His name is here but surely he cannot be. They had not taken up their land when he died, they had not even seen this place. He may have been buried somewhere along the way from Montreal to York or in that hectic new town itself. Perhaps in a raw temporary burying ground now paved over, perhaps without a stone in a churchyard where other bodies would someday be laid on top of his. Dead of some mishap in the busy streets of York, or of a fever, or dysentery—of any of the ailments, the accidents, that were the common destroyers of little children in his time.
Lying Under the Apple Tree
OVER ON the other side of town lived a woman named Miriam McAlpin, who kept horses. These were not horses that belonged to her—she boarded them and exercised them for their owners, who were harness-racing people. She lived in a house that had been the original farmhouse, close to the horse barns, with her old parents, who seldom came outside. Beyond the house and the barns was an oval track on which Miriam or her stable boy, or sometimes the owners themselves, could be seen now and then on the low seat of a flimsy-looking sulky, flying along and beating up the dust.
In one of the pasture fields for the horses, next to the town street, there were three apple trees, the remains of an old orchard. Two of them were small and bent and one was quite large, like a nearly grown maple. They were never pruned or sprayed and the apples were scabby, not worth stealing, but most years there was an abundant flowering, apple blossoms hanging on everywhere, so that the branches looked from a little way off to be absolutely clotted with snow.
I HAD inherited a bicycle, or at least I had the use of one left behind by our part-time hired man when he went away to work in an aircraft factory. It was a man’s bike, of course, high-seated and lightweight, of some odd-looking make long discontinued.
“You’re not going to ride that to school, are you?” my sister said, when I had started practice rides up and down our lane. My sister was younger than I was, but she sometimes suffered anxiety on my behalf, understanding perhaps before I did the various ways in which I could risk making a fool of myself. She was thinking not just of the look of the bike but of the fact that I was thirteen and in my first year at high school, and that this was a watershed year as far as girls riding bikes to school was concerned. All girls who wanted to establish their femininity had to quit riding them. Girls who continued to ride either lived too far out in the country to walk—and had parents who could not afford to board them in town—or were simply eccentric and unable to take account of certain unstated but far-reaching rules. We lived just beyond the town limits, so if I showed up riding a bicycle—and particularly this bicycle—it would put me in the category of such girls. Those who wore women’s oxford shoes and lisle stockings and rolled their hair.
“Not to school,” I said. But I did start making use of the bike, riding it out to the country along the back roads on Sunday afternoons. There was hardly a chance then of meeting anybody I knew, and sometimes I met nobody at all.
I liked to do this because I was secretly devoted to Nature. The feeling came from books, at first. It came from the girls’ stories by the writer L. M. Montgomery, who often inserted some sentences describing a snowy field in moonlight or a pine forest or a still pond mirroring the evening sky. Then it had merged with another private passion I had, which was for lines of poetry. I went rampaging through my school texts to uncove
r them before they could be read and despised in class.
To betray either of these addictions, at home or at school, would have put me into a condition of permanent vulnerability. Which I felt that I was in already, to some extent. All someone had to say, in a certain voice, was you would, or how like you, and I felt the taunt, the chastening air, the lines drawn. But now that I had the bike, I could ride on Sunday afternoons into territory that seemed waiting for the kind of homage I ached to offer. Here were the sheets of water from the flooded creeks flashing over the land, and here were the banks of trillium under the red-budded trees. And the chokecherries, the pin cherries, in the fencerows, breaking into tender bits of bloom before there was a leaf on them.
The cherry blossoms got me thinking about the trees in Miriam McAlpin’s field. I wanted to look at them when they flowered. And not just to look at them—as you could do from the street—but to get underneath those branches, to lie down on my back with my head against the trunk of the tree and to see how it rose, as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom. Also to see if there were bits of sky showing through, so that I could screw up my eyes to make them foreground not background, bright-blue fragments on that puffy white sea. There was a formality about this idea that I longed for. It was almost like kneeling down in church, which in our church we didn’t do. I had done it once, when I was friends with Delia Cavanaugh and her mother took us to the Catholic church on a Saturday to arrange the flowers. I crossed myself and knelt in a pew and Delia said—not even whispering—“What are you doing that for? You’re not supposed to do that. Just us.”
I LEFT the bike lying in the grass. It was evening, I had ridden through town on back streets. There was nobody in the stable yard or around the house. I got myself over the fence. I tried to go as quickly as possible, without running, over the ground where the horses had been cropping the early grass. I ducked under the branches of the big tree and went on stooping and stumbling, sometimes hit in the face by the blossoms, till I reached the trunk and could do what I’d come to do.
I lay down flat on my back. There was a root of the tree making a hard ridge under me, so I had to shift around. And there were last year’s apples, dark as chunks of dried meat, that I had to get out of the way before I could settle. Even then, when I composed myself, I was aware of my body’s being in an odd and unnatural situation. And when I looked up at all the dangling pearly petals with their faint rosy smear, all the pre-arranged nosegays, I was not quite swept into the state of mind, of worship, that I had been hoping for. The sky was thinly clouded, and what I could see of it reminded me of dingy bits of china.
Not that this wasn’t worth doing. At least—as I began to understand as I got to my feet and scrambled out of there—it was worth having done. It was along the lines of an acknowledgment, rather than an experience. I hurried across the field and over the fence, retrieved my bicycle, and was in fact starting to ride away when I heard a loud whistle, and my name.
“Hey. You. Yeah. You.”
It was Miriam McAlpin.
“You come on over here for a minute.”
I wheeled around. There in the driveway between the old house and the horse barns, Miriam was talking to two men, who must have driven up in the car parked beside the road. They were wearing white shirts, suit vests, and trousers—just the same thing any man who worked at a desk or behind a counter in those days would be wearing from the time he got dressed in the morning till he got undressed to go to bed. Next to them, Miriam in her work pants and loose checked shirt looked like a cocky twelve-year-old boy, though she was a woman of between twenty-five and thirty. Either that, or she looked like a jockey. Cropped hair, hunched shoulders, raw skin. She gave me a look that was threatening and derisive.
“I saw you,” she said. “Over in our field.”
I said nothing. I knew what the next question would be and I was trying to think of an answer.
“So. What were you doing there?”
“Looking for something,” I said.
“Looking for something. Yeah. What?”
“A bracelet.”
I had never owned a bracelet in my life.
“So. Why did you think it was in there?”
“I thought I’d lost it.”
“Yeah. In there. How come?”
“Because I was in there the other day looking for morels,” I floundered. “I had it on then and I thought it could have slipped off.”
It was true enough that people looked for morels under old apple trees in the spring. Though I don’t suppose they wore bracelets while they were at it.
“Unh-hunh,” said Miriam. “Did you find any? Whatchamacallums? Morels?”
I said no.
“That’s good. ’Cause they would’ve been mine.”
She looked me up and down and said what she’d been wanting to say all along. “You’re starting early, aren’t you?”
One of the men was looking at the ground, but I thought he was smiling. The other looked straight at me, raising his eyebrows slightly in droll reproach. Men who knew who I was, men who knew my father, would probably not have let their looks say so much.
I understood. She thought—they all thought—that I had been under the tree, yesterday evening or some other evening, with a man or a boy.
“You go on home,” Miriam said. “You and your bracelets go on home and don’t ever come back monkeying around on my property in the future. Go on.”
Miriam McAlpin was well known for her tendency to bawl people out. I had once heard her in the grocery store, carrying on at the top of her voice about some bruised peaches. The way she was treating me was predictable, and the suspicions she had of me seemed to rouse an unambiguous feeling in her—pure disgust—which did not surprise me.
It was the men who made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads.
The stable boy had come out while this was going on. He was leading a horse belonging to one or both of the men. He halted in the yard, did not come closer. He seemed not to be looking at his boss, or the horse owners, or at me, not to take any interest in the scene. He would be used to Miriam’s way of telling people off.
People’s thoughts about me—not just the kind of thoughts the men or Miriam might be having, each kind rather dangerous in its own way—but any thoughts at all, seemed to me a mysterious threat, a gross impertinence. I hated even to hear a person say something relatively harmless.
“I seen you walking down the street the other day. Looked like you were off in the clouds.”
Judgments and speculations all like a swarm of bugs trying to get into my mouth and eyes. I could have swatted them, I could have spat.
“DIRT,” MY sister whispered to me when I got home. “Dirt on the back of your blouse.”
She watched me take it off in the bathroom, and scrub at it with a hard bar of soap. We didn’t have running hot water except in the winter, so she offered to get me some from the kettle. She didn’t ask me how the dirt had got there, she was only hoping to get rid of the evidence, keep me out of trouble.
ON SATURDAY nights there was always a crowd on the main street. At that time there wasn’t such a thing as a mall anywhere in the county, and it wasn’t until several years after the war that the big shopping night would shift to Friday. The year I’m talking about is 1944, when we still had ration books and there were a lot of things you couldn’t buy—like new cars and silk stockings—but the farmers came into town with some money in their pockets and the stores had brightened up after the Depression doldrums and everything stayed open till ten o’clock.
Most town people did their shopping during the week and in the daytime. Unless they worked in the stores or restaurants they stayed out of the way on Saturday evenings, playing cards with their neighbors or listening to the radio. Newly married couples, engaged couples, couples who were “g
oing out,” cuddled in the movie house or drove, if they could get the gas coupons, to one of the dance halls on the lakeshore. It was the country people who took over the street and the country men and girls on the loose who went into Neddy’s Night Owl, where the platform was raised above a dirt floor and every dance cost ten cents.
I stood close to the platform with some friends of my own age. Nobody came along to pay ten cents for any of us. No wonder. We laughed loudly, we criticized the dancing, the haircuts, the clothes. We sometimes spoke of a girl as a slut, or a man as a fairy, though we did not have a precise definition of either of these words.
Neddy himself, who sold the tickets, was apt to turn to us and say, “Don’t you think you girls need some fresh air?” And we would swagger off. Or else we would get bored and leave on our own initiative. We bought ice-cream cones and gave each other licks to try the different flavors, and walked along the street in a haughty style, swinging around the knots of talkers and through the swarms of children squirting water at each other from the drinking fountain. Nobody was worth our notice.
The girls who took part in this parade were not out of the top drawer—as my mother would have said, with a wistful and lightly sarcastic edge to her voice. Not one of them had a sunroom on their house or a father who wore a suit on any day but Sunday. Girls of that sort were at home now, or in each other’s houses, playing Monopoly or making fudge or trying out hairstyles. My mother was sorry not to see me accepted into that crowd.