Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

  Another woman brought her a slice of spice cake on a plastic plate.

  “You must be hungry,” she said. “Everybody else is.”

  A woman who used to be Corrie’s hairdresser said, “I told everybody you would probably drop in. I told them you couldn’t till you’d closed up the library. I said it was too bad you had to miss the service. I said so.”

  “It was a lovely service,” another woman said. “You’ll want tea once you’re done with that cake.”

  And so on. She couldn’t think of anybody’s name. The United church and the Presbyterian church were just hanging on; the Anglican church had closed ages ago. Was this where everybody had gone?

  There was only one other woman at the reception who was getting as much attention as Corrie, and who was dressed as Corrie would have expected a funeral-going woman to be. A lovely lilac-gray dress and a subdued gray summer hat.

  The woman was being brought over to meet her. A string of modest genuine pearls around her neck.

  “Oh, yes.” She spoke in a soft voice, as pleased as the occasion would allow. “You must be Corrie. The Corrie I’ve heard so much about. Though we never met, I felt I knew you. But you must be wondering who I am.” She said a name that meant nothing to Corrie. Then shook her head and gave a small, regretful laugh.

  “Lillian worked for us ever since she came to Kitchener,” she said. “The children adored her. Then the grandchildren. They truly adored her. My goodness. On her day off I was just the most unsatisfactory substitute for Lillian. We all adored her, actually.”

  She said this in a way that was bemused, yet delighted. The way women like that could be, showing such charming self-disparagement. She would have spotted Corrie as the only person in the room who could speak her language and not take her words at face value.

  Corrie said, “I didn’t know she was sick.”

  “She went that fast,” the woman with the teapot said, offering more to the lady with the pearls and being refused.

  “It takes them her age faster than it does the real old ones,” the tea lady said. “How long was she in the hospital?” she asked in a slightly menacing way of the pearls.

  “I’m trying to think. Ten days?”

  “Shorter time than that, what I heard. And shorter still when they got around to letting her people know at home.”

  “She kept it all very much to herself.” This from the employer, who spoke quietly but held her ground. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Corrie said.

  At that moment, a stout, smiling young woman came up and introduced herself as the minister.

  “We’re speaking of Lillian?” she asked. She shook her head in wonder. “Lillian was blessed. Lillian was a rare person.”

  All agreed. Corrie included.

  “I suspect Milady the Minister,” Corrie wrote to Howard, in the long letter she was composing in her head on the way home.

  Later in the evening she sat down and started that letter, though she would not be able to send it yet—Howard was spending a couple of weeks at the Muskoka cottage with his family. Everybody slightly disgruntled, as he had described it in advance—his wife without her politics, he without his piano—but unwilling to forgo the ritual.

  “Of course, it’s absurd to think that Lillian’s ill-gotten gains would build a church,” she wrote. “But I’d bet she built the steeple. It’s a silly-looking steeple, anyway. I never thought before what a giveaway those upside-down ice-cream-cone steeples are. The loss of faith is right there, isn’t it? They don’t know it, but they’re declaring it.”

  She crumpled the letter up and started again, in a more jubilant manner.

  “The days of the Blackmail are over. The sound of the cuckoo is heard in the land.”

  She had never realized how much it weighed on her, she wrote, but now she could see it. Not the money—as he well knew, she didn’t care about the money, and, anyway, it had become a smaller amount in real terms as the years passed, though Lillian had never seemed to realize that. It was the queasy feeling, the never-quite-safeness of it, the burden on their long love, that had made her unhappy. She had that feeling every time she passed a postbox.

  She wondered if by any chance he would hear the news before her letter could get it to him. Not possible. He hadn’t reached the stage of checking obituaries yet.

  It was in February and again in August of every year that she put the special bills in the envelope and he slipped the envelope into his pocket. Later, he would probably check the bills and type Lillian’s name on the envelope before delivering it to her box.

  The question was, had he looked in the box to see if this summer’s money had been picked up? Lillian had been alive when Corrie made the transfer but surely not able to get to the mailbox. Surely not able.

  It was shortly before Howard left for the cottage that Corrie had last seen him and that the transfer of the envelope had taken place. She tried to figure out exactly when it was, whether he would have had time to check the box again after delivering the money or whether he would have gone straight to the cottage. Sometimes while at the cottage in the past he’d found time to write Corrie a letter. But not this time.

  She goes to bed with the letter to him still unfinished.

  And wakes up early, when the sky is brightening, though the sun is not yet up.

  There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone.

  She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.

  There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any.

  No news about Lillian, because Lillian doesn’t matter and she never did. No post office box, because the money goes straight into an account or maybe just into a wallet. General expenses. Or a modest nest egg. A trip to Spain. Who cares? People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money. It can’t even be called a windfall. No need to explain it.

  She gets up and quickly dresses and walks through every room in the house, introducing the walls and the furniture to this new idea. A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest. She makes coffee and doesn’t drink it. She ends up in her bedroom once more, and finds that the introduction to the current reality has to be done all over again.

  The briefest note, the letter tossed.

  “Lillian is dead, buried yesterday.”

  She sends it to his office, it does not matter. Special delivery, who cares?

  She turns off the phone, so as not to suffer waiting. The silence. She may simply never hear again.

  But soon a letter, hardly more to it than there was to hers.

  “All well now, be glad. Soon.”

  So that’s the way they’re going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse.

  TRAIN

  THIS is a slow train anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve. Jackson is the only passenger left, the next stop, Clover, being about twenty miles ahead. And after that Ripley, and Kincardine and the lake. He is in luck and it’s not to be wasted. Already he has taken his ticket stub out of its overhead notch.

  He heaves his bag, and sees it land just nicely, in between the rails. No choice now—the train’s not going to get any slower.

  He takes his chance. A young man in good shape, agile as he’ll ever be. But the leap, the landing, disappoints him. He’s stiffer than he’d thought, the stillness pitches him forward, his palms come down hard on the gravel between the ties, he’s scraped the skin. Nerves.

  The train is out of sight, he hears it putting on a bit of speed, clear of the curve. He spits on his hurting hands, getting the gravel out. Then picks up his bag and starts walking back in the direction he has just covered on the train. If he followed the train he would show up at Clover station well after dark. He’d still be able to complain that he’d fallen asleep and wakened all mixed up, thinking he’d slept thr
ough his stop when he hadn’t. Jumped off all confused, then had to walk.

  He would have been believed. Coming home from so far away, home from the war, he could have got mixed up in his head. It’s not too late, he would be where he was supposed to be before midnight.

  But all the time he’s thinking this, he’s walking in the opposite direction.

  He doesn’t know many names of trees. Maples, that everybody knows. Pines. Not much else. He’d thought that where he jumped was in some woods, but it wasn’t. The trees are just along the track, thick on the embankment, but he can see the flash of fields behind them. Fields green or rusty or yellow. Pasture, crops, stubble. He knows just that much. It’s still August.

  And once the noise of the train has been swallowed up he realizes there isn’t the perfect quiet around that he would have expected. Plenty of disturbance here and there, a shaking of the dry August leaves that wasn’t wind, the racket of some unseen birds chastising him.

  Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going? A sense of being watched by things you didn’t know about. Of being a disturbance. Life around coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.

  People he’d met in the last few years seemed to think that if you weren’t from a city, you were from the country. And that was not true. There were distinctions you could miss unless you lived there, between country and town. Jackson himself was the son of a plumber. He had never been in a stable in his life or herded cows or stooked grain. Or found himself as now stumping along a railway track that seemed to have reverted from its normal purpose of carrying people and freight to become a province of wild apple trees and thorny berry bushes and trailing grapevines and crows—he knew that bird at least—scolding from perches you could not see. And right now a garter snake slithering between the rails, perfectly confident he won’t be quick enough to tramp on and murder it. He does know enough to figure that it’s harmless, but the confidence riles him.

  The little Jersey, whose name was Margaret Rose, could usually be counted on to show up at the stable door for milking twice a day, morning and evening. Belle didn’t often have to call her. But this morning she was too interested in something down by the dip of the pasture field, or in the trees that hid the railway tracks on the other side of the fence. She heard Belle’s whistle and then her call, and started out reluctantly. But then decided to go back for another look.

  Belle set the pail and stool down and started tramping through the morning-wet grass.

  “So-boss. So-boss.”

  She was half coaxing, half scolding.

  Something moved in the trees. A man’s voice called out that it was all right.

  Well of course it was all right. Did he think she was afraid of him? Better for him to be afraid of the cow with the horns still on.

  Climbing over the rail fence, he waved in what he might have considered a reassuring way.

  That was too much for Margaret Rose, she had to put on a display. Jump one way, then the other. Toss of the wicked little horns. Nothing much, but Jerseys can always surprise you in an unpleasant way, with their speed and spurts of temper. Belle called out, to scold her and to reassure him.

  “She won’t hurt you. Just don’t move. It’s her nerves.”

  Now she noticed the bag he had hold of. That was what had caused the trouble. She had thought he was just out walking the tracks, but he was going somewhere.

  “She’s upset with your bag. If you could just lay it down for a moment. I have to get her back towards the barn to milk her.”

  He did as she asked, and then stood watching, not wanting to move an inch.

  She got Margaret Rose headed back to where the pail was, and the stool, on this side of the barn.

  “You can pick it up now,” she called. And spoke companionably as he got nearer. “As long as you don’t wave it around at her. You’re a soldier, aren’t you? If you wait till I get her milked I can get you some breakfast. That’s a stupid name when you have to holler at her. Margaret Rose.”

  She was a short sturdy woman with straight hair, gray mixed in with what was fair, and childish bangs.

  “I’m the one responsible for it,” she said, as she got herself settled. “I’m a royalist. Or I used to be. I have porridge made, on the back of the stove. It won’t take me long to milk. If you wouldn’t mind going round the barn and waiting where she can’t see you. It’s too bad I can’t offer you an egg. We used to keep hens but the foxes kept getting them and we just got fed up.”

  We. We used to keep hens. That meant she had a man around somewhere.

  “Porridge is good. I’ll be glad to pay you.”

  “No need. Just get out of the way for a bit. She’s got herself too interested to let her milk down.”

  He took himself off, around the barn. It was in bad shape. He peered between the boards to see what kind of a car she had, but all he could make out in there was an old buggy and some other wrecks of machinery.

  The place showed some sort of tidiness, but not exactly industry. On the house, white paint all peeling and going gray. A window with boards nailed across it, where there must have been broken glass. The dilapidated henhouse where she had mentioned the foxes getting the hens. Shingles in a pile.

  If there was a man on the place he must have been an invalid, or else paralyzed with laziness.

  There was a road running by. A small fenced field in front of the house, a dirt road. And in the field a dappled peaceable-looking horse. A cow he could see reasons for keeping, but a horse? Even before the war people on farms were getting rid of them, tractors were the coming thing. And she hadn’t looked like the sort to trot round on horseback just for the fun of it.

  Then it struck him. The buggy in the barn. It was no relic, it was all she had.

  For a while now he’d been hearing a peculiar sound. The road rose up a hill, and from over that hill came a clip-clop, clip-clop. Along with the clip-clop some little tinkle or whistling.

  Now then. Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small horses. Smaller than the one in the field but no end livelier. And in the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with proper black hats on their heads.

  The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discreet high-pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. They never looked at him as they went by.

  That chilled him. The buggy in the barn and the horse in the field were nothing in comparison.

  He was still standing there looking one way and another when he heard her call, “All finished.” She was standing by the house.

  “This is where to go in and out,” she said of the back door. “The front is stuck since last winter, it just refuses to open, you’d think it was still frozen.”

  They walked on planks laid over an uneven dirt floor, in a darkness provided by the boarded-up window. It was as chilly there as it had been in the hollow where he’d slept. He had wakened again and again, trying to scrunch himself into a position where he could stay warm. The woman didn’t shiver here—she gave off a smell of healthy exertion and what was likely the cow’s hide.

  She poured the fresh milk into a basin and covered it with a piece of cheesecloth she kept by, then led him into the main part of the house. The windows there had no curtains, so the light was coming in. Also the woodstove had been in use. There was a sink with a hand pump, a table with oilcloth on it worn in some places to shreds, and a couch covered with a patchy old quilt.

  Also a pillow that had shed some feathers.

  So far, not so bad, though old and shabby. There was a use for everything that you could see. But raise your eyes and up there on shelves was pile on
pile of newspapers or magazines or just some kind of papers, up to the ceiling.

  He had to ask her, Was she not afraid of fire? A woodstove for instance.

  “Oh, I’m always here. I mean, I sleep here. There isn’t anyplace else I can keep the drafts out. I’m watchful. I haven’t had a chimney fire even. A couple of times it got too hot and I just threw some baking powder on it. Nothing to it.

  “My mother had to be here anyway,” she said. “There was noplace else for her to be comfortable. I had her cot in here. I kept an eye on everything. I did think of moving all the papers into the front room but it’s really too damp in there, they would all be ruined.”

  Then she said she should have explained. “My mother’s dead. She died in May. Just when the weather got decent. She lived to hear about the end of the war on the radio. She understood perfectly. She lost her speech a long time ago but she could understand. I got so used to her not speaking that sometimes I think she’s here but of course she’s not.”

  Jackson felt it was up to him to say he was sorry.

  “Oh well. It was coming. Just lucky it wasn’t in the winter.”

  She served him oatmeal porridge and poured tea.

  “Not too strong? The tea?”

  Mouth full, he shook his head.

  “I never economize on tea. If it comes to that, why not drink hot water? We did run out when the weather got so bad last winter. The hydro gave out and the radio gave out and the tea gave out. I had a rope round the back door to hang on to when I went out to milk. I was going to let Margaret Rose into the back kitchen but I figured she’d get too upset with the storm and I couldn’t hold her. Anyway, she survived. We all survived.”

  Finding a space in the conversation, he asked, were there any dwarfs in the neighborhood?

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “In a cart?”

  “Oh. Were they singing? It must have been the little Mennonite boys. They drive their cart to church and they sing all the way. The girls have to go in the buggy with the parents but they let the boys ride in the cart.”