by Alice Munro
“I dare you touch it,” I said scornfully to Mary Agnes. “Touch a dead cow.”
Mary Agnes came up slowly, and to my astonishment she bent down, grunting, looking at the eye as if she knew I had been wondering about it, and she laid her hand—she laid the palm of her hand— over it, over the eye. She did this seriously, shrinkingly, yet with a tender composure that was not like her. But as soon as she had done it she stood up, and held her hand in front of her face, palm towards me, fingers spread, so that it looked like a huge hand, bigger than her whole face, and dark. She laughed right at me.
“You’d be scared to let me catch you now,” she said, and I was, but walked away from her insolently as I could manage.
It often seemed then that nobody else knew what really went on, or what a person was, but me. For instance people said “poor Mary Agnes” or implied it, by a drop in pitch, a subdued protective tone of voice, as if she had no secrets, no place of her own, and that was not true.
“YOUR UNCLE CRAIG DIED last night.”
My mother’s voice, telling this, was almost shy.
I was eating my favourite, surreptitious breakfast—puffed wheat drowned in black molasses—and sitting on the cement slab outside our door, in the morning sun. It was two days since I had returned from Jenkin’s Bend and when she said Uncle Craig I thought of him as I had seen him, standing in the doorway, in his vest and shirt-sleeves, benignly perhaps impatiently waving me off.
The active verb confused me. He died. It sounded like something he willed to do, chose to do. As if he said, “Now I’ll die.” In that case it could not be so final. Yet I knew it was.
“In the Orange Hall, at Blue River. He was playing cards.”
The card table, the bright Orange Hall. (Though I knew it was really the Orangemen’s Hall, the name had nothing to do with the colour, any more than Blue River meant the river there was blue.)
Uncle Craig was dealing out cards, his heavy-lidded, serious way. He wore his sateen-backed vest, with pens and pencils clipped in the pocket. Now?
“He had a heart attack.”
Heart attack. It sounded like an explosion, like fireworks going off, shooting sticks of light in all directions, shooting a little ball of light—that was Uncle Craig’s heart, or his soul—high into the air, where it tumbled and went out. Did he jump up, throw his arms out, yell? How long did it take, did his eyes close, did he know what was happening? My mother’s usual positiveness seemed clouded over; my cold appetite for details irritated her. I followed her around the house, scowling, persistent, repeating my questions. I wanted to know. There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.
But by the day of the funeral things had changed. My mother had regained confidence; I had quieted down. I did not want to hear anything more about Uncle Craig, or about death. My mother had got my Black Watch plaid dress out of mothballs, brushed it, aired it on the line.
“It’s all right for summer, cooler than cotton, that light wool. Anyway its the only dark thing you own. I don’t care. If it was up to me you could wear scarlet. If they really believed in Christianity that’s what they’d all wear, it’d be all dancing and rejoicing, after all, they spend their whole life singing and praying about getting out of this world and on their way to Heaven. Yes. But I know your aunts, they’ll expect dark clothes, conventional to the last hair!”
She was not surprised to hear that I did not want to go.
“Nobody does,” she said frankly. “Nobody ever does. You have to, though. You have to learn to face things sometime.”
I did not like the way she said this. Her briskness and zeal seemed false and vulgar. I did not trust her. Always when people tell you you will have to face this sometime, when they hurry you matter-of-factly towards whatever pain or obscenity or unwelcome revelation is laid out for you, there is this edge of betrayal, this cold, masked, imperfectly hidden jubilation in their voices, something greedy for your hurt. Yes, in parents too; in parents particularly.
“What is Death?” continued my mother with ominous cheerfulness. “What is being dead?”
“Well, first off, what is a person? A large percent water. Just plain water. Nothing in a person is that remarkable. Carbon. The simplest elements. What is it they say? Ninety-eight cents worth? That’s all. It’s the way its put together that’s remarkable. The way it’s put together, we have the heart and the lungs. We have the liver. Pancreas. Stomach. Brain. All these things, what are they? Combinations of elements! Combine them—combine the combinations—and you’ve got a person! We call it Uncle Craig, or your father, or me. But its just these combinations, these parts put together and running in a certain particular way, for the time being. Then what happens is that one of the parts gives out, breaks down. In Uncle Craig’s case, the heart. So we say, Uncle Craig is dead. The person is dead. But that’s just our way of looking at it. That’s just our human way. If we weren’t thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dying—well not dying, changing, changing is the word I want, changing into something else, all those elements that made the person changing and going back into Nature again and reappearing over and over in birds and animals and flowers—Uncle Craig doesn’t have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!”
“I’ll get carsick,” I said. “I’ll vomit.”
“No you won’t.” My mother, in her slip, rubbed cologne on her bare arms. She pulled her navy blue crepe dress over her head. “Come and do me up. What a dress to wear in this heat. I can smell the Cleaners on it. Heat brings out that smell. Let me tell you about an article I was reading just a couple of weeks ago. It ties in perfectly with what I’m saying now.”
She went into her room and brought back her hat, which she put on in front of my little bureau mirror, hastily scraping the front hair underneath and leaving some back tails out. It was a pillbox hat of a hideous colour popular during the war—Air Force Blue.
“People are made up of parts,” she resumed. “Well when a person dies—as we say—only one part, or a couple of parts, may actually be worn out. Some of the other parts could run thirty, forty years more. Uncle Craig, for instance—he might have had perfectly good kidneys that a young person with sick kidneys could use. And this article was saying—someday these parts will be used! That’s the way it will be. Come on downstairs.”
I followed her down to the kitchen. She started putting her rouge on, at the dark mirror over the kitchen sink. For some reason she kept her make-up there, on a sticky tin shelf above the sink, all mixed up with bottles of dark old pills, and razor blades and tooth powder and Vaseline, no tops on anything.
“Transplant them! For instance eyes. They are already able to transplant eyes, not whole eyes but the cornea, I think it is. That’s only the beginning. Someday they’ll be able to transplant hearts and lungs and all the organs that the body needs. Even brains—I wonder, could they transplant brains? So all these parts won’t die at all, they’ll go on living as part of somebody else. Part of another combination. Then you won’t be able properly to speak of death at all. ‘Heirs of the Living Body.’ That’s what the article was called. We would all be heirs of one another’s bodies, we would all be donors too. Death as we know it now would be done away with!”
My father had come down, in his dark suit.
“Were you planning to discuss these ideas with the folks at the funeral?”
In a back-to-earth voice my mother said, “No.”
“Because they do have a different set of notions, and they might easy be upset.”
“I never mean to upset anybody,” cried my mother. “I never do! I think it’s a beautiful idea. It has its own kind of beauty! Isn’t it better than Heaven and Hell? I can’t understand people, I never can make out what they really believe. Do they think your Uncle Craig is wearing so
me kind of white nightshirt and floating around Eternity this very minute? Or do they think they put him in the ground and he decays?”
“They think both,” my father said, and in the middle of the kitchen he put his arms around my mother, holding her lightly and gravely, careful not to disturb her hat or her newly-pink face.
I used to wish sometimes for this very thing, to see my parents by look or embrace affirm that romance—I did not think of passion— had once caught them up and bound them together. But at this moment, seeing my mother go meek and bewildered—this was what the slump of her back showed, that her words never would—and my father touching her in such a gentle, compassionate, grieving way, his grieving having not much to do with Uncle Craig, I was alarmed, I wanted to shout at them to stop and turn back into their separate, final, unsupported selves. I was afraid that they would go on and show me something I no more wanted to see than I wanted to see Uncle Craig dead.
“Owen doesn’t have to go,” I said bitterly, pushing my face into the loosened mesh of the screen door, seeing him sitting in the yard in his old wagon, bare legged, dirty, remote, pretending he was something else, anything—an Arab in a caravan or an Eskimo on a dogsled.
That drew them away from each other, my mother sighing.
“Owen’s young.”
THE HOUSE WAS like on one of those puzzles, those mazes on paper, with a black dot in one of the squares, or rooms; you are supposed to find your way in to it, or out from it. The black dot in this case was Uncle Craig’s body, and my whole concern was not to find my way to it but to avoid it, not to open even the safest looking door because of what might be stretched out behind it.
The hay coils were still there. Last week, when I was visiting, the hay was cut, right up to the verandah steps, and coiled into smooth, perfect beehives higher than anybody’s head. In the evening, first casting long, pulled-out shadows, then turning grey, solid, when the sun went down, these hay-coils made a village, or, if you looked around the corner of the house down the rest of the field, a whole city of secretive, exactly similar, purple grey huts. But one had tumbled down, one was soft and wrecked, left for me to jump in. I would stand back against the steps and then run at it with my arms spread passionately, landing deep in fresh hay, still warm, still with its grassy growing smell. It was full of dried flowers—purple and white money-musk, yellow toadflax, little blue flowers nobody knew the name of. My arms and legs and face were covered with scratches, and when I roused myself from the hay these scratches stung, or glowed on me, in the rising breeze from the river.
Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace had come and jumped in the hay too, with their aprons flying, laughing at themselves. When the moment came they would hesitate, and jump with not quite sufficient abandon, landing in a decorous sitting position, hands spread as on bouncing cushion, or holding their hair.
When they came back and sat on the verandah, with basins of strawberries they were hulling, to make jam, Auntie Grace spoke breathlessly, but in a calm, musing voice.
“If a car had come by, wouldn’t you just have wanted to die?”
Aunt Elspeth took the pins out of her hair and let it down overthe back of her chair. When her hair was pinned up it looked nearly all grey, but when it was loose it showed a great deal of dark, silky brown, mink’s colour. With little snorting sounds of pleasure she shook her head back and forth and drew her spread fingers through her hair, to get rid of the little bits of hay that had flown up, and were sticking in it.
“Fools we are!” she said.
Where was Uncle Craig this while? Typing undauntedly, behind his closed windows and pulled-down blinds.
The squashed hay coil was just the same. But men were walking on the hay-stubble, all in dark suits like tall crows, talking. A wreath of white lilies hung on the front door, which was standing ajar. Mary Agnes came up joyfully smiling and made me stand still while she tied and re-tied my sash. The house and yard were full of people. Relatives from Toronto sat on the verandah, looking benevolent, but voluntarily apart. I was taken and made to speak to them, and avoided looking into the windows behind them, because of Uncle Craig’s body. Ruth McQueen came out carrying a wicker basket of roses, which she set on the verandah railing.
“There are more flowers than will ever go in the house,” she said, as if this was something we might all grieve for. “I thought I’d set them out here.” She was fair-haired, discreet, wanly solicitous— already an old maid. She knew everyone’s names. She introduced my mother and me to a man and his wife from the southern part of the county. The man was wearing a suit jacket with overalls.
“He give us our marriage licence,” the woman said proudly.
My mother said she must go to the kitchen and I followed her, thinking that at least they could not have put Uncle Craig there, where the smells of coffee and food were coming from. Men were in the hall, too, like tree trunks to work your way through. Both doors of the front room were closed, a basket of gladioli set in front of them.
Aunt Moira, draped in black like a massive, public pillar, was standing over the kitchen table counting teacups.
“I’ve counted three times and every time I come up with a different number,” she said, as if this was a special misfortune that could happen only to her. “My brain is not able to work today. I can’t stand on my feet much longer.”
Aunt Elspeth, wearing a wonderful starched and ironed apron, with frills of white lawn, kissed my mother and me. “There now,” she said, backing up from her kiss with a sigh of accomplishment. “Grace is upstairs, freshening her eyes. We just can’t believe it, so many people! Grace said to me, I think half the county is here, and I said what do you mean, half the county, I wouldn’t be surprised if its the whole county! We miss Helen, though. She sent a blanket of lilies.”
“There ought to be enough, goodness!” she said practically, looking at the teacups. All our good ones and kitchen ones and the ones we borrowed from the church!”
“Do like at the Poole funeral,” whispered a lady by the table. “She put away her good ones, locked them up and used the ones from the church. Said she wasn’t risking her china.”
Aunt Elspeth rolled her red-rimmed eyes in appreciation—her usual expression, just tempered by the occasion.
“The food will hold out anyway. I think there’s enough here to feed the five thousand.”
I thought so too. Everywhere I looked I saw food. A cold roast of pork, fat roast chickens, looking varnished, crusted scalloped potatoes, tomato aspic, potato salad, cucumber and beet salad, a rosy ham, muffins, baking powder biscuits, round bread, nut bread, banana-loaf fruitcake, light and dark layer cake, lemon meringue and apple and berry pies, bowls of preserved fruit, ten or twelve varieties of pickles and relishes. Watermelon-rind pickles, Uncle Craig’s favourite. He always said he would like to make a meal out of those, with just bread and butter.
“No more than enough,” said Aunt Moira, darkly. “They all bring their appetites to funerals.”
There was a stir in the hallway; Auntie Grace passing through, the men making way, she thanking them, subdued and grateful as if she had been a bride. The minister trailed behind her. He spoke to the women in the kitchen with restrained heartiness.
“Well, ladies! Ladies! It doesn’t look as if you have let time lie heavy on your hands. Work is a good offering, work is a good offering in time of grief.”
Auntie Grace bent and kissed me. There was a faint sour smell, a warning, under her eau de cologne. “Do you want to see your Uncle Craig?” she whispered, tender and sprightly as if she were promising a reward. “He’s in the front room, he looks so handsome, under the lilies Aunt Helen sent.”
So. Some ladies spoke to her, and I got away. I went through the hall again. The front room doors were still closed. At the bottom of the stairway, by the front door, my father and a man I did not know were pacing, turning, measuring discreetly with their hands.
“This’ll be the tricky place. Here.”
“Take the do
or off?”
“Too late for that. You don’t want to make a commotion. It might upset the ladies, seeing us take it off. If we back around like this—”
Down the side hall two old men were talking. I ducked between them.
“Not like in the winter, remember Jimmy Poole’s. The ground was like a rock. You couldn’t put a dent in it with any kind of a tool.”
“Had to wait over two months for a thaw.”
“By that time must have been three-four of them waiting. Let see.
There’d be Jimmy Poole—”
“Him all right. There’d be Mrs. Fraleigh, senior—”
“Hold on there, she died before the freeze, she’d be all right.”
I went through the door at the end of the side hall into the old part of the house. This part was called the storeroom; from outside, it looked like a little house of logs tacked on to the side of the big brick house. The windows were small and square and set slightly askew like the never-quite-convincing windows in a doll’s house. Hardly any light got in, because of the dim towering junk piled up everywhere even in front of the windows—the churn and the old washing machine that was turned by hand, wooden bedsteads taken apart, trunks, tubs, scythes, a baby carriage clumsy as a galleon, keeling drunkenly to one side. This was the room Auntie Grace refused to go into; Aunt Elspeth always had to go, if they wanted something out of it. She would stand in the doorway and sniff boldly and say, “What a place! The air in here’s just like a tomb!”
I loved the sound of that word when I first heard her say it. I did not know exactly what it was, or had got it mixed up with womb, and I saw us inside some sort of hollow marble egg, filled with blue light, that did not need to get in from outside.
Mary Agnes was sitting on the churn, not looking surprised.
“What are you coming in here for?” she said softly. “You’re going to get yourself lost.”
