Alice Munro's Best

by Alice Munro

  “You will have to go to the Antiquarian Bookstore,” I said. “The one on Fort Street. It isn’t far to take them.”

  He made a sound of disgust, maybe indicating that he knew well enough where it was, or that he had already made an unsuccessful trip there, or that most of these books had come from there, one way or another, in the first place.

  “How is Charlotte?” I said warmly. I had not seen her for a while, although she used to visit the store quite often. She would bring me little presents – coffee beans coated with chocolate to give me energy; a bar of pure glycerine soap to counteract the drying effects, on the skin, of having to handle so much paper. A paperweight embedded with samples of rocks found in British Columbia, a pencil that lit up in the dark (so that I could see to write up bills if the lights should go out). She drank coffee with me, talked, and strolled about the store, discreetly occupied, when I was busy. Through the dark, blustery days of fall she wore the velvet cloak that I had first seen her in, and kept the rain off with an oversized, ancient black umbrella. She called it her tent. If she saw that I had become too involved with a customer, she would tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’ll just silently steal away with my tent now. We’ll talk another day.”

  Once, a customer said to me bluntly, “Who is that woman? I’ve seen her around town with her husband. I guess he’s her husband. I thought they were peddlers.”

  Could Charlotte have heard that, I wondered. Could she have detected a coolness in the attitude of my new clerk? (Charlotte was certainly cool to her.) There might have been just too many times when I was busy. I did not actually think that the visits had stopped. I preferred to think that an interval had grown longer, for a reason that might have nothing to do with me. I was busy and tired, anyway, as Christmas loomed. The number of books I was selling was a pleasant surprise.

  “I don’t want to be any kind of character assassin,” the clerk had said to me. “But I think you should know that that woman and her husband have been banned from a lot of stores in town. They’re suspected of lifting things. I don’t know. He wears that rubber coat with the big sleeves and she’s got her cloak. I do know for sure that they used to go around at Christmastime and snip off holly that was growing in people’s gardens. Then they took it round and tried to sell it in apartment buildings.”

  On that cold morning, after I had refused all the books in his wagon, I asked Gjurdhi again how Charlotte was. He said that she was sick. He spoke sullenly, as if it were none of my business.

  “Take her a book,” I said. I picked out a Penguin light verse. “Take her this – tell her I hope she enjoys it. Tell her I hope she’ll be better very soon. Perhaps I can get around to see her.”

  He put the book into his bundle in the wagon. I thought that he would probably try to sell it immediately.

  “Not at home,” he said. “In the hospital.”

  I had noticed, each time he bent over the wagon, a large, wooden crucifix that swung down outside his coat and had to be tucked back inside. Now this happened again, and I said, thoughtlessly, in my confusion and contrition, “Isn’t that beautiful! What beautiful dark wood! It looks medieval.”

  He pulled it over his head, saying, “Very old. Very beautiful. Oak wood. Yes.”

  He pushed it into my hand, and as soon as I realized what was happening I pushed it back.

  “Wonderful wood,” I said. As he put it away I felt rescued, though full of irritable remorse.

  “Oh, I hope Charlotte is not very sick!” I said.

  He smiled disdainfully, tapping himself on the chest – perhaps to show me the source of Charlotte’s trouble, perhaps only to feel for himself the skin that was newly bared there.

  Then he took himself, the crucifix, the books, and the wagon out of my store. I felt that insults had been offered, humiliations suffered, on both sides.

  UP PAST THE tobacco field was a beech wood, where Lottar had often gone to get sticks for the fire. Beyond that was a grassy slope – a high meadow – and at the top of the meadow, about half an hour’s climb from the kula, was a small stone shelter, a primitive place with no window, a low doorway and no door, a corner hearth without a chimney. Sheep took cover there; the floor was littered with their droppings.

  That was where she went to live after she became a Virgin. The incident of the Muslim bridegroom had taken place in the spring, just about a year after she first came to Maltsia e madhe, and it was time for the sheep to be driven to their higher pastures. Lottar was to keep count of the flock and see that they did not fall into ravines or wander too far away. And she was to milk the ewes every evening. She was expected to shoot wolves, if any came near. But none did; no one alive now at the kula had ever seen a wolf. The only wild animals Lottar saw were a red fox, once, by the stream, and the rabbits, which were plentiful and unwary. She learned to shoot and skin and cook them, cleaning them out as she had seen the butcher girls do at the kula and stewing the meatier parts in her pot over the fire, with some bulbs of wild garlic.

  She did not want to sleep inside the shelter, so she fixed up a roof of branches outside, against the wall, this roof an extension of the roof of the building. She had her heap of ferns underneath, and a felt rug she had been given, to spread on the ferns when she slept. She no longer took any notice of the bugs. There were some spikes pushed into the wall between the dry stones. She did not know why they were there, but they served her well for hanging up the milk pails and the few pots she had been provided with. She brought her water from the stream, in which she washed her own head scarf, and herself sometimes, more for relief from the heat than out of concern about her dirtiness.

  Everything was changed. She no longer saw the women. She lost her habits of constant work. The little girls came up in the evenings to get the milk. This far away from the kula and their mothers, they became quite wild. They climbed up on the roof, often smashing through the arrangement of branches which Lottar had contrived. They jumped into the ferns and sometimes snatched an armful of them to bind into a crude ball, which they threw at one another until it fell apart. They enjoyed themselves so much that Lottar had to chase them away at dusk, reminding them of how frightened they got in the beech wood after dark. She believed that they ran all the way through it and spilled half the milk on their way.

  Now and then they brought her corn flour, which she mixed with water and baked on her shovel by the fire. Once they had a treat, a sheep’s head – she wondered if they had stolen it – for her to boil in her pot.She was allowed to keep some of the milk, and instead of drinking it fresh she usually let it go sour, and stirred it to make yogurt to dip her bread in. That was how she preferred it now.

  The men often came up through the wood shortly after the little girls had run through it on their way down. It seemed that this was a custom of theirs, in the summer. They liked to sit on the banks of the stream and fire off blanks and drink raki and sing, or sometimes just smoke and talk. They were not making this expedition to see how she was getting on. But since they were coming anyway, they brought her presents of coffee and tobacco and were full of competing advice on how to fix up the roof of her shelter so it wouldn’t fall down, how to keep her fire going all night, how to use her gun.

  Her gun was an old Italian Martini, which had been given to her when she left the kula. Some of the men said that gun was unlucky, since it had belonged to a boy who had been killed before he himself had even shot anybody. Others said that Martinis in general were unlucky, hardly any use at all.

  Mausers were what you needed, for accuracy and repeating power.

  But Mauser bullets were too small to do enough damage. There were men walking around full of Mauser holes – you could hear them whistle as they passed by.

  Nothing can really compare with a heavy flintlock that has a good packing of powder, a bullet, and nails.

  When they weren’t talking about guns, the men spoke of recent killings, and told jokes. One of them told a joke about a wizard. There was a wizard held in pri
son by a Pasha. The Pasha brought him out to do tricks in front of guests. Bring a bowl of water, said the wizard. Now, this water is the sea. And what port shall I show you on the sea? Show a port on the island of Malta, they said. And there it was. Houses and churches and a steamer ready to sail. Now would you like to see me step on board that steamer? And the Pasha laughed. Go ahead! So the wizard put his foot in the bowl of water and stepped on board the steamer and went to America! What do you think of that!

  “There are no wizards, anyway,” said the Franciscan, who had climbed up with the men on this evening, as he often did. “If you had said a saint, you might have made some sense.” He spoke severely, but Lottar thought he was happy, as they all were, as she too was permitted to be, in their presence and in his, though he paid no attention to her. The strong tobacco that they gave her to smoke made her dizzy and she had to lie down on the grass.

  THE TIME CAME when Lottar had to think about moving inside her house. The mornings were cold, the ferns were soaked with dew, and the grape leaves were turning yellow. She took the shovel and cleaned the sheep droppings off the floor, in preparation for making up her bed inside. She began to stuff grass and leaves and mud into the chinks between the stones.

  When the men came they asked her what she was doing that for. For the winter, she said, and they laughed.

  “Nobody can stay here in the winter,” they said. They showed her how deep the snow was, putting hands against their breastbones. Besides, all the sheep would have been taken down.

  “There will be no work for you – and what will you eat?” they said. “Do you think the women will let you have bread and yogurt for nothing?”

  “How can I go back to the kula?” Lottar said. “I am a Virgin, where would I sleep? What kind of work would I do?”

  “That is right,” they said kindly, speaking to her and then to each other. “When a Virgin belongs to the kula she gets a bit of land, usually, where she can live on her own. But this one doesn’t really belong to the kula, she has no father to give her anything. What will she do?”

  Shortly after this – and in the middle of the day, when visitors never came – the Franciscan climbed the meadow, all alone.

  “I don’t trust them,” he said. “I think they will try again to sell you to a Muslim. Even though you have been sworn. They will try to make some money out of you. If they could find you a Christian, it might not be so bad, but I am sure it will be an infidel.”

  They sat on the grass and drank coffee. The Franciscan said, “Do you have any belongings to take with you? No. Soon we will start.”

  “Who will milk the ewes?” said Lottar. Some of the ewes were already working their way down the slope; they would stand and wait for her.

  “Leave them,” said the Franciscan.

  In this way she left not only the sheep but her shelter, the meadow, the wild grape and the sumac and mountain ash and juniper bushes and scrub oak she had looked at all summer, the rabbit pelt she had used as a pillow and the pan she had boiled her coffee in, the heap of wood she had gathered only that morning, the stones around her fire – each one of them known to her by its particular shape and color. She understood that she was leaving, because the Franciscan was so stern, but she did not understand it in a way that would make her look around, to see everything for the last time. That was not necessary, anyway. She would never forget any of it.

  As they entered the beech wood the Franciscan said, “Now we must be very quiet. I am going to take another path, which does not go so near the kula. If we hear anybody on the path, we will hide.”

  Hours, then, of silent walking, between the beech trees with their smooth elephant bark, and the black-limbed oaks and the dry pines. Up and down, crossing the ridges, choosing paths that Lottar had not known existed. The Franciscan never hesitated and never spoke of a rest. When they came out of the trees at last, Lottar was very surprised to see that there was still so much light in the sky.

  The Franciscan pulled a loaf of bread and a knife from some pocket in his garment, and they ate as they walked.

  They came to a dry riverbed, paved with stones that were not flat and easily walkable but a torrent, a still torrent of stones between fields of corn and tobacco. They could hear dogs barking, and sometimes people’s voices. The corn and tobacco plants, still unharvested, were higher than their heads, and they walked along the dry river in this shelter, while the daylight entirely faded. When they could not walk anymore and the darkness would conceal them, they sat down on the white stones of the riverbed.

  “Where are you taking me?” Lottar finally asked. At the start she had thought they must be going in the direction of the church and the priest’s house, but now she saw that this could not be so. They had come much too far.

  “I am taking you to the Bishop’s house,” said the Franciscan. “He will know what to do with you.”

  “Why not to your house?” said Lottar. “I could be a servant in your house.”

  “It isn’t allowed – to have a woman servant in my house. Or in any priest’s house. This Bishop now will not allow even an old woman. And he is right, trouble comes from having a woman in the house.”

  After the moon rose they went on. They walked and rested, walked and rested, but never fell asleep, or even looked for a comfortable place to lie down. Their feet were tough and their sandals well worn, and they did not get blisters. Both of them were used to walking long distances – the Franciscan in his far-flung parish and Lottar when she was following the sheep.

  The Franciscan became less stern – perhaps less worried – after a while and talked to her almost as he had done in the first days of their acquaintance. He spoke Italian, though she was now fairly proficient in the language of the Ghegs.

  “I was born in Italy,” he said. “My parents were Ghegs, but I lived in Italy when I was young, and that was where I became a priest. Once I went back for a visit, years ago, and I shaved off my mustache, I do not know why. Oh, yes, I do know – it was because they laughed at me in the village. Then when I got back I did not dare show my face in the madhe. A hairless man there is a disgrace. I sat in a room in Skodra until it grew again.”

  “It is Skodra we are going to?” said Lottar.

  “Yes, that is where the Bishop is. He will send a message that it was right to take you away, even if it is an act of stealing. They are barbarians, in the madhe. They will come up and pull on your sleeve in the middle of Mass and ask you to write a letter for them. Have you seen what they put up on the graves? The crosses? They make the cross into a very thin man with a rifle across his arms. Haven’t you seen that?” He laughed and shook his head and said, “I don’t know what to do with them. But they are good people all the same – they will never betray you.”

  “But you thought they might sell me in spite of my oath.”

  “Oh, yes. But to sell a woman is a way to get some money. And they are so poor.”

  Lottar now realized that in Skodra she would be in an unfamiliar position – she would not be powerless. When they got there, she could run away from him. She could find someone who spoke English, she could find the British Consulate. Or, if not that, the French.

  The grass was soaking wet before dawn and the night got very cold. But when the sun came up Lottar stopped shivering and within an hour she was hot. They walked on all day. They ate the rest of the bread and drank from any stream they found that had water in it. They had left the dry river and the mountains far behind. Lottar looked back and saw a wall of jagged rocks with a little green clinging around their bases. That green was the woods and meadows which she had thought so high. They followed paths through the hot fields and were never out of the sound of barking dogs. They met people on the paths.

  At first the Franciscan said, “Do not speak to anybody – they will wonder who you are.” But he had to answer when greetings were spoken.

  “Is this the way to Skodra? We are going to Skodra to the Bishop’s house. This is my servant with me, who has come f
rom the mountains.

  “It is all right, you look like a servant in these clothes,” he said to Lottar. “But do not speak – they will wonder, if you speak.”

  I HAD PAINTED THE walls of my bookstore a clear, light yellow. Yellow stands for intellectual curiosity. Somebody must have told me that. I opened the store in March of 1964. This was in Victoria, in British Columbia.

  I sat there at the desk, with my offerings spread out behind me. The publishers’ representatives had advised me to stock books about dogs and horses, sailing and gardening, bird books and flower books – they said that was all anybody in Victoria would buy. I flew against their advice and brought in novels and poetry and books that explained about Sufism and relativity and Linear B. And I had set out these books, when they came, so that Political Science could shade into Philosophy and Philosophy into Religion without a harsh break, so that compatible poets could nestle together, the arrangement of the shelves of books – I believed – reflecting a more or less natural ambling of the mind, in which treasures new and forgotten might be continually surfacing. I had taken all this care, and now what? Now I waited, and I felt like somebody who had got dramatically dressed up for a party, maybe even fetching jewels from the pawnshop or the family vault, only to discover that it was just a few neighbors playing cards. It was just meat loaf and mashed potatoes in the kitchen, and a glass of fizzy pink wine.

  The store was often empty for a couple of hours at a time, and then when somebody did come in, it would be to ask about a book remembered from the Sunday-school library or a grandmother’s bookcase or left behind twenty years ago in a foreign hotel. The title was usually forgotten, but the person would tell me the story. It is about this little girl who goes out to Australia with her father to mine the gold claims they have inherited. It is about the woman who had a baby all alone in Alaska. It is about a race between one of the old clipper ships and the first steamer, way back in the 1840s.