by Alice Munro
Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream.
II
THE STONE IN THE FIELD
My mother was not a person who spent all her time frosting the rims of glasses and fancying herself descended from the aristocracy. She was a businesswoman, really, a trader and dealer. Our house was full of things that had not been paid for with money, but taken in some complicated trade, and that might not be ours to keep. For a while we could play a piano, consult an Encyclopaedia Britannica, eat off an oak table. But one day I would come home from school and find that each of these things had moved on. A mirror off the wall could go as easily, a cruet stand, a horsehair love seat that had replaced a sofa that had replaced a daybed. We were living in a warehouse.
My mother worked for, or with, a man named Poppy Cullender. He was a dealer in antiques. He did not have a shop. He too had a house full of furniture. What we had was just his overflow. He had dresses back-to-back and bedsprings upended against the wall. He bought things—furniture, dishes, bedspreads, doorknobs, pump handles, churns, flatirons, anything—from people living on farms or in little villages in the country, then sold what he had bought to antique stores in Toronto. The heyday of antiques had not yet arrived. It was a time when people were covering old woodwork with white or pastel paint as fast as they were able, throwing out spool beds and putting in blond maple bedroom suites, covering patchwork quilts with chenille bedspreads. It was not hard to buy things, to pick them up for next to nothing, but it was a slow business selling them, which was why they might become part of our lives for a season. Just the same, Poppy and my mother were on the right track. If they had lasted, they might have become rich and justified. As it was, Poppy kept his head above water and my mother made next to nothing, and everybody thought them deluded.
They didn’t last. My mother got sick, and Poppy went to jail, for making advances on a train.
There were farmhouses where Poppy was not a welcome sight. Children hooted and wives bolted the door as he came toiling through the yard in his greasy black clothes, rolling his eyes in an uncontrollably lewd or silly way he had and calling in a soft, pleading voice, “Ith anybody h-home?” To add to his other problems he had both a lisp and a stammer. My father could imitate him very well. There were places where Poppy found doors barred and others, usually less respectable, where he was greeted and cheered and fed, just as if he had been a harmless weird bird dropped out of the sky, valued for its very oddity. When he had experienced no welcome he did not go back; instead, he sent my mother. He must have had in his head a map of the surrounding country with every house in it, and just as some maps have dots to show you where the mineral resources are, or the places of historical interest, Poppy’s map would have marked the location of every known and suspected rocking chair, pine sideboard, piece of milk glass, mustache cup. “Why don’t you run out and take a look at it?” I would hear him say to my mother when they were huddled in the dining room looking at something like the maker’s mark on an old pickle crock. He didn’t stammer when he talked to her, when he talked business; his voice though soft was not humble and indicated that he had his own satisfactions, maybe his own revenge. If I had a friend with me, coming in from school, she would say, “Is that Poppy Cullender?” She would be amazed to hear him talking like an ordinary person and amazed to find him inside somebody’s house. I disliked his connection with us so much that I wanted to say no.
Not much was made, really, of Poppy’s sexual tendencies. People may have thought he didn’t have any. When they said he was queer, they just meant queer: odd, freakish, disturbing. His stammer and his rolling eyes and his fat bum and his house full of throwaways were all rolled up into that one word. I don’t know if he was very courageous, trying to make a life for himself in a place like Dalgleish where random insults and misplaced pity would be what was always coming at him, or whether he was just not very realistic. Certainly it was not realistic to make such suggestions to a couple of baseball players on the Stratford train.
I never knew what my mother made of his final disastrous luck, or what she knew about him. Years later she read in the paper that a teacher at the college I was going to had been arrested for fighting in a bar over a male companion. She asked me did they mean he was defending a friend, and if so, why didn’t they say so? Male companion?
Then she said, “Poor Poppy. There were always those that were out to get him. He was very smart, in his way. Some people can’t survive in a place like this. It’s not permitted. No.”
MY MOTHER had the use of Poppy’s car, for business forays, and sometimes for a weekend, when he went to Toronto. Unless he had a trailer-load of things to take down, he travelled—unfortunately, as I have said—by train. Our own car had gone so far beyond repair that we were not able to take it out of town; it was driven into Dalgleish and back, and that was all. My parents were like many other people who had entered the Depression with some large possession, such as a car or a furnace, which gradually wore out and couldn’t be fixed or replaced. When we could take it on the roads we used to go to Goderich once or twice in a summer, to the lake. And occasionally we visited my father’s sisters who lived out in the country.
My mother always said that my father had a very odd family. It was odd because there had been seven girls and then one boy; and it was odd because six of those eight children still lived together, in the house where they were born. One sister had died young, of typhoid fever, and my father had got away. And those six sisters were very odd in themselves, at least in the view of many people, in the time they lived in. They were leftovers, really; my mother said so; they belonged in another generation.
I don’t remember that they ever came to visit us. They didn’t like to come to a town as big as Dalgleish, or to venture so far from home. It would have been a drive of fourteen or fifteen miles, and they had no car. They drove a horse and buggy, a horse and cutter in the winter-time, long after everyone else had ceased to do so. There must have been occasions when they had to drive into town, because I saw one of them once, in the buggy, on a town street. The buggy had a great high top on it, like a black bonnet, and whichever aunt it was was sitting sideways on the seat, looking up as seldom as it is possible to do while driving a horse. Public scrutiny seemed to be causing her much pain, but she was stubborn; she held herself there on the seat, cringing and stubborn, and she was as strange a sight, in her way, as Poppy Cullender was in his. I couldn’t really think of her as my aunt; the connection seemed impossible. Yet I could remember an earlier time, when I had been out to the farm—maybe more than one time, for I had been so young it was hard to remember—and I had not felt this impossibility and had not understood the oddity of these relatives. It was when my grandfather was sick in bed—dying, I suppose—with a big brown-paper fan hanging over him. It was worked by a system of ropes which I was allowed to pull. One of my aunts was showing me how to do this, when my mother called my name from downstairs. Then the aunt and I looked at each other exactly as two children look at each other when an adult is calling. I must have sensed something unusual about this, some lack of what was expected, even necessary, in the way of balance, or barriers, else I would not have remembered it.
One other time with an aunt. I think the same one, but maybe another, was sitting with me on the back steps of the farmhouse, with a six-quart basket of clothes pegs on the step beside us. She was making dolls for me, mannikins, out of the roundheaded pegs. She used a black crayon and a red, to make their mouths and eyes, and she brought bits of yarn out of her apron pocket, to twist around to make the hair and clothes. And she talked to me; I am certain she talked.
“Here’s a lady. She went to church with her wig on, see? She was proud. What if a wind comes up? It would blow her wig right off. See? You blow.
“Here’s a soldier. See he only has t
he one leg? His other leg was blown off by a cannonball at the Battle of Waterloo. Do you know what a cannonball is, that shoots out of a big gun? When they have a battle? Boom!”
NOW WE were going out to the farm, in Poppy’s car, to visit the aunts. My father said no, he wouldn’t drive another man’s car—meaning he wouldn’t drive Poppy’s, wouldn’t sit where Poppy had sat—so my mother drove. That made the whole expedition feel uncertain, the weight wrongly distributed. It was a hot Sunday late in the summer.
My mother was not altogether sure of the way, and my father waited until the last moment to reassure her. This was understood to be teasing, and yet was not altogether free of reservations or reproof.
“Is it here we turn? Is it one further? I will know when I see the bridge.”
The route was complicated. Around Dalgleish most roads were straight, but out here the roads twisted around hills or buried themselves in swamps. Some dwindled to a couple of ruts with a row of plantain and dandelions running between. In some places wild berry bushes sent creepers across the road. These high, thick bushes, dense and thorny, with leaves of a shiny green that seemed almost black, reminded me of the waves of the sea that were pushed back for Moses.
There was the bridge, like two railway cars joined together, stripped to their skeletons, one lane wide. A sign said it was unsafe for trucks.
“We’ll never make it,” my father said as we bumped onto the bridge floor. “There he is. Old Father Maitland.”
My sister said, “Where? Who? Where is he?”
“The Maitland River,” my mother said.
We looked down, where the guardrails had fallen out of the side of the bridge, and saw the clear brown water flowing over big dim stones, between cedar banks, breaking into sunny ripples further on. My skin was craving for it.
“Do they ever go swimming?” I said. I meant the aunts. I thought that if they did, they might take us.
“Swimming?” said my mother. “I can’t picture it. Do they?” she asked my father.
“I can’t picture it either.”
The road was going uphill, out of the gloomy cedar bush on the riverbank. I started saying the aunts’ names.
“Susan. Clara. Lizzie. Maggie. Jennet was the one who died.”
“Annie,” said my father. “Don’t forget Annie.”
“Annie. Lizzie. I said her. Who else?”
“Dorothy,” said my mother, shifting gears with an angry little spurt, and we cleared the top of the hill, leaving the dark bush hollow behind. Up here were pasture hills covered with purple-flowering milkweed, wild pea blossom, black-eyed Susans. Hardly any trees here, but lots of elderberry bushes, blooming all along the road. They looked as if they were sprinkled with snow. One bald hill reached up higher than any of the others.
“Mount Hebron,” my father said. “That is the highest point of land in Huron County. Or so I always was told.”
“Now I know where I am all right,” my mother said. “We’ll see it in a moment, won’t we?”
And there it was, the big wooden house with no trees near it, the barn and the flowering brown hills behind. The drive shed was the original barn, built of logs. The paint on the house was not white as I had absolutely believed but yellow, and much of it had peeled away.
Out in front of the house, in a block of shade which was quite narrow at this time of day, several figures were sitting on straight-backed chairs. On the wall of the house, behind them, hung the scoured milk pails and parts of the separator.
They were not expecting us. They had no telephone, so we hadn’t been able to let them know we were coming. They were just sitting there in the shade, watching the road where scarcely another car went by all afternoon.
One figure got up, and ran around the side of the house.
“That’ll be Susan,” my father said. “She can’t face company.”
“She’ll come back when she realizes it’s us,” my mother said. “She won’t know the strange car.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t count on it.”
The others stood, and stiffly readied themselves, hands clasped in front of their aprons. When we got out of the car and were recognized, one or two of them took a few steps forward, then stopped, and waited for us to approach them.
“Come on,” my father said, and led us to each in turn, saying only the name in recognition of the meeting. No embraces, no touch of hands or laying together of cheeks.
“Lizzie. Dorothy. Clara.”
It was no use, I could never get them straight. They looked too much alike. There must have been a twelve- or fifteen-year age span, but to me they all looked about fifty, older than my parents but not really old. They were all lean and fine-boned, and might at one time have been fairly tall, but were stooped now, with hard work and deference. Some had their hair cut short in a plain, childish style; some had it braided and twisted on top of their heads. Nobody’s hair was entirely black or entirely gray. Their faces were pale, eyebrows thick and furry, eyes deep-set and bright; blue-gray or green-gray or gray. They looked a good deal like my father, though he did not stoop, and his face had opened up in a way that theirs had not, to make him a handsome man.
They looked a good deal like me. I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t have wanted to. But suppose I stopped doing anything to my hair now, stopped wearing makeup and plucking my eyebrows, put on a shapeless print dress and apron, and stood around hanging my head and hugging my elbows? Yes. So when my mother and her cousins looked me over, anxiously turned me to the light, saying, “Is she a Chaddeley? What do you think?” it was the Fleming face they were seeing, and to tell the truth it was a face that wore better than theirs. (Not that they were claiming to be pretty; to look like a Chaddeley was enough.)
One of the aunts had hands red as a skinned rabbit. Later in the kitchen this one sat in a chair pushed up against the woodbox, half hidden by the stove, and I saw how she kept stroking these hands and twisting them up in her apron. I remembered that I had seen such hands before, on one of the early visits, long ago, and my mother had told me that it was because this aunt—was it always the same one?—had been scrubbing the floor and the table and chairs with lye, to keep them white. That was what lye did to your hands. And after this visit too, on the way home my mother was to say in a tone of general accusation, sorrow, and disgust, “Did you see those hands? They must have got a Presbyterian dispensation to let them scrub on Sundays.”
The floor was pine and it was white, gleaming, but soft-looking, like velvet. So were the chairs and the table. We all sat around the kitchen, which was like a small house tacked onto the main house; back and front doors opposite each other, windows on three sides. The cold black stove shone too, with polishing. Its trim was like mirrors. The room was cleaner and barer than any I have ever been in. There was no sign of frivolity, no indication that the people who lived here ever sought entertainment. No radio; no newspapers or magazines; certainly no books. There must have been a Bible in the house, and there must have been a calendar, but these were not to be seen. It was hard now even to believe in the clothespin dolls, the crayons and the yarn. I wanted to ask which of them had made the dolls; had there really been a wigged lady and a one-legged soldier? But though I was not usually shy, a peculiar paralysis overcame me in this room, as if I understood for the first time how presumptuous any question might be, how hazardous any opinion.
Work would be what filled their lives, not conversation; work would be what gave their days shape. I know that now. Drawing the milk down through the rough teats, slapping the flatiron back and forth on the scorched-smelling ironing board, swishing the scrub-water in whitening arcs across the pine floor, they would be mute, and maybe content. Work would not be done here as it was in our house, where the idea was to get it over with. It would be something that could, that must, go on forever.
What was to be said? The aunts, like those who engage in a chat with royalty, would venture no remarks of their own, but could answer questions. They offered no
refreshments. It was clear that only a great effort of will kept them all from running away and hiding, like Aunt Susan, who never did reappear while we were there. What was felt in that room was the pain of human contact. I was hypnotized by it. The fascinating pain; the humiliating necessity.
My father did have some idea of how to proceed. He started out on the weather. The need for rain, the rain in July that spoiled the hay, last year’s wet spring, floods long past, the prospects or non-prospects of a rainy fall. This talk steadied them, and he asked about the cows, the driving horse whose name was Nelly and the workhorses Prince and Queen, the garden; did the blight get on their tomatoes?
“No, it didn’t.”
“How many quarts did you do down?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Did you make any chili sauce? Did you make some juice?”
“Juice and chili sauce. Yes.”
“So you won’t starve next winter. You’ll be falling into flesh, next.”
Giggles broke from a couple of them and my father took heart, continued teasing. He inquired whether they were doing much dancing these days. He shook his head as he pretended to recall their reputation for running around the country to dances, smoking, cutting up. He said they were a bad lot, they wouldn’t get married because they’d rather flirt; why, he couldn’t hold up his head for the shame of them.
My mother broke in then. She must have meant to rescue them, thinking it cruel to tease them in this way, dwelling on just what they had never had, or been.
“That is a lovely piece of furniture,” she said. “That sideboard. I always have admired it.”
Flappers, my father said, that’s what they were, in their prime.
My mother went over to look at the kitchen dresser, which was pine, and very heavy and tall. The knobs on all the doors and drawers were not quite round but slightly irregular, either from the making or from all the hands that had pulled on them.
“You could have an antique dealer come in here and offer you a hundred dollars for that,” my mother said. “If that ever happens, don’t take it. The table and chairs as well. Don’t let anybody smooth-talk you into selling them before you find out what they’re really worth. I know what I’m talking about.” Without asking permission she examined the dresser, fingered the knobs, looked around at the back. “I can’t tell you what it’s worth myself but if you ever want to sell it I will get it appraised by the best person I can find. That’s not all,” she said, stroking the pine judiciously. “You have a fortune’s worth of furniture in this house. You sit tight on it. You have the old furniture that was made around here, and there’s hardly any of that left. People threw it out, around the turn of the century; they bought Victorian things when they started getting prosperous. The things that didn’t get thrown out are worth money and they’re going to be worth more. I’m telling you.”
