by Alice Munro
When the cut had been bandaged, out on the steps—Gretchen having gone back to the kitchen and made the children come with her, but Mrs. Travers remaining, watching intently, with her lips pressed together as if promising that she would not make any interruptions—Neil said that he thought it would be a good idea to run Grace into town, to the hospital.
“For an anti-tetanus shot.”
“It doesn’t feel too bad,” said Grace.
Neil said, “That’s not the point.”
“I agree,” said Mrs. Travers. “Tetanus—that’s terrible.”
“We shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Here. Grace? Grace, I’ll get you to the car.” He held her under one arm. She had strapped on the one sandal, and managed to get her toes into the other so that she could drag it along. The bandage was very neat and tight.
“I’ll just run in,” he said, when she was sitting in the car. “Make my apologies.”
To Gretchen? To Mavis.
Mrs. Travers came down from the verandah, wearing the look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her, and indeed irrepressible, on this day. She put her hand on the car door.
“This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence, a weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
—
THE HOSPITAL was in Carleton Place, three miles away. There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression that at its crest the car had lifted off the pavement, they were flying. There was hardly any traffic about, she was not frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.
—
NEIL KNEW THE NURSE who was on duty in Emergency, and after he had filled out a form and let her take a passing look at Grace’s foot (“Nice job,” she said without interest), he was able to go ahead and give the tetanus shot himself. (“It won’t hurt now, but it could later.”) Just as he finished, the nurse came back into the cubicle and said, “There’s a guy in the waiting room to take her home.”
She said to Grace, “He says he’s your fiancé.”
“Tell him she’s not ready yet,” Neil said. “No. Tell him we’ve already gone.”
“I said you were in here.”
“But when you came back,” said Neil, “we were gone.”
“He said you were his brother. Won’t he see your car in the lot?”
“I parked out back. I parked in the doctors’ lot.”
“Pret-ty tric-ky,” said the nurse, over her shoulder.
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.
Once more she was helped to the car, sandal flopping from the toe strap, and settled on the creamy upholstery. They took a back street out of the lot, an unfamiliar way out of the town. She knew they wouldn’t see Maury. She did not have to think of him. Still less of Mavis.
Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.
Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelt on.
And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.
—
FIRST THEY DROVE WEST on Highway 7. In Grace’s recollection, there is not another car on the highway, and their speed approaches the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home that Sunday morning, on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. On their way to church or coming home from church. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages or the edges of towns, and for the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, wind taking charge of her hair. That gave her the illusion of constant speed, perfect flight—not frantic but miraculous, serene.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family were wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message.
You’ll know how to do it.
Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself would figure more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.
They stopped, finally, at Kaladar, and went into the hotel—the old hotel which is still there. Taking her hand, kneading his fingers between hers, slowing his pace to match her uneven steps. Neil led her into the bar. She recognized it as a bar, though she had never been in one before. (Bailey’s Falls Inn did not yet have a license—drinking was done in people’s rooms, or in a rather ramshackle so-called nightclub across the road.) This was just as she would have expected—an airless darkened big room, with the chairs and tables put back in a careless way after a hasty cleanup, a smell of Lysol not erasing the smell of beer, whisky, cigars, pipes, men.
There was nobody there—perhaps it wasn’t open till afternoon. But might it not now be afternoon? Her idea of time seemed faulty.
Now a man came in from another room, and spoke to Neil. He said, “Hello there, Doc,” and went behind the bar.
Grace believed that it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.
“You know it’s Sunday,” the man said in a raised, stern, almost shouting voice, as if he wanted to be heard out in the parking lot. “I can’t sell you anything in here on a Sunday. And I can’t sell anything to her, ever. She shouldn’t even be in here. You understand that?”
“Oh yes, sir. Yes indeed, sir,” said Neil. “I heartily agree, sir.”
While both men were talking, the man behind the bar had taken a bottle of whisky from a hidden shelf and poured some into a glass and shoved it to Neil across the counter.
“You thirsty?” he said to Grace. He was already opening a Coke. He gave it to her without a glass.
Neil put a bill on the counter and the man shoved it away.
“I told you,” he said. “Can’t sell.”
“What about the Coke?” said Neil.
“Can’t sell.”
The man put the bottle away, Neil drank what was in the glass very quickly. “You’re a good man,” he said. “Spirit of the law.”
“Take the Coke along with you. Sooner she’s out of here the happier I’ll be.”
“You bet,” Neil said. “She’s a good girl. My sister-in-law. Future sister-in-law. So I understand.”
“Is that the truth?”
They didn’t go back to Highway 7. Instead they took the road north, which was not paved, but wide enough and decently graded. The drink seemed to have had the opposite effect to what drinks were supposed to have on Neil’s driving. He had slowed down to the seemly, even cautious, rate this road required.
“You don’t mind?” he said.
Grace said, “Mind what?”
“Being dragged into any old place.”
“No.”
“I need your company. How’s your foot?”
“It’s fine.”
“It must hurt some.”
“Not really. It’s okay.”
“Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes?”
“No,” lied Grace, thinking how like his mother that word was. Fell.
“There was a time when you would have been right,” he said, just as if she had answered yes. “But not today. I don’t think so. You’re safe as a church today.”
The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words, but not the sense, of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“True. True.”
“And I’m not your sister-in-law.”
“Future. Didn’t I say future?”
“I’m not that either.”
“Oh. Well. I guess I’m not surprised. No. Not surprised.”
Then his voice changed again, became businesslike.
“I’m looking for a turnoff up here, to the right. There’s a road I ought to recognize. Do you know this country at all?”
“Not around here, no.”
“Don’t know Flower Station? Oompah, Poland? Snow Road?”
She had not heard of them.
“There’s somebody I want to see.”
A turn was made, to the right, with some dubious mutterings on his part. There were no signs. This road was narrower and rougher, with a one-lane plank-floored bridge. The trees of the hardwood forest laced their branches overhead. The leaves were late to turn this year because of the strangely warm weather, so these branches were still green, except for the odd one here and there that flashed out like a banner. There was a feeling of sanctuary. For miles Neil and Grace were quiet, and there was still no break in the trees, no end to the forest. But then Neil broke the peace.
He said, “Can you drive?” and when Grace said no, he said, “I think you should learn.”
He meant, right then. He stopped the car, got out and came around to her side, and she had to move behind the wheel.
“No better place than this.”
“What if something comes?”
“Nothing will. We can manage if it does. That’s why I picked a straight stretch. And don’t worry, you do all the work with your right foot.”
They were at the beginning of a long tunnel under the trees, the ground splashed with sunlight. He did not bother explaining anything about how cars ran—he simply showed her where to put her foot, and made her practice shifting the gears, then said, “Now go, and do what I tell you.”
The first leap of the car terrified her. She ground the gears, and she thought he would put an end to the lesson immediately, but he laughed. He said, “Whoa, easy. Easy. Keep going,” and she did. He did not comment on her steering, or the way the steering made her forget about the accelerator, except to say, “Keep going, keep going, keep on the road, don’t let the engine die.”
“When can I stop?” she said.
“Not till I tell you how.”
He made her keep driving until they came out of the tunnel, and then instructed her about the brake. As soon as she had stopped she opened the door so that they could trade sides, but he said, “No. This is just a breather. Soon you’ll be getting to like it.” And when they started again she began to see that he might be right. Her momentary surge of confidence almost took them into the ditch. Still, he laughed when he had to grab the wheel, and the lesson continued.
He did not let her stop until they had driven for what seemed miles, and even gone—slowly—around several curves. Then he said they had better switch, because he could not get a feeling of direction unless he was driving.
He asked how she felt now, and though she was shaking all over, she said, “Okay.”
He rubbed her arm from shoulder to elbow and said, “What a liar.” But he did not touch her, beyond that, did not let any part of her feel his mouth again.
He must have got the feeling of direction back some miles on when they came to a crossroads, for he turned left, and the trees thinned out and they climbed a rough road up a long hill, and after a few miles they came to a village, or at least a roadside collection of buildings. A church and a store, neither of them open to serve their original purposes, but probably lived in, to judge by vehicles around them and the sorry-looking curtains in the windows. A couple of houses in the same state and behind one of them a barn that had fallen in on itself, with old dark hay bulging out between its cracked beams like swollen innards.
Neil exclaimed in celebration at the sight of this place, but did not stop there.
“What a relief,” he said. “What—a—relief. Now I know. Thank you.”
“Me?”
“For letting me teach you to drive. It calmed me down.”
“Calmed you down?” said Grace. “Really?”
“True as I live.” Neil was smiling, but did not look at her. He was busy looking from side to side across the fields that lay along the road after it had passed through the village. He was talking as if to himself.
“This is it. Got to be it. Now we know.”
And so on, till he turned onto a lane that didn’t go straight but wound around through a field, avoiding rocks and patches of juniper. At the end of the lane was a house in no better shape than the houses in the village.
“Now, this place,” he said, “this place I am not going to take you in. I won’t be five minutes.”
—
HE WAS longer than that.
She sat in the car, in the house’s shade. The door to the house was open, just the screen door closed. The screen had mended patches in it, newer wire woven in with the old. Nobody came to look at her, not even a dog. And now that the car had stopped, the day filled up with an unnatural silence. Unnatural because you would expect such a hot afternoon to be full of the buzzing and humming and chirping of insects in the grass, in the juniper bushes. Even if you couldn’t see them anywhere, their noise would seem to rise out of everything growing on the earth, as far as the horizon. But it was too late in the year, maybe too late even to hear geese honking as they flew south. At any rate, she didn’t hear any.
It seemed they were up on top of the world here, or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides, the trees around being only partly visible because they grew on lower ground.
Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but there was no end to the strangeness Grace could encounter today. No end to it.
Once this had been a brick house, but someone had begun to take the brick walls down. Plain wooden walls had been bared, underneath, and the bricks that had covered them were roughly piled in the yard, maybe waiting to be sold. The bricks left on this wall of the house formed a diagonal line, stairsteps, and Grace, with nothing to do, leaned back, pushed her seat back, in order to count them. She did this both foolishly and seriously, the way you could pull petals off a flower, but not with any words so blatant as He loves me, he loves me not.
Lucky. Not. Lucky. Not. That was all she dared.
She found that it was hard to keep track of bricks arranged in this zigzag fashion, especially since the line flattened out above the door.
She knew. What else could this be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger at home—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat in his dirty but tidy room (she knew it would be that way by the mended patches in the screen). Getting up from his creaky cot or couch, with the stained quilt on it that some woman relative of his, some wom
an now dead, had made long ago.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable, and some that were not. She knew how things were.
How strange that she’d thought of marrying Maury. A kind of treachery it would be. A treachery to herself. But not a treachery to be riding with Neil, because he knew some of the same things she did. And she knew more and more, all the time, about him.
And now in the doorway it seemed that she could see her uncle, stooped and baffled, looking out at her, as if she had been away for years and years. As if she had promised to go home and then she had forgotten about it, and in all this time he should have died but he hadn’t.
She struggled to speak to him, but he was lost. She was waking up, moving. She was in the car with Neil, on the road again. She had been asleep with her mouth open and she was thirsty. He turned to her for a moment, and she noticed, even with the wind that they made blowing round them, a fresh smell of whisky.
It was true.
“You awake? You were fast asleep when I came out of there,” he said. “Sorry—I had to be sociable for a while. How’s your bladder?”
That was a problem she had been thinking about, in fact, when they were stopped at the house. She had seen a toilet back there, beyond the house, but had felt shy about getting out and walking to it.
He said, “This looks like a possible place,” and stopped the car. She got out and walked in amongst some blooming goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and wild aster, to squat down. He stood in such flowers on the other side of the road, with his back to her. When she got back into the car she saw the bottle on the floor beside her feet. More than a third of its contents seemed already to be gone.
He saw her looking.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I just poured some in here.” He held up a flask. “Easier when I’m driving.”
