Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  On the floor there was also another Coca-Cola. He told her to look in the glove compartment and find the bottle opener.

  “It’s cold,” she said in surprise.

  “Icebox. They cut ice off the lakes in the winter and store it in sawdust. He keeps it under the house.”

  “I thought I saw my uncle in the doorway of that house,” she said. “But I was dreaming.”

  “You could tell me about your uncle. Tell me about where you live. Your job. Anything. I just like to hear you talk.”

  There was a new strength in his voice, and a change in his face, but it wasn’t any manic glow of drunkenness. It was just as if he’d been sick—not terribly sick, just down, under the weather—and was now wanting to assure you he was better. He capped the flask and laid it down and reached for her hand. He held it lightly, a comrade’s clasp.

  “He’s quite old,” said Grace. “He’s really my great-uncle. He’s a caner—that means he canes chairs. I can’t explain that to you, but I could show you if we had a chair to cane—”

  “I don’t see one.”

  She laughed, and said, “It’s boring, really.”

  “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”

  She said, “You do.”

  “Oh. What interests you about me?” His hand slid away.

  “What you’re doing now,” said Grace determinedly. “Why.”

  “You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”

  “Because I know what you’d say.”

  “What’s that? What would I say?”

  “You’d say, what else is there to do? Or something like that.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”

  “No,” said Grace. “No. I wouldn’t.”

  When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him with these answers, trying to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope—genuine, reasonable, and everlasting.

  Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”

  In a while, he said, “You know—I’m sleepy. Soon as we find a good spot I’m going to pull over and go to sleep. Just for a little while. You don’t mind that?”

  “No. I think you should.”

  “You’ll watch over me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The spot he found was in a little town called Fortune. There was a park on the outskirts, beside a river, and a gravelled space for cars. He settled the seat back, and at once fell asleep. Evening had come on as it did now, around suppertime, proving that this wasn’t a summer day after all. A short while ago people had been having a Thanksgiving picnic here—there was still some smoke rising from the outdoor fireplace, and a smell of hamburgers in the air. The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly—it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.

  He went to sleep immediately, and she got out. Some dust had settled on her with all the stopping and starting of her driving lesson. She washed her arms and hands and her face as well as she could at an outdoor tap. Then, favoring her cut foot, she walked slowly to the edge of the river, saw how shallow it was, with reeds breaking the surface. A sign there warned that profanity, obscenity, or vulgar language was forbidden in this place and would be punished.

  She tried the swings, which faced west. Pumping herself high, she looked into the clear sky—faint green, fading gold, a fierce pink rim at the horizon. Already the air was getting cold.

  She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.

  What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.

  It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else.

  She went back to the car and tried to wake him up. He stirred but wouldn’t waken. So she walked around again to keep warm, and to practice the easiest way with her foot—she understood now that she would be working again, serving breakfast, in the morning.

  She tried once more, talking to him urgently. He answered with various promises and mutters, and once more he fell asleep. By the time it was really dark she had given up. Now with the cold of night settled in some other facts became clear to her. That they could not remain here, that they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.

  With some difficulty she got him over into the passenger seat. If that did not wake him, it was clear nothing could. She took a while to figure out how the headlights went on, and then she began to move the car, jerkily, slowly, back onto the road.

  She had no idea of directions, and there was not a soul on the street to ask. She just kept driving to the other side of the town, and there, most blessedly, there was a sign pointing the way to Bailey’s Falls, among other places. Only nine miles.

  She drove along the two-lane highway at never more than thirty miles an hour. There was little traffic. Once or twice a car passed her, honking, and the few she met honked also. In one case it was probably because she was going so slowly, and in the other, because she did not know how to dim the lights. Never mind. She couldn’t stop to get her courage up again in the middle of the road. She could just keep going, as he had said. Keep going.

  At first she did not recognize Bailey’s Falls, coming upon it in this unfamiliar way. When she did, she became more frightened than she had been in all the nine miles. It was one thing to drive in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.

  He was awake when she got stopped in the parking lot. He didn’t show any surprise at where they were, or at what she had done. In fact, he told her, the honking had wakened him, miles back, but he had pretended to be still asleep, because the important thing was not to startle her. He hadn’t been worried, though. He knew she would make it.

  She asked if he was awake enough to drive now.

  “Wide-awake. Bright as a dollar.”

  He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he felt and pressed it here and there before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized it was time to say good-bye.

  As a matter of fact she does not know to this day if those words were spoken, or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continual, changing pressures that it seemed more than two arms were needed, that she was surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he was telling her she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.

  —

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, the manager knocked on the dormitory door, calling for Grace.

  “Somebody on the phone,” he said. “Don’t bother, they just wanted to know if you were here. I said I’d go and check. Okay now.”

  It would be Maury, she thought. One of them, anyway. But probably Maury. Now she’d have to deal with Maury.

  When she went down to serve breakfast—wearing her canvas shoes—she heard about the accident. A car had gone into a bridge abutment halfway down the road to Little Sabot Lake. It had been rammed right in, it was totally smashed and burned up. There were no other cars involved, and apparently no passengers. The driver would have to be identified by dental recor
ds. Or probably had been, by this time.

  “One hell of a way,” the manager said. “Better to go and cut your throat.”

  “It could’ve been an accident,” said the cook, who had an optimistic nature. “Could’ve just fell asleep.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Her arm hurt now as if it had taken a wicked blow. She couldn’t balance her tray but had to carry it in front of her, using both hands.

  —

  SHE DID NOT have to deal with Maury face-to-face. He wrote her a letter.

  Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.

  She wrote back five words. I did want to go. She was going to add I’m sorry, but stopped herself.

  —

  MR. TRAVERS came to the inn to see her. He was polite and businesslike, firm, cool, not unkind. She saw him now in circumstances that let him come into his own. A man who could take charge, who could tidy things up. He said that it was very sad, they were all very sad, but that alcoholism was a terrible thing. When Mrs. Travers was a little better he was going to take her on a trip, a vacation, somewhere warm.

  Then he said that he had to be going, many things to do. As he shook her hand good-bye he put an envelope into it.

  “We both hope you’ll make good use of this,” he said.

  The cheque was for one thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life.

  The View from Castle Rock

  THE FIRST TIME Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half-doors were open, showing the firelit insides of taverns which he hoped they might enter, because he was wet through. They did not, they were bound somewhere else. Earlier on the same afternoon they had been in some such place, but it was not much more than an alcove, a hole in the wall, with planks on which bottles and glasses were set and coins laid down. He had been continually getting squeezed out of that shelter into the street and into the puddle that caught the drip from the ledge over the entryway. To keep that from happening, he had butted in low down between the cloaks and sheepskins, wedged himself amongst the drinking men and under their arms.

  He was surprised at the number of people his father seemed to know in the city of Edinburgh. You would think the people in the drinking place would be strangers to him, but it was evidently not so. Amongst the arguing and excited queer-sounding voices his father’s voice rose the loudest. America, he said, and slapped his hand on the plank for attention, the very way he would do at home. Andrew had heard that word spoken in that same tone long before he knew it was a land across the ocean. It was spoken as a challenge and an irrefutable truth but sometimes—when his father was not there—it was spoken as a taunt or a joke. His older brothers might ask each other, “Are ye awa to America?” when one of them put on his plaid to go out and do some chore such as penning the sheep. Or, “Why don’t ye be off to America?” when they had got into an argument, and one of them wanted to make the other out to be a fool.

  The cadences of his father’s voice, in the talk that succeeded that word, were so familiar, and Andrew’s eyes so bleary with the smoke, that in no time he had fallen asleep on his feet. He wakened when several pushed together out of the place and his father with them. Some one of them said, “Is this your lad here or is it some tinker squeezed in to pick our pockets?” and his father laughed and took Andrew’s hand and they began their climb. One man stumbled and another man knocked into him and swore. A couple of women swiped their baskets at the party with great scorn, and made some remarks in their unfamiliar speech, of which Andrew could only make out the words “daecent bodies” and “public footpaths.”

  Then his father and the friends stepped aside into a much broader street, which in fact was a courtyard, paved with large blocks of stone. His father turned and paid attention to Andrew at this point.

  “Do you know where you are, lad? You’re in the castle yard, and this is Edinburgh Castle that has stood for ten thousand years and will stand for ten thousand more. Terrible deeds were done here. These stones have run with blood. Do you know that?” He raised his head so that they all listened to what he was telling.

  “It was King Jamie asked the young Douglases to have supper with him and when they were fair sitten down he says, oh, we won’t bother with their supper, take them out in the yard and chop off their heads. And so they did. Here in the yard where we stand.

  “But that King Jamie died a leper,” he went on with a sigh, then a groan, making them all be still to consider this fate.

  Then he shook his head.

  “Ah, no, it wasn’t him. It was King Robert the Bruce that died a leper. He died a king but he died a leper.”

  Andrew could see nothing but enormous stone walls, barred gates, a redcoat soldier marching up and down. His father did not give him much time, anyway, but shoved him ahead and through an archway, saying, “Watch your heads here, lads, they was wee little men in those days. Wee little men. So is Boney the Frenchman, there’s a lot of fight in your wee little men.”

  They were climbing uneven stone steps, some as high as Andrew’s knees—he had to crawl occasionally—inside what as far as he could make out was a roofless tower. His father called out, “Are ye all with me then, are ye all in for the climb?” and some straggling voices answered him. Andrew got the impression that there was not such a crowd following as there had been on the street.

  They climbed far up in the roundabout stairway and at last came out on a bare rock, a shelf, from which the land fell steeply away. The rain had ceased for the present.

  “Ah, there,” said Andrew’s father. “Now where’s all the ones was tramping on our heels to get here?”

  One of the men just reaching the top step said, “There’s two-three of them took off to have a look at the Meg.”

  “Engines of war,” said Andrew’s father. “All they have eyes for is engines of war. Take care they don’t go and blow themselves up.”

  “Haven’t the heart for the stairs, more like,” said another man who was panting. And the first one said cheerfully, “Scairt to get all the way up here, scairt they’re bound to fall off.”

  A third man—and that was the lot—came staggering across the shelf as if he had in mind to do that very thing.

  “Where is it then?” he hollered. “Are we up on Arthur’s seat?”

  “Ye are not,” said Andrew’s father. “Look beyond you.”

  The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in sunlight and part in shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

  “So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.”

  “Well the sea does not look so wide as I thought,” said the man who had stopped staggering. “It does not look as if it would take you weeks to cross it.”

  “It is the effect of the height we’re on,” said the man who stood beside Andrew’s father. “The height we’re on is making the width of it the less.”

  “It’s a fortunate day for the view,” said Andrew’s father. “Many a day you could climb up here and see nothing but the fog.”

  He turned and addressed Andrew.

  “So there you are my lad and you have looked over at America,” he said. “God grant you one day you will see it closer up and for yourself.”

  —

  ANDREW HAS BEEN to the Castle one time since, with a group of the lads
from Ettrick, who all wanted to see the great cannon, Mons Meg. But nothing seemed to be in the same place then and he could not find the route they had taken to climb up to the rock. He saw a couple of places blocked off with boards that could have been it. But he did not even try to peer through them—he had no wish to tell the others what he was looking for. Even when he was ten years old he had known that the men with his father were drunk. If he did not understand that his father was drunk—due to his father’s sure-footedness and sense of purpose, his commanding behavior—he did certainly understand that something was not as it should be. He knew he was not looking at America, though it was some years before he was well enough acquainted with maps to know that he had been looking at Fife.

  Still, he did not know if those men met in the tavern had been mocking his father, or if it was his father playing one of his tricks on them.

  —

  OLD JAMES THE FATHER. Andrew. Walter. Their sister Mary. Andrew’s wife Agnes, and Agnes and Andrew’s son James, under two years old.

  In the harbor of Leith, on the 4th of June, 1818, they set foot on board a ship for the first time in their lives.

  Old James makes this fact known to the ship’s officer who is checking off the names.

  “The first time, serra, in all my long life. We are men of the Ettrick. It is a landlocked part of the world.”

  The officer says a word which is unintelligible to them but plain in meaning. Move along. He has run a line through their names. They move along or are pushed along, Young James riding on Mary’s hip.

  “What is this?” says Old James, regarding the crowd of people on deck. “Where are we to sleep? Where have all these rabble come from? Look at the faces on them, are they the blackamoors?”

  “Black Highlanders, more like,” says his son Walter. This is a joke, muttered so his father cannot hear—Highlanders being one of the sorts the old man despises.

  “There are too many people,” his father continues. “The ship will sink.”

  “No,” says Walter, speaking up now. “Ships do not often sink because of too many people. That’s what the fellow was there for, to count the people.”