Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  When he had finished the floor to his satisfaction he hooked the mop to the side and rolled the apparatus down a slanting passageway that connected the office with the main building. He opened a door that had a sign on it.

  Caretaker.

  “My domain.”

  He emptied the water from the buckets into an iron tub, rinsed and emptied them again, swished the tub clean. There on a shelf above the tub among the tools and rubber hose and fuses and spare windowpanes was his lunch bucket, which I packed every day when I got home from school. I filled the thermos with strong black tea and put in a bran muffin with butter and jam and a piece of pie if we had any and three thick sandwiches of fried meat and ketchup. The meat was cottage roll ends or baloney, the cheapest meat you could buy.

  He led the way into the main building. The lights burning there were like streetlights—that is, they cast their light at the intersections of the passageways, but didn’t light up the whole inside of the building, which was so large and high that I had the sense of being in a forest with thick dark trees, or in a town with tall, even buildings. My father switched on some more lights and things shrank a bit. You could now see the brick walls, blackened on the inside, and the windows not only painted over but covered with black wire mesh. What lined the passageways were stacks of bins, one on top of the other higher than my head, and elaborate, uniform metal trays.

  We came on an open area with a great heap of metal lumps on the floor, all disfigured with what looked like warts or barnacles.

  “Castings,” my father said. “They haven’t been cleaned yet. They put them in a contraption called a wheelabrator and it blasts shot at them, takes all the bumps off.”

  Then a pile of black dust, or fine black sand.

  “That looks like coal dust but you know what they call it? Green sand.”

  “Green sand?”

  “Use it for molding. It’s sand with a bonding agent in it, like clay. Or sometimes it’s linseed oil. Are you any way interested in all this?”

  I said yes, partly for pride’s sake. I didn’t want to seem like a stupid girl. And I was interested, but not so much in the particular explanations my father began to provide me with, as in the general effects—the gloom, the fine dust in the air, the idea of there being places like this all over the country, in every town and city. Places with their windows painted over. You passed them in a car or on the train and never gave a thought to what was going on inside. Something that took up the whole of people’s lives. A never-ending over-and-over attention-consuming, life-consuming process.

  “Like a tomb in here,” my father said, as if he had picked up some of my thoughts.

  But he meant something different.

  “Compared to the daytime. The racket then, you can’t imagine it. They try to get them to wear earplugs, but they won’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Too independent. They won’t wear the fire aprons either. See here. Here’s what they call the cupola.”

  This was an immense black pipe which did have a cupola on top. He showed me where they made the fire, and the ladles used to carry the molten metal and pour it into the molds. He showed me chunks of metal that were like grotesque stubby limbs, and told me that those were the shapes of the hollows in the castings. The air in the hollows, that is, made solid. He told me these things with a prolonged satisfaction in his voice, as if what he revealed gave him reliable pleasure.

  We turned a corner and came on two men working, stripped to their pants and undershirts.

  “Now here’s a couple of good hardworking fellows,” my father said. “You know Ferg? You know Geordie?”

  I did know them, or at least I knew who they were. Geordie Hall delivered bread, but had to work in the Foundry at night to make extra money, because he had so many children. There was a joke that his wife made him work to keep him away from her. Ferg was a younger man you saw around town. He couldn’t get girls because he had a wen on his face.

  “She’s seeing how us working fellows live,” my father said, with a note of humorous apology. Apologizing to them for me, for me to them—light apologies all round. This was his style.

  Working carefully together, using long, strong hooks, the two men lifted a heavy casting out of a box of sand.

  “That’s plenty hot,” my father said. “It was cast today. Now they have to work the sand around and get it ready for the next casting. Then do another. It’s piecework, you know. Paid by the casting.”

  We moved away.

  “Two of them been together for a while,” he said. “They always work together. I do the same job by myself. Heaviest job they’ve got around here. It took me a while to get used to it, but it doesn’t bother me now.”

  Much that I saw that night was soon to disappear. The cupola, the hand-lifted ladles, the killing dust. (It was truly killing—around town, on the porches of small neat houses, there were always a few yellow-faced, stoical men set out to take the air. Everybody knew and accepted that they were dying of the foundry disease, the dust in their lungs.) Many particular skills and dangers were going to go. Many everyday risks, along with much foolhardy pride, and random ingenuity and improvisation. The processes I saw were probably closer to those of the Middle Ages than to those of today.

  And I imagine that the special character of the men who worked in the Foundry was going to change, as the processes of the work changed. They would become not so different from the men who worked in the factories, or at other jobs. Up until the time I’m talking about they had seemed stronger and rougher than those other workers; they had more pride and were perhaps more given to self-dramatization than men whose jobs were not so dirty or dangerous. They were too proud to ask for any protection from the hazards they had to undergo, and in fact, as my father had said, they disdained what protection was offered. They were said to be too proud to bother about a union.

  Instead, they stole from the Foundry.

  “Tell you a story about Geordie,” my father said, as we walked along. He was “doing a round” now, and had to punch clocks in various parts of the building. Then he would get down to shaking out his own floors. “Geordie likes to take a bit of lumber and whatnot home with him. A few crates or whatever. Anything he thinks might come in handy to fix the house or build a back shed. So the other night he had a load of stuff, and he went out after dark and put it in the back of his car so it’d be there when he went off work. And he didn’t know it, but Tom was in the office and just happened to be standing by the window and watching him. Tom hadn’t brought the car, his wife had the car, she’d gone somewhere, and Tom had just walked over to do a little work or pick up something he forgot. Well, he saw what Geordie was up to and he waited around till he saw him coming off work and then he stepped out and said, hey. He said, hey, wonder if you could give me a lift home. The wife’s got the car, he said. So they got in Geordie’s car with the other fellows standing around spluttering and Geordie sweating buckets, and Tom never said a word. Sat there whistling while Geordie’s trying to get the key in the ignition. He let Geordie drive him home and never said a word. Never turned and looked in the back. Never intended to. Just let him sweat. And told it all over the place next day.”

  It would be easy to make too much of this story and to suppose that between management and workers there was an easy familiarity, tolerance, even an appreciation of each other’s dilemmas. And there was some of that, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t also plenty of rancor and callousness and of course deceit. But jokes were important. The men who worked in the evenings would gather in my father’s little room, the caretaker’s room, in most weather—but outside the main door when the evenings were hot—and smoke and talk while they took their unauthorized break. They would tell about jokes that had been played recently and in years past. They talked about jokes played by and upon people now long dead. Sometimes they talked seriously as well. They argued about whether there were ghosts, and talked about who claimed to have seen one.
They discussed money—who had it, who’d lost it, who’d expected it and not got it, and where people kept it. My father told me about these talks years later.

  One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life?

  Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and having a good time.

  Or when you’re a young fellow going out and haven’t got any responsibilities.

  Or when you’re first married if you’re fond of your wife and a bit later, too, when the children are just little and running around and haven’t shown any bad characteristics yet.

  My father spoke up and said, “Now. I think maybe now.”

  They asked him why.

  He said because you weren’t old yet, with one thing or another collapsing on you, but old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get. It was hard to explain how you could be happy in such a situation, but sometimes he thought you were.

  When he was telling me about this he said, “I think it was the company I enjoyed. Up till then I’d been so much on my own. They weren’t maybe the cream of the crop, but those were some of the best fellows I ever met.”

  He also told me that one night not long after he had started working at the Foundry he came off work around midnight and found that there was a great snowstorm in progress. The roads were full and the snow blowing so hard and fast that the snowplows would not get out till morning. He had to leave the car where it was—even if he got it shovelled out he couldn’t tackle the roads. He started to walk home. It was a distance of about two miles. The walking was heavy, in the freshly drifted snow, and the wind was coming against him from the west. He had done several floors that night, and he was just getting used to the work. He wore a heavy overcoat, an Army greatcoat, which one of our neighbors had given him, having no use for it when he got home from the war. My father did not often wear it either. Usually he wore a windbreaker. He must have put it on that night because the temperature had dropped even below the usual winter cold, and there was no heater in the car.

  He felt dragged down, pushing against the storm, and about a quarter of a mile from home he found that he wasn’t moving. He was standing in the middle of a drift and he could not move his legs. He could hardly stand against the wind. He was worn out. He thought perhaps his heart was giving out. He thought of his death.

  He would die leaving a sick crippled wife who could not even take care of herself, an old mother full of disappointment, a younger daughter whose health had always been delicate, an older girl who was strong and bright enough but who often seemed to be self-centered and mysteriously incompetent, a son who promised to be clever and reliable but who was still only a little boy. He would die in debt, and before he had even finished pulling down the pens. They would stand there—drooping wire on the cedar poles that he had cut in Austins swamp in the summer of 1927—to show the ruin of his enterprise.

  “Was that all you thought about?” I said when he told me this.

  “Wasn’t that enough?” he said, and went on to tell me how he pulled one leg out of the snow, and then the other: he got out of that drift and then there were no more drifts quite so deep, and before long he was in the shelter of the windbreak of pine trees that he himself had planted the year that I was born. He got home.

  But I had meant, didn’t he think of himself, of the boy who had trapped along the Blyth Creek, and who went into the store and asked for Signs Snow Paper, didn’t he struggle for his own self? I meant, was his life now something only other people had a use for?

  —

  MY FATHER ALWAYS SAID he didn’t really grow up till he went to work in the Foundry. He never wanted to talk about the fox farm or the fur business, until he was old and could talk easily about almost anything. But my mother, walled in by increasing paralysis, was always eager to recall the Pine Tree Hotel, the friends and the money she had made there.

  —

  AND MY FATHER, as it turned out, had another occupation waiting for him. I’m not talking about his raising turkeys, which came after the work at the Foundry and lasted till he was seventy or over, and which may have done damage to his heart, since he would find himself wrestling and hauling around fifty- and sixty-pound birds. It was after giving up such work that he took up writing. He began to write reminiscences and to turn some of them into stories, which were published in an excellent though short-lived local magazine. And not long before his death he completed a novel about pioneer life, called The Macgregors.

  He told me that writing it had surprised him. He was surprised that he could do such a thing, and surprised that doing it could make him so happy. Just as if there was a future in it for him.

  Here is part of a piece called “Grandfathers,” part of what my father wrote about his own grandfather Thomas Laidlaw, the same Thomas who had come to Morris at the age of seventeen and been appointed to do the cooking in the shanty.

  He was a frail white-haired old man, with thin longish hair and a pale skin. Too pale, because he was anemic. He took Vita-Ore, a much-advertised patent medicine. It must have helped, because he lived into his eighties…When I first became aware of him he had retired to the village and leased the farm to my father. He would visit the farm, or me, as I thought, and I would visit him. We would go for walks. There was a sense of security. He talked much more easily than Dad but I don’t recall that we conversed at any length. He explained things much as if he were discovering them himself at the same time. Perhaps he was in a way looking at the world from a child’s viewpoint.

  He never spoke harshly, he never said, “Get down off that fence,” or “Mind that puddle.” He preferred to let nature take its course so I could learn that way. The freedom of action inspired a certain amount of caution. There was no undue sympathy when one did get hurt.

  We took slow staid walks because he couldn’t go very fast. We gathered stones with fossils of weird creatures of another age, for this was gravelly country in which such stones might be found. We each had a collection. I inherited his when he died and kept both assortments for many years. They were a link with him with which I was very reluctant to part.

  We walked along the nearby railway tracks to the huge embankment carrying the tracks over another railway and a big creek. There was a giant stone and cement arch over these. One could look down hundreds of feet to the railway below. I was back there lately. The embankment has shrunk strangely; the railway no longer runs along it. The C.P.R. is still down there but not nearly so far down and the creek is much smaller…

  We went to the planing mill nearby and watched the saws whirling and whining. These were the days of all sorts of gingerbread woodwork used for ornamenting the eaves of houses, the verandahs, or any place that could be decorated. There were all sorts of discarded pieces with interesting designs, which one could take home.

  In the evening we went to the station, the old Grand Trunk, or the Butter and Eggs, as it was known in London. One could put an ear to the track and hear the rumble of the train, far away. Then a distant whistle, and the air became tense with anticipation. The whistles became closer and louder and finally the train burst into view. The earth shook, the heavens all but opened, and the huge monster slid screaming with tortured brakes to a stop…

  Here we got the evening daily paper. There were two London papers, the Free Press and the ’Tiser (Advertiser). The ’Tiser was Grit and the Free Press was Tory.

  There was no compromise about this. Either you were right or you were wrong. Grandfather was a good Grit of the old George Brown school and took the ’Tiser, so I also have become a Grit and have remained one up to now…And so in this best of all systems were governments chosen according to the number of little Grits or little Tories who got old enough to vote…

  The conductor grasped the handhold by the steps. He shouted, “Bort!” and waved
his hand. The steam shot down in jets, the wheels clanked and groaned and moved forward, faster and faster, past the weigh scales, past the stockyards, over the arches, and grew smaller and smaller like a receding galaxy until the train disappeared into the unknown world to the north…

  Once there was a visitor, my namesake from Toronto, a cousin of Grandfather. The great man was reputed to be a millionaire, but he was disappointing, not at all impressive, only a slightly smoother and more polished version of Grandfather. The two old men sat under the maples in front of our house and talked. Probably they talked of the past as old men will. I kept discreetly in the background. Grandpa didn’t say outright but delicately hinted that children were to be seen and not heard.

  Sometimes they talked in the broad Scots of the district from which they came. It was not the Scots of the burring R’s which we hear from the singers and comedians but was rather soft and plaintive, with a lilt like Welsh or Swedish.

  That is where I feel it best to leave them—my father a little boy, not venturing too close, and the old men sitting through a summer afternoon on wooden chairs placed under one of the great benevolent elm trees that used to shelter my grandparents’ farmhouse. There they spoke the dialect of their childhood—discarded as they became men—which none of their descendants could understand.

  Hired Girl

  MRS. MONTJOY was showing me how to put the pots and pans away. I had put some of them in the wrong places.

  Above all things, she said, she hated a higgledy-piggledy cupboard.

  “You waste more time,” she said. “You waste more time looking for something because it wasn’t where it was last time.”

  “That’s the way it was with our hired girls at home,” I said. “The first few days they were there they were always putting things away where we couldn’t find them.