The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!

  A jolt it would give them, if she yelled that into the kitchen.

  At six o’clock she locked the store. When she went into the kitchen she was surprised to see her father there. She hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t been either talking or coughing. He was dressed in his good suit, which was an unusual color—a dark oily sort of green. Perhaps it had been cheap.

  “Look at him all dressed up,” Flo said. “He thinks he looks smart. He’s so pleased with himself he wouldn’t go back to bed.”

  Rose’s father smiled unnaturally, obediently.

  “How do you feel now?” Flo said.

  “I feel all right.”

  “You haven’t had a coughing spell, anyway.”

  Her father’s face was newly shaved, smooth and delicate, like the animals they had once carved at school out of yellow laundry soap.

  “Maybe I ought to get up and stay up.”

  “That’s the ticket,” Billy Pope said boisterously. “No more laziness. Get up and stay up. Get back to work.”

  There was a bottle of whiskey on the table. Billy Pope had brought it. The men drank it out of little glasses that had once held cream cheese. They topped it up with half an inch or so of water.

  Brian, Rose’s half brother, had come in from playing somewhere; noisy, muddy, with the cold smell of outdoors around him.

  Just as he came in Rose said, “Can I have some?” nodding at the whiskey bottle.

  “Girls don’t drink that,” Billy Pope said.

  “Give you some and we’d have Brian whining after some,” said Flo.

  “Can I have some?” said Brian, whining, and Flo laughed uproariously, sliding her own glass behind the bread box. “See there?”

  There used to be people around in the old days that did cures,” said Billy Pope at the supper table. “But you don’t hear about none of them no more.”

  “Too bad we can’t get hold of one of them right now,” said Rose’s father, getting hold of and conquering a coughing fit.

  “There was the one faith healer I used to hear my Dad talk about,” said Billy Pope. “He had a way of talkin, he talked like the Bible. So this deaf fellow went to him and he seen him and he cured him of his deafness. Then he says to him, ‘Durst hear?’ ”

  “Dost hear?” Rose suggested. She had drained Flo’s glass while getting out the bread for supper, and felt more kindly disposed toward all her relatives.

  “That’s it. Dost hear? And the fellow said yes, he did. So the faith healer says then, Dost believe? Now maybe the fellow didn’t understand what he meant. And he says What in? So the faith healer he got mad, and he took away the fellow’s hearing like that, and he went home deaf as he come.”

  Flo said that out where she lived when she was little, there was a woman who had second sight. Buggies, and later on, cars, would be parked to the end of her lane on Sundays. That was the day people came from a distance to consult with her. Mostly they came to consult her about things that were lost.

  “Didn’t they want to get in touch with their relations?” Rose’s father said, egging Flo on as he liked to when she was telling a story. “I thought she could put you in touch with the dead.”

  “Well, most of them seen enough of their relations when they was alive.”

  It was rings and wills and livestock they wanted to know about; where had things disappeared to?

  “One fellow I knew went to her and he had lost his wallet. He was a man that worked on the railway line. And she says to him, well, do you remember it was about a week ago you were working along the tracks and you come along near an orchard and you thought you would like an apple? So you hopped over the fence and it was right then you dropped your wallet, right then and there in the long grass. But a dog came along, she says, a dog picked it up and dropped it a ways further along the fence, and that’s where you’ll find it. Well, he’d forgot all about the orchard and climbing that fence and he was so amazed at her, he gave her a dollar. And he went and found his wallet in the very place she described. This is true, I knew him. But the money was all chewed up, it was all chewed up in shreds, and when he found that he was so mad he said he wished he never give her so much!”

  “Now, you never went to her,” said Rose’s father. “You wouldn’t put your faith in the like of that?” When he talked to Flo he often spoke in country phrases, and adopted the country habit of teasing, saying the opposite of what’s true, or believed to be true.

  “No, I never went actually to ask her anything,” Flo said. “But one time I went. I had to go over there and get some green onions. My mother was sick and suffering with her nerves and this woman sent word over, that she had some green onions was good for nerves. It wasn’t nerves at all it was cancer, so what good they did I don’t know.”

  Flo’s voice climbed and hurried on, embarrassed that she had let that out.

  “I had to go and get them. She had them pulled and washed and tied up for me, and she says, don’t go yet, come on in the kitchen and see what I got for you. Well, I didn’t know what, but I dasn’t not do it. I thought she was a witch. We all did. We all did, at school. So I sat down in the kitchen and she went into the pantry and brought out a big chocolate cake and she cut a piece and give it to me. I had to sit and eat it. She sat there and watched me eat. All I can remember about her is her hands. They were great big red hands with big veins sticking up on them, and she’d be flopping and twisting them all the time in her lap. I often thought since, she ought to eat the green onions herself, she didn’t have so good nerves either.

  “Then I tasted a funny taste. In the cake. It was peculiar. I dasn’t stop eating though. I ate and ate and when I finished it all up I said thank you and I tell you I got out of there. I walked all the way down the lane because I figured she was watching me, and when I got to the road I started to run. But I was still scared she was following after me, invisible or something, and she might read what was in my mind and pick me up and pound my brains out on the gravel. When I got home I just flung open the door and hollered Poison! That’s what I was thinking. I thought she made me eat a poisoned cake.

  “All it was was moldy. That’s what my mother said. The damp in her house and she would go for days without no visitors to eat it, in spite of the crowds she collected other times. She could have a cake sitting around too long a while.

  “But I didn’t think so. No. I thought I had ate poison and I was doomed. I went and sat in this sort of place I had in a corner of the granary. Nobody knew I had it. I kept all kinds of junk in there. I kept some chips of broken china and some velvet flowers. I remember them, they were off a hat that had got rained on. So I just sat there, and I waited.”

  Billy Pope was laughing at her. “Did they come and haul you out?”

  “I forget. I don’t think so. They would’ve had a hard time finding me, I was in behind all the feed bags. No. I don’t know. I guess what happened in the end was I got tired out waiting and come out by myself.”

  “And lived to tell the tale,” said Rose’s father, swallowing the last word as he was overcome by a prolonged coughing fit. Flo said he shouldn’t stay up any longer but he said he would just lie down on the kitchen couch, which he did. Flo and Rose cleared the table and washed the dishes, then for something to do they all—Flo and Billy Pope and Brian and Rose—sat around the table and played euchre. Her father dozed. Rose thought of Flo sitting in a corner of the granary with the bits of china and the wilted velvet flowers and whatever else was precious to her, waiting, in a gradually reduced state of terror, it must have been, and exaltation, and desire, to see how death would slice the day.

  Her father was waiting. His shed was locked, his books would not be opened again, by him, and tomorrow was the last day he would wear shoes. They were all used to this idea, and in some ways they would be more disturbed if his death did not take place, than if it did. No one could ask what he thought about it. He would have treated such an inquiry as
an impertinence, a piece of dramatizing, an indulgence. Rose believed he would have. She believed he was prepared for Westminster Hospital, the old soldiers’ hospital, prepared for its masculine gloom, its yellowing curtains pulled around the bed, its spotty basins. And for what followed. She understood that he would never be with her more than at the present moment. The surprise to come was that he wouldn’t be with her less.

  Drinking coffee, wandering around the blind green halls of the new high school, at the Centennial Year Reunion—she hadn’t come for that, had bumped into it accidentally, so to speak, when she came home to see what was to be done about Flo—Rose met people who said, “Did you know Ruby Carruthers was dead? They took off the one breast and then the other but it was all through her, she died.

  And people who said, “I saw your picture in a magazine, what was the name of that magazine, I have it at home.”

  The new high school had an auto mechanics shop for training auto mechanics and a beauty parlor for training beauty parlor operators; a library; an auditorium; a gymnasium; a whirling fountain arrangement for washing your hands in the Ladies’ Room. Also a functioning dispenser of Kotex.

  Del Fairbridge had become an undertaker.

  Runt Chesterton had become an accountant.

  Horse Nicholson had made a lot of money as a contractor and had left that to go into politics. He had made a speech saying that what they needed was a lot more God in the classroom and a lot less French.

  Wild Swans

  Flo said to watch for White Slavers. She said this was how they operated: an old woman, a motherly or grandmotherly sort, made friends while riding beside you on a bus or train. She offered you candy, which was drugged. Pretty soon you began to droop and mumble, were in no condition to speak for yourself. Oh, help, the woman said, my daughter (granddaughter) is sick, please somebody help me get her off so that she can recover in the fresh air. Up stepped a polite gentleman, pretending to be a stranger, offering assistance. Together, at the next stop, they hustled you off the train or bus, and that was the last the ordinary world ever saw of you. They kept you a prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you had been transported drugged and bound so you wouldn’t even know where you were), until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and invested with vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. It took about three years, for you to get to this state. You wouldn’t want to go home, then, maybe couldn’t remember home, or find your way if you did. So they let you out on the streets.

  Flo took ten dollars and put it in a little cloth bag which she sewed to the strap of Rose’s slip. Another thing likely to happen was that Rose would get her purse stolen.

  Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adopted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money.

  Rose said she didn’t see how she could tell which ones were disguised.

  Flo had worked in Toronto once. She had worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in Union Station. That was how she knew all she knew. She never saw sunlight, in those days, except on her days off. But she saw plenty else. She saw a man cut another man’s stomach with a knife, just pull out his shirt and do a tidy cut, as if it was a watermelon not a stomach. The stomach’s owner just sat looking down surprised, with no time to protest. Flo implied that that was nothing, in Toronto. She saw two bad women (that was what Flo called whores, running the two words together, like badminton) get into a fight, and a man laughed at them, other men stopped and laughed and egged them on, and they had their fists full of each other’s hair. At last the police came and took them away, still howling and yelping.

  She saw a child die of a fit, too. Its face was black as ink.

  “Well I’m not scared,” said Rose provokingly. “There’s the police, anyway.”

  “Oh, them! They’d be the first ones to diddle you!”

  She did not believe anything Flo said on the subject of sex. Consider the undertaker.

  A little bald man, very neatly dressed, would come into the store sometimes and speak to Flo with a placating expression.

  “I only wanted a bag of candy. And maybe a few packages of gum. And one or two chocolate bars. Could you go to the trouble of wrapping them?”

  Flo in her mock-deferential tone would assure him that she could. She wrapped them in heavy-duty white paper, so they were something like presents. He took his time with the selection, humming and chatting, then dawdled for a while. He might ask how Flo was feeling. And how Rose was, if she was there.

  “You look pale. Young girls need fresh air.” To Flo he would say, “You work too hard. You’ve worked hard all your life.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Flo would say agreeably.

  When he went out she hurried to the window. There it was—the old black hearse with its purple curtains.

  “He’ll be after them today!” Flo would say as the hearse rolled away at a gentle pace, almost a funeral pace. The little man had been an undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had taken over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all over the country, looking for women. So Flo said. Rose could not believe it. Flo said he gave them the gum and the candy. Rose said he probably ate them himself. Flo said he had been seen, he had been heard. In mild weather he drove with the windows down, singing, to himself or to somebody out of sight in the back.

  Her brow is like the snowdrift

  Her throat is like the swan

  Flo imitated him singing. Gently overtaking some woman walking on a back road, or resting at a country crossroads. All compliments and courtesy and chocolate bars, offering a ride. Of course every woman who reported being asked said she had turned him down. He never pestered anybody, drove politely on. He called in at houses, and if the husband was home he seemed to like just as well as anything to sit and chat. Wives said that was all he ever did anyway but Flo did not believe it.

  “Some women are taken in,” she said. “A number.” She liked to speculate on what the hearse was like inside. Plush. Plush on the walls and the roof and the floor. Soft purple, the color of the curtains, the color of dark lilacs.

  All nonsense, Rose thought. Who could believe it, of a man that age?

  Rose was going to Toronto on the train for the first time by herself. She had been once before, but that was with Flo, long before her father died. They took along their own sandwiches and bought milk from the vendor on the train. It was sour. Sour chocolate milk. Rose kept taking tiny sips, unwilling to admit that something so much desired could fail her. Flo sniffed it, then hunted up and down the train until she found the old man in his red jacket, with no teeth and the tray hanging around his neck. She invited him to sample the chocolate milk. She invited people nearby to smell it. He let her have some ginger ale for nothing. It was slightly warm.

  “I let him know,” Flo said looking around after he had left. “You have to let them know.”

  A woman agreed with her but most people looked out the window. Rose drank the warm ginger ale. Either that, or the scene with the vendor, or the conversation Flo and the agreeing woman now got into about where they came from, why they were going to Toronto, and Rose’s morning constipation which was why she was lacking color, or the small amount of chocolate milk she had got inside her, caused her to throw up in the train toilet. All day long she was afraid people in Toronto could smell vomit on her coat.

  This time Flo started the trip off by saying, “Keep an eye on her, she’s never been away from home before!” to the conductor, then looking around and laughing, to show that was jokingly meant. Then she had to get off. It seemed the conductor had no more need for jokes than Rose had, and no intention of keeping an eye on anybody. He never spoke to Rose except to ask for her ticket. She had a window seat, and was soon extraordinarily happy. She felt Flo receding, West Hanratty flying away from her, her own wearying self discarded as ea
sily as everything else. She loved the towns less and less known. A woman was standing at her back door in her nightgown, not caring if everybody on the train saw her. They were traveling south, out of the snow belt, into an earlier spring, a tenderer sort of landscape. People could grow peach trees in their backyards.

  Rose collected in her mind the things she had to look for in Toronto. First, things for Flo. Special stockings for her varicose veins. A special kind of cement for sticking handles on pots. And a full set of dominoes.

  For herself Rose wanted to buy hair-remover to put on her arms and legs, and if possible an arrangement of inflatable cushions, supposed to reduce your hips and thighs. She thought they probably had hair-remover in the drugstore in Hanratty, but the woman in there was a friend of Flo’s and told everything. She told Flo who bought hair dye and slimming medicine and French safes. As for the cushion business, you could send away for it but there was sure to be a comment at the Post Office, and Flo knew people there as well. She also planned to buy some bangles, and an angora sweater. She had great hopes of silver bangles and powder-blue angora. She thought they could transform her, make her calm and slender and take the frizz out of her hair, dry her underarms and turn her complexion to pearl.

  The money for these things, as well as the money for the trip, came from a prize Rose had won, for writing an essay called “Art and Science in the World of Tomorrow.” To her surprise, Flo asked if she could read it, and while she was reading it, she remarked that they must have thought they had to give Rose the prize for swallowing the dictionary. Then she said shyly, “It’s very interesting.”

  She would have to spend the night at Cela McKinney’s. Cela McKinney was her father’s cousin. She had married a hotel manager and thought she had gone up in the world. But the hotel manager came home one day and sat down on the dining room floor between two chairs and said, “I am never going to leave this house again.” Nothing unusual had happened, he had just decided not to go out of the house again, and he didn’t, until he died. That had made Cela McKinney odd and nervous. She locked her doors at eight o’clock. She was also very stingy. Supper was usually oatmeal porridge, with raisins. Her house was dark and narrow and smelled like a bank.