Read Online Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro - Free Book Online

savage dejection. I didn’t want to go with Mary Agnes. I wanted to stay and eat things, and hear more about Porterfield, that depraved sullen town, filled with untrustworthy, gangsterish people. I heard Mary Agnes coming after me, with her heavy tripping run.
    “Mary Agnes, stay out of the sun where you can. Don’t go paddling in the river. You can catch cold any time of the year!”
    We went down the road and along the river bank. In the heat of dry stubble-fields, cracked creek-beds, white dusty roads, the Wawanash river made a cool trough. The shade was of thin willow leaves, which held the sunlight like a sieve. The mud along the banks was dry but not dried to dust; it was like cake icing, delicately crusted on top but moist and cool underneath, lovely to walk on. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot. Mary Agnes hooted, “I’m telling on you!”
    “Tell if you like.” I called her bugger under my breath.
    Cows had been down to the river and had left their hoof-prints in the mud. They left cowpats too, nicely rounded, looking when they dried like artifacts, like handmade lids of day. Along the edge of the water, on both sides, were carpets of lily leaves spread out, and here and there a yellow water lily, looking so pale, tranquil and desirable, that I had to tuck my dress into my pants and wade in among the sucking roots, in black mud that oozed up between my toes and clouded the water, silting the leaves and lily petals.
    “You’re going to drown, you’re going to drown,” cried Mary Agnes in cross excitement, though I was hardly past my knees. Brought to shore, the flowers seemed coarse and rank and began to die immediately. I walked on forgetting about them, mashing the petals in my fist.
    We came upon a dead cow, lying with its hind feet in the water. Black flies were crawling and clustering on its brown and white hide, sparkling where the sun caught them like beaded embroidery.
    I took a stick and tapped the hide. The flies rose, circled, dropped back. I could see that the cow’s hide was a map. The brown could be the ocean, the white the floating continents. With my stick I traced their strange shapes, their curving coasts, trying to keep the point of the stick exactly between the white and the brown. Then I guided the stick up the neck, following a taut rope of muscle—the cow had died with its neck stretched out, as if reaching for water, but it was lying the wrong way for that—and I tapped the face. I was shyer about touching the face. I was shy about looking at its eye.
    The eye was wide open, dark, a smooth sightless bulge, with a sheen like silk and a reddish gleam in it, a reflection of light. An orange stuffed in a black silk stocking. Flies nestled in one corner, bunched together beautifully in an iridescent brooch. I had a great desire to poke the eye with my stick, to see if it would collapse, if it would quiver and break like a jelly, showing itself to be the same composition all the way through, or if the skin over the surface would break and let loose all sorts of putrid mess, to flow down the face. I traced the stick all the way round the eye, I drew it back—but I was not able, I could not poke it in.
    Mary Agnes did not come close. “Leave it alone,” she warned. “That old dead cow. It’s dirty. You get yourself dirty.”
    “Day-ud cow,” I said, expanding the word lusciously. “Day-ud cow, day-ud cow.”
    “You come on,” Mary Agnes bossed me, but was afraid, I thought, to come nearer.
    Being dead, it invited desecration. I wanted to poke it, trample it, pee on it, anything to punish it, to show what contempt I had for its being dead. Beat it up, break it up, spit on it, tear it, throw it away! But still it had power, lying with a gleaming strange map on its back, its straining neck, the smooth eye. I had never once looked at a cow alive and thought what I thought now: why should there be a cow? Why should the white spots be shaped just the way they were, and never