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

again, not on any cow or creature, shaped in exactly the same way? Tracing the outline of a continent again, digging the stick in, trying to make a definite line, I paid attention to its shape as I would sometimes pay attention to the shape of real continents or islands on real maps, as if the shape itself were a revelation beyond words, and I would be able to make sense of it, If I tried hard enough, and had time.
    “I dare you touch it,” I said scornfully to Mary Agnes. “Touch a dead cow.”
    Mary Agnes came up slowly, and to my astonishment she bent down, grunting, looking at the eye as if she knew I had been wondering about it, and she laid her hand—she laid the palm of her hand — over it, over the eye. She did this seriously, shrinkingly, yet with a tender composure that was not like her. But as soon as she had done it she stood up, and held her hand in front of her face, palm towards me, fingers spread, so that it looked like a huge hand, bigger than her whole face, and dark. She laughed right at me.
    “You’d be scared to let me catch you now,” she said, and I was, but walked away from her insolently as I could manage.
    It often seemed then that nobody else knew what really went on, or what a person was, but me. For instance people said “poor Mary Agnes” or implied it, by a drop in pitch, a subdued protective tone of voice, as if she had no secrets, no place of her own, and that was not true.
     
    “Y OUR UNCLE CRAIG DIED last night.”
    My mother’s voice, telling this, was almost shy.
    I was eating my favourite, surreptitious breakfast—puffed wheat drowned in black molasses—and sitting on the cement slab outside our door, in the morning sun. It was two days since I had returned from Jenkin’s Bend and when she said Uncle Craig I thought of him as I had seen him, standing in the doorway, in his vest and shirt-sleeves, benignly perhaps impatiently waving me off.
    The active verb confused me. He died . It sounded like something he willed to do, chose to do. As if he said, “Now I’ll die.” In that case it could not be so final. Yet I knew it was.
    “In the Orange Hall, at Blue River. He was playing cards.”
    The card table, the bright Orange Hall. (Though I knew it was really the Orange men’s Hall, the name had nothing to do with the colour, any more than Blue River meant the river there was blue.)
    Uncle Craig was dealing out cards, his heavy-lidded, serious way. He wore his sateen-backed vest, with pens and pencils clipped in the pocket. Now?
    “He had a heart attack.”
    Heart attack . It sounded like an explosion, like fireworks going off, shooting sticks of light in all directions, shooting a little ball of light—that was Uncle Craig’s heart, or his soul—high into the air, where it tumbled and went out. Did he jump up, throw his arms out, yell? How long did it take, did his eyes close, did he know what was happening? My mother’s usual positiveness seemed clouded over; my cold appetite for details irritated her. I followed her around the house, scowling, persistent, repeating my questions. I wanted to know. There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.
    But by the day of the funeral things had changed. My mother had regained confidence; I had quieted down. I did not want to hear anything more about Uncle Craig, or about death. My mother had got my Black Watch plaid dress out of mothballs, brushed it, aired it on the line.
    “It’s all right for summer, cooler than cotton, that light wool. Anyway its the only dark thing you own. I don’t care. If it was up to me you could wear scarlet. If they really believed in Christianity that’s what they’d all wear, it’d be all dancing and rejoicing, after all, they spend their whole life singing and praying about getting out of this world and on their way to