Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories (36 page)

ACCIDENTS

WHEN ARTHUR CAME
home from the factory a little before noon he shouted, “Stay out of my way till I wash! There’s been an accident over
at the works!” Nobody answered. Mrs. Feare, the housekeeper, was talking on the kitchen telephone so loudly that she could not hear him, and his daughter was of course at school. He washed, and stuffed everything he had been wearing into the hamper, and scrubbed up the bathroom, like a murderer. He started out clean, with even his hair slicked and patted, to drive to the man’s house. He had had to ask where it was. He thought it was up Vinegar Hill but they said no, that was the father – the young fellow and his wife live on the other side of town, past where the Apple Evaporator used to be, before the war.

He found the two brick cottages side by side, and picked the left-hand one, as he’d been told. It wouldn’t have been hard to pick which house, anyway. News had come before him. The door to the house was open, and children too young to be in school yet hung about in the yard. A small girl sat on a kiddie car, not going anywhere, just blocking his path. He stepped around her. As he did so an older girl spoke to him in a formal way – a warning.

“Her dad’s dead. Hers!”

A woman came out of the front room carrying an armload of curtains, which she gave to another woman standing in the hall. The woman who received the curtains was gray-haired, with a pleading face. She had no upper teeth. She probably took her plate out, for comfort, at home. The woman who passed the curtains to her was stout but young, with fresh skin.

“You tell her not to get up on that stepladder,” the gray-haired woman said to Arthur. “She’s going to break her neck taking down curtains. She thinks we need to get everything washed. Are you the undertaker? Oh, no, excuse me! You’re Mr. Doud. Grace, come out here! Grace! It’s Mr. Doud!”

“Don’t trouble her,” Arthur said.

“She thinks she’s going to get the curtains all down and washed and up again by tomorrow, because he’s going to have to go in the front room. She’s my daughter. I can’t tell her anything.”

“She’ll quiet down presently,” said a sombre but comfortable-looking man in a clerical collar, coming through from the back of the house. Their minister. But not from one of the churches Arthur knew. Baptist? Pentecostal? Plymouth Brethren? He was drinking tea.
Some other woman came and briskly removed the curtains.

“We got the machine filled and going,” she said. “A day like this, they’ll dry like nobody’s business. Just keep the kids out of here.”

The minister had to stand aside and lift his teacup high, to avoid her and her bundle. He said, “Aren’t any of you ladies going to offer Mr. Doud a cup of tea?”

Arthur said, “No, no, don’t trouble.”

“The funeral expenses,” he said to the gray-haired woman. “If you could let her know–”

“Lillian wet her pants!” said a triumphant child at the door. “Mrs. Agnew! Lillian peed her pants!”

“Yes. Yes,” said the minister. “They will be very grateful.”

“The plot and the stone, everything,” Arthur said. “You’ll make sure they understand that. Whatever they want on the stone.”

The gray-haired woman had gone out into the yard. She came back with a squalling child in her arms. “Poor lamb,” she said. “They told her she wasn’t supposed to come in the house so where could she go? What could she do but have an accident!”

The young woman came out of the front room dragging a rug.

“I want this put on the line and beat,” she said.

“Grace, here is Mr. Doud come to offer his condolences,” the minister said.

“And to ask if there is anything I can do,” said Arthur.

The gray-haired woman started upstairs with the wet child in her arms and a couple of others following.

Grace spotted them.

“Oh, no, you don’t! You get back outside!”

“My mom’s in here.”

“Yes and your mom’s good and busy, she don’t need to be bothered with you. She’s here helping me out. Don’t you know Lillian’s dad’s dead?”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Arthur said, meaning to clear out.

Grace stared at him with her mouth open. Sounds of the washing machine filled the house.

“Yes, there is,” she said. “You wait here.”

“She’s overwhelmed,” the minister said. “It’s not that she means to be rude.”

Grace came back with a load of books.

“These here,” she said. “He had them out of the Library. I don’t want to have to pay fines on them. He went every Saturday night so I guess they are due back tomorrow. I don’t want to get in trouble about them.”

“I’ll look after them,” Arthur said. “I’d be glad to.”

“I just don’t want to get in any trouble about them.”

“Mr. Doud was saying about taking care of the funeral,” the minister said to her, gently admonishing. “Everything including the stone. Whatever you want on the stone.”

“Oh, I don’t want anything fancy,” Grace said.

On Friday morning last there occurred in the sawmill operation of Douds Factory a particularly ghastly and tragic accident. Mr. Jack Agnew, in reaching under the main shaft, had the misfortune to have his sleeve caught by a setscrew in an adjoining flunge, so that his arm and shoulder were drawn under the shaft. His head in consequence was brought in contact with the circular saw, that saw being about one foot in diameter. In an instant the unfortunate young man’s head was separated from his body, being severed at an angle below the left ear and through the neck. His death is believed to have been instantaneous. He never spoke or uttered a cry so it was not by any sound of his but by the spurt and shower of his blood that his fellow-workers were horribly alerted to the disaster.

This account was reprinted in the paper a week later for those who might have missed it or who wished to have an extra copy to send to friends or relations out of town (particularly to people who used to live in Carstairs and did not anymore). The misspelling
of flange
was corrected. There was a note apologizing for the mistake. There was also a description of a very large funeral, attended even by people from neighboring towns and as far away as Walley. They came by car and train, and some by horse and buggy. They had not known Jack Agnew when he was alive, but, as the paper said, they wished to pay tribute to the sensational and tragic manner of his death. All the stores in Carstairs were
closed for two hours that afternoon. The hotel did not close its doors but that was because all the visitors needed somewhere to eat and drink.

The survivors were a wife, Grace, and a four-year-old daughter, Lillian. The victim had fought bravely in the Great War and had only been wounded once, not seriously. Many had commented on this irony.

The paper’s failure to mention a surviving father was not deliberate. The editor of the paper was not a native of Carstairs, and people forgot to tell him about the father until it was too late.

The father himself did not complain about the omission. On the day of the funeral, which was very fine, he headed out of town as he would have done ordinarily on a day he had decided not to spend at Douds. He was wearing a felt hat and a long coat that would do for a rug if he wanted to take a nap. His overshoes were neatly held on his feet with the rubber rings from sealing jars. He was going out to fish for suckers. The season hadn’t opened yet, but he always managed to be a bit ahead of it. He fished through the spring and early summer and cooked and ate what he caught. He had a frying pan and a pot hidden out on the riverbank. The pot was for boiling corn that he snatched out of the fields later in the year, when he was also eating the fruit of wild apple trees and grapevines. He was quite sane but abhorred conversation. He could not altogether avoid it in the weeks following his son’s death, but he had a way of cutting it short.

“Should’ve watched out what he was doing.”

Walking in the country that day, he met another person who was not at the funeral. A woman. She did not try to start any conversation and in fact seemed as fierce in her solitude as himself, whipping the air past her with long fervent strides.

THE PIANO FACTORY
, which had started out making pump organs, stretched along the west side of town, like a medieval town wall. There were two long buildings like the inner and outer ramparts, with a closed-in bridge between them where the main offices were. And reaching up into the town and the streets of workers’ houses you had the kilns and the sawmill and the lumberyard and storage sheds. The factory whistle
dictated the time for many to get up, blowing at six o’clock in the morning. It blew again for work to start at seven and at twelve for dinner time and at one in the afternoon for work to recommence, and then at five-thirty for the men to lay down their tools and go home.

Rules were posted beside the time clock, under glass. The first two rules were:

ONE MINUTE LATE IS FIFTEEN MINUTES PAY. BE PROMPT. DON’T TAKE SAFETY FOR GRANTED. WATCH OUT FOR YOURSELF AND THE NEXT MAN.

There had been accidents in the factory and in fact a man had been killed when a load of lumber fell on him. That had happened before Arthur’s time. And once, during the war, a man had lost an arm, or part of an arm. On the day that happened, Arthur was away in Toronto. So he had never seen an accident – nothing serious, anyway. But it was often at the back of his mind now that something might happen.

Perhaps he did not feel so sure that trouble wouldn’t come near him, as he had felt before his wife died. She had died in 1919, in the last flurry of the Spanish flu, when everyone had got over being frightened. Even she had not been frightened. That was nearly five years ago and it still seemed to Arthur like the end of a carefree time in his life. But to other people he had always seemed very responsible and serious – nobody had noticed much difference in him.

In his dreams of an accident there was a spreading silence, everything was shut down. Every machine in the place stopped making its customary noise and every man’s voice was removed, and when Arthur looked out of the office window he understood that doom had fallen. He never could remember any particular thing he saw that told him this. It was just the space, the dust in the factory yard, that said to him
now.

THE BOOKS STAYED
on the floor of his car for a week or so. His daughter Bea said, “What are those books doing here?” and then he remembered.

Bea read out the titles and the authors.
Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the Northwest Passage
, by G. B. Smith.
What’s Wrong with the World?
, G. K. Chesterton.
The Taking of Quebec
, Archibald Hendry.
Bolshevism: Practice and Theory
, by Lord Bertrand Russell.

“Bol-
shev
-ism,” Bea said, and Arthur told her how to pronounce it correctly. She asked what it was, and he said, “It’s something they’ve got in Russia that I don’t understand so well myself. But from what I hear of it, it’s a disgrace.”

Bea was thirteen at this time. She had heard about the Russian Ballet and also about dervishes. She believed for the next couple of years that Bolshevism was some sort of diabolical and maybe indecent dance. At least this was the story she told when she was grown up.

She did not mention that the books were connected with the man who had had the accident. That would have made the story less amusing. Perhaps she had really forgotten.

THE LIBRARIAN WAS
perturbed. The books still had their cards in them, which meant they had never been checked out, just removed from the shelves and taken away.

“The one by Lord Russell has been missing a long time.”

Arthur was not used to such reproofs, but he said mildly, “I am returning them on behalf of somebody else. The chap who was killed. In the accident at the factory.”

The Librarian had the Franklin book open. She was looking at the picture of the boat trapped in the ice.

“His wife asked me to,” Arthur said.

She picked up each book separately, and shook it as if she expected something to fall out. She ran her fingers in between the pages. The bottom part of her face was working in an unsightly way, as if she was chewing at the inside of her cheeks.

“I guess he just took them home as he felt like it,” Arthur said.

“I’m sorry?” she said in a minute. “What did you say? I’m sorry.”

It was the accident, he thought. The idea that the man who had died in such a way had been the last person to open these books, turn these
pages. The thought that he might have left a bit of his life in them, a scrap of paper or a pipe cleaner as a marker, or even a few shreds of tobacco. That unhinged her.

“No matter,” he said. “I just dropped by to bring them back.”

He turned away from her desk but did not immediately leave the Library. He had not been in it for years. There was his father’s picture between the two front windows, where it would always be.

A.V. Doud, founder of the Doud Organ Factory and
Patron of this Library. A Believer in Progress, Culture,
and Education. A True Friend of the Town of
Carstairs and of the Working Man.

The Librarian’s desk was in the archway between the front and back rooms. The books were on shelves set in rows in the back room. Green-shaded lamps, with long pull cords, dangled down in the aisles between. Arthur remembered years ago some matter brought up at the Council Meeting about buying sixty-watt bulbs instead of forty. This Librarian was the one who had requested that, and they had done it.

In the front room, there were newspapers and magazines on wooden racks, and some round heavy tables, with chairs, so that people could sit and read, and rows of thick dark books behind glass. Dictionaries, probably, and atlases and encyclopedias. Two handsome high windows looking out on the main street, with Arthur’s father hanging between them. Other pictures around the room hung too high, and were too dim and crowded with figures for the person down below to interpret them easily. (Later, when Arthur had spent many hours in the Library and had discussed these pictures with the Librarian, he knew that one of them represented the Battle of Flodden Field, with the King of Scotland charging down the hill into a pall of smoke, one the funeral of the Boy King of Rome, and one the Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)