Free Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro Page B

of pickles and relishes. Watermelon-rind pickles, Uncle Craig’s favourite. He always said he would like to make a meal out of those, with just bread and butter.
    “No more than enough,” said Aunt Moira, darkly. “They all bring their appetites to funerals.”
    There was a stir in the hallway; Auntie Grace passing through, the men making way, she thanking them, subdued and grateful as if she had been a bride. The minister trailed behind her. He spoke to the women in the kitchen with restrained heartiness.
    “Well, ladies! Ladies! It doesn’t look as if you have let time lie heavy on your hands. Work is a good offering, work is a good offering in time of grief.”
    Auntie Grace bent and kissed me. There was a faint sour smell, a warning, under her eau de cologne. “Do you want to see your Uncle Craig?” she whispered, tender and sprightly as if she were promising a reward. “He’s in the front room, he looks so handsome, under the lilies Aunt Helen sent.”
    So. Some ladies spoke to her, and I got away. I went through the hall again. The front room doors were still closed. At the bottom of the stairway, by the front door, my father and a man I did not know were pacing, turning, measuring discreetly with their hands.
    “This’ll be the tricky place. Here.”
    “Take the door off?”
    “Too late for that. You don’t want to make a commotion. It might upset the ladies, seeing us take it off. If we back around like this—”
    Down the side hall two old men were talking. I ducked between them.
    “Not like in the winter, remember Jimmy Poole’s. The ground was like a rock. You couldn’t put a dent in it with any kind of a tool.”
    “Had to wait over two months for a thaw.”
    “By that time must have been three-four of them waiting. Let see.
    There’d be Jimmy Poole—”
    “Him all right. There’d be Mrs. Fraleigh, senior—”
    “Hold on there, she died before the freeze, she’d be all right.”
    I went through the door at the end of the side hall into the old part of the house. This part was called the storeroom; from outside, it looked like a little house of logs tacked on to the side of the big brick house. The windows were small and square and set slightly askew like the never-quite-convincing windows in a doll’s house. Hardly any light got in, because of the dim towering junk piled up everywhere even in front of the windows—the churn and the old washing machine that was turned by hand, wooden bedsteads taken apart, trunks, tubs, scythes, a baby carriage clumsy as a galleon, keeling drunkenly to one side. This was the room Auntie Grace refused to go into; Aunt Elspeth always had to go, if they wanted something out of it. She would stand in the doorway and sniff boldly and say, “What a place! The air in here’s just like a tomb!”
    I loved the sound of that word when I first heard her say it. I did not know exactly what it was, or had got it mixed up with womb, and I saw us inside some sort of hollow marble egg, filled with blue light, that did not need to get in from outside.
    Mary Agnes was sitting on the churn, not looking surprised.
    “What are you coming in here for?” she said softly. “You’re going to get yourself lost.”
    I didn’t answer her. Not turning my back, I wandered round the room. I had often wondered, thinking back, if there was anything in that baby carriage. Sure enough there was; a pile of old Family Heralds . I heard my mother’s voice calling my name. She sounded slightly anxious, unwillingly deferential. I didn’t make a sound and Mary Agnes didn’t either. What had she been doing in here? She had found a pair of old-fashioned ladies’ boots, laced up the front and trimmed with fur, and she was hanging on to them. She rubbed the fur under her chin.
    “Rabbit fur.”
    Now she came and stuck the boots in my face. “Rabbit fur?”
    “I don’t want them.”
    “Come and see Uncle Craig.”
    “No.”
    “You haven’t seen him yet.”
    “No.”
    She waited