Free Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro Page A

think they put him in the ground and he decays?”
    â€œThey think both,” my father said, and in the middle of the kitchen he put his arms around my mother, holding her lightly and gravely, careful not to disturb her hat or her newly-pink face.

    I used to wish sometimes for this very thing, to see my parents by look or embrace affirm that romance—I did not think of passion— had once caught them up and bound them together. But at this moment, seeing my mother go meek and bewildered—this was what the slump of her back showed, that her words never would—and my father touching her in such a gentle, compassionate, grieving way, his grieving having not much to do with Uncle Craig, I was alarmed, I wanted to shout at them to stop and turn back into their separate, final, unsupported selves. I was afraid that they would go on and show me something I no more wanted to see than I wanted to see Uncle Craig dead.
    â€œ Owen doesn’t have to go,” I said bitterly, pushing my face into the loosened mesh of the screen door, seeing him sitting in the yard in his old wagon, bare legged, dirty, remote, pretending he was something else, anything—an Arab in a caravan or an Eskimo on a dogsled.
    That drew them away from each other, my mother sighing.
    â€œOwen’s young.”
    T HE HOUSE WAS like on one of those puzzles, those mazes on paper, with a black dot in one of the squares, or rooms; you are supposed to find your way in to it, or out from it. The black dot in this case was Uncle Craig’s body, and my whole concern was not to find my way to it but to avoid it, not to open even the safest looking door because of what might be stretched out behind it.
    The hay coils were still there. Last week, when I was visiting, the hay was cut, right up to the verandah steps, and coiled into smooth, perfect beehives higher than anybody’s head. In the evening, first casting long, pulled-out shadows, then turning grey, solid, when the sun went down, these hay-coils made a village, or, if you looked around the corner of the house down the rest of the field, a whole city of secretive, exactly similar, purple grey huts. But one had tumbled down, one was soft and wrecked, left for me to jump in. I would stand back against the steps and then run at it with my arms spread passionately, landing deep in fresh hay, still warm, still with its grassy growing smell. It was full of dried flowers—purple and white money-musk, yellow toadflax, little blue flowers nobody knew thename of. My arms and legs and face were covered with scratches, and when I roused myself from the hay these scratches stung, or glowed on me, in the rising breeze from the river.
    Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace had come and jumped in the hay too, with their aprons flying, laughing at themselves. When the moment came they would hesitate, and jump with not quite sufficient abandon, landing in a decorous sitting position, hands spread as on bouncing cushion, or holding their hair.
    When they came back and sat on the verandah, with basins of strawberries they were hulling, to make jam, Auntie Grace spoke breathlessly, but in a calm, musing voice.
    â€œIf a car had come by, wouldn’t you just have wanted to die?”
    Aunt Elspeth took the pins out of her hair and let it down overthe back of her chair. When her hair was pinned up it looked nearly all grey, but when it was loose it showed a great deal of dark, silky brown, mink’s colour. With little snorting sounds of pleasure she shook her head back and forth and drew her spread fingers through her hair, to get rid of the little bits of hay that had flown up, and were sticking in it.
    â€œFools we are!” she said.
    Where was Uncle Craig this while? Typing undauntedly, behind his closed windows and pulled-down blinds.
    The squashed hay coil was just the same. But men were walking on the hay-stubble, all in dark suits like tall crows, talking. A wreath of white lilies hung