Free Runaway by Alice Munro Page A

mind watching him while I go?”
    “I don’t want to stay with her,” the child said, without looking up.
    “I’ll go,” said Juliet. But at that moment a waiter entered the car with the coffee wagon.
    “There. I shouldn’t’ve complained so soon,” the mother said. “Did you hear it was a b-o-d-y?”
    Juliet shook her head.
    “He didn’t have a coat on even. Somebody saw him get off and walk on up ahead but they never realized what he was doing. He must’ve just got round the curve so the engineer couldn’t see him till it was too late.”
    A few seats ahead, on the mother’s side of the aisle, a man said, “Here they come back,” and some people got up, from Juliet’s side, and stooped to see. The child stood up too, pressed his face to the glass. His mother told him to sit down.
    “You color. Look at the mess you made, all over the lines.”
    “I can’t look,” she said to Juliet. “I can’t stand to look at anything like that.”
    Juliet got up and looked. She saw a small group of men tramping back towards the station. Some had taken off their coats, which were piled on top of the stretcher that a couple of them were carrying.
    “You can’t see anything,” a man behind Juliet said to a woman who had not stood up. “They got him all covered.”
    Not all of the men who proceeded with their heads lowered were railway employees. Juliet recognized the man who had sat across from her up in the observation car.
    After ten or fifteen minutes more, the train began to move. Around the curve there was no blood to be seen, on either side of the car. But there was a trampled area, a shovelled mound of snow. The man behind her was up again. He said, “That’s where it happened, I guess,” and watched for a little while to see if there was anything else, then turned around and sat down. The train, instead of speeding to make up for lost time, seemed to be going more slowly than previously. Out of respect, perhaps, or with apprehension about what might lie ahead, around the next curve. The headwaiter went through the car announcing the first seating for lunch, and the mother and child at once got up and followed him. A procession began, and Juliet heard a woman who was passing say, “Really?”
    The woman talking to her said softly, “That’s what she said. Full of blood. So it must have splashed in when the train went over—”
    “Don’t say it.”
    A little later, when the procession had ended and the early lunchers were eating, the man came through—the man from the observation car who had been seen outside walking in the snow.
    Juliet got up and quickly pursued him. In the black cold space between the cars, just as he was pushing the heavy door in front of him, she said, “Excuse me. I have to ask you something.”
    This space was full of sudden noise, the clanking of heavy wheels on the rails.
    “What is it?”
    “Are you a doctor? Did you see the man who—”
    “I’m not a doctor. There’s no doctor on the train. But I have some medical experience.”
    “How old was he?”
    The man looked at her with a steady patience and some displeasure.
    “Hard to say. Not young.”
    “Was he wearing a blue shirt? Did he have blondish-brown-colored hair?”
    He shook his head, not to answer her question but to refuse it.
    “Was this somebody you knew?” he said. “You should tell the conductor if it was.”
    “I didn’t know him.”
    “Excuse me, then.” He pushed open the door and left her.
    Of course. He thought she was full of disgusting curiosity, like many other people.
    Full of blood. That
was disgusting, if you liked.
    She could never tell anybody about the mistake that had been made, the horrid joke of it. People would think her exceptionally crude and heartless, were she ever to speak of it. And what was at one end of the misunderstanding—the suicide’s smashed body—would seem, in the telling, to be hardly more foul and frightful than her own menstrual blood.
    Never tell that