Alice Munro: Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories

Now the bank, instead of willows, grew thick bushes higher than my head. I stayed on the path, about halfway up the bank, while my father went down to the water. When he bent over the trap, I could no longer see him. I looked around slowly and saw something else. Further along, and higher up the bank, a man was making his way down. He made no noise coming through the bushes and moved easily, as if he followed a path I could not see. At first I could just see his head and the upper part of his body. He was dark, with a high bald forehead, hair long behind the ears, deep vertical creases in his cheeks. When the bushes thinned I could see the rest of him, his long clever legs, thinness, drab camouflaging clothes, and what he carried in his hand, gleaming where the sun caught it—a little axe, or hatchet.

I never moved to warn or call my father. The man crossed my path somewhere ahead, continuing down to the river. People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. All my life I had known there was a man like this and he was behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative, electrified against the dark noon sky, with blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Annie eyes. The man slipped down through the bushes to my father. And I never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst.

My father did not know. When he straightened up, the man was not three feet away from him and hid him from me. I heard my father’s voice come out, after a moment’s delay, quiet and neighbourly.

“Hello, Joe. Well. Joe. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

The man did not say a word, but edged around my father giving him a close look. “Joe, you know me,” my father told him. “Ben Jordan. I been out looking at my traps. There’s a lot of good rats in the river this year, Joe.”

The man gave a quick not-trusting look at the trap my father had baited.

“You ought to set a line out yourself.”

No answer. The man took his hatchet and chopped lightly at the air.

“Too late this year, though. The river is already started to go down.”

“Ben Jordan,” the man said with a great splurt, a costly effort, like somebody leaping over a stutter.

“I thought you’d recognize me, Joe.”

“I never knew it was you, Ben. I thought it was one them Silases.”

“Well I been telling you it was me.”

“They’s down here all the time choppin my trees and pullin down my fences. You know they burned me out, Ben. It was them done it.”

“I heard about that,” my father said.

“I didn’t know it was you, Ben. I never knew it was you. I got this axe, I just take it along with me to give them a little scare. I wouldn’t of if I’d known it was you. You come on up and see where I’m living now.”

My father called me. “I got my young one out following me today.”

“Well you and her both come up and get warm.”

We followed this man, who still carried and carelessly swung his hatchet, up the slope and into the bush. The trees chilled the air, and underneath them was real snow, left over from winter, a foot, two feet deep. The tree trunks had rings around them, a curious dark space like the warmth you make with your breath.

We came out in a field of dead grass, and took a track across it to another, wider, field where there was something sticking out of the ground. It was a roof, slanting one way, not peaked, and out of the roof came a pipe with a cap on it, smoke blowing out. We went down the sort of steps that lead to a cellar, and that was what it was—a cellar with a roof on. My father said, “Looks like you fixed it up all right for yourself, Joe.”

“It’s warm. Being down in the ground the way it is, naturally it’s warm. I thought what is the sense of building a house up again, they burned it down once, they’ll burn it down again. What do I need a house for anyways? I got all the room I need here, I fixed it up comfortable.” He opened the door at the bottom of the steps. “Mind your head here. I don’t say everybody should live in a hole in the ground, Ben. Though animals do it, and what an animal does, by and large it makes sense. But if you’re married, that’s another story.” He laughed. “Me, I don’t plan on getting married.”

It was not completely dark. There were the old cellar windows, letting in a little grimy light. The man lit a coal-oil lamp, though, and set it on the table.

“There, you can see where you’re at.”

It was all one room, an earth floor with boards not nailed together, just laid down to make broad paths for walking, a stove on a sort of platform, table, couch, chairs, even a kitchen cupboard, several thick, very dirty blankets of the type used in sleighs and to cover horses. Perhaps if it had not had such a terrible smell—of coal oil, urine, earth and stale heavy air—I would have recognized it as the sort of place I would like to live in myself, like the houses I made under snow drifts, in winter, with sticks of firewood for furniture, like another house I had made long ago under the verandah, my floor the strange powdery earth that never got sun or rain.

But I was wary, sitting on the dirty couch, pretending not to look at anything. My father said, “You’re snug here, Joe, that’s right.” He sat by the table, and there the hatchet lay.

“You should of seen me before the snow started to melt. Wasn’t nothing showing but a smokestack.”

“Nor you don’t get lonesome?”

“Not me. I was never one for lonesome. And I got a cat, Ben. Where is that cat? There he is, in behind the stove. He don’t relish company, maybe.” He pulled it out, a huge, grey torn with sullen eyes. “Show you what he can do.” He took a saucer from the table and a Mason jar from the cupboard and poured something into the saucer. He set it in front of the cat.

“Joe that cat don’t drink whisky, does he?”

“You wait and see.”

The cat rose and stretched himself stiffly, took one baleful look around and lowered his head to drink.

“Straight whisky,” my father said.

“I bet that’s a sight you ain’t seen before. And you ain’t likely to see it again. That cat’d take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don’t get no milk, he’s forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”

“Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”

The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.

“Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”

“It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but be brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the coloured stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.

“It’s them Silases botherin me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won’t ever quit botherin me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”

“Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”