Alice Munro: The Love Of A Good Woman

They crossed the bridge the same way as always, on the shelf. But they had no sense of risk or courage or nonchalance. They might as well have taken the walkway.

Instead of following the sharp-turning road from which you could reach both the harbor and the square, they climbed straight up the bank on a path that came out near the railway sheds. The clock played its quarter-after chimes. A quarter after twelve.

This was the time when people were walking home for dinner. People from offices had the afternoon off. But people who worked in stores were getting only their customary hour-the stores stayed open till ten or eleven o’clock on Saturday night.

Most people were going home to a hot, filling meal. Pork chops, or sausages, or boiled beef, or cottage roll. Potatoes for certain, mashed or fried; winter-stored root vegetables or cabbage or creamed onions. (A few housewives, richer or more feckless, might have opened a tin of peas or butter beans.) Bread, muffins, preserves, pie. Even those people who didn’t have a home to go to, or who for some reason didn’t want to go there, would be sitting down to much the same sort of food at the Duke of Cumberland, or the Merchants’ Hotel, or for less money behind the foggy windows of Shervill’s Dairy Bar.

Those walking home were mostly men. The women were already there-they were there all the time. But some women of middle age who worked in stores or offices for a reason that was not their fault-dead husbands or sick husbands or never any husband at all-were friends of the boys’ mothers, and they called out greetings even across the street (it was worst for Bud Salter, whom they called Buddy) in a certain amused or sprightly way that brought to mind all they knew of family matters, or distant infancies.

Men didn’t bother greeting boys by name, even if they knew them well. They called them “boys” or “young fellows” or, occa-sionally, sirs.

“Good day to you, sirs.”

“You boys going straight home now?”

“What monkey business you young fellows been up to this morning?”

All these greetings had a degree of jocularity, but there were differences. The men who said “young fellows” were better disposed-or wished to seem better disposed-than the ones who said “boys.” “Boys” could be the signal that a telling off was to follow, for offenses that could be either vague or specific. “Young fellows” indicated that the speaker had once been young himself. “Sirs” was outright mockery and disparagement but didn’t open the way to any scolding, because the person who said that could not be bothered.

When answering, the boys didn’t look up past any lady’s purse or any man’s Adam’s apple. They said “Hullo” clearly, because there might be some kind of trouble if you didn’t, and in answer to queries they said “Yessir” and “Nosir” and “Nothing much.” Even on this day, such voices speaking to them caused some alarm and confusion, and they replied with the usual reticence.

At a certain corner they had to separate. Cece Ferns, always the most anxious about getting home, pulled away first. He said, “See you after dinner.”

Bud Salter said, “Yeah. We got to go downtown then.”

This meant, as they all understood, “downtown to the Police Office.” It seemed that without needing to consult each other they had taken up a new plan of operation, a soberer way of telling their news. But it wasn’t clearly said that they wouldn’t be telling anything at home. There wasn’t any good reason why Bud Salter or Jimmy Box couldn’t have done that. Cece Ferns never told anything at home.

Cece Ferns was an only child. His parents were older than most boys’ parents, or perhaps they only seemed older, because of the disabling life they lived together. When he got away from the other boys, Cece started to trot, as he usually did for the last block home. This was not because he was eager to get there or because he thought he could make anything better when he did. It may have been to make the time pass quickly, because the last block had to be full of apprehension.

His mother was in the kitchen. Good. She was out of bed though still in her wrapper. His father wasn’t there, and that was good, too. His father worked at the grain elevator and got Saturday afternoon off, and if he wasn’t home by now it was likely that he had gone straight to the Cumberland. That meant it would be late in the day before they had to deal with him.

Cece’s father’s name was Cece Ferns, too. It was a well-known and generally an affectionately known name in Walley, and somebody telling a story even thirty or forty years later would take it for granted that everybody would know it was the father who was being talked about, not the son. If a person relatively new in town said, “That doesn’t sound like Cece,” he would be told that nobody meant that Cece.

“Not him, we’re talking about his old man.”

They talked about the time Cece Ferns went to the hospital-or was taken there-with pneumonia, or some other desperate thing, and the nurses wrapped him in wet towels or sheets to get the fever down. The fever sweated out of him, and all the towels and sheets turned brown. It was the nicotine in him. The nurses had never seen anything like it. Cece was delighted. He claimed to have been smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol since he was ten years old.

And the time he went to church. It was hard to imagine why, but it was the Baptist church, and his wife was a Baptist, so perhaps he went to please her, though that was even harder to imagine. They were serving Communion the Sunday he went, and in the Baptist church the bread is bread but the wine is grape juice. “What’s this?” cried Cece Ferns aloud. “If this is the blood of the Lamb then he must’ve been pretty damn anemic.”

Preparations for the noon meal were under way in the Fernses’ kitchen. A loaf of sliced bread was sitting on the table and a can of diced beets had been opened. A few slices of bologna had been fried-before the eggs, though they should have been done after-and were being kept slightly warm on top of the stove. And now Cece’s mother had started the eggs. She was bending over the stove with the egg lifter in one hand and the other hand pressed to her stomach, cradling a pain.

Cece took the egg lifter out of her hand and turned down the electric heat, which was way too high. He had to hold the pan off the burner while the burner cooled down, in order to keep the egg whites from getting too tough or burning at the edges. He hadn’t been in time to wipe out the old grease and plop a bit of fresh lard in the pan. His mother never wiped out the old grease, just let it sit from one meal to the next and put in a bit of lard when she had to.

When the heat was more to his liking, he put the pan down and coaxed the lacy edges of the eggs into tidy circles. He found a clean spoon and dribbled a little hot fat over the yokes to set them. He and his mother liked their eggs cooked this way, but his mother often couldn’t manage it right. His father liked his eggs turned over and flattened out like pancakes, cooked hard as shoe leather and blackened with pepper. Cece could cook them the way he wanted, too.

None of the other boys knew how practiced he was in the kitchen-just as none of them knew about the hiding place he had made outside the house in the blind corner past the dining-room window, behind the Japanese barberry.

His mother sat in the chair by the window while he was finishing up the eggs. She kept an eye on the street. There was still a chance that his father would come home for something to eat. He might not be drunk yet. But the way he behaved didn’t always depend on how drunk he was. If he came into the kitchen now he might tell Cece to make him some eggs, too. Then he might ask him where his apron was and say that he would make some fellow a dandy wife. That would be how he’d behave if he was in a good mood. In another sort of mood he would start off by staring at Cece in a certain way-that is, with an exaggerated, absurdly threatening expression-and telling him he better watch out.