Alice Munros Best

when he was also eating the fruit of wild apple trees and grapevines. He was quite sane but abhorred conversation. He could not altogether avoid it in the weeks following his son’s death, but he had a way of cutting it short.
    “Should’ve watched out what he was doing.”
    Walking in the country that day, he met another person who was not at the funeral. A woman. She did not try to start any conversation and in fact seemed as fierce in her solitude as himself, whipping the air past her with long fervent strides.
    THE PIANO FACTORY , which had started out making pump organs, stretched along the west side of town, like a medieval town wall. There were two long buildings like the inner and outer ramparts, with a closed-in bridge between them where the main offices were. And reaching up into the town and the streets of workers’ houses you had the kilns and the sawmill and the lumberyard and storage sheds. The factory whistledictated the time for many to get up, blowing at six o’clock in the morning. It blew again for work to start at seven and at twelve for dinner time and at one in the afternoon for work to recommence, and then at five-thirty for the men to lay down their tools and go home.
    Rules were posted beside the time clock, under glass. The first two rules were:
    ONE MINUTE LATE IS FIFTEEN MINUTES PAY. BE PROMPT. DON’T TAKE SAFETY FOR GRANTED. WATCH OUT FOR YOURSELF AND THE NEXT MAN.
    There had been accidents in the factory and in fact a man had been killed when a load of lumber fell on him. That had happened before Arthur’s time. And once, during the war, a man had lost an arm, or part of an arm. On the day that happened, Arthur was away in Toronto. So he had never seen an accident – nothing serious, anyway. But it was often at the back of his mind now that something might happen.
    Perhaps he did not feel so sure that trouble wouldn’t come near him, as he had felt before his wife died. She had died in 1919, in the last flurry of the Spanish flu, when everyone had got over being frightened. Even she had not been frightened. That was nearly five years ago and it still seemed to Arthur like the end of a carefree time in his life. But to other people he had always seemed very responsible and serious – nobody had noticed much difference in him.
    In his dreams of an accident there was a spreading silence, everything was shut down. Every machine in the place stopped making its customary noise and every man’s voice was removed, and when Arthur looked out of the office window he understood that doom had fallen. He never could remember any particular thing he saw that told him this. It was just the space, the dust in the factory yard, that said to him
now.
    THE BOOKS STAYED on the floor of his car for a week or so. His daughter Bea said, “What are those books doing here?” and then he remembered.
    Bea read out the titles and the authors.
Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the Northwest Passage
, by G. B. Smith.
What’s Wrong with the World?
, G. K. Chesterton.
The Taking of Quebec
, Archibald Hendry.
Bolshevism: Practice and Theory
, by Lord Bertrand Russell.
    “Bol-
shev
-ism,” Bea said, and Arthur told her how to pronounce it correctly. She asked what it was, and he said, “It’s something they’ve got in Russia that I don’t understand so well myself. But from what I hear of it, it’s a disgrace.”
    Bea was thirteen at this time. She had heard about the Russian Ballet and also about dervishes. She believed for the next couple of years that Bolshevism was some sort of diabolical and maybe indecent dance. At least this was the story she told when she was grown up.
    She did not mention that the books were connected with the man who had had the accident. That would have made the story less amusing. Perhaps she had really forgotten.
    THE LIBRARIAN WAS perturbed. The books still had their cards in them, which meant they had never been checked out, just removed from the shelves and taken away.
    “The one by Lord Russell has been missing a long time.”
    Arthur was not used to such reproofs, but he said mildly, “I am returning them on behalf of somebody else. The chap who was killed. In the accident at the factory.”
    The Librarian had the Franklin book open. She was looking at the picture of the boat trapped in the ice.
    “His wife asked me to,” Arthur said.
    She picked up each book separately, and shook it as if she expected something to fall out. She ran her fingers in between the