Alice Munros Best

Louisa sturdily. “Arthur died six years ago. We kept the factory going all through the thirties even though at times we were down to three men. We had no money for repairs and I remember cutting up the office awnings so that Arthur could carry them up on a ladder and patch the roof. We tried making everything we could think of. Even outdoor bowling alleys for those amusement places. Then the war came and we couldn’t keep up. We could sell all the pianos we could make but also we were making radar cases for the Navy. I stayed in the office all through.”
    “It must have been a change,” he said, in what seemed a tactful voice. “A change from the Library.”
    “Work is work,” she said. “I still work. My stepdaughter Bea is divorced, she keeps house for me after a fashion. My son has finally finished university – he is supposed to be learning about the business, but he has some excuse to go off in the middle of every afternoon. When I come home at suppertime, I am so tired I could drop, and I hear the ice tinkling in their glasses and them laughing behind the hedge. Oh, Mud, they say when they see me, Oh, poor Mud, sit down here, get her a drink! They call me Mud because that was my son’s name for me when he was a baby. But they are neither of them babies now. The house is cool when I come home – it’s a lovely house if you remember, built in three tiers like a wedding cake. Mosaic tiles in the entrance hall. But I am always thinking about the factory, that is what fills my mind. What should we do to stay afloat? There are only five factories in Canada making pianos now, and three of them are in Quebec with the low cost of labor. No doubt you know all about that. When I talk to Arthur in my head, it is always about the same thing. I am very closeto him still but it is hardly in a mystical way. You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled. What a thing to talk to a dead man about.”
    She stopped, she was embarrassed. But she was not sure that he had listened to all of this, and in fact she was not sure that she had said all of it.
    “What started me off–” he said. “What got me going in the first place, with whatever I have managed to do, was the Library. So I owe you a great deal.”
    He put his hands on his knees, let his head fall.
    “Ah, rubbish,” he said.
    He groaned, and ended up with a laugh.
    “My father,” he said. “You wouldn’t remember my father?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Well. Sometimes I think he had the right idea.”
    Then he lifted his head, gave it a shake, and made a pronouncement.
    “Love never dies.”
    She felt impatient to the point of taking offense. This is what all the speechmaking turns you into, she thought, a person who can say things like that. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid – it might as well be dead.
    “Arthur used to come and sit in the Library,” she said. “In the beginning I was very provoked with him. I used to look at the back of his neck and think, Ha, what if something should hit you there! None of that would make sense to you. It wouldn’t make sense. And it turned out to be something else I wanted entirely. I wanted to marry him and get into a normal life.
    “A normal life,” she repeated – and a giddiness seemed to be taking over, a widespread forgiveness of folly, alerting the skin of her spotty hand, her dry thick fingers that lay not far from his, on the seat of the chair between them. An amorous flare-up of the cells, of old intentions.
Oh, never dies.
    Across the gravelled yard came a group of oddly dressed folk. They moved all together, a clump of black. The women did not show their hair – they had black shawls or bonnets covering their heads. The menwore broad hats and black braces. The children were dressed just like their elders, even to the bonnets and hats. How hot they all looked in those clothes – how hot and dusty and wary and shy.
    “The Tolpuddle Martyrs,” he said, in a faintly joking, resigned, and compassionate voice. “Ah, I guess I’d better go over. I’d better go over there and have a word with them.”
    That edge of a joke, the uneasy kindness, made her think of somebody else. Who was it? When she saw the breadth of his shoulders from behind, and the broad flat buttocks, she knew who.
    Jim Frarey.
    Oh, what kind of a