Alice Munros Best

a bridge there, you had to pay a man to row you.
    “I couldn’t pay but I crossed on the stones and just hiked up my skirts and waded,” she said. “It was that dry a summer.”
    Naturally I did not know what summer she was talking about.
    Then it was, Look at the big fields, where are the stumps gone, where is the bush? And look how straight the road goes, and they’re building their houses out of brick! And what are those buildings as big as churches?
    Barns, I said.
    I knew my way to Carstairs all right but expected help from Old Annie once we got there. None was forthcoming. I drove up and down the main street waiting for her to spot something familiar. “If I could just see the inn,” she said, “I’d know where the track goes off behind it.”
    It was a factory town, not very pretty in my opinion. The Steamer of course got attention, and I was able to call out for directions to the Herron farm without stopping the engine. Shouts and gestures and finally I was able to get us on the right road. I told Old Annie to watch the mailboxes but she was concerned with finding the creek. I spotted the name myself, and turned us in at a long lane with a red-brick house at the end of it and a couple of these barns that had amazed Old Annie. Red-brick houses with verandas and key windows were all the style then, they were going up everywhere.
    “Look there!” Old Annie said, and I thought she meant where a herd of cows was tearing away from us in the pasture-field alongside the lane. But she was pointing at a mound pretty well covered with wild grape, a few logs sticking out of it. She said that was the shanty. I said, “Well, good – now let’s hope you recognize one or two of the people.”
    There were enough people around. A couple of visiting buggies were pulled up in the shade, horses tethered and cropping grass. By the time the Steamer stopped at the side veranda, a number were lined up to look at it. They didn’t come forward – not even the children ran out to look close up the way town children would have done. They all just stood in a row looking at it in a tight-lipped sort of way.
    Old Annie was staring off in the other direction.
    She told me to get down. Get down, she said, and ask them if there is a Mr. George Herron that lives here and is he alive yet, or dead?
    I did what I was told. And one of the men said, that’s right. He is. My father.
    Well, I have brought somebody, I told them. I have brought Mrs. Annie Herron.
    The man said, that so?
    (A pause here due to a couple of fainting-fits and a trip to the hospital. Lots of tests to use up the taxpayers’ money. Now I’m back and have read this over, astounded at the rambling but too lazy to start again. I have not even got to Treece Herron, which is the part you are interested in, but hold on, I’m nearly there.)
    These people were all dumbfounded about Old Annie, or so I gathered. They had not known where she was or what she was doing or if she was alive. But you mustn’t think they surged out and greeted her in any excited way. Just the one young man came out, very mannerly, and helped first her then me down from the car. He said to me that Old Annie was his grandfather’s sister-in-law. It was too bad we hadn’t come even a few months sooner, he said, because his grandfather had been quite well and his mind quite clear – he had even written a piece for the paper about his early days here – but then he had got sick. He had recovered but would never be himself again. He could not talk, except now and then a few words.
    This mannerly young man was Treece Herron.
    We must have arrived just after they finished their dinner. The woman of the house came out and asked him – Treece Herron – to ask us if we had eaten. You would think she or we did not speak English. They were all very shy – the women with their skinned-back hair, and men in dark-blue Sunday suits, and tongue-tied children. I hope you do not think I am making fun of them – it is just that I cannot understand for the life of me why it is necessary to be so shy.
    We were taken to the dining-room which had an unused smell – they must have had their dinner elsewhere – and were served a great deal of food of which I remember salted radishes and leaf lettuce and roastchicken and strawberries and cream. Dishes from the china cabinet, not their usual. Good old Indian Tree. They had sets of everything. Plushy living-room suite, walnut dining-room suite. It was going to