Alice Munros Best

Ladner cremated, but I didn’t think of it. I just put him here in the Doud plot to surprise my father and mystepmother. But now I must tell you, the other night I had a dream! I dreamed that I was around behind the Canadian Tire Store and they had the big plastic tent up as they do when they are selling bedding-plants in the spring. I went and opened up the trunk of my car, just as if I were getting my annual load of salvia or impatiens. Other people were waiting as well and men in green aprons were going back and forth from the tent. A woman said to me, ‘Seven years sure goes by in a hurry!’ She seemed to know me but I didn’t know her and I thought, Why is this always happening? Is it because I did a little schoolteaching? Is it because of what you might politely call the conduct of my life?
    “Then the significance of the seven years struck me and I knew what I was doing there and what the other people were doing there. They had come for the bones. I had come for Ladner’s bones; in the dream it was seven years since he had been buried. But I thought, Isn’t this what they do in Greece or somewhere, why are we doing it here? I said to some people, Are the graveyards getting overcrowded? What have we taken up this custom for? Is it pagan or Christian or what? The people I spoke to looked rather sullen and offended and I thought, What have I done now. I’ve lived around here all my life but I can still get this look – is it the word
pagan?
Then one of the men handed me a plastic bag and I took it gratefully and held it, thinking of Ladner’s strong leg bones and wide shoulder bones and intelligent skull all washed and polished by some bath-and-brush apparatus no doubt concealed in the plastic tent. This seemed to have something to do with my feelings for him and his for me being purified but the idea was more interesting and subtle than that. I was so happy, though, to receive my load and other people were happy too. In fact some of them became quite jolly and were tossing their plastic bags in the air. Some of the bags were bright blue, but most were green, and mine was one of the regular green ones.
    “‘Oh,’ someone said to me. ‘Did you get the little girl?’
    “I understood what was meant. The little girl’s bones. I saw that my bag was really quite small and light, to contain Ladner. I mean, Ladner’s bones. What little girl? I thought, but I was already getting confused about everything and had a suspicion that I might be dreaming. It came into my mind, Do they mean the little boy? Just as I woke up I wasthinking of Kenny and wondering, Was it seven years since the accident? (I hope it doesn’t hurt you, Liza, that I mention this – also I know that Kenny was no longer little when the accident happened.) I woke up and thought that I must ask Ladner about this. I always know even before I am awake that Ladner’s body is not beside me and that the sense of him I have, of his weight and heat and smell, are memories. But I still have the feeling – when I wake – that he is in the next room and I can call him and tell him my dream or whatever. Then I have to realize that isn’t so, every morning, and I feel a chill. I feel a shrinking. I feel as if I had a couple of wooden planks lying across my chest, which doesn’t incline me to get up. A common experience I’m having. But at the moment I’m not having it, just describing it, and in fact I am rather happy sitting here with my bottle of red wine.”
    This was a letter Bea Doud never sent and in fact never finished. In her big, neglected house in Carstairs, she had entered a period of musing and drinking, of what looked to everybody else like a slow decline, but to her seemed, after all, sadly pleasurable, like a convalescence.
    Bea Doud had met Ladner when she was out for a Sunday drive in the country with Peter Parr. Peter Parr was a science teacher, also the Principal of the Carstairs High School, where Bea had for a while done some substitute teaching. She did not have a teacher’s certificate, but she had an M.A. in English and things were more lax in those days. Also, she would be called upon to help with school excursions, herding a class to the Royal Ontario Museum or to Stratford for their annual dose of Shakespeare. Once she became interested in Peter Parr, she tried to keep clear of such involvements. She wished things to be seemly, for his sake. Peter Parr’s wife was in a nursing home – she had multiple sclerosis,