Alice Munros Best

“Bar-ley.”
    “‘Only reapers, reaping early,’” Eve said. She tried to remember. “‘Save the reapers, reaping early –’” “Save” was what sounded best. Save the reapers.
    SOPHIE AND IAN had bought corn at a roadside stand. It was for dinner. Plans had changed – they weren’t leaving till morning. And they had bought a bottle of gin and some tonic and limes. Ian made the drinks while Eve and Sophie sat husking the corn. Eve said, “Two dozen. That’s crazy.”
    “Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”
    Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”
    Ian wasn’t much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of mediumheight, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she’d been here. But happier, too.
    Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother’s city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve’s feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see – the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.
    “They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.
    Ian said, “Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”
    Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.
    Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.
    “The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know or didn’t care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there – think of that.”
    Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.
    “Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.
    “Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”
    She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.
    There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.
    She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.
    Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve’s story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults’ feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
    What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.
    IF THE GIRL CAME looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve’s carefulness would go for nothing.
    The girl wouldn’t come. Much better offers would turn up before she’d stood ten