Alice Munros Best

he says, not too loudly but firmly, and nudges again.
    Almeda tastes bile at the back of her throat.
    “Alive,” says Jarvis Poulter, and the woman confirms this. She stirs, she grunts weakly.
    Almeda says, “I will get the doctor.” If she had touched the woman, if she had forced herself to touch her, she would not have made such a mistake.
    “Wait,” says Jarvis Poulter. “Wait. Let’s see if she can get up.”
    “Get up, now,” he says to the woman. “Come on. Up, now. Up.”
    Now a startling thing happens. The body heaves itself onto all fours, the head is lifted – the hair all matted with blood and vomit – and thewoman begins to bang this head, hard and rhythmically, against Almeda Roth’s picket fence. As she bangs her head, she finds her voice and lets out an open-mouthed yowl, full of strength and what sounds like an anguished pleasure.
    “Far from dead,” says Jarvis Poulter. “And I wouldn’t bother the doctor.”
    “There’s blood,” says Almeda as the woman turns her smeared face.
    “From her nose,” he says. “Not fresh.” He bends down and catches the horrid hair close to the scalp to stop the head-banging.
    “You stop that, now,” he says. “Stop it. Gwan home, now. Gwan home, where you belong.” The sound coming out of the woman’s mouth has stopped. He shakes her head slightly, warning her, before he lets go of her hair. “Gwan home!”
    Released, the woman lunges forward, pulls herself to her feet. She can walk. She weaves and stumbles down the street, making intermittent, cautious noises of protest. Jarvis Poulter watches her for a moment to make sure that she’s on her way. Then he finds a large burdock leaf, on which he wipes his hand. He says, “There goes your dead body!”
    The back gate being locked, they walk around to the front. The front gate stands open. Almeda still feels sick. Her abdomen is bloated; she is hot and dizzy.
    “The front door is locked,” she says faintly. “I came out by the kitchen.” If only he would leave her, she could go straight to the privy. But he follows. He follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall. He speaks to her in a tone of harsh joviality that she has never before heard from him. “No need for alarm,” he says. “It’s only the consequences of drink. A lady oughtn’t to be living alone so close to a bad neighborhood.” He takes hold of her arm just above the elbow. She can’t open her mouth to speak to him, to say thank you. If she opened her mouth, she would retch.
    What Jarvis Poulter feels for Almeda Roth at this moment is just what he has not felt during all those circumspect walks and all his own solitary calculations of her probable worth, undoubted respectability, adequate comeliness. He has not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair – prematurely gray but thick and soft – her flushed face, her light clothing, whichnobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?
    “I will call on you later,” he says to her. “I will walk with you to church.”
At the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets last Sunday morning there was discovered, by a lady resident there, the body of a certain woman of Pearl Street, thought to be dead but only, as it turned out, dead drunk. She was roused from her heavenly – or otherwise – stupor by the firm persuasion of Mr. Poulter, a neighbour and a Civil Magistrate, who had been summoned by the lady resident. Incidents of this sort, unseemly, troublesome, and disgraceful to our town, have of late become all too common.
v
    I sit at the bottom of sleep,
As on the floor of the sea.
And fanciful Citizens of the Deep
Are graciously greeting me.
    As soon as Jarvis Poulter has gone and she has heard her front gate close, Almeda rushes to the privy. Her relief is not complete, however, and she realizes that the pain and fullness in her lower body come from an accumulation of menstrual blood that has not yet started to flow. She closes and locks the back door. Then, remembering Jarvis Poulter’s words about church, she writes on a piece of paper,
I am not well, and wish to rest today.
She sticks this firmly into the outside frame of the little window in the front door. She locks that door too. She is trembling, as if from a great shock or danger. But she builds a fire, so that she can make tea. She boils water, measures the tea leaves, makes a