Selected Stories by Alice Munro

he can do.” He took a saucer from the table and a mason jar from the cupboard and poured something into the saucer. He set it in front of the cat.
    “Joe, that cat don’t drink whisky, does he?”
    “You wait and see.”
    The cat rose and stretched himself stiffly, took one baleful look around, and lowered his head to drink.
    “Straight whisky,” my father said.
    “I bet that’s a sight you ain’t seen before. And you ain’t likely to see it again. That cat’d take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don’t get no milk, he’s forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”
    “Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”
    The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap, and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.
    “Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”
    “It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but he brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the colored stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.
    “It’s them Silases botherin’ me, Ben. They come by day and bynight. People won’t ever quit botherin’ me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin’ for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”
    “Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”
    The man groaned and shook his head. “They never will stop. No. They never will stop.”
    “Just try not paying any attention to them, they’ll tire out and go away.”
    “They’ll burn me in my bed. They tried to before.”
    My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open.
    M Y FATHER set me down. “You’re woken up now. Stand up. See. I can’t carry you and this sack full of rats both.”
    We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish-brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of gray barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small.
    “Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing.
    It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind.
    “That’s no more’n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we’ll see the light in the dining room where your momma is.”
    On the way I said, “Why did he have an axe?”
    “Now listen,” my father said. “Are you listening to me? He don’t mean any harm with that axe. It’s just his habit, carrying it around. But don’t say anything about it at home. Don’t mention it to your momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it. You and me aren’t, but they might be. And there is no use of that.”
    After a while he said, “What are you not going to mention about?” and I said, “The axe.”
    “You weren’t scared, were you?”
    “No,” I said hopefully. “Who is going to burn him and his bed?”
    “Nobody. Less he manages it