Selected Stories by Alice Munro Page A

himself like he did last time.”
    “Who is the Silases?”
    “Nobody,” my father said. “Just nobody.”
    “W E FOUND the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wisht we could’ve brought him home.”
    “We thought you’d fell in the Wawanash River,” said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks.
    “Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no-man’s-land beyond the bush.”
    “Him!” said Mary like an explosion. “He’s the one burned his house down, I know him!”
    “That’s right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You’d be as cozy as a groundhog, Mary.”
    “I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right.” She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough.
    “A man that’d do a thing like that ought to be locked up.”
    “Maybe so,” my father said. “Just the same I hope they don’t get him for a while yet. Old Joe.”
    “Eat your supper,” Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. “Look at her,” she said. “Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she’s been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?”
    “Not a drop,” said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

    “ANYWAY, HE KNOWS how to fascinate the women,” said Et to Char. She could not tell if Char went paler, hearing this, because Char was pale in the first place as anybody could get. She was like a ghost now, with her hair gone white. But still beautiful, she couldn’t lose it.
    “No matter to him the age or the size,” Et pressed on. “It’s natural to him as breathing, I guess. I only hope the poor things aren’t taken in by it.”
    “I wouldn’t worry,” Char said.
    The day before, Et had taken Blaikie Noble up on his invitation to go along on one of his tours and listen to his spiel. Char was asked too, but of course she didn’t go. Blaikie Noble ran a bus. The bottom part of it was painted red and the top part was striped, to give the effect of an awning. On the side was painted: LAKESHORE TOURS, INDIAN GRAVES, LIMESTONE GARDENS, MILLIONAIRE’S MANSION, BLAIKIE NOBLE, DRIVER, GUIDE . Blaikie had a room at the hotel, and he also worked on the grounds, with one helper, cutting grass and clipping hedges and digging the borders. What a comedown, Et had said at the beginning of the summer when they first found out he was back. She and Char had known him in the old days.
    So Et found herself squeezed into his bus with a lot of strangers, though before the afternoon was over she had made friends with anumber of them and had a couple of promises of jackets needing letting out, as if she didn’t have enough to do already. That was beside the point, the thing on her mind was watching Blaikie.
    And what did he have to show? A few mounds with grass growing on them, covering dead Indians, a plot full of odd-shaped, grayish-white, dismal-looking limestone things—farfetched imitations of plants (there could be the cemetery, if that was what you wanted)—and an old monstrosity of a house built with liquor money. He made the most of it. A historical discourse on the Indians, then a scientific discourse on the Limestone. Et had no way of knowing how much of it was true. Arthur would know. But Arthur wasn’t there; there was nobody there but silly women, hoping to walk beside Blaikie to and from the sights, chat with him over