The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro

they came to consult her about things that were lost.
    “Didn’t they want to get in touch with their relations?” Rose’s father said, egging Flo on as he liked to when she was telling a story. “I thought she could put you in touch with the dead.”
    “Well, most of them seen enough of their relations when they was alive.”
    It was rings and wills and livestock they wanted to know about; where had things disappeared to?
    “One fellow I knew went to her and he had lost his wallet. He was a man that worked on the railway line. And she says to him, well, do you remember it was about a week ago you were working along the tracks and you come along near an orchard and you thought you would like an apple? So you hopped over the fence and it was right then you dropped your wallet, right then and there in the long grass. But a dog came along, she says, a dog picked it up and dropped it a ways further along the fence, and that’s where you’ll find it. Well, he’d forgot all about the orchard and climbing that fence and he was so amazed at her, he gave her a dollar. And he went and found his wallet in the very place she described. This is true, I knew him. But the money was allchewed up, it was all chewed up in shreds, and when he found that he was so mad he said he wished he never give her so much!”
    “Now, you never went to her,” said Rose’s father. “You wouldn’t put your faith in the like of that?” When he talked to Flo he often spoke in country phrases, and adopted the country habit of teasing, saying the opposite of what’s true, or believed to be true.
    “No, I never went actually to ask her anything,” Flo said. “But one time I went. I had to go over there and get some green onions. My mother was sick and suffering with her nerves and this woman sent word over, that she had some green onions was good for nerves. It wasn’t nerves at all it was cancer, so what good they did I don’t know.”
    Flo’s voice climbed and hurried on, embarrassed that she had let that out.
    “I had to go and get them. She had them pulled and washed and tied up for me, and she says, don’t go yet, come on in the kitchen and see what I got for you. Well, I didn’t know what, but I dasn’t not do it. I thought she was a witch. We all did. We all did, at school. So I sat down in the kitchen and she went into the pantry and brought out a big chocolate cake and she cut a piece and give it to me. I had to sit and eat it. She sat there and watched me eat. All I can remember about her is her hands. They were great big red hands with big veins sticking up on them, and she’d be flopping and twisting them all the time in her lap. I often thought since, she ought to eat the green onions herself, she didn’t have so good nerves either.
    “Then I tasted a funny taste. In the cake. It was peculiar. I dasn’t stop eating though. I ate and ate and when I finished it all up I said thank you and I tell you I got out of there. I walked all the way down the lane because I figured she was watching me, and when I got to the road I started to run. But I was still scared she was following after me, invisible or something, and she might read what was in my mind and pick me up and pound my brains out on the gravel. When I got home I just flung open the door and hollered Poison! That’s what I was thinking. I thought she made me eat a poisoned cake.
    “All it was was moldy. That’s what my mother said. The damp in her house and she would go for days without no visitors to eat it, in spite of the crowds she collected other times. She could have a cake sitting around too long a while.
    “But I didn’t think so. No. I thought I had ate poison and I was doomed. I went and sat in this sort of place I had in a corner of the granary. Nobody knew I had it. I kept all kinds of junk in there. I kept some chips of broken china and some velvet flowers. I remember them, they were off a hat that had got rained on. So I just sat there, and I