The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Page A

waited.”
    Billy Pope was laughing at her. “Did they come and haul you out?”
    “I forget. I don’t think so. They would’ve had a hard time finding me, I was in behind all the feed bags. No. I don’t know. I guess what happened in the end was I got tired out waiting and come out by myself.”
    “And lived to tell the tale,” said Rose’s father, swallowing the last word as he was overcome by a prolonged coughing fit. Flo said he shouldn’t stay up any longer but he said he would just lie down on the kitchen couch, which he did. Flo and Rose cleared the table and washed the dishes, then for something to do they all—Flo and Billy Pope and Brian and Rose—sat around the table and played euchre. Her father dozed. Rose thought of Flo sitting in a corner of the granary with the bits of china and the wilted velvet flowers and whatever else was precious to her, waiting, in a gradually reduced state of terror, it must have been, and exaltation, and desire, to see how death would slice the day.
    Her father was waiting. His shed was locked, his books would not be opened again, by him, and tomorrow was the last day he would wear shoes. They were all used to this idea, and in some ways they would be more disturbed if his death did not take place, than if it did. No one could ask what he thought about it. He would have treated such an inquiry as an impertinence, a piece of dramatizing, an indulgence. Rose believed he would have. She believed he was prepared for Westminster Hospital, the old soldiers’ hospital, prepared for its masculine gloom, its yellowing curtains pulled around the bed, its spotty basins. And for what followed. She understood that he would never be with her more than at the present moment. The surprise to come was that he wouldn’t be with her less.
    D rinking coffee, wandering around the blind green halls of the new high school, at the Centennial Year Reunion—she hadn’t come for that, had bumped into it accidentally, so to speak, when she camehome to see what was to be done about Flo—Rose met people who said, “Did you know Ruby Carruthers was dead? They took off the one breast and then the other but it was all through her, she died.
    And people who said, “I saw your picture in a magazine, what was the name of that magazine, I have it at home.”
    The new high school had an auto mechanics shop for training auto mechanics and a beauty parlor for training beauty parlor operators; a library; an auditorium; a gymnasium; a whirling fountain arrangement for washing your hands in the Ladies’ Room. Also a functioning dispenser of Kotex.
    Del Fairbridge had become an undertaker.
    Runt Chesterton had become an accountant.
    Horse Nicholson had made a lot of money as a contractor and had left that to go into politics. He had made a speech saying that what they needed was a lot more God in the classroom and a lot less French.

Wild Swans
    F lo said to watch for White Slavers. She said this was how they operated: an old woman, a motherly or grandmotherly sort, made friends while riding beside you on a bus or train. She offered you candy, which was drugged. Pretty soon you began to droop and mumble, were in no condition to speak for yourself. Oh, help, the woman said, my daughter (granddaughter) is sick, please somebody help me get her off so that she can recover in the fresh air. Up stepped a polite gentleman, pretending to be a stranger, offering assistance. Together, at the next stop, they hustled you off the train or bus, and that was the last the ordinary world ever saw of you. They kept you a prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you had been transported drugged and bound so you wouldn’t even know where you were), until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and invested with vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. It took about three years, for you to get to this state. You wouldn’t want to go home,