The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Page B

then, maybe couldn’t remember home, or find your way if you did. So they let you out on the streets.
    Flo took ten dollars and put it in a little cloth bag which she sewed to the strap of Rose’s slip. Another thing likely to happen was that Rose would get her purse stolen.
    Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adopted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money.
    Rose said she didn’t see how she could tell which ones were disguised.
    Flo had worked in Toronto once. She had worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in Union Station. That was how she knew all she knew. She never saw sunlight, in those days, except on her days off. But she saw plenty else. She saw a man cut another man’s stomach with a knife, just pull out his shirt and do a tidy cut, as if it was a watermelon not a stomach. The stomach’s owner just sat looking down surprised, with no time to protest. Flo implied that that was nothing, in Toronto. She saw two bad women (that was what Flo called whores, running the two words together, like badminton) get into a fight, and a man laughed at them, other men stopped and laughed and egged them on, and they had their fists full of each other’s hair. At last the police came and took them away, still howling and yelping.
    She saw a child die of a fit, too. Its face was black as ink.
    “Well I’m not scared,” said Rose provokingly. “There’s the police, anyway.”
    “Oh, them! They’d be the first ones to diddle you!”
    She did not believe anything Flo said on the subject of sex. Consider the undertaker.
    A little bald man, very neatly dressed, would come into the store sometimes and speak to Flo with a placating expression.
    “I only wanted a bag of candy. And maybe a few packages of gum. And one or two chocolate bars. Could you go to the trouble of wrapping them?”
    Flo in her mock-deferential tone would assure him that she could. She wrapped them in heavy-duty white paper, so they were something like presents. He took his time with the selection, humming and chatting, then dawdled for a while. He might ask how Flo was feeling. And how Rose was, if she was there.
    “You look pale. Young girls need fresh air.” To Flo he would say, “You work too hard. You’ve worked hard all your life.”
    “No rest for the wicked,” Flo would say agreeably.
    When he went out she hurried to the window. There it was—the old black hearse with its purple curtains.
    “He’ll be after them today!” Flo would say as the hearse rolled away at a gentle pace, almost a funeral pace. The little man had beenan undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had taken over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all over the country, looking for women. So Flo said. Rose could not believe it. Flo said he gave them the gum and the candy. Rose said he probably ate them himself. Flo said he had been seen, he had been heard. In mild weather he drove with the windows down, singing, to himself or to somebody out of sight in the back.
Her brow is like the snowdrift
Her throat is like the swan
    Flo imitated him singing. Gently overtaking some woman walking on a back road, or resting at a country crossroads. All compliments and courtesy and chocolate bars, offering a ride. Of course every woman who reported being asked said she had turned him down. He never pestered anybody, drove politely on. He called in at houses, and if the husband was home he seemed to like just as well as anything to sit and chat. Wives said that was all he ever did anyway but Flo did not believe it.
    “Some women are taken in,” she said. “A number.” She liked to speculate on what the hearse was like inside. Plush. Plush on the walls and the roof and the floor. Soft purple, the color of the curtains, the color of dark lilacs.
    All nonsense, Rose thought. Who could believe it, of a man that age?
    R ose was going to Toronto