The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online

some thread of ordinary classroom routine was maintained; an offering. Some people learned to spell.
    She took snuff. She was the only person Rose had ever seen do that. She would sprinkle a bit on the back of her hand and lift the hand to her face, give a delicate snort. Her head back, her throat exposed, she looked for a moment contemptuous, challenging. Otherwise she was not in the least eccentric. She was plump, gray, shabby.
    Flo said she had probably fogged her brain with the snuff. It was like being a drug addict. Cigarettes only shot your nerves.
    One thing in the school was captivating, lovely. Pictures of birds. Rose didn’t know if the teacher had climbed up and nailed them above the blackboard, too high for easy desecration, if they were her first and last hopeful effort, or if they dated from some earlier, easier time in the school’s history. Where had they come from, how hadthey arrived there, when nothing else did, in the way of decoration, illustration?
    A red-headed woodpecker; an oriole; a blue jay; a Canada goose. The colors clear and long-lasting. Backgrounds of pure snow, of blossoming branches, of heady summer sky. In an ordinary classroom they would not have seemed so extraordinary. Here they were bright and eloquent, so much at variance with everything else that what they seemed to represent was not the birds themselves, not those skies and snows, but some other world of hardy innocence, bounteous information, privileged lightheartedness. No stealing from lunchpails there; no slashing coats; no pulling down pants and probing with painful sticks; no fucking; no Franny.
    T here were three big girls in the Entrance Class. One was named Donna; one was Cora; one was Bernice. Those three were the Entrance Class; there was nobody else. Three queens. But when you looked closer, a queen and two princesses. That was how Rose thought of them. They walked around the schoolyard arm-in-arm, or with their arms around each other’s waists. Cora in the middle. She was the tallest. Donna and Bernice leaning against and leading up to her.
    It was Cora Rose loved.
    Cora lived with her grandparents. Her grandmother went across the bridge to Hanratty, to do cleaning and ironing. Her grandfather was the honey-dumper. That meant he went around cleaning out toilets. That was his job.
    Before she had the money saved up to put in a real bathroom Flo had gotten a chemical toilet to put in a corner of the woodshed. A better arrangement than the outhouse, particularly in the wintertime. Cora’s grandfather disapproved. He said to Flo, “Many has got these chemicals in and many has wished they never.”
    He pronounced the ch in chemicals like the ch in church.
    Cora was illegitimate. Her mother worked somewhere, or was married. Perhaps she worked as a maid, and she was able to send castoffs. Cora had plenty of clothes. She came to school in fawn-colored satin, rippling over the hips; in royal-blue velvet with a rose of the same materialflopping from one shoulder; in dull rose crepe loaded with fringe. These clothes were too old for her (Rose did not think so), but not too big. She was tall, solid, womanly. Sometimes she did her hair in a roll on top of her head, let it dip over one eye. She and Donna and Bernice often had their hair done in some grown-up style, their lips richly painted, their cheeks cakily powdered. Cora’s features were heavy. She had an oily forehead, lazy brunette eyelids, the ripe and indolent self-satisfaction that would soon go hard and matronly. But she was splendid at the moment, walking in the schoolyard with her attendants (it was actually Donna with the pale oval face, the fair frizzy hair, who came closest to being pretty), arms linked, seriously talking. She did not waste any attention on the boys at school, none of those girls did. They were waiting, perhaps already acquiring, real boyfriends. Some boys called to them from the basement door, wistfully insulting, and Cora turned and yelled at