The View from Castle Rock (11 page)

“That’s the way Indians do,” Mary said. “You didn’t try to follow her?”

“She was just ducking along in and out the trees and then I couldn’t see her anymore. Else I would have. I’d have followed her and asked her what she thought she was doing.”

“Don’t you ever do such a thing,” Mary said. “You don’t know the bush like they do, you could lose yourself like
that.
” She snapped her fingers at him, then busied herself again with the baby. “I expect she was on her own business,” she said.

“Indian people have their own business we don’t ever know about. They’re not telling us everything they’re up to. Even Becky. Why should she?”

The woman of the inn entered with a big pitcher of water.

“What’s the matter?” she said to Jamie. “You scared there’s some strange boys out there? It’s just my own boys, they’re not going to hurt you.”

Such a suggestion sent Jamie skittering down the stairs and Johnnie after him. Then the two little ones ran out as well.

“Tommy! Robbie!” Mary called, but the woman said, “Your husband’s out back there, he’ll watch out for them.”

Mary did not bother saying anything. It was no strange person’s business to know that she had no husband.

The baby fell asleep at the breast, and Mary laid her on the bed, with a bolster on either side in case she rolled. She went down to eat supper, with one aching arm hanging gratefully empty of its daylong load. There was pork to eat, with cabbage and boiled potatoes. The last of last year’s potatoes, these were, and the meat had a good tough layer of fat. She filled up on fresh radishes and greens and new-baked bread which was tasty, and strong tea. The children ate at one table by themselves and were all so merry they didn’t give her a glance, not even Tommy. She was tired enough to drop, and wondering how she would ever stay awake long enough to get them to bed.

There was only one other woman in the room besides the woman of the inn who was bringing in the food. That other woman never raised her head and gobbled her supper as if she was starved. She kept her bonnet on and looked like a foreigner. Her foreign husband spoke to her in businesslike grunts now and then. Other men kept up a steady conversation, mostly in the hard punishing American tone that Mary’s own boys were beginning to imitate. These men were full of information and contradictions, and they waved their knives and forks in the air. In fact there were two or three conversations—one about the trouble in Mexico, another about where a railroad was going, which got mixed up with one about a gold strike. Some men smoked cigars at the table and if the spittoons were not handy they turned around and spat on the floor. The man sitting beside Mary tried to open a conversation more suited to a lady, asking if she had been to the tent meeting. She did not at first understand that he was speaking of a revival meeting, but when she did she said that she had no use for such things, and he begged her pardon and spoke no more.

She thought that she should not have spoken so shortly, especially as she was depending on him to pass her the bread. On the other hand, she was aware that Andrew, sitting on her other side, would not have liked her talking. Not to that man, maybe not to anybody. Andrew kept his head down and curtailed his answers. Just as he’d done when he was a lad at school. It had always been hard to tell whether he was disapproving, or just shy.

Will had been freer. Will might have wanted to hear about Mexico. So long as the men talking knew what they were talking about. Often, he thought that people didn’t. When you considered that streak in him, Will had not been so unlike Andrew, not so unlike his family, as he himself thought.

One thing there was no word of here was religion—unless you wanted to count the revival meeting, and Mary did not. No fierce arguments about doctrine. No mention either of ghosts or weird visitors, as in the old days in Ettrick. Here it was all down-to-earth, it was all about what you could find and do and understand about the real world under your feet, and she supposed that Will would have approved—that was the world he had thought he was heading for.

She squeezed out of her place, telling Andrew she was too tired to take another bite, and headed for the front hall.

At the screen door the little tag end of a breeze found its way between her sweaty dusty clothing and her skin, and she longed for the deep still night, though there was probably never such a thing in an inn. Besides the hubbub in the dining room she could hear the clatter in the kitchen and out the back door the splash of slops dumped into the pig trough, with the pigs squealing for them. And in the yard the rising voices of children, her own among them.
Ready-or-not-you’re-sure-to-be-caught
—

She clapped her hands and shouted.

“Robbie and Tommy! Johnnie, bring the little lads in.”

When she saw that Johnnie had heard her she didn’t wait, but turned and climbed the stairs.

Johnnie, herding his brothers into the hall, looked up to see his mother at the top of the stairs, looking at him with terrible cold fright, as if she didn’t know him. She took one step down and stumbled and righted herself just in time, grabbing hold of the bannister rail. She raised her head and met his eyes but could not speak. He cried out, running up the steps, and heard her say, almost without breath, “The baby—”

She meant that the baby was gone. The bolsters were not disturbed, nor was the cloth that had been placed between them, on top of the quilt. The baby had been picked up with care and taken away.

Johnnie’s cry brought a crowd, almost at once. The news travelled from one person to another. Andrew reached Mary and said to her, “Are you sure?” then made his way past her to the room. Thomas cried out in his piercing small child’s voice that the doggies had eaten his baby.

“That’s a lie,” the woman of the inn shouted, as if tackling a grown man. “Those dogs never hurt anybody in their life. They won’t even kill a groundhog.”

Mary said, “No. No.” Thomas ran to her and butted his head between her legs and she sank down on the steps.

She said she knew what had happened. Trying to get her breath steady then, she said that it was Becky Johnson.

Andrew had come back from looking around the bedroom and making sure it was as she said. He asked her what she meant.

Mary said that Becky Johnson had treated that baby almost as if it was her own. She wanted so much to keep that baby with her that she must have come and stolen her.

“She’s a squaw,” said Jamie, explaining to the people around him at the bottom of the stairs. “She was following us today. I saw her.”

Several people, but most forcibly Andrew, wanted to know where he had seen her and was he sure it was her and why had he not said anything. Jamie said that he had told his mother. Then he repeated more or less what he had said to Mary.

“I didn’t pay enough attention when he told me,” Mary said.

A man said that squaws were well known for helping themselves to white baby girls.

“They bring them up like Indians and then they go and sell them to some chief or other for a big pile of wampum.”

“It’s not like she wouldn’t take good care of her,” said Mary, maybe not even hearing this. “Becky’s a good Indian.”

Andrew asked where Becky was likely to go now and Mary said, probably back home.

“I mean to Joliet,” she said.

The innkeeper said that they could not follow that road at night, nobody could, except Indians. His wife agreed with him. She had brought Mary a cup of tea. Kindly now, she patted Tommy’s head. Andrew said that they would start back as soon as it was light in the morning.

“I’m sorry,” said Mary.

He said that it couldn’t be helped. Like a good many things, was what he implied.

The man who had set up the sawmill in this community owned a cow, which he let wander round the settlement, sending his daughter Susie out in the evening to find her and milk her. Susie was almost always accompanied by her friend Meggie, the daughter of the local schoolteacher. These girls were thirteen and twelve years old and they were bound together in an intense relationship loaded with secret rituals and special jokes and fanatical loyalty. It was true that they had nobody else to be friendly with, being the only two girls of their age in the community, but that did not stop them from feeling as if they had chosen each other against the rest of the world.

One of the things they liked to do was to call people by wrong names. Sometimes this was simple substitution, as when they called somebody named George
Tom,
or somebody named Rachel
Edith.
Sometimes they celebrated a certain characteristic—as when they called the innkeeper Tooth, because of the long eyetooth that caught on his lip—or sometimes they picked on the very opposite of what the person wanted to be, as with the innkeeper’s wife, who was very particular about her clean aprons. They called her Greasy-gravy.

The boy who looked after the horses was named Fergie, but they called him Birdie. This annoyed him quite satisfactorily. He was short and thickset, with black curly hair and widespaced innocent eyes, and had come out from Ireland just a year or so before. He would chase them when they imitated his way of talking. But the best thing they had managed was to write him a love letter and sign it Rose—the real name, as it happened, of the innkeeper’s daughter—and leave it on the horse blanket he slept under in the barn. They had not realized that he didn’t know how to read. He showed it to some men who came round the stable and it was a great joke and scandal. Rose was soon sent away to learn to be a milliner, though she was not actually suspected of having written the letter.

Neither were Susie and Meggie suspected.

One outcome was that the stable boy showed up at Meggie’s father’s door and demanded to be taught to read.

It was Susie, the eldest, who sat down on the stool they’d brought, and set to milking the cow, while Meggie wandered about picking and eating the last of the wild strawberries. The place the cow had chosen to browse in at the end of this day was close to the woods, at a little distance from the inn. Between the side door of the inn and the real woods was a stand of apple trees, and between the last of these apple trees and the trees of the woods was a small shack with a door hanging loose. It was called the smokehouse though it was not used for that purpose, or any purpose, at present.

What made Meggie investigate the shack at this time? She never knew. Perhaps it was that the door was shut, or pulled forward to be as nearly shut as it could be. It was not until she began to wrestle with the door to get it open that she heard a baby crying.

She carried it back to show Susie, and when she dipped her fingers in the fresh milk and offered one to the baby, it stopped crying and began to suck hard.

“Did somebody have it and hide it there?” she said, and Susie humiliated her—as she could occasionally do, with certain superior knowledge—by saying that it was nothing like a newborn, it was far too big. And it was dressed the way it wouldn’t be if somebody was just getting rid of it.

“Well yes,” said Meggie. “What are we going to do with it?”

Did she mean, what is the right thing to do with this? In which case the answer would be, to take it to one of their houses. Or take it to the inn, which was closer.

That was not quite what she meant.

No. She meant, how can we use this? How can we best make a joke, or fool somebody?

His plans had never been complete. He understood, when they left home, that his father—who was not under that stone but in the air or walking along the road invisibly and making his views known as well as if they had been talking together—
his father
was against their going. His mother ought to know that too, but she was ready to give in to that newcomer who looked and even sounded like his father but was entirely a sham. Who might indeed have been his father’s brother but was just the same a sham.

Even when she started packing he had believed something would stop her—it was not till
Uncle Andrew
arrived that he saw no accident was going to prevent them and it was up to him.

Then when he got tired trying to keep so far ahead of them and slipped off into the woods he started imagining he was an Indian, as he had often done before. It was an idea that came naturally from the paths you found, or the suggestions of paths, leading alongside the road or away from it. Trying his best to glide along without being heard or seen he imagined companion Indians and got so that he could almost see them and he thought of Becky Johnson, how she might have been following along trying for a chance to sneak away the baby whom she loved unreasonably. He had kept in the woods until the others had stopped in front of the inn and he had seen this shack, investigated it before he made his way among the apple trees. Those same apple trees sheltered him when he went out of the side door with the sleeping baby so light in his arms, so faintly breathing, hardly imaginable as a human person. Her eyes were open a crack as she slept. In the shack there were a couple of shelves that had not fallen down, and he put her on the top one, where wolves or wildcats if there were any would not get at her.

He came in late to supper but nobody thought anything of it. He was prepared to say he had been at the toilet, but he wasn’t asked. Everything was sliding along so easily, as if it was still in his imagination.

After the fuss when the baby was found to be missing, he hadn’t wanted to disappear too quickly, so it was almost dark when he ran along under the trees to get a look at her in the shack. He hoped she wouldn’t be hungry already, but thought that if she was he could spit on his finger and let her suck it, and maybe she wouldn’t know the difference between that and milk.

The plans had been made to turn back, just as he had foreseen, and what he was counting on was that once they got back, somehow his mother would understand that their attempts to leave were doomed to failure and would tell
Uncle Andrew
to get about his business.

Since he now credited his father with putting the whole plan into his head, he supposed his father must have foreseen that this was exactly what would happen.