The View from Castle Rock (18 page)

There was no compromise about this. Either you were right or you were wrong. Grandfather was a good Grit of the old George Brown school and took the
’Tiser,
so I also have become a Grit and have remained one up to now…And so in this best of all systems were governments chosen according to the number of little Grits or little Tories who got old enough to vote…

The conductor grasped the handhold by the steps. He shouted, “Bort!” and waved his hand. The steam shot down in jets, the wheels clanked and groaned and moved forward, faster and faster, past the way scales, past the stockyards, over the arches, and grew smaller and smaller like a receding galaxy until the train disappeared in to the unknown world to the north…

Once there was a visitor, my namesake from Toronto, a cousin of Grandfather. The great man was reputed to be a millionaire, but he was disappointing, not at all impressive, only a slightly smoother and more polished version of Grandfather. The two old men sat under the maples in front of our house and talked. Probably they talked of the past as old men will. I kept discreetly in the background. Grandpa didn’t say outright but delicately hinted that children were to be seen and not heard.

Sometimes they talked in the broad Scots of the district from which they came. It was not the Scots of the burring R’s which we hear from the singers and comedians but was rather soft and plaintive, with a lilt like Welsh or Swedish.

That is where I feel it best to leave them—my father a little boy, not venturing too close, and the old men sitting through a summer afternoon on wooden chairs placed under one of the great benevolent elm trees that used to shelter my grandparents’ farmhouse. There they spoke the dialect of their childhood—discarded as they became men—which none of their descendants could understand.

PART TWO

Home

Fathers

All over the countryside, in spring, there was a sound that was soon to disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who had tractors already could not always get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring ploughing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn’t hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls on their inland flights were saying, or follow the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could generally tell which words were swearing.

With one man it was all swearing. It didn’t matter which words he was using. He could have been saying “butter and eggs” or “afternoon tea,” and the spirit that spilled out would have been the same. As if he was boiling over with a scalding rage and loathing.

His name was Bunt Newcombe. He had the first farm on the county road that curved southwest from town. Bunt was probably a nickname given him at school for going around with his head lowered, ready to bump and shove anybody aside. A boyish name, a holdover, not really adequate to his behavior, or to his reputation, as a grown man.

People sometimes asked what could be the matter with him. He wasn’t poor—he had two hundred acres of decent land, and a banked barn with a peaked silo, and a drive shed, and a well-built square red-brick house. (Though the house, like the man himself, had a look of bad temper. There were dark-green blinds pulled most of the way, or all the way, down on the windows, no curtains visible, and a scar along the front wall where the porch had been torn away. The front door which must at one time have opened onto that porch now opened three feet above weeds and rubble.) And he was not a drunk or a gambler, being too careful of his money for that. He was mean in both senses of the word. He mistreated his horses, and it goes without saying that he mistreated his family.

In the winter he took his milk cans to town on a sleigh pulled by a team of horses—snowplows for the county roads being in short supply then, just like tractors. This was at the time in the morning when everybody was walking to school, and he never slowed down as other farmers did to let you jump on the back of the sleigh and catch a ride. He picked up the whip instead.

Mrs. Newcombe was never with him, on the sleigh or in the car. She walked to town, wearing old-fashioned galoshes even when the weather got warm, and a long drab coat and a scarf over her hair. She mumbled hello without ever looking up, or sometimes turned her head away, not speaking at all. I think she was missing some teeth. That was more common then than it is now, and it was more common also for people to make plain a state of mind, in their speech and dress and gestures, so that everything about them said,
I know how I should
look and behave and if I don’t do it that’s my own business,
or,
I don’t care, things have gone too far with me, think what you like.

Nowadays Mrs. Newcombe might be seen as a serious case, terminally depressed, and her husband with his brutish ways might be looked on with concern and compassion.
These people need help.
In those days they were just taken as they were and allowed to live out their lives without anyone giving a thought to intervention. They were regarded in fact as a source of interest and entertainment. It might be said—it was said—that nobody had any use for him and that you had to feel sorry for her. But there was a feeling that some people were born to make others miserable and some let themselves in for being made miserable. It was simple destiny and there was nothing to be done about it.

The Newcombes had had five daughters, then one son. The girls’ names were April, Corinne, Gloria, Susannah, and Dahlia. I thought these names fanciful and lovely and I would have liked the daughters’ looks to match them, as if they were the daughters of an ogre in a fairy tale.

April and Corinne were gone from home some time ago, so I had no way of knowing what they looked like. Gloria and Susannah lived in town. Gloria was married and had dropped from view as married girls did. Susannah worked in the hardware store, and she was a stout girl, with slightly crossed eyes, not at all pretty, but quite normal looking (crossed eyes being a variation of normal and not a particular misfortune at that time, not a thing to be remedied, any more than dispositions were). She did not seem in any way cowed like her mother or brutal like her father. And Dahlia was a couple of years older than I was, the first of the family to go to high school. She was no wide-eyed ripply-haired beauty of an ogre’s daughter either, but she was handsome and sturdy, her hair thick and fair, her shoulders strong, her breasts firm and high. She got quite respectable marks and was good at games, particularly at basketball.

During my first few months at high school I found myself walking part of the way to school with her. She walked along the county road and over the bridge to town. I lived at the end of the half-mile road that was parallel to this road, on the river’s north side. Up to now she and I had lived our lives within shouting distance of each other, you might say, but the school districts were divided in such a way that I had always gone to the town school, while the Newcombes went to a country school farther out along the county road. The first two years that Dahlia was at high school and I was still at public school we must have walked the same route, though we would not have walked together—it was not done, high school and public school students walking together. But now that we were both going to high school we would usually meet where the roads joined, and if either of us saw the other coming we would wait.

This was how it was during my first fall at high school. Walking together did not mean that we became exactly friends. It was just that it would have seemed odd to walk singly now that we were both at the high school and going the same way. I don’t know what we talked about. I have an idea that there were long periods of silence, due to Dahlia’s senior dignity and a matter-of-factness about her that ruled out silly conversation. But I don’t recall finding these silences uncomfortable.

One morning she didn’t appear, and I went on. In the cloakroom at school she said to me, “I won’t be coming in that way anymore because I’m staying in town now, I’m staying at Gloria’s.”

And we hardly spoke together again until one day in early spring—that time I’ve been talking about, with the trees bare, but reddening, and the crows and seagulls busy and the farmers hollering to their horses. She caught up to me, as we were leaving the school. She said, “You going right home?” and I said yes, and she started to walk beside me.

I asked her if she was living at home again and she said, “Nope. Still at Gloria’s.”

When we had walked a bit farther she said, “I’m just going out there to have a look at what’s going on.”

Her way of saying this was straightforward, not confidential. But I knew that
out there
must mean out at her home, and that
what’s going on,
though unspecific, meant nothing good.

During the past winter Dahlia’s status in the school had risen because she was the best player on the basketball team and the team had nearly won the county championship. It gave me a feeling of distinction to be walking with her and to be receiving whatever information she felt like giving me. I can’t remember for sure, but I think that she must have started high school with all the business of her family dragging behind her. It was a small enough town so that all of us started that way, with favorable factors to live up to or some shadow to live down. But now she had been allowed, to a large extent, to slip free. The independence of spirit, the faith you have to have in your body, to become an athlete, won respect and discouraged anybody who would think of snubbing her. She was well dressed, too—she had very few clothes but those she had were quite all right, not like the matronly hand-me-downs that country girls often wore, or the homemade outfits my mother had labored at for me. I remember a red V-necked sweater often worn by her, and a pleated Royal Stewart skirt. Maybe Gloria and Susannah thought of her as the representative and pride of the family, and had pooled some of their resources to dress her.

We were out of town before she spoke again.

“I got to keep track of what my old man is up to,” she said. “He better not be beating up on Raymond.”

Raymond. That was the brother.

“Do you think he might be?” I said. I felt as if I had to pretend to know less about her family than I—and everybody—actually did.

“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “Yeah. He might. Raymond used to get off better than the rest of us but now he’s the only one left at home I got my doubts.”

“Did he beat you?”

I said this almost casually, trying to sound moderately interested, not in any way horrified.

She gave a snort. “Are you kidding? Before I got away the last time he tried to brain me with the shovel.”

After we had walked a bit farther, she said, “Yeah, and I just told him to come on. Come on, let’s see you kill me. Let’s see you, then you’ll get hung. But then I took off, because I thought yeah, sure, but then I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing him. Hung.”

She laughed. I said encouragingly, “Do you hate him?”

“Sure I hate him,” she said, with not much more expression than if she had said that she hated sausages. “If somebody told me that he was drowning in the river I would go and stand on the bank and cheer.”

There was no way to comment about this. But I said, “What if he takes after you now?”

“He’s not going to see me. I’m just going to spy on him.”

When we came to the division of our roads she said almost cheerfully, “You want to come with me? You want to see how I do my spying?”

We walked across the bridge with our heads soberly bowed, looking through the cracks between the planks at the high-flowing river. I was full of alarm and admiration.

“I used to come out here in the winter,” she said. “I used to get right up against the kitchen windows when it was dark out. Now it stays light too late. And I used to think, he’ll see the boot marks in the snow and know there was somebody had been spying on him and that’ll drive him crazy.”

I asked whether her father had a shotgun.

“Sure,” she said. “So what if he comes out and shoots me? He shoots me and he gets hung and goes to Hell. Don’t worry—he’s not going to see us.”

Before we were in sight of the Newcombes’ buildings we climbed a bank on the opposite side of the road, where there was a thick growth of sumac bordering a planted windbreak of spruce. When Dahlia began to walk in a crouch, ahead of me, I did the same. And when she stopped I stopped.

There was the barn, and the barnyard, full of cows. I realized, once we stopped making our own noise among the branches, that we had been hearing the trampling and bawling of the cows all along. Unlike most farmsteads, the Newcombes’ did not have a lane. House and barn and barnyard were all right along the road.

There wasn’t enough fresh grass for cows to be out to pasture yet—the low places in the pastures were still mostly underwater—but they were let out of the stable to exercise before the evening milking. From behind our screen of sumac, we could look across the road and down at them as they jostled each other and blundered around in the muck, uneasy and complaining because of their full udders. Even if we snapped a branch, or spoke in normal voices, there was too much going on over there for anybody to hear us.

Raymond, a boy about ten years old, came around the corner of the barn. He had a stick but he was just tapping the cows’ rumps with it, pushing them and saying, “So-boss, so-boss,” in an easygoing rhythm and urging them towards the stable door. It was the sort of mixed herd most farms had at that time. A black cow, a rusty-red cow, a pretty golden cow that must have been part Jersey, others splotched brown and white and black and white in all sorts of combinations. They still had their horns, and that gave them a look of dignity and ferocity which cows have now lost.

A man’s voice, Bunt Newcombe’s voice, called from the stable.

“Hurry up. What’s the holdup? Do you think you’ve got all night?”

Raymond called back, “Okay. O-
kay.
” The tone of his voice did not indicate anything to me, except that he didn’t seem scared. But Dahlia said quietly, “Yah. He’s giving him lip. Good for him.”

Bunt Newcombe came out of another door of the stable. He was wearing overalls and a greasy barn smock, instead of the buffalo coat I thought of as his natural costume, and he moved with an odd swing of one leg.

“Bum leg,” Dahlia said, in the same quiet but intensely satisfied voice. “I heard Belle kicked him but I thought it was too good to be true. Too bad it wasn’t his head.”

He was carrying a pitchfork. But it seemed he meant no harm to Raymond. All he used the fork for was to pitch manure out of that doorway, while the cows were driven in at the other.