The View from Castle Rock (3 page)

Self-dramatization got short shrift in our family. Though now that I come to think of it, it wasn’t exactly that word they used. They spoke of
calling attention. Calling attention to yourself.
The opposite of which was not exactly modesty but a strenuous dignity and control, a sort of refusal. The refusal to feel any need to turn your life into a story, either for other people or for yourself. And when I study the people I know about in the family, it does seem that some of us have that need in large and irresistible measure—enough so as to make the others cringe with embarrassment and apprehension. That’s why the judgment or warning had to be given out so frequently.

By the time his grandsons—James Hogg and James Laidlaw—were young men, the world of Will O’Phaup was almost gone. There was a historical awareness of that recent past, even a treasuring or exploitation of it, which is only possible when people feel themselves most decidedly removed. James Hogg clearly felt that, though he was so much a man of Ettrick. It is mostly his writings I have to thank for what I know of Will O’Phaup. Hogg was both insider and outsider, industriously and—he hoped—profitably shaping and recording his people’s stories. And he had a fine source in his mother—Will O’Phaup’s eldest daughter, Margaret Laidlaw, who had grown up at Far-Hope. There would be some trimming and embroidering of material on Hogg’s part. Some canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do.

Walter Scott was an outsider of sorts, an Edinburgh lawyer now appointed to a high post in his family’s traditional territory. But he too understood, as outsiders sometimes do better, the importance of something that was vanishing. When he became the Sherriff of Selkirkshire—that is, the local judge—he began to go around the country collecting the old songs and ballads which had never been written down. He would publish them in
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
Margaret Laidlaw Hogg was famous locally for the number of verses she carried in her head. And Hogg—with his eye on posterity as well as present advantage—made sure he took Scott to see his mother.

She recited plenty of verses, including the newfound “Ballad of Johnie Armstrong,” which she said she and her brother had got “from old Andrew Moore who had it from Bebe Mettlin [Maitland] who was housekeeper to the First Laird of Tushielaw.”

(It happens that this same Andrew Moore had been Boston’s servant and that it was he who had reported Boston as having “laid the ghost” who appears in one of Hogg’s poems. A new light on the minister.)

Margaret Hogg made a great fuss when she saw the book Scott produced in 1802 with her contributions in it.

“They were made for singin and no for prentin,” she is supposed to have said. “And noo they’ll never be sung mair.”

She complained further that they were “neither right settin down nor right spelt,” though this may seem an odd judgment to be made by someone who had been presented—by herself or by Hogg—as a simple old countrywoman with only a minimum of education.

She was probably both simple and sharp. She had known what she was doing but could not help regretting what she had done.

And noo they’ll never be sung mair.

She might also have enjoyed showing that it took more than a printed book, it took more than the Shirra of Selkirk, to make a favorable impression on her. Scots are like that, I think. My family was like that.

Fifty years after Will O’Phaup clasped his children and prayed for protection on All Hallows’ Eve, Hogg and a few of his male cousins—he does not give their names—are to meet in that same high house at Phaup. By this time the house is used as a lodging by whatever bachelor shepherd is in charge of the high-feeding sheep, and the others are present that evening not to get drunk and tell stories but to
read essays.
These essays Hogg describes as flaming and bombastical, and from those words, and from what was said afterwards, it would seem that these young men deep in the Ettrick had heard about the Age of Reason, though they probably didn’t call it that, and about the ideas of Voltaire and Locke and of David Hume, their fellow Scot and Lowlander. Hume had grown up at Ninewells near Chirnside, about fifty miles away, and it was to Ninewells that he retreated when he suffered a breakdown at the age of eighteen—perhaps overcome, temporarily, by the scope of the investigation he saw in front of him. He would still have been alive when these boys were born.

I could be guessing wrong, of course. What Hogg calls essays could have been stories. Tales of the Covenanters being hunted down at their outdoor services by red-coated dragoons, of witches, of the walking dead. These were lads who would try their hand at any composition, at prose or poetry. John Knox’s schools had done their work, and a rash of literature, a fever of poetry, was breaking out in all classes. When Hogg had been at his lowest point, working as a shepherd on the lonely hills of Nithsdale, living in a rough shelter called a bothy, the Cunningham brothers—the stonemason’s apprentice and poet Allan Cunningham, and his brother James—had come trudging over the countryside to meet him and tell him of their admiration. (Hogg was alarmed at first, thinking they came to charge him with some trouble about a woman.) The three of them left the dog Hector to guard the sheep and settled down to talk of poetry all day, then crawled into the bothy to drink whiskey and talk of poetry all night.

The shepherds’ meeting at Phaup, which Hogg claims that he himself did not manage to attend, in spite of having such an essay in his pocket, was held in winter. The weather had been strangely warm. That night, however, a storm arose which turned out to be the worst in half a century. Sheep were frozen in their pens and men and horses were trapped and frozen on the roads, while houses were buried in snow up to their roofs. For three or four days the storm continued, roaring and devastating, and when it was over, and the young shepherds came down to the valley alive, their families were relieved but in no way pleased with them.

Hogg’s mother told him plainly that it was a punishment brought on the whole countryside by the Devil’s work being done in whatever reading and conversing was going on at Phaup that night. No doubt many other parents thought the same.

Some years later, Hogg wrote a fine description of this storm, and it was published in
Blackwoods Magazine. Blackwoods
was the favorite reading of the little Brontës, in the rectory at Haworth, and when they each chose a hero to impersonate in their games, Emily chose the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. (Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington.)
Wuthering Heights,
Emily’s great novel, begins with a description of a terrible storm. I have often wondered if there is a connection.

I don’t believe that James Laidlaw was one of those present at Phaup that night. His letters don’t show anything like a skeptical, or theorizing, or poetical sort of mind. Of course the letters that I have read were written when he was old. People change.

Certainly he is a joker when we meet him first, by Hogg’s account, in Tibbie Shiel’s inn (which is still there, more than an hour’s walk through the hills from Phaup, just as Phaup is still there, now a bothy shelter on the Southern Uplands Way, a walking trail). He is putting on a show that could be seen to be blasphemous. Blasphemous, risky, and funny. Down on his knees, he is offering up prayers for several of those present. He asks forgiveness, and specifies the sins that are outstanding, prefacing each one with
an if it be true
—

An if it be true
that the bairn born a fortnight past to——————’s wife has an almighty look about it of———, then wilt Thou Lord show mercy on all the participants…

An if it be true
that——————cheated——————out of twenty pieces of lamb siller [silver] at the last St. Boswell’s sheep fair, then we pray Thee, O Lord, in spite of such devil’s doing…

Some of those named could not be held back, and his friends had to drag James out before harm came to him.

By this time he was probably a widower, a fellow on the loose, too poor for any likely woman to marry. His wife had borne him a daughter and five sons, then died at the birth of the last one. Mary, Robert, James, Andrew, William, Walter.

Writing to an emigration society around the time of Waterloo, he presents himself as an excellent prospect, because of the five strong sons who will accompany him to the New World. Whether or not he was offered help to emigrate I do not know. Probably not, because we next hear of him having trouble raising the fare. A depression has followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the price of sheep has fallen. And there is no more boast of the five sons. Robert, the eldest, has taken off for the Highlands. James—the younger James—has gone to America, which includes Canada, all on his own, and it seems he has not sent word to say where he is or what he is doing. (He is in Nova Scotia, and he is teaching school in a place called Economy, though he has no qualifications for this except what he got in the Ettrick schoolhouse, and probably a strong right arm.)

And as for William, the second youngest, a boy not yet out of his teens who will be my great-great-grandfather—he is gone as well. When we next hear of him he is settled in the Highlands, a factor on one of the new sheep farms cleared of the crofters. And so scornful is he of the place where he was born, as to write—in a letter to the girl he later marries—that it would be unthinkable for him to live in the Ettrick Valley ever again.

The poverty and the ignorance distress him, apparently. The poverty which seems to him willful, and the ignorance which he judges to be ignorant even of its own existence. He is a modern man.

The View from Castle Rock

The first time Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half-doors were open, showing the firelit insides of taverns which he hoped they might enter, because he was wet through. They did not, they were bound somewhere else. Earlier on the same afternoon they had been in some such place, but it was not much more than an alcove, a hole in the wall, with planks on which bottles and glasses were set and coins laid down. He had been continually getting squeezed out of that shelter into the street and into the puddle that caught the drip from the ledge over the entryway. To keep that from happening, he had butted in low down between the cloaks and sheepskins, wedged himself amongst the drinking men and under their arms.

He was surprised at the number of people his father seemed to know in the city of Edinburgh. You would think the people in the drinking place would be strangers to him, but it was evidently not so. Amongst the arguing and excited queer-sounding voices his father’s voice rose the loudest.
America,
he said, and slapped his hand on the plank for attention, the very way he would do at home. Andrew had heard that word spoken in that same tone long before he knew it was a land across the ocean. It was spoken as a challenge and an irrefutable truth but sometimes—when his father was not there—it was spoken as a taunt or a joke. His older brothers might ask each other, “Are ye awa to America?” when one of them put on his plaid to go out and do some chore such as penning the sheep. Or, “Why don’t ye be off to America?” when they had got into an argument, and one of them wanted to make the other out to be a fool.

The cadences of his father’s voice, in the talk that succeeded that word, were so familiar, and Andrew’s eyes so bleary with the smoke, that in no time he had fallen asleep on his feet. He wakened when several pushed together out of the place and his father with them. Some one of them said, “Is this your lad here or is it some tinker squeezed in to pick our pockets?” and his father laughed and took Andrew’s hand and they began their climb. One man stumbled and another man knocked into him and swore. A couple of women swiped their baskets at the party with great scorn, and made some remarks in their unfamiliar speech, of which Andrew could only make out the words “daecent bodies” and “public footpaths.”

Then his father and the friends stepped aside into a much broader street, which in fact was a courtyard, paved with large blocks of stone. His father turned and paid attention to Andrew at this point.

“Do you know where you are, lad? You’re in the castle yard, and this is Edinburgh Castle that has stood for ten thousand years and will stand for ten thousand more. Terrible deeds were done here. These stones have run with blood. Do you know that?” He raised his head so that they all listened to what he was telling.

“It was King Jamie asked the young Douglases to have supper with him and when they were fair sitten down he says, oh, we won’t bother with their supper, take them out in the yard and chop off their heads. And so they did. Here in the yard where we stand.

“But that King Jamie died a leper,” he went on with a sigh, then a groan, making them all be still to consider this fate.

Then he shook his head.

“Ah, no, it wasn’t him. It was King Robert the Bruce that died a leper. He died a king but he died a leper.”

Andrew could see nothing but enormous stone walls, barred gates, a redcoat soldier marching up and down. His father did not give him much time, anyway, but shoved him ahead and through an archway, saying, “Watch your heads here, lads, they was wee little men in those days. Wee little men. So is Boney the Frenchman, there’s a lot of fight in your wee little men.”

They were climbing uneven stone steps, some as high as Andrew’s knees—he had to crawl occasionally—inside what as far as he could make out was a roofless tower. His father called out, “Are ye all with me then, are ye all in for the climb?” and some straggling voices answered him. Andrew got the impression that there was not such a crowd following as there had been on the street.

They climbed far up in the roundabout stairway and at last came out on a bare rock, a shelf, from which the land fell steeply away. The rain had ceased for the present.

“Ah, there,” said Andrew’s father. “Now where’s all the ones was tramping on our heels to get here?”

One of the men just reaching the top step said, “There’s two-three of them took off to have a look at the Meg.”

“Engines of war,” said Andrew’s father. “All they have eyes for is engines of war. Take care they don’t go and blow themselves up.”

“Haven’t the heart for the stairs, more like,” said another man who was panting. And the first one said cheerfully, “Scairt to get all the way up here, scairt they’re bound to fall off.”

A third man—and that was the lot—came staggering across the shelf as if he had in mind to do that very thing.

“Where is it then?” he hollered. “Are we up on Arthur’s seat?”

“Ye are not,” said Andrew’s father. “Look beyond you.”

The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in sunlight and part in shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

“So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.”

“Well the sea does not look so wide as I thought,” said the man who had stopped staggering. “It does not look as if it would take you weeks to cross it.”

“It is the effect of the height we’re on,” said the man who stood beside Andrew’s father. “The height we’re on is making the width of it the less.”

“It’s a fortunate day for the view,” said Andrew’s father. “Many a day you could climb up here and see nothing but the fog.”

He turned and addressed Andrew.

“So there you are my lad and you have looked over at America,” he said. “God grant you one day you will see it closer up and for yourself.”

Andrew has been to the Castle one time since, with a group of the lads from Ettrick, who all wanted to see the great cannon, Mons Meg. But nothing seemed to be in the same place then and he could not find the route they had taken to climb up to the rock. He saw a couple of places blocked off with boards that could have been it. But he did not even try to peer through them—he had no wish to tell the others what he was looking for. Even when he was ten years old he had known that the men with his father were drunk. If he did not understand that his father was drunk—due to his father’s sure-footedness and sense of purpose, his commanding behavior—he did certainly understand that something was not as it should be. He knew he was not looking at America, though it was some years before he was well enough acquainted with maps to know that he had been looking at Fife.

Still, he did not know if those men met in the tavern had been mocking his father, or if it was his father playing one of his tricks on them.

Old James the father. Andrew. Walter. Their sister Mary. Andrew’s wife Agnes, and Agnes and Andrew’s son James, under two years old.

In the harbor of Leith, on the 4th of June, 1818, they set foot on board a ship for the first time in their lives.

Old James makes this fact known to the ship’s officer who is checking off the names.

“The first time, serra, in all my long life. We are men of the Ettrick. It is a landlocked part of the world.”

The officer says a word which is unintelligible to them but plain in meaning. Move along. He has run a line through their names. They move along or are pushed along, Young James riding on Mary’s hip.

“What is this?” says Old James, regarding the crowd of people on deck. “Where are we to sleep? Where have all these rabble come from? Look at the faces on them, are they the blackamoors?”

“Black Highlanders, more like,” says his son Walter. This is a joke, muttered so his father cannot hear—Highlanders being one of the sorts the old man despises.

“There are too many people,” his father continues. “The ship will sink.”

“No,” says Walter, speaking up now. “Ships do not often sink because of too many people. That’s what the fellow was there for, to count the people.”

Barely on board the vessel and this seventeen-year-old whelp has taken on knowing airs, he has taken to contradicting his father. Fatigue, astonishment, and the weight of the greatcoat he is wearing prevent Old James from cuffing him.

All the business of life aboard ship has already been explained to the family. In fact it has been explained by the old man himself. He was the one who knew all about provisions, accommodations, and the kind of people you would find on board. All Scotsmen and all decent folk. No Highlanders, no Irish.

But now he cries out that it is like the swarm of bees in the carcass of the lion.

“An evil lot, an evil lot. Oh, that ever we left our native land!”

“We have not left yet,” says Andrew. “We are still looking at Leith. We would do best to go below and find ourselves a place.”

More lamentation. The bunks are narrow, bare planks with horsehair pallets both hard and prickly.

“Better than nothing,” says Andrew.

“Oh, that it was ever put in my head to bring us here, onto this floating sepulchre.”

Will nobody shut him up? thinks Agnes. This is the way he will go on and on, like a preacher or a lunatic, when the fit takes him. She cannot abide it. She is in more agony herself than he is ever likely to know.

“Well, are we going to settle here or are we not?” she says.

Some people have hung up their plaids or shawls to make a half-private space for their families. She goes ahead and takes off her outer wrappings to do the same.

The child is turning somersaults in her belly. Her face is hot as a coal and her legs throb and the swollen flesh in between them—the lips the child must soon part to get out—is a scalding sack of pain. Her mother would have known what to do about that, she would have known which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice.

At the thought of her mother such misery overcomes her that she wants to kick somebody.

Andrew folds up his plaid to make a comfortable seat for his father. The old man seats himself, groaning, and puts his hands up to his face, so that his speaking has a hollow sound.

“I will see no more. I will not harken to their screeching voices or their satanic tongues. I will not swallow a mouth of meat nor meal until I see the shores of America.”

All the more for the rest of us, Agnes feels like saying.

Why does Andrew not speak plainly to his father, reminding him of whose idea it was, who was the one who harangued and borrowed and begged to get them just where they are now? Andrew will not do it, Walter will only joke, and as for Mary she can hardly get her voice out of her throat in her father’s presence.

Agnes comes from a large Hawick family of weavers, who work in the mills now but worked for generations at home. And working there they learned all the arts of cutting each other down to size, of squabbling and surviving in close quarters. She is still surprised by the rigid manners, the deference and silences in her husband’s family. She thought from the beginning that they were a queer sort of people and she thinks so still. They are as poor as her own folk, but they have such a great notion of themselves. And what have they got to back this up? The old man has been a wonder in the tavern for years, and their cousin is a raggedy lying poet who had to flit to Nithsdale when nobody would trust him to tend sheep in Ettrick. They were all brought up by three witchey-women of aunts who were so scared of men that they would run and hide in the sheep pen if anybody but their own family was coming along the road.

As if it wasn’t the men that should be running from them.

Walter has come back from carrying their heavier possessions down to a lower depth of the ship.

“You never saw such a mountain of boxes and trunks and sacks of meal and potatoes,” he says excitedly. “A person has to climb over them to get to the water pipe. Nobody can help but spill their water on the way back and the sacks will be wet through and the stuff will be rotted.”

“They should not have brought all that,” says Andrew. “Did they not undertake to feed us when we paid our way?”

“Aye,” says the old man. “But will it be fit for us to eat?”

“So a good thing I brought my cakes,” says Walter, who is still in the mood to make a joke of anything. He taps his foot on the snug metal box filled with oat cakes that his aunts gave him as a particular present because he was the youngest and they still thought of him as the motherless one.

“You’ll see how merry you’ll be if we’re starving,” says Agnes. Walter is a pest to her, almost as much as the old man. She knows there is probably no chance of them starving, because Andrew is looking impatient, but not anxious. It takes a good deal, of course, to make Andrew anxious. He is apparently not anxious about her, since he thought first to make a comfortable seat for his father.