The View from Castle Rock (35 page)

My father wrote that the countryside created by the efforts of the pioneers had changed very little in his time. The farms were still the size that had been manageable in that time and the woodlots were in the same places and the fences, though repaired many times, were still where they used to be. So were the great bank barns—not the first barns but buildings created around the end of the nineteenth century, chiefly for the storage of hay and the shelter of livestock through the winters. And many of the houses—brick houses succeeding the first log structures—had been there since sometime in the eighteen-seventies or -eighties. Cousins of ours had in fact retained the log house built by the first Laidlaw boys in Morris Township, simply building additions to it at different times. The inside of this house was baffling and delightful, with so many turns and odd little sets of steps.

Now that house is gone, the barns have been pulled down (also the original cow byre built of logs). The same thing has happened to the house my father was born in, and to the house my grandmother lived in as a child, to all the barns and sheds. The land the buildings stood on can be identified perhaps by a slight rise in the ground, or by a clump of lilacs—otherwise it has become just a patch of field.

In the early days in Huron County there was a great trade in apples—hundreds of thousands of bushels shipped out, so I’ve been told, or sold to the evaporator in Clinton. That trade died off many years ago when the orchards in British Columbia went into operation, with their advantage of a longer growing season. Now there might be one or two trees left, with their scabby little apples. And those everlasting lilac bushes. These the only survivors of the lost farmstead; not another sign that people have ever lived here. Fences have been pulled down wherever there are crops instead of livestock. And of course just in the recent decade the low barns as long as city blocks, as forbidding and secretive as penitentiaries have appeared, with the livestock housed inside of them, never to be seen—chickens and turkeys and hogs raised in the efficient and profitable modern way.

The removal of so many of the fences, and of orchards and houses and barns, seems to me to have had the effect of making the countryside look smaller, instead of larger—the way the space once occupied by a house looks astonishingly small, once you see only the foundation. All those posts and wires and hedges and windbreaks, those rows of shade trees, those varied uses of plots of land, those particular colonies of occupied houses and barns and useful outbuildings every quarter of a mile or so—all that arrangement and shelter for lives that were known and secret. It made every fence corner or twist of a creek seem remarkable.

As if you could see more then, though now you can see farther.

In the summer of 2004 I visited Joliet, looking for some trace of the life of William Laidlaw, my great-great-grandfather, who died there. We drove from Ontario through Michigan along what was once the Chicago Turnpike and before that the route of La Salle and many generations of First Nations travellers, and is now Highway 12, passing through the old towns of Coldwater and Sturgis and White Pigeon. The oak trees were magnificent. White oak, red oak, burr oak, their limbs arching over the town streets and stretches of the country roads. Also great walnut trees, maples, of course, all the luxuriance of the Carolinian zone which is just slightly unfamiliar to me, being south of the region that I know. Poison ivy here grows three feet high instead of being a carpet on the forest floor, and vines seem to envelop every tree trunk, so that you can’t look into the roadside woods—everywhere are wreaths and curtains of green.

We listened to music on National Public Radio, and then when that signal faded we listened to a preacher answering questions about demons. Demons can possess animals and houses and features of the landscape as well as people. Sometimes whole congregations and denominations. The world is aswarm with them and the prophecies are proving true that they will proliferate during the Last Days. Which are come upon us now.

Flags everywhere. Signs. God Bless America.

Then the freeways south of Chicago, road repairs, unexpected tolls, the restaurant that was built on an overpass and that is now empty and dark, a wonder of former times. And Joliet rimmed with new suburban houses, as every city is these days, acres of houses, miles of houses, joined or separate, all alike. And even these are preferable, I think, to the grander sort of new houses which are here too—set apart, not quite the same but all related, with vast shelter for cars and windows high enough for a cathedral.

No deaths recorded in Joliet until 1843. No Laidlaw listed in the earliest list of the settlers or those buried in the first cemeteries. What singular folly of mine, to come to a place like this—that is, to any place that has prospered, or even grown, during the last century—hoping to find some notion of what things were like more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Looking for a grave, a memory. There is only one listing that gets my attention.

Unknown Cemetery.

In a certain corner of Homer Township, a burial ground in which only two stones have been found, but in which as many as twenty were said to have existed at one time. The two stones remaining, according to the lists, bear the names of people who died in the year 1837. There is speculation that some of the others might have been those of soldiers who died in the Black Hawk war.

This means that there was a graveyard in existence before Will died.

We go there, we drive to the corner of 143rd and Parker. On the northwest corner is a golf course, on the northeast and southeast corners are recently built houses with landscaped lots. On the southwest corner there are houses, also fairly new, but with the difference that their lots on the corner do not reach the street, being separated from it by a high fence. Between this fence and the street is a patch of land gone completely wild.

I clamber into it, brushing aside the vigorous poison ivy. In among the half-grown trees and almost impenetrable undergrowth, hidden from the street, I peer all around—I cannot straighten up, because of the tree branches. I do not see any leaning or fallen or broken gravestones, or any plants growing—rosebushes, for instance—that might be a sign that graves had once been here. It is useless. I become apprehensive about the poison ivy. I grope my way out.

But why has the wild land remained there? Human burial is one of the very few reasons that any land is undisturbed, nowadays, when all the land around it is put to use.

I could pursue this. It’s what people do. Once they get started they’ll follow any lead. People who have done little reading in their whole lives will immerse themselves in documents, and some who would have trouble telling you the years in which the First World War was begun and ended will toss about dates from past centuries. We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine—sometimes cannot believe in—the future of our children’s children. We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.

Another cemetery, in Blyth. Where the body of James was moved for burial, decades after he had been killed by the falling tree. And here is where Mary Scott is buried. Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man,
William Laidlaw.

Died in Illinois.
And buried God knows where.

Beside her is the body and stone of her daughter Jane, the girl born on the day of her father’s death, who was carried as a baby from Illinois. She died when she was twenty-six years old, giving birth to her first child. Mary did not die until two years later. So she had that loss, as well, to absorb before she was finished.

Jane’s husband lies nearby. His name was Neil Armour and he too died young. He was a brother of Margaret Armour who was Thomas Laidlaw’s wife. They were the children of John Armour, the first teacher at S.S. No.1 Morris Township, where many of the Laidlaws went to school. The baby that cost Jane her life was named James Armour.

And here a live memory comes twitching through my mind. Jimmy Armour.
Jimmy Armour.
I don’t know what happened to him but I know his name. And not only that—I think I saw him once or more than once, an old man come on a visit from wherever he lived then to the place where he had been born, an old man among other old people—my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather’s sisters. And now it occurs to me that he must have been brought up with those people—my grandfather and my great-aunts, the children of Thomas Laidlaw and Margaret Armour. They were his first cousins, after all, his double first cousins. My Aunt Annie, Aunt Jenny, Aunt Mary, my grandfather William Laidlaw, the “Dad” of my father’s memoir.

Now all these names I have been recording are joined to the living people in my mind, and to the lost kitchens, the polished nickel trim on the commodious presiding black stoves, the sour wooden drainboards that never quite dried, the yellow light of the coal-oil lamps. The cream cans on the porch, the apples in the cellar, the stovepipes going up through the holes in the ceiling, the stable warmed in winter by the bodies and breath of the cows—those cows whom we still spoke to in words common in the days of Troy.
So bos. So bos.
The cold waxed parlor where the coffin was put when people died.

And in one of these houses—I can’t remember whose—a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far, because I could hold it to my ear—when nobody was there to stop me—and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published ten previous collections of stories—
Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage;
and
Runaway
—as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women,
and a
Selected Stories.

During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards; two of its Giller Prizes; the Rea Award for the Short Story; the Lannan Literary Award; the W. H. Smith Award, given to
Open Secrets
as the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995; the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award; and the Edward MacDowell Medal in Literature. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review,
and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO

Runaway

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The Love of a Good Woman

Selected Stories

Open Secrets

Friend of My Youth

The Progress of Love

The Moons of Jupiter

The Beggar Maid

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

Lives of Girls and Women

Dance of the Happy Shades

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2006 by Alice Munro

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

Some of the stories in this collection were previously published, some in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Fathers” in
The New Yorker;
“Hired Girl” in
The New Yorker;
“Home” in
New Canadian Short Stories
(Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1974) and in
The Virginia Quarterly Review;
“Lying Under the Apple Tree” in
The New Yorker;
“The View from Castle Rock” in
The New Yorker;
“What Do You Want to Know For” in
The American Scholar;
and “Working for a Living” in
Grand Street.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Munro, Alice.

The view from Castle Rock : stories / by Alice Munro.—1st ed.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PR
9199.3.
M
8
V
54 2006

813'.54—
DC
22                                                                                                                                        2006045261

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26602-6

v3.0