The View from Castle Rock

Aunt Charlie and Uncle Cyril had never had children. As far as I know there was never even a pregnancy. So I could have stumbled into sensitive territory.
    It looked for a moment as if Aunt Charlie was not going to go on with her story. She seemed to have decided that I was not deserving of it. But after a moment she could not help herself.
    Leo took off, then, he went places. He worked with a lumbering crew in Northern Ontario. He went with a harvesters’ excursion and became a hired man out west. When he came back, years later, he had a wife with him and somewhere he had learned house carpentry and roofing, so he did that. The wife was a nice person, she had been a schoolteacher. Somewhere along the line she had a baby, but it died, like the other. She and Leo lived in town, and did not go to a local church – she belonged to some freak religion of the sort they had out west. So nobody got to know her very well. Nobody even knew that she had leukemia until shortly before she died of it. It was the first case of leukemia that people had heard of in this part of the country.
    Leo stayed on, he got work. He began to visit more with his relatives. He got a car, and would drive out to see them. The word got around that he was planning to marry for a third time, and that she was a widow from somewhere down near Stratford.
    But before this he showed up at my grandmother’s house one weekday afternoon. It was the time of year-after frost but before heavy snow-when my grandfather and my father, who was through with school by that time, were hauling firewood from the bush. They must have seen the car but they went on with what they were doing. My grandfather didn’t come up to the house to greet his cousin.
    And anyway, Leo and my grandmother didn’t stay in the house, which they could have had all to themselves. My grand mother saw fit to put on her coat and they went out to the car. And did not stay sitting there either, but drove down the lane and then along the road to the highway, where they turned around and drove back. They did this several times, in full view of anybody who looked out the windows of any farm house along the road. And by this time everybody along the road knew Leo’s car.
    During this drive Leo asked my grandmother to come away with him. He told her that he was still a free agent, not
yet
committed to the widow. And presumably he mentioned that he was still in love. With her. My grandmother. Selina.
    My grandmother reminded him that she herself was not free, whatever he might be, and so the state of her feelings did not come into it.
    “And the sharper she spoke,” said Aunt Charlie, with one or two choppy little nods of her head, “why, the sharper she spoke to him, the more her heart cracked open. Surely it did.”
    Leo drove her home. He married the widow. The one I had been told to call Aunt Mabel.
    “If Selina knew I told you anything about this, my name would be mud,” said Aunt Charlie.

    I had three marriages to study, fairly close-up, in this early part of my life. My parents’ marriage-I suppose you might say that it was the most close-up, but in a way it was the most mysterious and remote, because of my childish difficulty in thinking of my parents as having any connection but the one they had through myself. My parents, like most other parents I knew, called each other Mother and Daddy. They did this even in conversations that had nothing to do with their children. They seemed to have forgotten each other’s first names. And since there was never any thought of their divorcing or separating-I did not know of any parents, or any couples, who had done that-I did not have to be gauging their feelings or anxiously paying attention to the weather between them, as children often do nowadays. As far as I was concerned they were mostly caretakers-of the house, the farm, the animals, and us children.
    When my mother became sick-permanently sick, not just troubled with odd symptoms-the balance was altered. This happened when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. From then on she was weighing the family down on one side, and we-my father and brother and sister and I-were holding it up to a kind of normality on the other. So my father seemed to belong with us more than he did with her. She was three years older than he was, anyway-being born in the nineteenth century while he was born in the twentieth, and as her long siege progressed she began to seem more like his mother than his