The View from Castle Rock

his way there by his nose,” Irlma says. And repeats herself, with relish, as she often does. “Find his way there by his nose!”
    Irlma is a stout and rosy woman, with tinted butterscotch curls, brown eyes in which there is still a sparkle, a look of emotional readiness, of being always on the brink of hilarity. Or on the brink of impatience flaring into outrage. She likes to make people laugh, and to laugh herself. At other times she will put her hands on her hips and thrust her head forward and make some harsh statement, as if she hoped to provoke a fight. She connects this behavior with being Irish and with being born on a train.
    “I’m Irish, you know. I’m fighting Irish. And I was born on a moving train. I couldn’t wait. Kicking Horse Railway, what do you think of that? Born on a kicking horse you know how to stick up for yourself, and that’s a fact.” Then, whether her listeners reply in kind or shrink back in disconcerted silence, she will throw out a challenging laugh.
    She says to Harry, “Joe still got that Peggy-woman living with him?”
    I don’t know who Peggy is, so I ask.
    “Don’t you mind Peggy?” Harry says reproachfully. And to Irlma, “You bet he has.”
    Harry used to work for us when my father had the fox farm and I was a little girl. He gave me licorice whips, out of the fuzzy depths of his pockets, and tried to teach me how to drive the truck and tickled me up to the elastic of my bloomers.
    “Peggy Goring?” he says. “Her and her brothers used to live up by the tracks this side of the Canada Packers? Part Indian. Hugh and Bud Goring. Hugh used to work at the creamery?”

    “Bud was the caretaker at the Town Hall,” my father puts in.
    “You mind them now?” says Irlma with a slight sharpness. Forgetting local names and facts can be seen as deliberate, unmannerly.
    I say that I do, though I don’t, really.
    “Hugh went off and he never come back,” she says. “So Bud shut the house up. He just lives in the one back room of it. He’s got the pension now but he’s too cheap to heat the whole house all the same.”
    “Got a little queer,” my father says. “Like the rest of us.”
    “So Peggy?” says Harry, who knows and always has known every story, rumor, disgrace, and possible paternity within many miles. “Peggy used to be going around with Joe? Years back. But then she took off and got married to somebody else and was living up north. Then after a while Joe took off up there too and he was living with her but they got into some big kind of a fight and he went away out west.” He laughs as he has always done, silently, with a great private derision that seems to be held inside him, shuddering through his chest and his shoulders.
    “That’s the way they did,” says Irlma. “That’s the way they carried on.”
    “So then Peggy went out west chasing after him,” Harry resumes, “and they ended up living together out there and it seems like he was beating up on her pretty bad so finally she got on the train and come back here. Beat her up so bad before she got on the train they thought they’d have to stop and put her in a hospital.”
    “I’d like to see that,” Irlma says. “I’d like to see a man try that on me.”
    “Yeah, well,” says Harry. “But she must’ve got some money or she made Bud pay her a share on the house because she bought herself the trailer. Maybe she thought she was going to travel. But Joe showed up again and they moved the trailer out to the river and went and got married. Her other husband must’ve died.”
    “Married is what they say,” says Irlma.
    “I don’t know,” says Harry. “They say he still thumps her good when he takes the notion.”
    “Anybody tried that on me,” Irlma says, “I’d let him have it. I’d let him have it in the you-know-where.”
    “Now now,” says my father, in mock consternation.
    “Her being part Indian might have something to do with it,” Harry says. “They say the Indians thump their women every once in a while and it makes them love ’em better.”
    I feel obliged to say, “Oh, that’s just the way people talk about Indians,” and Irlma-immediately sniffing out some high-mindedness or superiority-says that what people say about the Indians has a lot of truth to it, never mind.
    “Well, this conversation is way too stimulating for an old chap like me,” says my father. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while upstairs.”

    “He’s not himself,”