The View from Castle Rock

Irlma says, after we have listened to my father’s slow steps on the stairs. “He’s been feeling tough two or three days now.”
    “Has he?” I say, guilty that I haven’t noticed. He has seemed to me the way he always seems now when a visit brings Irlma and me together-just a bit shaky and apprehensive, as if he had to be on guard, as if it took some energy explaining and defending us, one to the other.
    “He don’t feel right,” Irlma says. “I can tell.”
    She turns to Harry, who has put on his outdoor jacket.
    “Just tell me something before you go out that door,” she says, getting between him and the door to block his way. “Tell me-how much string does it take to tie up a woman?”
    Harry pretends to consider. “Big woman or little woman, would that be?”
    “Any size woman at all.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Couldn’t say.”
    “Two balls and six inches,” cries Irlma, and some far gurgles reach us, from Harry’s subterranean enjoyment.
    “Irlma, you’re a Tartar.”
    “I am so. I’m an old Tartar. I am so.”

    I go along in the car with my father, to take the potatoes to Joe Thorns.
    “You aren’t feeling well?”
    “Not the very best.”
    “’
How
aren’t you feeling well?”
    “I don’t know. Can’t sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got the flu.”
    “Are you going to call the doctor?”
    “If I don’t get better I’ll call him. Call him now I’d just be wasting his time.”
    Joe Thorns, a man about ten years older than I am, is alarmingly frail and shaky, with long stringy arms, an unshaven, ruined, handsome face, grayed-over
eyes.
I can’t see how he could manage to thump anybody. He gropes to meet us and take the sack of potatoes, urges us inside the smoky trailer.
    “I mean to pay you for these here,” he says. “Just tell me what they’re worth?”
    My father says, “Now now.”
    An enormous woman stands at the stove, stirring something in a pot.
    My father says, “Peggy, this is my daughter. Smells good, whatever you got there.”
    She doesn’t respond, and Joe Thorns says, “It’s just a rabbit we got give for a present. No use to talk to her, she’s got her deaf ear to you. She’s deaf and I’m blind. Isn’t that the devil? It’s just a rabbit but we don’t mind rabbit. Rabbit’s a clean feeder.”
    I see now that the woman is not so enormous all over. The upper part of the arm next to us is out of proportion to the rest of her body, swollen like a puffball. The sleeve has been ripped out of her dress, leaving the armhole frayed, threads dangling, and the great swelling of flesh exposed and gleaming in the smoke and shadow of the trailer.
    My father says, “It can be pretty good all right, rabbit.”
    “Sorry not to offer you a shot,” Joe says. “But we don’t have it in the house. We don’t drink no more.”
    “I’m not feeling up to it either, to tell you the truth.”
    “Nothing in the house since we joined the Tabernacle. Peggy and me both. You hear we joined up?”
    “No, Joe. I didn’t hear about that.”
    “We did. And it’s a comfort to us.”
    “Well.”
    “I realize now I spent a lot of my life in the wrong way. Peggy, she realizes it too.”
    My father says, “H’m-h’m.”
    “I say to myself it’s no wonder the Lord struck me blind. He struck me blind but I see his purpose in it. I see the Lord’s purpose. We have not had a drop of liquor in the place since the first of July weekend. That was the last time. First of July.”
    He sticks his face close to my father’s.

    “You see the Lord’s purpose?”
    “Oh Joe,” says my father with a sigh. “Joe, I think all that’s a lot of hogwash.”
    I am surprised at this, because my father is usually a man of great diplomacy, of kind evasions. He has always spoken to me, almost warningly, about the need
to fit in,
not to rile people.
    Joe Thorns is even more surprised than I am.
    “You don’t mean to say that. You don’t mean it. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
    “Yes I do.”
    “Well you should read your Bible. You should see what all it says in rhe Bible.”
    My father slaps his hands nervously or impatiently on his knees.
    “A person can agree or disagree with the Bible, Joe. The Bible is just a book like any other book.”
    “It’s a sin to say that. The Lord wrote the Bible and He planned and created the world and every one of us here.”
    More hand slapping. “I don’t know about that, Joe. I don’t know. Come to