The View from Castle Rock

planning the world, who says it has to’ve been planned at all?”
    “Well then, who created it?”
    “I don’t know the answer to that. And I don’t care.”
    I see that my father’s face is not as usual, that it is not agreeable (that has been its most constant expression) and not ill-humored either. It is stubborn but not challenging, simply locked into itself in an unyielding weariness. Something has shut down in him, ground to a halt.

    He drives himselt to the hospital. I sit beside him with a washed-out can on my knees, ready to hold it for him if he should have to pull off the road and be sick again. He has been up all night, vomiting often. In between times he sat at the kitchen table looking at the
Historical Atlas.
He who has rarely been out of the province of Ontario knows about rivers in Asia and ancient boundaries in the Middle East. He knows where the deepest trench is in the ocean floor. He knows Alexander’s route, and Napoleon’s, and that the Khazars had their capital city where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea.
    He said he had a pain across his shoulders, across his back. And what he called his old enemy, his gut pain.
    About eight o’clock he went upstairs to try to sleep, and Irlma and I spent the morning talking and smoking in the kitchen, hoping that he was doing that.
    Irlma recalled the effect she used to have on men. It started early. A man tried to lure her off when she was watching a parade, only nine years old. And during the early years of her first marriage she found herself walking down a street in Toronto, looking for a place she’d heard about, that sold vacuum-cleaner parts. And a man, a perfect stranger, said to her, “Let me give you a piece of advice, young lady. Don’t walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face. People could take that up the wrong way.”
    “I didn’t know how I was smiling. I wasn’t meaning any harm. I’d always’ve rather smiled than frowned. I was never so flabbergasted in my life.
Dont walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face.
” She leans back in her chair, opens her arms helplessly, laughs.
    “Hot stuff,” she says. “And didn’t even know it.”
    She tells me what my father has said to her. He has said that he wished that she’d always been his wife, and not my mother.
    “That’s what he said. He said I was the one what would have suited him. Should’ve got me the first time.”

    And that’s the truth, she says.

    When my father came downstairs he said he felt better, he had slept a little and the pain was gone, or at least he thought it was going. He could try to eat something. Irlma offered a sandwich, scrambled eggs, applesauce, a cup of tea. My father tried the cup of tea, and then he vomited and kept vomiting bile.
    But before he would leave for the hospital he had to take me out to the barn and show me where the hay was, how to put it down for the sheep. He and Irlma keep two dozen or so sheep. I don’t know why they do this. I don’t think they make enough money on the sheep for the work that is created to be worthwhile. Perhaps it is just reassuring to have some animals around. They have Buster of course, but he is not exactly a farm animal. The sheep provide chores, farm work still to be done, the kind of work they have known all their lives.
    The sheep are still out to pasture, but the grass they get has lost some of its nourishment-there have been a couple of frosts-so they must have the hay as well.

    In the car I sit beside him holding the can and we follow slowly that old, usual route-Spencer Street, Church Street, Wexford Street, Ladysmith Street-to the hospital. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same-nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.

    Not for my father. He has lived here and nowhere else. He has not escaped things by such use.

    Two slightly strange things happen when I take my father into the hospital. They ask me how old he is, and I say immediately, “Fifty-two,” which is the age of a man I am in love with. Then I laugh and apologize and run to the bed in the Emergency Ward where he is lying, and ask him if he is seventy-two or seventy-three. He looks at me as if the question bewilders him too.