The View from Castle Rock

put me to bed,” says Mr. Ellers the railroad man. He is in bed, propped up. His voice is harsh and strong but he does not wake my father. My father’s eyelids tremble. His false teeth have been taken out so that his mouth sinks down at the corners, his lips have nearly disappeared. On his sleeping face there is a look of the most unalterable disappointment.
    “Shut up that racket out there,” says Mr. Ellers to the silent hall. “Shut up or I’ll fine you a hunderd and eighty dollars.”
    “Shut up yourself, you old looney,” says the man with the radio, and turns it on.
    “A hunderd and eighty dollars.”
    My father opens his eyes, tries to sit up, sinks back, and says to me in a tone of some urgency, “How can we tell that the end product is man?”
    Get yo ham outa my pocket
-
    “Evolution,” my father says. “We mightVe got the wrong end of the stick about that. Something going on we don’t know the first thing about.”
    I touch his head. Hot as ever.
    “What do you think about it?”
    “I don’t know, Dad.”
    Because I don’t think-I don’t think about things like that. I did at one time, but not anymore. Now I think about my work, and about men.
    His conversational energy is already running out.
    “May be coming-new Dark Ages.”
    “Do you think so?”
    “Irlma’s got the jump on you and me.”
    His voice sounds fond to me, yet rueful. Then he faintly smiles. The word I think he says is…
wonder.

    “Buster come through,” Irlma greets me when I get home. A glow of relief and triumph has spread over her face.
    “Oh. That’s good.”
    “Just after you went to the hospital he got down to business. I’ll have you a cup of coffee in a minute.” She plugs in the kettle. On the table she has set out ham sandwiches, mustard pickles, cheese, biscuits, dark and light honey. It is just a couple of hours since we finished supper.
    “He started grunting and pacing and worrying at the mat. He was just crazy with the misery and wasn’t nothing I could do. Then about quarter past seven I heard the change. I can tell by the sound he makes when he’s got it worked down into a better position where he can make the effort. There’s some pie left, we never finished it, would you rather have the pie?”
    “No thanks. This is fine.”
    I pick up a ham sandwich.
    “So I open the door and try to persuade him to get outside where he can pass it.”
    The kettle is whistling. She pours water on my instant coffee.
    “Wait a minute, I’ll get you some real cream-but too late. Right on the mat there he passed it. A hunk like that.” She shows me her fists bunched together. “And
hard.
Oh boy. You should of seen it. Like rock.
    “And I was right,” she says. “It was chock-full of turkey quills.”
    I stir the muddy coffee.
    “And after that
whoosh,
out with the soft stuff. Bust the dam, you did.” She says this to Buster, who has raised his head. “You went and stunk the place up something fierce, you did. But the most of it went on the mat so I took it outside and put the hose on it,” she said, turning back to me. “Then I took the soap and the scrub-brush and then I renched it with the hose all over again. Then scrubbed up the floor too and sprayed with Lysol and left the door open. You can’t smell it in here now, can you?”
    “No.”

    “I was sure good and happy to see him get relief. Poor old fellow. He’d be the age of ninety-four if he was human.”

    During the first visit I made to my father and Irlma after I left my marriage and came east, I went to sleep in the room that used to be my parents’ bedroom. (My father and Irlma now sleep in the bedroom that used to be mine.) I dreamed that I had just entered this room where I was really sleeping, and I found my mother on her knees. She was painting the baseboard yellow. Don’t you know, I said, that Irlma is going to paint this room blue and white? Yes I do know, my mother said, but I thought if I hurried up and got it all done she would leave it alone, she wouldn’t go to the trouble of covering up fresh paint. But you will have to help me, she said. You will have to help me get it done because I have to do it while she’s asleep.
    And that was exactly like her, in the old days-she would start something in a big burst of energy, then marshall everybody to help her, because of a sudden onslaught of fatigue and helplessness.
    “I’m dead you know,” she said in explanation. “So I have to do this while she’s