The View from Castle Rock

Rachel.

***

    Rachel’s mother does not seem at all surprised by our curiosity or put out by our visit. She invites us into her house, where there is a noisy interested dog and a self-possessed husband just finishing a late lunch. The main floor of the house is all one big room with a wide view of fields and trees.
    She brings out a book that I did not see in the Regional Reference Room. An old soft-covered history of the township. She thinks it has a chapter about cemeteries.
    And in fact it does. In a short time she and I are reading together a section on the Mannerow Cemetery, “famous for its two vaults.” There is a grainy photograph of the larger crypt. It is said to have been built in 1895 to receive the body of a three-year-old boy, a son of the Mannerow family. Other members of the family were placed there in the years that followed. One Mannerow husband and wife were put into the smaller crypt in the corner of the cemetery. What was originally a family graveyard later became public and the name of it was changed, from Mannerow to Cedardale.
    The vaults were roofed with concrete on the inside.
    Rachel’s mother says that there was only one descendant of the family living in the township today. He lives in Scone.
    “Next door to the house my brother’s in,” she says. “You know how there’s just the three houses in Scone? That’s all there is. There’s the yellow brick house and that’s my brother’s, then the one in the middle, that’s Mannerows’. So maybe they might tell you something more, if you went there and asked them.”

    While I was talking to Rachel’s mother and looking at the history book, my husband sat at the table and talked to her husband. That is the proper way for conversations to go in our part of the country. The husband asked where we came from, and on hearing that we came from Huron County, he said that he knew it very well. He went there straight off the boat, he said, when he came out from Holland not long after the war. In 1948, yes. (He is a man considerably older than his wife.) He lived for a while near Blyth and he worked on a turkey farm.
    I overhear him saying this and when my own conversation has drawn to a close I ask him if it was the Wallace Turkey Farm that he worked on.
    Yes, he says, that was the one. And his sister married Alvin Wallace.
    “Corrie Wallace,” I say.
    “That’s right. That’s her.”
    I ask him if he knew any Laidlaws from around that area, and he says no.
    I say that if he worked at Wallaces’ (another rule in our part of the country is that you never say
the
so-and-so’s, just the name), then he must have known Bob Laidlaw.
    “He raised turkeys too,” I tell him. “And he knew Wallaces from when they’d gone to school together. Sometimes he worked with them.”
    “Bob Laidlaw?” he says, on a rising note. “Oh, sure, I knew him. But I thought you meant around Blyth. He had a place up by Wingham. West of Wingham. Bob Laidlaw.”
    I say that Bob Laidlaw grew up near Blyth, on the Eighth Line of Morris Township, and that was how he knew the Wallace brothers, Alvin’s father and uncle. They had all gone to school at S.S. No. 1, Morris, right beside the Wallace farm.
    He takes a closer look at me, and laughs.
    “You’re not telling me he was your dad, are you? You’re not Sheila?”

    “Sheila’s my sister. I’m the older one.”
    “I didn’t know there was an older one,” he says. “I didn’t know that. But Bill and Sheila. I knew them. They used to be down working at the turkeys with us, before Christmas. You never were there?”
    “I was away from home by then.”
    “Bob Laidlaw. Bob Laidlaw was your dad. Well. I should have thought of that right away. But when you said from around Blyth I didn’t catch on. I was thinking, Bob Laidlaw was from up at Wingham. I never knew he was from Blyth in the first place.”
    He laughs and reaches across the table to shake my hand.
    “Well now. I can see it in you. Bob Laidlaw’s girl. ’Round the eyes. That’s a long time ago. A long time ago.”
    I am not sure whether he means it’s a long time ago that my father and the Wallace boys went to school in Morris Township, or a long time since he himself was a young man fresh from Holland, and worked with my father and my brother and sister preparing the Christmas turkeys. But I agree with him, and then we both say that it is a small world. We say this, as people usually do, with a sense of wonder and refreshment.