The View from Castle Rock

(People who are not going to be comforted by this discovery usually avoid making it.) We explore the connection as far as it will go, and soon find that there is not much more to be got out of it. But we are both happy. He is happy to be reminded of himself as a young man, fresh in the country and able to turn himself to any work that was offered, with confidence in what lay ahead of him. And by the looks of this well-built house with its wide view, and his lively wife, his pretty Rachel, his own still alert and useful body, it does look as if things have turned out pretty well for him.

    And I am happy to find somebody who can see me still as part of my family, who can remember my father and the place where my parents worked and lived for all of their married lives, first in hope and then in honorable persistence. A place that I seldom drive past and can hardly relate to the life I live now, though it is not much more than twenty miles away.
    It has changed, of course, it has changed utterly, becoming a car-wrecking operation. The front yard and the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hayfield, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture and the ground once covered by the fox pens, are all swept under a tide of car parts, gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grilles, and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten bloated stuffing-heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant and surviving metal.
    But that is not the only thing that deprives it of meaning for me. No. It is the fact that it
is
only twenty miles away, that I could see it every day if I wanted to. The past needs to be approached from a distance.
    Rachel’s mother asks us if we would like to look at the inside of the church, before we head off to Scone, and we say that we would. We walk down the hill and she takes us hospitably into the red-carpeted interior. It smells a little damp or musty as stone buildings often do, even when they are kept quite clean.
    She talks
to
us about how things have been going with this building and its congregation.
    The whole church was raised up some years ago, to add on the Sunday School and the kitchen underneath.
    The bell still rings out to announce the death of every church member. One ring for every year of life. Everybody within hearing distance can listen and count the times it rings and try to figure out who it must be for. Sometimes it’s easy-a person who was expected to die. Sometimes it’s a surprise.
    She mentions that the front porch of the church is modern, as we must have noticed. There was a big argument when it was put on, between those who thought it was necessary and even liked it, and those who disagreed. Finally there was a split. The ones who didn’t like it went off to Williamsford and formed their own church there, though with the same minister.
    The minister is a woman. The last time a minister had to be hired, five out of the seven candidates were women. This one is married to a veterinarian, and used to be a veterinarian herself. Everybody likes her fine. Though there was a man from Faith Lutheran in Desboro who got up and walked out of a funeral when he found she was preaching at it. He could not stand the idea of a woman preaching.
    Faith Lutheran is part of the Missouri Synod, and that is the way they are.
    There was a great fire in the church some time ago. It gutted much of the inside but left the shell intact. When the surviving inside walls were scrubbed down afterwards, layers of paint came off with the smoke and there was a surprise underneath. A faint text in German, in the Gothic German lettering, which did not entirely wash off. It had been hidden under the paint.
    And there it is. They touched up the paint, and there it is.
    Ich hebe meine Augen auf zu den Bergen, von welchen mir Hilfe Kommt.
That is on one side wall. And on the opposite wall:
Dein Wort ist meines Fusses Leuchte und ein Licht auf meinem Wege.
    I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
    Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

    Nobody had known, nobody had remembered that the German words were there, until the fire and the cleaning revealed them. They must have been painted over at some time, and afterwards nobody spoke of them, and so the memory that they were there had entirely died out.
    At what time? Very likely it happened at the beginning of the First World War, the 1914-18 war.