The View from Castle Rock

says that her husband is very hard of hearing, so it wouldn’t do much good to talk to him. And he has just come home from the hospital a few days ago, so he isn’t really feeling like talking. She doesn’t have much time to talk herself, because she is getting ready to go out. Her daughter is coming from Chesley to pick her up. They are going to a family picnic to celebrate her daughter’s husband’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.
    But she wouldn’t mind telling me as much as she knows.
    Though being only married into the family she never knew too much.
    And even they didn’t know too much.
    I notice something new in the readiness of both this older woman and the energetic younger woman in the log house. They do not seem to find it strange that anybody should wish to know about things that are of no particular benefit or practical importance. They do not suggest that they have better things to think about. Real things, that is. Real work. When I was growing up an appetite for impractical knowledge of any kind did not get encouragement. It was all right to know which field would suit certain crops, but not all right to know anything about the glacial geography that I have mentioned. It was necessary to learn to read but not in the least desirable to end up with your nose in a book. If you had to learn history and foreign languages to pass out of school it was only natural to forget that sort of thing as quickly as you could. Otherwise you would
stand out.
And that was not a good idea. And wondering about
olden days
-what used to be here, what happened there, why, why?-was as sure a way to make yourself stand out as any.
    Of course some of this kind of thing would be expected in outsiders, city people, who have time on their hands. Maybe this woman thinks that’s what I am. But the younger woman found out differently, and still seemed to think my curiosity understandable.
    Mrs. Mannerow says that she did use to wonder. When she was first married she used to wonder. Why did they put their people in there like that, where did they get the idea? Her husband didn’t know why. The Mannerows all took it for granted. They didn’t know why. They took it for granted because that was the way they had always done it. That was their way and they never thought to ask why or where their family got the idea.
    Did I know the vault was all concrete on the inside?
    The smaller one on the outside too. Yes. She hadn’t been in the cemetery for a while and she had forgotten about that one.
    She did remember the last funeral they had when they put the last person in the big vault. The last time they had opened it up. It was for Mrs. Lempke, who had been born a Mannerow. There was just room for one more and she was the one. Then there was no room for anybody else.
    They dug down at the end and opened up the bricks and then you could see some of the inside, before they got her coffin in. You could see there were coffins in there before her, along either side. Put in nobody knows how long a time ago.
    “It gave me a strange feeling,” she says. “It did so. Because you get used to seeing the coffins when they’re new, but not so much when they’re old.”
    And the one little table sitting straight ahead of the entranceway, a little table at the far end. A table with a Bible opened up on it.
    And beside the Bible, a lamp.
    It was just an ordinary old-fashioned lamp, the kind they used to burn coal oil in.
    Sitting there the same today, all sealed up and nobody going to see it ever again.
    “Nobody knows why they did it. They just did.”
    She smiles at me with a sociable sort of perplexity, her almost colorless eyes enlarged, made owlish, by her glasses. She gives a couple of tremulous nods. As if to say, it’s beyond us, isn’t it? A multitude of things, beyond us. Yes.

    The radiologist says that when she looked at the mammograms that had come in from the country hospital, she could see that the lump had been there in 1990 and in 1991. It had not changed. Still in the same place, still the same size. She says that you can never be absolutely one hundred percent certain that such a lump is safe, unless you do a biopsy. But you can be sure enough. A biopsy in itself is an intrusive procedure and if she were in my place she would not have it. She would have a mammogram in another six months, instead. If it were her breast she would keep an eye on it, but for the time being she would let it alone.
    I ask why nobody