The View from Castle Rock

black pot hanging over the fire, thinking it was full of devils.
    Her brothers call Mary
Poor Mary,
and indeed the mea-greness and timidity of many of the women in their family has caused that word to be attached to the names they were given at their christening-names that were themselves altered to something less substantial and graceful. Isabel became Poor Tibbie; Margaret, Poor Maggie; Jane, Poor Jennie. People in Ettrick said it was a fact that the looks and the height went to the men.
    Mary is under five feet tall and has a little tight face with a lump of protruding chin, and a skin that is subject to fiery eruptions that take a long time to fade. When she is spoken to her mouth twitches as if the words were all mixed up with her spittle and her crooked little teeth, and the response she manages is a dribble of speech so faint and scrambled that it is hard for people not to think her dim-witted. She has great difficulty in looking anybody in the face-even the members of her own family. It is only when she gets the boy hitched on to the narrow shelf of her hip that she is capable of some coherent and decisive speech-and then it is mostly to him.
    Somebody is saying something to her now. It is a person almost as small as herself-a little brown man, a sailor, with gray whiskers and not a tooth in his head. He is looking straight at her and then at Young James and back to her again-right in the middle of the pushing or loitering, bewildered or inquisitive crowd. At first she thinks it is a foreign language he is speaking, but then she makes out the word
cu.
She finds herself answering with the same word, and he laughs and waves his arms, pointing to somewhere farther back on the ship, then pointing at James and laughing again. Something she should take James to see. She has to say, “Aye. Aye,” to stop him gabbling, and then to step off in that direction so that he won’t be disappointed.
    She wonders what part of the country or the world he could have come from, then realizes that this is the first time in her life that she has ever spoken to a stranger. And except for the difficulty of understanding what he was saying, she has managed it more easily than when having to speak to a neighbor in the Ettrick, or to her father.
    She hears the bawling of the cow before she can see it. The press of people increases around her and James, forms a wall in front of her and squeezes her from behind. Then she hears the bawling in the sky and looking up sees the brown beast dangling in the air, all caged in ropes and kicking and roaring frantically. It is held by a hook on a crane, which now hauls it out of sight. People around her are hooting and clapping hands. Some child’s voice cries out in the language she understands, wanting to know if the cow will be dropped into the sea. A man’s voice tells him no, she will go along with them on the ship.
    “Will they milk her then?”
    “Aye. Keep still. They’ll milk her,” says the man reprovingly. And another man’s voice climbs boisterously over his.
    “They’ll milk her till they take the hammer to her, and then ye’ll have the blood pudding for yer dinner.”
    Now follow the hens swung through the air in crates, all squawking and fluttering in their confinement and pecking each other when they can, so that some feathers escape and float down through the air. And after them a pig trussed up like the cow, squealing with a human note in its distress and shitting wildly in midair, so that howls of both outrage and delight rise below, depending on whether they come from those who are hit or those who see others hit.
    James is laughing too, he recognizes shite, and cries out his own word for it, which is
gruggin.
    Someday he may remember this. /
saw a cow and a pig fly through the air.
Then he may wonder if it was a dream. And nobody will be there-she will certainly not be there-to tell that it was not a dream, it happened on this ship. He will know that he was once on a ship because he will have been told that, but it’s possible that he will never see a ship like this again in all his waking life. She has no idea where they will go when they reach the other shore, but imagines it will be some place inland, among the hills, some place like the Ettrick.
    She does not think she will live long, wherever they go. She coughs in the summer as well as the winter and when she coughs her chest aches. She suffers from sties, and cramps in the stomach, and her bleeding comes