The View from Castle Rock

expedition that their father might have in mind. Then the brother James perversely set out for America on his own, saying that at least if he did that, he could save himself hearing any more about it. And finally Will, younger than Andrew but always the most contrary and the most bitterly set against the father, Will too had run away, to join Robert. That left only Walt, who was still childish enough to be thinking of adventures-he had grown up bragging about how he was going to fight the French, so maybe now he thought he’d fight the Indians.
    And then there was Andrew himself, who ever since that day on the rock has felt about his father a deep bewildered sense of responsibility, much like sorrow.
    But then, Andrew feels a responsibility for everybody in his family. For his often ill-tempered young wife, whom he has again brought into a state of peril, for the brothers far away and the brother at his side, for his pitiable sister and his heedless child. This is his burden-it never occurs to him to call it love.

    Agnes keeps asking for salt, till they begin to fear that she will fuss herself into a fever. The two women looking after her are cabin passengers, Edinburgh ladies, who took on the job out of charity.
    “You be still now,” they tell her. “You have no idea what a fortunate lassie you are that we had Mr. Suter on board.”
    They tell her that the baby was turned the wrong way inside her, and they were all afraid that Mr. Suter would have to cut her, and that might be the end of her. But he had managed to get it turned so that he could wrestle it out.

    “I need salt for my milk,” says Agnes, who is not going to let them put her in her place with their reproaches and Edinburgh speech. They are idiots anyway. She has to tell them how you must put a little salt in the baby’s first milk, just place a few grains on your finger and squeeze a drop or two of milk onto it and let the child swallow that before you put it to the breast. Without this precaution there is a good chance that it will grow up half-witted.
    “Is she even a Christian?” says the one of them to the other.
    “I am as much as you,” Agnes says. But to her own surprise and shame she starts to weep aloud, and the baby howls along with her, out of sympathy or out of hunger. And still she refuses to feed it.
    Mr. Suter comes in to see how she is. He asks what all the grief is about, and they tell him the trouble.
    “A newborn baby to get salt on its stomach-where did she get the idea?”
    He says, “Give her the salt.” And he stays to see her squeeze the milk on her salty finger, lay the finger to the infant’s lips, and follow it with her nipple.
    He asks her what the reason is and she tells him.
    “And does it work every time?”
    She tells him-a little surprised that he is as stupid as they are, though kinder-that it works without fail.
    “So where you come from they all have their wits about them? And are all the girls strong and good-looking like you?”
    She says that she would not know about that.
    Sometimes visiting young men, educated and from the town, used to hang around her and her friends, complimenting them and trying to work up a conversation, and she always thought any girl was a fool who allowed it, even if the man was handsome. Mr. Suter is far from handsome-he is too thin, and his face is badly pocked, so that at first she took him for an old fellow. But he has a kind voice, and if he is teasing her a little there could be no harm in it. No man would have the nature left to deal with a woman after looking at them spread wide, their raw parts open to the air.
    “Are you sore?” he says, and she believes there is a shadow on his damaged cheeks, a slight blush rising. She says that she is no worse than she has to be, and he nods, picks up her wrist, and bows over it, strongly pressing her pulse.
    “Lively as a racehorse,” he says, with his hands still above her, as if he did not know where to drop them next. Then he decides to push back her hair and press his fingers to her temples, as well as behind her ears.
    She will recall this touch, this curious, gentle, tingling pressure, with an addled mixture of scorn and longing, for many years to come.
    “Good,” he says. “No touch of a fever.”
    He watches, for a moment, the child sucking.
    “All’s well with you now,” he says, with a sigh. “You have a fine daughter and she can say all her life that she was born at sea.

    Andrew arrives later and