The View from Castle Rock

hungry, crafty, and oppressive. It is Young James’s first conscious encounter with someone as perfectly self-centered as himself.
    He is barely able to focus his intelligence, to show himself not quite defeated.
    “Key,” he says. “Key?”

***

    Agnes, watching the dancing, catches sight of Andrew, red in the face and heavy on his feet, linked arm to arm with various jovial women. They are doing the “Strip the Willow” now. There is not one girl whose looks or dancing gives Agnes any worries. Andrew never gives her any worries anyway. She sees Mary tossed around, with even a flush of color in her cheeks-though she is too shy, and too short, to look anybody in the face. She sees the nearly toothless witch of a woman who birthed a child a week after her own, dancing with her hollow-cheeked man. No sore parts for her. She must have dropped the child as slick as if it was a rat, then given it over to one or the other of her weedy-looking daughters to mind.
    She sees Mr. Suter, the surgeon, out of breath, pulling away from a woman who would grab him, ducking through the dance and coming to greet her.
    She wishes he would not. Now he will see who her father-in-law is, he may have to listen to the old fool’s gabble. He will get a look at their drab, and now not even clean, country clothes. He will see her for what she is.
    “So here you are,” he says. “Here you are with your treasure.”
    That is not a word that Agnes has ever heard used to refer to a child. It seems as if he is talking to her in the way he might talk to a person of his own acquaintance, some sort of a lady, not as a doctor talks to a patient. Such behavior embarrasses her and she does not know how to answer.
    “Your baby is well?” he says, taking a more down-to-earth tack. He is still catching his breath from the dancing, and his face, though not flushed, is covered with a fine sweat. Aye.
    “And you yourself? You have your strength again?”
    She shrugs very slightly, so as not to shake the child off the nipple.
    “You have a fine color, anyway, that is a good sign.”
    She thinks that he sighs as he says this, and wonders if that may be because his own color, seen in the morning light, is sickly as whey.
    He asks then if she will permit him to sit and talk to her for a few moments, and once more she is confused by his formality, but says he may do as he likes.
    Her father-in-law gives the surgeon-and her as well-a despising glance, but Mr. Suter does not notice it, perhaps does not even understand that the old man, and the fair-haired boy who sits straight-backed and facing this old man, have anything to do with her.
    “The dancing is very lively,” he says. “And you are not given a chance to decide who you would dance with. You get pulled about by all and sundry.” And then he asks, “What will you do in Canada West?”
    It seems to her the silliest question. She shakes her head-what can she say? She will wash and sew and cook and almost certainly suckle more children. Where that will be does not much matter. It will be in a house, and not a fine one.
    She knows now that this man likes her, and in what way. She remembers his fingers on her skin. What harm can happen, though, to a woman with a baby at her breast?
    She feels stirred to show him a bit of friendliness.
    “What will you do?” she says.
    He smiles and says that he supposes he will go on doing what he has been trained to do, and that the people in America-so he has heard-are in need of doctors and surgeons just like other people in the world.
    “But I do not intend to get walled up in some city. I’d like to get as far as the Mississippi River, at least. Everything beyond the Mississippi used to belong to France, you know, but now it belongs to America and it is wide open, anybody can go there, except that you may run into the Indians. I would not mind that either. Where there is fighting with the Indians, there’ll be all the more need for a surgeon.”
    She does not know anything about this Mississippi River, but she knows that he does not look like a fighting man himself-he does not look as if he could stand up in a quarrel with the brawling lads of Hawick, let alone red Indians.
    Two dancers swing so close to them as to put a wind into their faces. It is a young girl, a child really, whose skirts fly out-and who should she be dancing with but Agnes’s brother-in-law, Walter. Walter makes some sort of silly bow to Agnes and the surgeon and his father, and