The View from Castle Rock

where he had himself photographed wearing a plaid and holding on to a bouquet of thistles.
    On the stone commemorating Andrew and Agnes (and Old James and Helen) there appears also the name of their daughter Isabel, who like her mother Agnes died an old woman. She has a married name, but there is no further sign of her husband.
    Born at Sea.
    And here also is the name of Andrew and Agnes’s firstborn child, Isabel’s elder brother. His dates as well.
    Young James was dead within a month of the family’s landing at Quebec. His name is here but surely he cannot be. They had not taken up their land when he died, they had not even seen this place. He may have been buried somewhere along the way from Montreal to York or in that hectic new town itself. Perhaps in a raw temporary burying ground now paved over, perhaps without a stone in a churchyard where other bodies would some day be laid on top of his. Dead of some mishap in the busy streets of York, or of a fever, or dysentery-of any of the ailments, the accidents, that were the common destroyers of little children in his time.

Illinois
    A letter from his brothers reached William Laidlaw in the Highlands sometime early in the eighteen-thirties. They complained of not hearing from him for three years, and told him that his father was dead. It did not take him very long, once he was sure of that, to start making his plans to go to America. He asked for and was given a letter of reference from his employer, Colonel Munro (perhaps one of the many Highland landowners who had made sure of profitable sheep-rearing by hiring Borders men as their factors). He waited until Mary’s fourth baby boy was born-this was my great-grandfather Thomas-and then he bundled up his family and set out. His father and his brothers had spoken of going to America, but when they said that, it was really Canada they meant. William spoke accurately. He had discarded the Ettrick Valley for the Highlands without the least regret, and now he was ready to get out from under the British flag altogether-he was bound for Illinois.
    They settled in Joliet, near Chicago.
    There in Joliet, on the 5th of January, in either 1839 or 1840, William died of cholera, and Mary gave birth to a girl. All on the one day.
    She wrote to the brothers in Ontario-what else could she do?-and in the late spring when the roads were dry and the crops were planted Andrew arrived with a team of oxen and a cart, to carry her and her children and their goods back to Esquesing.
    “Where is the tin box?” said Mary. “I saw it last thing before I went to bed. Is it in the cart already?”
    Andrew said that it was not. He had just come back from loading the two rolls of bedding, wrapped up in canvas.
    “Becky?” said Mary sharply. Becky Johnson was right there, rocking back and forth on a wooden stool with the baby in her arms, so surely she might have spoken if she knew the whereabouts of the box. But she was in a sulky mood, she had said barely a word that morning. And now she did nothing but shake her head slightly, as if the box and the packing and loading and the departure, which was close at hand, meant nothing to her.
    “Does she understand?” said Andrew. Becky was half Indian and he had taken her for a servant, till Mary explained that she was a neighbor.
    “We’ve got them too,” he said, speaking as if Becky had no ears in her head. “But we don’t have them coming in and sitting down in the house like that.”
    “She has been more help to me than anybody,” Mary said, trying to shush him. “Her father was a white man.”
    “Well,” said Andrew, as if to say there were two ways of looking at that.
    Mary said, “I can’t think how it would disappear from in front of my eyes.”
    She turned away from her brother-in-law to the son who was her chief comfort.
    “Johnnie, did you happen to see the black tin box?”
    Johnnie was sitting on the lower bunk, now bare of bedclothes, keeping a watch over his younger brothers Robbie and Tommy, as his mother had asked him to. He had invented a game of dropping a spoon between the slats onto the plank floor, and having them see who could pick it up first. Naturally Robbie always won, even though Johnnie had asked him to slow down and give his smaller brother a chance. Tommy was in such a state of excitement that he did not seem to mind. He was used to this situation anyway, as the youngest.
    Johnnie shook his head, preoccupied. Mary expected no more than that. But