The View from Castle Rock

in a moment he spoke, as if just recollecting her question.
    “Jamie’s setting on it. Out in the yard.”
    Not only sitting on it, Mary saw when she hurried out, but he had covered it with his father’s coat, the coat Will had been married in. He must have got that out of the clothes trunk that was already in the cart.
    “What are you doing?” cried Mary, as if she couldn’t see. “You’re not supposed to touch that box. What are you doing with your father’s coat after I packed it up? I ought to smack you.”
    She was aware that Andrew was watching, and likely thinking that was a poor enough reprimand. He had asked Jamie to help him load the trunk and Jamie had done so, reluctantly, but then he had slipped away, instead of hanging around to see what more he could help with. And yesterday, when Andrew first arrived, the boy had pretended not to know who he was. “There’s a man out in the road with a cart and an ox team,” he had said to his mother, as if no such thing was expected and was of no concern to him.
    Andrew had asked her if the lad was all right. All right in the head, was what he meant.
    “His father’s dying was a hard matter for him,” she said.
    Andrew said, “Aye,” but added that there’d been time to get over it, by now.
    The box was locked. Mary had the key to it around her neck. She wondered if Jamie had meant to get into it, not knowing that. She was ready to weep.
    “Put the coat back in the trunk,” was all she could say.
    In the box were Will’s pistol and such papers as Andrew needed concerning the house and land, and the letter Colonel Munro had written before they left Scotland, and another letter, that Mary herself had sent to Will, before they were married. It was in reply to one from him-the first word she’d had since he left Ettrick, years before. He said in it that he remembered her well and had thought that by now he would have heard of her wedding. She had replied that in such case she would have sent him an invitation.
    “Soon I will be like the old almanacks left on the shelf, that no person will buy,” she wrote. (But to her shame, when he showed her this letter long afterwards, she saw that she had spelled “buy”
by.
Living with him, having books and journals around, had done a power of good for her spelling.)
    It was true that she was in her twenty-fifth year when she wrote that, but she was still confident of her looks. No woman who thought herself lacking in that way would have dared such a comparison. And she had finished off by inviting him, as plain as any words could do it.
If you should come courting me,
she had said,
if you should come courting me some moonlight night, I think that you should be preferred before any.
    What a chance to take, she said when he showed her that. Did I have no pride?
    Nor I, he said.

    Before they left she took the children to Will’s grave to say good-bye. Even the baby Jane, who would not remember but could be told later that she had been there.
    “She don’t know,” said Becky, trying to hang onto the child for a few moments longer. But Mary took the baby out of her arms and Becky went away then. She went out of the house without ever saying good-bye. She had been there when the baby was born and had taken care of them both when Mary was beside herself, but now she didn’t wait to say good-bye.
    Mary had the children bid farewell to their father one by one. Even Tommy said it, eager to copy the others. Jamie’s voice was weary and without expression, as if he had been made to recite something at school.
    The baby fretted in Mary’s arms, perhaps missing Becky and her smell. What with that, and the thought of Andrew waiting, in a hurry to be off, and the self-consciousness, the annoyance roused in her by Jamie’s tone, Mary’s own good-bye was quick and formal, there was no heart in it.

    Jamie had a good idea of what his father would have thought of that. That business of trotting them all up there to say goodbye to a stone. His father did not believe in pretending one thing was another and he would have said that a stone was a stone and if there was any way of speaking to a dead person, and hearing back from them, this was not it.
    His mother was a liar. Or if she didn’t lie outright, she at least covered things up. She had said his uncle was coming but she had not said-he was sure she had not said-that they were going back with him. Then when the truth came out she claimed she had told him before.