The View from Castle Rock

told his mother. Then he repeated more or less what he had said to Mary.
    “I didn’t pay enough attention when he told me,” Mary said.
    A man said that squaws were well known for helping themselves to white baby girls.
    “They bring them up like Indians and then they go and sell them to some chief or other for a big pile of wampum.”
    “It’s not like she wouldn’t take good care of her,” said Mary, maybe not even hearing this. “Becky’s a good Indian.”
    Andrew asked where Becky was likely to go now and Mary said, probably back home.
    “I mean to Joliet,” she said.
    The innkeeper said that they could not follow that road at night, nobody could, except Indians. His wife agreed with him. She had brought Mary a cup of tea. Kindly now, she patted Tommy’s head. Andrew said that they would start back as soon as it was light in the morning.
    “I’m sorry,” said Mary.
    He said that it couldn’t be helped. Like a good many things, was what he implied.

    The man who had set up the sawmill in this community owned a cow, which he let wander round the settlement, sending his daughter Susie out in the evening to find her and milk her. Susie was almost always accompanied by her friend Meggie, the daughter of the local schoolteacher. These girls were thirteen and twelve years old and they were bound together in an intense relationship loaded with secret rituals and special jokes and fanatical loyalty. It was true that they had nobody else to be friendly with, being the only two girls of their age in the community, but that did not stop them from feeling as if they had chosen each other against the rest of the world.
    One of the things they liked to do was to call people by wrong names. Sometimes this was simple substitution, as when they called somebody named George
Tom,
or somebody named Rachel
Edith.
Sometimes they celebrated a certain characteristic-as when they called the innkeeper Tooth, because of the long eyetooth that caught on his lip-or sometimes they picked on the very opposite of what the person wanted to be, as with the innkeeper’s wife, who was very particular about her clean aprons. They called her Greasy-gravy.
    The boy who looked after the horses was named Fergie, but they called him Birdie. This annoyed him quite satisfactorily. He was short and thickset, with black curly hair and wide-spaced innocent eyes, and had come out from Ireland just a year or so before. He would chase them when they imitated his way of talking. But the best thing they had managed was to write him a love letter and sign it Rose-the real name, as it happened, of the innkeeper’s daughter-and leave it on the horse blanket he slept under in the barn. They had not realized that he didn’t know how to read. He showed it to some men who came round the stable and it was a great joke and scandal. Rose was soon sent away to learn to be a milliner, though she was not actually suspected of having written the letter.
    Neither were Susie and Meggie suspected.
    One outcome was that the stable boy showed up at Meggies father’s door and demanded to be taught to read.
    It was Susie, the eldest, who sat down on the stool they’d brought, and set to milking the cow, while Meggie wandered about picking and eating the last of the wild strawberries. The place the cow had chosen to browse in at the end of this day was close to the woods, at a little distance from the inn. Between the side door of the inn and the real woods was a stand of apple trees, and between the last of these apple trees and the trees of the woods was a small shack with a door hanging loose. It was called the smokehouse though it was not used for that purpose, or any purpose, at present.
    What made Meggie investigate the shack at this time? She never knew. Perhaps it was that the door was shut, or pulled forward to be as nearly shut as it could be. It was not until she began to wrestle with the door to get it open that she heard a baby crying.
    She carried it back to show Susie, and when she dipped her fingers in the fresh milk and offered one to the baby, it stopped crying and began to suck hard.
    “Did somebody have it and hide it there?” she said, and Susie humiliated her-as she could occasionally do, with certain superior knowledge-by saying that it was nothing like a newborn, it was far too big. And it was dressed the way it wouldn’t be if somebody was just getting rid of it.
    “Well yes,” said Meggie. “What are we going to do with it?”
    Did