The View from Castle Rock

Forrest and Lizzie’s door. Lizzie was the first to open the door in the morning. She had forgotten about Halloween, which none of the family ever paid any attention to, and when she saw the shape of the bundle she cried out, more in amazement than vexation. In its ragged wool wrappings she saw the shape of a baby, and she would have heard somehow about babies being abandoned, left on the doorstep of people who might care for them. For one whole moment she must have thought that that had happened to her, that she had actually been singled out for such a gift and duty. Then Forrest came from the back of the house to see her stoop and pick it up, and he knew at once what it was. So did she, once she felt it. A parcel of straw in sacking, tied with cords, to resemble a baby, the face marked with crayon at the appropriate place on the sacking, to crudely show a baby’s face.

    Less innocent than Lizzie, Forrest caught the implication, and he grabbed the bundle from her, tore it in pieces, stuffed the pieces into the stove.
    She saw that this was a thing she had better not ask about, or even mention in the future, and she never did. Neither did he mention it, and the story survived only as rumor, always to be questioned and deplored by those who passed it on.

    “They were devoted to each other,” said my mother, who had never actually met them, but was generally in favor of brotherly-sisterly relationships, unsullied by sex.
    My father had seen them at church, when he was a child, and might have visited them a couple of times, with his mother. They were only second cousins of his father’s and he did not think they had ever come to his parents’ house.
    He did not admire them, or blame them. He wondered at them.
    “To think what their ancestors did,” he said. “The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon.”

Working for a Living
    When my father was twelve years old and had gone as far as he could go at the country school, he went into town to write a set of exams. Their proper name was the Entrance Examinations, but they were known collectively as the Entrance. The Entrance meant, literally, the entrance to high school, but it also meant, in an undefined way, the entrance to the world. The world of professions such as medicine or law or engineering or teaching. Country boys did enter that world in the years before the First World War, more easily than they did a generation later. It was a time of prosperity in Huron County and expansion in the country. It was 1913 and the country was not yet fifty years old.
    My father passed the Entrance with high honors and went on to the Continuation School in the town of Blyth. Continuation Schools offered four years of high school, without the final year called Upper School, or Fifth Form-you would have to go to a larger town for that. It looked as if he was on his way.
    During his first week at Continuation School my father heard the teacher read a poem.

    Liza Grayman Ollie Minus.
    We can make Eliza blind.
    Andy Parting, Lee Beehinus.
    Foo Prince in the Sansa Time.

    He used to recite this to us as a joke, but the fact was, he did not hear it as a joke. Around the same time, he went into the stationery store and asked for Signs Snow Paper.
    Signs Snow Paper.
    Science notepaper.
    Soon he was surprised to see the poem written on the blackboard.

    Lives of Great Men all remind us,
    We can make our lives sublime.
    And, departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the Sands of Time.

    He had not hoped for such reasonable clarification, would not have dreamed of asking for it. He had been quite willing to give the people at the school the right to have a strange language or logic. He did not ask for them to make sense on his terms. He had a streak of pride which might look like humility, making him scared and touchy, ready to bow out. I know that very well. He made a mystery there, a hostile structure of rules and secrets, far beyond anything that really existed. He felt nearby the fierce breath of ridicule, he overestimated the competition, and the family caution, the country wisdom, came to him then: stay out of it.
    In those days people in town did generally look upon the people from the country as more apt to be slow-witted, tongue-tied, uncivilized, than themselves, and somewhat more docile in spite of their strength. And farmers saw people who lived in towns as having an easy life and being unlikely to survive in