The View from Castle Rock

And all for money. I thought such behavior shameful, as of course my grandmother did. I took it for granted that my father felt the same way though he did not show it. I believed-or thought I believed-in working hard and being proud, not caring about being poor and indeed having a subtle contempt for those who led easeful lives.
    I did, then, regret the loss of the foxes. Not of the business, but of the animals themselves, with their beautiful tails and angry golden eyes. As I grew older, and more and more aloof from country ways, country necessities, I began for the first time to question their captivity, to feel regret for their killing, their conversion into money. (I never got so far as feeling anything like this for the mink, who seemed to me mean and rat-like, deserving of their fate.) I knew this feeling to be a luxury, and when I mentioned it to my father, in later years, I spoke of it lightly. In the same spirit he said that he believed there was some religion in India that held with all animals getting into Heaven. Think, he said, if that were true-what a pack of snarling foxes he would meet there, not to mention all the other fur-bearers he had trapped, and the mink, and a herd of thundering horses he had butchered for their meat.
    Then he said, not so lightly, “You get into things, you know. You sort of don’t realize what you’re getting into.”
    It was in those later years, after my mother was dead, that he spoke of my mother’s salesmanship and how she had saved the day. He spoke of how he didn’t know what he was going to do, at the end of that trip, if it turned out that she hadn’t made any money.
    “But she had,” he said. “She had it.” And the tone in which he said this convinced me that he had never shared those reservations of my grandmother’s and mine. Or that he’d resolutely put away such shame, if he’d ever had it.
    A shame that has come full circle, finally being shameful in itself to me.

    On a spring evening in 1949-the last spring, in fact the last whole season, that I was to live at home-I was riding my bicycle to the Foundry, to deliver a message to my father. I seldom rode my bicycle anymore. For a while, maybe all through the fifties, it was considered eccentric for any girl to be riding a bicycle after she was old enough, say, to wear a brassiere. But to get to the Foundry I could travel on back roads, I didn’t have to go through town.
    My father had started working in the Foundry in 1947. It had become apparent the year before that not just our fox farm but the whole fur-farming industry was going downhill very fast. Perhaps the mink would have tided us over if we had gone more heavily into mink, or if we had not owed so much money still, to the feed company, to my grandmother, to the bank. As it was, mink could not save us. My father had made the mistake many fox farmers made just at that time. It was believed that a new paler kind of fox, called a platinum, was going to save the day, and with borrowed money my father had bought two male breeders, one an almost snowy-white Norwegian platinum and one called a pearl platinum, a lovely bluish-gray. People were sick of silver foxes, but surely with these beauties the market would revive.
    Of course there is always the chance, with a new male, of how well he will perform, and how many of the offspring will have their father’s color. I think there was trouble on both fronts, though my mother would not allow questions or household talk about these matters. I think one of the males had a standoffish nature and another sired mostly dark litters. It did not matter much, because the fashion went against longhaired furs altogether.
    When my father went looking for a job it was necessary to find a night job, because he had to spend all day going out of business. He had to pelt all the animals and sell the pelts for whatever he could get and he had to tear down the guard fence, the Old Sheds and the New Sheds, and all the pens. I suppose he did not have to do that immediately, but he must have wanted all traces of the enterprise destroyed.
    He got a job as night watchman at the Foundry, covering the hours from five in the afternoon till ten o’clock in the evening. There was not so much money in being a night watchman, but the good fortune in it was that he was able to do another job at that time as well. This extra job was called shaking down floors. He was never finished with it when his watchman’s shift was over,