The View from Castle Rock

opened onto that porch now opened three feet above weeds and rubble.) And he was not a drunk or a gambler, being too careful of his money for that. He was mean in both senses of the word. He mistreated his horses, and it goes without saying that he mistreated his family.
    In the winter he took his milk cans to town on a sleigh pulled by a team of horses-snowplows for the county roads being in short supply then, just like tractors. This was at the time in the morning when everybody was walking to school, and he never slowed down as other farmers did to let you jump on the back of the sleigh and catch a ride. He picked up the whip instead.
    Mrs. Newcombe was never with him, on the sleigh or in the car. She walked to town, wearing old-fashioned galoshes even when the weather got warm, and a long drab coat and a scarf over her hair. She mumbled hello without ever looking up, or sometimes turned her head away, not speaking at all. I think she was missing some teeth. That was more common then than it is now, and it was more common also for people to make plain a state of mind, in their speech and dress and gestures, so that everything about them said,
I know how I should look and behave and if I don
’
t do it that
’
s my own business,
or,
I
don
’
t care, things have gone too far with me, think what you like.

    Nowadays Mrs. Newcombe might be seen as a serious case, terminally depressed, and her husband with his brutish ways might be looked on with concern and compassion.
These people need help.
In those days they were just taken as they were and allowed to live out their lives without anyone giving a thought to intervention. They were regarded in fact as a source of interest and entertainment. It might be said-it was said-that nobody had any use for him and that you had to feel sorry for her. But there was a feeling that some people were born to make others miserable and some let themselves in for being made miserable. It was simple destiny and there was nothing to be done about it.
    The Newcombes had had five daughters, then one son. The girls’ names were April, Corinne, Gloria, Susannah, and Dahlia. I thought these names fanciful and lovely and I would have liked the daughters’ looks to match them, as if they were the daughters of an ogre in a fairy tale.
    April and Corinne were gone from home some time ago, so I had no way of knowing what they looked like. Gloria and Susannah lived in town. Gloria was married and had dropped from view as married girls did. Susannah worked in the hardware store, and she was a stout girl, with slightly crossed eyes, not at all pretty, but quite normal looking (crossed eyes being a variation of normal and not a particular misfortune at that time, not a thing to be remedied, any more than dispositions were). She did not seem in any way cowed like her mother or brutal like her father. And Dahlia was a couple of years older than I was, the first of the family to go to high school. She was no wide-eyed ripply-haired beauty of an ogre’s daughter either, but she was handsome and sturdy, her hair thick and fair, her shoulders strong, her breasts firm and high. She got quite respectable marks and was good at games, particularly at basketball.
    During my first few months at high school I found myself walking part of the way to school with her. She walked along the county road and over the bridge to town. I lived at the end of the half-mile road that was parallel to this road, on the river’s north side. Up to now she and I had lived our lives within shouting distance of each other, you might say, but the school districts were divided in such a way that I had always gone to the town school, while the Newcombes went to a country school farther out along the county road. The first two years that Dahlia was at high school and I was still at public school we must have walked the same route, though we would not have walked together-it was not done, high school and public school students walking together. But now that we were both going to high school we would usually meet where the roads joined, and if either of us saw the other coming we would wait.
    This was how it was during my first fall at high school. Walking together did not mean that we became exactly friends. It was just that it would have seemed odd to walk singly now that we were both at the high school and going the same way. I don’t know what we talked about. I have an idea that there were long periods of silence, due to