The View from Castle Rock

Dahlia’s senior dignity and a matter-of-factness about her that ruled out silly conversation. But I don’t recall finding these silences uncomfortable.

***

    One morning she didn’t appear, and I went on. In the cloakroom at school she said to me, “I won’t be coming in that way anymore because I’m staying in town now, I’m staying at Glorias.”
    And we hardly spoke together again until one day in early spring-that time I’ve been talking about, with the trees bare, but reddening, and the crows and seagulls busy and the farmers hollering to their horses. She caught up to me, as we were leaving the school. She said, “You going right home?” and I said yes, and she started to walk beside me.
    I asked her if she was living at home again and she said, “Nope. Still at Gloria’s.”
    When we had walked a bit farther she said, “I’m just going out there to have a look at what’s going on.”
    Her way of saying this was straightforward, not confidential. But I knew that
out there
must mean out at her home, and that
what
’
s going on,
though unspecific, meant nothing good.
    During the past winter Dahlia’s status in the school had risen because she was the best player on the basketball team and the team had nearly won the county championship. It gave me a feeling of distinction to be walking with her and to be receiving whatever information she felt like giving me. I can’t remember for sure, but I think that she must have started high school with all the business of her family dragging behind her. It was a small enough town so that all of us started that way, with favorable factors to live up to or some shadow to live down. But now she had been allowed, to a large extent, to slip free. The independence of spirit, the faith you have to have in your body, to become an athlete, won respect and discouraged anybody who would think of snubbing her. She was well dressed, too-she had very few clothes but those she had were quite all right, not like the matronly hand-me-downs that country girls often wore, or the homemade outfits my mother had labored at for me. I remember a red V-necked sweater often worn by her, and a pleated Royal Stewart skirt. Maybe Gloria and Susannah thought of her as the representative and pride of the family, and had pooled some of their resources to dress her.
    We were out of town before she spoke again.
    “I got to keep track of what my old man is up to,” she said. “He better not be beating up on Raymond.”
    Raymond. That was the brother.
    “Do you think he might be?” I said. I felt as if I had to pretend to know less about her family than I-and everybody-actually did.
    “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “Yeah. He might. Raymond used to get off better than the rest of us but now he’s the only one left at home I got my doubts.”
    “Did he beat you?”
    I said this almost casually, trying to sound moderately interested, not in any way horrified.
    She gave a snort. “Are you kidding? Before I got away the last time he tried to brain me with the shovel.”
    After we had walked a bit farther, she said, “Yeah, and I just told him to come on. Come on, let’s see you kill me. Let’s see you, then you’ll get hung. But then I took off, because I thought yeah, sure, but then I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing him. Hung.”
    She laughed. I said encouragingly, “Do you hate him?”
    “Sure I hate him,” she said, with not much more expression than if she had said that she hated sausages. “If somebody told me that he was drowning in the river I would go and stand on the bank and cheer.”
    There was no way to comment about this. But I said, “What if he takes after you now?”

    “He’s not going to see me. I’m just going to spy on him.”
    When we came to the division of our roads she said almost cheerfully, “You want to come with me? You want to see how I do my spying?”
    We walked across the bridge with our heads soberly bowed, looking through the cracks between the planks at the high-flowing river. I was full of alarm and admiration.
    “I used to come out here in the winter,” she said. “I used to get right up against the kitchen windows when it was dark out. Now it stays light too late. And I used to think, he’ll see the boot marks in the snow and know there was somebody had been spying on him and that’ll drive him crazy.”
    I asked whether her father had a shotgun.
    “Sure,” she said. “So what if he comes out and shoots me? He