The View from Castle Rock

shoots me and he gets hung and goes to Hell. Don’t worry-he’s not going to see us.”
    Before we were in sight of the Newcombes’ buildings we climbed a bank on the opposite side of the road, where there was a thick growth of sumac bordering a planted windbreak of spruce. When Dahlia began to walk in a crouch, ahead of me, I did the same. And when she stopped I stopped.
    There was the barn, and the barnyard, full of cows. I realized, once we stopped making our own noise among the branches, that we had been hearing the trampling and bawling of the cows all along. Unlike most farmsteads, the Newcombes’ did not have a lane. House and barn and barnyard were all right along the road.
    There wasn’t enough fresh grass for cows to be out to pasture yet-the low places in the pastures were still mostly underwater-but they were let out of the stable to exercise before the evening milking. From behind our screen of sumac, we could look across the road and down at them as they jostled each other and blundered around in the muck, uneasy and complaining because of their full udders. Even if we snapped a branch, or spoke in normal voices, there was too much going on over there for anybody to hear us.
    Raymond, a boy about ten years old, came around the corner of the barn. He had a stick but he was just tapping the cows’ rumps with it, pushing them and saying, “So-boss, so-boss,” in an easygoing rhythm and urging them towards the stable door. It was the sort of mixed herd most farms had at that time. A black cow, a rusty-red cow, a pretty golden cow that must have been part Jersey, others splotched brown and white and black and white in all sorts of combinations. They still had their horns, and that gave them a look of dignity and ferocity which cows have now lost.
    A man’s voice, Bunt Newcombe’s voice, called from the stable.
    “Hurry up. What’s the holdup? Do you think you’ve got all night?”
    Raymond called back, “Okay.
O-kay.
” The tone of his voice did not indicate anything to me, except that he didn’t seem scared. But Dahlia said quietly, “Yah. He’s giving him lip. Good for him.”
    Bunt Newcombe came out of another door of the stable. He was wearing overalls and a greasy barn smock, instead of the buffalo coat I thought of as his natural costume, and he moved with an odd swing of one leg.
    “Bum leg,” Dahlia said, in the same quiet but intensely satisfied voice. “I heard Belle kicked him but I thought it was too good to be true. Too bad it wasn’t his head.”
    He was carrying a pitchfork. But it seemed he meant no harm to Raymond. All he used the fork for was to pitch manure out of that doorway, while the cows were driven in at the other.

    Perhaps a son was abhorred less than his daughters?
    “If I had a gun I could get him now,” Dahlia said. “I should do it while I’m still young enough so’s I’m not the one that ends up hung.”
    “You’d go to jail,” I said.
    “So what? He runs his own jail. Maybe they’d never catch me. Maybe they’d never even know it was me.”
    She couldn’t mean what she was saying. If she had any such intentions wouldn’t it be crazy of her to tell me about them? I could betray her. I would not intend to, but somebody might get it out of me. Because of the war I often thought of what it would be like to be tortured. How much could I stand? At the dentist’s, when he hit a nerve, I had thought, if a pain like that went on and on unless I betrayed where my father was hiding with the Resistance, what would I do?
    When the cows were all inside and Raymond and his father had shut the stable doors we walked, still bent, back through the sumacs and once out of sight we climbed down to the road. I thought that Dahlia might say now that the shooting part was only kidding, but she didn’t. I wondered why she had not said anything about her mother, about being worried for her mother as she had been for Raymond. Then I thought that she probably despised her mother, for what her mother had put up with and what she had become. You would have to show some spirit to make the grade with Dahlia. I wouldn’t have wanted her to know that I was afraid of the horned cows.
    We must have said good-bye when she took the route back to town, to Gloria’s house, and I turned onto our dead-end road. But perhaps she just walked on and left me. I kept thinking about whether she could really kill her father. I had a strange idea that she was too young to do that-as if