The View from Castle Rock

and ran into the house as if I’d been a wildcat after them. The screen door banged in my face and I was left staring down a long bare hallway. I could hear a subdued commotion in the back of the house, perhaps having to do with who should go to greet me. And then Russell himself came down the stairs, his hair dark from a recent wetting, and let me in.
    “So you got here okay,” he said. He backed off from touching me.
    Mr. and Mrs. Craik did not wear their Salvation Army uniforms around home. I don’t know why I had thought they would. The father, whose street preaching was always on the ferocious side, wrathful even when he held out the hope of mercy and salvation, and whose expression when he sat hunched on the coal wagon was always one of disgruntlement, came forward now as a scrubbed and tidy man with a shining bald head, and greeted me as if he was actually glad to see me in his house. The mother was tall, like Russell, large-boned and flat-fronted, with gray hair chopped off at the level of her ears. Russell had to tell her my name twice, through the racket she was making mashing the potatoes, before he could get her to turn around. She wiped her hand on her apron as if she had thought of shaking mine, but she did not do so. She said that she was pleased to meet me. Her voice when she sang the street-corner hymns was full and sweet, but when she spoke now it cracked with embarrassment like an adolescent boy’s.
    Russell’s father was ready to step into the breach. He asked me if I had any experience of banty hens. I said no, and he said he had thought I might have, being brought up on a farm.
    “The hens are my hobby,” he said. “Come and have a look.”
    The two girls had reappeared and were hanging around in the hall doorway. They were about to follow their father and Russell and me out into the backyard, but their mother called to them.
    “Annieanmavis! You stay here an put the plates on the table.”
    The banty rooster was named King George.
    “That’s a joke,” Mr. Craik said. “On account of George is my name.”
    The hens were named after Mae West and Tugboat Annie and Daisy Mae and other personalities from the movies or comic strips or popular folklore. This surprised me because of the fact that movies were forbidden to this family and the movie theatre was singled out in the Saturday sermons as a place to be specially abhorred. I had thought the comic strips would be out of bounds as well. Perhaps it was all right to give such names to silly hens. Or perhaps the Craiks had not always belonged to the Salvation Army.
    “How do you tell which is which?” I said. I didn’t have my wits about me at all, or else I would have seen that each was distinctly marked, had its own pattern of red and brown and rust and gold feathers.
    Russell’s brother had turned up from somewhere. He snickered.
    “Oh, you learn to,” the father said. He began to identify each one for me, but the hens were getting flustered by all the attention and scattered around the yard so that he couldn’t keep them straight. The rooster was bold and pecked at my shoe.
    “Don’t be alarmed,” Russell’s father said. “He’s just showing off.”
    “Do they lay eggs?” was my next foolish-sounding question.
    “Oh, they do, they do, but not so’s it’s a common occurrence. No. Not even enough for our own table. Oh no, they’re an ornamental breed, that’s what they are. Ornamental breed.”
    “You’re going to get a clout,” Russell said to his brother, behind my back.
    At supper, the father gave Russell a nod to ask the Blessing, and Russell did so. Blessings here were leisurely and composed on the spot to suit the occasion, nothing like the Bless-this-food-to-our-use-and-us-to-thy-service that used to be mumbled at our table at home when we ate as a family. Russell spoke slowly and confidently and mentioned the name of everyone at the table-including me, asking that the Lord should make me welcome. The chill thought came to me that the war might not rescue him entirely, that when it was through with him he might revert to the other Army and put on the old uniform, that he might even have a gift and a hankering for public preaching.
    There were no bread-and-butter plates. You put your slice of bread on the oilcloth or on the side of your big plate. And you wiped your plate clean with a piece of bread before the pie was set down on it.
    The rooster appeared in the doorway but was ordered away by Mr. Craik.