The View from Castle Rock

This caused Mavis and Annie to giggle and hold their mouths.
    “Choke on your food and it’ll serve you right,” said Russell.
    Mrs. Craik avoided saying my name-she said in a harsh whisper to Russell, “Pass her the tomatoes”-but this seemed to be the result of extreme shyness, not of ill will. Mr. Craik continued
to
show an unperturbed sense
of
social occasion, asking me how my mother’s health was, and what hours my father worked at the Foundry and how he liked his job there, did he find it a change from being his own boss? His way of speaking to me was more that of a teacher or a shopkeeper or even a professional man in town, than that of the man on the coal wagon. And he seemed to take it for granted that our families were on an equal footing and had a comfortable acquaintance with each other. This was close to the truth, as far as the equal footing went, and it was also true that my father had a comfortable acquaintance with almost everybody. Nevertheless it made me feel uneasy, even a little ashamed, because I was deceiving this family and my own, I was at this table under false pretenses.
    But it seemed to me then that Russell and I would have been under false pretenses at any family supper table where we had to sit as if we were concerned with nothing but the food and whatever conversation was offered. While in fact we were marking time, our urgent needs were not to be met here, and our only real concern was to get at each other’s skin.
    It never crossed my mind that a young couple in our situation did indeed belong right here, that we were entered on the first stage of a life that would turn us, soon enough, into the Father and the Mother. Russell’s parents probably knew this, and may have been privately dismayed, but decently hopeful, or resigned. Russell was already a force in the family whom they did not control. And Russell knew it, if he was capable at the moment of thinking that far ahead. He hardly looked at me, but when he did it was a steady look, laying claim, and it hit me and resonated as if I’d been a drum.
    It was late in the summer now, the evenings closed in early. The light was turned on in the kitchen when we did the dishes. The dishpan was set on the table, the water had been heated on the stove, which was just the way things were managed when I washed the dishes at home. The mother washed, the sisters and I dried. Perhaps relieved that the meal was over and that I would soon be going home, Russell’s mother made a few statements.
    “It always takes more dishes than you’d think it would for to make a meal.”
    “Don’t bother with them pots, I’ll set them on the stove.”
    “That looks like it’s about it now.”
    This last sentence sounded like a thank-you that she didn’t know how to say.
    So close to me and to their mother, Mavis and Annie had not dared giggle. When we got in each other’s way at the draining pan they had said softly, “Parmee.”
    Russell came in from helping his father put the banties to roost. He said, “I guess it’s time for you to be getting home,” as if getting me home was just another nightly chore, instead of our anticipated first walk in the dark together. Mutely, exquisitely anticipated, on my part, the thought of it growing all through the dish-drying routine and even transforming that into a feminine ritual mysteriously linked to what was to come.

    It was not so dark as I had hoped. To get me home we would have to cross the town, east to west, and almost certainly we would be noticed.
    But that was not where we were going. At the end of this short street Russell put his hand on my back-a quick, functional pressure, to head me not towards home but towards Miriam McAlpin’s horse barn.
    I turned around to see if anybody was spying on us.
    “What if your brother or sisters followed us?”
    “They wouldn’t,” he said. “I’d kill them.”
    The barn was painted red, the color plain in the half-dark. The stable doors were on the lower level in the back. On the upper barn doors, which faced the street, were painted two prancing white horses. A gangway of stone and earth was built up to these doors-this was the way the loads of hay were driven in. In one of these big upper doors there was an ordinary-sized door, fitted snugly so that you would hardly notice it, holding the hoof and part of one painted horse’s back legs. It was locked, but Russell had the key.
    He pulled me inside after him. And once he had closed the door