The View from Castle Rock

Now and then he would speak about God. His tone at such times was firm and factual, as if God were a superior officer, was occasionally gracious but often inflexible and impatient, in a manly way. When the war was over and he was out of the Army (“If I’m not killed,” he said cheerfully), there would still be the commands of God and his Army to be reckoned with.

“I’ll have to do what God wants me to.”

That struck me. What terrible docility it took, to be such a believer.

Or-when you considered the war and the ordinary Army-just to be a man.

The thought of his future might have come to him because we had noticed, on the trunk of a beech tree-those trees whose gray bark is ideal for messages-a carved face and a date. The year was 1909. During the time since, the tree had been growing, its trunk had been widening, so that the outlines of the face had broadened at the sides to become blotches wider than the face itself. The rest of the date had been blotched out entirely, and the numbers of the year might soon be illegible as well.

“That was before the First World War,” I said. “Whoever did it might be dead now. He might’ve been killed in that war.

“Or he could just be dead anyway,” I added hastily.

It was on that day, I believe, that we got so hot on the way back that we took off our shoes and socks and lowered ourselves from the planks to stand in the knee-high water of the creek. We splashed our arms and faces.

“You know that time I got caught coming out from under the apple tree?” I said, to my own surprise.

“Yeah.”

“I told her I was looking for a bracelet, but it wasn’t true. I went in there for another reason.”

“Is that right?”

By now I wished I had not started this.

“I wanted to get under the big tree when it was all in bloom and look up at it from underneath.”

He laughed. “That’s fu

I was surprised, and somehow not quite pleased, to find that we had had this urge in common. But surely I would not have told him if I hadn’t hoped that it was something he would understand?

“Come to our place for supper,” he said.

“Don’t you have to ask your mother if it’s all right?”

“She don’t care.”

My mother would have cared, if she had known. But she didn’t know, because I lied and said I was going to my friend Claras. Now that my father had to be at the Foundry by five o’clock-even on Sundays, because he was the watchman-and my mother was so often not feeling well, our suppers had become rather haphazard. If I cooked, there were things that I liked. One was sliced bread and cheese with milk and beaten eggs poured over it, baked in the oven. Another, also oven-baked, was a loaf of ti

Perhaps my mother, if she had known, would have found a way to say to me that once you went into certain houses as an equal and a friend-and this was true even if they were in a way perfectly respectable houses-you showed that the value you put on yourself was not very high, and after that others would value you accordingly. I would have argued with her, of course, and the more fiercely because I would have known that what she was saying was true, as far as life in that town went. I was the one, after all, who would make any excuse now not to go with my friends past the corner where Russell and his family stationed themselves on Saturday nights.

I sometimes thought ahead hopefully to the time when Russell would have put away that slightly comic dark-blue red-piped uniform and replaced it with khaki. It seemed as if much more than the uniform might be changed, that an identity itself could be peeled away and a fresh one shine out, unassailable, once he was dressed as a fighting man.

The Craiks lived on a narrow diagonal street only a block long, not far from the horse barns. I had never had any reason to walk along this street before. The houses were close to the sidewalk and close to each other with no room for driveways or side yards in between. The people who owned cars had to park them partly on the sidewalk and partly on the strips of grass that served as front lawns. The Craiks’ large wooden house was painted yellow-Russell had told me to look for the yellow house-but the paint was weathered and blistered.

Just as the brown paint was, that had once, ill-advisedly, covered the red brick of the house that I lived in. When it came to ready money our two families were not so far apart. Not far apart at all.

Two little girls were sitting on the front step, maybe stationed there in case I should have forgotten the house’s description.

They jumped up, however, without a word, 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.

“A

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 A

“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.