Alice Munro

A compilation of short fiction journeys from the Scotland of the author's own family heritage and a ship en route to the New World, to a family odyssey from Illinois to Canada and in and around Lake Huron.

Stories

The View from Castle Rock

Sarah Christine Gill

This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water just playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog has gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails all golden like creatures of Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging. 

They had entered a forest of great oak trees whose branches met over the road. In the branches you could hear and sometimes see the flight of the bright orioles, the cardinals, the red-winged blackbirds. The sumac had put its creamy cones out, coltsfoot and columbine were blooming, and the mullein was standing up straight as soldiers. Wild grapevine had wrapped some bushes so thickly that you would think they were feather beds, or old ladies.

Everything was normal when I got home that evening. This was the summer when my brother and sister had learned to play solitaire, and played it at every opportunity. They were sitting now at either end of the dining-room table, nine and ten years old and grave as an old couple, the cards spread out in front of them. My mother had already gone to bed. She spent many hours in bed, but she never seemed to sleep as other people did, she just dozed for short periods of the day and night, maybe got up and drank tea or sorted out a drawer. Her life had stopped being securely connected at any point with the life of the family.

The yellow color shows sand, not along the lakeshore but collected inland, often bordering a swamp or a long-gone lake. The freckles are not round but appear in the landscape like partly buried eggs, with the blunt end against the low of the ice. These are drumlins - thickly packed in some places, sparse in others. Some qualifying as big smooth hills, some barely breaking through the ground. They give their name to the soil in which they appear (drumlinized till-tan) and to the somewhat rougher soil which has none of them in it (undrumlinized till battleship gray). The glacier in fact did lay them down like eggs, neatly and economically get- ting rid of material that it had picked up in its bulldozing advance. And where it didn't manage this, the ground is natu- rally roughet.

But there is always more than just the keen pleasure of of identification. Theres’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason, its favorite crops and trees and weeds oaks and pines, for instance, growing on sand, and cedars and strayed lilacs on limestone - each with its special expression, its pull on the imagination. The fact of these little countries lying snug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that's usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counterpane. It's the fact you cherish. 

I could pursue this. It's what people do. Once they get started they'll follow any lead. People who have done little reading in their whole lives will immerse themselves in documents, and some who would have trouble telling you the years in which the First World War was begun and ended will toss about dates from past centuries. We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine sometimes cannot believe in the future of our children's children. We can't resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life . 

Now all these names I have been recording are joined to the living people in my mind, and to the lost kitchens, the polished nickel trim on the commodious presiding black stoves, the sour wooden drainboards that never quite dried, the yellow light of the coal-oil lamps. The cream cans on the porch, the apples in the cellar, the stovepipes going up through the holes in the ceiling, the stable warmed in winter by the bodies and breath of the cows whom we still spoke to in words common in the days of Troy. So bos. So bos. The cold waxed parlor where the coffin was put when people died.

And in one of these houses - l can't remember whose - a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far, because I could hold it to my ear when nobody was there to stop me and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.

The View from Castle Rock quotes

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