The View from Castle Rock (13 page)

That fall he got the roof on though he didn’t get it shingled, and he had a stove installed. He got help in both these undertakings from a man he worked with at the mill. It was the first time anyone from outside the family had done any work on the premises, except for the barn raising in their father’s time. Their father had been annoyed at his daughters that day because they had set all the food out on trestle tables in the yard, then disappeared, rather than face waiting on strangers.

Time had not made them easier. While the helper was there—and he was not a real stranger, just a town man who did not go to their church—Lizzie and Maggie would not go out to the barn, though it was their turn to milk. Susan had to go. She was the one who always spoke up when they had to enter a store and buy something. And she was the boss of the brothers when they were in the house. She was the one who had made it a rule that nobody should question Forrest during the early stages of his undertaking. She appeared to think he would give it up if there was no interest or prohibition. He is only doing it to get noticed, she said.

And certainly he was. Not so much by his brothers and sisters—who avoided looking out the windows on that side of their house—as by the neighbors, and even by town people who would make a special drive past, on Sundays. The fact that he had got a job away from home, that he ate at the hotel though he never took a drink there, that he had practically moved out on his family, was a widespread subject of conversation. It was such a break with all that was known about the rest of the family as to be almost a scandal. (Duncan’s departure was by now more or less forgotten.) People wondered about what had happened, at first behind Forrest’s back and eventually to his face.

Had there been a fight? No.

Ah then. Ah. Was he planning to get married?

If this was a joke, he did not take it so. He did not say yes or no or maybe.

There was not a looking glass in the family home, except for the little wavy one the men shaved by—the sisters could tell each other when they looked decent. But in the hotel there was a mammoth glass behind the counter, and Forrest could have seen in it that he was a good-enough-looking man in his late thirties, black-haired and broad and tall. (Actually the sisters were even better looking than the brothers but nobody ever looked at them closely enough to figure that out. Such is the effect of style and manner.)

So why should he not think that marriage was possible, if he hadn’t thought about it already?

That winter he lived with only the board walls between himself and the weather and with temporary boards shuttering the window spaces. He put up the inside partitions and built the stairs and closets and laid the final floorboards of oak and pine.

Next summer he built the brick chimney to replace the stovepipe sticking out of the roof. And he covered the whole structure with fresh red bricks, set together as well as any bricklayer might have done them. Windows were put into place, plank doors removed and ready-made doors hung, back and front. An up-to-date stove installed, with baking oven and warming oven and the reservoir for heating water. The pipes fitted into the new chimney. The big job left was the plastering of the inside walls, and he was ready for that when the weather grew chilly. A coat of rough plaster first, then the painstakingly smoothed plaster on top. He understood that wallpaper should go over that but could not think how to choose it. Meanwhile all the rooms looked wonderfully bright, with the plaster shining indoors and the snow without.

The need for furnishings took him by surprise. In the house where he had lived with his brothers and sisters, Spartan preferences ruled. No curtains, only dark-green blinds, bare floors, hard chairs, no sofas, shelves instead of cupboards. Clothing hanging from hooks on the back of doors instead of in wardrobes—more clothes than could be managed that way being seen as excessive. He did not necessarily wish to copy this style, but he had such small experience of other houses that he did not know what other way to manage. He could hardly afford—or wish—to make the place look like the hotel.

He made do, for the present, with the discards placed in the barn. A chair with two rungs missing, some rough shelving, a table that chickens had been plucked on, a cot with horse blankets laid on it for a mattress. All this was set up in the same room as the stove, the other rooms being left entirely bare.

Susan had decreed, when they all lived together, that Maggie should take care of Sandy’s clothing, Lizzie of Forrest’s, Annie of Simon’s, she herself of John’s. This meant ironing and mending and darning socks, and knitting scarves and vests and making new shirts as might be needed. Lizzie was not supposed to continue looking after Forrest—or to have anything at all to do with him—after he moved out. But a time came—five or six years after his house had been finished—when she took it upon herself to see how he was getting on. Susan was ill by this time, greatly weakened by pernicious anemia, so that her rules were not always enforced.

Forrest had quit his job at the planing mill. The reason being, so people said, that he could not bear the razzing he got all the time about marrying. Stories circulated, about his going to Toronto on the train, and sitting in Union Station all day long, looking for a woman who would fill the bill but not finding her. Also a story of his writing to an agency in the United States, then hiding in his cellar when some hefty female came knocking on his door. The younger fellows at the mill were particularly hard on him, with their preposterous advice.

He got a job as a janitor at the Presbyterian church, where he did not have to see anybody except the minister or an occasional officious Member of the Session—neither of these being the sort to make crude or personal remarks.

Lizzie crossed the field on a spring afternoon and knocked on his door. No answer. It was not locked, however, and she went in.

Forrest was not asleep. He was lying fully dressed on the cot, with his arms behind his head.

“Are you sick?” said Lizzie. None of them ever lay down in the daytime unless they were sick.

Forrest said no. He did not reproach her for coming in without being asked, but he did not welcome her either.

The place smelled bad. No wallpaper had ever been put up and there was still some whiff of raw plaster. Also the smell of horse blankets and of other clothing not washed for a long time, if ever. And of ancient grease in the frying pan and bitter tea leaves in the pot (Forrest had taken up the fancy habit of drinking tea instead of just hot water). The windows were bleary in the spring sunlight and dead flies lay on their sills.

“Did Susan send you?” Forrest said.

“No,” said Lizzie. “She’s not herself.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. “Did Simon?”

“I came on my own.” Lizzie put down the parcel she was carrying and looked about for a broom. “We are all well at the house,” she said, just as if he had asked. “Except for Susan.”

In the parcel was a new shirt of blue cotton, and half a loaf of bread and a fresh chunk of butter. All bread that the sisters made was excellent, and the butter tasty, being made from the milk of Jersey cows. Lizzie had taken these things without permission.

This was the beginning of a new disposition of the family. Susan did rouse herself when Lizzie got home, enough to tell her she must go or stay. Lizzie said she would go, but to Susan’s surprise, and everybody’s, she asked for her share of household goods. Simon separated out what she should have, with severe justice, and in that way Forrest’s house was, eventually, sparsely furnished. No wallpaper was put up or curtains hung, but everything was scrubbed and gleaming. Lizzie had asked for a cow and a half dozen hens and a pig to raise, and Forrest set to work as a carpenter again, to build a barn with two stalls and a haymow. When Susan died it was discovered that she had put by a surprising nest egg, and a share of that was meted out as well. A horse was bought, and a buggy, around the first time that cars were becoming a usual thing on these roads. Forrest gave up walking to his job, and on Saturday nights he and Lizzie rode to town to shop. Lizzie reigned in her own house, like any married woman.

On one Halloween night—Halloween in those days being more of a time for serious tricks than an occasion for handouts—a bundle was left at Forrest and Lizzie’s door. Lizzie was the first to open the door in the morning. She had forgotten about Halloween, which none of the family ever paid any attention to, and when she saw the shape of the bundle she cried out, more in amazement than vexation. In its ragged wool wrappings she saw the shape of a baby, and she would have heard somehow about babies being abandoned, left on the doorstep of people who might care for them. For one whole moment she must have thought that that had happened to her, that she had actually been singled out for such a gift and duty. Then Forrest came from the back of the house to see her stoop and pick it up, and he knew at once what it was. So did she, once she felt it. A parcel of straw in sacking, tied with cords, to resemble a baby, the face marked with crayon at the appropriate place on the sacking, to crudely show a baby’s face.

Less innocent than Lizzie, Forrest caught the implication, and he grabbed the bundle from her, tore it in pieces, stuffed the pieces into the stove.

She saw that this was a thing she had better not ask about, or even mention in the future, and she never did. Neither did he mention it, and the story survived only as rumor, always to be questioned and deplored by those who passed it on.

“They were devoted to each other,” said my mother, who had never actually met them, but was generally in favor of brotherly-sisterly relationships, unsullied by sex.

My father had seen them at church, when he was a child, and might have visited them a couple of times, with his mother. They were only second cousins of his father’s and he did not think they had ever come to his parents’ house.

He did not admire them, or blame them. He wondered at them.

“To think what their ancestors did,” he said. “The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon.”

Working for a Living

When my father was twelve years old and had gone as far as he could go at the country school, he went into town to write a set of exams. Their proper name was the Entrance Examinations, but they were known collectively as the Entrance. The Entrance meant, literally, the entrance to high school, but it also meant, in an undefined way, the entrance to the world. The world of professions such as medicine or law or engineering or teaching. Country boys did enter that world in the years before the First World War, more easily than they did a generation later. It was a time of prosperity in Huron County and expansion in the country. It was 1913 and the country was not yet fifty years old.

My father passed the Entrance with high honors and went on to the Continuation School in the town of Blyth. Continuation Schools offered four years of high school, without the final year called Upper School, or Fifth Form—you would have to go to a larger town for that. It looked as if he was on his way.

During his first week at Continuation School my father heard the teacher read a poem.

Liza Grayman Ollie Minus.

We can make Eliza blind.

Andy Parting, Lee Beehinus.

Foo Prince in the Sansa Time.

He used to recite this to us as a joke, but the fact was, he did not hear it as a joke. Around the same time, he went into the stationery store and asked for Signs Snow Paper.

Signs Snow Paper.

Science notepaper.

Soon he was surprised to see the poem written on the blackboard.

Lives of Great Men all remind us,

We can make our lives sublime.

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the Sands of Time.

He had not hoped for such reasonable clarification, would not have dreamed of asking for it. He had been quite willing to give the people at the school the right to have a strange language or logic. He did not ask for them to make sense on his terms. He had a streak of pride which might look like humility, making him scared and touchy, ready to bow out. I know that very well. He made a mystery there, a hostile structure of rules and secrets, far beyond anything that really existed. He felt nearby the fierce breath of ridicule, he overestimated the competition, and the family caution, the country wisdom, came to him then: stay out of it.

In those days people in town did generally look upon the people from the country as more apt to be slow-witted, tongue-tied, uncivilized, than themselves, and somewhat more docile in spite of their strength. And farmers saw people who lived in towns as having an easy life and being unlikely to survive in situations calling for fortitude, self-reliance, hard work. They believed this in spite of the fact that the hours men worked at factory jobs or in stores were long and the wages low, in spite of the fact that many houses in town had no running water or flush toilets or electricity. But the people in town had Saturday or Wednesday afternoons and the whole of Sundays off and that was enough to make them soft. The farmers had not one holiday in their lives. Not even the Scots Presbyterians; cows don’t recognize the Sabbath.

The country people when they came into town to shop or to go to church often seemed stiff and shy and the town people did not realize that this could actually be seen as a superior behavior. I’m-not-going-to-let-any-of-them-make-a-fool-out-of-me behavior. Money would not make much difference. Farmers might maintain their proud and wary reserve in the presence of citizens whom they could buy and sell.

My father would say later that he had gone to Continuation School too young to know what he was doing, and that he should have stayed there, he should have made something out of himself. But he said this almost as a matter of form, not as if he cared very much. And it wasn’t as if he had run off home at the first indication that there were things he didn’t understand. He was never very clear about how long he had stayed. Three years and part of the fourth? Two years and part of the third? And he didn’t quit suddenly—it was not a matter of going to school one day and staying away the next and never showing up again. He just began to spend more and more time in the bush and less and less time at school, so that his parents decided there was not much point in thinking about sending him to a larger town to do his Fifth Form, not much hope of university or the professions. They could have afforded that—though not easily—but it was evidently not what he wanted. And it could not be seen as a great disappointment. He was their only son, the only child. The farm would be his.

There was no more wild country in Huron County then than there is now. Perhaps there was less. The farms had been cleared in the period between 1830 and 1860, when the Huron Tract was being opened up, and they were cleared thoroughly. Many creeks had been dredged—the progressive thing to do was to straighten them out and make them run like tame canals between the fields. The early farmers hated the very sight of a tree and admired the look of open land. And the masculine approach to the land was managerial, dictatorial. Only women were allowed to care about landscape and not to think always of its subjugation and productivity. My grandmother, for example, was famous for having saved a line of silver maples along the lane. These trees grew beside a crop field and they were getting big and old—their roots interfered with the ploughing and they shaded too much of the crop. My grandfather and my father went out one morning and made ready to cut the first of them down. But my grandmother saw what they were doing from the kitchen window and she flew out in her apron and harangued and upbraided them so that they finally had to take up the axes and the crosscut saw and leave the scene. The trees stayed and spoiled the crop at the edge of the field until the terrible winter of 1935 finished them off.

But at the back of the farms the farmers were compelled by law to leave a woodlot. They could cut trees there both for their own use and to sell. Wood of course had been their first crop—rock elm went for ships’ timbers and white pine for the ships’ masts, until hardly any rock elm or white pine remained. Now there was protection decreed for the poplar and ash and maple and oak and beech, the cedar and hemlock that were left.

Through the woodlot—called the bush—at the back of my grandfather’s farm ran the Blyth Creek, dredged a long time ago when the farm was first cleared. The earth dredged out then made a high, hummocky bank on which thick clumps of cedars grew. This was where my father started trapping. He eased himself out of school and into the life of a fur-trapper. He could follow the Blyth Creek for many miles in either direction, to its rising in Grey Township or to the place where it flows into the Maitland River which flows into Lake Huron. In some places—most particularly in the village of Blyth—the creek became public for a while, but for much of its length it ran through the backs of farms, with the bush on either side, so that it was possible to follow it and be hardly aware of the farms, the cleared land, the straight-laid roads and fences—it was possible to imagine that you were out in the forest as it was a hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that.

My father had read a lot of books by this time, books he found at home and in the Blyth Library and in the Sunday School Library. He had read books by Fenimore Cooper and he had absorbed the myths or half-myths about wilderness that most of the country boys around him knew nothing about, since few of them were readers. Most boys whose imaginations were lit up by the same notions as his would live in cities. If they were rich enough they would travel north every summer with their families, they would go on canoe trips and later on fishing and hunting trips. If their families were truly rich they would navigate the rivers of the Far North with Indian guides. People eager for this experience of the wilderness would drive right through our part of the country without noticing there was one bit of wilderness there.

But farm boys from Huron County, knowing hardly anything about this big deep country of the Precambrian Shield and the wild rivers, nevertheless were drawn—some of them were, for a time—drawn to the strips of bush along the creeks, where they fished and hunted and built rafts and set traps. Even if they hadn’t read a word about that sort of life they might make their forays into it. But they soon gave it up to enter upon the real, heavy work of their lives, as farmers.

And one of the differences between farmers then and now was that in those days nobody expected recreation to play any regular part in the farming life.

My father, being a farm boy with that extra, inspired or romantic perception (he would not have cared for those words), with a Fenimore Cooper–cultivated hunger, did not turn aside from these juvenile pursuits at the age of eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Instead of giving up the bush, he took to it more steadily and seriously. He began to be talked about and thought about more as a trapper than as a young farmer. And as a solitary and slightly odd young man, though not a person who was in any way feared or disliked. He was edging away from the life of a farmer, just as he had edged away earlier from the idea of getting an education and becoming a professional man. He was edging towards a life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he didn’t want so much better than what he wanted.

A life in the bush, away from the towns, on the edge of the farms—how could it be managed?

Even here, where men and women mostly took whatever was cut out for them, some men had managed it. Even in this tamed country there were a few hermits, a few men who had inherited farms and didn’t keep them up, or who were just squatters come from God knows where. They fished and hunted and travelled around, were gone and came back, were gone and never came back—not like the farmers who whenever they left their own localities went in buggies or sleighs or more often now by car, bound on definite errands to certain destinations.

He was making money from his trapline. Some skins could bring him as much as a fortnight’s work on a threshing gang. So at home they could not complain. He paid board, and he still helped his father when it was necessary. He and his father never talked. They could work all morning cutting wood in the bush, and never say a word, except when they had to speak about the work. His father was not interested in the bush except as a woodlot. It was to him just like a field of oats, with the difference that the crop was firewood.

His mother was more curious. She walked back to the bush on Sunday afternoons. She was a tall upright woman with a stately figure, but she still had a tomboy’s stride. She would bunch up her skirts and expertly swing her legs over a fence. She was knowledgeable about wildflowers and berries and she could tell you the name of any bird from its song.

He showed her the snares where he caught fish. That made her uneasy, because the fish could be caught in the snares on a Sunday, just as on any other day. She was very strict about all Presbyterian rules and observances, and this strictness had a peculiar history. She had not been brought up as a Presbyterian at all, but had led a carefree childhood and girlhood as a member of the Anglican Church, also known as the Church of England. There were not many Anglicans in that part of the country and they were sometimes thought of as next thing to Papists—but also as next door to freethinkers. Their religion often seemed to outsiders to be all a matter of bows and responses, with short sermons, easy interpretations, worldly ministers, much pomp and frivolity. A religion to the liking of her father, who had been a convivial Irishman, a storyteller, a drinker. But when my grandmother married she had wrapped herself up in her husband’s Presbyterianism, becoming fiercer than many who were brought up in it. She was a born Anglican who took on the Presbyterian righteousness-competition just as she was a born tomboy who took on the farm-housewife competition, with her whole heart. People might have wondered, did she do this for love?

My father and those who knew her well did not think so. She and my grandfather were mismatched, though they didn’t fight. He thoughtful, silent; she spirited, sociable. No, not for love but for pride’s sake she did what she did. Not to be outdone or criticized in any way. And not to have anybody say that she regretted a decision that she had made, or wanted anything that she couldn’t have.

She stayed friends with her son in spite of the Sunday fish, which she wouldn’t cook. She took an interest in the animal skins he showed her, and heard how much he got for them. She washed his smelly clothes, whose smell was as much from the fish bait he carried as from the pelts and guts. She could be exasperated but tolerant with him as if he was a much younger son. And perhaps he did seem younger to her, with his traps and treks along the creek, and his unsociability. He never went after girls, and gradually lost touch with his childhood friends who were doing so. She did not mind. His behavior might have helped her to bear a disappointment that he had not gone on in school, he was not going to become a doctor or a minister. Maybe she could pretend that he might still do that, the old plans—her plans for him—being not forgotten but just postponed. At least he was not just turning into a silent farmer, a copy of his father.

As for my grandfather, he passed no opinion, did not say whether he approved or disapproved. He maintained his air of discipline and privacy. He was a man born in Morris, settled in to be a farmer, a Grit and a Presbyterian. Born to be against the English Church and the Family Compact and Bishop Strachan and saloons; to be for universal suffrage (but not for women), free schools, responsible government, the Lord’s Day Alliance. To live by hard routines, and refusals.

My grandfather diverged a little—he learned to play the fiddle, he married the tall temperamental Irish girl with eyes of two colors. That done, he withdrew, and for the rest of his life was diligent, orderly, and quiet. He too was a reader. In the winter he managed to get all his work done—and well done—and then he would read. He never talked about what he read, but the whole community knew about it. And respected him for it. That is an odd thing—there was a woman too who read, she got books from the library all the time, and nobody respected her in the least. The talk was always about how the dust grew under her beds and her husband ate a cold dinner. Perhaps it was because she read novels, stories, and the books my grandfather read were heavy. Heavy books, as everybody remembered, but their titles are not remembered. They came from the library, which at that time contained Blackstone, Macauley, Carlyle, Locke, Hume’s
History of England.
What about
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
? What about Voltaire? Karl Marx? It’s possible.