Alice Munro - The View from Castle Rock

James, once Jamie, Laidlaw died like his father in a place where no reliable burial records yet existed. It is believed that he was put into a corner of the land that he and his brothers and cousin had cleared, then sometime around 1900 his body was moved to the Blyth Cemetery.

Big Rob, who wrote this account of the settlement in Morris, was the father of many sons and daughters. Simon, John, Duncan, Forrest, Sandy, Susan, Maggie, Annie, Lizzie. Duncan left home early. (That name is correct, but I am not absolutely certain of all of the others.) He went to Guelph, and they seldom saw him. The others stayed at home. The house was big enough for them. At first their mother and father were with them, then for several years just their father, and finally they were on their own. People did not remember that they had ever been young.

They turned their backs on the world. The women wore their hair parted in the middle and slicked tight to their heads, though the style of the day ran to bangs and rolls. They wore dark homemade dresses with skinny skirts. And their hands were red because they scrubbed the pine floor of their kitchen with lye every day. It shone like velvet.

They were capable of going to church-which they did every Sunday-and returning home without having spoken to a soul.

Their religious observances were dutiful but not in any way emotional.

The men had to talk more than the women did, doing their business at the mill or the cheese factory. But they wasted no words or time. They were honest but firm in all their dealings. If they made money it was never with the aim of buying new machinery, of lessening their labor or adding comforts to their way of living. They were not cruel to their animals but they had no sentimental feelings for them.

The diet of the household was very plain, and water was what they drank at meals, instead of tea.

So without any pressure from the community, or their religion (the Presbyterian faith was still contentious and cranky but did not lay siege to the soul as fiercely as it had done in Boston’s day), they had constructed a life for themselves that was monastic without any visitations of grace or moments of transcendence.

On a Sunday afternoon in the fall Susan looked out a window and saw Forrest walking back and forth in the big front field, where there was now only wheat stubble. He tramped hard. He stopped and judged what he was doing.

But what was that? She would not give him the satisfaction of asking.

It turned out that before the frost came he was set to dig a large hole. He worked by day and by lantern light. He went six feet down but the hole was much too large for a grave. It was in fact to be the cellar of a house. He brought the dirt up in a wheelbarrow, making use of a ramp he had built.

He hauled large stones from the stone pile into the barn, and there, after the winter closed in, he trimmed them with a stone chisel, for his cellar walls. He did not stop doing his share of the farm chores, but worked on this solitary project late into the night.

Next spring as soon as the hole was dry he mortared the stones in place to make the cellar walls. He put in the pipe for his drain and got the cistern built, then fashioned in plain view the stone foundation for his house. It could be seen that this was no two-room shanty he planned. It was a real and commodious house. It would require an entry road and a drainage ditch and would take up arable land.

His brothers spoke to him, finally. He said he would not dig the ditch till the fall when the crop was off and, as for the road, he had not thought of one and supposed he could walk over from the main house on a narrow path, not depriving them of any more grain than necessary.

They said there was still the house to be reckoned with, the land the house had taken from them, and he said yes, that was true. He would pay a reasonable sum, he said.

Where would he get it?

It could be worked out in terms of the labor he had done on the farm already, deducting living expenses. Also he was giving up his share in the inheritance and that all together should make up for a hole in the field.

He proposed not to work on the farm anymore but to get a job at the planing mill.

They could not believe their ears, just as-until he fitted those massive and permanent stones in-they had not been able to believe their eyes. Well then, they said. If you want to set yourself up to be a laughingstock. Well then you must do it.

He went to work at the planing mill, and in the long evenings he put up the frame of his house. It was to be two stories high, with four bedrooms and a back and front kitchen and pantry and double parlor. The walls were to be planked, with a brick veneer. He would have to buy the bricks, of course, but the planks he planned to use for the walls underneath were those stacked in the barn, left over from the old drive shed he and his brothers had pulled down when they built the new banked barn. Were such planks his to use? Strictly speaking, they were not. But no other use for them had been planned and there was some uneasiness in the family about how people would judge them if they quarrelled and quibbled about things. Already Forrest was eating his supper at a hotel in Blyth because of remarks that Sandy had made about his eating at the family table, eating what the labor of the others provided. They had let him have the land for the house when he claimed it as his due because they did not want him passing around stories of their meanness, and in the same spirit now they let him have the planks.

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.)