Alice Munro: The View from Castle Rock

Certainly he is a joker when we meet him first, by Hogg’s account, in Tibbie Shiel’s inn (which is still there, more than an hour’s walk through the hills from Phaup, just as Phaup is still there, now a bothy shelter on the Southern Uplands Way, a walking trail). He is putting on a show that could be seen to be blasphemous. Blasphemous, risky, and funny. Down on his knees, he is offering up prayers for several of those present. He asks forgiveness, and specifies the sins that are outstanding, prefacing each one with an if it be true -

An if it be true that the bairn born a fortnight past to--’s wife has an almighty look about it of____________________, then

wilt Thou Lord show mercy on all the participants…

An if it be true that -- -- cheated ____________________out of twenty pieces of lamb siller [silver] at the last St. Boswell’s sheep fair, then we pray Thee, O Lord, in spite of such devil’s doing…

Some of those named could not be held back, and his friends had to drag James out before harm came to him.

By this time he was probably a widower, a fellow on the loose, too poor for any likely woman to marry. His wife had borne him a daughter and five sons, then died at the birth of the last one. Mary, Robert, James, Andrew, William, Walter.

Writing to an emigration society around the time of Waterloo, he presents himself as an excellent prospect, because of the five strong sons who will accompany him to the New World. Whether or not he was offered help to emigrate I do not know. Probably not, because we next hear of him having trouble raising the fare. A depression has followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the price of sheep has fallen. And there is no more boast of the five sons. Robert, the eldest, has taken off for the Highlands. James-the younger James-has gone to America, which includes Canada, all on his own, and it seems he has not sent word to say where he is or what he is doing. (He is in Nova Scotia, and he is teaching school in a place called Economy, though he has no qualifications for this except what he got in the Ettrick schoolhouse, and probably a strong right arm.)

And as for William, the second youngest, a boy not yet out of his teens who will be my great-great-grandfather-he is gone as well. When we next hear of him he is settled in the Highlands, a factor on one of the new sheep farms cleared of the crofters. And so scornful is he of the place where he was born, as to write-in a letter to the girl he later marries-that it would be unthinkable for him to live in the Ettrick Valley ever again.

The poverty and the ignorance distress him, apparently. The poverty which seems to him willful, and the ignorance which he judges to be ignorant even of its own existence. He is a modern man.

The first time Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half-doors were open, showing the firelit insides of taverns which he hoped they might enter, because he was wet through. They did not, they were bound somewhere else. Earlier on the same afternoon they had been in some such place, but it was not much more than an alcove, a hole in the wall, with planks on which bottles and glasses were set and coins laid down. He had been continually getting squeezed out of that shelter into the street and into the puddle that caught the drip from the ledge over the entryway. To keep that from happening, he had butted in low down between the cloaks and sheepskins, wedged himself amongst the drinking men and under their arms.

He was surprised at the number of people his father seemed to know in the city of Edinburgh. You would think the people in the drinking place would be strangers to him, but it was evidently not so. Amongst the arguing and excited queer-sounding voices his father’s voice rose the loudest. America, he said, and slapped his hand on the plank for attention, the very way he would do at home. Andrew had heard that word spoken in that same tone long before he knew it was a land across the ocean. It was spoken as a challenge and an irrefutable truth but sometimes-when his father was not there-it was spoken as a taunt or a joke. His older brothers might ask each other, “Are ye awa to America?” when one of them put on his plaid to go out and do some chore such as penning the sheep. Or, “Why don’t ye be off to America?” when they had got into an argument, and one of them wanted to make the other out to be a fool.

The cadences of his father’s voice, in the talk that succeeded that word, were so familiar, and Andrew’s eyes so bleary with the smoke, that in no time he had fallen asleep on his feet. He wakened when several pushed together out of the place and his father with them. Some one of them said, “Is this your lad here or is it some tinker squeezed in to pick our pockets?” and his father laughed and took Andrew’s hand and they began their climb. One man stumbled and another man knocked into him and swore. A couple of women swiped their baskets at the party with great scorn, and made some remarks in their unfamiliar speech, of which Andrew could only make out the words “daecent bodies” and “public footpaths.”

Then his father and the friends stepped aside into a much broader street, which in fact was a courtyard, paved with large blocks of stone. His father turned and paid attention to Andrew at this point.

“Do you know where you are, lad? You’re in the castle yard, and this is Edinburgh Castle that has stood for ten thousand years and will stand for ten thousand more. Terrible deeds were done here. These stones have run with blood. Do you know that?” He raised his head so that they all listened to what he was telling.

“It was King Jamie asked the young Douglases to have supper with him and when they were fair sitten down he says, oh, we won’t bother with their supper, take them out in the yard and chop off their heads. And so they did. Here in the yard where we stand.

“But that King Jamie died a leper,” he went on with a sigh, then a groan, making them all be still to consider this fate.

Then he shook his head.

“Ah, no, it wasn’t him. It was King Robert the Bruce that died a leper. He died a king but he died a leper.”

Andrew could see nothing but enormous stone walls, barred gates, a redcoat soldier marching up and down. His father did not give him much time, anyway, but shoved him ahead and through an archway, saying, “Watch your heads here, lads, they was wee little men in those days. Wee little men. So is Boney the Frenchman, there’s a lot of fight in your wee little men.”

They were climbing uneven stone steps, some as high as Andrew’s knees-he had to crawl occasionally-inside what as far as he could make out was a roofless tower. His father called out, “Are ye all with me then, are ye all in for the climb?” and some straggling voices answered him. Andrew got the impression that there was not such a crowd following as there had been on the street.

They climbed far up in the roundabout stairway and at last came out on a bare rock, a shelf, from which the land fell steeply away. The rain had ceased for the present.

“Ah, there,” said Andrew’s father. “Now where’s all the ones was tramping on our heels to get here?”

One of the men just reaching the top step said, “There’s two-three of them took off to have a look at the Meg.”

’Engines of war,” said Andrew’s father. “All they have eyes for is engines of war. Take care they don’t go and blow themselves up.”

“Haven’t the heart for the stairs, more like,” said another man who was panting. And the first one said cheerfully, “Scairt to get all the way up here, scairt they’re bound to fall off.”