The View From Castle Rock Part 21

No deaths recorded in Joliet until 1843. No Laidlaw listed in the earliest list of the settlers or those buried in the first cemeteries. What singular folly of mine, to come to a place like this-that is, to any place that has prospered, or even grown, during the last century-hoping to find some notion of what things were like more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Looking for a grave, a memory. There is only one listing that gets my attention.

Unknown Cemetery.

In a certain corner of Homer Township, a burial ground in which only two stones have been found, but in which as many as twenty were said to have existed at one time. The two stones remaining, according to the lists, bear the names of people who died in the year 1837. There is speculation that some of the others might have been those of soldiers who died in the Black Hawk war.

This means that there was a graveyard in existence before Will died.

We go there, we drive to the corner of 143rd and Parker. On the northwest corner is a golf course, on the northeast and southeast corners are recently built houses with landscaped lots. On the southwest corner there are houses, also fairly new, but with the difference that their lots on the corner do not reach the street, being separated from it by a high fence. Between this fence and the street is a patch of land gone completely wild.

I clamber into it, brushing aside the vigorous poison ivy. In among the half-grown trees and almost impenetrable undergrowth, hidden from the street, I peer all around-I cannot straighten up, because of the tree branches. I do not see any leaning or fallen or broken gravestones, or any plants growing-rose bushes, for instance-that might be a sign that graves had once been here. It is useless. I become apprehensive about the poison ivy. I grope my way out.

But why has the wild land remained there? Human burial is one of the very few reasons that any land is undisturbed, nowadays, when all the land around it is put to use.

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 doc.u.ments, 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.

Another cemetery, in Blyth. Where the body of James was moved for burial, decades after he had been killed by the falling tree. And here is where Mary Scott is buried. Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man, William Laidlaw.

Died in Illinois. And buried G.o.d knows where.

Beside her is the body and stone of her daughter Jane, the girl born on the day of her father's death, who was carried as a baby from Illinois. She died when she was twenty-six years old, giving birth to her first child. Mary did not die until two years later. So she had that loss, as well, to absorb before she was finished.

Jane's husband lies nearby. His name was Neil Armour and he too died young. He was a brother of Margaret Armour who was Thomas Laidlaw's wife. They were the children of John Armour, the first teacher at S.S.No. 1 Morris Township, where many of the Laidlaws went to school. The baby that cost Jane her life was named James Armour.

And here a live memory comes twitching through my mind. Jimmy Armour. Jimmy Armour. I don't know what happened to him but I know his name. And not only that-I think I saw him once or more than once, an old man come on a visit from wherever he lived then to the place where he had been born, an old man among other old people-my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather's sisters. And now it occurs to me that he must have been brought up with those people-my grandfather and my great-aunts, the children of Thomas Laidlaw and Margaret Armour. They were his first cousins, after all, his double first cousins. My Aunt Annie, Aunt Jenny, Aunt Mary, my grandfather William Laidlaw, the "Dad" of my father's memoir.

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-those cows whom you still spoke to in words common in the days of Troy. So-boss. So-boss. The cold waxed parlour where the coffin was put when someone died.

And in one of these houses-I can't remember whose-a magic doorstop, a big mother-of-pearl seash.e.l.l that I recognized as a messenger from near and far, because I could hold it to my ear-when n.o.body was there to stop me-and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.

Alice Munro (nee Laidlaw) grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books - Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; and Runaway - as well as Selected Stories, an anthology of stories culled from her dazzling body of work.

During her distinguished career, she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Award in the U.K., for the year's best book, and, in the U.S., the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and, in 2005, the U.S. National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.

In Canada, her prize-winning record is extraordinary -including three Governor General's Awards; several Libris Awards, given by the country's booksellers; the Trillium Book Award; the Jubilee Prize; and two Giller Prizes.

Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in, as demonstrated by the reviewers' quotes on the back of the book. In 2005, she was included in Time magazine's list of the world's one hundred most influential people, and she has been frequently mentioned as a potential winner of the n.o.bel Prize in Literature.

Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, (in "Alice Munro country") Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

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ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO.

Runaway.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The Love of a Good Woman.

Selected Stories.

Open Secrets.

Friend of My Youth.

The Progress of Love.

The Moons of Jupiter.

Who Do You Think You Are?

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You.

Lives of Girls and Women.

Dance of the Happy Shades.