The View From Castle Rock Part 6

"Go on," said Mary to Jamie. "Take Johnnie with you. I'll keep Robbie and Tommy here."

"I saw a person you know," said Jamie.

The baby was wet through her soakers and would have to be changed on the floor, not the bed. Down on her knees, Mary said, "Who was that? Who that I know?"

"I saw Becky Johnson."

"Where?" said Mary, rocking back. "Where? Becky Johnson? Is she here?"

"I saw her in the bush."

"Where was she going? What did she say?"

"I wasn't near enough to talk to her. She never saw me."

"Was this back near home?" Mary said. "Think now. Back near home or nearer here?"

"Nearer here," said Jamie, considering. "Why do you say near home when you said we'd never go back there?"

Mary disregarded that. "Where was she going?"

"This way. She just went out of sight in a minute." He shook his head, like an old man. "She wasn't making any noise."

"That's the way Indians do," Mary said. "You didn't try to follow her?"

"She was just ducking along in and out the trees and then I couldn't see her anymore. Else I would have. I'd have followed her and asked her what she thought she was doing."

"Don't you ever do such a thing," Mary said. "You don't know the bush like they do, you could lose yourself like that" She snapped her fingers at him, then busied herself again with the baby. "I expect she was on her own business," she said. "Indian people have their own business we don't ever know about. They're not telling us everything they're up to. Even Becky. Why should she?"

The woman of the inn entered with a big pitcher of water.

"What's the matter?" she said to Jamie. "You scared there's some strange boys out there? It's just my own boys, they're not going to hurt you."

Such a suggestion sent Jamie skittering down the stairs and Johnnie after him. Then the two little ones ran out as well.

"Tommy! Robbie!" Mary called, but the woman said, "Your husband's out back there, he'll watch out for them."

Mary did not bother saying anything. It was no strange person's business to know that she had no husband.

The baby fell asleep at the breast, and Mary laid her on the bed, with a bolster on either side in case she rolled. She went down to eat supper, with one aching arm hanging gratefully empty of its daylong load. There was pork to eat, with cabbage and boiled potatoes. The last of last year's potatoes, these were, and the meat had a good tough layer of fat. She filled up on fresh radishes and greens and new-baked bread which was tasty, and strong tea. The children ate at one table by themselves and were all so merry they didn't give her a glance, not even Tommy. She was tired enough to drop, and wondering how she would ever stay awake long enough to get them to bed.

There was only one other woman in the room besides the woman of the inn who was bringing in the food. That other woman never raised her head and gobbled her supper as if she was starved. She kept her bonnet on and looked like a foreigner. Her foreign husband spoke to her in businesslike grunts now and then. Other men kept up a steady conversation, mostly in the hard punishing American tone that Mary's own boys were beginning to imitate. These men were full of information and contradictions, and they waved their knives and forks in the air. In fact there were two or three conversations-one about the trouble in Mexico, another about where a railroad was going, which got mixed up with one about a gold strike. Some men smoked cigars at the table and if the spittoons were not handy they turned around and spat on the floor. The man sitting beside Mary tried to open a conversation more suited to a lady, asking if she had been to the tent meeting. She did not at first understand that he was speaking of a revival meeting, but when she did she said that she had no use for such things, and he begged her pardon and spoke no more.

She thought that she should not have spoken so shortly, especially as she was depending on him to pa.s.s her the bread. On the other hand, she was aware that Andrew, sitting on her other side, would not have liked her talking. Not to that man, maybe not to anybody. Andrew kept his head down and curtailed his answers. Just as he'd done when he was a lad at school. It had always been hard to tell whether he was disapproving, or just shy.

Will had been freer. Will might have wanted to hear about Mexico. So long as the men talking knew what they were talking about. Often, he thought that people didn't. When you considered that streak in him, Will had not been so unlike Andrew, not so unlike his family, as he himself thought.

One thing there was no word of here was religion-unless you wanted to count the revival meeting, and Mary did not. No fierce arguments about doctrine. No mention either of ghosts or weird visitors, as in the old days in Ettrick. Here it was all down-to-earth, it was all about what you could find and do and understand about the real world under your feet, and she supposed that Will would have approved-that was the world he had thought he was heading for.

She squeezed out of her place, telling Andrew she was too tired to take another bite, and headed for the front hall.

At the screen door the little tag end of a breeze found its way between her sweaty dusty clothing and her skin, and she longed for the deep still night, though there was probably never such a thing in an inn. Besides the hubbub in the dining room she could hear the clatter in the kitchen and out the back door the splash of slops dumped into the pig trough, with the pigs squealing for them. And in the yard the rising voices of children, her own among them. Ready-or-not-you're-sure-to-be-caught- She clapped her hands and shouted.

"Robbie and Tommy! Johnnie, bring the little lads in."

When she saw that Johnnie had heard her she didn't wait, but turned and climbed the stairs.

Johnnie, herding his brothers into the hall, looked up to see his mother at the top of the stairs, looking at him with terrible cold fright, as if she didn't know him. She took one step down and stumbled and righted herself just in time, grabbing hold of the bannister rail. She raised her head and met his eyes but could not speak. He cried out, running up the steps, and heard her say, almost without breath, "The baby-"

She meant that the baby was gone. The bolsters were not disturbed, nor was the cloth that had been placed between them, on top of the quilt. The baby had been picked up with care and taken away.

Johnnie's cry brought a crowd, almost at once. The news travelled from one person to another. Andrew reached Mary and said to her, "Are you sure?" then made his way past her to the room. Thomas cried out in his piercing small child's voice that the doggies had eaten his baby.

"That's a lie," the woman of the inn shouted, as if tackling a grown man. "Those dogs never hurt anybody in their life. They won't even kill a groundhog."

Mary said, "No. No." Thomas ran to her and b.u.t.ted his head between her legs and she sank down on the steps.

She said she knew what had happened. Trying to get her breath steady then, she said that it was Becky Johnson.

Andrew had come back from looking around the bedroom and making sure it was as she said. He asked her what she meant.

Mary said that Becky Johnson had treated that baby almost as if it was her own. She wanted so much to keep that baby with her that she must have come and stolen her.

"She's a squaw," said Jamie, explaining to the people around him at the bottom of the stairs. "She was following us today. I saw her."

Several people, but most forcibly Andrew, wanted to know where he had seen her and was he sure it was her and why had he not said anything. Jamie said that he had told his mother. Then he repeated more or less what he had said to Mary.

"I didn't pay enough attention when he told me," Mary said.

A man said that squaws were well known for helping themselves to white baby girls.

"They bring them up like Indians and then they go and sell them to some chief or other for a big pile of wampum."

"It's not like she wouldn't take good care of her," said Mary, maybe not even hearing this. "Becky's a good Indian."

Andrew asked where Becky was likely to go now and Mary said, probably back home.

"I mean to Joliet," she said.

The innkeeper said that they could not follow that road at night, n.o.body could, except Indians. His wife agreed with him. She had brought Mary a cup of tea. Kindly now, she patted Tommy's head. Andrew said that they would start back as soon as it was light in the morning.

"I'm sorry," said Mary.

He said that it couldn't be helped. Like a good many things, was what he implied.

The man who had set up the sawmill in this community owned a cow, which he let wander round the settlement, sending his daughter Susie out in the evening to find her and milk her. Susie was almost always accompanied by her friend Meggie, the daughter of the local schoolteacher. These girls were thirteen and twelve years old and they were bound together in an intense relationship loaded with secret rituals and special jokes and fanatical loyalty. It was true that they had n.o.body else to be friendly with, being the only two girls of their age in the community, but that did not stop them from feeling as if they had chosen each other against the rest of the world.

One of the things they liked to do was to call people by wrong names. Sometimes this was simple subst.i.tution, as when they called somebody named George Tom, or somebody named Rachel Edith. Sometimes they celebrated a certain characteristic-as when they called the innkeeper Tooth, because of the long eyetooth that caught on his lip-or sometimes they picked on the very opposite of what the person wanted to be, as with the innkeeper's wife, who was very particular about her clean ap.r.o.ns. They called her Greasy-gravy.

The boy who looked after the horses was named Fergie, but they called him Birdie. This annoyed him quite satisfactorily. He was short and thickset, with black curly hair and wide-s.p.a.ced innocent eyes, and had come out from Ireland just a year or so before. He would chase them when they imitated his way of talking. But the best thing they had managed was to write him a love letter and sign it Rose-the real name, as it happened, of the innkeeper's daughter-and leave it on the horse blanket he slept under in the barn. They had not realized that he didn't know how to read. He showed it to some men who came round the stable and it was a great joke and scandal. Rose was soon sent away to learn to be a milliner, though she was not actually suspected of having written the letter.

Neither were Susie and Meggie suspected.

One outcome was that the stable boy showed up at Meggies father's door and demanded to be taught to read.

It was Susie, the eldest, who sat down on the stool they'd brought, and set to milking the cow, while Meggie wandered about picking and eating the last of the wild strawberries. The place the cow had chosen to browse in at the end of this day was close to the woods, at a little distance from the inn. Between the side door of the inn and the real woods was a stand of apple trees, and between the last of these apple trees and the trees of the woods was a small shack with a door hanging loose. It was called the smokehouse though it was not used for that purpose, or any purpose, at present.

What made Meggie investigate the shack at this time? She never knew. Perhaps it was that the door was shut, or pulled forward to be as nearly shut as it could be. It was not until she began to wrestle with the door to get it open that she heard a baby crying.

She carried it back to show Susie, and when she dipped her fingers in the fresh milk and offered one to the baby, it stopped crying and began to suck hard.

"Did somebody have it and hide it there?" she said, and Susie humiliated her-as she could occasionally do, with certain superior knowledge-by saying that it was nothing like a newborn, it was far too big. And it was dressed the way it wouldn't be if somebody was just getting rid of it.

"Well yes," said Meggie. "What are we going to do with it?"

Did she mean, what is the right thing to do with this? In which case the answer would be, to take it to one of their houses. Or take it to the inn, which was closer.

That was not quite what she meant.

No. She meant, how can we use this? How can we best make a joke, or fool somebody?

His plans had never been complete. He understood, when they left home, that his father-who was not under that stone but in the air or walking along the road invisibly and making his views known as well as if they had been talking together-his father was against their going. His mother ought to know that too, but she was ready to give in to that newcomer who looked and even sounded like his father but was entirely a sham. Who might indeed have been his father's brother but was just the same a sham.

Even when she started packing he had believed something would stop her-it was not till Uncle Andrew arrived that he saw no accident was going to prevent them and it was up to him.

Then when he got tired trying to keep so far ahead of them and slipped off into the woods he started imagining he was an Indian, as he had often done before. It was an idea that came naturally from the paths you found, or the suggestions of paths, leading alongside the road or away from it. Trying his best to glide along without being heard or seen he imagined companion Indians and got so that he could almost see them and he thought of Becky Johnson, how she might have been following along trying for a chance to sneak away the baby whom she loved unreasonably. He had kept in the woods until the others had stopped in front of the inn and he had seen this shack, investigated it before he made his way among the apple trees. Those same apple trees sheltered him when he went out of the side door with the sleeping baby so light in his arms, so faintly breathing, hardly imaginable as a human person. Her eyes were open a crack as she slept. In the shack there were a couple of shelves that had not fallen down, and he put her on the top one, where wolves or wildcats if there were any would not get at her.

He came in late to supper but n.o.body thought anything of it. He was prepared to say he had been at the toilet, but he wasn't asked. Everything was sliding along so easily, as if it was still in his imagination.

After the fuss when the baby was found to be missing, he hadn't wanted to disappear too quickly, so it was almost dark when he ran along under the trees to get a look at her in the shack. He hoped she wouldn't be hungry already, but thought that if she was he could spit on his finger and let her suck it, and maybe she wouldn't know the difference between that and milk.

The plans had been made to turn back, just as he had foreseen, and what he was counting on was that once they got back, somehow his mother would understand that their attempts to leave were doomed to failure and would tell Uncle Andrew to get about his business.

Since he now credited his father with putting the whole plan into his head, he supposed his father must have foreseen that this was exactly what would happen.

But there was a flaw. His father had not put into his head any idea of how he was to get the baby back there, other than carrying her all the way, travelling through the woods as he had done part of the way today. And then what? When it turned out that Becky Johnson didn't have her, when it turned out in fact that Becky Johnson had never left home?

Something would come to him. It would have to. He could certainly carry the baby, now there was no choice. And keep far enough from them that they would not hear the crying. She would be hungry by then.

Could he figure out a way to steal some milk from the inn?

He could not continue with this problem because he noticed something.

The shack door was open, which he thought he had shut.

There was no crying, not a sound.

And there was no baby.

Most of the men staying at the inn had taken bedrooms, but a few, like Andrew, with his nephews James and John, were lying on mats on the wooden floor of the long porch.

Andrew was wakened sometime before midnight by the need to relieve himself. He got up and walked the length of the porch, glanced at the boys to see if they were asleep, then stepped down, and decided, for propriety's sake, to walk behind the building, down to the field where he could see by the moonlight that the horses were asleep on their feet and munching in their dreams.

James had heard his uncle's feet and closed his eyes, but he had not slept.

Either the baby had been really stolen this time, or it had been dragged off and mauled and probably half eaten by some animal. There was no reason that he himself should be involved, or in any way held to blame. Perhaps Becky Johnson might be blamed in some way, if he swore he'd seen her in the woods. She would swear she hadn't been there but he would swear she was.

Because they'd go back, surely. They'd have to bury the baby if they ever found anything left of her, or even if they didn't, they would have to have a funeral service, wouldn't they? So what he had wanted to happen would be accomplished. His mother would be in a bad way, though.

Her hair might turn white overnight.

If this was his father's present way of ordering or arranging things, it was a great deal more drastic than anything he would have thought of in the days when he was alive.

And operating in this pitiless or haphazard fashion, would his father even care that Jamie got the blame?

Also, his mother might see that he had something to do with it, something that he wasn't telling. She could do that sometimes, though she had easily swallowed the lie about Becky Johnson. If she knew, or even suspected anything like the truth, she would hate him forever.

He could pray, if a liar's prayers had any value. He could pray that the baby was taken by an Indian, though not Becky Johnson, and that she would grow up in an Indian camp, and one day come to the door trying to sell some Indian trinkets and would be very beautiful and be recognized at once by his mother who would cry out with joy and look the way she used to look before his father died.

Stop that. How could he think of anything so stupid?

Andrew walked into the barn's shadow and stood there urinating. While he did so he heard a strange thin sound of distress. He thought it was some night animal, maybe a mouse in a trap. When he had b.u.t.toned himself up he heard it again, and now it was clear enough that he could follow it. Around the barn, across the barnyard, to an outbuilding which had a regular door, not a door for livestock. The sound was louder now and Andrew, the father of several children, recognized it for what it was.

He knocked on the door, twice, and when there was no answer he tried the latch. There was no bolt on, the door swung inwards. The moon shone in through a window and showed a baby. Sure enough, a baby. Lying there on a narrow cot made up with a rough blanket and a flat pillow that must be someone's bed. Hooks on the wall held a few articles of clothing and a lantern. This must be where the stable boy slept. But he wasn't home, he was still out-probably at the other, shabbier hotel, which sold beer and whisky. Or mooning around with some girl.

In his place, on his bed, was this hungry baby.

Andrew picked it up, not noticing the bit of paper which fell away from its clothing. He had never paid a lot of attention to what Mary's baby looked like and he did not do so now. There was not much chance of there being two babies missing in the same night. He didn't fuss over it, but carried it confidently back to the hotel. It had stopped crying anyway, when it was picked up.

n.o.body stirred on the porch when he mounted the steps, and he proceeded up the stairs to Mary's room. She opened the door before he could knock, as if she had heard the child's snuffling breathing, and he spoke at once, quietly, to stop her crying out.

"Is this the one you're missing?"

The stable boy found the paper on the floor when he got back. He could read it, too.

A PRESENT from one of your SWEETHEARTS.

But no present, not even a joke of a present, that he could see, anywhere around.

Jamie had heard his uncle come up on the porch, then enter the inn. Now he heard him come out, he heard his deliberate and threatening footsteps coming this way, instead of the other way. His heart thumped with the steps. Then he knew that his uncle was standing there looking down on him. He wagged his head about and opened his eyes reluctantly, as if waking up.

"I just took your sister upstairs to your mother," his uncle said matter-of-factly. "I thought I'd put your mind to rest." And he turned around to go to his own sleeping spot.

So there was no need to turn back, and they continued their journey on in the morning. Andrew thought it just as well not to interfere with the story of the Indian woman, and gave it as his opinion that she had got scared and left the baby in the stable boy's bed. He did not believe that the stable boy was in any way involved, and he did believe that James was, but he left the matter uninvestigated. The lad was sly and troublesome, but by the look of him in the night he might have learned a lesson.

Mary had been so glad to have the baby back that she didn't much question what had happened. Did she still blame Becky? Or did she have more of an inkling than she wanted to let on about the tendencies of her eldest son?

Oxen are long-suffering and reliable beasts and the only real problem with them is that once they get an idea of where they want to go it is very hard to make them change their minds. If they spot a pond that reminds them of how thirsty they are and how pleasant water is, you might as well let them go to it. And that is what happened around midday after they had left the inn. The pond was a large one close to the road, and the two older boys took off their clothes and climbed a tree with an overhanging branch and dropped again and again into the water. The little boys paddled at the water's edge and the baby slept in the long gra.s.s in the shade and Mary looked for strawberries.