The View from Castle Rock

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 seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far, because I could hold it to my ear-when nobody was there to stop me-and discover the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea.

Alice Munro

    Alice Munro (née 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 Nobel Prize in Literature.
    Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, (in “Alice Munro country”) Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

***