The View from Castle Rock

and puts his hands up to his face, so that his speaking has a hollow sound.
    “I will see no more. I will not harken to their screeching voices or their satanic tongues. I will not swallow a mouth of meat nor meal until I see the shores of America.”
    All the more for the rest of us, Agnes feels like saying.
    Why does Andrew not speak plainly to his father, reminding him of whose idea it was, who was the one who harangued and borrowed and begged to get them just where they are now?

    Andrew will not do it, Walter will only joke, and as for Mary she can hardly get her voice out of her throat in her father’s presence.
    Agnes comes from a large Hawick family of weavers, who work in the mills now but worked for generations at home. And working there they learned all the arts of cutting each other down to size, of squabbling and surviving in close quarters. She is still surprised by the rigid manners, the deference and silences in her husband’s family. She thought from the beginning that they were a queer sort of people and she thinks so still. They are as poor as her own folk, but they have such a great notion of themselves. And what have they got to back this up? The old man has been a wonder in the tavern for years, and their cousin is a raggedy lying poet who had to flit to Nithsdale when nobody would trust him to tend sheep in Ettrick. They were all brought up by three witchey-women of aunts who were so scared of men that they would run and hide in the sheep pen if anybody but their own family was coming along the road.
    As if it wasn’t the men that should be running from them.
    Walter has come back from carrying their heavier possessions down to a lower depth of the ship.
    “You never saw such a mountain of boxes and trunks and sacks of meal and potatoes,” he says excitedly. “A person has to climb over them to get to the water pipe. Nobody can help but spill their water on the way back and the sacks will be wet through and the stuff will be rotted.”
    “They should not have brought all that,” says Andrew. “Did they not undertake to feed us when we paid our way?”
    “Aye,” says the old man. “But will it be fit for us to eat?”
    “So a good thing I brought my cakes,” says Walter, who is still in the mood to make a joke of anything. He taps his foot on the snug metal box filled with oat cakes that his aunts gave him as a particular present because he was the youngest and they still thought of him as the motherless one.
    “You’ll see how merry you’ll be if we’re starving,” says Agnes. Walter is a pest to her, almost as much as the old man. She knows there is probably no chance of them starving, because Andrew is looking impatient, but not anxious. It takes a good deal, of course, to make Andrew anxious. He is apparently not anxious about her, since he thought first to make a comfortable seat for his father.

    Mary has taken Young James back up to the deck. She could tell that he was alarmed down there in the half-dark. He does not have to whimper or complain-she knows his feelings by the way he digs his little knees into her.
    The sails are furled tight. “Look up there, look up there,” Mary says, and points to a sailor who is busy high up in the rigging. The boy on her hip makes his sound for bird. “Sailor-peep, sailor-peep,” she says. She says the right word for
sailor
but his word for
bird.
She and he communicate in a half-and-half language-half her teaching and half his invention. She believes that he is one of the cleverest children ever born into the world. Being the eldest of her family, and the only girl, she has tended all of her brothers, and been proud of them all at one time, but she has never known a child like this. Nobody else has any idea of how original and independent and clever he is. Men have no interest in children so young, and Agnes his mother has no patience with him.
    “Talk like folk,” Agnes says to him, and if he doesn’t, she may give him a clout. “What are you?” she says. “Are you a folk or an elfit?”

    Mary fears Agnes’s temper, but in a way she doesn’t blame her. She thinks that women like Agnes-men’s women, mother women-lead an appalling life. First with what the men do to them-even so good a man as Andrew-and then what the children do, coming out. She will never forget her own mother, who lay in bed out of her mind with a fever, not knowing any of them, till she died, three days after Walter was born. She had screamed at the