The View from Castle Rock Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”
    A third man-and that was the lot-came staggering across the shelf as if he had in mind to do that very thing.
    “Where is it then?” he hollered. “Are we up on Arthur’s seat?”
    “Ye are not,” said Andrew’s father. “Look beyond you.”
    The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in sunlight and part in shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.
    “So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.”
    “Well the sea does not look so wide as I thought,” said the man who had stopped staggering. “It does not look as if it would take you weeks to cross it.”
    “It is the effect of the height we’re on,” said the man who stood beside Andrew’s father. “The height we’re on is making the width of it the less.”
    “It’s a fortunate day for the view,” said Andrew’s father. “Many a day you could climb up here and see nothing but the fog.”
    He turned and addressed Andrew.
    “So there you are my lad and you have looked over at America,” he said. “God grant you one day you will see it closer up and for yourself.”

***

    Andrew has been to the Castle one time since, with a group of the lads from Ettrick, who all wanted to see the great cannon, Mons Meg. But nothing seemed to be in the same place then and he could not find the route they had taken to climb up to the rock. He saw a couple of places blocked off with boards that could have been it. But he did not even try to peer through them-he had no wish to tell the others what he was looking for. Even when he was ten years old he had known that the men with his father were drunk. If he did not understand that his father was drunk-due to his father’s sure-footedness and sense of purpose, his commanding behavior-he did certainly understand that something was not as it should be. He knew he was not looking at America, though it was some years before he was well enough acquainted with maps to know that he had been looking at Fife.
    Still, he did not know if those men met in the tavern had been mocking his father, or if it was his father playing one of his tricks on them.

    Old James the father. Andrew. Walter. Their sister Mary. Andrew’s wife Agnes, and Agnes and Andrew’s son James, under two years old.
    In the harbor of Leith, on the 4th of June, 1818, they set foot on board a ship for the first time in their lives.
    Old James makes this fact known to the ship’s officer who is checking off the names.
    “The first time, serra, in all my long life. We are men of the Ettrick. It is a landlocked part of the world.”
    The officer says a word which is unintelligible to them but plain in meaning. Move along. He has run a line through their names. They move along or are pushed along, Young James riding on Mary’s hip.
    “What is this?” says Old James, regarding the crowd of people on deck. “Where are we to sleep? Where have all these rabble come from? Look at the faces on them, are they the blackamoors?”
    “Black Highlanders, more like,” says his son Walter. This is a joke, muttered so his father cannot hear-Highlanders being one of the sorts the old man despises.
    “There are too many people,” his father continues. “The ship will sink.”
    “No,” says Walter, speaking up now. “Ships do not often sink because of too many people. That’s what the fellow was there for, to count the