Free The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro Page A

you ask them, oh aye but it’s too steep hereabouts, the land is too heavy.”
    “To be born in the Ettrick is to be born in a backward place,” he would say. “Where the people is all believing in old stories and seeing ghosts and I tell you it is a curse to be born in the Ettrick.”
    And very likely that would lead him on to the subject of America, where all the blessings of modern invention were put to eager use and the people could never stop improving the world around them.
    But harken at him now.
    “I don’t believe those were fairies,” Nettie says.
    “So do you think they were his neighbors all the time?” says her father. “Do you think they were playing a trick on him?”
    Never has Walter heard a father speak to a child so indulgently. And fond as he has grown of Nettie he cannot approve of it. It can only make her believe that there are no opinions on the face of the earth that are more worthy of being listened to than hers.
    “No I do not,” she says.
    “What then?” says her father.
    “I think they were dead people.”
    “What do you know about dead people?” her father asks her, finally speaking with some sternness. “Dead people won’t rise up till the Day of Judgment. I don’t care to hear you making light about things of that sort.”
    “I was not making light,” says Nettie carelessly.
    The sailors are scrambling loose from their sails and pointing at the sky, far to the west. They must see there something that excites them. Walter makes bold to ask, “Are they English? I cannot tell what they say.”
    “Some of them are English, but from parts that sound foreign to us. Some are Portuguese. I cannot make them out either but I think that they are saying they see the rotches. They all have very keen eyes.”
    Walter believes that he too has very keen eyes, but it takes him a moment or two before he can see these birds, the ones that must be called rotches. Flocks and flocks of seabirds flashing and rising overhead, mere bright speckles on the air.
    “You must make sure to mention those in your journal,” Nettie’s father says. “I have seen them when I made this voyage before. They feed on fish and here is the great place for them. Soon you’ll see the fishermen as well. But the rotches filling the sky are the very first sign that we must be on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
    “You must come up and talk to us on the deck above,” he says, in bidding good-bye to Walter. “I have business to think about and I am not much company for my daughter. She is forbidden to run around because she is not quite recovered from the cold she had in the winter but she is fond of sitting and talking.”
    “I don’t believe it is the rule for me to go there,” says Walter, in some confusion.
    “No, no, that is no matter. My girl is lonely. She likes to read and draw but she likes company too. She could show you how to draw, if you like. That would add to your journal.”
    If Walter flushes it is not noticed. Nettie remains quite composed.
             
    So they sit out in the open and draw and write. Or she reads aloud to him from her favorite book, which is
The Scottish Chiefs.
He already knows much about what happens in the story—who does not know about William Wallace?—but she reads smoothly and at just the proper speed and makes some things solemn and others terrifying and something else comical, so that he is as much in thrall to the book as she is herself. Even though, as she says, she has read it twelve times already.
    He understands a little better now why she has all those questions to ask him. He and his folk remind her of some people in her book. Such people as there were out on the hills and valleys in the olden times. What would she think if she knew that the
old fellow,
the old tale-spinner spouting all over the boat and penning people up to listen as if they were the sheep and he was the sheepdog—if she knew that he was Walter’s father?
    She would be delighted,