Family Furnishings by Alice Munro

Author:Alice Munro [Munro, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Retail, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781101874103
Google: suPNngEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

The View from Castle Rock

THE FIRST TIME Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half-doors were open, showing the firelit insides of taverns which he hoped they might enter, because he was wet through. They did not, they were bound somewhere else. Earlier on the same afternoon they had been in some such place, but it was not much more than an alcove, a hole in the wall, with planks on which bottles and glasses were set and coins laid down. He had been continually getting squeezed out of that shelter into the street and into the puddle that caught the drip from the ledge over the entryway. To keep that from happening, he had butted in low down between the cloaks and sheepskins, wedged himself amongst the drinking men and under their arms.

He was surprised at the number of people his father seemed to know in the city of Edinburgh. You would think the people in the drinking place would be strangers to him, but it was evidently not so. Amongst the arguing and excited queer-sounding voices his father’s voice rose the loudest. America, he said, and slapped his hand on the plank for attention, the very way he would do at home. Andrew had heard that word spoken in that same tone long before he knew it was a land across the ocean. It was spoken as a challenge and an irrefutable truth but sometimes—when his father was not there—it was spoken as a taunt or a joke. His older brothers might ask each other, “Are ye awa to America?” when one of them put on his plaid to go out and do some chore such as penning the sheep. Or, “Why don’t ye be off to America?” when they had got into an argument, and one of them wanted to make the other out to be a fool.

The cadences of his father’s voice, in the talk that succeeded that word, were so familiar, and Andrew’s eyes so bleary with the smoke, that in no time he had fallen asleep on his feet. He wakened when several pushed together out of the place and his father with them. Some one of them said, “Is this your lad here or is it some tinker squeezed in to pick our pockets?” and his father laughed and took Andrew’s hand and they began their climb. One man stumbled and another man knocked into him and swore. A couple of women swiped their baskets at the party with great scorn, and made some remarks in their unfamiliar speech, of which Andrew could only make out the words “daecent bodies” and “public footpaths.”

Then his father and the friends stepped aside into a much broader street, which in fact was a courtyard, paved with large blocks of stone. His father turned and paid attention to Andrew at this point.

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