Ancestors

BOOKS BY
W
ILLIAM
M
AXWELL

All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
(1995)

Billie Dyer and Other Stories
(1992)

The Outermost Dream
(1989)

So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980)

Over by the River and Other Stories
(1977)

Ancestors
(1971)

The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing
(1966)

The Châteaux
(1961)

Stories
(1956)
(with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)

Time Will Darken It
(1948)

The Heavenly Tenants
(1946)

The Folded Leaf
(1945)

They Came Like Swallows
(1937)

Bright Center of Heaven
(1934)

For my cousin Mimi Miller,
who provided me with a genealogical structure
to hang the family stories on—
most affectionately.

My Grandfather Maxwell was a lawyer in Lincoln, Illinois, and one of his clients, out of affection for him, brought back from a visit to Scotland a sepia photograph of Caerlaverock Castle. This ruined fortress is the ancestral seat of a Scottish family of some importance, members of which have held the titles of earl of Morton, earl of Nithsdale, Lord Maxwell, and Lord Herries. I don’t know what place of honor the photograph occupied in my grandfather’s house or office, for he died before I was born. During my childhood it hung over the horsehair couch in my Aunt Maybel’s sitting room. When I was tired of reading I used to lie on the couch and stare at it. Steeped in storybooks, I expected history to show, like emotion on a human face, and it did not seem possible that any splendor had ever fallen on these particular castle walls. Instead of a proper drawbridge there was a light wooden bridge, painted white, with railings, as if it were a building in a public park. The castle itself appeared to be damp and mouldy and in the middle of nowhere, and I found it hard to imagine anyone living in it. It was referred to in the family as the Maxwell castleproudly, but also as if that was all there was to know about it. I didn’t think to ask somebody where it was.

My ignorance lasted about forty-five years, until my daughter Kate at the age of ten took The Scottish Chiefs out of her school library and when she was a few pages into it raised her head to ask a question about Scottish history. I had been watching her with pleasure. At about that same
age I read and reread this rather stilted and old-fashioned novel, which is about a lost cause—the insurrection led by Sir William Wallace against the English king, Edward I. The moment he was successful—at one point he drove the English entirely out of Scotland—the Scottish nobles either deserted his banner or divided his councils by their jealousy. They perjured themselves, they changed sides again and again. Even Robert the Bruce. Most of all Robert the Bruce. Wallace alone never wavered, a boy’s hero that no historian has ever had to apologize for.

I got up and went to the bookcase and took down Volume I of Green’s
A Short History of England.
As I was turning the pages of the section on the conquest of Scotland, to my astonishment I came upon the Maxwell castle. There was no mistaking it, even though the castle in the engraving was only an inch and a half high and it was not the view in the photograph but from the other side. Furthermore, since the caption under the engraving read, “After J. M. W. Turner,” I was obliged to conjure up a little man with a hook nose, in an ill-cut brown tailcoat, with very small hands and feet, setting up his easel where there was a good view of the castle and the plain.

Someone I know went to Caerlaverock Castle two or three years ago and, discovering later that I was interested in it, dug up the
Ministry of Public Building and Works Official Guidebook
sold at the castle gate. From this I learned, for the first time, that Caerlaverock is triangular in shape—the photograph didn’t show it—with four big round towers and two moats, one inside the other. It stands on a peninsula of the Solway, which in Medieval times was one of the main highways into Scotland. It was built toward the end of the 13th century, probably by the English to use against the Scots, but fell into their hands. In 1300 Edward I led an English army into Scotland for the siege of Caerlaverock. There exists a rhyming account of this incident,
in Old French, and I am indebted to the
Guidebook
for the following passage from it. Even though it is a translation, it has an eerie quality. It is not just a written description but a voice speaking, from such a remote past, and in the special and highly characteristic language of that past: “Caerlaverock was so strong a castle that it feared no siege before the king came there, for it would never have had to surrender, provided it was well supplied, when the need arose, with men, engines and provisions. In shape it was like a shield, for it had but three sides round it, with a tower at each corner, but one of them was a double one, so high, so long and so wide, that the gate was underneath it, well made and strong, with a drawbridge and a sufficiency of other defenses. And it had good walls, and good ditches filled to the brim with water. And I think you will never see a more finely situated castle, for on the one side can be seen the Irish Sea, towards the west, and to the north the fair moorland, surrounded by an arm of the sea, so that no creature can approach it on two sides, without putting himself in danger of the sea. On the south side it is not easy, for there are many places difficult to get through because of woods and marshes and ditches hollowed out by sea where it meets the river.”