Part 15 (1/2)

'Take it the way you want to take it,' said Joe. 'That's all right.'

'Make that idiot shut up, why don't you?' the county health officer said. He was looking down the driveway at the halfwit, who was leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and howling. Tears ran down his pudgy, dirty cheeks. Every now and then he would draw back and slap himself a good one, like he knew the whole thing was his fault.

'He's all right, too.'

'Nothing up here seems all right to me,' said the county health man, 'least of all sixteen cows layin dead on their backs with their legs stickin up like fence-posts. I can see 'em from here.'

'Good,' said Joe Newall, 'because it's as close as you'll get.'

The county health officer threw the Gates Falls vet's paper down and stamped one of his boots on it. He looked at Joe Newall, his face flushed so bright that the burst squiggles of veins on the sides of his nose stood out purple. 'I want to see those cows. Haul one away, if it comes to that.'

'No.'

'You don't own the world, Newall - I'll get a court order.'

'Let's see if you can.'

The health officer drove away. Joe watched him. Down at the end of the driveway the halfwit, clad in dung-splattered bib overalls from the Sears and Roebuck mail-order catalogue, went on leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and howling. He stayed there all that hot August day, howling at the top of his lungs with his flat mongoloid face turned up to the yellow sky. 'Bellerin like a calf in the moonlight' was how young Gary Paulson put it.

The county health officer was Clem Upshaw, from Sirois Hill. He might have dropped the matter once his thermostat went down a little, but Brownie McKissick, who had supported him for the office he held (and who let him charge a fair amount of beer), urged him not to. Harley McKissick's dad was not the kind of man who usually resorted to cat's paws - or had to - but he'd wanted to make a point concerning private property with Joe Newall. He wanted Joe to understand that private property is a great thing, yes, an American thing, but private property is still st.i.tched to the town, and in Castle Rock people still believed the community came first, even with rich folks that could build a little more house on their house whenever the whim took them. So Clem Upshaw went on down to Lackery, which was the county seat in those days, and got the order.

While he was getting it, a large van drove up past the howling moron and to the barn. When Clem Upshaw returned with his order, only one cow remained, gazing at him with black eyes which had grown dull and distant beneath their covering of hay chaff. Clem determined that this cow at least had died of bovine meningitis, and then he went away. When he was gone, the remover's van returned for the last cow.

In 1928 Joe began another wing. That was when the men who gathered at Brownie's decided the man was crazy. Smart, yes, but crazy. Benny Ellis claimed that Joe had gouged out his daughter's one eye and kept it in a jar of what Benny called 'fubbledehyde'' on the kitchen table, along with the amputated fingers which had been poking out of the other socket when the baby was born.

Benny was a great reader of the horror pulps, magazines that showed naked ladies being carried off by giant ants and similar bad dreams on their covers, and his story about Joe Newall's jar was clearly inspired by his reading matter. As a result, there were soon people all over Castle Rock - not just the Bend - who claimed every word of it was true. Some claimed Joe kept even less mentionable things in the jar.

The second wing was finished in August of 1929 and two nights later a fast-moving jalopy with great sodium circles for eyes screamed juddering into Joe Newall's driveway and the stinking, flyblown corpse of a large skunk was thrown at the new wing. The animal splattered above one of the windows, throwing a fan of blood across the panes in a pattern almost like a Chinese ideogram.

In September of that year a fire swept the carding room of Newall's flags.h.i.+p mill in Gates Falls, causing fifty thousand dollars' worth of damage. In October the stock market crashed. In November Joe Newall hanged himself from a rafter in one of the unfinished rooms - probably a bedroom, it was meant to be - of the newest wing. The smell of sap in the fresh wood was still strong. He was found by Cleveland Torb.u.t.t, the a.s.sistant manager of Gates Mills and Joe's partner (or so it was rumored) in a number of Wall Street ventures that were now not worth the puke of a tubercular c.o.c.ker spaniel. The county coroner, who happened to be Clem Upshaw's brother n.o.ble, cut down the body.

Joe was buried next to his wife and child on the last day of November. It was a hard, brilliant day and the only person from Castle Rock to attend the service was Alvin Coy, who drove the Hay Peabody funeral hack. Alvin reported that one of the spectators was a young, shapely woman in a racc.o.o.n coat and a black cloche hat. Sitting in Brownie's and eating a pickle straight out of the barrel, Alvin would smile mordantly and tell his cronies that she was a jazz baby if he had ever seen one. She bore not one whit of resemblance to Cora Leonard Newall's side of the family, and she hadn't closed her eyes during the prayer.

Gary Paulson enters the store with exquisite slowness, closing the door carefully behind him.

'Afternoon,' Harley McKissick says neutrally.

'Heard you won a turkey down to the Grange last night,' says Old Clut as he prepares to light his pipe.

'Yuh,' Gary says. He's eighty-four and, like the others, can remember when the Bend was a d.a.m.ned sight livelier than it is now. He lost two sons in two wars - the two before that mess in Viet Nam - and that was a hard thing. His third, a good boy, died in a collision with a pulpwood truck up around Presque Isle - back in 1973, that was. Somehow that one was easier to take, G.o.d knows why. Gary sometimes drools from the corners of his lips these days, and makes frequent smacking sounds as he tries to suck the drool back into his mouth before it can get away and start running down his chin. He doesn't know a whole h.e.l.l of a lot lately, but he knows getting old is a lousy way to spend the last years of your life.

'Coffee?' Harley asks.

'Guess not.'

Lenny Partridge, who will probably never recover from the broken ribs he suffered in a strange road-accident two autumns ago, pulls his feet back so the older man can pa.s.s by him and lower himself carefully into the chair in the corner (Gary caned the seat of this chair himself, back in '82). Paulson smacks his lips, sucks back spit, and folds his lumpy hands over the head of his cane. He looks tired and haggard.

'It is going to rain a pretty b.i.t.c.h,' he says finally. 'I'm aching that bad.'

'It's a bad fall,' Paul Corliss says.

There is silence. The heat from the stove fills the store that will go out of business when Harley dies or maybe even before he dies if his youngest daughter has her way, it fills the store and coats the bones of the old men, tries to, anyway, and sniffs up against the dirty gla.s.s with its ancient posters looking out at the yard where there were gas-pumps until Mobil took them out in 1977. They are old men who have, for the most part, seen their children go away to more profitable places. The store does no business to speak of now, except for a few locals and the occasional through-going summer tourists who think old men like these, old men who sit by the stove in their thermal unders.h.i.+rts even in July, are quaint. Old Clut has always claimed that new people are going to come to this part of the Rock, but the last couple of years things have been worse than ever - it seems the whole G.o.ddam town is dying.

'Who is building the new wing on that Christly Newall house?' Gary asks finally.

They look around at him. For a moment the kitchen match Old Clut has just scratched hangs mystically over his pipe, burning down the wood, turning it black. The sulfur node at the end turns gray and curls up. At last, Old Clut dips the match into the bowl and puffs.

'New wing?' Harley asks.

'Yuh.'

A blue membrane of smoke from Old Clut's pipe drifts up over the stove and spreads there like a delicate fisherman's net. Lenny Partridge tilts his chin up to stretch the wattles of his neck taut and then runs his hand slowly down his throat, producing a dry rasp.

'No one that I know of,' Harley says, somehow indicating by his tone of voice that this includes anyone of any consequence, at least in this part of the world.

'They ain't had a buyer on that place since nineteen n eighty-one,' Old Clut says. When Old Clut says they, he means both Southern Maine Weaving and The Bank of Southern Maine, but he means more: he means The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into owners.h.i.+p of Joe's three mills - and Joe's house on the ridge - about a year after Joe took his own life, but as far as the men gathered around the stove in Brownie's are concerned, that name's just a smoke-screen . . . or what they sometimes call The Legal, as in She swore out a perfection order on him n now he can't even see his own kids because of The Legal. These men hate The Legal as it impinges upon their lives and the lives of their friends, but it fascinates them endlessly when they consider how some people put it to work in order to further their own nefarious money-making schemes.

Southern Maine Weaving, aka The Bank of Southern Maine, aka The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops, enjoyed a long and profitable run with the mills Joe Newall saved from extinction, but it's the way they have been unable to get rid of the house that fascinates the old men who spend their days in Brownie's. 'It's like a booger you can't flick off the end of your finger,' Lenny Partridge said once, and they all nodded. 'Not even those spaghetti-suckers from Maiden n Revere can get rid of that millstone.'

Old Clut and his grandson, Andy, are currently estranged, and it is the owners.h.i.+p of Joe Newall's ugly house, which has caused it . . . although there are other, more personal issues swirling around just below the surface, no doubt - there almost always are. The subject came up one night after grandfather and grandson - both widowers now - had enjoyed a pretty decent dinner at Young Clut's house in town.

Young Andy, who had not yet lost his job on the town's police-force, tried (rather self-indulgently) to explain to his grandfather that Southern Maine Weaving had had nothing to do with any of the erstwhile Newall holdings for years, that the actual owner of the house in the Bend was The Bank of Southern Maine, and that the two companies had nothing whatever to do with each other. Old John told Andy he was a fool if he believed that; everyone knew, he said, that both the bank and the textile company were fronts for The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops, and that the only difference between them was a couple of words. They just hid the more obvious connections with great bunches of paperwork, Old Clut explained - The Legal, in other words.

Young Clut had the bad taste to laugh at that. Old Clut turned red, threw his napkin onto his plate, and got to his feet. Laugh, he said. You just go on. Why not? The only thing a drunk does better'n laugh at what he don't understand is cry over he don't know what. That made Andy mad, and he said something about Melissa being the reason why he drank, and John asked his grandson how long he was going to blame a dead wife for his boozing. Andy turned white when the old man said that, and told him to get out of his house, and John did, and he hasn't been back since. Nor does he want to. Harsh words aside, he can't bear to see Andy going to h.e.l.l on a handcart like he is.

Speculation or not, this much cannot be denied: the house on the ridge has been empty for eleven years now, no one has ever lived there for long, and The Bank of Southern Maine is usually the organization that ends up trying to sell it through one of the local real estate firms.

'The last people to buy it come from uppa state New York, didn't they?' Paul Corliss asks, and he speaks so rarely they all turn toward him. Even Gary does.

'Yessir,' Lenny says. 'They was a nice couple. The man was gonna paint the barn red and turn it into some sort of antique store, wasn't he?'

'Ayuh,' Old Clut says. 'Then their boy got the gun they kep - '

'People are so G.o.ddam careless - ' Harley puts in.

'Did he die?' Lenny asks. 'The boy?'

Silence greets the question. It seems no one knows. Then, at last - almost reluctantly - Gary speaks up. 'No,' he said. 'But it blinded him. They moved up to Auburn. Or maybe it was Leeds.'

'They was likely people,' Lenny said. 'I really thought they might make a go of it. But they was set on that house. Believed everybody was pullin their leg about how it was bad luck, on account of they was from Away.' He pauses meditatively. 'Maybe they think better now . . . wherever they are.'

There's silence as the old men think of the people from uppa state New York, or maybe of their own failing organs and sensory equipment. In the dimness behind the stove, oil gurgles. Somewhere beyond it, a shutter claps heavily back and forth in the restless autumn air.

'There's a new wing going up on it, all right,' Gary says. He speaks quietly but emphatically, as if one of the others has contradicted this statement. 'I saw it comin down the River Road. Most of the framing's already done. d.a.m.n thing looks like it wants to be a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. Never noticed it before. Nice maple, looks like. Where does anybody get nice maple like that in this day n age?'

No one answers. No one knows.

At last, very tentatively, Paul Corliss says, 'Sure you're not thinking of another house, Gary? Could be you - '