‘They don’t think he’ll ever wake up, poor fella. There’s a piece of history that’ll die with him.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’ Good riddance, I thought. ‘Does he have children?’
‘No. There have been Merrills on the TR for two hundred years; one died at Cemetery Ridge. But all the old families are dying out now. You have a nice day, Mike.’ She smiled. Her eyes remained flat and considering.
I got into my Chevy, put the bag with my purchases in it on the passenger seat, then simply sat for a moment, letting the air conditioner pour cool air on my face and neck. Kenny Auster was in Taxachusetts. That was good. A step in the right direction. But there was still my caretaker.
‘Bill’s not here,’ Yvette said. She stood in the door, blocking it as well as she could (you can only do so much in that regard when you’re five-three and weigh roughly a hundred pounds), studying me with the gimlet gaze of a nightclub bouncer denying re-entry to a drunk who’s been tossed out on his ear once already.
I was on the porch of the neat-as-ever-you-saw Cape Cod which stands at the top of Peabody Hill and looks all the way across New Hampshire and into Vermont’s back yard. Bill’s equipment sheds were lined up to the left of the house, all of them painted the same shade of gray, each with its own sign: DEAN CARETAKING, No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3. Parked in front of No. 2 was Bill’s Dodge Ram. I looked at it, then back at Yvette. Her lips tightened a little more. Another notch and I figured they’d be gone entirely.
‘He went to North Conway with Butch Wiggins,’ she said. ‘They went in Butch’s truck. To get —
‘
‘No need lying for me, dear heart,’ Bill said from behind her.
It was still over an hour shy of noon, and on the Lord’s Day to boot, but I had never heard a man who sounded more tired. He clumped down the hall, and as he came out of its shadows and into the light — the sun was finally burning through the murk — I saw that Bill now looked his age. Every year of it, and maybe ten more to grow on. He was wearing his usual khaki shirt and pants — Bill
Dean would be a Dickies man until the day he died — but his shoulders looked slumped, almost sprained, a-s if he’d spent a week lugging buckets that were too heavy for him. The falling-away of his face had finally begun, an indefinable something that makes the eyes look too big, the jaw too prominent, the mouth a bit loose. He looked old. There were no children to carry on the family line of work, either; all the old families were dying out, Lila Proulx had said. And maybe that was a good thing.
‘Bill — ‘ she began, but he raised one of his big hands to stop her. The callused fingertips shook a little.
‘Go in the kitchen a dight,’ he told her. ‘I need to talk to my compadre here. ‘T’won’t take long.’
Yvette looked at him, and when she looked back at me, she had indeed reached zero lip-surface.
There was just a black line where they had been, like a mark dashed off with a pencil. I saw with woeful clarity that she hated me.
‘Don’t you tire him out,’ she said to me. ‘He hasn’t been sleepin. It’s the heat.’ She walked back down the hall, all stiff back and high shoulders, disappearing into shadows that were probably cool.
It always seems to be cool in the houses of old people, have you noticed?
Bill came out onto the porch and put his big hands into the pockets of his pants without offering to shake with me. ‘I ain’t got nothin to say to you. You and me’s quits.’
‘Why, Bill? Why are we quits?’
He looked west, where the hills stepped into the burning summer haze, disappearing in it before they could become mountains, and said nothing.
‘I’m trying to help that young woman.’ He gave me a look from the corners of his eyes that I could read well enough. ‘Ahuh. Help y’self right into her pants. I see men come up from New York and New Jersey with their young girls. Summer weekends, ski weekends, it don’t matter. Men who go with girls that age always look the same, got their tongues run out even when their mouths are shut. Now you look the same.’
I felt both angry and embarrassed, but I resisted the urge to chase him in that direction. That was what he wanted.
‘What happened here?’ I asked him. ‘What did your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers do to Sara Tidwell and her family? You didn’t just move them on, did you?’
‘Didn’t have to,’ Bill said, looking past me at the hills. His eyes were moist almost to the point of tears, but his jaw was set and hard. ‘They moved on themselves. Never was a nigger who didn’t have an itchy foot, my dad used to say.’
‘Who set the trap that killed Son Tidwell’s boy? Was it your father, Bill? Was it Fred?’
His eyes moved; his jaw never did. ‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘I hear him crying in my house. Do you know what it’s like to hear a dead child crying in your house? Some bastard trapped him like a weasel and I hear him crying in my fucking house!’
‘You’re going to need a new caretaker,’ Bill said. ‘I can’t do for you no more. Don’t want to. What I want is for you to get off my porch.’
‘What’s happening? Help me, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I’ll help you with the toe of my shoe if you don’t get going on your own.’
I looked at him a moment longer, taking in the wet eyes and the set jaw, his divided nature written on his face.
‘I lost my wife, you old bastard,’ I said. ‘A woman you claimed to love.’
Now his jaw moved at last. He looked at me with surprise and injury. ‘That didn’t happen here,’
he said. ‘That didn’t have anything to do with here. She might’ve been off the TR because . . . well,
she might’ve had her reasons to be off the TR . . . but she just had a stroke. Would have happened anywhere. Anywhere.’
‘I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do, either. Something followed her to Derry, maybe because she was pregnant . . . ‘
Bill’s eyes widened. I gave him a chance to say something, but he didn’t take it.
‘ . . . or maybe just because she knew too much.’
‘She had a stroke.’ Bill’s voice wasn’t quite even. ‘I read the obituary myself. She had a damn stroke.’
‘What did she find out? Talk to me, Bill. Please.’
There was a long pause. Until it was over I allowed myself the luxury of thinking I might actually be getting through to him.
‘I’ve only got one more thing to say to you, Mike — stand back. For the sake of your immortal soul, stand back and let things run their course. They will whether you do or don’t. This river has almost come to the sea; it won’t be dammed by the likes of you. Stand back. For the love of Christ.’
Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? God’s butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?
Bill turned and walked to his door, the heels of his workboots clodding on the painted boards.
‘Stay away from Mattie and Ki,’ I said. ‘If you so much as go near that trailer — ‘
He turned back, and the hazy sunshine glinted on the tracks below his eyes. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his cheeks. ‘I ain’t stirrin from this house. I wish to God I’d never come back from my vacation in the first place, but I did — mostly on your account, Mike. Those two down on Wasp Hill have nothing to fear from me. No, not from me.’
He went inside and closed the door. I stood there looking at it, feeling unreal — surely I could not have had such a deadly conversation with Bill Dean, could I? Bill who had reproached me for not letting folks down here share — and perhaps ease — my grief for Jo, Bill who had welcomed me back so warmly?
Then I heard a clack sound. He might not have locked his door while he was at home in his entire life, but he had locked it now. The clack was very clear in the breathless July air. It told me everything I had to know about my long friendship with Bill Dean. I turned and walked back to my car, my head down. Nor did I turn when I heard a window run up behind me.