The old men watch the children and speak in low, desultory tones. John Clutterbuck, whose grandson, Andy, is busy drinking himself to death this fall, has been talking about the town landfill. The landfill stinks like a bugger in the summertime, he says. No one disputes this — it’s true — but no one is very interested in the subject, either, because it’s not summer, it’s autumn, and the huge range-oil stove is throwing off a stuporous glow of heat. The Winston thermometer behind the counter says 82. Clutterbuck’s forehead has a huge dent above his left eyebrow where he struck his head in a car accident in 1963. Small children sometimes ask to touch it. Old Clut
has won a great deal of money from summer people who don’t believe the dent in his head will hold the contents of a medium-sized water tumbler.
‘Paulson,’ Harley McKissick says quietly.
An old Chevrolet has pulled in behind Lenny Partridge’s oil-burner. On the side is a cardboard sign held with heavy masking tape. GARY PAULSON CHAIR’S CANED ANTIQUES BOUGHT & SOLD, the sign reads, with the telephone number to call beneath the words. Gary Paulson gets out of his car slowly, an old man in faded green pants with a huge satchel seat. He drags a knurled cane out after him, holding to the doorframe tightly until he has the cane planted just the way he likes it.
The cane has the white plastic handgrip from a child’s bike affixed over its dark tip like a condom. It makes small circles in the lifeless dust as Paulson begins his careful trip from his car to the door of Brownie’s.
The children on the bandstand look up at him then follow his glance (fearfully, it seems) to the leaning, crepitating bulk of the Newall house on the ridge above them. Then they go back to their firetruck.
Joe Newall bought in Castle Rock in 1904 and owned in Castle Rock until 1929, but his fortune was made in the nearby mill town of Gates Falls. He was a scrawny man with an angry, hectic face and eyes with yellow corneas. He bought a great parcel of open land out in the Bend — this was when it was quite a thriving village, complete with a profitable little combined wood-milling operation and furniture factory — from The First National Bank of Oxford. The bank got it from Phil Budreau in a foreclosure assisted by County Sheriff Nickerson Campbell. Phil Budreau, well-liked but considered something of a fool by his neighbors, slunk away to Kittery and spent the next twelve years or so tinkering with cars and motorcycles. Then he went off to France to fight the Heinies, fell out of an airplane while on a reconnaissance mission (or so the story has it), and was killed.
The Budreau patch lay silent and fallow for most of those years, while Joe Newall lived in a rented house in Gates Falls and saw to the making of his fortune. He was known more for his employee-severance policies than for the way he’d turned around a mill, which had been tottering on the brink of ruination when he’d bought it for a song, back in ’02. The mill-workers called him Firing Joe, because if you missed a single shift you were sent down the road, no excuses accepted or even listened to.
He married Cora Leonard, niece of Carl Stowe, in 1914. The marriage had great merit — in Joe Newall’s eyes, certainly — because Cora was Carl’s only living relative, and she would no doubt come into a nice little bundle when Carl passed on (as long as Joe remained on good terms with him, that was, and he had no intentions of being on anything less with the old fellow, who had been Damned Shrewd in his day but was considered to have become Rather Soft in his declining years). There were other mills in the area that could be bought for a song and then turned around . . . if, that was, a man had a little capital to use as a lever. Joe soon had his lever; his wife’s rich uncle died within a year of the wedding.
So the marriage had merit — oh yes, no doubt about it. Cora herself did not have merit, however. She was a grainbag of a woman, incredibly wide across the hips, incredibly full in the butt, yet almost as flatchested as a boy and possessed of an absurd little pipestem neck upon which her oversized head nodded like a strange pale sunflower. Her cheeks hung like dough, her lips like strips of liver; her face was as silent as a full moon on a winter night. She sweated huge dark patches around the armholes of her dresses even in February, and she carried a dank smell of perspiration with her always.
Joe began a house for his wife on the Budreau patch in 1915, and a year later it seemed finished. It was painted white and enclosed twelve rooms that sprouted from many strange angles. Joe Newall was not popular in Castle Rock, partly because he made his money out of town, partly because Budreau, his predecessor, had been such an all-around nice fellow (though a fool, they always reminded each other, as if foolishness and niceness went together and it would be death to forget it), but mostly because his damned house was built with out-of-town labor. Shortly before the gutters and downspouts were hung, an obscene drawing accompanied by a one-syllable Anglo-Saxon word was scrawled on the fanhghted front door in soft yellow chalk.
By 1920 Joe Newall was a rich man. His three Gates Falls mills were going like a house afire, stuffed with the profits of a world war and comfortable with the orders of the newly arisen or (arising) middle class. He began to build a new wing on his house. Most folks in the village pronounced it unnecessary — after all, there were just the two of them up there — and almost all opined it added nothing but ugly to a house most of them already considered ugly beyond almost all measure. This new wing towered one story above the main house and looked blindly down the ridge, which had in those days been covered with straggling pines.
The news that just the two of them were soon to become just the three of them trickled in from Gates Falls, the source most likely being Doris Gingercroft, who was Dr. Robertson’s nurse in those days. So the added wing was in the nature of a celebration, it seemed. After six years of wedded bliss and four years of living in the Bend, during which she had been seen only at a distance as she crossed her dooryard, or occasionally picking flowers — crocuses, wild roses, Queen Anne’s lace, ladyslipper, paintbrush — in the field beyond the buildings, after all that time, Cora Leonard Newall had Kindled.
She never shopped at Brownie’s. Cora did her marketing at the Kitty Korner Store over in Gates Center every Thursday afternoon.
In January of 1921, Cora gave birth to a monster with no arms and, it was said, a tiny clutch of perfect fingers sticking out of one eyesocket. It died less than six hours after mindless contractions had pushed its red and senseless face into the light. Joe Newall added a cupola to the wing seventeen months later, in the late spring of 1922 (in western Maine there is no early spring; only late spring and winter before it). He continued to buy out of town and would have nothing to do with Bill ‘Brownie’ McKissick’s store. He also never crossed the threshold of the Bend Methodist Church. The deformed infant which had slid from his wife’s womb was buried in the Newall plot in Gates rather than in Homeland. The inscription on the tiny headstone read: SARAH TAMSON TABITHA FRANCINE NEWALL
JANUARY 14, 1921
GOD GRANT SHE LIE STILL.
In the store they talked about Joe Newall and Joe’s wife and Joe’s house as Brownie’s kid Harley, still not old enough to shave (but with his senescence buried inside just the same, hibernating, waiting, perhaps dreaming) but old enough to stack vegetables and haul pecks of potatoes out to the roadside stand whenever called upon to do so, stood by and listened. Mostly it was the house of which they spoke; it was considered to be an affront to the sensibilities and an offense to the eye. ‘But it grows on you,’ Clayton Clutterbuck (father of John) sometimes remarked. There was never any answer to this. It was a statement with absolutely no meaning . . .
yet at the same time it was a patent fact. If you were standing in the yard at Brownie’s, maybe just looking at the berries for the best box when berry-season was on, you sooner or later found
your eyes turning up to the house on the ridge the way a weathervane turns to the nor’east before a March blizzard. Sooner or later you had to look, and as time went by, it got to be sooner for most people. Because, as Clayt Clutterbuck said, the Newall place grew on you.