In 1924, Cora fell down the stairs between the cupola and the new wing, breaking her neck and her back. A rumor went through town (it probably originated at a Ladies Aid Bake Sale) that she had been stark naked at the time. She was interred next to her ill-formed, short-lived daughter.
Joe Newall — who, most folks now agreed, undoubtedly contained a touch of the kike —
continued to make money hand over fist. He built two sheds and a barn up on the ridge, all of them connected to the main house by way of the new wing. The barn was completed in 1927, and its purpose became clear almost at once — Joe had apparently decided to become a gentleman farmer. He bought sixteen cows from a fellow in Mechanic Falls. He bought a shiny new milking machine from the same fellow. It looked like a metal octopus to those who glanced into the back of the delivery truck and saw it when the driver stopped at Brownie’s for a cold bottle of ale before going on up the hill.
With the cows and the milking machine installed, Joe hired a halfwit from Motion to take care of his investment. How this supposedly hard-fisled and tough-minded mill-owner could have done such a thing perplexed everyone who turned his mind to the question — that Newall was slipping seemed to be the only answer — but he did, and of course the cows all died.
The county health officer showed up to look at the cows, and Joe showed him a signed statement from a veterinarian (a Gates Falls veterinarian, folks said ever after, raising their brows significantly as they said it) certifying that the cows had died of bovine meningitis.
‘That means bad luck in English,’ Joe said.
‘Is that supposed to be a joke?”
‘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 stitched 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 flagship 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 Torbutt, the assistant 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 cocker spaniel. The county coroner, who happened to be Clem Upshaw’s brother Noble, 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 raccoon 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 damned 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, God 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 hell 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 pass 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.