‘It is going to rain a pretty bitch,’ 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 glass 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 undershirts 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 goddam 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 Massachusetts Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into ownership 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 Massachusetts 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 ownership 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 Massachusetts 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 hell 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 goddam 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. Damn 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 — ‘
‘Could be shit,’ Gary says, just as quietly but even more forcefully. ‘It’s the Newall place, a new wing on the Newall place, already framed up, and if you still got doubts, just step outside and have a look for yourself.’
With that said, there is nothing left to say — they believe him. Neither Paul nor anyone else rushes outside to crane up at the new wing being added to the Newall house, however. They consider it a matter of some importance, and thus nothing to hurry over. More time passes —
Harley McKissick has reflected more than once that if time was pulpwood, they’d all be rich.
Paul goes to the old water-cooled soft-drink chest and gets an Orange Crush. He gives Harley sixty cents and Harley rings up the purchase. When he slams the cash-drawer shut again, he realizes the atmosphere in the store has changed somehow. There are other matters to discuss.
Lenny Partridge coughs, winces, presses his hands lightly against his chest where the broken ribs have never really healed, and asks Gary when they are going to have services for Dana Roy.