‘Tomorrow,’ Gary says, ‘down Gorham. That’s where his wife is laid to rest.’
Lucy Roy died in 1968; Dana, who was until 1979 an electrician for U.S. Gypsum over in Gates Falls (these men routinely and with no prejudice refer to the company as U.S. Gyp Em), died of intestinal cancer two days before. He lived in Castle Rock all his life, and liked to tell people that he’d only been out of Maine three times in his eighty years, once to visit an aunt in Connecticut, once to see the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park (‘And they lost, those bums,’
he always added at this point), and once to attend an electricians’ convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. ‘Damn waste of time,’ he always said of the convention. ‘Nothin but drinkin and wimmin, and none of the wimmin even worth lookin at, let alone that other thing.’ He was a crony of these men, and in his passing they feel a queer mixture of sorrow and triumph.
‘They took out four feet of his underpinnin,’ Gary tells the other men. ‘Didn’t do no good. It was all through him.’
‘He knew Joe Newall,’ Lenny says suddenly. ‘He was up there with his dad when his dad was puttin in Joe’s lectricity — couldn’t have been more’n six or eight, I’d judge. I remember he said Joe give him a sucker one time, but he pitched it out’n his daddy’s truck on the ride home. Said it tasted sour and funny. Then, later, after they got all the mills runnin again — the late thirties, that would’ve been — he was in charge of the rewirin. You member that, Harley?’
‘Yup.’
Now that the subject has come back to Joe Newall by way of Dana Roy, the men sit quietly, conning their brains for anecdotes Concerning either man. But when Old Clut finally speaks, he
says a startling thing. ‘ ‘It was Dana Roy’s big brother, Will, who throwed that skunk at the side of the house that time. I’m almost sure ’twas.’
‘Will?’ Lenny raises his eyebrows. ‘Will Roy was too steady to do a thing like that, I would have said.’
Gary Paulson says, very quietly: ‘Ayuh, it was Will.’
They turn to look at him.
‘And ’twas the wife that give Dana a sucker that day he came with his dad,’ Gary says. ‘Cora, not Joe. And Dana wa’ant no six or eight; the skunk was throwed around the time of the Crash, and Cora was dead by then. No, Dana maybe remembered some of it, but he couldn’t have been no more than two. It was around 1916 that he got that sucker, because it was in ‘ 16 that Eddie Roy wired the house. He was never up there again. Frank — the middle boy, he’s been dead ten or twelve year now — he would have been six or eight then, maybe. Frank seen what Cora done to the little one, that much I know, but not when he told Will. It don’t matter. Finally Will decided to do somethin about it. By then the woman was dead, so he took it out on the house Joe built for her.’
‘Never mind that part,’ Harley says, fascinated. ‘What’d she do to Dana? That’s what I want to know.’
Gary speaks calmly, almost judiciously. ‘What Frank told me one night when he’d had a few was that the woman give him the sucker with one hand and reached into his didies with the other.
Right in front of the older boy.’
‘She never!’ Old Clut says, shocked in spite of himself.
Gary only looks at him with his yellowed, fading eyes and says nothing.
Silence again, except for the wind and the clapping shutter. The children on the bandstand have taken their firetruck and gone somewhere else with it and still the depthless afternoon continues on and on, the light that of an Andrew Wyeth painting, white and still and full of idiot meaning. The ground has given up its meager yield and waits uselessly for snow.
Gary would like to tell them of the sickroom at Cumberland Memorial Hospital where Dana Roy lay dying with black snot caked around his nostrils and smelling like a fish left out in the sun. He would like to tell them of the cool blue tiles and of nurses with their hair drawn back in nets, young things for the most part with pretty legs and firm young breasts and no idea that 1923
was a real year, as real as the pains which haunt the bones of old men. He feels he would like to sermonize on the evil of time and perhaps even the evil of certain places, and explain why Castle Rock is now like a dark tooth which is finally ready to fall out. Most of all he would like to inform them that Dana Roy sounded as if someone had stuffed his chest full of hay and he was trying to breathe through it, and that he looked as if he had already started to rot. Yet he can say none of these things because he doesn’t know how, and so he only sucks back spit and says nothing.
‘No one liked old Joe much,’ Old Clut says . . . and then his face brightens suddenly. ‘But by God, he grew on you!’
The others do not reply.
Nineteen days later, a week before the first snow comes to cover the useless earth, Gary Paulson has a surprisingly sexual dream . . . except it is mostly a memory.
On August 14, 1923, while driving by the Newall house in his father’s farm truck, thirteen-year-old Gary Martin Paulson happened to observe Cora Leonard Newall turning away from her mailbox at the end of the driveway. She had the newspaper in one hand. She saw Gary and
reached down with her free hand to grasp the hem of her housedress. She did not smile. That tremendous moon of a face was pallid and empty as she raised the dress, revealing her sex to him
— it was the first time he had ever seen that mystery so avidly discussed by the boys he knew.
And, still not smiling but only looking at him gravely, she pistoned her hips at his gaping, amazed face as he passed her by. And as he passed, his hand dropped into his lap and moments later he ejaculated into his flannel pants.
It was his first orgasm. In the years since, he has made love to a good many women, beginning with Sally Ouelette underneath the Tin Bridge back in ’26, and every time he has neared the moment of orgasm — every single one — he has seen Cora Leonard Newall: has seen her standing beside her mailbox under a hot gunmetal sky, has seen her lifting her dress to reveal an almost non-existent thatch of gingery hair beneath the creamy ground-swell of her belly, has seen the exclamatory slit with its red lips tinting toward what he knows would be the most deliriously delicate coral
(Cora)
pink. Yet it is not the sight of her vulva below that somehow promiscuous swell of gut that has haunted him through all the years, so that every woman became Cora at the moment of release; or it is not just that. What always drove him mad with lust when he remembered (and when he made love he was helpless not to) was the way she had pumped her hips at him . . . once, twice, three times. That, and the lack of expression on her face, a neutrality so deep it seemed more like idiocy, as if she were the sum of every very young man’s limited sexual understanding and desire
— a tight and yearning darkness, no more than that, a limited Eden glowing Cora-pink.
His sex-life has been both delineated and delimited by that experience — a seminal experience if ever there was one — but he has never mentioned it, although he has been tempted more than once when in his cups. He has hoarded it. And it is of this incident that he is dreaming, penis perfectly erect for the first time in almost nine years, when a small blood vessel in his cerebellum ruptures, forming a clot which kills him quietly, considerately sparing him four weeks or four months of paralysis, the flexible tubes in the arms, the catheter, the noiseless nurses with their hair in nets and their fine high breasts. He dies in his sleep, penis wilting, the dream fading like the afterimage of a television picture tube switched off in a dark room. His cronies would be puzzled, however, if any of them were there to hear the last two words he speaks — gasped out but still clear enough:
‘The moon!’
The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland, a new cupola starts to go up on the new wing on the Newall house.