He told Uncle Otto just that, in tones one usually saves for a religious conversion. They walked back to the road together and hooked a ride into Castle Rock with the Cushman Bakery truck, which happened to be passing.
McCutcheon told my father that it had been God’s hand at work — he had been looking for just the perfect place, and there it had been all the time, in that field they passed three and four times a week, with never a spared glance.
The hand of God, he reiterated, never knowing that he would die in that field two years later, crushed under the
front end of his own truck — the truck which became Uncle Otto’s truck when he died.
McCutcheon had Billy Dodd hook his wrecker up to the Cresswell and drag it around so it faced the road.
So he could look at it, he said, every time he went by, and know that when Dodd hooked up to it again and dragged it away for good, it would be so that the construction men could come and dig him a cellar-hole. He was something of a sentimentalist, but he was not a man to let sentiment stand in the way of making a dollar. When a pulper
named Baker came by a year later and offered to buy the Cresswell’s wheels, tires and all, because they were the
right size to fit his rig, McCutcheon took the man’s twenty dollars like a flash. This was a man, remember, who was then worth a million dollars. He also told Baker to block the truck up aright smart. He said he didn’t want to go past it and see it sitting in the field hip-deep in hay and timothy and goldenrod, like some old derelict. Baker did it. A year later the Cresswell rolled off the blocks and crushed McCutcheon to death. The old-timers told the story with relish, always ending by saying that they hoped old Georgie McCutcheon had enjoyed the twenty dollars he got for
those wheels.
I grew up in Castle Rock. By the time I was born my father had worked for Schenck and McCutcheon
almost ten years, and the truck, which had become Uncle Otto’s along with everything else McCutcheon owned,
was a landmark in my life. My mother shopped at Warren’s in Bridgton, and the Black Henry Road was the way
you got there. So every time we went, there was the truck, standing in that field with the White Mountains behind it. It was no longer blocked up — Uncle Otto said that one accident was enough — but just the thought of what had happened was enough to give a small boy in knee-pants a shiver.
It was there in the summer; in the fall with oak and elm trees blazing on the three edges of the field like
torches; in the winter with drifts sometimes all the way up and over its bug-eyed headlights, so that it looked like a mastodon struggling in white quicksand; in the spring, when the field was a quagmire of March-mud and you
wondered that it just didn’t sink into the earth. If not for the underlying backbone of good Maine rock, it might well have done just that. Through all the seasons and years, it was there.
I was even in it, once. My father pulled over to the side of the road one day when we were on our way to the
Fryeburg Fair, took me by the hand and led me out to the field. That would have been 1960 or 1961,1 suppose. I
was frightened of the truck. I had heard the stories of how it had slithered forward and crushed my uncle’s partner. I had heard these tales in the barbershop, sitting quiet as a mouse behind a Life magazine I couldn’t read, listening to the men talk about how he had been crushed, and about how they hoped old Georgie had enjoyed his twenty dollars
for those wheels. One of them — it might have been Billy Dodd, crazy Frank’s father — said McCutcheon had
looked like “a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor wheel.” That haunted my thoughts for months… but my father, of course, had no idea of that.