announcing it was a gift to the town — a fine new schoolhouse, he said, and all he asked was that they name it after his late partner.
Castle Rock’s selectmen were flabbergasted. So was everyone else. Most everyone in the Rock had gone to
such a one-room school (or thought they had, which comes down to almost the same thing). But all of the one-
room schools were gone from Castle Rock by 1965. The very last of them, the Castle Ridge School, had closed the
year before. It’s now Steve’s Pizzaville out on Route 117. By then the town had a glass-and-cinderblock grammar
school on the far side of the common and a fine new high school on Carbine Street. As a result of his eccentric
offer, Uncle Otto made it all the way from “odd” to “damn peculiar” in one jump.
The selectmen sent him a letter (not one of them quite dared to go see him in person) thanking him kindly,
and hoping he would remember the town in the future, but declining the little schoolhouse on the grounds that the educational needs of the town’s children were already well provided for. Uncle Otto flew into a towering rage.
Remember the town in the future? he stormed to my father. He would remember them, all right, but not the way
they wanted. He hadn’t fallen off a hay truck yesterday. He knew a hawk from a handsaw. And if they wanted to get into a pissing contest with him, he said, they were going to find he could piss like a polecat that had just drunk a keg of beer.
“So what now?” my father asked him. They were sitting at the kitchen table in our house. My mother had
taken her sewing upstairs. She said she didn’t like Uncle Otto; she said he smelled like a man who took a bath once a month, whether he needed one or not — “and him a rich man,” she would always add with a sniff. I think his smell
really did offend her but I also think she was frightened of him. By 1965, Uncie Otto had begun to look damn peculiar as well as act that way. He went around dressed in green workman’s pants held up by suspenders, a
thermal underwear shirt, and big yellow workshoes. His eyes had begun to roll in strange directions as he spoke.
“Huh?”
“What are you going to do with the place now?”
“Live in the son of a bitch,” Uncle Otto snapped, and that’s what he did.
The story of his later years doesn’t need much telling. He suffered the dreary sort of madness that one often
sees written up in cheap tabloid newspapers. Millionaire Dies of Malnutrition in Tenement Apartment. Bag Lady Was Rich, Bank Records Reveal. Forgotten Bank Tycoon Dies in Seclusion.
He moved into the little red house — in later years it faded to a dull, washed-out pink — the very next week.
Nothing my father said could talk him out of it. A year afterward, he sold the business I believe he had murdered to keep. His eccentricities had multiplied, but his business sense had not deserted him, and he realized a handsome
profit — staggering might actually be a better word.
So mere was my Uncle Otto, worth perhaps as much as seven millions of dollars, living in that tiny little
house on the Black Henry Road. His town house was locked up and shuttered. He had by then progressed beyond
“damned peculiar” to “crazy as a shithouse rat.” The next progression is expressed in a flatter, less colorful, but more ominous phrase: “dangerous, maybe.” That one is often followed by committal.
In his own way, Uncle Otto became as much a fixture as the truck across the road, although I doubt if any
tourists ever wanted to take his picture. He had grown a beard, which came more yellow than white, as if infected by the nicotine of his cigarettes. He had gotten very fat. His jowls sagged down into wrinkly dewlaps creased with dirt. Folks often saw him standing in the doorway of his peculiar little house, just standing there motionlessly, looking out at the road, and across it.