It (72 page)

My father had a subscription to the Derry
News.
He kept his eye on the ads announcing land for sale. They had saved up a good bit of money. At last he saw a farm for sale that looked like a good proposition . . . on paper, at least. The two of them rode up from Texas on a Trailways bus, looked at it, and bought it the same day. The First Merchants of Penobscot County issued my father a ten-year mortgage, and they settled down.

“We had some problems at first,” my father said another time. “There were people who didn't want Negroes in the neighborhood. We knew it was going to be that way—I hadn't forgotten about the Black Spot—and we just hunkered down to wait it out. Kids would go by and throw rocks or beer cans. I must have replaced twenty windows
that first year. And some of them weren't just kids, either. One day when we got up, there was a swastika painted on the side of the chickenhouse and all the chickens were dead. Someone had poisoned their feed. Those were the last chickens I ever tried to keep.

“But the County Sheriff—there wasn't any police chief in those days, Derry wasn't quite big enough for such a thing—got to work on the matter and he worked hard. That's what I mean, Mikey, when I say there is good here as well as bad. It didn't make any difference to that man Sullivan that my skin was brown and my hair was kinky. He come out half a dozen times, he talked to people, and finally he found out who done it. And who do you think it was? I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count!”

“I don't know,” I said.

My father laughed until tears spouted out of his eyes. He took a big white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away. “Why, it was Butch Bowers, that's who! The father of the kid you say is the biggest bully at your school. The father's a turd and the son's a little fart.”

“There are kids at school who say Henry's father is crazy,” I told him. I think I was in the fourth grade at that time—far enough along to have had my can righteously kicked by Henry Bowers more than once, anyway . . . and now that I think about it, most of the pejorative terms for “black” or “Negro” I've ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four.

“Well, I'll tell you,” he said, “the idea that Butch Bowers is crazy might not be far wrong. People said he was never right after he come back from the Pacific. He was in the Marines over there. Anyway, the Sheriff took him into custody and Butch was hollering that it was a put-up job and they were all just a bunch of nigger-lovers. Oh, he was gonna sue everybody. I guess he had a list that would have stretched from here to Witcham Street. I doubt if he had a single pair of underdrawers that was whole in the seat, but he was going to sue me, Sheriff Sullivan, the Town of Derry, the County of Penobscot, and God alone knows who else.

“As to what happened next . . . well, I can't swear it's true, but this is how I heard it from Dewey Conroy. Dewey said the Sheriff went in to see Butch at the jail up in Bangor. And Sheriff Sullivan says, ‘It's time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening,
Butch. That black guy, he don't want to press charges. He don't want to send you to Shawshank, he just wants the worth of his chickens. He figures two hundred dollars would do her.'

“Butch tells the Sheriff he can put his two hundred dollars where the sun don't shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch: ‘They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after you've been workin there about two years, your tongue goes as green as a lime Popsicle. Now you pick. Two years peelin lime or two hundred dollars. What do you think?'

“ ‘No jury in Maine will convict me,' Butch says, ‘not for killing a nigger's chickens.

“ ‘I know that,' ” Sullivan says.

“ ‘Then what the Christ are we chinnin about?' Butch asks him.

“ ‘You better wake up, Butch. They won't put you away for the chickens, but they
will
put you away for the swastiker you painted on the door after you killed em.'

“Well, Dewey said Butch's mouth just kind of dropped open, and Sullivan went away to let him think about it. About three days later Butch told his brother, the one that froze to death couple of years after while out hunting drunk, to sell his new Mercury, which Butch had bought with his muster-out pay and was mighty sweet on. So I got my two hundred dollars and Butch swore he was going to burn me out. He went around telling all his friends that. So I caught up with him one afternoon. He'd bought an old pre-war Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pick-up. I cut him off out on Witcham Street by the trainyards and got out with my Winchester rifle.

“ ‘Any fires out my way and you got one bad black man gunning for you, old hoss,' I told him.

“ ‘You can't talk to me that way, nigger,' he said, and he was damn near to blubbering between bein mad and bein scared. ‘You can't talk to no white man that way, not a jig like you.'

“Well, I'd had enough of the whole thing, Mikey. And I knew if I didn't scare him off for good right then I'd never be shed of him. There wasn't nobody around. I reached in that Ford with one hand and caught him by the hair of the head. I put the stock of my rifle against the buckle of my belt and got the muzzle right up under his chin. I said, ‘The next time you call me a nigger or a jig, your brains are going to be dripping off the domelight of your car. And you believe
me, Butch: any fires out my way and I'm gunning for you. I may come gunning for your wife and your brat and your nocount brother as well. I have had enough.'

“Then he
did
start to cry, and I never saw an uglier sight in my life. ‘Look what things has come to here,' he says, ‘when a nih . . . when a jih . . . when a feller can put a gun to a workingman's head in broad daylight by the side of the road.'

“ ‘Yeah, the world must be going to a camp-meeting hell when something like that can happen,' I agreed. ‘But that don't matter now. All that matters now is, do we have an understanding here or do you want to see if you can learn how to breathe through your forehead?'

“He allowed as how we had an understanding, and that was the last bit of trouble I ever had with Butch Bowers, except for maybe when your dog Mr. Chips died, and I've got no proof that was Bowers's doing. Chippy might have just got a poison bait or something.

“Since that day we've been pretty much left alone to make our way, and when I look back on it, there ain't much I regret. We've had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isn't nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams.”

February 28th, 1985

It's been days since I sat down to write the story of the fire at the Black Spot as my father told it to me, and I haven't gotten to it yet. It's in
The Lord of the Rings,
I think, where one of the characters says that “way leads on to way”; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

It's his voice that I remember, certainly: my father's voice, low and slow, how he would chuckle sometimes or laugh outright. The pauses to light his pipe or to blow his nose or to go and get a can
of Narragansett (Nasty Gansett, he called it) from the icebox. That voice, which is for me somehow the voice of all voices, the voice of all years, the ultimate voice of this place—one that's in none of the Ives interviews nor in any of the poor histories of this place . . . nor on any of my own tapes.

My father's voice.

Now it's ten o'clock, the library closed an hour ago, and a proper old jeezer is starting to crank up outside. I can hear tiny spicules of sleet striking the windows in here and in the glassed-in corridor which leads to the Children's Library. I can hear other sounds, too—stealthy creaks and bumps outside the circle of light where I sit, writing on the lined yellow pages of a legal pad. Just the sounds of an old building settling, I tell myself . . . but I wonder. As I wonder if somewhere out in this storm there is a clown selling balloons tonight.

Well . . . never mind. I think I've finally found my way to my father's final story. I heard it in his hospital room no more than six weeks before he died.

I went to see him with my mother every afternoon after school, and alone every evening. My mother had to stay home and do the chores then, but she insisted that I go. I rode my bike. She wouldn't let me hook rides, not even four years after the murders had ended.

That was a hard six weeks for a boy who was only fifteen. I loved my father, but I came to hate those evening visits—watching him shrink and shrivel, watching the pain-lines spread and deepen on his face. Sometimes he would cry, although he tried not to. And going home it would be getting dark and I would think back to the summer of '58, and I'd be afraid to look behind me because the clown might be there . . . or the werewolf . . . or Ben's mummy . . . or my bird. But I was mostly afraid that no matter what shape It took, It would have my father's cancer-raddled face. So I would pedal as fast as I could no matter how hard my heart thundered in my chest and come in flushed and sweaty-haired and out of breath and my mother would say, “Why do you want to ride so fast, Mikey? You'll make yourself sick.” And I'd say, “I wanted to get back in time to help you with the chores,” and she'd give me a hug and a kiss and tell me I was a good boy.

As time went on, it got so I could hardly think of things to talk
about with him anymore. Riding into town, I'd rack my brain for subjects of conversation, dreading the moment when both of us would run out of things to say. His dying scared me and enraged me, but it
embarrassed
me, too; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that when a man or woman goes it should be a quick thing. The cancer was doing more than killing him. It was degrading him, demeaning him.

We never spoke of the cancer, and in some of those silences I thought that we
must
speak of it, that there would be nothing else and we would be stuck with it like kids caught without a place to sit in a game of musical chairs when the piano stops, and I would become almost frantic, trying to think of something—anything!—to say so that we would not have to acknowledge the thing which was now destroying my daddy, who had once taken Butch Bowers by the hair and jammed his rifle into the shelf of his chin and demanded of Butch to be left alone. We would be forced to speak of it, and if we were I would cry. I wouldn't be able to help it. And at fifteen, I think the thought of crying in front of my father scared and distressed me more than anything else.

It was during one of those interminable, scary pauses that I asked him again about the fire at the Black Spot. They'd filled him full of dope that evening because the pain was very bad, and he had been drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes speaking clearly, sometimes speaking in that exotic language I think of as Sleepmud. Sometimes I knew he was talking to me, but at other times he seemed to have me confused with his brother Phil. I asked him about the Black Spot for no real reason; it had just jumped into my mind and I seized on it.

His eyes sharpened and he smiled a little. “You ain't never forgot that, have you, Mikey?”

“No, sir,” I said, and although I hadn't thought about it in three years or better, I added what he sometimes said: “It hasn't ever escaped my mind.”

“Well, I'll tell you now,” he said. “Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother ain't here to stop me. Besides, you ought to know. I think something like it could only have happened in Derry, and you need to know that, too. So you can beware. The conditions for
such things have always seemed right here. You're careful, aren't you, Mikey?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. “That's good.” I thought he was going to drift off again—his eyes had slipped closed—but instead he began to talk.

“When I was at the army base here in '29 and '30,” he said, “there was an NCO Club up there on the hill, where Derry Community College is now. It was right behind the PX, where you used to be able to get a pack of Lucky Strike Greens for seven cents. The NCO Club was only a big old quonset hut, but they had fixed it up nice inside—carpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukebox—and you could get soft drinks on the weekend . . . if you were white, that was. They would have bands in most Saturday nights, and it was quite a place to go. It was just pop over the bar, it being Prohibition, but we heard you could get stronger stuff if you wanted it . . . and if you had a little green star on your army card. That was like a secret sign they had. Home-brew beer mostly, but on weekends you could sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white.

“Us Company E boys weren't allowed any place near it, of course. So we went on the town if we had a pass in the evening. In those days Derry was still something of a logging town and there were eight or ten bars, most of em down in a part of town they called Hell's Half-Acre. They wasn't speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasn't anybody in em spoke very easy, anyhow. They was what folks called ‘blind pigs,' and that was about right, because most of the customers acted like pigs when they were in there and they was about blind when they turned em out. The Sheriff knew and the cops knew, but those places roared all night long, same as they'd done since the logging days in the 1890s. I suppose palms got greased, but maybe not as many or with so much as you might think; in Derry people have a way of looking the other way. Some served hard stuff as well as beer, and by all accounts I ever heard, the stuff you could get in town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys' NCO on Friday and Saturday nights. The downtown hooch came over the border from Canada in pulp trucks, and most of them bottles had what the labels said. The
good stuff was expensive, but there was plenty of furnace-oil too, and it might hang you over but it didn't kill you, and if you
did
go blind, it didn't last. On any given night you'd have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nan's, the Paradise, Wally's Spa, the Silver Dollar, and one bar, the Powderhorn, where you could sometimes get a whore. Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn't even have to work at it that hard—there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off'n the rye loaf was any different—but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whore—a
white
whore—that was something you had to sit down and consider.”