DERRY: THE FOURTH INTERLUDE

 

“You got to lose

You can’t win all the time.

You got to lose

You can’t win all the time, what’d I say?

I know, pretty baby,

I see trouble comin down the line.”

–John Lee Hooker, “You Got to Lose”

 

 

April 6th, 1985

 

Tell you what, friends and neighbors-I’m drunk tonight. Fuck-drunk. Rye whiskey. Went down to Wally’s and got started, went to the greenfront down on Center Street half an hour before they closed, and bought a fifth of rye. I know what I’m up to. Drink cheap tonight, pay dear tomorrow. So here he sits, one drunk nigger in a public library after closing, with this book open in front of me and the bottle of Old Kentucky on my left. Tell the truth and shame the devil,” my mom used to say, but she forgot to tell me that sometimes you can’t shame Mr Splitfoot sober. The Irish know, but of course they’re God’s white niggers and who knows, maybe they’re a step ahead.

Want to write about drink and the devil. Remember Treasure Island? The old seadog at The Admiral Benbow. “We’ll do “em yet, Jacky!” I bet the bitter old fuck even believed it. Full of rum-or rye-you can believe anything.

Drink and the devil. Okay.

Amuses me sometimes to think how long I’d last if I actually published some of this stuff I write in the dead of night. If I flashed some of the skeletons in Derry’s closet. There is a library Board of Directors. Eleven of them. One is a seventy-year-old writer who suffered a stroke two years ago and who now often needs help to find his place on each meeting’s printed agenda (and who has sometimes been observed picking large dry boogers out of his hairy nostrils and placing them carefully in his ear, as if for safe-keeping). Another is a pushy woman who came here from New York with her doctor husband and who talks in a constant, whiny monologue about how provincial Derry is, how no one here understands THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE and how one has to go to Boston to buy a skirt one would care to be seen in. Last time this anorexic babe spoke to me without the services of an intermediary was during the Board’s Christmas party about a year and a half ago. She had consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and asked me if anyone in Derry understood THE BLACK EXPERIENCE. I had also consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and answered: “Mrs Gladry, Jews may be a great mystery, but niggers are understood the whole world round.” She choked on her drink, whirled around so sharply that her panties were momentarily visible under her flaring skirt (not a very interesting view; would that it had been Carol Danner!), and so ended my last informal conversation with Mrs Ruth Gladry. No great loss.

The other members of the Board are the descendants of the lumber barons. Their support of the library is an act of inherited expiation; they raped the woods and now care for these books the way a libertine might decide, in his middle age, to provide for the gaily gotten bastards of his youth. It was their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who actually spread the legs of the forests north of Derry and Bangor and raped those green-gowned virgins with their axes and peaveys. They cut and slashed and strip-timbered and never looked back. They tore the hymen of those great forests open when Grover Cleveland was President and had pretty well finished the job by the time Woodrow Wilson had his stroke. These lace-ruffled ruffians raped the great woods, impregnated them with a litter of slash and junk spruce, and changed Derry from a sleepy little ship-building town into a booming honky-tonk where the ginmills never closed and the whores turned tricks all night long. One old campaigner, Egbert Thoroughgood, now ninety-three, told me of taking a slat-thin prostitute in a crib on Baker Street (a street which no longer exists; middle-class apartment housing stands quietly where Baker Street once boiled and brawled).

“I only realized after I spent m’spunk in her that she was laying in a pool of jizzum maybe an inch deep. Stuff had just about gone to jelly. “Girl,” I says, “ain’t you never cared for y’self?” She looks down and says, “I’ll put on a new sheet if you want to go again. There’s two in the cu’bud down the hall, I think. I knows pretty much what I’m layin in until nine or ten, but by midnight my cunt’s so numb it might’s well be in Ellsworth.”

So that was Derry right through the first twenty or so years of the twentieth century: all boom and booze and balling. The Penobscot and the Kenduskeag were full of floating logs from ice-out in April to ice-in in November. The business began to slacken off in the twenties without the Great War or the hardwoods to feed it, and it staggered to a stop during the Depression. The lumber barons put their money in those New York or Boston banks that had survived the Crash and left Derry’s economy to live-or die-on its own. They retreated to their gracious houses on West Broadway and sent their children to private schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. And lived on their interest and political connections.

What’s left of their supremacy seventy-some years after Egbert Thoroughgood spent his love with a dollar whore in a spermy Baker Street bed are empty wildwoods in Penobscot and Aroostook Counties and the great Victorian houses which stand for two blocks along West Broadway… and my library, of course. Except those good folks from West Broadway would take “my library” away from me in jig time (pun definitely intended) if I published anything about the Legion of Decency, the fire at the Black Spot, the execution of the Bradley Gang… or the affair of Claude Heroux and the Silver Dollar.

The Silver Dollar was a beerjoint, and what may have been the queerest mass murder in the entire history of America took place there in September of 1905. There are still a few old timers in Derry who claim to remember it, but the only account that I really trust is Thoroughgood’s. He was eighteen when it happened.

Thoroughgood now lives in the Paulson Nursing Home. He’s toothless, and his St John’s Valley Franco/Downcast accent is so thick that probably only another old Mainer could understand what he was saying if his talk were written down phonetically. Sandy Ives, the folklorist from the University of Maine whom I have mentioned previously in these wild pages, helped me to translate my audio tapes.

Claude Heroux was, according to Thoroughgood, “Un bat Canuck sonofa-whore widdin eye that’d roll adju like a mart’s in dem oonlight.”

(Translation: “One bad Canuck son of a whore with an eye that would roll at you like a mare’s in the moonlight.”)

Thoroughgood said that he-and everyone else who had worked with Heroux-believed the man was as sly as a chicken-stealing dog… which made his hatchet-wielding foray into the Silver Dollar all the more startling. It was not in character. Up until then, lumbermen in Derry had believed Heroux’s talents ran more to lighting fires in the woods.

The summer of ’05 was long and hot and there had been many fires in the woods. The biggest of them, which Heroux later admitted he set by simply putting a lighted candle in the middle of a pile of woodchips and kindling, happened in Haven’s Big Injun Woods. It burned twenty thousand acres of prune hardwood, and you could smell the smoke of it thirty-five miles away as the horse-drawn trollies breasted Up-Mile Hill in Derry.

In the spring of that year there had been some brief talk about unionizing. There were four lumbermen involved in organizing (not that there was much to organize; Maine workingmen were anti-union then and are, for the large part, anti-union now), and one of the four was Claude Heroux, who probably saw his union activities mostly as a chance to talk big and spend a lot of time drinking down on Baker and Exchange Streets. Heroux and the other three called themselves “organizers”; the lumber barons called them “ringleaders.” A proclamation nailed to the cooksheds in lumber camps from Monroe to Haven Village to Sumner Plantation to Millinocket informed lumbermen that any man overheard talking union would be fired off the job immediately.

In May of that year there was a brief strike up near Trapham Notch, and although the strike was broken in short order, both by scabs and by “town constables” (and that was rather peculiar, you understand, since there were nearly thirty “town constables” swinging axe-handles and creasing skulls, but before that day in May, there hadn’t been so much as a single constable in Trapham Notch-which had a population of 79 in the census of 1900-so far as anyone knew), Heroux and his organizing friends considered it a great victory for their cause. Accordingly, they came down to Derry to get drunk and to do some more “organizing”… or “ringleading,” depending on whose side you favored. Whichever, it must have been dry work. They hit most of the bars in Hell’s Half-Acre, finishing up in The Sleepy Silver Dollar, arms around each other’s shoulders, pissing-down-your-leg drunk, alternating union songs with bathetic tunes like “My Mother’s Eyes Are Looking Down from Heaven’, although I myself think any mother looking down from there and seeing her son in such a state might well have been excused for turning away.

According to Egbert Thoroughgood, the only reason anyone could figure for Heroux being in the movement at all was Davey Hartwell. Hartwell was the chief “organizer” or “ringleader,” and Heroux was in love with him. Nor was he the only one; most of the men in the movement loved Hartwell deeply and passionately, with that proud love men save for those of their own sex who possess a magnetism that seems to approach divinity. “davvey Ardwell wadda main who walk lak e ohn heffa de worl an haddim a daylah on de resp,” Thoroughgood said.

(Translation: “davey Hartwell was a man who walked like he owned half of the world and had him a deadlock on the rest.’)

“He wadda great main inniz way; no use sayn he woint. He haddim foce, he haddim some big dinnity iniz walk anniz talk. Ainno use sayin he wadda good main. Just trine dellya he wadda great un.”

Heroux followed Hartwell into the organizing business the way he would have followed him if he had decided to go for a shipbuilder up in Brewer or down in Bath, or building the Seven Trestles over in Vermont, or trying to bring back the Pony Express out west, for that matter. Heroux was sly and he was mean, and I suppose that in a novel that would preclude any good qualities at all. But sometimes, when a man has spent a life being distrusted and distrustful, being a loner (or a Loser) both by choice and by reason of society’s opinions of him, he can find a friend or a lover and simply live for that person, the way a dog lives for its master. That’s the way it appeared to have been between Heroux and Hartwell.

Anyway, there were four of them who spent that night in the Brentwood Arms Hotel, which was then called the Floating Dog by the lumbermen (the reason why is lost in obscurity-not even Egbert Thoroughgood remembers). Four checked in; none checked out. One of them, Andy DeLesseps, was never seen again; for all history tells he might have spent the rest of his life living in pleasant ease in Portsmouth. But somehow I doubt it. Two of the other “ringleaders,” Amsel Bickford and Davey Hartwell himself, were found floating face-down in the Kenduskeag. Bickford was missing his head; someone had taken it off with the swipe of a woodsman’s two-hander. Both of Hartwell’s legs were gone, and those who found him swore that they had never seen such an expression of pain and horror on a human face. Something had distended his mouth, stuffing out his cheeks, and when his discoverers turned him over and spread his lips, seven of his toes fell out onto the mud. Some thought he might have lost the other three during his years working in the woods; others held the opinion that he might have swallowed them before he died.

Pinned to the back of each man’s shirt was a paper with the word UNION on it.

Claude Heroux was never brought to trial for what happened in the Silver Dollar on the night of September 9th, 1905, so there’s no way of knowing exactly how he escaped the fate of the others that night in May. We could make assumptions; he had been on his own a long time, had learned how to jump fast, had perhaps developed the knack some cur-dogs have of getting out just before real trouble develops. But why didn’t he take Hartwell with him? Or was he perhaps taken into the woods with the rest of the “agitators’? Maybe they were saving him for last, and he was able to get away even while Hartwell’s screams (which would have grown muffled as they jammed his toes into his mouth) were echoing in the dark and scaring birds off their roosts. There’s no way of knowing, not for sure, but that last feels right to my heart.

Claude Heroux became a ghost-man. He would come strolling into a camp in the St John’s Valley, line up at the cook-shed with the rest of the loggers, get a bowl of stew, eat it, and be gone before anyone realized he wasn’t one of the topping gang. Weeks after that he’d show up in a Winterport beerjoint, talking union and swearing he’d have his revenge on the men that had murdered his friends-Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently. All of them lived in Derry, and their gabled gambrelled cupola-ed houses stand on West Broadway to this day. Years later, they and their descendants would fire the Black Spot.

That there were people who would have liked Claude Heroux put out of the way cannot be doubted, particularly after the fires started in June of that year. But although Heroux was seen frequently, he was quick and had an animal’s awareness of danger. So far as I have been able to find out, no official warrant was ever sworn out against him, and the police never took a hand. Maybe there were fears about what Heroux might say if he was brought to trial for arson.

Whatever the reasons, the woods around Derry and Haven burned all that hot summer. Children disappeared, there were more fights and murders than usual, and a pall of fear as real as the smoke you could smell from the top of Up-Mile Hill lay over the town.

The rains finally came on September first, and it rained for a solid week. Downtown Derry was flooded out, which was not unusual, but the big houses on West Broadway were high above downtown, and in some of those big houses there must have been sighs of relief. Let the crazy Canuck hide out in the woods all whiter, if that’s what he wants, they might have said. His work’s done for this summer, and we’ll get him before the roots dry next June.

Then came September 9th. I cannot explain what happened; Thoroughgood cannot explain it; so far as I know, no one can. I can only relate the events which occurred.

The Sleepy Silver Dollar was full of loggers drinking beer. Outside, it was drawing down toward misty dark. The Kenduskeag was high and silver-sullen, filling its channel from bank to bank, and according to Egbert Thoroughgood, a fallish wind was blowin-the kine dat alms fine de hole in y’paints and blow strayduppa cracka yo ais.” The streets were quagmires. There was a card game going on at one of the tables in the back of the room. They were William Mueller’s men. Mueller was part owner of the GS amp;WM rail line as well as a lumber potentate who owned millions of acres of prime timber, and the men who were playing poker around an oilcloth-covered table in the Dollar that night were part-time lumbermen, part-time railroad bulls, and full time trouble. Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as The Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King-a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut. It seems very likely that they were at least some of the men who had spent the last two and a half months keeping an eye out for Claude Heroux. It seems just as likely-although there is not a shred of proof-that they were in on the little cutting party in May when Hartwell and Bickford were laid low.

The bar was crowded, Thoroughgood said; dozens of men were bellied up there, drinking beer and eating bar lunches and dripping onto the sawdust-covered dirt floor.

The door opened and in came Claude Heroux. He had a woodsman’s double-bitted axe in his hand. He stepped up to the bar and elbowed himself a place. Egbert Thoroughgood was standing on his left; he said that Heroux smelled like a polecat stew. The barman brought Heroux a schooner of beer, two hard-cooked eggs in a bowl, and a shaker of salt. Heroux paid him with a two-dollar bill and put his change-a dollar-eighty-five-into one of the flap pockets of his lumberman’s jacket. He salted his eggs and ate them. He salted his beer, drank it off, and uttered a belch.

“More room out than there is in, Claude,” Thoroughgood said, just as if half the enforcers in northern Maine hadn’t been on the prod for Heroux all that summer.

“You know that’s the truth,” Heroux said, except, being a Canuck, what he probably said came out sounding more like “You know dot da troot.”

He ordered himself another schooner, drank up, and belched again. Talk at the bar went on; there was no silence like the ones in the western movies when the good guy or the bad guy pushes his way through the batwings and makes his ominous way to the bar. Several people called to him. Claude nodded and waved, but he didn’t smile. Thoroughgood said he looked like a man who was half in a dream. At the table in back, the poker game went on. El Katook was dealing. No one bothered to tell any of the players that Claude Heroux was in the bar… although, since their table was no more than twenty feet away, and since Claude’s name was hollered more than once by people who knew him, it is hard to know how they could have gone on playing, unaware of his potentially murderous presence. But that is what occurred.

After he finished his second schooner of beer, Heroux excused himself to Thoroughgood, picked up his two-hander, and went back to the table where Mueller’s men were playing five-card stud. Then he started cutting.

Floyd Calderwood had just poured himself a glass of rye whiskey and was setting the bottle back down when Heroux arrived and chopped Calderwood’s hand off at the wrist. Calderwood looked at his hand and screamed; it was still holding the bottle but all of a sudden wasn’t attached to anything but wet gristle and trailing veins. For a moment the severed hand clutched the bottle even tighter, and then it fell off and lay on the table like a dead spider. Blood spouted from his wrist.

At the bar, somebody called for more beer and someone else asked the bartender, whose name was Jonesy, if he was still dying his hair. “Never dyed it,” Jonesy said in an ill-tempered way; he was vain of his hair.

“Met a whore down at Ma Courtney’s who said what grows around your pecker is just as white as snow,” the fellow said.

“She was a liar,” Jonesy replied.

“Drop your pants and let’s us see,” said a lumberman named Falkland, with whom Egbert Thoroughgood had been matching for drinks before Heroux came in. This provoked general laughter.

Behind them, Floyd Calderwood was shrieking. A few of the men leaning against the bar took a casual look around in time to see Claude Heroux bury his woodsman’s axe in Tinker McCutcheon’s head. Tinker was a big man with a black beard going gray. He got halfway up, blood pouring down his face in freshets, then sat down again. Heroux pulled the axe out of his head. Tinker started to get up again, and Heroux slung the axe sideways, burying it in his back. It made a sound, Thoroughgood said, like a load of laundry being dropped on a rug. Tinker flopped over the table, his cards spraying out of his hand.

The others players were hollering and bellowing. Calderwood, still shrieking, was trying to pick up his right hand with his left as his life’s blood ran out of his stump of a wrist in a steady stream. Stugley Grenier had what Thoroughgood called a “clutch-pistol” (meaning a gun in a shoulder-holster) and he was grabbing for it with no success whatsoever. Eddie King tried to get up and fell right out of his chair on his back. Before he could get up, Heroux was standing astride him, the axe slung up over his head. King screamed and held up both hands in a warding-off gesture.

“Please, Claude, I just got married last month!” King screamed.

The axe came down, its head almost disappearing in King’s ample gut. Blood sprayed all the way up to the Dollar’s beamed roof. Eddie began to crawfish on the floor. Claude pulled the axe out of him the way a good woodsman will pull his axe out of a softwood tree, kind of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clinging grip of the sappy wood. When it was free he slung it up over his head. He brought it down again and Eddie King stopped screaming. Claude Heroux wasn’t done with him, however; he began to chop King up like kindling-wood.

At the bar, conversation had turned to what sort of winter lay ahead. Veraon Stanchfield, a farmer from Palmyra, claimed it would be a mild one-fall rain uses up winter snow was his scripture. Alfie Naugler, who had a farm out on the Naugler Road in Derry (it is gone now; where Alfie Naugler once grew his peas and beans and beets, the Interstate extension now runs its 8.8 mile, six-lane course), begged to disagree. Alfie claimed the coming winter was going to be a jeezer. He had seen as many as eight rings on some of the mohair caterpillars, he said, an unheard-of number. Another man held out for ice; another for mud. The Buzzard of ’01 was duly recalled. Jonesy sent schooners of beer and bowls of hardcooked eggs skidding down the bar. Behind them the screaming went on and the blood flowed in rivers.

At this point in my questioning of Egbert Thoroughgood, I turned off my cassette recorder and asked him: “How did it happen? Are you saying you didn’t know it was going on, or that you knew but you let it go on, or just what?”

Thoroughgood’s chin sank down to the top button of his food-spotted vest. His eyebrows drew together. He said nothing for a long, long time. Outside it was winter, and I could hear-very faintly-the yells and laughter of the children sliding down the big hill in McCarron Park. The silence in Thoroughgood’s room, small, cramped, and medicinal-smelling, spun out so long that I was about to repeat my question, when he replied: “We knew. But it didn’t seem to matter. It was like politics, in a way. Ayuh, like that. Like town business. Best let people who understand politics take care of that and people who understand town business take care of that. Such things be best done if working men don’t mix in.”

“Are you really talking about fate and just afraid to come out and say so?” I asked suddenly. The question was simply jerked out of me, and I certainly did not expect Thoroughgood, who was old and slow and unlettered, to answer it… but he did, with no surprise at all.

“Ayuh,” he said. “Mayhap I am.”

While the men at the bar went on talking about the weather, Claude Heroux went on cutting. Stugley Grenier had finally managed to clear his clutch-pistol. The axe was descending for another chop at Eddie King, who was by then in pieces. The bullet Grenier fired struck the head of the axe and richocheted off with a spark and a whine.

El Katook got to his feet and started backing away. He was still holding the deck he had been dealing from; cards were fluttering off the bottom and onto the floor. Claude came after him. El Katook held out his hands. Stugley Grenier got off another round, which didn’t come within ten feet of Heroux.

“Stop, Claude,” El Katook said. Thoroughgood said it appeared like Katook was trying to smile. “I wasn’t with them. I didn’t mix in at all.”

Heroux only growled.

“I was in Millinocket,” El Katook said, his voice starting to rise toward a scream. “I was in Millinocket, I swear it on my mother’s name! Ask anybody if you don’t believe meeeee…”

Claude raised the dripping axe, and El Katook sprayed the rest of the cards into his face. The axe came down, whistling. El Katook ducked. The axe-head buried itself in the planking that formed the Silver Dollar’s back wall. El Katook tried to run. Claude hauled the axe out of the wall and poked it between his ankles. El Katook went sprawling. Stugley Grenier shot at Heroux again, this time having a bit more luck. He had been aiming at the crazed lumberman’s head; the bullet struck home in the fleshy part of Heroux’s thigh.

Meantime, El Katook was crawling busily toward the door with his hair hanging in his face. Heroux swung the axe again, snarling and gibbering, and a moment later Katook’s severed head was rolling across the sawdust-strewn floor, the tongue popped bizarrely out between the teeth. It rolled to a stop by the booted foot of a lumberman named Varney, who had spent most of the day in the Dollar and who, by then, was so exquisitely slopped that he didn’t know if he was on land or at sea. He kicked the head away without looking down to see what it was, and hollered for Jonesy to run him down another beer.

El Katook crawled another three feet, blood spraying from his neck in a high-tension jet, before he realized he was dead and collapsed. That left Stugley. Heroux turned on him, but Stugley had run into the outhouse and locked the door.

Heroux chopped his way in, hollering and blabbering and raving, slobber falling from bis jaws. When he got in Stugley was gone, although the cold, leaky little room was windowless. Heroux stood there for a moment, head lowered, powerful arms slimed and splattered with blood, and then, with a roar, he flipped up the lid of the three-holer. He was just in time to see Stugley’s boots disappearing under the ragged board skirting of the outhouse wall. Stugley Grenier ran screaming down Exchange Street in the rain, beshitted from top to toe, crying that he was being murdered. He survived the cutting party in the Silver Dollar-he was the only one who did-but after three months of listening to jokes about his method of escape, he quitted the Derry area forever.

Heroux stepped out of the toilet and stood in front of it like a bull after a charge, head down, his axe held in front of him. He was puffing and blowing and covered with gore from head to foot.

“Shut the door, Claude, that shitpot stinks to high heaven,” Thoroughgood said. Claude dropped his axe on the floor and did as he had been asked. He walked over to the card-strewn table where his victims had been sitting, kicking one of Eddie King’s severed legs out of his way. Then he simply sat down and put his head in his arms. The drinking and conversation at the bar went on. Five minutes later more men began to pile in, three or four sheriffs deputies among them (the one in charge was Lal Machen’s father, and when he saw the mess he had a heart attack and had to be taken away to Dr Shratt’s office). Claude Heroux was led away. He was docile when they took him, more asleep than awake.

That night the bars all up and down Exchange and Baker Streets boomed and hollered with news of the slaughter. A righteous drunken sort of fury began to build up, and when the bars closed better than seventy men headed downtown toward the jail and the court-house. They had torches and lanterns. Sonic were carrying guns, some had axes, some had peavies.

The County Sheriff wasn’t due from Bangor until the noon stage the next day, so he wasn’t there, and Goose Machen was laid up in Dr Shratt’s infirmary with his heart attack. The two deputies who were sitting in the office playing cribbage heard the mob coming and got out of there fast. The drunks broke in and dragged Claude Heroux out of his cell. He didn’t protest much; he seemed dazed, vacant.

They carried him on their shoulders like a football hero; down to Canal Street they carried him, and there they lynched him from an old elm that overhung the Canal. “He was so far gone that he didn’t kick but twice,” Egbert Thoroughgood said. It was, so far as the town records show, the only lynching to ever take place in this part of Maine. And almost needless to say, it was not reported in the Derry News. Many of those who had gone on drinking unconcernedly while Heroux went about his business in the Silver Dollar were in the necktie party that strung him up. By midnight their mood had changed.

I asked Thoroughgood my final question: had he seen anyone he didn’t know during that day’s violent activities? Someone who struck him as strange, out of place, funny, even clownish? Someone who would have been drinking at the bar that afternoon, someone who had maybe turned into one of the rabble-rousers that night as the drinking went on and the talk turned to lynching?

“Mayhap there was,” Thoroughgood replied. He was tired by then, drooping, ready for his afternoon nap. “It were a long time ago, mister. Long and long.”

“But you remember something,” I said.

“I remember thinkin that there must be a county fair up Bangor way,” Thoroughgood said. “I was having a beer in the Bloody Bucket that night. The Bucket was about six doors from the Silver Dollar. There was a fella in there… comical sort of fella… doing flips and rollovers… jugglin glasses… tricks… put four dimes on his forrid and they’d stay right there… comical, you know…”

His bony chin had sunk to his chest again. He was going to sleep right in front of me. Spittle began to bubble at the corners of his mouth, which had as many tucks and wrinkles as a lady’s change-purse.

“Seen him a few now” n thens since,” Thoroughgood said. “Figure maybe he had such a good time that night… that he decided to stick around.”

“Yeah. He’s been around a long time,” I said.

His only response was a weak snore. Thoroughgood had gone to sleep in his chair by the window, with his medicines and nostrums lined up beside him on the sill, soldiers of old age at muster. I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona. Pennywise had been there, guiding them down the path toward another gaudy sacrifice-just one more in Derry’s long history of gaudy sacrifices. That one, in September of 1905, ushered in a heightened period of terror that would include the Easter-tide explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks the following year.

This raises some interesting (and, for all I know, vitally important) questions. What does It really eat, for instance? I know that some of the children have been partially eaten-they show bite-marks, at least-but perhaps it is we who drive It to do that. Certainly we have all been taught since earliest childhood that what the monster does when it catches you in the deep wood is eat you. That is perhaps the worst thing we can conceive. But it’s really faith that monsters live on, isn’t it? I am led irresistibly to this conclusion: Food may be life, but the source of power is not food but faith. And who is more capable of a total act of faith than a child?

But there’s a problem: kids grow up. In the church, power is perpetuated and renewed by periodic ritualistic acts. In Derry, power seems to be perpetuated and renewed by periodic ritualistic acts, too. Can it be that It protects Itself by the simple fact that, as the children grow into the adults, they become either incapable of faith or crippled by a sort of spiritual and imaginative arthritis?

Yes. I think that’s the secret here. And if I make the calls, how much will they remember? How much will they believe? Enough to end this horror once and for all, or only enough to get them killed? They are being called-I know that much. Each murder in this new cycle has been a call. We almost killed It twice, and in the end we drove It deep in Its warren of tunnels and stinking rooms under the city. But I think It knows another secret: although It may be immortal (or almost so), we are not. It had only to wait until the act of faith, which made us potential monster-killers as well as sources of power, had become impossible. Twenty-seven years. Perhaps a period of sleep for It, as short and refreshing as an afternoon nap would be for us. And when It awakes, It is the same, but a third of our lives has gone by. Our perspectives have narrowed; our faith in the magic that makes magic possible, has worn off like the shine on a new pair of shoes after a hard day’s walking.

Why call us back? Why not just let us die? Because we nearly killed It, because we frightened It, I think. Because It wants revenge.

And now, now that we no longer believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Hansel and Gretel, or the troll under the bridge, It is ready for us. Come on back, It says. Come on back, let’s finish our business in Derry. Bring your jacks and your marbles and your yo-yos! We’ll play. Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all: how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

On that one, at least I score a thousand per cent: I am frightened. So goddam frightened.

 

Part 5

THE RITUAL OF CHUD

 

“It is not to be done. The seepage has

rotted out the curtain. The mesh

is decayed. Loosen the flesh

from the machine, build no more

bridges. Through what air will you

fly to span the continents? Let the words

fall any way at all-that they may

hit love aslant. It will be a rare

visitation. They want to rescue too much,

the flood has done its work”

–William Carlos Williams, Paterson

 

 

“Look and remember. Look upon this land,

Far, far across the factories and the grass.

Surely, there, surely they will let you pass.

Speak then and ask the forest and the loam.

What do you hear? What does the land command?

The earth is taken: this is not your home.”

–Karl Shapiro, “Travelogue for Exiles”

 

Chapter 19

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