But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them: The power of the silver, the power of the slugs-where does power like that come from? Where does any power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?
It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question, perhaps the only question. It had some real shape; he had nearly seen it. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn't it true that power, like It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Beverly looked at Bill and the way Bill looked back.
What, exactly what, was power, anyway?
12
Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.
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.