Characters in The Tommyknockers

They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident.

“I’ll call Adley McKeen and Dick Allison. Bryant, go back and tell Marie to put on lots of coffee. It’s going to be a long night.” They moved off in different directions; the men who had calls to make headed in the direction of Henry Applegate’s house.

… Albert “Pits” Barfield was really the last act of outrageous craziness in Haven, and in that light it probably deserves a brief mention. Hank and Pits Barfield were part of the Thursday-night poker circle to which Joe Paulson had also belonged. By July 31st the poker games had ended, and …

… and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder. Whoever he was, he won most of the Christians in town over to his own lively version of the faith by the time the corn was ready for picking—much to the despair of Mr. Hartley, who ministered to the Methodists …

There was shouting. Albion Thurlow heard it clearly, although Albion lived a quarter of a mile down the road and was deaf in one ear. Following the shouting there was a sound of a chainsaw cranking up, followed by a gunshot and a scream.

When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn’t shown up, Mrs. McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable.

Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told ’Becka this on Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pantsuit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.

“Felt like I was dine,” Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident. “What exactly do you mean?” Leandro asked. Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly.

Kyle Archinbourg asked Newt. “I didn’t catch all of it.” “Are you fucking deaf?” Andy Baker snarled. “Jesus Christ, people in three counties heard the bang when that bitch blew the roof off. For two cents—” He balled his fists. “Quit it, both of you,” Hazel McCready said.

7 Wednesday, August 3rd: Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven’s only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly.

“They look almost . . . drawn on.” 6 The calling of the bells. Eddie Stampnell of the Derry barracks crossed the street with Andy Rideout from Orono—both of them had known Ruth, liked her. “Pretty, ain’t it?” Eddie asked dubiously. “Maybe,” Andy said.

2 The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words NEWS SNOOP tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters.

As he watched, Ann Delaney, who wrote spare, haunting poems about rural working-class New England, stretched her jaws wide and ripped into the huge sandwich she was holding.

… Brennan had sent to Haven had been in D.C., and there he had met a beautiful young woman named Annabelle. This summer she had come to Maine to be with him, and had come to Haven with him this morning to keep him company. He had promised her …

This was an effect Anne Anderson often had on people. “Good for you, dear.” Anne marched past the attendant and up the jetway, swinging a large, screamingly purple totebag in one hand. The attendant never even had time to wish her a pleasant stay in the Bangor area.

And suddenly he was seventeen again. He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn’t nukes but nooky. The girl’s name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn’t lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight.

I am sorry about this mess. He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan. He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window. At last another relay kicked over.

… syndrome—mongoloidism, in other words—and blindness, and—” “I want you to get out of my house,” Arberg said. “You’ve got potato chips on your chin,” Gardener said, and turned back to Mr. and Mr. Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from …

After a while it got so that even Arlene Cullum, who sold Amway with the zeal of a Christian martyr, would make herself scarce when she saw Frank Garrick’s truck (plastered with bumper-stickers which said things like IF THE RAPTURE’S TODAY SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL) driving down the village’s …

Cars and trucks passed occasionally along Derry Road in both directions, and once as she sat there, Ashley Ruvall came along on his bike. He had his fishing pole. He saw her and raised a hand to her. “Hi, Mitsuths McCauthland!” he cried chirpily, and grinned.

In her record book she noted: B. Moran, Amount Contributed: $1.00. 3 The Haven Town Library. The Cancer Society. The New England Conference of Small Towns.

“Ta-daaa!” he shouted. Now the gasps and shouts would come. More polite applause. Barney Applegate yawned. Hilly could have cheerfully shot him. Hilly had planned to work his way up from the tomato trick to his Grand Finale, and it was a good plan, as far as it went.

She glanced into the Haven Lunch. Beach Jernigan, the short-order cook, raised a hand to her. Ruth raised one in return. She saw Beach’s mouth move, clearly forming the words There she goes. Several men at the counter turned around and waved. They smiled.

There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters. “Look,” Gardener said, “I appreciate it, but—” “C’mon, Beaver,” Eddie said. “Cough up, you fuckin Scrooge.”

Benny Jorgenson died of a stroke, and Iva remarried three years later, becoming Iva Haney. Not long after, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started having household mishaps. The boy fell getting out of the tub; the girl burned her arm on the stove.

You think?” “Not really,” Benton Rhodes said. “But it could be,” Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.

Then he decided he wanted some fresh air and he went outside and stepped on the same rake little Bethie Jorgenson stepped on two months ago, and that was when he decided he ought to just pack up and go. I think he was right to do it, poor man.

… had long since tottered home, where Anne supposed she would be sitting up with her cunt of a sister Betty, the two of them drinking that shitty claret they liked, wailing over the dead man while they got slopped). She got nothing but that …

“But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.” Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one.

Beach was almost fawning. “No. There isn’t time. What about the deer? You got that?” “Ayuh. Bill Elderly kilt it and Dave Rutledge dressed it out.” “That’s good. Get going.” “Okay, Dick.”

After further questioning Blue realized it had been more like five Sundays since his aunt had favored them—and maybe as many as six. Bill Spruce kept a herd of dairy cows in Cleaves Mills. His brother Frank kept a herd in Haven.

It had belonged to little Billy Fannin at the beginning of the summer. In the center of the wagon was a platform. On the platform was a Bensohn brush-trimmer—little more than a power blade at the end of a long pole. The blade was controlled by a pistol-grip control.

She could see Bobby Tremain and Stephanie Colson walking slowly toward the edge of town along Route 9, hand in hand. They had been going together for four years and it really was a wonder Stephanie wasn’t pregnant yet, Ruth thought.

For the first and only time, he felt a bitter envy for Bradley Colson—or Cooder, if that was his real name. Colson had run away from Ilium . . . oh, beg your pardon, from Haven.

Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital. “It’ll slow him down, at least,” Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.

Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now. Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone . . . Beach, I think . . . Beach was honored to be chosen.

… a little weight, going from one hundred and twenty-six to two hundred and three, most of that since Byron, their only chick, had left home. She could have ignored it, would have ignored it, perhaps even have come to tolerate it with relief; if …

It showed a great deal of a girl named Candi (whose hobbies, the magazine said, included “sailing and men with hands both strong and gentle”), and he looked up far too late to do …

“You think he’s in the woods, Ruth?” Casey Tremain asked. “He must be,” she answered tiredly. Her head ached again. David was (not-there) no more in the woods than the President of the United States was.

She could even have ignored a third factor: at about the same time the pawings had stopped and the perfume smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired from the post office and a woman named Nancy Voss had come up from the Augusta post office to take his place.

Christina Lindley, who was only seventeen but had still taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State O’ Maine Photography Competition the year before, arrived back almost two hours later, scared, out of breath (and feeling rather sexy, if the truth was to be told) …

It was so bad on the night of July 4th that she called Christina McKeen, with whom she had planned to go see the fireworks in Bangor, and begged off.

he wailed. “That’s all we got!” Torgeson had met Claudell Weems pulling into the parking lot of the barracks just as Torgeson himself was pulling out. Claudell Weems, Maine’s only black state trooper, was tall—not as tall as the late Monster Dugan, but a very respectable six-four.

Cora Simard, the midwife who had delivered the baby, was in a half-doze by the kitchen stove, waiting for her husband Irwin to finally make his way through the …

Jesus was represented in lifelike 3-D. This was a picture of Him that ’Becka’s older sister, Corinne, who lived in Portsmouth, had given them as a wedding present.

She picked up the corpse and laid it on spread newspapers in her trunk and drove it to Dr. Daggett, the Augusta vet who had cared for Bobbi’s dog, Peter, before selling the practice and moving to Florida.

Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of “bitchin reefer” between the mattress and box spring of her bed.

Whatever you called it (and eventually it became, except in the memory of the oldest old-timers, like Dave Rutledge, plain old Route 9), that road was the one the loggers had to take when they went to Derry at the end of each month to spend their pay drinking and …

For a moment forty-two-year-old Justin Hurd’s mind was totally open to four-year-old David Brown’s, and David understood that Justin was ripping his entire garden to pieces, plowing the unripened corn back under, tearing up the pea-patch, squashing the new melons to pulp under the wheels of his tractor.

… and south was a rather unpleasant fellow named Delbert Chiles, who always looked at her as if he knew exactly what she would look like with her clothes off (not much, his eyes said, but I guess it’d do in a pinch) and always wanted to know if Anderson was …

Del Cullum, for instance. The Cullums had been in Haven since time out of mind, and Delbert—a thick-browed mechanic who worked at Elt Barker’s Shell—was probably not the first of them to engage in sexual congress with his daughters.

Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been one of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947.

Ruth was there ten minutes before the first pumper showed up. She would have torn Dick Allison’s head off when he finally showed up, except she had known both of the Paulsons were dead . . . and, of course, Dick Allison had known too.

He knew what Doc Warwick was going to say before he said it. Not TB; big C. Lung cancer. But that was in May. Now, in July, Beach was fit as a fiddle.

Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so.

He had run, and now Donald Hartley found himself wishing he could do the same. Why did they do it? Why? They knew what he was, they knew! So why did they— A strong, warm hand fell on his back. He turned and saw his good friend Fred Perry.

… to Dr. Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia—there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr. Elfman’s prognosis was grave. “If he got out, he’s probably dead,” Elfman said. Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police …

… , spotting her yellow slacks and white institutional shoes); Blacky the cat was still hissing; even Dr. Etheridge’s gerbils were going mad in the complicated maze of plastic tubes and towers on the far shelf that made up their home; Eric the Crazed …

As if the little boy had come from nowhere. The nurse bolted from the room, screaming for Dr. Greenleaf. 6 Hilly Brown opened his eyes. “David?” “Shut up, Hilly, I’m sleepun.”

“He’ll stop now,” Dr. Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly’s thumbs . . . blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been …

“Men love to talk big, but I guess most of em pack derringers in their pants no matter how big they talk,” old Duke Barfield said in the barbershop one evening. If there had been a Stinkiest Man in Town contest, old Duke would have won hands down.

Two people were killed when Early Hutchinson’s VW collided with the Fannins’ station wagon, but such minor things stopped no one. Their mental chant filled the hollow spaces in the air with a steady, rhythmic cry: Before he can do anything to the ship!

The year before, while wriggling into Hilly’s “neatest all-time hiding place” during a game of hide-and-go-seek, Eddie Golden had torn his leg open on a strand of rusty barbed wire Hilly had always managed to miss (Hilly had, in fact, never even seen that old piece of sticker-wire at all).

“Really . . . no—” Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.

he asked irritably. “The hands are funny,” she said. “They look almost . . . drawn on.” 6 The calling of the bells. Eddie Stampnell of the Derry barracks crossed the street with Andy Rideout from Orono—both of them had known Ruth, liked her. “Pretty, ain’t it?” Eddie asked dubiously.

They stared at her with their glazey eyes and at last she understood why the dolls had frightened Edwina Thurlow so badly.

7 Haven came after Jim Gardener. They came in cars. They came in pickup trucks. They came on tractors. They came on motorcycles. Mrs. Eileen Crenshaw, the Avon lady who had been so bored at Hilly Brown’s SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, came driving her son Galen’s dune-buggy.

His mother knew he was “following up” some aspect of his “big story,” and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven. Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro’s mother, which put her close to seventy.

In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.

No one was very surprised. Coodersville it remained until 1864, when the name was changed to Montgomery, in honor of Ellis Montgomery, a local boy who had fallen at Gettysburg, where, some say, the 20th Maine preserved the Union all by itself. The change seemed a fine idea.

She went out, driving her old Dodge Dart, and found Elmer Haney sitting on the porch drinking a quart of Miller Lite, picking his nose, and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. Ruth suggested to Elmer Haney that he was bad luck around Iva’s place, particularly for Bethie and Richard Jorgenson.

That had been thirteen years ago, and it had not been new then. She had run it on the road until 1984, when even Elt Barker down at the Shell station, Haven’s only garage and gas stop, would no longer slap an inspection sticker on it.

… remember biting his arm until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not remember Emory’s breathless bird-cries from the next bed—“Please, Daddy, no, Daddy, please not me tonight, please, Daddy.” Children, of course, forget …

… Etna, and Unity (the joke in those days was that Emory Crowell’s parsonage belonged to the town of Troy, but his piles belonged to God). Nevertheless, their exhortations were voices crying in the wilderness. Preacher Colson’s congregation continued to grow as that well-nigh perfect summer of 1900 drew toward its …

With the clear eye of her writer’s mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling.

“He’ll always be on the jump,” the boy’s grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). “Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He’ll keep his mom n dad on the hop, Hilly will.” Hilly kept them hopping, all right.

“Guess I’ll have to take a ride down Haven and see Frank, now that my Evelyn’s on the mend.”

But the barbershop gossips of course knew what had happened on March 29th, after Faith Clarendon gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy. A wild wet norther was whooping around the eaves of the Clarendon house, dropping 1901’s last large budget of snow until November.

… miracle that they hadn’t blown themselves up with Frank Garrick’s old blowtorch rig—they had cut off the roof of the wagon from above the front seat on back, turning it into a half-assed truck. “Lookit that, Gard-ole-Gard,” Bobbi Anderson had proclaimed solemnly, staring at the remains of the wagon. “We …

… land behind Bobbi’s house, a battery bigger than Frank Spruce’s dairy barn. Ruth knew that, whatever Bobbi and her friend were digging up in the woods, it certainly wasn’t a gigantic Eveready Long-Life D-cell battery. Except . . . in a way, she thought that was exactly what it was.

“If it was happening in a carnival tent, they’d call it hysteria,” he told Fred Perry, a church deacon and his only close friend, one night over glasses of sherry in the church rectory. “Because it’s happening in a revival tent, they can get away with calling it Pentecostal Fire.”

“Don’t mention it,” the driver said. “Name’s Freeman Moss.” He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too-distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it. “Jim Gardener. Thanks again.” “Shoot a pickle,” Freeman Moss scoffed.

Mrs. Eileen Crenshaw, the Avon lady who had been so bored at Hilly Brown’s SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, came driving her son Galen’s dune-buggy. The Reverend Goohringer rode behind her, the remaining strands of his graying hair blowing back from his sunburned pate.

In 1830, a hostelry and feed store (owned by Hiram Cooder’s brother George) opened at the south end of the village. In 1831, Montville Plantation became Coodersville. No one was very surprised.

… and ailments of the bowels and the intestines, Georgina Leandro and the other members of the Ladies’ Aid passed out paper cups of Za-Rex and oatmeal cookies. And during the evening there was always a songfest for Christ in the church basement. Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.

5 Ad McKeen took her home and Hazel McCready put her to bed. She drifted off into wild, confused dreams.

“What the fuck’s going on?” “I don’t know.” “Any other casualties?” “A forest ranger from Newport died,” Dawson said reluctantly. “Who?” “Henry Amberson.” “What? Henry? Christ!” Torgeson felt as if he had been hit hard in the pit of the stomach.

She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney’s father, in the Browns’ back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly. In her current frame of mind, Marie would be more hindrance than help.

John Enders lowered him without saying anything. 4 Sunday, July 31st: Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning. People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard.

Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration. Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said. They’re supposed to go to about five different service stations, plus both auto-parts stores.

The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children—the knack of falling lucky.

The General Mercantile across the road (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder’s nephew) was less successful but still a marginally profitable business. In 1828, a Barber Shop and Small Surgery (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder’s cousin) opened next to the General Mercantile.

It began municipal existence in 1816 as Montville Plantation. It was owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by a man named Hugh Crane. Crane purchased it in 1813 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a province. He had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.

And it had all been for nothing. Hump Jernigan’s M-16 had been nothing but a dud after all. She grayed out and came back some four minutes later with a bat roosting on the bridge of her nose, lapping bloody tears from her cheek. “No you dirty FUCK!”

Ida Bozeman grinned a cheerful, reptilian grin. As the Bozemans began to get out of the Olds, the whirligig started to spin. A moment later the green parasol of flame began to form. Ida Bozeman tried to aim what she called her “molecule disco” at it, but too late.

When a terrified Irwin Simard finally found the courage to enter the Clarendon bedroom, he found man and wife on the bed, hands joined. Clarendon had cut his wife’s throat, laid down beside her, grasped her right hand with his left, and then cut his own.

Benny Jorgenson died of a stroke, and Iva remarried three years later, becoming Iva Haney. Not long after, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started having household mishaps. The boy fell getting out of the tub; the girl burned her arm on the stove.

… good old drunken blackout brawler and wife shooter James Eric Gardener. Get out of here, Gard. Never mind the New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or the Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if …

Jim Tierney’s the best A.G. we’ve had in Maine since I put on this uniform, and do you know where he is this gay day, Smokey?” “No.” “On vacation,” Torgeson said with a laugh that was slightly wild “First one since he took the job.

Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little—until this year, Peter had never lost his balance.

Oh, a few heads have rolled, and Joe Pell did something to the pull-ring in Mrs. Beasley’s back, and now all she’ll say is something like ‘Do you want to have a shower?’, but that’s about all the damage that’s been done.”

Joe Summerfield asked at last. “I don’t know,” Bobbi said. “Only that it’s not Gard.” Bobbi was swaying mildly on her feet. Her face was that of a woman who was fifty, not thirty-seven. There were brown circles of exhaustion under her eyes. The men seemed not to notice.

It was the Nixon doll, his stuffed fingers raised in twin V’s, speaking in the voice of John Enders down at the grammar school. They could, but that would be wrong. They love you, Ruth, but if you try to leave now they’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?

2 With only two hours of good daylight left, Ruth wasted no time. She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney’s father, in the Browns’ back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly.

But Ruth discovered she liked the job. Among other things, it gave her a chance to put a stop to some nasty goings-ons that old John Harley had allowed to continue . . . and grow. Del Cullum, for instance.

While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor Daily News named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again.

Frank Spruce, Haven’s biggest dairy farmer, answered the bells. John Mumphry, whose father had run against Ruth for the position of town constable, answered them. Ashley Ruvall, who had passed her out by the town line two days before her death, answered them with his parents. Ashley was crying.

This fellow, Jon Evard Symington by name, paused long enough to drop a handful of wrapped mini-wheels of Bonbel cheese into each pocket of his corduroy sportcoat (patched elbows, naturally), and then went back to the olives. Ron Cummings strolled over to where Gardener was standing.

Someone (Jud Tarkington) bumped into someone else (Hank Buck) and a momentary hateful exchange flared between them (you stay out of my way, strawfoot) (I’ll thump you with this light Buck swear to God I will) then the thoughts focused on her with real and undeniable (we all …

He was looking out through the window, and his eyes were suddenly prisoner’s eyes, lonely and trapped. David saw Justin Hurd out in his field, chugging along on his tractor, harrowing. Harrowing even though it was already the second week of July.

She was deliberately projecting as hard as she could, hoping to reach Christina Lindley as well as explain the situation to Kyle Archinbourg . . . to buck her up. The girl had (thought) sounded distraught, nearly hysterical, and she wouldn’t do them any good that way.

“Then why don’t you do something about it, Gooey?” Pamela Sargent asked him. Rev. Lester Goohringer had never been called “Gooey” in his entire life, but in his current state of rancor he barely noticed. “Maybe I will,” he said, looking at her through his thick glasses grimly.

Such was not the fate of Lester Moran, a textbook salesman who lived in a Boston suburb and spent most of his days on the highways of northern New England.

He was not even troubled by the brevity of discussion between the Town Clerk’s reading of the article and Head Selectman Luther Ruvall’s laconic, “What’s y’pleasure, people?” If he had had the slightest inkling, Hartley would have spoken vehemently, even furiously, for the only time in his life.

So I got one of Uncle Frank’s cigar boxes—there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is—and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried …

She walked downtown to the market, got some ground meat and two ears of fresh corn for her dinner, and spoke pleasantly with Madge Tilletts at the checkout counter and Dave Rutledge, who was sitting in his accustomed place at the front of the store, caning a chair slowly with …

John was feeble and nearly transparent. Maggie, his wife, was not well enough to attend.

A mattress and some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and dishes sat in the truck’s bed. Delbert and Maggie Cullum were seen no more in Haven. The three Cullum girls over eighteen went to work in Derry and in Bangor. The three minors were placed in foster homes.

… although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown—after all, she loved the guy!—she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn’t home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly. Hilly grew up nervous. Marie’s father, Ev, said he had cat whiskers …

But it was quiet except for the preacher, who had found his place again. She looked at Marty, but Marty was sitting in a glassy daze, looking at one of the stained-glass windows with the fixed gaze of one deeply hypnotized.

Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard. Mrs. Pulsifer’s friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments.

… his underwear, and that was fine, you go on, Johnny, go on and hunt up your scoop, I’ll just call Megan on the telephone, maybe in a week or two your cousin Alfie will bring her down here to see me, Alfie’s so good to his mother, et cetera, et …

… , and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he’d gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago—the Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn’t just being able to see into himself, either …

Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.

Molly Fenderson, Beach’s niece, was cooking now that Beach was dead. Molly was a helluva nice girl, but her fried eggs looked like broiled assholes. Dick thought they tasted that way, too, although he’d never actually eaten an asshole, broiled or any other way.

… at the advanced age of forty-five: In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe’s poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply laid …

“Is that so?” “There was an earthquake in Maine last year,” Mrs. Alden said. “I hope there won’t be another one. That nuclear plant at Wiscasset is too close for comfort.” Just ask Gard, Bobbi thought.

When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn’t shown up, Mrs. McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable.

“Things seemed a little crazy there for a while.” “Boy, were they ever! We had to call Medix for Mrs. Perkins.

… him to Bangor and have him take the Wechsler Test if you want to know how high his IQ actually is,” Mrs. Underhill told them. “Giving Hilly the Tompall IQ Test is like trying to determine a human’s IQ by giving him an intelligence test designed for goats …

Jim no longer taught there, not for eight years, but he still had friends on the faculty and kept in touch. Muriel in the office usually knew where he was. And did this time.

He went by the name of Colson, but Myrtle Duplissey, Haven’s self-appointed historian, eventually became convinced that Colson’s real name was Cooder, and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder.

… from the post office and a woman named Nancy Voss had come up from the Augusta post office to take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom ’Becka now thought of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years older than she and Joe, which would make her …

Ruth rejoined the search, which had now moved ten miles into the woods, at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. Newt Berringer took a look at her and said, “You got (no business being out, Ruth) “and you know it,” he finished aloud.

The woman with the thick spectacles was aware that her husband was doing exactly that which Nora had accused Gard himself of doing at parties once he got drunk: holding forth.

So Norma Thurlow had dragged little Edwina over to the schoolroom and little Edwina’s screams had been so loud they had brought Ralph all the way up from the cellar, where he had been caning chairs.

Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer’s poison bait and stumbled out here to die. Go home. Change your pants. You’re bloody and you stink.

If David wasn’t found by morning, she would call Orval Davidson up in Unity and have him bring his bloodhounds. This was a familiar enough procedure to most of them.

… roughly the size and thickness of the family Bible), squirting raspberry filling into the face of Ozzie, the cat, who had crept out from under the stove to see what was going on. “My Lord! My Lord!” ’Becka continued to shriek. Ozzie ran, …

“Then why don’t you do something about it, Gooey?” Pamela Sargent asked him. Rev. Lester Goohringer had never been called “Gooey” in his entire life, but in his current state of rancor he barely noticed. “Maybe I will,” he said, looking at her through his thick glasses grimly.

Must be Patricia McCardle, Anderson thought, smiling a little. “So he’d be back . . . when? Fourth of July?” “Gee, I don’t know when he’ll be back, Bobbi,” Muriel said. “You know Jim. His last reading’s June 30th. That’s all I can say for sure.”

She saw Paul Clarendon approach the crib where his new son lay—it was on the other side of the stove, in the corner which was warmest—and stand looking fixedly down at the new baby for over an hour.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Paula Anderson clapped her hands to her ears and began to shriek. 7 Anne had had no doubt—at least at first—that Bobbi would be at the funeral. Anne meant for her to be there, and so she would be.

First she had put Pauline Goudge, whom she felt most trustworthy, to work on one other matter, and then Hazel had gone down to her office, closed the door, and locked it.

With the clear eye of her writer’s mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling.

So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2. Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th. Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air.

Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were metaphorical ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands and faces of the two state cops. Those ashes were real.

“That’s what I was joking about.” “He” was Peter Reynault, the city editor. Bright had learned a good many years ago that city editors had one thing in common with God Himself, and he suspected that Johnny Leandro was about to learn it himself very soon now.

The air began to change, and the remaining Tommyknockers, gasping and whey-faced, gathered in Hazel McCready’s yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown got the big air-exchanger going. The survivors gathered around it as homesteaders might once have gathered around a stove on a bitter night. Their tortured breathing gradually eased.

I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder’s Market thinks I’ve gone nuts—I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more. “Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?” She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared.

Adley and Kyle were among them; so were Frank Spruce, the Goldens, Rosalie Skehan, and Pop Cooder. Newt and Dick were back by the road, keeping all in order. All of them turned toward HERE! BACK HERE! ALIVE!

5 At about the same time Queenie Golden was standing on the edge of Hazel’s dry well and preparing to jump in, a nurse stepped into Hilly Brown’s room to check on the boy, who had shown some faint signs of returning consciousness over the last couple of days.

She enrolled in the college’s pre-law program. The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also in pre-law.

Half of the chair lay on the asphalt. The other half was nowhere to be seen. Randy Kroger, the German who had owned Cooder’s since the late fifties, grabbed Hank and turned him around. “You’re payin’ for that display window, Buck,” he said.

’BECKA PAULSON 1 Rebecca Bouchard Paulson was married to Joe Paulson, one of Haven’s two mail carriers and one-third of Haven’s postal staff. Joe was cheating on his wife, something Bobbi Anderson knew already. Now ’Becka Paulson knew it as well. She had known it for the last three days.

Ruth suggested to Elmer Haney that he was bad luck around Iva’s place, particularly for Bethie and Richard Jorgenson. She had noticed, she said, that some stepfathers were very bad luck for their stepchildren. She said she thought their luck might improve if Elmer Haney left town. Very soon.

… flare with the smell of something decidedly off: Ricky Berringer was a house-painter in Bangor. His older brother, Newt, was a carpenter-contractor who also happened to be a Haven selectman. “We invited Newt up for dinner near the end of July,” Ricky said, “but he said he had the flu.”

Late in the afternoon, of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that …

… the Purple Sage, the book which had been Roberta Anderson’s favorite as a girl, the one which had perhaps set her course forever as a writer of westerns. The pilot was in mufti. “Are you Defense Department?” Tierney asked. The pilot looked at him with expressionless dark glasses. “Shop.” It …

Never had, never would. The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter. Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

… of the deck from the top, by causing Rosalie Skehan to find a card which she had looked at and then pushed back into the deck residing in her purse, and, of course, by making the Jacks run from the burning house, which may be the best card-trick ever invented.

It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter—RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut Road—even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.

Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was among them, as were Frank Spruce and Rudy Barfield, brother of the late and mostly unlamented Pits), because eventually they would run out of breathable air, in spite of the prevailing winds.

RUTH MCCAUSLAND 1 Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger—fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had.

All except Jim, who had published Boxing the Compass in the first place. She had dropped Sherry Fenderson a long chatty letter not long after coming to Haven, and had received a curt postcard in return: Please don’t write me anymore. I don’t know you.

I’m not one of Johnny’s biggest fans, but I’m worried about him.” Torgeson was still looking into the dispatcher’s office, where Smokey Dawson was now ratchet-jawing away a mile a minute. Smokey looked up, saw Torgeson looking, and held up one hand, all the fingers splayed. Wait, the gesture said.

There was a brief silence. Then Mr. Moran began to speak. Soon Mr. Moran began to shout. Finally Mr. Moran began to scream.

“Fine,” she said. “When it was Hilly’s turn to pin the tail on the donkey, he tripped on a table leg and stuck the pin into Stanley Jernigan’s arm, but that’s all so far.” Bryant cheered up at once. Things really were going well.

She could see Bobby Tremain and Stephanie Colson walking slowly toward the edge of town along Route 9, hand in hand. They had been going together for four years and it really was a wonder Stephanie wasn’t pregnant yet, Ruth thought. Just a July evening with twilight coming on—everything normal.

Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so.

He wanted to know about the possibility of further organized protests in the fall. He called the spare tire Ted. Ted the Power Man said he doubted there was much to worry about.

Christ! If I looked at that sucker too long, I’d go batshit, Dick said. Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration. Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said.

… mother had been in Halifax this past weekend, he had taken his nephew Tony out for a Dairy Queen. Tony (whom Leandro privately thought was an ill-mannered little snot) had sat in the back playing with a plastic toy that looked a bit like the …

When Gabbons came up from Georgia, Tug Ellender, the dispatcher, had started calling him that and it had stuck. Now, speaking in a high, strangled voice completely unlike his usual Jingles voice, Gabbons said: “Pull over, Bent. I’m sick.”

” “Vera is—” “Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, visiting her sister that week.”

The Reverend Goohringer rode behind her, the remaining strands of his graying hair blowing back from his sunburned pate. Vern Jernigan came in a hearse he had been trying to convert into a camper before the “becoming” got into high gear. They filled the roads.

… been the time he slid into the road in front of the Webber Oil truck, or the time he tried to give Victor a bubble bath in the toilet bowl. What do you want, Hilly? she would have cried, throwing up her hands. Dishonest praise? Ev, who saw much, …

… in the 1880s and drifted south with Wahwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Wahwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and …

Wendy Fannin was making bread in her kitchen, kneading one batch of dough while her mixer worked a second batch. Ruth saw with a weary lack of surprise that the mixer wasn’t plugged into the wall but into what looked like an electronic game with its cover off.