Spindle City

by Jotham Burrello

  “Maybe so . . .” Helen acknowledged. The cab driver called up the hill, and Will asked the man to take a lap around the block. “Maybe so, but he forced her to hide his son.”

  She had a point, he thought. Scandals ruined families. Hogwash—if the Bordens could withstand financial scandal, his father could weather any Highlands society mudslinging. Will handed back the package. “What does your mother say?”

  “What’s it matter? He’s brainwashed her to lie.” Helen snorted, then let out a wild laugh. “She deserves better than a man who asks to change the sheets after he soiled them with her.”

  Perhaps it was the notion of ownership that set Helen off. No one was free, not the Portuguese operatives, not the Irish cops, nor the skilled Frenchies in Saint Anne’s parish; in Helen’s mind, all power emanated from the Highlands. Let her try to dismantle the hierarchy, he thought, one stone at a time. Dad was the best friend labor had in this town. And everyone knew it.

  He pointed at the package. “Who else knows?”

  “What’s it matter?” She skipped a pebble down the drive, then another. She looked up at Will, caught his eye, and said, “I’m leaving Fall River.”

  “Calm down.” He set his hands on her shoulders.

  She slapped at his arms. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Helen, please,” he begged, holding her tighter. “I’m not my father.” Will led her by the elbow to the back of the house and left her sitting on the side steps while he fetched a glass of water.

  She gulped it and then stood up and squinted at the house, knocking the glass against her palm like a field hockey stick. He looked into her bloodshot eyes for a hint of that hazel swirl. As her breathing returned to normal, the red rashes faded from her chest. She tilted the drinking glass so it caught the porch light. This seemed to humor her, and she smiled—well, sort of smiled—and Will nodded and grinned, remembering last night. But then her face hardened. She reared back and hurled the glass over his head through the kitchen window. A beat later something smashed to the floor. Helen raised her hands to her mouth. Finally she’d shocked herself.

  Will stood, dumbly looking between the shattered pane and Helen. A muffled cry came from the house, and Evelyn’s head appeared in the hole in the glass.

  “Jesus Christ.” Will waved to Evelyn. “You okay?” She nodded slowly, looking aghast at her violated kitchen. “I’ll be right there.”

  Helen’s chest heaved. “I hate him.”

  “Don’t hate anything,” Will said. Hatred was something that couldn’t be patched or easily forgotten. “The Lord says—”

  “Oh, shut up. You’re starting to talk like my mother.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw the cab turn the corner toward the house. He stepped toward the street to signal another lap, and Helen snatched up the spade he’d wedged in the ground and raised her arm to launch another salvo. Evelyn shrieked and Will whipped to catch Helen’s arm; he spun her around, pinning her against the side of the house. She winced, but he held the arm tight.

  “Let me go!”

  “Relax,” he said. He stroked the back of her neck. The tendons were hard as oak. Yesterday he had kissed the nook of the elbow he now twisted. His stomach churned, and he tasted acid in the back of his throat.

  “Typical Bartlett response,” Helen sneered over her shoulder. “Did Hollister teach you that over dinner?”

  The cab driver shouted something and got out of his Ford. Will said everything was fine and eased off the arm. She’d never before used his brother against him.

  “We’ll leave—go away and never come back.”

  “Bastard. You’re all bastards.” Helen worked her wrist in a circle. His handprint lingered in the crook of her elbow. “I guess I was wrong about you, Will Bartlett. Yesterday you slapped me silly, and today you nearly break my arm. You’re finally hoisting the family colors.” She charged forward; Will shielded his face. She charged again; he flinched. She jerked a third time, but when he didn’t budge, she snapped, “But you’ll never be better than me,” and kicked his shin with the toe of her gray boot.

  “Goddamn, Helen.” Will hopped in a circle.

  “He gave my mother that house to hold her prisoner. He kept her and his bastard down. All of us down.”

  Will lifted his trouser leg. A trickle of blood soaked the lip of his sock. “You’re talking nonsense. Who got Ray those promotions?”

  “Go crawl in a hole.” She raked the back of her hand across her wet face. Both sockets were swollen.

  He limped toward her. “Don’t forget Cousin Pete—”

  “Brother Pete,” she corrected.

  “Brother Pete’s future. I’m sure they planned on telling him the truth eventually,” Will said, though he knew, that ship had already sailed. Highlands folk carried secrets to the grave. He squeezed her forearm. “Come inside. Dad will be back soon.”

  “Oh, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

  “You’re acting like a loon.” His father had used the term to describe woman organizers, loons.

  Helen punched his hand to release her arm. “I must have been a loon to say I loved the likes of you.”

  “You know you don’t mean that.”

  “And I’ve been with lots of men.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Will opened his arms, but Helen backed out of his reach. “Helen, I love you.”

  “Sure you do, until you lock me away in one of your daddy’s slum apartments like some doll, some mistress plaything; force me to produce bastards while your frigid society wife plays house on the hill.”

  He folded his arms. “You’re talking crazy.”

  “Go to hell.” She waved to the driver to start the engine and turned.

  “Helen,” he shouted. “Get back here!”

  “Never!”

  “What about last night?”

  “That’ll never happen again.”

  “God damn you!”

  The slope of the grass carried her quickly into the waiting taxi.

  “Helen!”

  The door slammed, and the car disappeared down the steep hill.

  newport news

  Waiting on the dock in Newport, Tommy Sheehan yawned. The sun poked between row houses on the water as he leaned against a luggage cart, tucking in his shirt and watching the unloading of vehicles from the belly of the Priscilla. Near the front of the procession was a converted Model T, a small truck now, with bartlett farms painted on the sides. Tommy knew Joseph’s farm distributed milk in southern Rhode Island, but as far as New York? Not in that truck. The truck came down the pier and idled beside Tommy. The woman in the passenger seat wore a yellow hat with a large ostrich feather; she glanced over his head at the steamship. The driver was clearly Portuguese; he leaned out his window to talk with one of the dockworkers in a denim coverall. The woman looked down at Tommy, and her smoky black eyes met his. She focused on his strawberry eye but smiled nonetheless, and he tipped his hat. She was something, with smooth brown skin and a long swan-like neck, but her nose was bent like Jack Dempsey’s, and near her hairline there was a discoloration of the skin from a scar that meandered to the ridge of her left eyebrow. Over the engine noise came shouting, beeps, and the cries of gulls as they stared at each other’s imperfections. The truck pulled forward, and the woman’s eyes shot open.

  “The girl.” Tommy yanked off his boater and ran to the middle of the pier. The truck banked left behind a stack of wooden crates and disappeared. What was she doing in a Bartlett Farms truck? A horn blasted. Tommy jumped.

  “Outta the way,” a dockworker shouted.

  Tommy waved and jogged back to the luggage cart. He combed a hand through his wavy blond hair. His mouth ran dry. The fun house. The blood. The glass. The torn frock. Hollister. Tommy could never forget. He’d run down the hill to the centennial carnival and done Joseph’s biddin
g; he’d sniffed Hollister out. Carried the girl out of the shards. It was Tommy who’d explained Hollister’s pedigree to the police. It was Tommy who’d suggested that the operator might have had a hand in the girl’s disfigurement. Tommy never heard what shenanigans Joseph had pulled to get Hollister out of that mess. Sending Hollister to White Mountain came after the police did not file charges. Muckrakers at the Gazette had sniffed around the story, gotten a tip from one of their snitches at the city lockup where they’d thrown the ride operator. But a Boston lawyer nobody had heard of showed up, and the man walked out of the cell the next day before Billy Connelly could pay the carny for his story. The carnival left town, and the girl disappeared with it. All the Sheehans knew the story, and in recent years Helen had ridden roughshod over Tommy for throwing the police off the trail long enough for Joseph to call in favors. Lately, she’d put a bug in Tommy’s ear about the Cleveland fire too—another tragedy that, according to Helen, was too easily explained. She’d collected a scrapbook of clippings about the blaze. She figured only two things could have motivated Stanton Cleveland to run into a burning building—a girl or a mountain of money. (Experience had taught her these two were responsible for most bad behavior.) And then there was the question of the security guard. Security guards don’t usually slip and drop lanterns. They get coldcocked. She shared these theories with her big brother.

  “There’s a third reason to run into an inferno,” he’d said.

  “What? Craziness?”

  “Honor, bravery, selflessness—call it what you like. That’s what killed Daddy.”

  “All the more reason for you to help me,” Helen said.

  “That’s old history,” he said. “Ain’t bringing anybody back. And ain’t worth a penny.”

  “But the truth is worth something.”

  “Only to you, squirt,” Tommy lectured his little sister. “Only to you.”

  Tommy knew nothing stuck to men like Joseph Bartlett. And now there was word that the Workers’ Union was giving him a humanitarian award. Perhaps even their medal wouldn’t stick.

  * * *

  “Anything else?” the waitress said. Tommy was sitting in a small coffee shop not far from the pier. The waitress glanced at his bad eye and shrugged her shoulders as if to say, I’ve seen worse.

  Tommy hated telling half-truths to girls, especially blond ones of marrying age wearing cute scalloped aprons with heart-shaped pockets on the hips, but he determined his reputation needed a hot story more than another girlfriend—Journalist Dictum #19: Skirt Chasers Miss the Story. He’d been sitting at the window table for two hours, waiting for any sign of the girl from the fun house. The trail had gone cold at the corner of Scarlet and Merchant Streets. He found the farm truck parked across the way. A small granite corner stone read managed by bartlett properties. inquire within. The coffee shop was the only place to loiter at six in the morning, plus he hadn’t eaten in eighteen hours, so Tommy stretched the breakfast out over two hours by ordering everything à la carte: first a poached egg with toast, then cold ham slices, a glass of milk, a cranberry muffin with butter, canned peaches, more coffee, ladyfingers.

  His serendipitous stakeout had begun on a somewhat unlucky note. The Priscilla had benefited from calm waters in New York Sound the previous night, making it to Newport twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Tommy overslept. A drowsy purser rushed him off the boat minus his satchel. On the pier Tommy flagged down the head purser, Pete Newton’s son Patrick, who raced back to the cabin to retrieve it before the boat sailed on to Fall River. Tommy was headed north to Bristol to interview a boatmaker. The assignment was another soft news story to add to Tommy’s already mushy clip book of soft news stories. The plan was for Tommy to sail with notable skippers before next year’s America’s Cup. His editors at the Globe wanted a jump on the story, given that the 1914 race had been suspended due to the war. Tommy had complained about the assignment, preferring to dwell in soft civic affairs and Ruth and the Red Sox rather than whisking three feet above the waterline with an egomaniac at the tiller. He epitomized the Globe mantra: We Publish Pictures with Text. Frankly, he was a poor swimmer, and large fish scared the bejesus out of him.

  The waitress said, “Perhaps that eye is worse than I thought?”

  Tommy smiled. He liked her already. “You bring me a little more butter for the muffin?”

  She turned and sliced the end off a square brick on the counter. “A little goes a long way.”

  He spread it over the muffin. “Super creamy,” he mumbled.

  “It’s made up the road in Middletown. Rose Butter.” Waiting on the dock, Tommy remembered seeing tubs with the name Rose Butter branded into the side of ash barrels waiting to be loaded into the Priscilla’s belly. “They’re moving in across the way there,” the waitress pointed outside. The block was a long row of triple-deckers, Queen Anne–style apartment houses flowing down the hill toward the Narragansett Bay. Their appearance ran the gamut from what Tommy called Yankee thrift to mild exuberance near the Island Cemetery. Windows of clear glass and solid shingled porch railings gave way to stained glass and railings of turned balusters and turrets. “There’s an old mill building behind those houses. Mr. Rose bought himself some newfangled butter-molding contraption; he’s gonna run it down there, near the dock. Ship Rhode Island butter up and down the East Coast.”

  “You like the sound of that, do ya?”

  “About time we sold something besides fish and cotton.”

  “This Rose a friend of yours?”

  “Said he’d deliver our tub personally, once he’s up and running.”

  “Is that his truck parked there?” Tommy stood up and pointed. “The one there: Bartlett Farms?”

  “That’s who makes the butter. Says it on all the wrappers.” She gestured toward the yellow brick on the counter. “But what’s it to you?” She crossed her arms.

  Tommy took out his press card and set it on the counter.

  The waitress spun the card around with two fingers. Her eyes narrowed.

  Tommy had talked himself out of plenty of sticky situations, most with street urchins he owed money. The key was to believe what you shoveled. “I’m doing some reporting on the economic development of the waterfront. This Mr. Rose sounds like a good man to profile.”

  She rescrutinized the card, picked it up, then handed it back. “Tommy, is it?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I don’t know what the man drives.”

  Tommy kept fishing. “He’s a ways from Middletown.”

  “He’s a heck of a ways.” The bell on the door rang, and a workman in blue dungarees entered and took a seat behind Tommy. Walking around the counter, she continued, “Born and raised in the Azores. Nice fella, though.”

  Given the drudgery of what awaited him in Bristol, Tommy was determined (for another hour or so) to eat sponge cake and drink coffee till his blood ran black—Journalist Dictum #4: Stories Lurk on Barstools—if it meant finding out why a Bartlett Farms truck disembarked from the steamship Priscilla in Newport, Rhode Island, at six in the morning carrying a Portuguese butter baron and the mill girl Hollister Bartlett had mutilated seven years ago.

  The waitress seemed to forget about him during the breakfast rush, but now his three-plus-hour stakeout was generating suspicion. Tommy noticed her pointing his way with a saltshaker and the cook coming out of his hive to investigate. The man wiped his hands down the front of his greasy apron and looked over his shoulder at a clock as the waitress whispered something behind a raised menu.

  She walked toward Tommy and set his slip on the table. “You’ve ordered everything on the menu but me.” She winked. She was a tad older than Tommy had originally thought. Creases etched around her mouth as she smiled. Her blond curls hung listless. But her spirit was intact; she placed her elbows on the counter and leaned forward, waiting for some come-on or otherwise smart-aleck comeback. Tommy s
uppressed it—Journalist Dictum #11: Friends Make Better Sources Than Enemies. She stood up and swept an empty saucer into her palm. “The boss says to kick you out.”

  He flipped up his sagging bang and tucked it under his boater. He sipped the last of his coffee and set it down on the counter without a sound.

  He turned the slip over. “What do I owe ya?” Tommy pulled out a few extra coins for her patience. “This Rose fella a nice guy?”

  “Is to me.”

  “He was driving a woman. Nice dresser.”

  “Never brought one in, but he wears a ring.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t.” She extended her left hand.

  Tommy stood and smiled. “You work all day?”

  “Just me and Ned.”

  “A family business then.”

  “Neddy’s family business. I just collect tips.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face, then wheeled around as the pick-up bell rang.

  “I’ll see ya next time?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  As Tommy set the money down, a letter carrier came in on the first of his three rounds of the day and slid a picture postcard across the counter.

  “Here ya go, Sheila,” he called.

  “Thanks, Paul.” Paul saluted her from the door.

  A crazy plot metastasized through the circuitry of Tommy’s gray matter before the door latch struck. Joseph had taken an interest in Otis’s run-down gentleman’s farm after the accident, renaming it Bartlett Farms. This newfangled Rhode Island butter dynasty was news to him, but what if ? he thought. Who’s this Rose? Why a Portuguese partner? What if ? A chill shook him. Just maybe. He slipped a sheet of Globe stationery from his satchel. He knew the half-truth he’d told Sheila was really a full-blown lie, but it had led him to this place, so he’d roll the dice. The truth was worth something. He scribbled out a note and reached for a three-cent stamp, determined to follow through regardless of the consequences. Envelope in hand, he tore out of the coffee shop and galloped toward the letter carrier as he exited the next building.