by Joan Samson
“I told you, sir. The governor is unavailable at the moment. But if you contact the police, they’ll take action through the appropriate channels.”
John bit off a hangnail on his index finger, trying to think which detail to tell her to convince her to let him speak to the governor.
“Thank you for calling, sir,” said the voice and there was a click. John’s money fell into the box of the telephone and he heard the dial tone again.
He found he had forgotten the number. He dialed the operator. “I need the police,” he said.
“Is this an emergency?” she asked.
“No,” he said. Then, considering, he said, “I think so,” but the operator was already gone.
Somewhere a phone rang and rang and rang. A family went by the telephone booth. John turned to stare after them as they passed. A man and a woman and two little boys dressed exactly alike in brand-new brown snowsuits.
Finally a weary man’s voice said, “Police.”
And the operator said, “Deposit ten cents please for the first three minutes.”
John put his money in and the man said, this time with a touch of impatience, “Police here.”
“I wanted to report some trouble,” John said.
“What kind of trouble?” said the tired voice.
“Well, it’s up to Harlowe.”
“Harlowe? Where’s that?”
“Harlowe,” John said distinctly.
“If you mean the town of Harlowe, that’s the state police,” said the man. “Call 271-3181.”
“Oh,” said John.
“Anytime,” said the policeman and hung up. John’s money dropped and he was back to the dial tone.
John called the operator again. Each time he dialed he got a different operator.
This time the phone was answered almost before it rang. “Police, State of New Hampshire,” said a woman’s voice. “May I help you?”
“I want to report some trouble.”
“Is it an emergency, sir?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“Where are you? We’ll send someone right out.”
John looked around him. “I don’t know exactly. It’s not that kind of emergency. Not so I need someone here right now. It’s up to—”
“Is it an emergency or is it not, sir?”
John hesitated. “Not an emergency this minute,” he said. “You might say it’s an emergency this week.”
There was a pause, then, “Just what is the nature of your problem, sir?”
“Well, I see a lot of trouble goin’ on,” John said and paused.
“Don’t we all!” said the woman. “What kind of trouble? When? Where?”
“Well this trouble’s laid up seven months now under all kinds of happenings as look all right. It was April-”
“April! And you’re just reporting it now?”
“Like I say, ma’am,” said John. “It was overlaid with sweet talk and I didn’t know as it would get so bad.”
“Oh, I see. It’s still going on, is it?” said the woman briskly. “What is it, extortion or something?”
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
There was a pause and a sigh, then the woman said, “Look, let’s start with your district, then I can connect you with the right supervisor. Now. Where are you?”
“In Concord, ma’am.”
“Concord has its own police force, sir,” she said. “I suggest you call them. Then if they feel we should be called in, they’ll call us.” I called them already, ma’am, and what they say is since the trouble’s up to Harlowe—”
Harlowe? she said. “Well, for heaven’s sake, why didn’t you say so? I’ll connect you with—um, let’s see-that’s Captain Sullivan.”
There was a long, long pause and again John had to deposit money.
Finally a crisp man’s voice said, “Sullivan speaking. Understand you’re worrying over Harlowe.”
“Right,” John said, relieved.
“What seems to be the problem?”
“There’s this auctioneer come in, sir. A stranger. First he come round to half the town and collected up their life’s belongin’s to sell at his auctions. And then there was all these accidents, all to them as didn’t see things his way. And now he’s after land and livin’ children.”
“Whose land and children?” asked the man.
“Everybody’s, sir. Everybody who ain’t a deputy. Or the doctor or the storekeeper or some others.”
“That doesn’t sound like quite everybody. You personally are on hard times? That what you’re trying to tell me?”
“No, sir. I mean yes, maybe...”
“You talked to Bob Gore about this?” he asked. “I should think he’d understand your situation better than I can. I was talking to him just last Tuesday, and he was telling me how Harlowe is just bustin’ out all over. Construction, and new people, and money coming in hand over fist. If times are hard for you, maybe the town can help you out some, tide you over the winter. You ablebodied?”
“Course I’m able-bodied.”
“Well then...”
“That ain’t the point. The point bein’ that this here auctioneer who’s gobblin’ up the townsfolk—”
“If you mean Perly Dunsmore,” said the voice, laughing, “I’d best tell you he’s the luckiest thing ever happened to Harlowe. Now there’s a man knows which end is up. But I understand some of the old families like the old ways and don’t want to move with the times. These big developers always have their enemies. You got to get with it though, mister. We’re in the twentieth century. There’s no stopping progress. As for that fellow Dunsmore, he’s three lengths smarter than most. A real winner. You should count your blessings.”
“I got no grudge with the twentieth century,” John said. “What Perly’s up to’s got nothin’ to do with any century.”
“You’re wrong about that, of course, but listen. What did you say your name was? Maybe you could come in here and we could talk this over.”
Moore held the receiver to his ear. “Whatever you do, don’t breathe the name of Moore,” Mim had said. And Ma had said. “Its a sorry day when you’re ashamed to say you’re a Moore.” John took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. The telephone booth was so steamed up now that he couldn’t see out at all.
“Hello?” said Captain Sullivan.
John hung up.
He opened the door and breathed the cold air. He doodled in the steam on the inside of the glass with his fingernail, thinking about Captain Sullivan knowing he meant Perly right off the bat like that.
Finally he closed the door and dialed the operator again. “Give me the State House, please,” he said.
When the woman with the licorice voice answered, he said, “I talked to the police and the state police like you said and they won’t help at all. You got to let me through to the governor.”
“I don’t ‘got to’ anything, sir. Didn’t I speak to you before?”
“I said so, ma’am,” John said, feeling the sweat start beneath the collar of his wool jacket.
“What was your problem again?”
“Where I come from, there’s a man takin’ people’s children, their own flesh and blood. He’s shootin’ people and knockin’ greenhouses down and jimmyin’ up the steerin’ so’s—”
“Who is doing what?”
“The auctioneer—”
“Didn’t you call me last week too?”
“No, ma’am. No. Not me.”
“I think you did. This sounds familiar.”
“No, no,” John said, his spirits rising. “But there’s plenty on the receivin’ end along with me. Stands to reason. Must be others called.”
“Listen. Crackpots call in here all the time. You wouldn’t believe the calls we get. Obscene phone calls. People wanting him to come to their grandmother’s birthday party. People will say anything on the phone. You know some guy called in here the other day, thought I was the governor’s wife.” The voice laughed
heartily.
“Please, ma’am,” John said. “In my whole life no one ever called me a crackpot. I been tendin’ my business, bidin’ my time, waitin’ for this to blow over. I never lodged a complaint before. I let others better outfitted than me do that. But I can’t wait no more. I’d be real quick. Three minutes. You got no call to stop me when I got a reason good as this.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, resuming her licorice voice. “He’s unavailable to random callers. You must understand the governor is a very busy man. There’s an election campaign just over, and Christmas coming. And then there was that terrible fire over in Manchester, and he’s very busy trying to organize some relief. And right at the moment all his aides are pretty well tied up too. Think of all the important things they have to look after—that broken dam up in Artemis that’s left all those poor people homeless. The welfare problem in the state—you just don’t know how bad it’s got.”
“But this here is people in trouble too,” John said, but he wasn’t sure, even as he stood there begging, that his problem was as important as all those other things. A broken dam was, after all, something you could stand in front of and look straight at.
“I would suggest that your problem is one for the police,” said the woman.
“Gosh sakes, who?” John asked, feeling the quick heat rise to his face. “I called all them. What’s a body got to do around here? Bust a dam? Burn a town?”
“That’d do it all right,” said the woman, giggling. When John made no response, she said, “Look, if you’re all that upset, you can come in here and make out a formal statement. The girls in the office here will tell you how to do it. If you want to bring charges, we’ll help you with the forms, and get you in to see a judge. But you can’t do these things on the telephone. How do I know who you are?”
“I can’t do that,” John moaned. “There’s too many people ready to steal my child, shoot my wife—God only knows.”
“If you feel the need for police protection, sir, you should discuss the matter with the police,” she said, more gently now.
John held onto the phone until the woman asked if he was there still and if he didn’t want to come in. Then, because he was incapable of speaking any more, he hung up.
11
He walked back to the truck, his body aching with fatigue. He folded his arms on the wide black steering wheel and rested his head against them. He more or less believed in the police, despite Cogswell’s warning about the troopers. At least he always had. It didn’t come naturally not to believe in them. In the police, and the army, and the country, and the goodness of his neighbor. He had accepted the inflation that made his milk worth less and less, and he had accepted the certification regulations which finally made it impossible for him to sell his milk at all. He accepted the fact that he was still living the way his grandfather had, while people in the towns and cities were filling their lives with expensive gadgets. He saw all the cars and the dishwashers and the cabins on the lakes and the trips hither and yon in fancy trailers and he dismissed them as a fragile tower that could be toppled in a cold wind. He let the tables and chairs go, and the tools and machinery, and even the cows, because of the land. Because the land was free and clear. Because he believed that a good piece of land was the only true security there was—the only security a family needed. Some man with a ski resort in mind had offered him forty-five thousand dollars for his land when Hildie was a baby, and he had laughed. “You could retire on that,” the stranger had reminded him. Money ain’t like land,” John had answered.
“Money gets stole. It loses value. Banks go bust. But my baby will always have that land.”
Perhaps he should go and speak to Captain Sullivan. Perhaps Sullivan had only chanced to meet Perly hunting or visiting and didn’t know him at all. After all, everybody who met Perly was impressed with him. But when he tried to picture Captain Sullivan, he saw Perly bending over Hildie, his face shining with promises of magic. Promises.
At the thought of Hildie, he lifted his head and looked around himself nervously. At this very moment, Gore and his deputies could be fanning out on all the roads from Concord, watching to see who it was that had made the phone calls-watching through rifle sights. If they had read his voice, they could be bearing down even now on Ma and Mim and Hildie as they went about their chores on the farm, alone. He had been gone almost six hours.
He headed out of Concord toward the turnpike, his stomach churning with hunger and impatience with the traffic. Once he was on the turnpike, the old truck hit sixty and the sense of rapid movement and direction and of perfect insulation from the rest of the world brought John to a sudden understanding of what he must do.
He stopped to top off the gas. Without getting out, he used the rearview mirror to watch the young boy standing jiggling to the sound of a radio as he waited for the tank to fill. He tried to decide whether it would be safe to ask him to fill the gas can. But when the moment came, he paid without a word and drove away with the gas can still empty.
Chilled at the thought of how long he’d been gone, he gave up the idea of waiting till night to return. Instead, he went past the Route 37 turnoff and circled around on back roads so that he approached Harlowe from the north instead of from the south as they would expect if they were looking. Through the last county to the north, he took fire roads all the way, rattling past old farms and a few new cottages, hoping nobody would report him. When he came to the bottom of the road past Cogswell’s, it was early afternoon, gray and wintry.
As the truck labored up the road fifteen feet from Cogswell’s front door, John’s face and neck twitched uneasily beneath the pressure of the eyes he knew were there—Jerry’s or Mickey’s— following his progress through the sights of the double-barreled shotgun. But Cogswell would have recognized his truck anyway, even at night.
Halfway down his own side of the hill, the road widened out where the drive into the old Wilder place had once begun. John pulled off. He got the gas can out of the bed of the truck, and a length of plastic tubing for a siphon. He put one end into the gas tank of the truck and, sitting on the ground, sucked on the other end, slowly, so as not to get a mouthful. When it was running, he led it into the can and listened as it filled, a sound like the finger of water trickling out of the spring halfway down the cliff behind the pasture. When the gas can was full, he stood up and lifted the end of the siphon over his head so that the gasoline in it ran back into the truck.
He carried the gas can through the overgrown drive, climbed down into the cellar hole, perfectly dry now in the autumn, but overgrown with raspberry brakes. He made his way to the cold recess in the stone foundation wall where the Wilders had kept their milk and butter. He pulled out a stuffing of blown leaves, placed the gasoline can in the recess, and shoved the leaves back so that the old red can was hidden.
Probably the Wilder place had burned. That was what usually happened to farmhouses. Whatever had happened, the land had been a part of the Moore place since the Civil War. The bridal maples some ancient Wilder had planted were so overwhelming now that they would have brushed the house had it been standing. They spread their branches over a natural clearing. All the land around had been scrub when John was a boy, but now the beech and maple were eight or nine inches through and the poplar thicker still and dying out. Ma could remember when the Wilder place was mostly pasture, with views from almost everywhere.
After a house burned, the chimnev stood alone awhile like a ‘ j child’s block tower. Then one year, the mortar completely gone, it would simply crumble in the spring thaw and the next summer there would be a heap of clean red bricks in the pit marked out by the cellar stones. He’d seen it happen. And presently the Virginia creeper and poison ivy would poke up through the bricks, and then, almost overnight, trees as thick as your wrist. Someday, someone would come and take the bricks to build a walk with, then everyone would forget—everything but the name. “The old Moore place. Whatever happened?” they would ask.
&n
bsp; But no, that wasn’t what Perly had in mind. He had in mind to make it modern, expensive, a place for play, not work—ropes with colored floats to mark off where to swim, the barn tricked up with picture windows, hexes, and a sign for Perly Acres, ski tows running up the pasture, the dooryard paved for parking sports cars and foreign station wagons—a place no Moore could even visit.
He drove into his yard in the last light. The woods were dark already, but the pond was a pale pool of light and the pasture rose gray and wide behind the house. The soft yellow glow of the kerosene lamp shone from the kitchen windows, and from the kitchen chimney he could see a wisp of smoke, almost black against the sky. Mim was watching from the window, and came running down the path in her shirtsleeves to meet him. He caught her in his arms and held her to him in a way he seldom did. She pulled away laughing, and didn’t ask him questions. She turned, almost bashful, and led the way up the path to the kitchen.
Only when he was settled at the table with his supper did she ask, “Did you tell him?”
John shook his head. “They got it fixed so you can’t,” he said. “And the cops want you to come in and stick your head in a noose before they’ll listen. First one that let me get six words in sets right off tellin’ me how Perly Dunsmore’s the best thing ever happened to us.”
“John!” Mim said. “You didn’t let on who you were?”
John shook his head. “You got to consider, a fellow that just took a week to tie up a Harlowe boy like Gore—one that’s lived down the road from us all his life—probably wouldn’t find it much of a challenge at all to hogtie a bunch of strangers.”
They sat at the table in silence. Ma didn’t bother to eat. Hildie slipped away from the table and vanished into the front room and nobody called her back.
Finally Mim sighed. “Now you see how it is? There’s nothin’ to do but go.”
“Maybe not,” John conceded. “Maybe not.”
All weekend they worked on the truck. John found a rusty saw left on a high hook in the barn, and there were pots of rusty but perfectly adequate nails. Mim worked enthusiastically, planning details, asking for shelves, thinking about how it would be, worrying about keeping warm. Hildie was as excited as a summer child preparing for a camping trip. They closed in the back of the truck with walls and a peaked roof that let Mim stand almost upright. There were no windows except the one into the cab in front. But there was a small hinged door on the back.
