The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “My mother didn’t have testates,” growled Farmer Meek. “She was woman.”

  “He’s talking about a will,” said Mary Beth. “She died without a will.”

  “Oh … well why didn’t he say so, instead of usin’ highfalutin’ lawyer talk?”

  “This should be a simple matter.” Gilbert told them how he would settle it. “The estate should pass equally to each brother. What they do with it is their own business.” It was exactly what he planned to tell Aaron the moment he opened the safe.

  “What would it take for you to take our case?” asked Mary Beth.

  Gilbert could have given her an estimate of his hours and costs. Instead, he said, “A ride to Livermore … and the pleasure of your company.”

  MAUREEN RYAN WORKED a twelve-hour shift at the Perkins home in the Back Bay.

  Mrs. Perkins had not seemed especially bothered that her husband had not contacted her from Block Island to say that he had weathered the storm. And Maureen had worried more about Bunson, who had sailed off saying that no one in his right mind went for a pleasure cruise to Block Island after Columbus Day. It was good that Mrs. Perkins had sent her home early. Otherwise Maureen would have been there for the arrival of a telegram: “Great storm. Bunson lost. Details to follow. MP.”

  As she climbed her stairs at Gloucester Place, Maureen heard music. The Victrola was playing Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie.” And someone was singing drunkenly.

  “Michael!” shouted Maureen. “You’re supposed to be working.”

  Her son looked up through bloodshot eyes, as if he had been crying. He cried sometimes when he drank. And he smelled of work-sweat, alcohol, and urine. He wet himself sometimes, too.

  “It’s rainin’,” he said by way of explanation.

  “The trains run in the rain.”

  “Not this rain.” He pulled open his little pint bottle of gin and downed a swallow.

  His mother stalked across the room and snatched it away. “Where did you get it?”

  He looked stupidly at her. “Sadie Ferguson’s. Where else?”

  “I’m tellin’ her never to sell to you again.”

  Maureen went into the kitchen, poured the gin down the sink. Then she added a scoopful of coal to the stove to bring up the heat, then she poked at it, all the while trying to keep down her anger … at her son, at the local bootlegger, and at herself because somehow she could have stopped this, if only she had raised him better. She could have stopped a lot of things, if only, if only …

  As she put two chicken breasts into a baking pan and shoved them into the oven, she shouted through the door at her son, “Whatever them women from the W.C.T.U did for America when they got Prohibition, they did nothin’ for you.”

  “Prohibition!” shouted Michael. “They got any sense, they’ll repeal it.”

  Maureen came back into the parlor. Though he was drunk, Michael was the only person she had to talk to, and when she sensed that he was saying something rational, conversational, intelligent, she tried to make something of it, to “have a chat” with him.

  “What does that mean, repeal it?”

  “They make a law, they can change it. Says so in that Constitution of yours. Repeal Prohibition and a man’ll be able to get an honest drink instead of sneakin’ around.” He pulled another bottle from between the seat cushions.

  “Mikey, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Well, Ma, don’t be wishin’ your life away, because I like to drink. It’s all I got.” And he drank.

  THE RAIN STOPPED around midnight. By then, the rivers had flash flooded in the mountains. But as the skies brightened on Friday morning, the water was moving into the flatlands, where the rivers rose more slowly, more predictably, and more powerfully.

  And no river caused more damage the next day than the Blackstone—the little Blackstone, the mighty Blackstone—because one of the most intense pockets of rain had settled the day before above the lake that fed it.

  In the early morning, a mill dam in Sutton gave way and swept a mother and daughter to their death. In Uxbridge, citizens were called out to help with rescues as the river rose ten feet above flood. It sent plains of water deep into the surrounding farmland, stranding families, destroying businesses, weakening levees that held water to run the mills. Then the flood moved on toward Millbridge.

  Sarah and Bill McGillis knew the crest was coming, so they put out the call for help. They sent four managers to the homes of four workers, each of whom went to see four more, who sent for four more … so that soon, every worker had arrived.

  They stood on the levee upstream from the mill and began to fill sandbags, pass sandbags, and pile sandbags faster and faster while the river rose and the water roared through the open millraces. Maybe the levee would hold.

  But the water kept rising. And they kept piling. The higher they piled, the higher the water rose.

  Then someone shouted, “Run for it. She’s toppin’!”

  Without malice or urgency, the water spilled over the wall of sandbags, then caved it in, then began to swirl toward the mill.

  Sarah and Bill and the others made it into the building. They scrambled up to the second floor and listened as it rushed across the ground between the mill and the headrace, then through the cellar windows and through the openings in the wheel house.

  It filled the cellar, destroying raw cotton and flooding the dyeing tubs. Then it rose halfway up the first floor and destroyed cotton yarn ready to be loomed into cloth, then it poured out the first floor windows and ran across the rail sidings and destroyed pallets of finished cloth that lay under tarps, awaiting shipment.

  Mr. Raymond Dunne of the First National Bank of Boston watched it all in shock. When the water had stopped rising, and the McGillises and Dunne and half the mill staff were trapped on the second floor, watching the water pour through the lower levels, Dunne turned to Sarah and Bill and said, “Jesus, who’ll buy this place now?”

  BY SUNDAY, THE Boston Globe reported, “The mad torrents of New England’s worst flood swept on to the sea last night, spending their fury in the lower reaches of the Connecticut and the Merrimack.”

  And while the Connecticut River ran through the streets of Hartford, snow fell on Vermont. The first cold of winter finally got over the mountains. It coated St. Albans with an inch of white in places that weren’t flooded; then it sent flurries skittering toward the Connecticut River.

  Gilbert Amory was wearing Farmer Meek’s barn coat when he and Mary Beth puttered off to see if there were roads left that could get them to New Hampshire.

  They arrived at Livermore late that afternoon. They had missed the graveside service. But Gilbert stopped and looked at the mounded earth next to his mother’s grave.

  “We had to plant him.” Aaron walked down from the house. “The preacher had to leave before it got dark. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” said Gilbert. “We’ll have a memorial service for him in Portland.” Then he introduced Mary Beth Meek. “My new friend, client, and chauffeur.”

  Aaron shook her hand. “It’s about time that my brother was driven around by a beautiful woman. Come in and have a drink.”

  Everyone left in Livermore had gathered in the Amorys’ house—the tough, callused ax men and their tough, callused wives, the teamsters, the boiler mechanics who kept the Baldwin and the sawmill running, two dozen people in all, a small, sad family. They had gathered to mourn the loss of George Amory, but they were mourning the end of Livermore, too. The flash flood had not destroyed the town, but it had ruined track far back in the valley, and the cost to relay it would be too great.

  After a respectable few minutes of conversation, Gilbert found old Frenchy, who could not stop crying and somehow blamed himself for George’s death. Gilbert embraced him and whispered in his ear, “My father left an envelope for me in his desk. It’s locked.”

  Frenchy dragged a sleeve across his face. “He said you’d ask … before he was cold in the ground.” Fre
nchy unbuttoned his shirt and pulled out a key suspended on a string around his neck. With a penknife, he cut the string and handed the key over.

  It opened George’s desk, where there was an envelope containing the combination. Soon, Gilbert and Aaron were at the safe, at the foot of the cellar stairs.

  “Remember,” said Gilbert. “Whatever is in here, we split. It’s in the will.”

  “The Constitution?” Aaron knew the story.

  “He never wanted to put it into the will, as if he never wanted to admit he owned it. Or had stolen it.” Gilbert pulled open the safe and looked inside.

  And there was … nothing but an envelope. It contained a letter.

  Sons: I am gone, and so is the Constitution. It has been put to good use. If a person should come to you for help and mention it, help them. It will satisfy your heart and give you purpose, and in this life there is no better feeling. But get on with your lives. That was what I did when I realized that this document would not change the world, because its final draft already had. Getting up every day to solve your problems, working hard, dreaming your dreams—that is the best way to be good Americans.

  Gilbert Amory looked at his brother and cursed.

  A FEW LOGS were cut at Livermore the following year; then everyone left. The last time Gilbert and Aaron visited, Frenchy said to Gilbert, “You want to open a ski hill. Do it here….”

  Sarah and Bill McGillis bought the mill from the bank, because no one else wanted it after the flood. Soon the click-cla-clack-cla-click-cla-clack was heard again on the banks of the Blackstone, but for how long? Unionization and competition from southern mills were sure to change things….

  Maureen Ryan read about their efforts in the paper and wondered what she could do to help. She and Bill McGillis were cousins. And in the hard days after her own father’s death, the McGillis family had helped Sheila Murphy Flaherty and her daughter. So someday, perhaps, Maureen would do something for the McGillis family. But first she had to do for her son …

  … who was reprimanded for leaving his shift on the day of the storm and warned that if he ever did such a thing again, he would lose his job. So he took the pledge and gave up the drink. While he liked his whiskey, he loved the sense of purpose that came each day when he put on his heavy brogans and conductor’s hat….

  In Litchfield County, Samuel Bishop told his wife, Will Pike’s other great-great-granddaughter, that if there had been more radio stations people would have listened day and night to news of the storm. He convinced his father that they should purchase a license from the government and put a transmitter on the top of the highest hill they owned….

  Gilbert Amory tried to raise money for his ski area, but people said that he had chosen the wrong part of Vermont, that the mountains to the west got the most snow and had the best rail lines. Not even his brother Aaron, who had two children bound for college, could contribute much.

  But Gilbert thanked God that fate had forced him into the Peacham Brook, because otherwise, he would not have married Mary Beth Meek. When her father died in September of 1929, she inherited his land. And George wondered if they might sell the orchard and put the money into the ski slope….

  BUT BEFORE LONG, some people had no money to buy an apple, never mind an orchard. Like the storm before it, the Crash changed lives irrevocably.

  First, it brought a bit of retribution….

  On a mild November weekend, Magnus Perkins and his wife went to Newport to close up the house.

  The staff worked. Mrs. Perkins sat in the solarium and read The Sun Also Rises.

  When Magnus told her that he was going for an end-of-the-season sail, she barely looked up. She simply raised her hand and gave him a little finger wave.

  That afternoon, Magnus Perkins pointed his boat east, tied down the helm, and opened his last bottle of Scotch. Though it was only two thirty, the eastern sky was already purpling. The November days were short.

  Let other men jump from windows on Wall Street. Magnus Perkins would sail away with a bit of elegance, and who could prove that it was suicide?

  If he contemplated his sins that day, perhaps he repented of them….

  A week later, Florence Perkins brought her staff together in the Back Bay house and said, with the implacable calm that was her hallmark, “I have two bits of news: Mr. Perkins has been officially declared lost at sea. And Perkins Holdings has been wiped out.”

  The Newport house was to be sold, she told them, “If we can find a buyer.”

  She then gave each of them a small check; “From Mr. Perkins’s life insurance.”

  Maureen Ryan cried on her walk home. She cried for her children, the living and the dead. She cried for the father she had hardly known and for the man who had raised her. She cried for the mother who had begged her to forget the one and embrace the other. And she cried for Florence Perkins, who had always treated her with respect.

  She did not cry for Mr. Magnus. She’d never liked him anyway.

  GILBERT AMORY TURNED fifty-one the following November.

  Aaron and his family came to celebrate the birthday on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Aaron brought champagne. After ten years of Prohibition, even the most law-abiding citizen could find a bottle of Mumm’s when the occasion called for it.

  Aaron toasted, “To my brother, a man with a dream.”

  Gilbert raised his glass to Aaron’s family: Adele, his wife of twenty-four years, a daughter named Dorothy, a son named Tristram. These were the people who would carry on the Amory name and remember the works of Dr. Aaron long after he was gone. And while their presence warmed Gilbert, it saddened him, too.

  Gilbert would have to mark his own footsteps boldly on the landscape, because he would have no children to widen them and keep them from filling in. He mustered a smile and said, “Some men slow down as they pass fifty, but thanks to Mary Beth and all of you, I feel ten years younger. I’m just warming up.”

  So Mary Beth offered a toast. “To a man warming up as the weather gets cold.”

  Aaron said, “A toast to cold, to snow, and a ski trail in Vermont!”

  While the women cooked the birthday dinner and Tristram listened to a radio serial, Gilbert and Aaron went outside and packed their pipes. From the porch of Gilbert’s Victorian on the East Promenade, the islands of Casco Bay seemed like jewels.

  Gilbert took a long suck on his pipe, inhaled, blew out his nose.

  “I only puff,” said Aaron. “It slows the burn and saves tobacco, and these days, saving anything is good.”

  For a time, the brothers smoked together in silence and watched a freighter working its way toward the docks.

  Then Aaron asked, “Can you meet the taxes on the Vermont land, at least?”

  “So far,” said Gilbert. “And once this downturn ends, people will have money. They’ll want to go to places in the winter as well as the summer and not break the bank.”

  “The bank’s already broken. You’ll need money to build your little colony.”

  “Maybe I’ll find that Constitution. Sell it and put the profits into Vermont.”

  Aaron puffed his pipe. “Do you ever wonder if Pa gave it to that woman? The one who claimed she was his illegitimate daughter?”

  “I’ve written her. She wrote back that she didn’t know what I was talking about. She could be lying.”

  “I’d believe her. Simple folk don’t lie well.” Aaron tapped his pipe on a porch pillar. “You’ll just have to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. That’s the New England way.”

  “I want to make money from money. That’s the New England way, too.”

  Soon, only the most optimistic of men were calling it a downturn. Others called it what it was: a depression. The Depression. The Great Depression.

  W ITHIN A YEAR, the Pike-Perkins Mill was in trouble again. Within two years, they were laying off workers, shutting down looms, failing again to meet payments.

  Maureen Ryan read of their travails in the paper and wondered
how she could help them. She decided to pray for them at Mass.

  One Sunday, she came home from the cathedral to find Michael, who had stumbled in after a night spent … somewhere. She looked at him, snoring, stinking of bootleg, a hand hanging over the side of the couch, and she decided that he was never going to change, no matter how many times he sobered up, put on his uniform, promised that he would never touch another drop, and headed off to work.

  No woman would ever marry him. No grandchildren would ever warm Maureen’s knee. And if he received an inheritance, he would only drink it away. Maureen made a decision that she prayed she would not regret.

  On her next day off, she went to the First National Bank, where she kept a safety deposit box, and removed a map case.

  She then boarded a train for Millbridge.

  A few hours later, she knocked on the door of the old house that looked like a Greek temple with peeling pillars and broken shutters.

  Sarah Pike McGillis herself answered the door. There were no servants in Millbridge, not even in the home of the mill owner.

  Sarah seemed thrilled to see Aunt Maureen, whom she had met only a few times. She brought out tea and cake. They talked in the parlor, which had a view of the single-arch bridge and, across the river, the great brick mill that had been the focus of Sarah’s family for more than a hundred years.

  They talked of little Buster, who was sitting on a blanket, gurgling with his mouth around a rattle. And of course, they discussed the challenges to keeping the mill open.

  Then, without ceremony, Maureen Ryan reached into her shopping sack and took out the cylindrical black map case. “This might help your business.”

  Sarah opened it, pulled out four sheets of printed words and handwritten notes.

  “George Amory give it to me. He was a grandson of Will Pike.”

  “And my great-uncle. But … he gave it to you?” said Sarah. “Why?”

  “A long story. But I think that it would be good if the Pike Mill was saved, and what better way than to use something Will Pike left behind? Maybe you can sell this and it will help you to keep folks workin’, keep the mill open.”