When we got down near the trees we heard hammering, and when we started into the woods we saw a rundown shack about twenty yards in. Sheriff called out, “Willy Gleason, you in there?” The hammering stopped and half a minute later Willy came out.
He stood with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, his eyes squinting. “What?” he said, and the cigarette didn’t move.
“Like to know what you’re up to,” the sheriff said.
“Fixing,” he answered.
“You’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” the sheriff said. “I thought I told you to be off your mother’s place.”
“I’m off it,” Willy Gleason said.
He was right about that. The Gleason property went as far as the trees. Sullivan owned the rest. Sullivan’s kids must have built the shack to play in a good seven or eight years ago. Willy had hauled out an old mattress, one that had probably been inside that shack all those years, through the snow and rain and rats and woodchucks. We had a pretty good idea that he was fixing up his honeymoon cottage.
“Sullivan know you’re on his land?” the sheriff asked.
Willy shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. Clarky started to laugh, but the sheriff gave him a look.
The sheriff eyed that shack like he was stumped. Then he said to Willy, “I believe you could live in there.”
Willy said nothing, just looked down at the dirt like we weren’t there.
Then the sheriff hitched up his pants. “I’ll tell you one thing, Gleason. Your mother’s coming back home, which you may not be too happy about, but I don’t give a damn about that. I don’t want to hear another word from you clowns out here. I don’t want to be called out here again for nothing. Next time I’ll lock you up a lot longer than overnight.”
If Willy was supposed to answer, nobody had told him about it. He stood with his head down, probably thinking how he was going to have to find a sheet of plastic to put over the roof for when it rained.
So we left, and by the time we reached our cars, the sheriff was swearing up a storm about how he had bette things to do with his time than referee a herd of idiots. The rest of us got in Clarky’s car, and we weren’t but half a mile down the road when all four of us broke loose laughing, even stone-faced Aldin.
The way Willy stood there and swore he was off his mother’s property reminded us of the way he had blasted away at his mother as if it was the right and natural thing to do. And that got us reminiscing about a few other Gleason gems. By the time we reached Rinaldi’s, we were well into the greased pig fiasco, but that’s another story.
From what Early told us, it looked like Willy was done fixing up his honeymoon cottage and Sylvia had moved in. Pete said you could make out where a path was starting to wear across the lawn, between the porch to those woods. He’d spot Willy out there, near those trees, smoking his cigarettes.
The old lady was sent home from the hospital but, even so, things stayed quiet for a while. We didn’t see any of the Gleasons in town much, except once in a while, down at Coleman’s buying cigarettes or candy or soft drinks. The old man, of course, was in and out as usual for his beer.
It was a Tuesday morning when we got the news about him. I can’t say that anyone was much surprised. Shorty Bova’s kid was headed for his new job at the milk plant, about five-thirty A.M., walking, because that last DWI he got had cost him his license. Halfway down Canal Street, almost to Osgood’s, he saw something in the canal that didn’t belong there. When he got closer he could see it was a man. Once he got his legs back, he turntailed it for the municipal building, which of course was closed, looking for the sheriff. By the time he flagged down May Hammer, just beginning the day’s rounds in her one-woman taxi operation, he was barely able to talk sense. May radioed for the sheriff and state police, and by six a.m. we had a full-blown carnival down on Canal Street. The sheriff, troopers, ambulance, Diefendorf from the Journal, clicking away with his camera, two fire trucks, and half the town came out to watch Old Man Gleason get fished out of the canal.
He was dead, of course. Had been for some time. We figured he must have bought a six-pack at last call and sat on the canal bank to finish it off. The carton lay on its side with the empties scattered around. One bottle, unopened, sat in the tipped-over carton.
I’ve seen dead men before, plenty of them. And I’ve seen two drowned men. But Gleason is the only one I can honestly say looked better drowned than he looked alive.
Naturally, the county paid for the funeral. The Gleason clan trooped into town, single file, scrubbed and dressed in what must have been their good clothes. The old lady sweated and huffed along in the lead. Sylvia Biddle followed at the end of the line, carrying that roundheaded baby. And Willy shuffled about twenty feet behind the rest, kicking up dust. They looked mournful and lost, marching like that, a string of ducks.
They gathered outside the Presbyterian church, even though no one had ever seen a Gleason step inside the place before. The old lady seemed drugged as she clutched one of her kids’ hands in each of hers. She let out a moan. “Daddy’s gone,” she said, talking to no one, just making a statement to the air. “Daddy’s gone,” she said again, real quiet. Her kids tugged at her, and she followed them into the church. Willy stayed outside, pacing up and down the sidewalk, smoking. Every once in a while he’d sneak a glance at the hearse parked at the curb, like it was something alive and he was checking to see if it had moved.
Grief it was, and it surprised me. They have feelings for each other, too, I realized, just like anyone else.
After the service they moved outside for the trip to the cemetery. The pallbearers were having a time getting the casket into the hearse, partly because the old man was heavy, partly because nobody knew what they were doing. While they struggled with the back doors that kept swinging shut on them, the kids raised hell, running and chasing each other, wild from sitting still in church. So nobody noticed when the one they call Francis climbed in the driver’s seat. When he started the engine, I suppose everyone just figured it was the driver, since they’d just managed to get the casket in, although they hadn’t yet figured out how to get the doors shut. The hearse lurched away, with the doors swinging behind.
The kid couldn’t drive, naturally. Things might have been different if he could see, but as it was, his head didn’t quite reach the top of the dash. It’s a miracle no one was run over. Half a dozen men took off down the street on foot, shouting after the hearse.
The ride was short. The kid swung wide onto Canal Street, and down they went, the Gleason boy, the dead man, and Lou Grasso’s brand-new fifteen-thousand-dollar hearse, into the canal. The boy made it out the window and waded to the bank, looking scared, but grinning too, mud and weeds dripping from him. The hearse lay nose down, with just its rear fender showing. And for the second time in three days the fire department was called to fish Old Man Gleason out of the canal.
And that was that. After we got the hearse pulled out, and finally got the old man buried, the Gleasons went back to their house on the mucklands, and we didn’t hear anything more for a good several months. That’s not counting the week the Catholic sisters took up a food and clothing collection and the three of them made a field trip out there. But that’s another story altogether.
Once the Gleasons did venture back into town for groceries, they were quiet about it. So it was a while before we began to notice the change taking place in Willy. He let his hair grow, and he started growing a beard and mustache, too. Then he got rid of his shoes. It was November and he was still walking the roads barefoot. During the winter we didn’t see any of them much, but a couple people swore Willy was at the laundromat in February, barefoot, and with a head of hair like a grizzly.
Then, just like that, we had one of those rare spring days when the temperature hit seventy and it seemed like summer, with everyone out, walking, raking their lawns, and visiting. Willy and Sylvia came to town, pushing their baby in a stroller. Willy’s scraggly beard reached halfway down his chest,
and his hair fell over his shoulders. He was barefoot, and he wore a heavy winter jacket, zipped up to the neck. Everyone else was in shirt sleeves, Sylvia and the baby too, it was that warm.
When they came out of Coleman’s store, Sylvia unwrapped two orange Popsicles and gave one to the kid, while Willy tucked a new pack of Lucky Strikes into his jacket pocket. They sat on the summer bench Coleman had just hauled outside the store. The kid teetered around on bowlegs, drooling over its Popsicle, while Sylvia sucked on her own with a dumb, dreamy look. Willy smoked.
Then, of course, the kid dropped the Popsicle in the dirt and started screaming over it. Sylvia tried to clean the thing off, then she offered part of her own, but the kid wouldn’t let up. Willy lifted the kid, and he held it so it stood on his lap facing him. He stared at it. That’s all. The baby went rigid, and dead silent, not even a sniffle, while it stared right back into Willy’s crazy eyes. I saw it happen. So did Grove and a few others.
After that, people started saying Willy almost looked like Jesus, what with the hair and the bare feet. But some were outraged over the comparison and insisted that if he looked like anything it was a lunatic, and a dangerous one at that.
A month or so later we sat at Rinaldi’s, talking. Both Aldin and Clarky were killing time, waiting for their social security checks, which were a day late. Grove was up front helping Rinaldi fill tin buckets with nails.
Clarky looked at the clock, then he called out to Grove, “Early go by yet?”
“Nope,” he said. Then he said, “Why you so worried about money, Clarky? Don’t you trust your government?”
“I got to eat, don’t I?” Clarky said. “I got to pay my bills.”
It was about that time the fire whistle sounded, twotwo, out of town. We jumped into Grove’s truck, all four of us wedging into the front seat, and we left Rinaldi setting out his buckets of brads and roofing nails.
We swung down Center Street and headed for the station, to follow the trucks out. Eddie Townsend was just getting behind the wheel of the pumper when we eased alongside. He waved us ahead and shouted, “Sawbuck Road. The Gleason house.” We took off.
“Jesus Almighty,” Clarky said. “Now what?”
We were halfway there when Grove let out a low whistle. He pointed north, beyond Hixson’s alfalfa lot and the trees edging the Squashalone, and we saw it, a chimney cloud of black smoke. Grove stepped on it, and we didn’t say another word until the pickup jumped the ditch and rocked to a halt on the Gleason lawn.
All that showed through the fire were the two-byfours that used to hold the inside walls, and the stair way leading to the second stor y. Even from inside the truck we felt the heat. We got out, and the air was loud with the sound of burning. Above the flames the black smoke, thick with cinders and bits of wood, rolled up into the sky. We had to shout to be heard over the roaring flames and splintering wood. Pretty soon it started snowing cinders.
We hauled a couple hoses out and turned the water on, knowing full well it was no use. Finally the chief shouted over for us to wet the trees and lawn and let the fire burn itself out.
The Gleasons and Sylvia Biddle stood off to the side, watching. The kids didn’t say anything except when the stairway collapsed. One of the boys pointed to it and said, “There she goes.” It fell apart in midair, just disappeared into the flames.
But the old lady wailed and paced and called for her dead husband. Just before the stairs went, she tried to run back into the burning house, calling out for the old man to hurry and get out. We tackled her and dragged her back. The sheriff kept an eye on her. He kept telling her, “Chester’s all right. He’s not in the house. He’s down at Osgood’s, remember?”
“Chester’s all right?” she asked him.
“He’s not in the house,” the sheriff kept telling her. “He’s in town, at Osgood’s.”
The fire soon eased up. There was nothing left to burn. That’s when we noticed the chicken coop or, I should say, what used to be the chicken coop. A few wisps of smoke rose from a black square burned onto the ground. We counted five chicken skeletons, the bones charred black. Then we saw that the woods beyond were on fire, too.
We moved the truck out there, fast, and started pumping. Once we got things under control, we could see it was the honeymoon shack that had started the trees off. And since the shack was so far from the house, we knew right then the fires had been set. A couple of cinder blocks, one hunk of mattress, and a rusted barrel with a length of stovepipe jammed into a hole cut in its side were all that remained.
Of course, the sheriff asked plenty of questions, but he didn’t get any answers. The old lady was too far gone to make sense. Her kids were too busy jumping over the fire hoses and slinging mud at each other from the puddles to bother talking to anyone about why their house had just burned to the ground. Sylvia stood in a trance, holding her sleeping kid. When the kid started drooling down the sleeve of her blouse she moved it to the other hip.
Willy smoked his cigarettes. He had watched the whole thing with a calm, interested expression. The sheriff tried to question him, but all he did was shrug his shoulders and say, “I don’t know nothing.” He kept his eyes on the smoldering house when he spoke.
It was Clarky who found the gasoline cans. He brought them over, two of them, and set them down between Willy and the sheriff, without saying a word. Willy glanced at them, then back at the house.
The sheriff shook his head. “It’s just about what I expected,” he said in a tired voice. “You done it now, Gleason. This one’s for keeps.”
Willy stood as if he hadn’t heard anything. Then, without turning his head, he flicked his burning cigarette toward one of the gasoline cans, and it was about six inches from dropping into the opening when Clarky jumped and sent the can flying with a kick of his boot, the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.
The sheriff jumped too. “Crazy bastard,” he yelled, and he punched Willy in the jaw. Willy’s head swung to one side with the force of the blow while the rest of his body stayed stock-still. Then he turned his head back until his eyes met the sheriff ’s. Willy looked worn out, but most of all he looked – dignified. That’s the only word for it, wild hair and crazy eyes notwithstanding. He let himself be handcuffed, and the sheriff had two of us ride with him as he took Willy over to the county jail.
The fire made our town famous. At least for a week or so it did. Once the word “arson” got out, we had people in here from the city newspaper and TV stations, doing interviews, taking pictures, asking questions. There were other people, too, the ones who drove in on a Saturday or Sunday to have a look at the burned-down Gleason place, and hear the stories that by that time were circulating around. One story told of a religious fanatic who had direct orders from God to burn his house down with all his family inside as punishment for the Gleason no one had known about, the one that had been kept locked in a broom closet for twenty years. Another version told of Willy burning just himself up in the house, as a sacrifice for the town’s sins. That version included finding thousands of dollars stuffed into canning jars buried in the cellar.
Then, as fast as it started, it stopped. The welfare trucked the Gleasons down to Hiram, in the southern tip of the county, to live in a renovated house near the state’s adult shelter. But Sylvia Biddle stayed. She moved back into the Beehive apartments in town, taking the fat-headed kid with her. So it was just Vallina Gleason and her brood down there in Hiram. All of them except Willy.
Willy stayed in the county jail a few days, until they sent him off somewhere for mental tests. Word was they’d locked him up in a prison for the criminally insane.
So they were gone, those Gleasons. They weren’t missed at Sunday church services, and their kids weren’t missed on the playground or little league field and, needless to say, none of the stores felt a dip in proceeds because of them. But something had changed, just the same. I’d call it a loss, of some sort. Maybe a loss of heritage would be the right way to put it. Good or bad, those Gleasons
belonged to this town.
Now, whenever we drove out there on Sawbuck Road and got a look at that charred place where the house used to be, and the black hole of the cellar half-filled with rotting wood and broken chimney bricks, we’d get to thinking about the Gleasons and what they were up to in that new house of theirs in Hiram.
Grove heard that the old lady dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after the move, supposedly because she couldn’t take living in a strange town so far from where her husband was buried. But nobody could say for sure if it was true. And Aldin had it from a cousin in Albany that Willy Gleason had already escaped from the prison for the criminally insane.
We were at Rinaldi’s, talking about it, in between Clarky going on about his social security and Grove telling how the doctor said it was arthritis of the spine, not lumbago, that he had.
“No wheelchair for me,” Grove said. “Shoot me first. I mean it.”
“Sure,” Aldin told him. “I know somebody’d love to do it, too, just for the fun of it.”
“I wonder what he’s up to,” Clarky said. He shook his head, thinking. “I hope to Christ he doesn’t come back here starting trouble.”
“There’s nothing in this town he wants,” Grove said. “It’s his mama he’s after, not you. Not her, either.”
He pointed out the window to where Sylvia Biddle was trying to get a baby stroller, with that fat-headed kid of hers in it, over the curb. Never mind the kid was big enough to walk. The stroller was a clumsy old-fashioned model, with one wheel about ready to come off. Sylvia leaned into the stroller, her rear end sticking out in one direction, and her scrawny arms in the other direction. She rocked that buggy, trying to swing it around, pushing like her life depended on it, trying to get over that damn curb.
“You think the old lady’s really dead?” Rinaldi said.
A Place Of Light Page 14
