The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

by James Lincoln Collier

  It was after Grampa, that was certain—would like to kill him if it could. What about me? Would it try to get me to walk off some high place or dive in front of a car? The idea that this thing could get inside you and make you do things you never wanted to do scared the pants off me. I shuddered when I thought of it. It was like having strange things growing out of your skin.

  Why was it after Grampa? Everybody in Magnolia thought the world of Grampa. They remembered that he’d once been a judge and a state senator, of course, and respected him for that. But there was more to it: people around town knew that Grampa was always straight with you. No matter whether you were the biggest man in town or somebody like Mr. Hawkins who hadn’t had two nickels to rub together, Grampa would treat you honestly.

  And why Mr. Hawkins? What had he got to do with Grampa and me? I never saw that much of Mr. Hawkins, and never had much conversation with him when I did. Just “Hello, Mr. Hawkins, is Sonny around?” The truth is, Mr. Hawkins didn’t much like to bother with kids. Sonny said that his dad used to take him fishing sometimes, but that was mostly when he’d borrowed a boat and needed Sonny to row. Sonny said that was all right, he didn’t mind rowing; it was kind of nice being out on the river with his dad, just the two of them, no snotty little sisters tagging along. Kind of nice, Sonny said, even if his dad didn’t have much to say but “Over to the left a little, Sonny,” or “Hold still right here.” His dad was a pretty good fisherman, Sonny said, and they usually went home with a nice mess of fish for supper. But that was about as far as Mr. Hawkins’ interest in kids went. He hardly knew who I was. He wasn’t connected to the specter through me or Grampa.

  These questions were buzzing around in my head like a swarm of bees. I knew I’d go crazy if I didn’t find some answers to them. I couldn’t go on living like this. It was like wrestling a waterfall: there was nothing you could grasp on to. Maybe Mr. Hawkins had walked out into midair because he couldn’t stand thinking about these things any longer. I could see how you could get to that point.

  It was clear enough that I’d better talk to Sam. She was kind of pretty: dark brown hair, brown eyes. We were both born in Magnolia, had gone to school together the whole time, same class most years. I don’t know as she was my best friend—Sonny was that—but she was my oldest friend. Grampa and Mr. Samuels were friends, too, although Grampa was a good deal older than Mr. Samuels. Belonged to the Lions Club, worked on charities together. Our families had been getting together since we were pups. There wasn’t much Sam and I didn’t know about each other.

  What was I going to tell Sam? She’d want to know too much—ask a lot of questions. But I didn’t see any other way to go. I lay there trying to think up some story to tell her she might believe. In a while I came up with one. I felt better after that and finally fell asleep.

  I caught Sam after school the next day. “I’ve got to talk to you,” I said.

  “I can’t. I have Girl Scouts.”

  “After Girl Scouts, then.”

  “I can’t then, either. Mom’s taking me to Weinberg’s for a summer outfit.”

  “It’s important, Sam. I have to talk to you.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “I can do it tomorrow. I’ll meet you at Hoags for sodas.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s private. Too many people there. Meet me at the bandstand. There won’t be anybody around.”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “Why? What’s the big secret about it?”

  “I can’t tell you now. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  We had a little park in Magnolia on the riverbank—gravel paths, big elm trees with their branches hanging downwards, park benches. Cool and shady in the summer. In the middle there was a bandstand, just a round platform a couple of feet off the ground, with a roof over it to shade it from the sun. On Sunday afternoons in the summer the Volunteer Firemen’s Band played there. The mayor made a speech from the bandstand on the Fourth of July with everybody waving little flags at him, and if the governor or some senator was in town, which wasn’t often, they’d make their speeches from the bandstand. Sometimes on rainy days in the summer, kids would roller-skate on it, but it really was too small for that. Mostly the bandstand just sat there, waiting for somebody to come.

  It was empty when I got there. In a couple of minutes Sam came up. She had an apple left over from her school lunch and we took turns taking bites out of it, each from our own side. “So what’s the big secret, Gene?”

  I was feeling pretty nervous, worried she’d find holes in my story. But I had to go ahead. “I heard something about my grampa,” I said. “I’m worried about it.”

  She stared at me, her eyes bright. Having a mystery to chew on suited Sam right down to the ground. “Like what? Heard what?”

  “I heard that back when we were little, Grampa did something really bad.”

  “Bad? What do you mean by that? Against the law?”

  “I don’t know what it was, just that it was very bad. It was back when we were maybe two years old or something. I figured there might be something in your dad’s newspaper about it.”

  “I never heard of your grampa doing anything bad. Nobody did. Why do you believe it? Who told it to you?”

  I took a deep breath. “Sonny Hawkins’ dad told me.”

  “Sonny Hawkins’ dad? The guy who killed himself?” She went on staring at me, her eyes bright. This was getting pretty interesting to her.

  “I don’t think he killed himself. Sonny says he didn’t. Sonny says he’d been having dizzy spells recently, and that’s what happened. He was up there on the lumber platform and had a dizzy spell.”

  “Everybody says he killed himself. Just walked off into the air.”

  “Well, they’re wrong. He didn’t.” I was getting stubborn about it. Funny as it seemed, Mr. Hawkins and I were together in the same thing. I was on his side about it. “People shouldn’t say stuff like that when they don’t know anything about it. He had a dizzy spell.”

  Sam shrugged. “The cops say they have eyewitness reports. There were four guys working right there, getting down those two-by-sixes, and they all saw him walk off into the air.”

  “Is your dad going to put that in the paper?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t always put everything in the paper. He says if it’s going to hurt a lot of people to no purpose he’ll leave it out.”

  “Tell him this will hurt Sonny and Mrs. Hawkins and the girls,” I said.

  “There’s no use in telling Dad anything when it comes to the Chronicle. He says he can’t run the paper to suit his family. How come Mr. Hawkins decided to tell you this stuff about your grampa?”

  I hadn’t figured she’d ask that. “I don’t know why he told me; he just did. I was out at Sonny’s practicing double plays with a tennis ball when Mr. Hawkins came along. We got into a conversation and he said that Grampa had done something really bad back then.” There wasn’t much truth to any of that. For one thing, Mr. Hawkins never had much to say to Sonny, much less me. “It doesn’t matter why he told me. He just did.”

  “Why do you believe him?” she said. “Mr. Hawkins is known for being bone lazy.”

  “What has being lazy got to do with telling lies?”

  “A lot. If he won’t do an honest day’s work, why would he be honest about the truth?”

  “Do you have to argue about everything, Sam?” I was getting exasperated. “You’re always grilling me. What he told me was what he told me.”

  She looked down. “I’m sorry, Gene. I didn’t mean to grill you. But the whole thing seems sort of weird.”

  Of course she was right. I wasn’t used to lying to Sam, and I could see that I hadn’t done a good job of it. It embarrassed me. I had figured that I could say I’d got this stuff about Grampa from Mr. Hawkins because he was dead and couldn’t deny it; I had forgot that it wasn’t very realistic for Mr. Hawkins to have told me anything like that. “Let’s get off Sonny’s dad. The main thing is whether I could look through
back issues of the Chronicle to see if there’s anything about Grampa in it.”

  “Dad’s got all the back issues on shelves in the storage room behind his office. They go way back to before Dad bought the paper, back into the 1890s or something. Dad won’t let anybody look through the real old issues unless they’ve got a good reason. They’re kind of yellow and crumbly.”

  “I don’t think this goes back that far. Just back to when we were little.”

  “Then that’s probably okay,” Sam said. “He’d probably let us look at those.”

  Us. I should have known that if there was a mystery involved Sam would have to get in on it. “Maybe you wouldn’t want to waste your time on it.”

  “Oh, it’ll be fun. I like reading the old papers. Seeing the funny clothes the ladies wore, the old-fashioned cars.”

  I wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it. So we made our plan. We’d tell Sam’s dad that we were working on a school project together—we’d done that before. We’d meet Saturday morning at the Chronicle office.

  When I got home that afternoon Grampa was reading the Chronicle. “Delivering groceries, Gene?” he asked.

  I blushed and for a minute I thought of lying about it. But I wasn’t much of a liar. “I was playing baseball.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was disappointed in me. Grampa didn’t expect me to give up playing baseball altogether, but I knew I ought to go to Snuffy’s more regularly than I had been doing recently.

  Grampa shook the paper. “There’s a story here about Sonny’s dad.” He folded the paper to the story and handed it to me. It was on page three, kind of short.

  Unexplained Death of Magnolia Man A local man, Frank Hawkins, plunged to his death Monday from the second-tier platform at Magnolia Hardware and Lumber. According to witnesses, Hawkins appeared to deliberately step off the platform. He was pronounced dead at Hardscrabble County Hospital. Witnesses said that Hawkins might have survived the fall, but that some of the lumber he had been handling followed him down, breaking his back and injuring his skull.

  The story went on from there to say Mr. Hawkins had lived on River Road, and was survived by his wife, and so forth.

  “Grampa, are they saying that Mr. Hawkins jumped off on purpose?”

  “That’s the idea, I guess. They were all talking about it at the garage when I went in to have the oil changed on the Model A. Billy Tolliver said he heard that Hawkins had been drinking.”

  I was bound and determined to stay on Mr. Hawkins’ side. “I never saw Mr. Hawkins drunk. I’ve been around their place more than anyone. He didn’t drink much.”

  “I didn’t think he did,” Grampa said. “I never heard of it, anyway. But all the fellows at the lumberyard swear he walked off that platform.”

  I knew better. “Why would somebody decide to kill himself in the middle of the morning for no good reason?”

  Grampa shook his head. “You never know about these things, Gene. He might have been brooding about it for days—for weeks, maybe. Been thinking about it since he got up that morning and all at once he got tired of having it buzzing around in his mind and jumped.”

  Buzzing around in his mind—just like me. I didn’t like that idea very much. “Why would somebody jump when he was only fifteen feet up? He might have only busted a leg. He couldn’t count on that lumber following him down.”

  “Yes, that’s true, Gene. But I don’t imagine that a fellow in that state of mind would be thinking very clearly about things.”

  I didn’t like Mr. Hawkins being blamed for his own death. “Grampa, it isn’t fair for everybody to be saying that Mr. Hawkins killed himself when he’s dead and can’t defend himself.”

  Grampa nodded. “That’s true, Gene. You’re right. We shouldn’t form hasty conclusions. I get your point. It’s especially unfair to Sonny and his family.” He stopped to think. “Perhaps I could write a letter to the Chronicle.” He considered some more. “Or perhaps you could. That’s a better idea.”

  “Me?” That was pretty startling.

  “Sure. Why not? You’re closer to the Hawkins family than anyone else. You have strong feelings about what’s going on. Just write exactly what you’ve been telling me. Put down your feelings about it.”

  The whole idea made me uncomfortable. I was just some kid. I wasn’t important enough to write a letter to the paper. Sam, she’d have done it in a shot. If she had an opinion about something, which mostly she did, she’d let you know. But that was Sam, not me. “They wouldn’t print a letter by some kid.”

  “Why not?” Grampa said. “I think Al Samuels would find it interesting to run a letter expressing the viewpoint of a youngster. It’s a different approach. Newspapers like to find unusual things to run.”

  Suddenly it occurred to me that the specter might not like it if I were to write such a letter. It seemed clear enough that it wouldn’t want people saying nice things about Mr. Hawkins. I sure didn’t want to bring the specter down on me any more than necessary. “I’m not a very good writer,” I said. “Just average.”

  “Most people aren’t expert writers,” Grampa said. “You write well enough for this. Just put on paper what you’ve been telling me. I’ll take the letter to Al Samuels myself.”

  As usual, what Grampa said made sense, but of course he didn’t know the truth of it—the specter and all that. On top of it, I’d never wanted to be anybody special. I just wanted to be a plain kid. “Grampa, I’d better ask Sonny first. He might not like it. He might want everybody to shut up about it.”

  Grampa nodded. “Possibly. Ask Sonny, then.”

  The next day after school I went to Snuffy’s to see if there were any deliveries. There were a couple—a big box for old Mr. and Mrs. Tonelli, who hardly had any money at all and would tip me only a nickel, and a box for Mrs. Frye, who was usually good for a dime. So I made the deliveries, which made me feel a little better about myself, and then I went over to Sonny’s. It was a pretty nice day, just right for baseball, so we went to the flat, grassy place between his house and the river and threw grounders and pop flies to each other.

  I wasn’t sure how to bring the subject up—plain didn’t want to, in fact. But I’d promised Grampa, and I had to do it. So finally, after we’d been tossing the ball around for twenty minutes, I stood there, dropping the ball into my glove and taking it out again. “Sonny, did you see the story in the Chronicle about your dad?”

  “No,” he said. “I never read it. Dad said most of what you read in the newspapers was a bunch of lies.”

  “It said that your dad walked off that lumber platform on purpose.”

  “He didn’t. I know it. That voice told him to do it and he couldn’t hold himself back.”

  “I don’t misbelieve that,” I said. “I believe it’s true. But people are saying he did it on purpose.”

  He slammed his right fist into his fielder’s glove. “It isn’t true!” he shouted. “He didn’t. They shouldn’t say that.”

  “Grampa said I should write a letter to the paper about it. You know, say it isn’t fair to gossip about somebody when they aren’t there to defend themselves.”

  He stopped slamming his fist into his glove and stared at me. “They wouldn’t put it in the paper,” he said finally.

  “Grampa said they might. He says he would carry the letter over to Mr. Samuels himself.”

  Sonny went on staring at me. “Your grampa said that?”

  “He said he would.”

  He looked at me for a while longer. Then he spit into the grass. “Naw, they wouldn’t put nothing good about us in the paper.”

  “Grampa says they would.”

  “I don’t believe it. Dad always said that nobody gives a plugged nickel about you if you don’t have the bucks. Not around here, anyways.”

  Now, if I left it at that I could get out of it. Just tell Grampa that Sonny wasn’t in favor of the letter. But I knew that wasn’t exactly the truth. “Sonny, I could try,” I said, hoping he’d say to
forget it.

  But he didn’t. He stared at me for the longest time. Then he said, “Would you do it, Gene?”

  I didn’t want to, that was for sure. “Sure I would, Sonny.”

  “I’d sure appreciate it.”

  I figured the sooner I got it over with, the better, so I said I’d do it right then, and I went home. Nobody was there. I went up to my room, tore a piece of paper out of my notebook, and spent a while sharpening a pencil, still trying to think of a way to get out of it. But there wasn’t any.

  How did you begin? Dear Magnolia Chronicle? Dear Editor? Dear Mr. Samuels? I decided I’d leave room for that and ask Grampa about it later. What next? I chewed on my pencil for a while. Then I wrote, “It isn’t fair for—” I stopped. Fair for what? I tried again. “It said in the paper that—” But I couldn’t remember exactly what it had said in the paper. I tried again. “People shouldn’t gossip about Mr. Hawkins when—”

  Then I felt that familiar tightness come into my chest, that pressure, and things slowly started moving around inside of me. “Please leave me alone,” I said. “Please go away.”

  “I’m not happy about this letter, Gene. I’d rather you drop it.”

  “Why are you bothering me?”

  “Let’s not go through all that again. It’s the letter that concerns me.”

  “If I forget about the letter, will you leave me alone?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve still got some tasks to do before that happens, Gene. For the moment I want you to forget about the letter.”

  “There must be some way to get rid of you!” I shouted.

  The specter chuckled. “But I’m not very likely to tell you, am I?”

  I thought: there might be some hope in that. “Why did you have to kill Mr. Hawkins?”

  “He deserved it, Gene. He did something very naughty back then. He deserved what he got.”

  “Back at the same time as Grampa did his bad thing?”