In the Evil Day

  Many farmers still rode buggies into town, either one- or two-horse rigs, and Main Street was littered with what were called horse puckies. John worked for a while at a grocery store on Colby Street in his early teens, and he remembers Ray Potter—who was blind, it was said, from injuries sustained in the Spanish-American War—being driven into town on a one-horse rig by a pipe-smoking companion known only as “his woman.” The woman would come into the grocery store and hand someone a list of items. Someone else would go about the store putting up a couple boxes of groceries, and then John would load the boxes onto the buggy.

  “Then Ray, who always spoke,” John wrote in one of his columns, “and his woman, who always did not, would cluck, one or both at once, and the horse would take them back up to Main Street and the short distance up Parsons Street to the Colebrook Restaurant, at that time a dive most kids were told to avoid on penalty of a good hiding, and they’d park the horse, often with a feed bag over its muzzle to keep it happy, and go in to sample the liquid wares, and when they were helped out and loaded into the rig, often in the wee hours, they’d collapse together on the seat in a sort of propping-each-other-up embrace, sound asleep, and with the bartender’s gentle slap on the rear, the horse would take them home.”

  John also remembers the wandering strangers his father brought home to dinner. “Many times I was the first one to get to the telephone, which was a wall affair with a crank. Mabel the operator would get a call from wherever Dad was, and—as she’d always say—‘patch him through.’ ‘Essie?’ I’d hear, my father mistaking my high-pitched prepubescent squeak for my mother’s voice. And then, ‘Tell your mother I’m bringing home one more for supper.’”

  This might be a man hitchhiking home from the Groveton mill, or a soldier thumbing home on leave, or a college student off to anywhere. An extra place would be made, and the conversation set in motion. Politics and journalism were favored topics. Two were forbidden: town gossip, which Fred abhorred, and any discussion of class—working versus professional, blue-collar versus white—distinctions deemed specious by this learned son of a gandy dancer.

  Meanwhile the Harrigans were considered bohemians by many of their neighbors, a suspicion confirmed whenever Esther—who believed children should be outside entertaining themselves, whatever the weather—would throw the kids out to play in the rain, sometimes with rain gear, sometimes not. John never had to be thrown out, though, and he didn’t like being inside during the school day either. Colebrook Academy overlooked the Mohawk River, and the constant sparkle and gurgle of that running water was torture to John.

  He and some friends commonly sneaked away early to a hairpin turn in the river called Big Bend. There they roasted hot dogs and cast squirming knots of worms into the river for brown and brook trout. About every fifth cast struck trout. Otherwise they caught big, silvery suckers, which they tore off their hooks and punted into the bushes like footballs. “Species bias,” John said. “Suckers are good to eat in the spring, before they get worms.”

  At some point in the ’50s, Fred Harrigan—John said—“poked his nose into the News and Sentinel” office in what would have to be counted another of life’s little accidents. The newspaper had been born in 1870 as the Northern Sentinel, printed off a flatbed letterpress in a room over what is now Howard’s Restaurant and as an organ of the Democratic Party, dedicated to “the overthrow of Radical power and corruption,” wrote founder James Peavey. The Sentinel offered a combination of national news as the Democrats saw it and local color as Peavey saw it. But Peavey sold the paper after two hardscrabble years, and its next owner—Albert Barker, a lawyer—wrote in his first editorial, “For ourselves we seek neither fame nor popularity, and the experience of our predecessor extinguishes even the hope of riches.”

  In fact, for all its history Colebrook’s weekly newspaper was a hand-to-mouth affair, run and staffed by people who learned their journalism on the job. In 1913 Alma Cummings, who became owner, editor, and publisher when her husband died, complained about how often she had to resort to bartering with her subscribers: “We have taken wood, potatoes, corn, eggs, butter, onions, turnips, pumpkins, beets, cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, squash, chickens, stone, lumber, labor, sand, calico, sauerkraut, second-hand clothing. Coon-skins, tape measures, pickles, sour milk, doughnuts, Dutch cheese, apples, clotheslines, old guns, cart wheels, grindstones, bicycles, bee’s honey, nails, barbed wire, fence posts, oats, grass seed, and articles too numerous to mention, on subscription in our 22 years of editorship, and now a man writes to us to know if we would send him the paper for six months for a large owl. There are few things a country editor would refuse on subscription, and if we come across any person who is out of owl, and is in need of one, will surely accommodate this man by selling paper for owl.”

  In the ’50s the newspaper was more commonly paid in cash than owls for its subscriptions and advertising space, but not a lot, and it was printed in space now occupied by the lounge side of the Wilderness Restaurant, where the Kiwanis Club meets. Meanwhile Fred had found himself not entirely absorbed by his divorce settlements and cow cases. On the day he “poked his nose in” at the Sentinel office, he got hired as a part-time editorial and features contributor. In 1956 he began writing a personal column, something like a modern blog, called “Meandering Comment,” which would run in the Sentinel for the next thirty-five years. In 1960 Harrigan bought the News and Sentinel and began scaling back his law practice. So in the same year that Fred and Esther’s belated fourth child arrived, Mary Jay, they also acquired their fifth, this “orphan child” of a newspaper, a sort of cowbird chick whose outsized appetites for money and attention would in some ways squeeze out the other nestlings in the family.

  John became a newsboy, selling newspapers on and around Main Street out of a sack slung over his shoulder. He remembers editor Merle Wright standing on the operator’s platform of an old Whitlock flatbed press, “his nimble fingers feeding in the sheets while his feet worked the control pedals.” On production days, “the place was a flurry of female fingers as elderly women speedily folded and collated the finished sheets, and out the door I went with my sack full of papers.”

  Early one winter morning in 1961, John woke on Park Street to the telephone ringing off the hook. He raced down the backstairs to answer and heard Izzie Haynes, whose husband was a fireman, shout through the earpiece, “The Sentinel’s afire!” He woke his father. They raced on foot through the icy darkness to find the south end of Main Street aglow with the flames. “In the following days,” he wrote about that time, “I helped a rigging crew drag out and load up fire-blackened printing equipment for repair and restoration, and began the long task of sorting the tens of thousands of pieces of type and spacers that had been spilled from the cases during the fire-fighting effort. For weeks I did little with my spare time but sort type.”

  For that and other reasons, John liked newspaper work no more than he liked being inside all day at school. Fred’s firstborn son was running wild, the black sheep among his siblings, and maybe the twenty-seven-inch lake trout he caught one day through the ice at Big Diamond Pond was, in a certain way, sacramental. “My mother already had supper prepared, but quickly wrapped the main course (meatloaf, again) and put it aside,” John wrote in a column. “‘Gimme that fish,’ she said, and snatched it away to rinse in the sink.

  “The fish, of course, was already cleaned. I never brought fish home without cleaning them first, usually at the water’s edge. She made a little bowl of thick sauce of lemon and butter, brushed it on the fish, and set it aside. She made up a quick batch of stuffing, which some people call dressing, and packed it into the lake trout’s body cavity, and administered various spices, and then sewed the belly-flaps together. One more slathering of lemony butter and roll through the flour, and the fish was ready for the oven.

  “We all sat down to the sight of a big fish steaming from a big platter in the middle of the table. We had never seen such a thing. Since I had brought home suppe
r, I carved. The big flakes of fish rolled right off the bone. To this day it remains the best fish I’ve ever tasted. I barely remember the carrots and rice.”

  That fish was among the articles in a declaration of independence that took John away from the house on Park Street—and the Sentinel, which had moved to its present brick-and-cinder-block structure on Bridge Street after the fire—and off to Rudy and Joan Shatney’s sporting camps as soon as mud season came.

  In 1988 Carl Drega wrote a letter to Fred Harrigan that was published in the News and Sentinel: “I have owned land in Columbia, NH, since 1970. Over the years I have experienced many problems with the Board of Selectmen and the Planning Board regarding their application of the law of New Hampshire and local ordinances. Specifically their selective enforcement of the law. Back in 1972 I was actually sued because I had erected a building and used tar paper siding instead of approved siding materials. Judgment was rendered against me and I satisfied the judgment.”

  Drega continued, noting other buildings in Columbia with tarpaper siding. To his way of thinking, judgment had been rendered against his building, a barn, because he was from away, was a “flatlander,” and because his wife, Rita—who was from the North Country—was part Native American, and so similarly despised and discriminated against. The letter does not touch on the circumstance that immediately conspired to compound its author’s anger with grief.

  Carl Charles Drega was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1935, according to his birth certificate, though he himself, for whatever reason—perhaps to be thought closer in age to Rita—claimed 1930 as his birth year, altering the date on his own copy of the certificate.

  He was the youngest of the seven children of Joseph and Anna Drega, Polish immigrants and Catholic, Joseph being a house painter. Carl Drega quit school after the tenth grade and earned membership in the United Brotherhood of Millwrights and Machinery Erectors, as well as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. He got short-contract jobs out of union halls in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, working at sites all over New England and elsewhere in the country—Ohio, Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, and several other states. Between jobs he lived on unemployment benefits.

  No matter how distant his job sites, Drega went in a pickup with a camper on the back, sleeping on-site in the truck to save money. At work he was a loner, eating lunch by himself, cultivating few friends, and acquiring a reputation for a quick temper in response to perceived slights or injustices. But his bosses liked him—Drega neither drank nor used drugs; was neat, honest, hardworking, highly skilled, and always ready to work double shifts. He had no trouble passing background checks to work several stints at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant in the 1990s.

  Those job-site virtues—and sometimes the temper—were twisted up in a streak of perfectionism that was never off the clock. Jerry Upton, Drega’s best friend, lives in a Vermont home full of handsome furniture that he built for his second wife, Margaret. Upton is a highly skilled carpenter, but once, while driving a tractor around a corner of the barn that Drega built at his place in Columbia, he accidentally hooked a board and pulled it loose. He stopped the tractor and asked Drega for a hammer to nail it back. “‘Nope,’ he told me,” Upton said. “I couldn’t be trusted. He wanted it done just so, just exactly—and I mean exactly—the way he wanted it.”

  Drega moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, from Massachusetts in 1965. That was where he met Rita Belliveau, who came from Groveton, just north of Lancaster, and who was fifteen years older than he was. Rita worked as a waitress in a Manchester restaurant Drega favored. It was his first marriage, her third. In 1969 the couple bought a two-acre lot in Bow and lived in rooms Drega built over a metal-sided garage. They lived quietly there, though once a complaint was filed against Drega for trapping a neighbor’s dog in a wire snare—but after the dog had broken into a pen and killed some of the pheasants Drega kept. The dog came back and was snared that second time.

  Physically, Drega was something of a protean figure. In newspaper accounts he was described as large and hulking, but the measurements ascribed to him—even in police records—varied widely (like his age), from 5′10″ to 6′4″, from 165 pounds to 230. Margaret Upton remembers him as tall and slender, 6′2″, 180 pounds or so, “and very good-looking.” Some others, people who met Drega only briefly, remember him as being of average height and frail-looking. But he was powerful enough to astonish Upton and others—when they were helping to line his riverfront with riprap—with the boulders he could lift.

  He was also that sort of prickly, wary soul who could become a close and loyal friend. The Dregas were social with neighbors in Bow, George and Bernice Prusia, and in 1991—after George Prusia had broken his ankle—Drega kept the Prusias’ driveway plowed all winter. Jerry Upton, who for many years ran a sawmill in Bow and also did excavating work, met Drega through a mutual friend after Rita had died. Their friendship began when Upton’s father suggested he take a plate of food to a man who was all by himself on Thanksgiving. Upton was surprised to find the widower moved nearly to tears by the gesture.

  The property that Carl and Rita bought in Columbia in 1970—a six-acre lot on the east bank of the Connecticut, land that had once supported a gravel pit—was intended eventually as the site of a retirement home. Its driveway off Route 3 led to a ridgetop and then down past the gravel pit to a two-bedroom stick-built cabin on a grassy swale near the river. Drega added a greenhouse and solarium to the cabin and then began work on a monumental three-story barn, built partly into the ridge, with three carports and a palladium window at its peak. Later Upton came up from Bow to help with that work, getting paid whatever Drega could afford and staying several days at a time. Upton remembers his friend using thin, triangular dowels of wood as forms in blocking CARL DREGA into the wet concrete on a wing wall outside the structure. When the concrete dried, it looked as though the words had been engraved there.

  Upton and Drega did other jobs around the property together or else rode the back roads looking for bargains in vehicles or heavy equipment. During one rainy ride they took far afield to look at a tractor, the windshield wipers went out on the orange 1974 Dodge D100 pickup gifted to Drega by his brother Frank. So Drega tied the wipers to string threaded through both the driver- and passenger-side windows, and they continued on, laughing, each taking turns with a yank to the string.

  Sometimes they put Drega’s canoe into the Connecticut and rode downstream to his cabin, with Upton fishing for trout, Drega often content to paddle. They resolved some day to canoe the length of the Allagash River in Maine, and talked about that often.

  Upton was hardly aware of the judgment rendered against his friend in 1972 or the rage incubating in the shadow it cast. Drega didn’t speak of it.

  John Harrigan never developed into a likely candidate for college—unlike Susan, who went to Connecticut College and then Yale, or Peter, who went to Harvard—but Fred and Esther insisted. “In high school I was going out with this beautiful blonde, and my folks were afraid I was going to get tied down into an early marriage,” John said. “So they sent me as far away as they could.”

  Which was out to New Mexico State University. John took a plane to Dallas–Fort Worth and then a bus to Las Cruces. “I got out, and there were tumbleweeds blowing across the ground, and I thought to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ That fall in the dormitory I found a scorpion in my slipper. I stayed long enough to determine that college wasn’t for me, that I was wasting my parents’ money. I went home in February and told my folks I was all done with that.”

  So he packed a lunch pail—like his grandfather Carl had—and took a job at the Ethan Allen furniture factory in Beecher Falls, Vermont. There he ran a slot-and-bore machine making bedposts ready to receive rails. When he had saved enough money, he sent for a beautiful brunette he had met at New Mexico State, Belinda Ramirez, the daughter of a security guard at Los Alamos.

  Belinda may have wondered what the hell she was doing in a pl
ace like New Hampshire’s North Country, once she came across the border from Montreal after John picked her up at the airport. But she found a job as a receptionist for Doc Gifford, the local historian who was also the family doctor for the Harrigans and—along with his wife, Dr. Marjorie Parsons, a.k.a. Parsie—most everybody else in the Colebrook area. In 1957 it had been Doc Gifford who pointed out Sputnik to John as the satellite whirled over Main Street one night. Ten years after Sputnik—to Fred and Esther’s dismay, and to John’s contrarian tied-down-early satisfaction—John and Belinda were married.

  Then the young couple abandoned the North Country. In 1968 they moved to Milford, in southern New Hampshire. At the Lorden Lumber Company, John was apprenticed to a master in the art of grading lumber and making 30 percent more money than at the furniture factory. But one day John got sick of always being outside in the mill yard and shivering through the winter. On his day off, he went from door to door down Main Street in the neighboring city of Nashua, where his father had nearly set up shop, looking for someplace where he could work inside.

  The office of the Nashua Telegraph, a daily newspaper, was the last place into which he poked his nose. No, he didn’t have a college degree. No, he couldn’t type. No, he didn’t have experience working at a newspaper beyond selling one on a street corner. “But I can do any job you give me better than anybody else.”

  It was only the bluster, what John calls his “French-Irish arrogance,” that got the attention of Telegraph editor Mike Shalhoup. “He stuck a well-worn twin-lens Rolleiflex into my hands and growled, ‘Go find me a picture for the front page,’” John wrote in a column. “I had utterly no idea what to do except drive around looking for something unusual. The Nashua-Hudson bridge was being replaced, the old one recently closed off as the new one received finishing touches. I spotted a stray cat on the empty bridge, jumped out, composed the shot, and made two exposures—the old rule of two negatives, never just one. And there it was, that very afternoon, page one.”