In the Evil Day

In fact she was happy enough in the Northwest that, when attorney Phil Waystack called from Colebrook in 1980, there was no reason to think she would even consider his invitation. Waystack had come from Boston—which made him the most egregious sort of flatlander—and had opened a practice in Colebrook in 1975. It was slow-going at first while he haunted the local district courts, passing out his card to anyone willing to take it. In 1977 the Superior Court in Lancaster appointed him to defend a murder case, and he earned an acquittal. He started getting plenty of work after that, but he got nervous in 1980 when he was appointed to a second murder case.

  A woman named Rotha Purrington had confessed to killing her husband, but the man had been a wife beater, and Waystack saw there was a case to be made for self-defense. The attorney general’s office was prosecuting Purrington with a team of two lawyers; Waystack didn’t like being outnumbered, and he was busy enough then that he generally needed help anyway. Then he remembered hearing about Vickie—a female attorney, good, who was from this area but currently on the West Coast.

  “The woman is charged with second-degree murder,” he told Vickie over the telephone. “She’s already spilled her guts to the police. I need some help, and I’d really like to have a woman on the team for this kind of case.”

  The next question, had he known Vickie, would have surprised Waystack. “What about after?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m sure I could use you on a permanent basis if things work out.”

  But Vickie was guarded about that with her parents. “I’m coming home to help with this murder case,” she told them. “But not for good—five months, maximum.”

  Waystack was taken aback when, on the first day of the trial, Vickie stopped to pick some lilacs from a bush outside the courthouse in Lancaster. “Lilacs are the New Hampshire state flower,” she told him, as if that were explanation enough.

  “But you can’t bring those into a courtroom,” Waystack said.

  Vickie did so anyway, laying a spray of blossoms at the side of the defendant. The judge called for the counsels for the prosecution and defense to introduce themselves, and then he asked Waystack, “What are those flowers?”

  “Your honor, those are lilacs.” Then, after a pause, “Which happen to be the state flower of New Hampshire.”

  “Please remove them from the courtroom.”

  The lilacs were excused, but the team of Waystack and Bunnell won an acquittal, and Waystack asked Vickie to stay on.

  “I have no idea why she changed her mind, because she liked Seattle so much,” Bunny said. “But I don’t know—she ended up doing so much pro bono work with Phil, maybe she figured she could do more good here.”

  Certainly, in hindsight, there was that, but maybe there was this too—that she wanted to go hunting and fishing out the back door again. Maybe she decided that what she was really born for was just that.

  During a warm, rainy night in June that year, John Harrigan was in Lancaster at the Coös Junction Press, printing that week’s run of the Coös County Democrat in the capacity of chief pressman. He went outside on a break just as Vickie happened to be driving by on her way to the Lancaster courthouse. He had heard she was back from the Northwest, but hadn’t seen her yet.

  He waved and Vickie stopped. She said she liked the work she was doing with Phil and that she was starting to look around for her own place to live. “She was so vibrant and energetic that I wondered if she really meant it about staying around here,” John recalled. “And she was a woman. I thought, ‘What’s there for a woman to do in the North Country?’”

  So he asked her that. “What about after work? Don’t you get bored around here with nothing to do?”

  Vickie’s eyes widened, enough so that John might have seen in them sun-streaked shadows of all the wild ponds, streams, and fields that Sliver and Bunny had showed her, that Rudy Shatney had showed John.

  “Nothing to do?” she scoffed.

  If there were a Tarot card bearing the image of Carl Drega, it would look like this: a man in sunglasses and a claw hammer in his hand, astride the peak of a barn. The sky is that of Titus Hill, lit with St. Elmo’s fire or else the mortar bursts of contending armies.

  In 1991 Jerry Upton went through a tough divorce, but he was buoyed through it all by the sympathy and encouragement of his best friend. And it was Drega who helped cut the last of the lumber at Upton’s sawmill in Bow. Then Upton closed that business and moved to Hardwick, Vermont, where he soon got hired to build a barn. He in turn hired three other builders, one of whom was Drega. They worked sixteen-hour days, making their own trusses by hand, with Drega applying shims to make sure all the trusses were exactly—exactly!—the same height.

  Upton has the snapshots he took of that project. The barn is a Noah’s ark of a building, forty-by-sixty, with an aluminum roof, batten-board siding, and a strip of Plexiglas windows around its circumference under the eaves. Half of it was for heavy-machinery storage, the other half a workshop. Upton is squeamish about heights, but Drega was fearless, and many of the photos are backside views of a lean and rangy man in blue jeans, T-shirt, and a carpenter’s belt on a high narrow catwalk, or at the top of a tall ladder, or striding boldly across the roof. Some are of a figure just barely visible, ghostlike, as he bends to his work in the gathering dusk.

  That was twenty years after the day in 1971that Drega had taken Rita—remembered by Eric Stohl as “a very nice lady, very quiet”—to Elliot Hospital in Manchester with back pain. The cause was found to be cervical cancer, already in an advanced stage. Months later Drega went into the hospital to visit Rita, and she noticed a slip of paper stuffed into his shirt pocket. “What’s that?” Rita asked. It was the receipt for his payment on her life insurance, and it stabbed the carpenter to the quick that Rita should have seen that paper as her life was slipping away. And he punished himself for it. “I felt like the dickens,” he confessed to Upton. “It’s never stopped bothering me.”

  Drega was already well into his own barn building then, and it’s odd that a man so practiced in construction and its protocols should have neglected to file for a building permit. No matter—Kenneth Parkhurst, a tough-minded Korean War vet and chair of the Columbia Board of Selectmen in 1971, told Drega he could apply after the fact and proceed with his work so long as the papers were in order. Drega grumbled but filled out an application and brought it to Parkhurst’s home. There Parkhurst asked him to fill in the blank on what the barn would have by way of permanent siding. “Just write down what you’re intending to do there, just so we have it on file,” he said.

  It was a small thing—seemingly. Perhaps by then these two tough-minded, strong-willed men had already gotten off on the wrong foot together. Perhaps Drega had already noticed that some structures in Columbia—grandfathered in, maybe, under old zoning regulations—didn’t have permanent siding. Perhaps this was a matter of new political conviction for a man who had previously abided by zoning regulations in Bow. Be that as it may: “His attitude was that no hick town was going to tell him what to do with his property,” Parkhurst later told a reporter from the Union Leader.

  The blank was left that way. In June 1971, Columbia selectmen denied Drega’s application for a building permit. They invited him to reapply within a week or else be charged a fine of ten dollars per day.

  Drega refused either to reapply or to pay the fine, and a year later the town sued. “I was the one who saw to that,” said Parkhurst. “We had no choice. Either you enforce the laws you’ve got, or you don’t need laws in the first place.” Drega did not appear in court, however, answering that Rita was too ill to be left alone. She was—in fact she died on the night of the hearing, June 9, at the age of fifty-two.

  Parkhurst has no doubt this coincidence was fateful. “Drega blamed the town for her death, claiming the whole thing was too much stress for her,” he told the Union Leader. “He was a thorn in our sides ever since.”

  In time Drega’s six-hundred-dollar fine—negotiated down from a much lar
ger amount—was paid by his brother Frank, a machine operator in southern Connecticut. In time—“in his own good time,” Parkhurst said—the barn was covered by handsome board-and-batten siding.

  But Drega was never able to let the incident go. The complaint he sent to the News and Sentinel was written sixteen years after the fact—a letter whose spelling and phrasing had been gussied up by someone else. Drega’s own prose style was, shall we say, rough-hewn. But the argument was his, and the bitterness.

  For twenty-five years Drega was a familiar figure at Rita Belliveau Drega’s grave in the Northumberland Cemetery, on the banks of the Connecticut. At home, whether in Bow or in the North Country, he nursed that grievance against the Town of Columbia—and then others that followed in its wake—in the way a spider nurses its egg.

  “The brain within its groove,” wrote Emily Dickinson, another solitary resident of a small New England town, “Runs evenly and true ;”

  But let a splinter swerve,

  ’T were easier for you

  To put the water back

  When floods have slit the hills,

  And scooped a turnpike for themselves,

  And blotted out the mills !

  John Harrigan was six years older than Vickie. He remembered her from boyhood visits to Sliver and Bunny’s barbershop, and he caught other glimpses of her during the years of friendship between Fred and Esther and the Bunnells. He lost track of her when she went to college and then the Northwest. He took sudden notice, though, that summer she was home from Plymouth State and working as a gravedigger for old Roland Martin, the sexton for the town cemetery.

  John passed by the cemetery gates one day, saw activity within, and turned in to say hi to Vickie. She and Roland and another man were halfway into a fresh grave. John remembers Vickie—wearing duck boots, khaki shorts, and a dirty T-shirt—rooting in the earth with her pointed shovel like a badger. The girl paused and grinned up at him. John took that gritty smile home with him and kept it.

  About a decade later, in the summer of 1980, it was Vickie who spied John taking a break outside the Coös Junction Press building in Lancaster and who stopped to say hi. At that time the Coös Junction Press was only a few weeks old. John had just bought that used Goss Community web offset press and moved the huge machine to Lancaster. With the Goss, John was already printing the Coös County Democrat—which he had purchased two years before—and picking up some local business. Eventually he would print weekly runs of his father’s News and Sentinel as well.

  At first Fred Harrigan was furious to have been outmaneuvered in buying the Democrat, to find himself still in competition with that operation, and to have his own son at the bottom of it all. At the same time he had to admire John’s gumption. Nor were the two papers really such direct competitors. Their base territories overlapped only in Stratford, and only on the biggest stories did their coverage stray farther than that. In time father and son resumed their Thursday tennis matches—which had been suspended—and they made it a point not to talk business. It helped when John offered his father a sweetheart deal in getting the Sentinel printed in Lancaster. But on the one occasion when enough of the Sentinel’s machinery was broken-down for Fred’s staff to have to come down to the Democrat to use that newsroom in beating their deadline, John took care to hide his own staff’s stories on the pasteup boards under layers of cardboard.

  In 1980 John—besides doing much of his own presswork at the printing business—was also writing the Democrat’s editorials, doing most of its darkroom work, and on Wednesdays even delivering the papers before dawn to various newsstands after working until midnight to print them. He was rarely home, which was one reason his marriage was on the skids. That next summer John bought a motor home and made himself stop working long enough for a four-week trip out West with Belinda and their three kids. Before that trip, though, while taking the motor home into Vermont for a test drive, John passed the Bunnells’ house in Canaan and saw Vickie in the front yard. He stopped and gave her a tour of the vehicle. He couldn’t help wishing that he was about to leave for somewhere far away with her.

  The vacation was a success, but not, ultimately, the marriage. Tangled up with John’s gumption, for better or for worse, is a doggedness that makes it hard for him to veer from the path he’s set on. Gene Ehlert—a reporter at the Democrat when John bought the paper, and later its managing editor—remembers a winter night on which John came to his house for dinner and brought his daughter Katie, who was still a baby. It had snowed all evening, and Gene asked John to wait a moment before leaving so he could shovel his step and then a path to John’s vehicle. John told Gene not to bother, growling that he could handle a little snow—and he promptly flipped head over heels with the baby in his arms.

  John stood, cussed, brushed himself off. He went back to the porch to make sure Katie was okay as Gene advanced with the snow shovel. John waved him off, sallied forth again, and just as quickly went arse-over-keister again. Without a glance backward, John regained his feet, cradled the uncomplaining child, and disappeared, without further mishap, into the dark.

  So it went at home, with that same sort of compact with fate. By the spring of 1981, John and Belinda were sleeping in separate bedrooms at their house in Lancaster. By the summer, John had moved out. One day in July, with the divorce already in motion, Belinda abruptly left for Montreal, and from there to New Mexico, with Karen, Michael, and Katie. “That nearly killed me,” John said. The divorce was followed by a long battle for custody of the children. All three came back in their teenage years to live most of each year with their father, but for a time John’s only glimpses of them were from a distance in New Mexico schoolyards.

  After the divorce, John worked harder and longer, if that was possible, but also began dating. He took care to avoid women in the Lancaster area so as not to feed the gossip mill. One candidate who met that criterion was Vickie, who by then had begun renting Warren and Ann Brown’s house on Bungy Loop. Their first date was a picnic-toting snowshoe trip through wild and untracked forest south of that house. It was April. There was still a lot of snow in the high country, but the streams had broken up and were running high.

  They came to a stream that John could usually hop across. It might have been a different matter for Vickie, even in summer. Bunny said that the reason she had been the scorekeeper at Canaan’s basketball games, rather than a player like her brother, was that she couldn’t jump a lick. In any event, this stream was too fast and too wide for anybody to jump. They made forays upstream and down, but found no rocks or logs on which to step across. The stream, though, was fringed on both sides by stands of supple white birch, and John remembered a trick he had learned from Rudy Shatney. He told Vickie what he had in mind. Her eyes widened, and then she held her mittens out flat with the palms down, as though fastening herself to the ground. “You go first,” she said.

  John wasn’t so sure about this himself, but characteristically, just to be dogged about it, he tossed his snowshoes and backpack over to the other side. Then he picked out a birch that leaned over the stream, whose crown inclined toward that of another birch on the opposite side. He shinnied up the trunk of the near tree and climbed high enough for his weight to swing its branches within reach of its opposite. Then he pitched himself like a monkey into that other birch and shinnied down safely on the far side.

  Vickie regarded this result with a mix of wonder and despair. John said she could see how easy it was and beckoned for her to throw him her own shoes and pack. Once she was marooned on that side without any gear, her own sort of gumption began to stir. She started up the birch with her heart in her throat but with no thought of backing off. Meanwhile John couldn’t help considering what a wrong-footed start this would be if she fell into the stream and broke her neck. But Vickie scaled the birch, hung on like death as it started to move, and gave herself up to whatever might come next, death or high water, in letting go. When her feet came down next to John’s, their fall was accompanied by
what he described as a “primal scream.”

  Years later, in relating this episode from the pulpit of Colebrook’s Congregational church, John would begin, “When I first walked with this great woman . . .”

  They began each year as soon as the season opened in mud time. Then they went as often as they could and always used flies, never bait, casting them so they just skimmed the water’s surface before settling or else floated quietly just beneath like larvae. In the spring they worked the shorelines as the trout followed the smelt into shallow water, as the bass were clearing off their nests there. Later in the year, in the dog days of summer, they might try another trick John had learned from Rudy Shatney, something Rudy called dredging. John would attach a heavier fly—a Black Ghost maybe—to a sinking line and then strip that fly along the bottom through trout lingering in the cool water there.

  They almost always went by canoe. Vickie paddled like John did, not from a seat but from her knees, down low in the water so your leverage is increased and your paddle gets more purchase. John would steer with the stern paddle Bunny had given him once he and Vickie had started going out together. One reason they liked the canoe was its quiet, the odds it offered of hearing a partridge drumming in the underbrush, of floating up unawares behind a moose feeding on pondweed. Once in a while they fished the Connecticut River, stopping to build a fire on a shady sandbar, roasting hot dogs or sweet sausage on forked willow switches—but like Bunny, they preferred the lakes and ponds.

  In the fall they went bird hunting. That season opened October 1 each year, while the fishing closed October 15. They loved that first half of the month for the opportunity to do both, though they never hunted the first weekend of the season, when the woods were full of flatlanders who scared more grouse than they shot. After that they hunted the untracked fields near Vickie’s house, around Bungy Loop and along Nash Stream and up Blue Mountain. They’d get out for a few hours on weekday afternoons or else make a whole day of it on Sunday, packing 20-gauge shotguns and lunch in their fanny packs.