In the Evil Day

  One weekday they got out earlier than usual, around noon. They wandered into an old apple orchard, picked some wild apples, and also bagged four grouse. They returned to Vickie’s in time for supper, and John plucked and cleaned the birds. He made a bread stuffing with onion and garlic and thyme, sweetened with the apples they had picked. The stuffing went into the birds with chunks of butter and a dusting of poultry seasoning. They baked the grouse in tin foil and ate all four with steamed broccoli and long-stemmed rice.

  Vickie was a fine cook—and every bit the gourmand she had promised to be when Grammy took her to that steak house in Chicago—but John could do great things with wild game. And this was a meal like the one made with the lake trout he had brought home from Big Diamond Pond as a boy—an occasion where everything was so perfect that it stitched body and soul together. John thought about some of the hundred-dollar meals he had been served in Manhattan restaurants during rare visits there. Then he calculated the cost of this meal—“Hardly a farthing,” he said—threw in the companionship he had, and pronounced another blessing.

  John’s other companions during the ’80s were an assorted collection of outdoorsmen that included game wardens, loggers, college professors, guides, students, wildlife biologists, mill hands, and schoolteachers, most of them local, but not all. Together they made up a sort of round table—they referred to themselves most frequently, and not unreasonably, as the Gang of Uglies—into which Vickie was inaugurated as the sole vested representative of her gender. The attribute of ugliness was honorary in her case.

  There were two biologists in that gang. John Lanier worked for state Fish & Game and found himself beguiled by the group’s come-what-may ethos. “A lot of the trips I did with those other guys—and Vickie—were just totally spontaneous,” he said. “Somebody would say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we . . . ’ and then everybody would just drop everything and go. We’d end up in three different vehicles scattered all over the landscape, all on the spur of the moment. That lifestyle was a little foreign to me, actually, but it was a lot of fun.”

  The other biologist, Jeff Fair, was from Sandwich, a town just south of the notches, but he often came up to the North Country to do contract work on loons, and so became the group’s Loon Ranger. “I had heard so much about Vickie, and when I met her I expected her, I suppose, to be gorgeous,” Fair said. “But her face always wore this very interested and observant sort of look, and there was always a presence to her. Anytime you were around her you were aware of her, intrigued by her. She looked you square in the eye and knew enough about anything to be able to talk with anybody in the group. After a couple of months, well, there I was—always glad to lay eyes on her and persuaded that she was beautiful. I guess I fell partly in love with her.”

  Vickie’s patience was tested on the one hand by John’s moods, on the other hand by the random groups of Uglies who would barrel into her office during the workday to steal her for a trip, or play a round of cribbage, or else arrive unannounced at her house for dinner. But this was all part of that freewheeling merry-go-round she rode with John. People came and went, and while they were around they were sometimes drunk and pointedly tactless, trading barbs in that gruff, bass-ackward manner in which men appreciate each other. Once Lanier collapsed while deer hunting in upstate New York with John and several Uglies. He was carried out of the woods and to a hospital, entirely conscious, by men who argued theatrically who would get his gun and boots once he was dead. One doctor opined, “That probably made him mad enough to stick around.” Vickie could give as good as she got in that rough-and-tumble society and made John’s fractious friends feel like they had been expected all the time.

  When they traveled, it was usually by rail and almost always north, where the country got wilder and the night skies darker. Lanier and his wife went once with John and Vickie—and Charlie Jordan and his wife, Donna—on a trip to Halifax by rail. It took three days, round-trip, which was fine in the second story of a glass-topped passenger car, sharing drinks and watching the Maritime countryside roll by as the travelers played cribbage.

  A snapshot from the Jordans’ photo album—one taken by a camera balanced on top of a fence post in Halifax—includes two couples: Charlie and Donna, Vickie and John. The Jordans stand smiling to the left, ramrod straight and adjacent. John looks to the camera and stands with one hand thrust into a hip pocket, the other arm around Vickie’s shoulder. Vickie, in jeans and a turtleneck and a white blouse, has hold of John’s right hand and has turned her smile to his face. One couple is happily married; the other plainly in love.

  Sometimes John left Vickie home and departed with anywhere from four to a dozen Uglies on all-male fishing junkets to Labrador, a thousand miles north of Colebrook. They’d leave at dawn, cross the St. Lawrence at Quebec, drive up the north shore of the St. Lawrence, stay the night at Sept Isles, and then board the Quebec North Shore & Labrador train the next morning. They continued 350 miles by rail until they were dumped—“And I mean ‘dumped,’” said John—at the end-of-the-line village of Menihek. From there they dispersed into fishing camps along 35 miles of pristine lakes and rivers.

  But it wasn’t easy for John to leave his girl home. Jeff Fair remembered one such trip in the mid-’80s when John had to get off the train at every stop in an attempt to find a telephone soon enough to call Vickie. “Lanier and I took note, but we kept quiet about it,” Fair said. “Another guy, though, was giving John all sorts of shit—‘Hey, John, we’re slowing down. You better go call Vickie. I’m telling you, she might get away.’”

  The Uglies didn’t really think she would. On the way home, during a stretch in which John lay asleep, they debated in fractious whispers what kind of canoe they might buy as a gift once John and Vickie got married.

  4

  DECENT, SANE, AND SIMPLE

  WHEN DENNIS JOOS AND SUSAN ZIZZA began trading the News and Sentinel’s editor-in-chief job between them like a medicine ball—for one issue Dennis was in charge, for the next Susan—John Harrigan made a sign to help the rest of the staff keep track. A replica of the notice that rests on the cluttered desk of the rumpled, cynical, and feathered journalist/antihero of the “Shoe” comic strip, the sign said, “The editor is in.” On the morning of August 19, the sign sat on Susan’s desk.

  And Susan was as surprised as John had once been to find herself, in her mid-forties, the editor of a newspaper. She had grown up in Lexington, Massachusetts, but her family roots went as deep into Colebrook history as the Bunnells’. In 1997 the old Getty gas station on the corner of Bridge and Main stood for sale and abandoned—its pumps removed, its light stanchions bare, its pavement cracking. That spot of ruin in the heart of downtown was emblematic of the economic malaise that wracked the North Country once the paper mills started closing. Later, in 2008, the Great Recession settled in like February frost. But in the ’50s, Susan’s grandfather had run that station, and Susan kept a photo of her and her brother gazing from behind its plate-glass window in those easier days.

  As a girl, she had spent part of each summer on her grandparents’ Piper Hill farm in Stewartstown, and her husband, Mark, her high school sweetheart, fell in love with the North Country on his first visit. The Zizzas moved to Colebrook in 1977, and Mark set up as a locksmith in a town, alas, where people generally don’t lock their doors. Nor do they go out of their way to engage in commerce with flatlanders.

  Mark went looking for odd jobs while Susan minded David, the first of their two boys. Things started to look up when Esther Harrigan hired Mark to paint and wallpaper the farmhouse the Harrigans bought on South Hill. Then Doc Gifford gave him some work, and more jobs followed. Eventually locksmithing jobs started to come in.

  When David’s little brother, Alex, was old enough to start school, Susan—whose high cheekbones, short auburn hair, and dusky eyes provided a fine showcase for any beauty product—started selling Avon cosmetics door to door. One day she knocked on the door of Esther Harrigan, who said that sh
e already had a regular Avon Lady, but wouldn’t she come in for some coffee?

  They talked about books they had read and plays they had seen. A while later Esther called to say that the Sentinel needed a typesetter. Did Susan know how to type? Yes. Did she get good grades in English at school? Straight As. Was she interested? Well, thank you, no, she was actually doing pretty well with Avon. Esther offered to pay her just to give it a try. Susan began working two days a week in 1986. Then she started doing pasteup and layout. Soon she was writing stories and taking photos, moving up—and getting sucked in—just as Fred and Esther had, and even their stray-cat son.

  John promoted Susan to assistant editor in 1995, and a year later Dennis suggested they begin power sharing. She fantasized sometimes about working at a big-city daily or a television station, but here she was only a few minutes’ walk from where Alex still attended school. In fact, when David and Alex were little, they would come in during the afternoon to color pictures or do homework at the big table in the newsroom. Fred and Esther didn’t mind (the boys made themselves useful by walking Sir George Colebrooke, the Harrigans’ wire-haired terrier, named after the East India Company magnate who had lent the town its name), nor did John. Susan’s friends on the staff made them feel welcome, especially Dennis. He and David Zizza shared certain passions: Superman comics, Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, baseball cards, most anything else to do with sports.

  And Susan liked having the more experienced Dennis by her side on these pressure-cooker Tuesdays, when everything had to fall into place or else be shimmed to look that way—not just the news and sports stories by Dennis or reporter Claire Lynch and the photos by Leith Jones, but the press releases, ad copy, letters to the editor, obituaries, marriage and birth announcements, and also all the “Locals” columns, these arriving by mail, through the front door, or over the telephone from correspondents in Pittsburg, North Stratford, Columbia, Errol, Stewartstown, Lemington, Canaan, and several other towns on both sides of the river.

  The “Locals” stretched back to the Sentinel’s founding, and their volume each week was a point of pride with the newspaper. For example: “On Sunday, August 10, Bud Hulse was a dinner guest of Mike and Joeng Divney”; or “Vernice Rice of Groveton and Lela Fields were Friday callers on Maxie Bordeau at the Coös County Nursing Hospital in Stewartstown”; or “Delight Thibeault saw a movie, ‘George of the Jungle,’ in Newport with Sarah Fontaine and Kristine Levesque”; and so on for many column inches.

  Arguably this was gossip, despised by John even more than Fred, partly because John had so frequently been a subject of it himself over the years. But scandal remained foreign to these columns, which ensured an absence of color, perhaps, but didn’t diminish the dignity they attached to the smallest gestures of social life in the North Country. The only problem was that the authors of these pieces were paid by the column inch, which lent itself to, well, prolixity. Susan’s first job with these was to cut the columns down to material John was willing to pay for.

  Later John would want feedback on and editing of his publisher’s column for this issue. He was back from his Kiwanis meeting and working on that piece behind a closed door. In the meantime Susan was scrolling through this issue’s first four pages on her monitor. The headline story on the front page, by Dennis, was about the sudden resignation of the town manager. Then there was Dennis’s story on the rediscovery—in a Lancaster Historical Society outbuilding, by Charlie and Donna Jordan—of the original sign marking where the 45th parallel transited Clarksville, and the sign’s reinstallation by the Jordans.

  A couple of short Claire Lynch pieces filled out the front page, stories that Fred Harrigan might have ignored: two boys had run away from Camp E-Toh-Anee, which hosted troubled teenagers and was known locally as Camp Runaway; and there was an incident of petty vandalism, some lit matches shoved down a mail slot, at the Colebrook post office. The previous week’s Lynch story on that weird exchange of gunfire on Bungy Road might possibly have been deemed by Fred serious enough to cover, or possibly dismissed for its lack of happy-go-lucky. That would have been a tough call for Fred, but not for John.

  Photographer Leith Jones also did some writing, and on the inside pages Leith had a story and photos on last Friday’s Old Home Day in Pittsburg and then a preview of the North Country’s biggest moneymaker, the Moose Festival. Now in its sixth year, this event—with its sidewalk sales, craft fairs, hot-air balloon rides, scenic train trips, moose stew cook-off, raffles, and Kiwanis chicken barbecue—was a bigger affair than Christmas for the money it brought in for area merchants, to say nothing of its value to Kiwanis and other charities. Claire would cover that with Leith, and Susan—back to being a reporter then—might do a story on it herself, if Dennis thought it was a good idea.

  Susan scrolled to the back pages and remembered that she needed to check with Dennis on the status of the obituaries. Doc Gifford had died in March, while his wife, Parsie, had died in 1994. A memorial service for both physicians, the Reverend Bud Hulse presiding, was scheduled for Saturday at the Colebrook Village Cemetery. Susan wanted to be sure that Dennis or somebody had written a notice about the event and to see if Dennis needed help in pasting up the obits.

  Around 9:00 a.m. Susie Sambito, Vickie Bunnell’s secretary, arrived, and Vickie herself came in the back door a few minutes later, Tallak trailing behind her. Susie and Vickie had been putting in long days, tying up the loose ends in Vickie’s practice before she headed for Greece the next week. But Vickie wasn’t so pressed that she couldn’t linger at the pasteup board, as she always did on a Tuesday morning, to get an early peek at the week’s news and chat about her own plans for the day.

  In fact Vickie had gotten far enough ahead to take some time off this afternoon. She said she’d be scooting out to meet an old friend (who might be more than just a friend now, Susan thought) for a ride in his private plane. Then she’d have dinner with her parents and also her brother, Earl, and his wife, Pam, at the cabin on Fish Pond. Okay, Susan thought—there was an item for the “Locals” section.

  Vickie was wearing a white blouse and a cool ankle-length cotton skirt with a flower print—similar to the dress she wore in a photograph that hung in the front office. The photo was of the Sentinel staff as it was in August 1970. Vickie worked as an intern at the newspaper that summer, and she stood in the front row next to Esther, who wore a long skirt and a ruffled blouse and who draped a maternal hand over the girl’s shoulder. Fred’s lean and mustachioed face peeked from the back row. They were all ranged in front of the building’s white brick facade. Vickie’s girlish smile was the same she wore today as she talked and laughed with Dennis.

  It seemed odd to Susan that Vickie was the only one in that photo still in the building, but then she reminded herself that it had been taken a long time ago—twenty-seven years this month. Fred and Esther weren’t the only ones who had since died and had their obituaries pasted up in the newsroom.

  Vickie exchanged greetings with Claire, who had been scratching Tallak’s ears, and tore herself away. She vanished into her office with the sound of the dog’s toenails clicking after her.

  The first case that Fred Harrigan wangled for himself in Colebrook, immediately after the war, had been a divorce proceeding. He kept on practicing law, and then serving as a probate and district court judge, even after he and Esther had bought the newspaper. When they moved into the building next to the gas station, he hung a brass plaque outside its front door: “Frederick J. Harrigan, Attorney at Law.” “Sometimes he sat on the same cases he reported on,” John said. “He’d conduct an arraignment, and then write about it in the Sentinel. It was a different kind of time then. You could wear a lot of different hats and nobody would really question you about it.”

  Meanwhile Vickie’s first job with Phil Waystack—after the Rotha Purrington trial—was a cow case, an incident in which a Vermont farmer refused to return a borrowed cow to his neighbor. From there it was on to divorces a
nd bar fights, and also tax law, real estate deeds, title searches, and wills. Still, the Purrington trial proved a harbinger of a different kind of time—an era in the North Country when things previously just whispered about began to show up in court. Vickie carved a niche for herself in skillfully handling such matters: sexual abuse, spouse abuse, victims’ rights, child custody, and adoption.

  She stayed with Waystack for five years and then hung her own shingle outside an office in a building on Main Street. “We were getting a lot of cases, and I wanted someone who could work six days a week,” Waystack said. “But Vickie wanted to cut back to three days, actually, so she could canoe and hike and snowshoe with John the rest of the time. So we parted company, but as friends, and we always referred cases to each other.”

  As her own boss, Vickie was free not only to set her own schedule but also to negotiate payment according to her clients’ circumstances, which were often distressed, and to do as much pro bono work as she felt she could afford. She began to learn French so she could speak in either language with clients of French descent, became a pioneer female member of the town’s Kiwanis Club, and made herself available as well to other local boards and committees. Figure in the time off she devoted to John, and she was making barely enough money to stay in business.

  Meanwhile John wasn’t getting rich, was still working long hours, but at least he had people to help pick up the slack when needed. He hired Dennis Joos to be the court reporter for the Coös County Democrat—until Fred stole Dennis away to the run the News and Sentinel. And John hired Charlie Jordan at the Democrat as well. When John decided he wanted to cut back a little in the mid-’80s—and spend time with Vickie—he proposed that Charlie take turns with him as editor in chief at the Democrat, just as Susan and Dennis would later at the Sentinel.