In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Vickie never broached the subject of marriage with John. It was just something that everybody expected would happen—not only the Uglies, but every vested member of the town gossip mill. As the months passed by, however, and the years mounted, John reached the end of each day thinking he still hadn’t quite recovered from the wounds of his divorce from Belinda, that things with Vickie were good enough as they were. “I was just stupid,” he said later. “The clock was ticking.”

  The relationship didn’t end so much as it simply lost heat and expired. “It wasn’t Vickie’s fault things didn’t work out,” John Lanier observed. In time, in the eyes of their friends, the two went from being joined at the hip to being as on-again/off-again as a woodstove in May and then—around 1990—to being simply off.

  Yet they never fought, nor were ever less than good friends. Maybe that was a mistake on Vickie’s part, if she really wanted to reel in this fish, but though she was plucky, it wasn’t in her nature to be hard that way. They still took long, rambling truck rides together on the cusp of each season, just to see what was settling in or breaking loose along the back roads. They still called each other to bet the price of dinner on the track of a thunderstorm as it came up the valley. John still went over to the house on Bungy Loop now and then to play cards, share a meal, sit by the fire. The difference was that he no longer stayed the night. The only time Vickie ever mentioned marriage was during one of those visits. “If you ever did marry,” she asked him, “would it be to someone like me?”

  In 1991, after Fred died, John gave Vickie his father’s collection of law books and a sweetheart deal on office space in the newspaper building. Vickie moved into Fred’s old office, where Tallak took up residence on Fred’s old leather couch. At John’s insistence, however, his father’s brass plaque remained mounted outside the front door. Vickie had a plaque done in exactly the same manner and hung it beneath Fred’s: “Vickie M. Bunnell, Attorney at Law.”

  Reporter Claire Lynch is of that cast of mind that sees the permeability of past, present, and future; sees time’s straddling of that borderland between the waking world and its semblances in dreams. That was one of the reasons—on the morning of August 19—that she was possessed by gloom, pricked by foreboding.

  Well, it was Tuesday, and even someone as skeptical as John Harrigan had noticed that big stories break on Tuesday, on press day, on the one day of the week when big stories were least easily accommodated. Claire had heard it too many times already—John’s voice ringing through the building, crackling with exasperation, as though he were still editor, and it was his job, not Dennis’s or Susan’s, to shoehorn it in: “We can’t have this today!”

  If not big stories, then acts of God. She remembered a Tuesday when the Connecticut was flooding and stretches of Route 3 to Lancaster were under water. Nonetheless, at the end of the day the page negatives had to get down to the Coös Junction Press. She and John lashed a canoe to the top of his pickup. Then they took Harvey Brook Road through Columbia. The brook was over its banks as well, and in places the water rose high on the fenders. But they splashed through without having to abandon the truck, and the Sentinel got printed.

  Tuesday was also the day that Claire visited the town, courthouse, and police department offices across the street—though actually she always enjoyed that. At 9:00 a.m., she was just going over her list of those she hoped to talk to there when Vickie Bunnell came in through the back door of the building. Tallak sniffed politely at Susan and Dennis, then came clicking over to Claire’s desk, her head bent and her tail gently moving. Claire took both floppy ears in her hands and scratched, drinking in the sweet-and-sour scent that always cloaked the English setter’s face, something like overripe cranberries, she thought.

  A few minutes later, Claire was cheered—if only slightly—to see a pair of state police cruisers parked on the other side of Bridge Street. One, 608, belonged to Scott Phillips, and that new Crown Victoria, 719, had to be Les Lord’s. Its paint and chrome were lustrous, almost fiery, in the morning light.

  The scanner had been quiet all morning, but Claire wanted to check for any word on the runaway campers. And these state troopers just happened to be her two favorite sources. Scott was thirty-two, about her own age, and action-hero handsome. He was also frank and honest with her, willing to say what was going on between the lines in the official version of a police story, trusting her enough to speak off the record when necessary. Les couldn’t resist a good story, and he was a fine source too, though sometimes his accounts could be a little too good—and just too funny—to be true.

  Inside the town police station, though, neither Scott nor Les had news on the runaways, or anything else. They sat at adjoining desks on the downstairs floor. Scott was working on a report, but he laid his pen aside to ask a few questions himself. He made some teasing references to someone else in law enforcement who, like Claire, had just become single again. Scott wanted to confirm eyewitness reports that the man had been flirting with her. He said, “I think there’s something going on between you two.”

  Claire laughed for what felt like the first time in weeks. “No, no—there’s nothing going on.”

  Les was eating at the other desk. He looked doubtfully at her with two oatmeal cookies in one hand and an open can of orange soda in the other. “Hey, you,” Claire said. “Don’t you have a heart condition?”

  She was glad of a chance to change the subject, to preempt anything Les might add, but now she was mad at him as well. She remembered a photo that Charlie Jordan took, one that had been used in a series of ads for the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital in Colebrook. The ads featured people whose lives had been saved by the proximity of that hospital—for example, Les, who was rushed there a few years ago with a heart attack. In the ad, Les stood grinning behind the open door of his old cruiser and above the quote that served as the ad’s banner: “Today I’m well, enjoying my family and my job.”

  “Is that what your doctor told you to eat?” she demanded.

  “Well, he did say this stuff would kill me,” Les said. “But he didn’t say when.”

  Claire mentioned Bev and their boys, Shawn and Corey, and how lucky Les was to have a family, and they to have a father. Mostly because she liked him so much, she found herself getting angry enough to annoy Les, which wasn’t easy to do. Suddenly the discussion was over. “Claire,” Les said, “you know I’m going to eat what I want to eat.”

  Claire shivered slightly and fell silent. She blamed herself—something bubbling over from that gloom, from what she had learned too suddenly of late about the noonday darkness on the other side of this sky, the cruel mortal speed of each minute and hour. She also had a feeling that Scott and Les were sitting on something they didn’t want to talk about yet.

  Claire went outside with her notebook empty and her emotions straining again at the leash she tried to keep them on. Within the past several months a series of catastrophes had hit her and her immediate family like drumbeats—the death of her grandmother, and then of her father, and then a close friend’s suicide, and then the failure of her marriage. Last night she had dreamed, again, about her father.

  She walked by Scott’s cruiser, wondering what might happen next, whether it might just be an inconvenient story at work or another harrowing of the spirit. That was when she remembered a dream recently told to her by Dennis, who shared her suspicions about loops in time and different levels of reality. Dennis dreamed that he was sitting in the back seat of Scott’s cruiser, this very vehicle, while Susan Zizza was in the front seat, weeping and complaining of a killing headache. He tried to comfort her, Dennis said, but she couldn’t hear him—and he couldn’t help.

  Dennis Joos thought that one problem with the television signal booster Beno Lamontagne had for sale at Lazerworks, the little electronics store across from the Sentinel Building on Bridge Street, was its price—at fifty-nine dollars, not so affordable really. The other problem was his certainty that neither Helen nor Scott Nearing would a
pprove.

  He thought about it that Tuesday morning as he stood in Lazerworks’s music section and flipped through racks of CDs. He was on a ten-minute break from the newspaper. The booster dangled in its plastic packaging on a rack in another part of the store. Beno waited patiently at the cash register, and Dennis didn’t want to betray how much he was struggling with this.

  He was frankly ashamed he had a TV and a rooftop aerial antenna for it—or even an electric bill. Dennis had come to the North County (and his wife, Polly, had come back to it) to be spared electric bills, among other things. He had grown up in Exeter, in southern New Hampshire, in a household rather like the Harrigans’: educated, middle-class, professional. He wanted a simpler and gentler sort of life than the one he saw around him, and after college (the University of Colorado, political science) he joined the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, vowing obedience, chastity, and poverty. He served a year as a postulant and then, starting in 1961, six years as a novice at a seminary in Callicoon, New York.

  One of his classmates at the St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary was a man who—many years later—would post a blog under the name of Geezer Ed: “The ramblings of a gay geezer who is still trying to figure it all out.” Dennis earned young Geezer Ed’s lifelong gratitude during lunch one day at the seminary, a day when another novice was attacking Ed with homophobic slurs. “Dennis was sitting opposite me and heard every nasty word,” Ed posted. “He turned to the boy (whose name I have forgotten) and told him very nicely to shut up. This was the last time I remember the boy hassling me.”

  In 1967, though, near the end of his novitiate, Dennis was excused from the order. “He was heartbroken,” Geezer Ed wrote of the night Dennis learned this. “He cried so hard I was worried for him, but I had no idea what to say.” Nor does Ed say why Dennis was expelled, but Claire Lynch believed the problem was obedience—or more precisely, irreverence. “I think he was thrown out for too many practical jokes,” she said.

  Instead Dennis became a VISTA volunteer, posted to Houston, Texas. He also began studying the back-to-the-land books of Helen and Scott Nearing, thrilling to the first sentence of Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World: “Many a modern worker, dependent on wage or salary, lodged in city flat or closely built-up suburb and held to the daily grind by family demands or other complicating circumstances, has watched for a chance to escape the cramping limitations of his surroundings, to take his life into his own hands and live it in the country, in a decent, simple, kindly way.”

  It was a kindly speech-and-hearing therapist who gave Dennis that chance. By 1971 he was back in New Hampshire and working as an attendant at the Laconia State School, a home for mentally disabled children and adults near where Vickie Bunnell was attending college. Polly Prince was born in Laconia but had grown up in Stewartstown and was anxious to return to the North Country, where land was plentiful and cheap enough to enact the Nearings’ model of the good life: a homemade stone house, homemade furniture, an ample garden, a small orchard, a maple sugar bush, and as little contact as possible with the consumer economy and the daily grind.

  In 1972 Dennis and Polly pooled their savings and bought a twenty-acre lot off South Hill Road, not far from where John Harrigan lived, but higher on the hill and across the town line. The next spring they made a pilgrimage to meet the Nearings at their stone house in Maine, quit their jobs in Laconia, moved into a 23-by-8-foot trailer on their Stewartstown property, and began building their home.

  “The summer of ’73 was a glorious time for us,” Dennis wrote in a March 1988 article published in the Mother Earth News. “We were delighted to be working for ourselves. We used to joke about being unemployed, unmarried, uninsured, and pregnant, but it was the first time either of us had felt such an intense sense of freedom.”

  The recklessness of it all was part of the glory: “Many of our relatives thought we were absolutely insane, and perhaps we were. Polly had a malignant tumor in her hip when she was a teenager, and the doctors zapped it with a megadose of cobalt radiation. Yet here she was mixing concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow.”

  They married in June, and their son, Aaron, was born in the fall. In deer season Dennis posted a sign on the property that he never took down: “Please don’t hunt here—I don’t want to get shot.” They had finished the shell of the house before Aaron’s birth, and then spent their first winter in the trailer.

  By the mid-’80s, Dennis wrote, they were still unhappy with an electrical system they ran at intervals off their car battery, but otherwise “we have reached a point of equilibrium. Aaron is in the seventh grade in a two-room school, Polly works three days a week as a speech therapist, and I work three days as a printer. We can survive on two part-time jobs because we have no mortgage, no electric bills, no car payments, and we make the most of our large, well-weeded garden.”

  Dennis had started out doing some freelance writing for cash, mostly for the Civic, a free weekly newspaper run by Merle Wright, the onetime News and Sentinel editor who had hired Fred Harrigan on the day the lawyer poked his nose in. When Wright died in a plane crash in 1977, Dennis was cajoled into part-time work at the printing business Wright had started, at that point run by his widow.

  And Dennis was still writing then, doing some freelance reporting on his off-days for the Coös County Democrat. Then slowly, inexorably, he got sucked into journalism on a full-time basis: the courthouse beat for the Democrat after John Harrigan bought it, then a stint running the Sentinel after being hired away by Fred Harrigan, and then a friendly reunion with John when he inherited the newspaper. At home Dennis and Polly had acquired a telephone and a pickup truck; Dennis had built a stone-sided woodshed, a small indoor pool in which Polly could exercise her damaged hip, and a windmill for recharging a bank of 12-volt batteries.

  Dennis wrote with an affection for the North Country and its people that pleased Fred Harrigan—and also John. In a profile of Doc Gifford, Dennis took note of the device Doc and Parsie employed to encourage the virtue of patience in people waiting outside their offices: a human skeleton in one chair with a book in its bony fingers and an expired cigarette clamped between its teeth. Dennis also noted that Doc took part in the sometimes saucy musicals mounted as fund-raisers for the American Legion Child Welfare Fund. In one such, an angel was required to descend from the heavens by means of cables and pulleys. One night in his office, after hours, Doc wanted to make sure that his harness worked properly. He took off his shirt, strapped the apparatus to his arms, and heard a knock at the door. He said come in to someone he presumed to be another member of the cast—actually it was a new patient from out of town. “She entered to find the doctor bare-chested with angel wings sprouting from his arms,” wrote Dennis. “Some doctors just know how to break the ice with a patient.”

  Dennis admired Doc’s and Parsie’s irreverence, their refusal to put on airs. As field boss of the Sentinel, he was like that himself. He organized his time according to the Betty Boop calendar over his desk, kept a photo on his wall of his adult self sitting on Santa’s lap, came to work in impertinent T-shirts—“Is it recess yet?”—or sometimes fake noses or cowboy hats. With John Harrigan’s consent, he sometimes planted bogus stories in the Sentinel, such as several about a hermit living in a snow pile in the parking lot behind the building.

  But there was nothing flip about the crash course in journalism Dennis taught to Susan Zizza, Claire Lynch, and the newspaper’s correspondents in outlying towns—all on-the-job learners, as he had been. There was always more than one point of view, he said, and you had to represent them all. Get the facts and then keep digging—there were liable to be more. Look for the odd angle, the unexpected approach, the catchy lead. If it sounded like writing, you’d have to rewrite it until it sounded like conversation. Tell the truth, but never forget how dangerous and terrible the truth could be.

  The truth could be bad enough for Fred Harrigan to want only part of it. John took on more, but at the cost of m
oodiness and intensity. Dennis’s mellow, beatific temperament offered a good counterweight to John’s, and his was a mildness stiffened by principles of tolerance and nonviolence that, St. Francis–like, encompassed the breadth of creation. At the Sentinel, Dennis was famous for his refusal to countenance even the squashing of a spider. Call him, he insisted, and he’d carry the offending arachnid outside. Beno Lamontagne was as tough as any of his French Canadian forebears, but he was deathly allergic to bee stings, and Beno was grateful to Dennis for one day removing a bee—alive, by hand, without a sting—that had gotten into Lazerworks and driven the owner under the counter.

  As a newspaperman, though, Dennis was challenged and affronted every day by the troubled world’s cruelty—a cruelty that couldn’t be just silenced, as it had once been during lunch at the seminary. Instead a reporter had to shout it abroad. Dennis never advised Susan or anyone else to allow a source to read or edit a story before it was published—that would be contrary to journalistic ethics. But he did it himself on several occasions: the hair stylist whose thirty-five-year-old daughter had committed suicide or the electric company lineman whose fourteen-year-old daughter had been raped. He allowed them to excise anything they found painful or lurid in his stories.

  Dennis warned Claire, when she was hired two years ago, that the newspaper business could make her cynical, to be careful about that. Over the years, behind the wacky T-shirts, Dennis could feel his own mind darkening, his optimism leaching away, along with that old sense of freedom and equilibrium. Sometimes, to his regret, other staffers at the Sentinel saw that darkness. John had a name for it: Dennis’s Look of Gloom.

  Dennis knew what brought it on: the various ways in which people failed to be kind and the tough news stories that resulted; this whole midlife-and-getting-older thing, now that he was fifty-one; and the realization that—despite the promises he had made to the Nearings—he had more or less become a modern worker and had joined the daily grind, “dependent on wage or salary.” The money had allowed the stone house to become much more comfortable—especially after he and Polly had consented to be wired into the New Hampshire Electric Co-Operative’s grid. Then they bought a TV, that electronic wormhole into the consumer economy, and an aerial that pulled in only a couple of snowy channels. Beno promised that this booster could clarify those channels and pull in a couple more.