In the Evil Day

  One of Dennis’s good sources on the crime beat was Howie Weber, a veteran detective in the state police. A few weeks ago they’d been talking about how they both wished they could slow down and appreciate life a little more. Dennis was shocked, really, to find himself in that sort of conversation with a strung-out cop, but it made him feel less alone.

  Then, right after that conversation, a surprising job offer came in over the transom: editor in chief for American Dowser, a little quarterly magazine with offices across the river in Danville, Vermont. Still a job, still a daily grind, but involving stories about people and water and an inexplicable sympathy between the two, instead of suicide, rape, murder. He could do much of his work at home and have more time for the novel he was writing, The Curse of the House of Wingate, a comic—you might say irreverent—tale set in the fictional Coös County town of Sussex. That, and Dennis would have more time with Polly, whose radiated hip had become more painful in recent years.

  It was on behalf of simplifying, of freeing himself of a few complicating circumstances, that Dennis had suggested he and Susan take turns as editor in chief. That had helped—he had more fun during the weeks he was just a reporter. But it hadn’t helped enough. He still caught himself wearing the Look of Gloom now and then, and now it was also brought on by the prospect of quitting at the Sentinel, where he had so many good friends to help ease the grind. Poor Claire was wearing her own Look of Gloom this morning—for good reason, he knew—and finally Dennis decided he needed to get out of the building for a few minutes.

  At Lazerworks, Dennis abandoned the CDs and limped back to the rack where the booster hung. Last week he had tumbled off his roof—slippery pieces of slate scrounged from Colebrook Academy’s last roof renovation in ’74—and hurt his back. The acupuncture wasn’t helping yet, and if he didn’t buy this booster, at least he wouldn’t have to get up on the roof again. He looked at the device, with its protruding coaxial cable fittings, and thought it looked more like a piece of plumbing. “Beno,” he said, “I still can’t believe this costs so much.”

  “Welcome to the North Country,” said Beno. “It’s brought to you here, at no small expense, from far away.”

  At the end of that Mother Earth News article, Dennis—looking ahead to 2000—asked, “Will we still be here in thirteen years?” He admitted he and Polly dreamed about warmer, sunnier places whenever it snowed in October or May. But he decided moving was unlikely. “Our souls, you see, are sunk into this place.”

  That tumble off his roof had gotten him thinking about what might happen to Polly if he weren’t around to help. The next day he had made out his will, or what passed for such—just a handwritten note he composed in front of Polly. The will stipulated that his body be cremated and its ashes scattered—privately, by immediate family—on that homesteaded plot of land. There would be no gravestone, no public observance. Decent, sane, and simple.

  Dennis sighed and hung the booster back on its hook, saying to Beno, “Well, I guess I’ll think about it some more.”

  Audrey Noyes remembered the last time she saw Vickie and was glad at least that Vickie was happy.

  Once Audrey had, briefly, been an employee of John Harrigan. In the ’70s, besides running an antique business with her husband and substitute teaching in the local schools, Audrey was an obituary writer and the Colebrook “Locals” correspondent for the Coös County Democrat. She was among several on that staff dismayed by the sale of the newspaper and among those who ended up quitting in 1978.

  “I liked John, but he had a sense of humor I didn’t understand,” Audrey said. She was afraid—probably with some justification—that he would slip something offbeat into one of the obituaries she wrote. If Audrey’s humor didn’t have quite the same ironic slant as John’s, it was no less capacious, and over the years, as neighbors in Colebrook, the two became good friends.

  Meanwhile, Vickie—during her years at Plymouth State College—became interested in antiques, and she often came to Audrey’s shop to learn about them. There Audrey told her something that she often told her students in school: “Not all the action’s down in New York City, you know.” Mix the beauty of the North Country with a little business acumen, and the wide world would come to you. For evidence she had the guest register signed by visitors to her antique shop: signatures by, among others, General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam; basketball player Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters; and Jimmy Greenspoon, the keyboard player for Three Dog Night.

  Her pet peeve with the school system was that not enough attention was paid, she believed, to local history. So she took time to help with that whenever she substituted. For example, take Monadnock, she told her students—one of a string of towering ancient volcanoes running from Vermont to Quebec, shaved down to its present three thousand feet by a glacier that was a mile thick. The abandoned gold mine on its east flank had been worked fruitlessly by Edward Norton, a man whose mania for gold made him a hermit, chained to that tunnel, until his death in 1922. The mountain was made chiefly of quartz and syenite, and not enough gold to make mining worthwhile.

  To Audrey, the mountain’s value was more spiritual—in the shelter it provided the town, in the sense of substance it lent to its community. She retired from teaching in 1988 and was Colebrook Academy’s commencement speaker that year. “Some of you will leave after today for other parts of the world, and others will not,” she said on that occasion. “The one thing shared by you all is that you grew up in the shadow of Monadnock, and no matter where you are, and no matter what happens to you, remember that Monadnock’s arms are around you.”

  Those arms played some role, Audrey thought, in bringing Vickie home again. But then it was mostly John who made her stay. And the last time Audrey saw Vickie was on the evening of August 15, 1997. That was the birthday of Bunny’s cousin Ellsworth Bunnell, a small, rotund man whose whole being had a twinkle to it, a self-taught pianist who had founded a swing-style dance band that once toured up and down the East Coast. Then he came back to Monadnock to become a local institution as a musician, composer, writer, historian, and general organizer of revels—such as the American Legion musicals, whose scores he often wrote himself. At Fred Harrigan’s funeral, he had played, at John’s request, a poignant rendition of “Harrigan, That’s Me.”

  This time the town organized the revel. Ellsworth was turning eighty, and a party was arranged at the Balsams, located in neighboring Dixville Notch and one of the North Country’s last luxury hotels. John’s friend Paul Nugent ran a transportation company in Colebrook, and one of the more remarked on events of the evening was Paul’s arrival in top hat and tails at the wheel of one of his limousines. In the backseat was an unexpected pairing—John Harrigan and Vickie Bunnell. As soon as they stepped out together, a rumor ran across the dance floor that this long-dormant volcano was about to throw off smoke again.

  Later, outside the Balsams’ Panorama Country Club and beneath the hotel’s fairy-castle spires and turrets, with Monadnock bearing witness to the west, Vickie sat alone on a terrace with Audrey. Vickie was in her mother-earth colors: a light beige top and a tan silk skirt, set off by a pink brooch that would appear later in an oil portrait. They talked. Audrey came to understand that Vickie would love to be involved again with John, but she had a feeling he still wasn’t ready to marry.

  Nonetheless, she was happy. “All her relatives and friends were there, and they were happy for her,” Audrey said. “And she was happy because she was with John, back in his arms, dancing.”

  5

  THE REST IS BLANK

  MAYBE THIS WAS A PORTENT of the events of 1997, even if it happened in 1835: the arrest of a Canadian citizen by Sheriff Richard Blanchard for debts incurred in the store of one Luther Parker. Canadian authorities responded by arresting both Blanchard and Parker. This soon led to what was technically an armed invasion of Canada by the smaller of the two nations on its southern border, the Indian Stream Republic.

&nbs
p; The citizens of this tiny nation had banded together in their common distrust of government authority. Because of where they lived, they had good reason. The Treaty of Paris—which in 1783 had divided the nascent United States from Canada—had set that boundary in this part of the North Country as “the northwestern-most head of the Connecticut River.” But the devil was in the details, since as many as three different streams—Hall’s, Indian, or Perry—could be construed as the headwater, resulting in three hundred square miles of territory claimed by both nations.

  This area commenced just north of Colebrook, and as settlers there began to build a local industry in potash fertilizer, they found themselves liable for taxes and import duties to both the United States and Canada. Tensions came to a head in 1831 when two young men were conscripted into the Canadian military. The next year some sixty families declared their independence from both nations and established the Indian Stream Republic—ruled by an executive council, a general assembly, and an independent judiciary and featuring (according to legend) an enormous overturned potash kettle that served as the Republic’s jail. Both New Hampshire and Lower Canada made political efforts to assert jurisdiction, but these were rebuffed, and internally the Indian Streamers governed themselves peacefully.

  But the arrests of Blanchard and Parker—the latter was president of the Republic’s executive council—provoked war, at least in a manner of speaking. An armed Indian Stream posse freed the prisoners just north of the Canadian border. Then the posse went on to Hereford to wage a street brawl and arrest the Canadian magistrate who had ordered the detentions. This official was carried back to Indian Stream but then quickly released. After several more skirmishes and amid rumors of an attack from Canada, New Hampshire governor William Badger dispatched a company of state militia into the Republic. They entered unopposed, and that spring the Republic passed resolutions ceding sovereignty to New Hampshire.

  In 1842 the Webster-Ashburton Treaty recognized what had come to pass and defined the border as it exists today. British negotiator Lord Ashburton, opposite Daniel Webster, was of the opinion that the land had no economic value anyway—though within five decades Colebrook and Pittsburg would be flush with the bonanzas of their spring log drives, their flourishing potato and sheep farms, their luxury hotel–driven tourist industry.

  The last log drive down the Connecticut was in 1915. Soon almost all the hotels went dark, and many of the tired farms were reclaimed by forest. But the border was still there, as was a local smuggling industry that antedated the Treaty of Paris and had facilitated the Underground Railroad, which ran through Colebrook and Pittsburg. During Prohibition, Colebrook was not only a conduit for liquor from Canada, but—thanks to its several stills—a productive source of domestic spirits. “Of course there was no such thing as ‘aged liquor,’” wrote Doc Gifford in his history of Colebrook. “As soon as it cooled, it was bottled and shipped to Boston or the Balsams. If there was ever a question about the quality of a batch, it was tried on Hollis Sweatt, and if he survived, it went on the market.”

  Outdoorsmen like Rudy Shatney would later find where some of the fast cars used by rumrunners sat bullet-pocked and rusting up in the woods. “It was an era of excitement, as the trucks from Canada rumbled through town with the ‘real stuff,’ the police in hot pursuit,” Gifford continued. “On one occasion, a load was ‘ditched’ in front of the Legion Restaurant and the bootleggers dashed through the dining room between startled diners and out through the kitchen with the law at their heels. Some of our citizens say that with the repeal of the 18th Amendment some of the ‘zing’ went out of the town, but those who are still in the know say, ‘If ’tain’t one thing it’s another.’”

  Whatever the thing, then and now, it owed—still owes—some part of its zing to the acts of secession and armed resistance that produced first the American republic and then the Indian Stream, not to mention that basic distrust of human nature that lurks deep in the country’s Protestant roots. It followed from this that authority was to be particularly distrusted, held to constant scrutiny, and, if necessary, defied.

  Among the New England states, New Hampshire was the fiercest in this suspicion and the most distinctive in its laissez-faire government and low tax burdens, the table thump of its “Live Free or Die” state slogan, the don’t-tread-on-me chin thrust of the Old Man of the Mountain, the famous rock formation that overlooked Franconia Notch until 2003. Philosophically, Bunny and Irene Bunnell were quite comfortable in Vermont, but John Harrigan spoke for many of his neighbors when, looking at that state’s more activist government and, only half in jest, he pronounced Vermont a foreign land.

  In 2001 Jason Sorens—then a doctoral student at Yale, now a Dartmouth lecturer—founded the Free State Project. Mounted on behalf of “those of us who believe government in the U.S. is far too involved in our daily lives and far too removed from the control and influence of ordinary people,” this was an initiative to gather enough libertarians from across the nation into one state and then to influence the politics of that state enough to reclaim such control. Two years later, after considering a number of states to target, the FSP chose New Hampshire. Sorens and his leadership liked not only the state’s historically libertarian culture but also its religious diversity—that is, there were no dominant voting blocks of more authoritarian-minded Roman Catholics or evangelical Protestants. This helped to sustain a high level of social tolerance throughout the state, a tendency to let other people think or do what they liked.

  They liked something else as well. Sorens cited the geography of New Hampshire—its small towns sprinkled among hills, mountains, and valleys—in helping to preserve its town meeting model of local government. “The town meeting system allowed citizens to keep their government officials close enough to ‘grab them by the scruff of their necks,’ if they overstepped their power,” Sorens wrote. “Essentially what developed was a kind of ‘communal libertarianism’ different from the individualism of the West, where one could simply escape the company of others.”

  The North Country, though, is that one portion of the state big enough and unpopulated enough where one indeed can “simply escape.” Colebrook and other towns not only cultivate their own hermits, cranks, eccentrics, and obsessives—such as gold miner Edward Norton—but attract them from elsewhere as well. Arguably Dennis and Polly Joos arrived with a little bit of a kink that way. All such are generally left alone so long as complaints aren’t lodged. And that culture of tolerance keeps the complaints to a minimum. It makes for a world where the “communal libertarianism” of southern New Hampshire is hybridized to a landscape where Clint Eastwood–style Strangers roam the hills. Sometimes the most suspicious of these clump together into twitchy-fingered militias.

  This makes for its own sort of zing. There is much more territory than the various law enforcement agencies—state police, municipal police, Fish & Game, the Border Patrol—can effectively patrol, in the event of complaints or laws being broken: sixty miles of interstate, three thousand miles of state and local highways. The state police and Fish & Game are run from Concord, which can seem as distant as Washington, D.C., if you put a mountain range in the way. The Border Patrol—well, that would be Washington. The local police are supported by towns that have little or no tax base, or much inclination to tax anyway. These municipal forces are chronically understaffed, underpaid, undertrained, underequipped.

  Mediating between the populace and those who enforce the laws are the people you see at town meetings—not politicians who come out only for news conferences, photo ops, or campaign rallies, but rather the grocers, schoolteachers, contractors, lawyers, shop owners, and so on, who volunteer—or get roped into—serving as selectmen: in other words, citizens who are at once the government officials and the ordinary people whom Sorens sets opposite each other. They know getting “grabbed by the scruff of the neck” comes with the territory, so to speak, especially given that the right of defiance is enshrined in Article 10 of the state constitut
ion: “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

  But somebody has to exercise power in defense of mankind’s good and happiness—on out to that disputed border between just and arbitrary, between order and oppression. Somebody has to do it. And on which side of that line did the Eighteenth Amendment fall, anyway? Who deserved to be put under the potash kettle for that one? Well, that was Washington, though first a lobby of zealous Protestants, who were sure they knew what was best for us all.

  What about a building permit for a barn?

  John Harrigan sometimes had trouble describing just how out-there this part of the world was. He said that telling people Colebrook was ten miles from Canada “just doesn’t cut it, so I try to put it into better perspective. The nearest traffic light from our doorstep is 57 miles. So are the nearest Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Walmart. This kind of information can bring startled looks in some quarters, and a sigh of envy in a hunting camp shared with people from away.”

  Outside the hunting camps, the merchants and municipalities are pretty much left to their own devices—those of an engaged citizenry—in respect to good and happiness, order or oppression. Strangers roam the hills. In certain respects, the Indian Stream Republic lives on.

  Eighteen years passed between the tarpaper dispute in 1972 (accompanied by the death of Rita Drega) and the Columbia town hall incident in 1990.