In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  No one else was there. Jordan pointed to a raised stone just off the hardtop that circled through the graves: “Rita Belliveau Drega 1920–1972.” Hidden in the shadow behind that stone, flat to the ground and directly adjacent, was a small brass plate: “Carl Drega June 19, 1935–August 19, 1997.”

  “You’d never find this, unless you knew where to look for it,” Jordan said. “I had just completed my counseling sessions when I heard he was buried here, of all places. But I guess Rita was from here originally.” He looked down at the plate. “It’s bizarre, hiding a grave like that—even this guy’s.”

  He glanced up at the flick of a blue jay in a yellow birch. The lines of his face seemed to tighten. “For the first few days and weeks, everything was about Drega,” he said. “You didn’t hear much about the people who died, who obeyed the laws and paid taxes, and for the survivors, that’s a killer. Then you had these people—some people—who sympathized with Drega. They never knew the whole story.”

  He added that he’s tried, but he’s never been able to forgive Carl Drega. “I attend church, and I know I’m supposed to forgive, but I can’t—I can’t. He took the best we had, didn’t he?”

  No more than can some others forgive. “The cops know where this grave is. Some of them come in here, one by one, every August nineteenth. I can hear it when a cruiser arrives. It’s not to leave flowers.”

  Jordan turned and inhaled the scent of the Connecticut like a good cologne, admired its cut-glass glint through the trees, saying, “Well, there were only two things this bastard ever loved—Rita and this river. He’s got ’em both here.”

  Charlie Jordan is a musician as well as a newspaperman, and his group Folk Tree is playing at the Moose Festival tonight beneath a tent set up on Main Street. With Charlie on vocals, fiddle, mandolin, and harmonica, the band includes Donna, their son Tommy, and two other musicians, playing a mix of folk, bluegrass, and soft-rock classics from the ’60s and ’70s.

  This afternoon he and Tommy are assembling the sound system, shuttling between the tent and a parked van with their arms full of wires and electronic equipment. A passerby asks if Susan Zizza will be on keyboards with them. “No, Susan hasn’t performed with us for a year or so,” Charlie says. “She’s been writing a book.”

  Charlie stops to talk for a few minutes. And how is the Colebrook Chronicle doing? “Great,” Charlie says. “Good circulation, adequate ad revenues, and since we’re free and come out on Friday, we’re not in quite such direct competition with the Sentinel. We cover the same beats, but we’re doing all right.”

  It’s already nine years since Charlie was called into John Harrigan’s News and Sentinel office and told he was being let go. Leith Jones was instructed that same day to drastically reduce the number of rolls of film he shot each week, and he chose to quit. The next day Susan Zizza decided to leave as well.

  Claire Lynch refers to the occasion as Black Sunday. If Charlie was angry then, he’s okay with it now. “It was an evolving situation,” he said. “Karen wanted to be editor, and it was always a family operation—I understand that. John gave me a song and dance about how he wanted to get back into the news cycle and edit the paper, but it wasn’t long before Karen was installed, and he was just publisher again.”

  John has said simply that Charlie was doing things he didn’t understand, couldn’t agree with. Newspapers everywhere were coming under pressure from the Internet and digital media; newsmen everywhere were disagreeing about how to respond to that. Leith was brilliant in the darkroom and frankly didn’t want to come out of there. Charlie, with his own affection for the ink stains and chemical baths of traditional journalism, may not have had the heart to demand that Leith use a digital camera.

  Instead he and Donna—with Susan Zizza and Leith also on the staff—started their own newspaper. Like Merle Wright’s old Civic, where Dennis Joos had gotten his start, the Colebrook Chronicle is free for the asking, supported entirely by its ad revenues, and is maybe a little more nimble than the Sentinel in posting online video as well as text content.

  Karen Harrigan became editor of the News and Sentinel in 2000, and three years later she and her second husband, Butch Ladd, bought the newspaper from John. By then John had already sold the Coös County Democrat.

  “The big box stores were coming into Littleton and Lancaster, and I knew the Democrat couldn’t survive without an owner with a lot of money, willing and able to pay for fine writing, or at least it needed to be part of a group,” John said. “And I needed to come home—not try to be in two places at once anymore.”

  John also shut down the Coös Junction Press and sold off its equipment, including its great beating heart—the seventeen-ton, thirty-three-foot Goss Community web press that he and Calvin Crawford had jackhammered out of the concrete of an abandoned press south of the notches some thirty years before. “Somebody bought it, put it on a truck to Miami, and then into a container aboard ship to São Paulo,” John said. “From there I heard it was barged up the São Paulo River to God knows where.”

  Karen has said that her dad really did want to get back into the news cycle in 1999 and that he jumped out of it again earlier than he wanted to. “He didn’t want to put me in the same position he had been in with Fred—a young person ready to do the job and a parent standing in the way. But yeah, he missed it. Still does.”

  Indeed, John can’t help but sound wistful describing that web press vanishing into the rain forest. He’s glad that the Democrat is still in business, but he says the staff has been cut back so sharply that each press day is like a ride over an Amazon waterfall.

  Karen’s husband, Butch, is the Sentinel’s advertising and circulation manager. Together they’ve put the newspaper on a sound enough footing to maintain a more humane—and practical—level of staffing. As of this Moose Festival, Claire Lynch is still there, as are Vivien Towle and Gil Short. Jana Riley left in 2002 to sell real estate, and Jana’s work is what Butch Ladd does now. Jeannette Ellingwood retired and then died in 2007. Plaques advertising the law offices of both Fred Harrigan and Vickie Bunnell remain by the front door. The crater of a bullet impact on the west side of the building is still there as well. John wants it left that way.

  Meanwhile John and Charlie have become friendly again. Charlie stoops to move a speaker out of Tommy’s path on the sidewalk and says, “I worry that I’m witnessing the end of the last generation of newspapers—at least the sort I’m familiar with. At the same time, around here, it’s come down to two different family operations, the Harrigans’ and the Jordans’. I guess that was inevitable. But nothing’s written in stone. We’ve worked together before, and might do so again.”

  One of the other band members comes up the sidewalk carrying bundles of electrical wire. She’s singing a Joni Mitchell tune, one that Folk Tree would cover that night, something about how they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

  One day in 1997, a week or two after the shootings, Susan Zizza saw an ad for a tropical juice drink on TV, an ad that included a parrot. Suddenly she remembered—remembered vividly—seeing just such a bird perched on the shoulder of an EMT tending to Dennis. The memory made no sense to her. Her nights were sleepless anyway, but the sort of challenge this posed to her sanity made rest all the more impossible—until a month or so later, when, while shopping at the IGA, she saw a woman walking the aisles with that very bird on her shoulder. Susan stopped to introduce herself to Cherie Leavitt, the RN who, on August 19, had been off duty, out with her bird, and using the ATM at the First Colebrook Bank when she heard gunshots.

  That helped. Susan held onto her sanity, if not the cheerfulness and whimsy that once possessed her in the newsroom. Black Sunday, for her, had hastened the inevitable. “I just couldn’t take another loss,” she said. “And I was ready. I think I needed to go.”

  Eventually she had to leave newspaper work altogether. “I just wasn’t your hard-boiled city editor,” she explained. “I’d love to talk to people at the Wall Street Jou
rnal, for example, after the murder of Daniel Pearl in Afghanistan—how they handled that on the personal level.”

  She needed something else to think about and found it in the photographs brought to her in 2000 by her neighbor Beverly Uran, whose aunt, North Country painter Glenduen Ladd, had used her revolutionary Kodak Folding Pocket Camera to record images of Colebrook and its people at a time when the advent of the automobile and paved roads was tolling the death knell of nearly all the region’s grand hotels—and thereby, paradoxically, restoring much of its former isolation.

  For eight years, Susan organized, restored, and reproduced the images. Then she wrote text and arranged them into the chapters that make up The Turn of the Twentieth: Early 1900s Northern New England Through the Lens of Photographer Glenduen Ladd, which had been published just in time for the Moose Festival.

  In the book’s preface, Susan writes that the photos Beverly Uran came to share were not “the usual images of hardy loggers in spiked boots, rugged farmers behind plows, and roughly clad children in front of one-room schoolhouses.” Inside there are in fact a few farmers, plows, and roughly clad kids, but much more by way of fine clothes, big houses, a surprising number of automobiles, and other accoutrements of Colebrook’s prosperity at the time. That Kodak Pocket Camera was one of the first to allow the photographing of ordinary people by ordinary people—though Ladd, starting when she was sixteen, wielded her camera with the eye of a budding artist.

  You might linger at a photo of Ladd’s uncle, George Keysar, in a suit and tie and a dapper straw boater, seated incongruously atop a pile of pulpwood that stretches nearly to the horizon behind him—and later a teenage Harry Ladd, then the photographer’s boyfriend (who would become a great uncle to Butch Ladd), in drag with a friend, a winter wind snatching at the boys’ Victorian dresses and purses. It’s a family album as the genre might have been invented by a good photographer with a sense of fun and an eye for the peculiar, for the parrot on the shoulder.

  Some of Ladd’s paintings are here as well, mostly landscapes: a crumbling abandoned barn in Columbia, the Dix Dam on the Swift Diamond River in Dixville. The paintings have a soft-focus gauziness that reminds Susan of the 1954 MGM film version of Brigadoon and its story, as she writes in her introduction, of “an enchanted town that remained unchanging and invisible to the outside world except for one day every hundred years.”

  On Sunday, after the Folk Tree concert Saturday night, Susan occupies a booth beneath a tent on the athletic fields at Canaan Memorial High School. She’s signing and selling copies of her book, is almost hidden behind two stacks of them on the table at which she sits and her line of customers. Elsewhere on the fields, the Kiwanis Club is selling hot dogs out of a boxcar-sized food truck, a towering Uncle Sam is striding on stilts among festival-goers, the Berlin Jazz Band is playing a Charleston, and a moose-calling contest is in full-throated vigor.

  During a moment when Susan has no customers, she remembers a trip to Sea World in San Diego that she once took with her husband’s sister and her two children. “We were sitting right by the platform and watching this killer whale leap entirely out of the water in what seemed like a burst of joy,” she says. “It was such a gorgeous day, and this was such a beautiful and magnificent animal that it was painful—and I began to cry. I couldn’t help thinking how Dennis, Vickie, their families, and Scott and Les too should be sharing this joy as well.”

  She recalls that Scott’s little boy was just three at the time, his daughter one and a half. “All those years they could’ve been with their father,” she says. “They were robbed of those years. Dennis’s son has grown up to be a civil engineer. He’s a smart young man.”

  She turns away and puts her hands to her face. “I’m determined to get to the day when I’ll shed my last tear over this,” she says after a moment. “I probably never will.”

  She smiles then and composes herself. “I believe in resurrection. But the years that were still owed to those lives on earth can never be given back. Who knows what made that man do what he did? Not God.”

  The centuries collapse, one superimposed on the other: the well-heeled, if rough at the edges, log-boom town of Glenduen Ladd and Sliver Bunnell at the turn of the twentieth; and the hardscrabble, ghost-haunted town of John Harrigan, Bunny Bunnell, Charlie Jordan, and Susan Zizza at the turn of the twenty-first—visible to the outside world only in eyeblink glimpses at great intervals, the faces and expressions frozen in time, like the portraits on that slab in Monument Lot.

  Susan once believed that such a lightning bolt as they endured would give way, at last, to a Brigadoon kind of life, perhaps, in which subsequent griefs would be ephemeral and events would flatline into a pleasant, gauzy stasis.

  “You think when you go through something like this and live through it—survive—that you’ll lead a charmed life afterwards,” she says. “But things go on happening—bad things, happy things, sad things. Nothing ever stays the same.”

  Pick a moment. It doesn’t make any difference which, here in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Any will do.

  In April, on South Hill farm, John and Nancee Harrigan are waiting for the sheep shearers, who are late. Some thirty head, about a fifth of the Harrigan flock—ewes, a crop of lambs that arrived early this spring, a few wethers (castrated rams)—are penned inside the barn. The sheep are snug inside the wool they wore this winter, and they mill about in shifting, puzzle-piece patterns of black, white, gray, and umber. They bleat and stare with their gemstone eyes at Nancee and her teenage son Micah. The sheep stand content to be petted or scratched. The wool is as light as gossamer, and its lanolin dries like aerosol on Micah’s fingers. The tails of the nursing lambs, as they suckle, wag like dogs’.

  John decided in the early 1990s that he wanted this to be a working farm again, at least in some respects. He bought a small flock of sheep and began to run into John and Nancee Amey at agricultural fairs and Farm Bureau events. In 1992 John found himself short on ewes, and he arranged with the Ameys to pasture some of their sheep at South Hill farm in exchange for the lambs. Then Nancee’s life changed—and her marriage dissolved—when her stepson, Eric, fell from the back of a moving pickup and died. John and Nancee started dating late in 1998, and they married in 2000.

  Nancee is pretty, raven-haired, sturdy, and no less hollowed out by grief than John. But John—persuaded by now that people indeed are meant to go through life two by two—has in Nancee, once more, a woman with whom he can hike and hunt birds, or the occasional rabbit, and his wedding present to her was an Italian 20-gauge double-barrel shotgun.

  In the barn today, Nancee waits impatiently for two of the few people left in the North Country—a middle-aged man and his twentyish son—who can still take the wool off a sheep as if it were a matter of unzipping a mackintosh. Nancee could shear these animals herself, has done it before, but it would take longer, yield less wool, and leave Nancee bruised, some of the sheep nicked and cut.

  Most of the wool will be sold at the red-ink price of fourteen cents per pound. The rest Nancee will spin into yarn and then weave into blankets for sale. There is little by way of a local market for the meat, and the nearest federally sanctioned slaughterhouse is in St. Johnsbury. In one of his “North Country Notebook” columns, John has written that sheep farming this far north, these days, is “an admittedly delusional enterprise.” But the sheep do help keep the pastures clear, fields that John himself reclaimed from brush and early succession forest, and so are good friends to that thirty-five-mile view he adores.

  While Nancee waits, she attends to another necessary task—she and Micah are castrating the male lambs, which with sheep this young is a bloodless operation. Micah catches a lamb and delivers it squirming to his mother, who sits on the floor and holds the animal’s back to her belly, its legs splayed out front and no longer thrashing. Then Nancee takes a coarse rubber band, hardly bigger than a Cheerio, and uses a pair of spreaders to widen it enough to
go around the lamb’s scrotum. Once in place, the rubber band pinches off blood supply to the testicles, which in several weeks will shrivel and drop off. When Nancee’s done, Micah lifts the lamb from her lap and drops it over the fence into the chicken yard outside the barn. The lamb kicks up its heels and runs bleating through a flock of hens.

  A laugh rings out from the east end of the house, on the other side of the chicken yard. “I thought it was supposed to be quiet in the country,” exclaims Josh Jaros, who has been hired by John to build a greenhouse for Nancee’s flowers and vegetables. “Sheep yelling, chickens squawking—I can’t hear myself pound nails.”

  Josh is a young carpenter from Minnesota, a literal sort of flatlander, easygoing and affable, who drifted like a tumbleweed out of the Midwest to the Maine coast, turned and started west again, and has settled, at least for a while, in Colebrook, where he likes it just fine. John has given Josh work and made him a steady fishing partner.

  Micah splits this Saturday morning between helping his mother and pitching in with Josh as the minutes slip by and the shearers remain overdue. When the farm’s rooster crows on the cusp of noon, Nancee walks stiffly out of the barn. She says she’ll fix some sandwiches in twenty minutes if someone will fetch John. “Where is he?” says Josh.

  “Across the road,” says Nancee. “He’s mending fence in one of the pastures over there.”

  Josh knows the story. Three drunk teenagers on a riding mower tore up some line a few weeks ago. They knocked on John’s door, confessed to the damage, and promised to fix it. And they did, but so poorly that now John has to repair their repairs. Josh lays down his hammer, walks under the sugar maples budding into green that line the road, and goes through the gate into the first pasture.