Come Sit By Me

by Hoobler, Thomas

  “I thought the author was famous.”

  “He was, although not so much any more. I just mean that he’s one of those writers whose books people read because they’re different, one of a kind. But it doesn’t pay to write like them. Henry James is another, although he doesn’t write anything like Wolfe. Neither of them could get published today. Anyway, I haven’t got a copy. Maybe your school library has it if you’re really desperate to read it.”

  The next day, I looked on the shelf in the library where the book should have been. I thought there might be a second copy. No luck, and worse, Ms. Clement saw me. “Can I help you find something, Paul?” she asked. I took a deep breath and was rewarded with a scent of her perfume. It overcame my good judgment, and unwisely, I told her the name of the book I was looking for.

  “I think we should have that,” she said. “Let’s take a look.” She went to her desk and typed the title onto her computer. After reading what came up, she looked at me with a little concern on her face. “How did you—” she began, and then shook her head. “I’m afraid that book is considered lost,” she told me.

  “Any chance you’ll get another copy?” I asked.

  She typed a few more things onto the computer and read what it said. “Only one person has checked it out in the past five years, so I guess I couldn’t justify the expense.” She looked at the computer again. “I see that the previous librarian sent several messages to the last person to have it, trying to get him to return it.”

  I nodded.

  “You know, Paul,” she said. “I happen to have read that book.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “The author clearly loved language. He was said to have been drunk with words. I share that passion. But it may be a little difficult for you.” After all, I was only at the Dr. Seuss level.

  Naturally, I didn’t think any book was too difficult for me. “Do you think it would be dangerous to read?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  “It’s not about guns and killing people?”

  “If anything, it’s an affirmation of life.”

  I couldn’t ask her So why was Cale reading it? as long as we were pretending I didn’t know who had checked it out. Instead I thanked her and went off to class. But that night I found a copy for sale online for three bucks, counting shipping. So I ordered it.

  I was just curious, that’s all.

  The following day, Terry and I were working in the newspaper office after school and I asked her, “Do you know anything about the cemetery south of town?”

  “I’m not going parking there with you, if that’s what you mean.”

  Funny that right away she would assume that. “No, I mean about the people who are buried there.”

  “They stopped burying people there around 1950,” she said. “Except for…I think one of the girls Cale killed is there, because her family had a crypt. You know, I never suspected that your obsession with Cale would lead you to examine cemeteries.”

  “It’s not an obsession.”

  “He’s not buried there, if that’s what you’re thinking. They took his body out of town so nobody would try to dig it up.”

  “Did you ever go there? To the cemetery?”

  “I’ve driven by there,” she said coolly.

  “Well, there’s a big angel there,”

  “And?”

  “I just wondered who put it there.”

  Terry shrugged. “Somebody who wanted to honor the person buried underneath, I suppose. Don’t you think?”

  I was annoyed, and wanted to explain to her that I wasn’t just a weirdo. “It has something to do with a book I’m reading.”

  “What book?”

  “Look Homeward, Angel. It’s by Thomas Wolfe.”

  “I know who it’s by. We read it in my sophomore year in Ms. Hayward’s American literature class for extra credit. She made it optional because of the sex scene. I was probably the only one who finished it. But you don’t need to read it for world lit. We’re supposed to be reading The Epic of Gilgamesh.” As if I didn’t know.

  “Well, I like to read in my spare time too,” I lied. “Anyway, it has an angel in it.” And a sex scene.

  “But it’s not the angel in our cemetery. Thomas Wolfe was writing about North Carolina.”

  “O.K., forget I asked.”

  We worked in silence for a little while. Then she said, “You know who would know?”

  “Know what?” I said, just to annoy her.

  “About that angel of yours.” Now it was my angel. “Mr. Gregorio could tell you about it.”

  “He’s the math teacher,” I pointed out.

  “But he’s also a member of the local historical society,” she replied. “He probably could tell you about anybody who’s buried in that cemetery.”

  I found out that asking Mr. Gregorio about local history was like getting Super Glue on your fingers. You couldn’t get rid of it easily. I caught him in his office after school, and he went on for half an hour about Sally—about twenty-nine minutes more than I wanted.

  “Poor, poor Sally,” he said when I asked about her. He rubbed his hands through his white hair. “She lived at a time when there was a wide gap between rich and poor. The wealthy families in town owned the mills that were the region’s chief economic activity. The river, you see, powered the water wheels that were harnessed to looms that spun cotton into cloth. There were the owners…” He raised his hand high. “…and there were the workers.” He lowered his hand below his knees. Rich and poor. I got it.

  “Sally,” he went on, “was one of the young women—they used boys too—who tended the looms. It was thought that their fingers, being small and nimble, could more easily guide the thread onto the collecting spindles. Although some lost their fingers in the effort.”

  He stopped to think, and I asked, “What about the angel?” It had occurred to me that if Sally was poor, how could her family afford what was probably an expensive monument?

  “Oh, that comes later in the story,” he said. It was clear that he wasn’t going to tell me the ending before I heard all the rest first.

  “Where were we?” he asked.

  “Sally worked on a loom,” I suggested.

  “Yes.” He looked around, the way he did in class when he was about to put a formula on the chalkboard. I was glad there wasn’t one here in his office. “And she was like all the other loom workers. Poor. Often, they were the main breadwinners for their families, because adults were thought to be unable to work the looms.”

  “Because of their fingers,” I said, to show I had gotten the point.

  “But,” he said, raising one of his fingers, which was thick and had smoking stains on it, “She was different in one way. Unfortunately for her.”

  I waited to hear what it was.

  “She was pretty.”

  I was going to ask why that was unfortunate, but he showed me his palm. “More than pretty. Beautiful in a way that struck everyone who ever saw her. Angelic.”

  “So that was why—” I started to stay, but got the palm again. It was probably better, I decided, to let him talk, because the only way I could stop him was by wrestling him to the floor and gagging him. And then I’d never hear the story.

  “And she attracted the attention of the youngest son of the family that owned the mill. The Crapper family.”

  “Crapper?” I said, barely stifling a laugh.

  “A fine old English name,” he said, “despite the vulgar connotation it has acquired.” I tried to look as if the vulgar connotation had never occurred to me.

  “Martin Crapper was his name,” said Mr. Gregorio. “Though he was only in his twenties, he had squandered his wealth and social position—and education, I might add, for he was a graduate of Princeton—to lead a life of dissipation.”

>   I had a pretty good idea what “dissipation” meant, but Mr. Gregorio set it out in detail. “He frequented the fleshpots of Philadelphia and New York, drinking, gambling, whoring…” Mr. Gregorio shook his head. “They say that the older generation builds the fortune and the next generation spends it. So it was with Martin Crapper.”

  Mr. Gregorio opened a desk drawer and looked inside. He didn’t seem to find what he was looking for, and sighed. “Not allowed to smoke in the building any more,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Where were we?”

  “Martin in the fleshpots,” I said, enjoying using a word I had never heard before.

  “Yes, and then one day he cast his eyes on Sally as she was leaving the mill with the other young workers. She was virtuous, they say, and at first resisted him. But he let her think that his intentions were honorable and that he would marry her. The Crapper family, of course, would never have allowed that.”

  Mr. Gregorio gave me a stern look and shook his finger. “She succumbed,” he said. I felt a little guilty. There had been a few girls I had hoped would succumb to me. However, I wasn’t rich.

  He went on: “And in the course of time, she became pregnant. Well. Martin turned his back on her. He may have offered to pay for a surgical procedure to terminate the pregnancy, but Sally refused. She had convinced herself that once he saw his child, his heart would soften.”

  He opened another drawer, apparently still in search of a cigarette. “It did not, of course. To make the story more pathetic, Martin had acquired a social disease in the course of his dissipations, and passed it on to Sally. The baby she gave birth to was blind, and because she could not afford to raise it, it was turned over to the local orphanage.”

  He paused, for a long enough time that I thought he had finished. But I wasn’t. “What about the angel?” I asked.

  “Oh. The story is that Sally died soon after giving away her child. She was buried in the place where she is now. Martin survived her, but not for long. The effects of his social disease affected his brain and he was sent to a sanitarium, where he died within a year. He is entombed in the family crypt.”

  “But the…?” I kind of leaned forward to urge him to finish the story. I thought we were never going to get to it.

  He nodded, as if he knew what I wanted. “The angel was installed one summer day over Sally’s resting place. According to some, the face bears a close resemblance to Sally herself. And then, of course, the touching inscription: ‘A fallen angel may rise again.’ Referencing, of course, the Christian belief in the resurrection of the virtuous.”

  “I don’t understand. Who paid for it?”

  “No one is quite sure. A charming mystery. Not the local church, I would guess, since by their standards Sally had fallen from grace.”

  “The Crappers?” I nearly laughed again, as I heard myself say the word.

  “Doubtful. For the angel points, in an accusatory manner, toward the Crapper family crypt. Chastising Martin, as it were.”

  “So who?”

  “That’s one of the puzzles that makes history such an enjoyable pastime. The cemetery records were damaged in a flood, so we may never know.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “How come you’re a math teacher? I mean, since you know all this about history.”

  He smiled. “When I was younger, I thought that mathematics offered certainty and precision. Those things were more appealing to me then.” He shrugged.

  I hesitated. “Did you ever have Cale Peters in one of your classes?”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Yes, I did. It’s a shame that he seems to be the one person who went to Hamilton High whose name everybody knows.”

  “You don’t think he had any connection to Sally Dennis?”

  “What an unusual question. But in fact, he asked me about that statue too. You and he were the only students to show that kind of curiosity about local history.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked being linked with Cale. “Was he a good student?”

  “Not really. No one would have thought him college material. His spelling was terrible. In light of what happened later, one thinks back to try and recall if there was any sign of a disordered mind.”

  “Was there?”

  “He seemed to be quite disturbed when his grandmother died. Of course, anyone is saddened by the loss of a loved one, but Cale’s grief lasted quite a while. I had to be lenient about the many assignments he failed to turn in.”

  “Do you think that his grandmother’s death had anything to do with…what he did?”

  He shrugged. “It may have, but of course students have loved ones die all the time, and don’t react the way Cale did. There has been considerable speculation, as you might imagine, about his motives. If I were you, I’d avoid pursuing the subject. It’s something that we have to put behind us.”

  That was the same advice everybody seemed to have for me. I should have taken it.

  chapter nine

  HAMILTON HIGH’S first football game was on Friday night, against a school named New Milford. I was supposed to cover it for the newspaper, but I would have gone anyway. I was curious. My school in New York didn’t have a football team. We played soccer instead. Less violent.

  It was a spectacle, or at least the best a town the size of Hamilton could do. The field was illuminated by lights, making the grass look greener than it really was. The cheerleaders, all girls, put on a show and worked the crowd into a frenzy. I didn’t think I would get caught up in it, but the sight of seven of the most spectacular girls in the school jumping up and down in tiny skirts and tight sweaters did a lot for my morale. Everybody in the stands dutifully helped spell out H…A…M…I…L…T…O…N. Probably the longest word some of them knew how to spell.

  Terry wouldn’t be caught dead at one of these games—although you weren’t supposed to use metaphors like that in the newspaper. But somebody sat down beside me anyway. Unfortunately, it was Seese. “I see you didn’t write anything in the newspaper about Caleb,” he said.

  “We ran out of space,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, they wouldn’t let you,” he said.

  The Hamilton team ran out onto the field just then, and I was glad to stand up and cheer with everybody else. Except Seese, who stayed seated and even gave them a finger—though not too openly. “You don’t like the team?” I asked after I sat down again.

  “Bunch of dumb jocks,” he said. “North Hawkins, big deal. He’s the star of the team now, but he wouldn’t have been if Ronnie and Marcus were still here.”

  Everybody seemed to worry about the effect the shooting had on the team. Too bad about the girls and the librarian.

  “Maybe the coach liked North better,” I said.

  “He was too good a coach. You never saw Ronnie and Marcus play.”

  I decided to keep an open mind. The game started and I settled back to watch. North was the Hamilton quarterback. He showed on the first series of downs that he could both throw and run, if necessary. What he needed was patience. He threw a couple times when he should have held onto the ball, and he decided to run when there was a receiver open. Hamilton failed to score and turned the ball over to New Milford.

  It was pretty clear that the only way Hamilton could win was to score a lot, because New Milford’s team totally outplayed Hamilton’s defense. New Milford’s linemen just pushed our guys out of the way, and their running backs came through the holes, ripping off runs of eight, ten, twenty yards, going right down the field for a touchdown. The opposing quarterback hardly threw a pass. His only job was to take the snap and hand off the ball without dropping it.

  Hamilton got the ball again, and this time North was a little steadier. He managed to move the ball downfield, but then the drive got stalled and Hamilton settled for a field goal.

  New Milford took over and showed again that they couldn’t be stopped
unless they fumbled or Hamilton got lucky in some other way. By the end of the first quarter, the score was 24-3. The fans on our side of the field started to lose interest, and people in the stands either booed or chatted among themselves.

  Unfortunately, Seese was still next to me. “Told you he was no good,” he said.

  “You can’t totally blame him,” I said. “The defense stinks, and even when we have the ball, North hasn’t gotten much support.”

  “He would have had support if Ronnie and Marcus had still been on the team.”

  “Well, it’s not his fault they aren’t around,” I said.

  “He didn’t want them here. He just wanted to be the star so his stats look good. He wants to go to West Point, and his grades aren’t that high.”

  This was so irrational that I would have got up and left, except that I couldn’t write a story about the game unless I knew the final score.

  “He’s a big gun nut,” Seese said. “His father was in the military. He could have gotten Caleb the guns.”

  “I understand a lot of people around here have guns,” I said. “And that still doesn’t explain why it was Cale who did the shooting.”

  Seese wandered off, peddling his conspiracy theory elsewhere, I suppose.

  New Milford’s coach wanted to give his reserves some playing time, so the final score was only 52-17. North managed to pass for one touchdown and run for another in the second half, when New Milford’s first string was sitting on the bench, high-fiving each other.

  Terry had told me to get some quotes from the players after the game. She was a bug on quotes, though she often rewrote them anyway, so I could have made them up. But I noticed North standing around on the field after the game, talking to the cheerleaders. He was still in his uniform, and it made him look bigger and stronger than he actually was. The girls didn’t seem to mind that the team had lost.

  “Hey, writer man,” he said when he saw me approach. “You know these ladies?” he asked with a sweep of his arm. I had seen most of them around school, but wouldn’t have dared to speak to them. Now, however, they all smiled at me. I had the North seal of approval. I was O.K.