When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  I wondered if the newspaper editors knew who I was. I wondered if they knew how everybody in town looked down on us because we stole, and Helen had run off, and Dad didn’t have a regular job. Would the editors decide that being as I was a White I was a liar, and they shouldn’t trust what I told them? I thought about putting on some kind of a PS saying that I wasn’t a liar and they could trust me, but I couldn’t think of any way of saying it that wouldn’t sound silly, so I let it go. And the next day, after school, I went to the post office and mailed the letter.

  The Timber Falls Journal came out on Thursdays. I mailed my letter on Monday, which meant that I had to wait a few days before the letter came out. I was pretty excited. When the letter came out, there was bound to be a lot of talk about it around town. I wondered what the kids at school would think. They would be pretty surprised all right, and a lot of them would wish that they’d thought up the idea first.

  But I was nervous, too, for there was no telling what Herbst might do. He would want to get me if he could. The question was whether he could or not.

  Finally Thursday came. It drizzled all day, and after school I walked through the drizzle to the drugstore and bought a copy of the paper. I didn’t want anybody to see me reading it—I didn’t know why, I just didn’t. So I went across Main Street and around in front of the railroad station. There was a bench on the station platform, with a roof over it, where people used to wait when they had passenger trains. I went and sat on the bench to keep out of the drizzle, and opened the paper. My hands were shaking and I felt weak. I flipped through the paper until I came to the “Letters to the Editor” column and raced down it.

  My letter wasn’t there. Maybe they had decided it was so important, they would put it in another part of the paper, I thought. I went back to the first page and went through the whole newspaper from beginning to end. The letter wasn’t anywhere. I started from the back and went through the whole paper again, looking as carefully as I could, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything. But my letter wasn’t in.

  I sat there watching the drizzle fall onto the shiny steel tops of the railroad tracks, and I wondered. I didn’t want to think they had decided not to run my letter because I was trash and couldn’t be trusted. Maybe it took them longer than a few days to get a letter in. Maybe they had others ahead of it. Or maybe you had to get your letter in a week in advance or something. There could be a lot of reasons why my letter wasn’t in the paper. There was only one thing to do, and that was wait until next week’s paper. So I balled the paper up, threw it into an oil drum they had for a trash can at the station, and went on home through the drizzle.

  That night, when Dad came home from work, he said less than usual. He just walked into the house, poured himself a drink of whiskey, and didn’t say anything to anybody. For a while he sat there at that scratched kitchen table drinking his whiskey. Then he said, “Harry, come out to the barn. I want to talk to you.”

  He’d found out something, that was for sure. He went out the door, and I went out behind him in the drizzling rain. When we got out to the barn, he leaned up against the workbench, which was all cluttered with tools and rags and bits of wood. I went over and leaned against the workbench, but a little way from him, so as not to be too close. I didn’t look at him but stared out into the dark drizzle at the end of the day.

  “I saw your pal Herbst today,” he said. “He had me come over to his office.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He told me the cops caught you out there by the carpet factory taking pictures.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything wrong, Dad—”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I didn’t say you were. He said it wasn’t likely anybody would get back in there again. They’re going to put a chain fence around that whole area and put a couple of dogs in there. So stay away from there from now on. You might get hurt.”

  “I wasn’t planning on—”

  “Shut up. I haven’t finished.” He was being mighty tough, and I didn’t understand why. “Now you listen to me close, Harry.” He stopped and gave me a hard look to make sure I was taking him seriously. “I want you to forget all about anything you saw in there. I don’t want you to say a word about it to anybody. Hear?”

  “But Dad,” I said. “They’re pollut—”

  He hit me. He smacked me hard across the face. It spun my head around, and I staggered away from the workbench and almost fell. I was dazed and shook my head to try to clear it. His words seemed to be coming from a distance. “I told you,” he said. “Just forget about it. Just forget it for good. You hear me?”

  My head was clearing. I licked my lips. I could taste salt and I knew I was bleeding. I stared at him.

  “You hear me, Harry?”

  I knew he would hit me again if I didn’t answer. “Yes,” I said in a low voice. He turned and walked out of the barn and I sat down on the rough plank floor and began to cry. My face hurt, but that wasn’t it. Why was Dad siding with Herbst, after all the terrible things he’d said about Herbst? He never liked Herbst. And he’d always said he himself was against pollution.

  For a long time I sat there on the barn floor. I knew that Mom and Dad were in the kitchen eating supper. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to see either of them. So I went on sitting there, getting hungrier and hungrier. Finally I got up and went down to the house. Mom was washing the dishes, and Dad was in the other room watching a baseball game.

  “There’s some hash on the stove, Harry,” Mom said in a low voice. “I kept it warm for you.”

  It wasn’t Mom’s fault that Dad had hit me, but I didn’t feel like saying thank you to anybody. So I just got a plate and helped myself to some hash out of the frying pan.

  “Don’t be too upset with Dad,” she said. “He’s only doing what he thinks is right for the family.”

  I didn’t understand that. Why was hitting me right for the family? “He didn’t have to hit me,” I said. I sat down at the table with my plate of hash.

  She sighed. “I know,” she said. “But he said you gave him an argument.”

  Dad came into the kitchen. I wouldn’t look at him, but bent my head down and started eating. He didn’t say anything but put on his jacket and went out the kitchen door. In a moment we heard the truck start and drive away. And that was when I remembered that the next Thursday my letter about the pollution would come out in the paper. I sat there frozen, a forkful of hash stopped in midair. If that letter was published, he’d give me a real beating. I didn’t understand why he was so strong on me keeping my mouth shut about the pollution pipe, but he was, and he would near beat me to death when that letter came out.

  ELEVEN

  “What’s the matter, Harry?” Mom said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just thought of something.” I shoved the forkful of hash into my mouth, but I didn’t feel like eating any more. If that letter was published, I’d be finished. I just had to get it back.

  The next afternoon I went over to the newspaper office after school. It was just outside of town, in the downstairs of an ordinary house. There was a regular front door with a wooden sign screwed onto it saying TIMBER FALLS JOURNAL. I was feeling pretty nervous. I didn’t know if I was supposed to knock, or just walk in, or what. Finally I opened the door and went in. A little fence divided the room in half. Behind the fence were a slim young man and a woman with gray hair. They sat at desks heaped with papers, and beside each desk was a typewriter on a little green metal table. Behind them an open door led to another room. I could see a part of a desk through the open door.

  The woman looked up at me. “Yes?” she said.

  “I sent a letter to the editor last week,” I said. “I changed my mind about getting it printed. I’d like to get it back if it isn’t too late,” I said, trying to be polite.

  She smiled. “You changed your mind?”

  “I decided I didn’t want to get it printed,” I said.

  “We don’t always print the letters we get,” she said
. “We might not have planned to print yours.”

  That was a relief, but I had to be sure. “It was about pollution at the carpet factory.”

  She gave me a funny look. “Oh, that letter,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I hope you won’t print it.”

  She got up and walked through the open door into the room behind her. In a minute she came back and sat down at her desk again. An older man appeared at the open door. He had a gray mustache and was wearing an unbuttoned vest. He was smoking a pipe. For a minute he stood in the doorway looking at me. It made me feel like I’d done something wrong. “You wrote that letter?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I said. I figured he was the editor. “I hope I can get it back, if it isn’t a lot of trouble,” I said, still trying to be polite.

  He sort of nibbled on the mouthpiece of the pipe. “You’re one of the Whites from Mountain Pass Road?”

  I hated that. “Yes,” I said.

  But at least he didn’t tell me to go away. “Come on in for a minute.”

  I opened the gate in the fence, went between the two desks and into the back room. He had a big desk, which was also covered with papers, and a typewriter on a green metal table. There was a faded rug on the floor, bookshelves filled with books on one wall, a huge map of the Adirondacks on another, and a big, worn overstuffed chair in one corner. He pointed to the armchair. “Have a seat.” I sat down, and he went behind the desk and sat down.

  He nibbled at the pipe a little and then took a puff on it. “You actually saw a pipe out there by the carpet factory? Actually spilling something into the river?”

  For a minute I thought about telling him it was all a lie, that I’d made the whole thing up. But I didn’t want to make my reputation any worse than I had to. “Yes, I saw it. But I want to forget about it.”

  “Tell me exactly what you saw,” he said.

  That worried me. It sounded like he was trying to get information for a story. “I’d just as soon—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to get you in trouble. Just tell me what it was.”

  There wasn’t much of a way around it. “Well, it looked like a twelve-inch iron pipe sticking out of the bank and angling down toward the water. It’s pretty hard to spot because there’s a lot of foliage around it, and if you weren’t looking for it, you probably wouldn’t notice. But there’s a furrow below the pipe running down to the water. You can tell there’s been chemicals coming out of the pipe, because nothing is growing there.”

  “So you didn’t actually see anything come out of it?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “I went up there one night with a flashlight, and I saw chemicals or something coming out.” I decided not to mention the pictures I’d taken.

  He squinted at me and took another puff on the pipe. “You actually saw something pouring into the river.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like greenish water,” I said.

  “You’re positive.”

  “Yes.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “What were you doing out there?”

  I was afraid he would ask that. I didn’t want to tell the truth. I didn’t want to say anything about not wanting to be trash anymore. I didn’t want to talk to him about being trash at all. So I told my old story. “I was looking for birds. Somebody said they saw a pileated woodpecker up there. They’re rare.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I know they’re rare. A couple of times we’ve done stories when somebody’s spotted one.” I could tell that he believed my story. “Why did you go back at night?”

  Suddenly I began to wonder how much he knew about what I’d been doing. Had the cops told him that they’d picked me up out there with a flash camera? Maybe they had. I decided I’d better stick as close to the truth as I could. “I saw that pipe the first time I was out there, and I figured that was where the pollution was coming from. I figured that if they were dumping stuff, they would do it at night. I just went back to see if they were.”

  “That’s when you saw liquid running from the pipe?”

  “Yes, but then somebody spotted me from the factory and called the cops. They said I was trespassing and took me down to the station house.”

  “I’ll bet they did,” he said. His pipe had gone out, and he lit it with a lighter. “Did they charge you with anything?”

  I decided it was best to keep Mr. Herbst and all that out of it. “No, they just let me go and told me not to hang around there anymore. But please,” I said. “I don’t want anybody to know about it now.”

  He puffed on his pipe, blowing smoke around the place. “I’m curious,” he said. “How come you changed your mind?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. I hadn’t figured anybody was going to ask me a lot of questions, and I hadn’t worked out a story. I felt myself go red, and then I looked down at my hands. Finally I said, “I don’t want to discuss it. I just changed my mind.”

  “Cops say anything about keeping your mouth shut?”

  I shook my head. “They just said to stay away from there.”

  “Somebody offer you some money to withdraw the letter?”

  When he said that, something came to me: Had Herbst bribed Dad to keep me quiet? Would he have done something like that? Would Dad have taken a bribe from somebody he hated? When I thought about it, I knew he would. He’d say that if they were stupid enough to offer him some money, he’d be glad to take it. “No,” I said. “Nobody offered me any money.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m positive. I wouldn’t take a bribe.”

  He knocked his pipe out on a big ashtray on his desk. “And you won’t tell me why you changed your mind about it.”

  I couldn’t tell him the real reason. He’d want to know why Dad had hit me, why Dad was so serious about keeping the whole thing quiet. I knew there wouldn’t be very good answers to that. I wondered: If Dad had taken a bribe, could they send him to jail for that? To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded him going to jail, but who would pay the rent? I said, “Nobody offered me any money. I just don’t want to discuss it.”

  He started to fill his pipe again from a leather pouch. “Well,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about it. There was no way we were going to run that letter. As a matter of fact, I burned it.”

  What a relief that was. I was safe from Dad. But I was pretty surprised too. “You burned my letter?”

  “Harry—You said your name is Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harry, you’re not the only person in town who knows what’s going on up there. I’ve known for years that they’ve been polluting the Timber River. Some of the guys who work up there know. The union shop steward knows, because I’ve talked to him about it. Some of the town officials know, because I’ve talked to them too. And the fishermen all know because you can’t eat the trout out of there anymore. It’s got a taste to it.”

  Well, that was about the biggest surprise I’d ever had. I just sat there with my mouth open, feeling sort of silly. “If they all know, why hasn’t anybody done something about it?”

  “It’s simple. Fred Herbst has said the main office will close down the factory if they force him to put in pollution controls. The carpet factory is just part of a larger company. They say that the factory isn’t profitable as it is, that they’re only keeping it open for the good of the town, and so forth.”

  “Is that true?” I said. “Isn’t it profitable?”

  He shrugged. “You’ll never know and I’ll never know. There’s no way the town can force them to open their books, and even if we did, they probably have the accounting worked out to make it look unprofitable whether it is or not.”

  “Is it legal to do that?”

  “Sure, if the tax people accept it. But it doesn’t really matter. Herbst says that if the factory is forced to put in pollution controls, they’ll have to close, and people around here aren’t willing to take the ch
ance. This area has been depressed for a long, long time. That carpet factory provides a lot of jobs to people around here, and those people cash their checks in the local stores. You walk into one of the supermarkets some Friday night when they’re in there with their families, and watch those cash registers ringing up eighty, ninety, a hundred dollars at a clip. Close the carpet factory and you’d close half the stores in town.”

  “Doesn’t anyone care about the river being polluted?”

  The editor puffed out a mouthful of smoke. “Sure they do,” he said. “Given their choice, people would rather see the Timber River cleaned up. But to most people being out of work is an awful lot worse than a little pollution.”

  There was something about it I didn’t understand. “You mean that people like the town officials and the union shop steward and whoever knew about it got together and decided to keep quiet about it?”

  He frowned, puffed on his pipe, and thought for a minute. “Well, not exactly. I don’t doubt that the town councilmen have discussed the whole thing quietly among themselves. I know for a fact that about five years back the Sportsmen’s Club invited Herbst to their monthly meeting. That’s a matter of record. I covered the meeting for the paper. That’s when Herbst made it clear that the factory would be closed if they were forced to put in pollution controls. I front-paged the story. After that people just decided to shut up about it. It wasn’t a question of getting together on it. They just quietly shut up.”

  I just sat there. I didn’t know what to say. My whole idea had been wrong from the beginning. It had all been a waste of effort. I felt plain stupid. “So it wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d brought you in pictures of the pollution or something.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to run that story. Not until there’s popular support for it.” He puffed and then gazed at the smoke slowly curling and twisting upward. “I was considering it. At the time that Herbst told the Sportsmen’s Club that he’d close the factory if they tried to do anything about pollution controls, I considered really going to town on it. I’d just got started checking into it when I got a phone call from the president of the Merchants" Association. He told me flat out that if I started a crusade against the factory, all the stores in town would pull their advertising out of the paper. I figure Herbst had leaned on him, but he wouldn’t admit it. You can’t run a newspaper without advertising—no advertising, no paper.”