Embracing Darkness

by Christopher D. Roe

  What’s more, born and raised a strict Congregationalist, I find that my faith here takes a back seat to everything involved. In other words, my story is the story of others. All that occurs, you see, are events that I’ve researched. Some of those involved are simply people whom I once knew; others, people I just heard of; and a few, ones I feared.

  Imagination and wonder are truly remarkable. Some say the two go hand in hand. Perhaps so, but wonder does lead to many things. It opens doors, huge floodgates of supposition. A powerful thing, surely, to be able to search one’s memory and wonder how the whole world could be different, or even to wonder about everything that exists within the confines of one’s own small town.

  I wonder a lot.

  I wonder how, had I chosen a different path, my life would have been. I wonder whether the mistakes I made, both during my stay at the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys and afterwards in adulthood, could have been avoided had I done things differently.

  I wonder what children who are like I once was—abused, beaten, and neglected—become once they reach adulthood. Do we necessarily become like our parents? Is the abused always destined to become the abuser? Or do we become something worse?

  I wonder too whether I can answer such questions. Isn’t the first step to self-improvement admitting to yourself and to others that you have a problem? I know all too well what my wife and children think of me. I’ve made mistakes. I acknowledge that. God only knows how many mistakes I’ve made. And I’m paying for them every day.

  I wonder why I ever became a writer in the first place. Was it so that I could relive the pain of remembering over and over as I transfer my reality into fiction? Was the decision a way to torture myself as a means of atonement? Some people become alcoholics or drug addicts to hurt themselves on purpose because of self-hate. Do I hate myself?

  I do not wonder why I’ve finally chosen to write this story. I desperately wanted to tell it, even though it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It took me years to drum up the courage. The research has steered me all over the country and consumed two years of my life. I had to investigate whatever needed to be found out to get the story right. The interviews were many; the disappointments and doors slammed in my face were even more. However, I vowed not to give up until I got everything down for a fair and accurate account of what occurred in Holly, New Hampshire, between 1925 and 1942.

  What would it have been like had Father Phineas Poole not been asked to take over the Parish of St. Andrew’s in the spring of 1925? Would the small Roman Catholic population of the town have grown substantially or decreased dramatically? Would the troubled youth of Rockingham County have been better off with indifferent foster families, or would such children have benefited more from a state-run institution whose bureaucracy would neglect these lost souls far worse than any private citizen ever could?

  Wondering becomes complicated. That’s why I stopped asking myself questions that were too complex to answer. Instead, I concentrated on only one: Would things ever be as close to normal again as they were in Holly before the arrival of the new priest?

  St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church was nothing spectacular, but then again neither was Holly. It was as close to a normal, small New England town as anyone could hope to find at that time. It had been established in 1640, shortly after Reverend John Wheelwright and his followers arrived, courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, today known as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wheelwright had been exiled for rather inflammatory religious opinions that he shared with Anne Hutchinson, his sister by marriage. His other sin was that he robbed the land in and around what would become Holly, land that had once belonged to the Squamscott Indians.

  Being a man of the cloth, one would presume that Reverend Wheelwright treated the natives fairly, giving them more than the twenty-four dollars that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, had paid for Manhattan Island only twelve years earlier. Yet who am I to say how their business transpired? There isn’t much in our local history books to shed enough light on whether or not Wheelwright acted magnanimously or miserly.

  I suppose this speculation is irrelevant, since it’s more astonishing to me that Holly was even founded at all. Even though it was hundreds of years ago, folks around town still hold to the legend that, when Reverend Wheelwright came through this territory on his way to establish Exeter, he passed a great spread of land. What made him choose to press on was not that he thought the land impossible to irrigate for farming, but the presence of one thing he called a “monstrosity.” Onward they continued, or at least most of the party did. A few of the nearly 200 souls he had taken with him asked to remain behind. They liked the land and thought Wheelwright’s “monstrosity” actually quite pleasant to look at.

  This geological structure known as a drumlin, formed by receding glaciers thousands of years ago, was indeed an amazing sight, bulging out in the middle of the flattest of flat land. Being a small-to-average size for a drumlin, it still looked immense to the human eye, yet its summit reached only eighty feet. From one side to the other, it spanned approximately 3,000 feet, looking like the back of a whale slowly emerging from the earth. The 1,200-foot ascent to its peak from its gentlest slope of four degrees made it not too difficult to climb and offered a much more pleasant view from its apex than from the bottom.

  “Climbing the beast,” as the locals used to say, was avoided in the beginning, with the first settlers ignoring its existence. Often it was Holly’s children who would call attention to the hill, periodically gawking at it. After a while some started asking their parents whether they could go climb it. They would say things like, “Perhaps we can see the ocean from the top!” and “Maybe a giant lives up there!”

  Old Mrs. Kingood would relate stories that she had heard when she was a child. Dr. Hapscotch, the town physician back in the early 1800s, was the first to deem the hill a blessing. It was, as he always put it, “a way for lazy people to go out and do their bodies some good for a change.” He’d always said that Holly had more than its share of corpulent people. Before the doctor went public with his approval of the hill, not one soul had ever climbed it, which was a shame because the top offered a splendidly picturesque and panoramic view of the land below. From the summit could be seen miles and miles of flat farmland, dirt roads, cows grazing in the distance, a house here and there, a thin blue line in the distance, signifying where New Hampshire’s coast met the vast Atlantic, and of course, directly down the hill, the cluster of small buildings and streets that made up the town of Holly.

  Silas Rosgrove and Cletis Cartwell, two rather large gentlemen in their forties, and best friends, took the doctor’s advice and made their way up the hill on the first day of summer in 1822. Unfortunately their first attempt was their last. About halfway up the hill, with their bald heads getting sunburned and their eyes stinging from drops of sweat, Silas took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead and, in doing so, accidentally pulled out an embroidered hanky with the initials “CC” on it. These initials were not Cletis’s but rather his wife’s. Clarissa Cartwell had been having an affair with Silas Rosgrove, and until that moment it was the best-kept secret in town.

  An argument on the hill ensued. People in town would bet what they’ve got in their purses that accusation and denial occurred up there on the hill that late June day of 1822. The two men were seen by Jeb Hawkins, the local blacksmith at the time, wrestling each other like two sumo wrestlers, until they both lost their balance and tumbled down the hill, clutching each other’s clothing and anything else they could grab. It was determined later by Dr. Hapscotch that Cletis had died from a broken neck, most likely due to the fall, and Silas from a heart attack.

  In the latter’s mouth was found the embroidered handkerchief. Of course, the only way anybody knew about the affair was that Missy Gilmore was at both funerals and quickly spread the word that Clarissa Cartwell had been sitting in the front row a
t Silas’s service and muttering words such as “loved,” “can’t,” “alone,” “need,” “miss,” and “we.” Missy even heard people saying how Clarissa had put off Cletis’s funeral so that she could attend both without missing a single word of Reverend White’s eulogies.

  In 1853 Jefferson Pierce, beau to Hilda Beauregard, had finally drummed up enough nerve to ask her to marry him. He had been the first in his family to graduate from college and was an aspiring young man who attended his first four years of college at Harvard before entering Yale Law School. During his first year in New Haven, he met and fell in love with Ms. Beauregard, the eldest daughter of one of his professors. The two quickly became constant companions. Among their friends the couple was voted most likely to be together until death did them part.

  Jefferson took Hilda up the hill. They made it up there in about ten minutes, which was about twice the average time for one to climb it, but the two had to stop every few seconds to cuddle, kiss, and fawn over each other. They reached the top a bit out of breath but happy to have finally made it. Spreading their blanket out on the edge of the summit, they set their shoes on each corner and immediately resumed the physical side of their love for one another.

  They had never made love before, but when Jefferson had told Hilda the night before that he wanted to take her up the hill to make a special request, she assumed it would involve her virginity rather than her hand. Jefferson pulled his lips away quickly, trying to speak over his heavy breathing, the result of his excitement and anticipation of the question he had yet to ask. Hilda was also still nearly out of breath, due to the ascent up the hill while half the time her lips had been locked onto Jefferson’s.

  “What is it?” asked Hilda.

  Jefferson lowered his head and said, “I’m, I’m ready to… well… would you be willing to… ?”

  Hilda, understanding Jefferson’s stammering to be a request for sexual intercourse, shouted, “Oh, yes! Jefferson! Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, yes!”

  Young Jimmy Phillips had also climbed the hill that day. He had been dared by his friends to climb to the peak, stick his mother’s broom handle into the ground, and come back down; yet he had come up from the opposite side, whose slope was steeper, another condition of the dare. After shoving the stick into the ground, Jimmy decided to take a rest, as the ascent had been fairly strenuous. So he lay down on his back, taking in the sun. As he reclined in the tall grass, he heard all the commotion coming from the two young lovers.

  Jimmy sat up and watched. Later he would say, “Call me a peepin’ tom if you want, but what I saw I ain’t never gonna forget! That’s for damn sure!”

  Hilda, after screaming her last “Oh, yes!” tore open the upper part of her dress and undid her corset. As stunned as Jimmy Phillips was, he said later that Jefferson’s face looked even more so. Hilda then leaned forward to rip open Jefferson’s shirt. Dumbfounded, he looked from her face to her naked chest, to his naked chest, and back to her face.

  Now a bit embarrassed by her astonishing behavior, Hilda said, “I’m just as anxious as you, I guess. That is why you asked me up here, isn’t it?”

  Jefferson paused, then grinned and exclaimed, “Uh, yeah! Oh, yeah!”

  The two laughed together before Hilda, wanting to finish what she had begun, lunged to unfasten his pants, losing her balance in the process and falling on top of him. With Jefferson’s back on the hill’s edge, his penis protruding from his trousers and the weight of Hilda Beauregard falling onto him, the two began to tumble down the hill, half-naked and wrapped in an embrace. There was nothing for either of them to hold onto except each other as they kept rolling.

  Suddenly, about halfway down the hill, Hilda felt something tear inside her. At that same moment she heard Jefferson grunt in pleasure. She soon began making that same animalistic sound as he tumbled over her, then she over him. During their last five tumbles before hitting the bottom, Jefferson screamed in coital pleasure, louder and louder with each roll. Having lost all their remaining clothes during their awkward journey downward, they came to a stop with a loud thud. Jefferson, now on top of Hilda, gasped and then sank his heavy head on her breast. He lay there motionless.

  Hilda, knowing that the deed was done, albeit not how either had planned, chuckled to herself, ran her fingers through Jefferson’s hair, and said, “Hmmm. That was fun, Jefferson. I mean, it hurt something awful. My mother always said that the first time would hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Probably because my mind was elsewhere, thinking we were going to break our fool necks.”

  Jefferson didn’t move a muscle. Unbeknownst to Hilda, some people had taken notice of the two lying at the foot of the hill naked.

  “Jefferson!” Hilda hissed, now realizing that people were gawking at them. She began to tug on his hair, whispering angrily, “Get off me, and take your thing out of me! I can feel blood trickling down my thigh, and there are people coming this way.”

  Still not a muscle did Jefferson Pierce move.

  “Jefferson?” Hilda asked, a bit frantic now as a crowd of eight assembled around them in confusion.

  “You alright, young lady?” Luther Reynolds asked as he patted Jefferson on the shoulder, as if beckoning him to remove himself from the young woman.

  Now realizing what had happened to her beau, Hilda gazed up at Luther Reynolds and the others and calmly said, quite indifferently, in fact, “He should’ve asked me to marry him instead.”

  Jimmy Phillips, who had run down the hill after them, said later that it took three grown men to pull Jefferson Pierce out of Hilda Beauregard.

  She left Holly the following week in grief for her dear Jefferson, taken away from her so prematurely. It was said that she gave birth to a son nine months later, whom she named Richard and called Dick for short.

  Hubert Young, one of the oldest living residents of Holly, would say from then on that the hill was like war: “A good way to keep the population down.” It would be several more years before the next endeavor was made to tackle the hill. That wouldn’t come until 1860.

  What John Wheelwright had failed to discover, besides the sheer beauty from the hill’s vantage point, was that it was an ideal place for a tree, far away enough so that people wouldn’t molest it for its sweet syrup or its wood. Such a tree standing tall at the summit of Holly’s drumlin symbolized the region. It became a full-grown New England maple, and it stood firm and proud, surveying everything else for miles around. In fact, this totemic tree, planted in 1860 by the Benson clan, was never once robbed of its syrup. It stood nearer to heaven than any other living thing of equal or larger size as far as the eye could see. Its leaves danced freely in the breeze that swept across the hill’s summit.

  St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church, like Holly itself, was in contrast to the maple rather bland and unimpressive. Of course, some said that its white-painted planks and timbers made the church glisten in sunlight, but if you didn’t notice St. Andrew’s aesthetic qualities it wouldn’t linger in your mind. This was in fact the opinion of nearly the entire population of Holly. St. Andrew’s, being so far out of everyone’s way, easily escaped attention, so much so that Holly’s tiny Catholic population infrequently attended St. Andrew’s, just as it was largely forgotten by almost everyone else.

  The sanctuary’s hill location prompted many of the faithful to worship at home on Sunday mornings. Some Catholic families even opted to break church law and attend the services of other denominations that were considerably closer and easier to get to. As was the case throughout this part of the country in the late nineteenth century, most New Englanders were Baptists, Congregationalists, or members of the United Church of Christ. Holly’s Catholics were descendants of Irish immigrants who’d left Eire during the potato famine of 1848, recently arrived Italians who had found Boston too crowded, and some German Americans who’d inhabited New England since before the Revolutionary Wa
r. No matter what their ethnic background, Holly was given a church for these people.

  It was certainly a wonder to many, if not most, why anyone would put a church on a hill with no road linking it to town. The only way up and down the mountain was by foot. During its construction back in 1892, it was decided by contractor Horace Crosby that the church should be built solely of wood, due to the difficulty of transporting stone and brick to the summit. This was fine by the Diocese of Manchester, which had recently established its presence in upper New England by 1884. The cost of constructing grandiose, cathedral-like churches ran very dear and would have taken more manpower to get the materials needed up the hill. Lumber, however, was plentiful and, better yet, cheap.

  Horace Crosby knew the local mill owner, Jack Harmon, whose grandfather had started the company when Jack’s father was still in grade school, but in recent years the mill was losing a considerable amount of business. Buildings were being created in brick and stone more frequently, and most sales of wood were mainly for floors and furniture.

  No one in Holly was building houses anymore. The population had remained very steady, with a low birth rate and constant mortality rate. In fact, 1889 stood out in Holly as the year when the population dipped under 1,000 for the first time since James Monroe was President.

  Jack Harmon, in a rare vein of humor, thus joked to his wife one night as she was clearing away the supper dishes: “People in this town seem to have forgotten how to fuck, but they sure as hell remember how to fucking die.”

  A decent and God-fearing Christian woman, Pamela Harmon simply shot her husband a disapproving look and continued cleaning off the caked meatloaf from her husband’s plate.

  As it turned out, the carpenters became Jack Harmon’s saving grace.