It all happened, you see.
Most of you reading this memoir will not believe that, not unless something like it has happened to you.
Any tale of grue should have a provenance or a secret. This has both. Let me begin by briefly telling you how my Uncle Otto, who was rich by the standards of Castle County, happened to spend the last 20 years of his life in a one-room house with no plumbing on a back road in a small town.
Otto was born in 1905, the eldest of five children. My father was the youngest of the Schenck children, born in 1920, and so my Uncle Otto always seemed very old to me—particularly because I was the youngest of my mother and father’s four children and was born in 1955.
Like many industrious Germans, my grandfather and grandmother came to America with some money. My grandfather settled in Derry because of the lumber industry, which he knew something about. He did well, and his children were born into comfortable circumstances.
My grandfather died in 1925. Uncle Otto, then 20, was the only child to receive a full inheritance. He moved to Castle Rock and began to speculate in real estate. In the next five years Uncle Otto made a lot of money dealing in wood and in land. He bought a large house on Castle Hill, had servants, and enjoyed his status as a young, relatively handsome (the qualifier “relatively” because he wore spectacles), extremely eligible bachelor. He remained a bachelor all his life.
He was badly hurt in the stock-market crash in 1929. He held onto the big house on Castle Hill until 1933 and then sold it because a great tract of woodland had come on the market and he wanted desperately to buy it. The land belonged to the New England Paper Company.
New England Paper still exists today, and if you wanted to purchase shares in the company, I would tell you to go right ahead. But in 1933 the company was offering huge chunks of land at fire-sale prices in a last-ditch effort to stay afloat.
How much land in the tract my uncle was after? That original, fabulous deed has been lost and accounts differ, but by all accounts, it was better than 4,000 acres. Most of it was in Castle Rock, but it sprawled into Waterford and Sweden. When the deal was broken down, New England Paper was offering it for about $23 an acre, if—and here was the big if—the purchaser would take it all.
That was a total price of almost $10,000. Uncle Otto didn’t have it and so he took a partner, a down-home Yankee named George McCutcheon. Today the names Schenck and McCutcheon are familiar ones in New England. The company was bought out long ago, but there are still Schenck and McCutcheon hardware stores in 40 New England cities, and Schenck and McCutcheon lumber yards from Central Falls to Derry.
McCutcheon was a burly man with a great black beard, and, like my Uncle Otto, he wore spectacles. His father and my grandfather had been acquaintances, and Uncle Otto met McCutcheon as a result of that friendship. Like Uncle Otto, he had inherited a sum of money. It must have been a fairish sum because he and Uncle Otto together swung the purchase of the 4,000-acre tract with no trouble. Both of them were pirates under the skin, and they got on well enough together. Their partnership lasted for 22 years—until the year I was born, in fact—and prosperity was all they knew.
But it all began with the purchase of those 4,000 acres that lay over three towns in western Maine, and they explored those 4,000 acres in McCutcheon’s truck, cruising the woods roads and the pulper’s tracks, grinding along in first gear for the most part, shuddering over washboards and splashing through washouts, McCutcheon at the wheel part of the time, my Uncle Otto at the wheel the rest of the time, two young men who had become New England land barons in the dark depths of the big Depression.
I don’t know where McCutcheon came by that truck, and I’m not sure it matters. It was a Cresswell, a breed that no longer exists. It had a huge cab painted bright red, wide running boards, and an electric starter. If the starter ever failed, it could be cranked—although the crank could just as easily kick back and break a shoulder, if the man cranking wasn’t careful. The bed was 25 feet long with stake sides, but what I remember best about that truck is its snout. Like the cab, it was as red as blood. To get at the engine, you had to lift out two steel panels, one on either side. The radiator was as high as a grown man’s chest. It was an ugly, monstrous thing.
McCutcheon’s truck broke down and was repaired, broke down again and was repaired again. When the Cresswell finally gave up, it gave up in spectacular fashion. It went like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the Holmes poem—all at once.
McCutcheon and Uncle Otto were coming up the Black Henry Road one day in 1953, and by Uncle Otto’s own admission both of them were “shithouse drunk.” Uncle Otto downshifted to first in order to get up Trinity Hill. That went fine, but, drank as he was, he never thought to shift up again coming down the far side. The Cresswell’s tired old engine overheated. Neither Uncle Otto nor McCutcheon saw the needle go over to the letter H on the right side of the dial. At the bottom of the hill there was an explosion that blew the engine compartment’s red folding sides out like red dragon’s wings. The radiator cap rocketed into the summer sky. Steam plumed up like Old Faithful. Oil went in a gusher, drenching the windshield. Uncle Otto cramped down on the brake pedal, but the Cresswell had developed a bad habit of shooting brake fluid over the last year or so, and that pedal just sank to the mat. He couldn’t see where he was driving and he ran off the road, first into a ditch and then out of it. If the Cresswell had stalled, all still might have been well. But the engine continued to run, and it blew first one piston and then two more, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One of them, Uncle Otto said, zinged right through his door, which had flopped open. The hole was big enough to put a fist through. They came to rest in a field full of August goldenrod. They would have had a fine view of the White Mountains if the windshield hadn’t been covered with oil.
That was it for the Cresswell; it never moved from that field again—which Uncle Otto and George McCutcheon owned, of course. Considerably sobered by the experience, the two men got out to examine the damage. Neither of them was a mechanic, but they didn’t have to be to see that the wound was mortal. Uncle Otto was stricken—or so he told my father—and offered to pay for the truck. George McCutcheon told him not to be a fool. McCutcheon was, in fact, in a kind of ecstasy. He had taken one look at the field, at the view of the mountains, and had decided this was the place where he would build his retirement home. He told Uncle Otto just that, in tones one usually saves for a religious conversion. They walked back to the road together and hooked a ride into Castle Rock with the Cushman Bakery truck, which happened to be passing. McCutcheon told my father that it had been God’s hand at work—he had been looking for just the perfect place, and there it had been all the time, in that field they passed three and four times a week with never a spared glance. The hand of God, he reiterated, never knowing that he would die in that field two years later, crushed under the front end of his own truck—the truck that became Uncle Otto’s truck when George died.
McCutcheon had Billy Dodd hook his wrecker up to the Cresswell and drag it around so it faced the road. So he could look at it, he said, every time he went by, and know that when Dodd hooked up to it again and dragged it away for good, it would be so that the construction men could come and dig him a cellar hole. He was something of a sentimentalist, but he was not a man to let sentiment stand in the way of making a dollar. When a pulper named Baker came by a year later and offered to buy the Cresswell’s wheels, tires and all, because they were the right size to fit his rig, McCutcheon took the man’s $20 like a flash. This was a man, remember, who was then worth a million dollars. He also told Baker to block the truck up right smart. He said he didn’t want to go past it and see it sitting there in the field hip-deep in hay and timothy and goldenrod, like some old derelict. Baker did it. A year later the Cresswell rolled off the blocks and crushed McCutcheon to death. The old-timers told the story with relish, always ending by saying that they hoped old Georgie McCutcheon had enjoyed his $20 for those wheels.
I grew
up in Castle Rock—by the time I was born my father worked for Schenck and McCutcheon—and the truck that had been George McCutcheon’s and became my Uncle Otto’s (along with everything else McCutcheon owned) was a landmark in my life. My mother shopped at Warren’s in Bridgton, and the Black Henry Road was the way to get there. So every time we went, there was the truck, standing in that field with the White Mountains behind it. It was no longer blocked up—Uncle Otto said that one accident was enough—but just the thought of what had happened was enough to give a small boy in knee pants a shiver.
It was there in the summer; in the fall with oak and elm trees blazing on the three edges of the field like torches; in the winter with drifts sometimes all the way up and over its bug-eyed headlights, so that it looked like a mastodon struggling in white quicksand; in the spring, when the field was a quagmire of March mud and you wondered that it just didn’t sink into the earth. If not for the underlying backbone of good Maine rock, it might well have done just that. Through all the seasons and years, it was there.
I was even in it once. My father pulled over to the side of the road one day when we were on our way to the Fryeburg Fair, took me by the hand and led me out to the field. It would have been around 1961, I suppose. I was frightened of the truck. I had heard the stories of how it had slithered forward like some stealthy but dangerous beast and crushed my uncle’s partner. I had heard these tales in the barbershop, sitting quiet as a mouse behind a Life magazine I couldn’t read, listening to the men talk about how he had been crushed, and about how they hoped old Georgie had enjoyed his $20 for those wheels. One of them—it might have been Billy Dodd, old crazy Frank’s father—said McCutcheon had looked like “a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor-wheel.” That haunted my thoughts for months. But my father, of course, had no idea of that. My father just thought I might like to sit in the cab of that old truck; he had seen the way I looked at it every time we passed, mistaking my dread for admiration, I suppose.
I remember the goldenrod, its bright yellow dulled by the October chill. I remember the gray taste of the air, a little bitter, a little sharp, and the silvery look of the dead grass. I remember the whisssht-whisssht of our footfalls. But what I remember best is the truck looming up, getting bigger and bigger—the toothy snarl of its radiator, the blood red of its paint, the bleary gaze of the windshield. I remember fear sweeping over me in a wave colder and grayer than the taste of the air as my father put his hands in my armpits and lifted me into the cab, saying, “Drive her to Portland, Quentin. Go to her!” I remember the air sweeping past my face as I went up and up, and then its clean taste was replaced by the smells of ancient oil, cracked leather, mouse droppings, and—I swear it—blood. I remember trying not to cry as my father stood grinning up at me, convinced he was giving me one hell of a thrill (and so he was, but not the way he thought). It came to me with perfect certainty that he would walk away then, or at least turn his back, and that the truck would just eat me. Eat me alive. And what it spat out would look chewed and broken and ... and sort of exploded. Like a pumpkin squot by a tractor-wheel.
I began to cry and my father, who was the best of men, took me down and soothed me and carried me back to the car. He carried me up in his arms, over his shoulder, and I looked at the receding truck, standing there in the field, red as blood, its huge radiator looming, the dark round hole where the crank was supposed to go looking like a horridly misplaced eyesocket, and I wanted to tell him I had smelled blood, and that’s why I had cried. I couldn’t think of a way to do it. I suppose he wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
As a five-year-old who still believed in Santy Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Allamagoosalum, I also believed that the bad, scary feelings that swamped me when my father boosted me into the cab of the truck came from the truck. It took 20 years for me to find out it wasn’t the Cresswell that had murdered George McCutcheon; my Uncle Otto had done that.
The Cresswell was a landmark of my life, but not just mine—it belonged to the whole area’s consciousness. If you were giving someone directions on how to get from Bridgton to Castle Rock, you told them they’d know they were going right if they saw a big old red truck sitting off to the left in a hayfield three miles or so after the turn from 302. You often saw tourists parked on the soft shoulder (and sometimes they got stuck there, which was always good for a laugh), taking pictures of the White Mountains with Uncle Otto’s truck in the foreground for picturesque perspective—for a long time my father called it “the Trinity Hill Memorial Tourist Truck,” but after a while he stopped. By then Uncle Otto’s obsession with it had gotten too strong for it to be funny.
What happened to my Uncle Otto?
There are too many ways to answer that question. All are plausible, none provable. It will be best, I think, if I tell everything, including those things I suspected and those I intuited.
That he killed McCutcheon is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure. “Squot him like a pumpkin,” the barbershop sages said. One of them added: “I bet he was down in front o’ that truck, prayin’ like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin’ to Arlah. I can just pitcher him that way. They was tetched, y’know, t’both of them. Just lookit the way Otto Schenck ended up, if you don’t believe me. Right across the road in that little house he thought the town was gonna take for a school, and just as crazy as a shithouse rat.”
This was greeted with nods and wise looks, but there wasn’t a one of the barbershop sages who considered that image—McCutcheon down on his knees “like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs” right in front of the truck on its rotted blocks—suspicious as well as eccentric.
Gossip is always a hot item in a small town; people are condemned as thieves, adulterers, poachers, and cheats on the flimsiest evidence and the wildest deductions. I think what keeps this from being actually nasty is that most party-line, grocery-store, and barbershop gossip is oddly naive. It is as if these people expect meanness and shallowness—will even invent it if it is not there—but that real and conscious evil may be beyond their conception, even when it floats right before their faces like an evil magic carpet from one o’ those greaseball Ay-rab fairy tales.
How do I know he did it, you ask? Simply because he was with McCutcheon that day? No, because of the truck, the Cresswell. When his obsession began to overtake him, he went to live across from it in that tiny house, even though in the last few years of his life he was deathly afraid of the truck beached across the road.
I think Uncle Otto got McCutcheon out into the field where the Cresswell was blocked up by getting him to talk about his house plans. McCutcheon was always eager to talk about his house and his approaching retirement. The partners had been made a good offer by a much larger company—I won’t mention the name, but if I did you would know it—and McCutcheon wanted to take it. Uncle Otto didn’t. There had been a quiet struggle going on between them over the offer since the spring. I think that disagreement was the main reason that Uncle Otto had decided to get rid of his partner.
I think that my uncle might have prepared for the moment by doing two things: first, undermining the blocks holding the truck up, and second, planting something on the ground or perhaps in it, directly in front of the truck, where McCutcheon would see it.
What sort of thing? I don’t know. Something bright. A diamond? Nothing more than a chunk of broken glass? It doesn’t matter. It winks and flashes in the sun. Maybe McCutcheon sees it. If not, you can be sure Uncle Otto points it out. What’s that? he asks, pointing. Dunno, McCutcheon says, and hurries over to see.
McCutcheon falls on his knees in front of the Cresswell, just like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin’ to Arlah, trying to work the object out of the ground, while my uncle strolls casually around to the back of the truck. One good shove and down it came, crushing McCutcheon flat. Squotting him like a pumpkin.
I suspect there may have been too much pirate in him to have died easily. In my imagination I see him lying pinned beneath the Cresswell’s snout, blo
od streaming from his nose and mouth and ears, his face paper-white, his eyes dark, pleading with my uncle to get help, to get help fast. Pleading, then begging, and finally cursing my uncle, promising him he would get him, kill him, finish him ... and my uncle standing there, watching, until it was over.
I think that guilt and fear began to steal over Uncle Otto, the guilt and fear that eventually robbed him of his sanity.
It wasn’t long after McCutcheon’s death that my uncle began to do things that were first described by the barbershop sages as odd, then as queer, then as “damn peculiar.” The things that finally caused him to be deemed, in the pungent barbershop argot, “as crazy as a shithouse rat,” came in the fullness of time. Major among them, of course, was first building and then taking up residence in the little house that faced the Cresswell truck from the other side of the road. But there seemed little doubt in anyone’s mind that his peculiarities began right around the time George McCutcheon died.
In 1965 Uncle Otto had a small one-room house built across from the truck. There was a lot of talk about what old Otto Schenck might be up to out there on the Black Henry, but the surprise was total when Uncle Otto finished the little building off by having Chuckie Barger slap on a coat of bright red paint and then announcing it was a gift to the town, a fine new schoolhouse, he said, and all he asked was that they name it after his late partner.
Castle Rock’s selectmen were flabbergasted. So was everyone else in town. Most everyone in town had gone to such a one-room school (or thought they had, which comes down to almost the same thing). But by 1965 all of the one-room schools were gone from Castle Rock. The very last of them, the Castle Ridge School, had closed the year before. It’s now Steve’s Pizzaville out on Route 117. By ’65 the town had a glass and cinderblock grammar school on the far side of the common and a fine new high school on Carbine Street. As a result of his eccentric offer, Uncle Otto made it all the way from “odd” to “damn peculiar” in one jump.
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