The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  By morning, Perkins planned to be at Block Island, with cases of Haig & Haig Pinch Bottle, Stolichnaya Vodka, and Burgundy wine in the hold, and he planned to drink as much of it as he could. What he could not drink, he would smuggle home, where he would continue to drink, just to irritate his wife.

  Once they had pushed away from the Brunswick and found a comfortable point of sail, Perkins secured the wheel and Bunson broke out the Scotch. They took their spots in the cockpit, with tumblers in hand and the rhythm of the hull on the waves regular and relaxing beneath them. And Perkins toasted, “To our last sail of the year.”

  Bunson toasted back, then said, “May I ask you something, sir?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You used to drink Tanqueray g-and-t’s and nothing else from June twenty-first to the end of boating season. Then, one day, you poured your gin down the sink and switched to Scotch. Why?”

  Magnus said, “The juniper.”

  “Juniper?”

  “It makes some people mean. I can drink anything else and I’m always a prince.”

  “Of course you are, sir.”

  “But the juniper in the gin …” His voice trailed off and he looked out at the sea.

  Bunson said, “It was around then that Rosemary Ryan had her fall, wasn’t it?”

  The boat rocked with the motion that calmed some men and made others seasick.

  Magnus snapped his attention back to his butler. “That was eight years ago. That’s when I did it. That’s when she died. I don’t see the correlation.”

  After a moment, Bunson said. “Snitterfield has died, you know.”

  “Stansfield’s butler? The one who used to walk the wolfhounds?”

  “I sat with him at his deathbed. He spoke of that night. The shadow that passed him—a man, tall and skinny, smelling of alcohol.”

  “Suspicion fell on Amory. But we vouched for him. It went a long way toward exonerating him.”

  “He did have his share of g-and-t’s that night. And Snitterfield told me that what he smelled was gin. Juniper berries. Juniper, which, as you say, makes you mean.”

  There was a moment of silence between Magnus Perkins and his butler.

  Then the wind gusted out of the southeast. The sloop heeled hard and the bottle of Scotch went tumbling over the side.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, the train from Boston pulled into Portland.

  The conductor, Michael Ryan, punched out.

  He didn’t mind the routine. He knew where a man could get a bottle in Portland. Then he would curl up on a passenger seat in the front car, drink himself to sleep, and be ready when the morning crew came aboard at five A.M.

  BY MIDNIGHT, THE wind was gusting to fifty knots at Providence.

  Soon after, it began to rain. But not just to rain. It was as if the wide Sargasso Sea had been sucked up into the clouds and carried north to inundate New England. It poured and roared and fell so thick that it seemed like a fog on the land. It fell through the night and into the morning, and in some places it fell at two inches an hour.

  And the storm did not lose power as it rolled toward the higher ground. Instead, it was stopped by cooler air to the north, so the rain-filled clouds kept coming and coming, throwing themselves against the wall of New England mountains like Union soldiers throwing themselves against that wall on the road to Richmond.

  But along the Maine coast, the rain was not so heavy.

  When Aaron Amory left his house on Bramhall Hill in Portland, it was barely sprinkling. He planned to make his rounds at the hospital, then hop a train back to Livermore and get to his father’s bedside by noon.

  He crossed to the West Promenade, which overlooked the approaches to the city. There was not a hint of brightening yet. But he could see the lights of the 5:25 to Boston, pushing out of the railyard and heading south, the steam engine moving like a big bull, unbothered by a little rain.

  MICHAEL RYAN PUNCHED tickets on the 5:25.

  The early businessmen were in their usual places, doing the usual things. The paper-readers were reading the papers, the coffee drinkers were blowing on their cardboard cups of coffee, the Boston-bound lawyers were pulling out their briefs.

  Michael Ryan kept up his stream of “good morning, sirs, tickets please, sirs, thank you, sirs,” and wouldn’t I love just a hair of the dog.

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, Gilbert Amory was ready to leave his hotel in Barre, Vermont.

  The rain was coming in sheets, in curtains, in thick heavy drapes of water, but the most that the man behind the desk could muster was, “Sure is comin’ down.”

  “What about the roads?” asked Gilbert.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On where you’re goin’. Rainin’ so hard west of here, you can’t walk, never mind drive.”

  “I’m headed east. New Hampshire.”

  “Can’t speak for New Hampshire. Never been there.”

  Yes, thought Gilbert, New Englanders could be provincial people.

  He stepped onto the veranda. Barre was a gray city even on the brightest day, because almost everything was built of the granite quarried in the surrounding hills. But today it was raining so hard that all other color was obscured. Everything was gray. And the water was roaring down Route 302, pushing stones and dirt like a mountain river in spring. That was the way he had to go.

  Most of the roads between Barre and New Hampshire were dirt, but they were solid, well graded, with high crowns in the middle for drainage. They would get him to Livermore despite the downpour. Besides, the rain would have to let up. It simply couldn’t rain any harder.

  And Gilbert had to get to his father’s bedside. He had to say good-bye, and once the old man’s eyes were closed, Gilbert would find the combination of the safe and go down and open it. When Gilbert had tried to convince the old man to rewrite his will, the best that Gilbert could get from his father had been a promise to divide the contents of the safe in half. George had stubbornly, resolutely refused to show his sons the Constitution or sign anything that mentioned it. Gilbert had begun to wonder if the old man even owned it, if it hadn’t all been a legend. But according to a telegram that had arrived from Aaron the night before, the Amory brothers were about to find out the truth. So Gilbert was hand-cranking the Model T while the rain soaked through his slicker and water swirled around his shoes.

  GEORGE AMORY SPENT the night in dreamless slumber and awoke to all the days of his life. They flowed through his brain without order or logic, in slices and shards … Forward the Twentieth … Why is your father so much older than the other dads? Because your mother is so ugly … Do you have feelin’s for me, George Amory? … Forward the Twentieth … There’s gray in your Vandyke…. You’ll not choose the ministry, then? … It’s an honorable discharge…. Business is business…. You’re big enough to pound me to pieces, but I’ll break your hands…. Come at two o’clock. Promise? … To the wall! Take the wall! … Cordelia is there, Cordelia and your two little boys….

  The thunder of the rain was like artillery. It roared down on Livermore. It softened the ground under the train tracks. It ran in torrents that no tree-covered watershed could have held, nor any cut-over hillside.

  Cordelia! She’s under the thunder of the guns. Cordelia!

  George Amory tried to get out of bed.

  A HUNDRED AND forty miles south, a pocket of torrential rain had settled over the hills of central Massachusetts.

  It had already knocked down the tent that the auctioneers had set up under the maples, so Bill and Sarah McGillis stood in the old boardroom, watching it fall and listening to it roar like the mill running balls to the wall.

  At eleven o’clock, the auctioneer came in. “Grade crossings washed out from Boston and Worcester. No one knows about the line from Providence. Best that we postpone.”

  Bill McGillis looked out at the river. “We got bigger problems than that.”

  “Oh?” said Raymond Dunne, the bank representative.

  “W
e got a mill dam about a hundred yards upstream, and the way the rain’s comin’ down, it might be topped. It might even break.”

  “What will happen then?” asked Dunne, whose big belly spread the buttons on his gray vest and whose forehead spread perspiration.

  “Why, we’ll flood. And—”

  “—the bank still owns the building.” Dunne looked out at the brown water roaring down the river and rushing through the headrace.

  “It’s going to be a long day or two,” said Sarah. “But this is America. In America, we get up in the morning and go to work and solve our problems.”

  GILBERT AMORY HUNCHED over the wheel and peered through the rain covering his windshield. He had given up using the wiper. He couldn’t drive and work the hand lever fast enough to make any difference. Uphill and down, past his ski slope, through the village of Orange, he puttered along at twenty miles an hour.

  The Wells River ran near the road, sometimes hard beside it, sometimes behind a hill and out of sight, and whenever Gilbert was able to take his eyes from the road and glance down into the gorge, the river had risen even more.

  Finally, he came down toward the town of Groton. A row of worker’s houses lined the rising ground left of the road. To the right, three houses sat on the edge of a wide plain that sloped gently to the river. Except that the river had risen out of its channel, up over the plain, and was now lapping the roadbed.

  Gilbert slowed as he came to a group of people standing in the road, dumbly, helplessly, looking out across this boiling brown torrent toward one of the houses.

  Gilbert dropped his window and shouted, “You folks need help?”

  “Not unless that car can float,” answered someone.

  A line of rope unspooled toward one of the houses, and Gilbert realized that it was not a single-story house, but two stories, and one was completely underwater.

  Then, over the roar of the river, he heard a baby crying and saw a woman waving frantically from one of the windows.

  “Oh, Good Lord,” shouted someone in the crowd by the road. “We’re losin’ ’em!”

  And the house began to move. It twisted in the torrent like a cardboard box crushed in a child’s hands. And with a groan of wood and nails that struck a chord just high enough to be heard over the roar of the river, it lifted off its foundation.

  The woman in the window screamed again. So did several on the road.

  “Maybe we can get her at the bridge!” shouted someone.

  “Bridge is out!” shouted someone else. “There’s washouts all the way to Ticklenaked Pond.”

  The house revolved twice, then broke apart in a burst of furniture and stove pots and bed linens.

  The people on the side of the road began to run toward the center of town, following the wreckage that carried the woman and her baby.

  Gilbert called after them, but it was as if this was a local tragedy, something personal, and they wanted no stranger to be part of it.

  So he drove a short distance more until the came to the Peacham Road. He decided to take it, because he would never get through Groton. Twelve miles of rough road would take him to West Danville. And further north, the Connecticut might not be so swollen. He might still be able to get across and make it to his father’s bedside.

  He went about seven miles, through farmland and woodlots, on undulating roads that took every bit of concentration. Then he came to a dip, and at the bottom, where there should have been a little bridge, there was water: Peacham Brook had overflowed its banks.

  Gilbert stood on the brake. The Model T skidded and began to slide on the muddy road, slide sideways, slowly, inexorably and completely into the brown roaring water.

  Gilbert tried to push open the door, but the force of the water held it shut, then picked up the car and rolled it over, and he thought, how foolish to die in Peacham Brook.

  THE 5:25 FROM Portland pulled into North Station at 9:30, an hour late.

  Michael Ryan’s schedule had him returning to Portland on the 2:10. Time enough to get over to the South End to buy a couple of bottles of bathtub gin at the bootlegger’s. From North Station to Dover Street, fifteen minutes on the subway. Then back with enough booze to get him to Portland and back one more time.

  DR. AARON AMORY’S train made it as far as the Victorian station at North Conway. Even its gay yellow paint seemed gray in the rain.

  The conductor came through the car shouting, “End of the line. Everybody off!”

  “Everybody off?” said Aaron. “What for?”

  “The track’s washed out below Bartlett, and there’s a landslide in Crawford Notch. Took out a freight train, or so they say.”

  The passengers muttered and looked at each other, as if for encouragement, or perhaps leadership. Wasn’t there something that could be done?

  Aaron said, “Is there a place we can hire a car?”

  “Hirin’ a car ain’t the problem,” said the conductor. “The hard part’ll be findin’ a road.”

  Aaron was still twenty miles from Livermore. And his father was dying.

  THE OLD MAN had not rescued his wife that morning.

  He had wobbled to his feet, then fallen back into a stupor. Later Frenchy had looked in on him, swung his feet back, and covered him so that he could sleep again.

  Now, around three in the afternoon, George Amory awoke.

  The guns were still thundering. Would they ever run out of ammunition? And why were the generals still sending soldiers up that hill?

  But Cordelia was up there, held captive behind the wall. Cordelia!

  This time, the old man made it to his feet.

  He looked down at the bony white toes, all seven of them, and … he had proved it before and he would prove it again. He was no coward. He was a good American. He had saved the Constitution. He had used it to save his son. Now he would save his wife.

  He smoothed his Vandyke, and Cordelia laughed at his gray hairs.

  The roar of the guns was so loud that Frenchy did not hear him go down the stairs, step out onto the porch, and call to his men. “Theirs not to reason why …” Forward the Twentieth!

  Then he came off the porch and felt the enemy fire pouring down from the sky. Enemy rain, falling so hard that it hurt his face. He could not appear frightened to his men, so he took a confident step down the embankment, slipped, and went skittering to the bottom, where he stopped a few feet from the foundation of the steam house.

  Get up … Don’t let your men see you down … They’ll never follow you….

  The boiler in the steam house was roaring, so the saws were screaming, like asylum inmates oblivious to the world outside.

  No one seemed to notice that the roar of the river was almost as loud. And no one seemed to notice George. It was as if he were invisible, a gray old man in a gray nightshirt stumbling through the gray rain.

  So he moved like a ghost between the ramshackle buildings, until something made him stop about thirty yards from the river.

  She had been here, on this spot, when the hillsides were covered in virgin timber, when his little cottage was here. She had been here, where the railroad tracks now crossed in the middle of Livermore. She had been here, and she was near again.

  He called her name and heard the roar

  It was not artillery. It was not the Baldwin coming down from the cuttings. It was a wall of water, roaring down the gorge, rising over the banks, knocking down toolsheds and workhouses, splashing against the sides of flatcars, and striking George knee-deep, knocking him over, bouncing him along, slamming him once, then twice….

  It seems, as dark approaches, that most of New England is under water. Nine inches have fallen in some places, and it is estimated that as much as fifteen may fall, but no one knows for certain because rain gauges have been overflowing for hours.

  All across the six states, men are piling sandbags against the rising onslaught.

  Here in the hills of northwestern Connecticut, we have seen roads washed out, rail crossings des
troyed, homes flooded.

  New England railways have lost hundreds of miles of track, and hundreds of miles of road have been ruined as well, and millions of dollars in property have been lost. And by dawn, it will be worse.

  But we must remember the words of Will Pike, a man who built a fine mill in Massachusetts. This is America. In America, we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we solve our problems. And tomorrow, we will solve ours.

  With that, Samuel Bishop finished an editorial on the storm. He called his assistant and ordered him to take it to composition. He congratulated himself on the last line. It would please his wife to read the oft-used family saying, passed down from her great-great-grandfather.

  Samuel Bishop did not think it very accurate. Had the McGillises the foresight to solve their problems, they would have followed other investors and sold out of the mill.

  GILBERT AMORY DID not know how he got out of the car or made it to the bank. But he did remember a blow on the head. The car door? The car itself? Whatever it was, it was enough to knock him cold.

  He did not awaken until he heard voices:

  “His card says he’s a lawyer, Pa.”

  “We shoot lawyers around here.”

  “Maybe he can help us.”

  “Help us? It’s lawyers causin’ us problems.”

  Gilbert realized he was looking into the barrels of a shotgun and the curious gaze of a woman whose face was shaded by a big sou’wester.

  The woman pushed the shotgun out of the way and smiled, and her whole face seemed to glow. That was how Gilbert Amory met Mary Beth Meek, a schoolteacher in her forties who had a problem.

  Soon he was in their kitchen, a blanket around his shoulders, his wet clothes drying on the stove, a mug of tea in his hands. “An estate problem?”

  “My brother got three kids,” said Farmer Meek. “So he’s suin’ for four shares of my mother’s land and money, now that she’s dead, against two for me and Mary Beth.”

  Gilbert said, “Your mother died intestate?”