The Winchesters

by James Lincoln Collier

  But my memories are kind of tantalizing, because I can't really get the feeling of what it was like. I can see the snapshots, but I can't remember what it felt like to be me, a little kid growing up out there in that Indian village. One of the things I want to do most when I'm a grownup is to go back there and see if I can get the feeling of what it was like, then.

  Anyway, when I was six Mom got pregnant again.

  She would have had the baby out there in the village with no doctor, just an Indian midwife, the way the Indians did, but there was an epidemic at the time. Dad didn't want to take a chance on it, so Mom and I flew down to Panama, where we had friends and there was a U.S. Army hospital. And the next thing we knew, a telegram came saying that Dad had died from the epidemic and they were sending his body back to the United States.

  He was a hero, my dad was. He gave up being rich in order to help poor people, and he died because he wanted to stay up in the mountains and nurse the sick. He didn't have to stay there during that epidemic, but he did. The last letter Mom got from him said that he was being careful and he thought he would be all right; but what was the point of being up there with those people if he was going to turn tail and run every time there was trouble? By the time the letter came he was already dying, but we didn't know that yet.

  So Mom had the baby, which turned out to be the twins. We came to the Winchester estate in Everidge and moved into the gatehouse. Uncle Foster gave Mom the job of taking care of the accounts for the house, checking the bills, paying the servants, and all that. She worked up at the big house every morning, and Uncle Foster paid her enough for us to live on, plus the gatehouse.

  I worked for Durham for my spending money—during summer vacation, and during the winter all day Saturday, and sometimes after school if they had a big party coming up or some other special work. I mowed the lawns, raked leaves, weeded the gardens, helped put the storm windows up and take them down—stuff like that. It wasn't too bad. Durham always wanted things done just right, so you couldn't slip by with him; but if I did a good job, sometimes he'd let me off early.

  Naturally I got to be friends with my cousin Ernest. We were the same age and even looked a little alike, except he was blond and I was dark, like Mom. Ernest always went to private schools, but when he was little they were day schools, so he was around home as much as I was, and we played together almost every afternoon—Ernest and his sister, Anne, who was a couple years younger than us. After Ernest went off to boarding school, I didn't see so much of him, but he was around for vacations and in the summer, except for August, when their whole family—Ernest and Anne and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Ernest—went off to a summer house they had in Bar Harbor, Maine. So we went on being friends.

  But it wasn't like having a real friend. We always played up at his house. The gatehouse was small, and Ernest had a big room where we could make block forts or set up his trains. Ernest had every kind of toy that was ever invented. He had a huge train set with all kinds of signals and cars that unloaded themselves; he had an electric car you could ride in, which we would race up and down the upstairs hall; he had a pony to ride; he had a science kit with a Bausch and Lomb stereozoom microscope. It was great having anything you wanted to play with. The trouble was that it was all his.

  None of it was mine at all. Of course Ernest and I were always friends, and he shared his things with me. He didn't try to boss me around, and if we got into an argument about whether to play with his electric car or set up his trains, we'd choose for it. Sometimes he'd even agree to go down to my house to play; Ernest was willing to do that, because he wanted to be fair with me. But there wasn't much point in playing in our crowded little house when he had that big room and all that good stuff in it.

  So in a way we were part of the family, and in a way we weren't. We always went up to the big house for Ernest's and Anne's birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and sat there in the big dining room with a lot of people, being stared at by old Amos Winchester. But we didn't live there, and there were a lot of things that Ernest and Anne did that I wasn't in on—trips to New York, parties they went to, things like that. We lived separate, in the gatehouse.

  The gatehouse was down at the end of the driveway, where it came off the road from Everidge. There was a tall, iron grillwork fence along that side of the estate, and a big gate, which nobody closed anymore. Back in the old days they'd always had a gatekeeper to stop people from coming in who didn't belong, to take messages, and to do errands. The gatehouse hadn't been meant for a whole family—just for a single man, or a couple. It was made of stone, like the big house. The twins had the original bedroom. I had a little back room, which had been meant for storage. There was a kitchen and a little living room, where Mom slept on a convertible sofa.

  Actually, the gatehouse was kind of nice, except for being too small. Nobody had lived in it for years before we came, and it still had old-fashioned furniture—a big soapstone sink in the kitchen and an old round oak table we ate off with a beaded lampshade hanging down over it. Through various windows we could see the sugar maples arching over the drive, or the pine trees at the end of the pond, or the fields out back with new-cut grass. That part was pretty nice.

  When you got down to it, we lived like anybody else around town —the people who worked in the mills, the people who kept stores and owned gas stations. I had a lot of friends in town, and it made me kind of uneasy when I thought about what Uncle Foster had said about “those people” not being of Ernest's social class. I felt like talking to somebody, and I decided to ride into town on my bike and see Teddy Melas. His dad had come over from Greece after World War II, when he was a kid. His mom was Greek, too. Mr. Melas worked for the Winchester Mills, in a tool room, checking out tools. They didn't have any more money than we did, and their house wasn't much bigger than ours. It was half a two-family house up on Mechanic Street, not far from the Scalzos. Teddy didn't have more things than I did; it was a lot more even between us than it was between Ernest and me.

  I got to be friendly with Teddy because he was a big baseball nut like me. His dad had seen GIs playing baseball back home in Greece after the war. When he came to Massachusetts he'd got to be a big Red Sox fan. He even remembered seeing Ted Williams. Sometimes he would take Teddy up to Fenway Park for the ball games, and after Teddy and I got to be friends, he'd take me, too. I loved that, watching the game and shouting for a hit and eating hot dogs while Mr. Melas drank foamy cups of beer.

  It was a nice ride. First there was the estate, with the fence along it, and cedars behind the fence, so people couldn't see in. Then you went past a couple of dairy farms, with cows grazing and corn growing and white houses and red barns. The Winchesters owned the farms and rented them out to the farmers. They lost money on the farms, but the idea was to keep developers from getting in there and putting up a shopping center or something next to the Winchester estate. After the farms you ran into a couple of gas stations and a supermarket, and then the town began. Main Street was lined with three- and four-storey old brick buildings, with offices upstairs and stores at the bottom—The Bootery, Kantor's Hardware, the Five and Ten, and such. On the side streets were the houses, mostly old, where the people who worked in the Winchester Mills lived. If you went on out the other side of town, you came to the mills—a collection of half a dozen huge factory buildings that went on for half a mile, getting newer and newer as you got farther away from town. The whole thing was surrounded by a hurricane fence. That was where all those millions and millions of dollars came from.

  The wooden two-family house that the Melases lived in had a porch that ran across the front, with two doors side by side for each family's part. I'd spent so much time at the Melases over the past eight years that I knew the house nearly as well as I knew my own. I knew where the loose board was on the porch; I knew about kicking the bottom of the back door to open it; I knew that you had to jiggle the handle on the toilet after you flushed it so the water wouldn't go on running.

  Teddy
was sitting on his front porch, putting new laces in his baseball glove. Teddy was tall and lanky and dark, and wanted to be a pitcher. I used to catch him a lot so he could work on his fork ball. “What do you say, Chris?” he said when he saw me.

  I leaned my bike against the porch. “Not much,” I said. I was feeling sort of nervous about raising the subject of Benny Briggs. Teddy and I didn't talk about serious stuff much. Mostly we talked about baseball. “What's the matter with your laces?”

  “They were getting worn. I didn't want them breaking on me in the middle of a game.” Some of the fathers who worked with Mr. Melas in his department at the mills had organized a Babe Ruth League for the kids, but I couldn't play in it, because they practiced two or three afternoons a week and I had to work for Durham. “I wish I could play,” I said.

  “Wouldn't Durham let you off sometimes? We don't start practice until four, when the mill lets out.”

  “By the time I got changed and rode into town it would be too late,” I said. I climbed up onto the porch and sat down beside him. “Listen, Teddy. Did you hear anything about what happened to Benny Briggs?”

  He gave me a kind of sideways look. “Yeah,” he said.

  “What did they say?”

  He looked at me again. “It's going around that you and your cousin, whatever his name, sicced an attack dog on Benny. It's going around that the dog went for his throat and would have killed him, but luckily he grabbed up a stick and knocked the dog out. They said that this black guy you have up there said he would shoot Benny if he came around again.”

  That made me mad. “It isn't true. That's a complete lie. It didn't happen that way at all.”

  “Don't get mad at me, Chris. I didn't say it was true.” He looked at me. “What really happened?”

  I realized I'd better get the straight story going around if I could. Otherwise everybody would be sore at me when I started school in September. “It wasn't like that at all. Benny and these two other guys were swimming in the pond. My cousin went over and told them to get out. They told him to go to hell or something, and he was going to go after them. Then Durham came along with Duchess. She was on a leash the whole time. She didn't attack anybody.”

  “Well, I figured Benny was exaggerating.”

  “Durham never let go of the dog. He just told Benny and those kids to get out of there, and they took off.”

  “I told them there was probably another side to it. I told them that I knew you, and you wouldn't sic a dog on anybody.”

  It was a relief that Teddy had stuck up for me, but it worried me an awful lot that Benny was spreading his story around. “Listen, Teddy. Maybe you could start telling people that Benny's lying. Maybe you could tell them you know it for a fact.”

  He gave me a kind of sideways look. “How could I tell them that?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Well, I don't know it for a fact. I didn't see it myself.”

  “Sure, I know that, Teddy,” I said. Suddenly I began to wonder what he really thought about the whole thing. “But you know I wouldn't lie to you. You know if I told you what really happened it would have to be true.”

  “Yeah, sure. But that isn't the same as knowing it for a fact.” He looked out the window and didn't say anything. Then he said, “Chris, Benny's out to get you. He's been telling everybody he's going to beat the hell out of you.”

  That worried me. It wasn't that I minded having to fight Benny Briggs. He was older and taller, but I weighed about as much as he did. Anyway, so what if he beat me? It would just be a fight. What I hated about it was the idea that people in town would be against me. “Well, if he wants to fight me, I'll fight him.”

  Teddy gave me another look. “They say he's trying to get Marie Scalzo away from you. They say he started hanging around Scalzo's store.”

  “Marie wouldn't go for Benny.” But it made me uneasy, all the same. “Why is everybody blaming the whole thing on me? I told Ernest to let them swim there.”

  “Well, it looked like you were going to fight them.”

  I couldn't deny that; it was true. “They didn't have any right to swim there,” I said.

  Teddy didn't say anything. Then he said, “Well, you better watch out, Chris. Benny might come after you with those two other guys.”

  Something came to me. “Listen, Teddy. If those three guys came after me at school, would you help me fight them?”

  He looked down at his baseball glove and began to work on the lacing again. “If it got started at school, somebody would stop it. Mr. Fusco or somebody would stop it.”

  I kept looking at him. “Yeah, but suppose they didn't. Supposed it happened after school.”

  “Maybe Benny will forget about it by the time school starts.”

  I didn't say anything for a minute. Then I said, “You mean you wouldn't fight them, Teddy?”

  He looked at me. “I didn't say that. Maybe I would.”

  Suddenly I realized that Mr. Melas was standing in the porch doorway, listening. He was a short, dumpy guy, with a little mustache. He saw me look at him. He came out onto the porch and put his arm around me. “Chris, it isn't fair to put Teddy on the spot like that.”

  I didn't understand. “What spot?” I said. “If it was the other way around, I'd help him fight Benny.”

  He took his arm off my shoulder, but he kept hold of my arm and looked me straight in the face. “Try to understand, Chris. It's different for you. You get into some kind of trouble in town, you can always go back out to your estate, and your family will take care of you. If Teddy gets into trouble, he's got no place to go. These are our people—we don't have anybody else. We can't get into trouble with them.”

  I was feeling pretty confused. “But I'm from town, too. I've gone to school with Teddy and the rest of those kids for eight years. How come all of a sudden it isn't my town anymore?”

  Mr. Melas put his arm around my shoulder again. “Chris, it never was your town—not in the same way that it's ours. Maybe you thought it was, but it wasn't. To all of us, you were always a little different. We always knew in the back of our minds that you were a Winchester. We always knew that you weren't really one of us.”

  I stood there with my mouth half-open, feeling shocked, not knowing what to say. “But what did I do wrong?”

  “From where you see it, nothing,” Mr. Melas said. He took his arm off my shoulder and sat down on the porch, his legs dangling down. “But in town people are saying, ‘What was so bad about those kids swimming in that pond? What harm were they doing?”

  That was hard to answer. What was so bad about it? “Well, they'd leave stuff around—soda cans and food and stuff.”

  Mr. Melas shrugged. “People will say, ‘So what, the Winchesters can afford to have somebody clean the place up.' Mind you, Chris, I'm not saying that the people in town are right, I'm not saying they're wrong. But you better understand how they feel.”

  I was beginning to feel kind of confused. I hadn't wanted to help Ernest kick those guys out of there, but all along I'd figured he had a right to do it. It was the Winchesters' pond. But the way Mr. Melas was putting it, I wasn't so sure anymore. “Even so, it's their pond.”

  Mr. Melas shrugged again. “Everything in Everidge is theirs,” he said. “They own the mills and the bank and half the houses the people live in. You don't get elected to anything around here unless they say so. You think the cops would do anything the Winchesters didn't like?” He stopped and looked at me some more, and then he said, “Chris, you got to understand, people around here don't like your family. They remember what happened in thirty-seven, during the Depression.”

  “Mr. Melas, that isn't fair. That was fifty years ago or something.”

  “The old people remember. They remember living on boiled potatoes. They remember being in breadlines to get handouts. Some people's pride is still bad hurt by that. The Winchesters don't know what it's like to take handouts to feed your family. Maybe if they'd done something since to make up for
it, people would forget, but what have they done? And now they're going to try to bust the union and cut wages.”

  “Mr. Melas, why am I getting the blame? It doesn't have anything to do with me.”

  “Your name's Winchester, Chris. That'll be enough for most people around here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I stuck around the Melases for a little while and then I said I had to get home for supper. I was feeling pretty bad. That's one of the worst things there is, to find out that a lot of people hate you—to find out that everywhere you went there would be enemies. I just wished Ernest hadn't started anything with those guys. I wished I'd told him I wasn't going to help him, and not even gone over to the pond with him. Although from what Mr. Melas said, that probably wouldn't have done any good. My name was Winchester. I wondered if I ought to change my name. Would that do any good? Mom wouldn't like that very much, though.

  What about Marie Scalzo? Would she start hating me? Marie and I had a lot of fun together. She was short and cute and had long, black hair that came halfway down to her waist. She was interested in nature. She was always taking books out of the library on wild-flowers and trees and birds, and on Saturday mornings she went on these nature walks they had, where they would go on one of the school buses to a lake or a forest preserve somewhere to study it. At least she went when it wasn't too busy at the store and her dad would let her get away.

  On Sundays she and I would go on nature walks of our own. We'd ride our bikes out to someplace where she'd been, and we'd walk around holding hands while she explained everything to me. Then we'd sit down in the middle of the woods all by ourselves and eat lunch. That was one advantage of having a girlfriend whose family owned a grocery store. She always brought terrific lunches—deviled eggs and turkey sandwiches and fresh doughnuts.