The shove was violent and out of nowhere. He had been fussing with his books, preparing for the start of First Period and English with Mr. Pepin, his favorite. And then the snarling; hairy face was in his face.
“Don’t you ever shove me, punk.”
He didn’t know what to say or what to do. He hadn’t shoved anybody.
Alan Ambrose inhabited the body of a fully formed adult. He was 16, and in the 7th grade--miles ahead of the other 7th graders physically. He’d been kept back from the 8th grade and before that from the 6th grade. He’d once punched a teacher in the men’s room. He had long greasy black hair and broken teeth and a face set off by a large nose and small, viper-like eyes. He smoked—right there in school—cause for expulsion, but the teachers didn’t have the nerve to grab him and drag him to the principal’s office.
“I didn’t shove you.”
“I said you did.” Alan Ambrose grabbed his shoulders and shoved him again.
“Now say you’re sorry.”
The second shove from Ambrose had knocked him back into the gray metal locker. Larry Cobb in the locker next to his looked on, but offered no help. Blake was down on one knee. He contemplated jumping up right in the bully’s face. But Alan Ambrose had cocked a big greasy fist and stood over him.
“I’m sorry. But, I never shoved you.”
“I said you shoved me. Now you stay out of my way.”
“I...”
“”Shut up. You stay out of my way.”
When he told Katherine about Vietnam he took her back to Alan Ambrose and junior high school. When he was finished, Katherine just shook her head. “That bullying. So terrible. So primitive.”
“Kath. I walked away. I should have just taken a swing at him and let him beat the crap out of me. I should have jumped up and taken a swing at him. But I walked. Took the easy road home. And after that it’s been a pattern.”
“Bobby. Bobby. Bobby. Stop! Stop! Now! You’ll talk yourself into being a big loser, when you are no such thing.”
But sometime, after they met and married and should have been happy, the bad dreams started. Always with Kevin Flanagan. Kevin calling: “Come on Blake. We gotta stop this shit.” And the bad dreams segued further and further back into the past until they ended when he was 13, and there was Alan Ambrose, smirking down at him at his locker in North Junior High.
* * *
Chapter 41
The Jones Library was a two-story stone building near the center of Amherst. Lester Carlson parked his Mercedes in the gravel lot to the side of the library and entered its cool interior. At the main desk, a perky gray-haired woman near his own age greeted him with a wide smile and directed him to the local history room. Lester Carlson smiled back and made his way down a flight of steps into a small basement room lined with old books with battered green or brown leather covers, an assortment of newer volumes with bright paper covers, and three-ring binders holding papers and photographs.
He appreciated that smile from the woman at the front desk. He could tell she thought him attractive. Her eyes had immediately traveled to his left hand and noted the lack of a wedding ring. He had taken his wedding ring off after Emily died.
Unfortunately, he found women his own age did not attract him sexually. They made excellent friends, but he was attracted to younger women--age 40 or so. That seemed to him the best of all possible ages. Women younger than that were really just children, callow, full of sexual games, and without enough life experience to be interesting. Women in their 40’s and up into their 50’s were old enough to be interesting, still sexually active, and usually with a soft blooming radiance, like a wildflower in August before autumn sets in.
Katherine, the wife of the Vietnam Vet now hanging around, was probably in her low 40’s. Funny how even at his age, 74, you could still meet somebody and feel that old instant desire--the quickening in the blood that starts as a teenager and never really leaves a man.
It had always been that way for him. He had seen Emily for the first time in a bar in Washington, D.C. sitting at a table with two women friends from work, and he had looked and known that she was the one. It had been awkward approaching a table with three women, introducing himself, and showing interest only in one--but Emily had also sensed their affinity, and had smiled back and given him a phone number. That would have been almost 40 years ago.
Lester Carlson glanced in the card catalog and then moved to the shelves. He found the section on Quabbin Reservoir and pulled out several books. There were two volumes that were obviously very old, another that appeared to be a history printed in 1950, and then several more recent books. He gathered the pile up and went back upstairs. The gray-haired librarian smiled at him again and took the books.
“Now several of these are not volumes that we allow to circulate,” she said.
“I see,” Lester Carlson smiled back.
“Yes, you see the older volumes are quite rare and out of print. But let’s see. You can take these out,” she pointed to several of the newer books, “and if you want, read these others here.”
“I don’t need to take any out. I’ll just glance at them here if I may.”
“Very good. We have a lovely quiet reading alcove right over there.”
Lester Carlson smiled again and carried his books into the alcove. For the next three hours he skimmed through the books.
The old codger at the Tuesday Tea had mentioned a Quabbin story with an old curse. He flipped through the books looking for the story. The book he found most helpful was one of the out-of-print-books. It contained detailed histories of the towns, family histories of the people from the towns, and a whole chapter on a famous curse—the Elijah Durman story.
Lester Carlson read this book. The newer Quabbin books he pushed aside.
There was plenty of information about the Durman family in the book. Old Elijah Durman had settled in Enfield shortly after the Revolutionary War. There had been doubts about him from the start.
Where did he come from?
In Colonial days, everybody knew everybody else in the community, and it was rare for a stranger to just appear in your midst from another community. Elijah Durman had no history, at least none that he ever spoke of. He was a cold man with a strange fixed glance that seemed almost hypnotic. Somehow he had prevailed on the widow Flanagan to marry him. She was probably desperate at the time, needing somebody to help her farm a small plot of land. And Elijah Durman worked hard on his little farm and kept to himself. But there had been incidents.
On one occasion he struck his wife full in the face with a closed fist when he found her in church at Sunday service. The congregation had gasped, but only one man, the local blacksmith named Richardson, had stepped forward to remonstrate. Elijah Durman was, the book said, one of those rare individuals that others were simply afraid of without knowing why. Later, a local boy by the name of Tim ran afoul of him. Elijah Durman caught him stealing apples from the Durman orchard and poked a sharpened stick into the boy’s eye, blinding him in that eye.
And the town, indeed the whole Quabbin Valley, had come to live in fear of an unknown killer who stalked and killed randomly. It had started with the Jamson boy and his young lady friend from Dana, Carol Hillson, slaughtered while swimming naked at Pottapaug Pond. And after that horrific discovery, the disappearance of Melissa Sanderson, who vanished while on her way home one winter night.
The books recounted the last days of Elijah Durman--his feud with an old farmer named Gogan; the death of the Gogan’s in a fire, and the ongoing suspicions of Greg Richardson the blacksmith from Dana. And then the death of Greg Richardson witnessed by a small boy who told how Elijah Durman struck the blacksmith with a large stone and then drowned him. And later, the death by fire of Elijah Durman just as he was about to be hung for Greg Richardson’s death, and his famous last curse.
Elijah Durman had vowed to return to Enfield and the other valley towns and avenge himself on the world. When the times were right and the earth and s
un at their limits, he would return for his vengeance, he screamed. There was also an old talisman involved. Elijah Durman would find his way back to the world using his talisman. He always returned, he shouted as fire consumed him. He would come back. He would return again, and again, and again.
And then a final coda to the story. A day after Elijah Durman’s death a Jesuit priest, a rarity in New England during that era, came to the valley looking for a red-haired man--a person of such evil that the Jesuit had been assigned to track him through the world. Told that most probably the man he sought had just died, burnt before being hung, the priest seemed relived at first, but then asked one question. Had the red-haired man left any sort of talisman or jewelry behind? And indeed Elijah Durman had.
In his final moments, he handed his wife a stone cross inlaid with a blue stone.
The Jesuit had looked pained by that news, but had gone off to find the widow Flanagan. He had never completed his inquiry.
A great thunderstorm rose over Pottapaug Pond and engulfed the valley with ripping lightning and deafening wind. The Jesuit rode grimly through the lashing wind and rain, holding onto his horse’s bridle, his head ducked down, his hat long since blown away by the wind. As he approached the widow Durman’s house in Enfield, a bolt of lightning struck a huge old oak near the path. The great tree cracked and a large upper branch crashed down on the Jesuit and his horse killing both. End of story.
Lester Carlson closed the book after reading this. It was all so vague and speculative. The very thing from which thousands of local legends and ghost stories were concocted. Even the author didn’t take the story very seriously, but reported it as a good yarn.
* * *
Chapter 42
The afternoon was waning. Lester Carlson pushed his chair back and looked at the sky through the high windows above him in the library’s reading alcove. Gray clouds whipped through the blue sky, bobbing into view in the window frame and then sliding away behind the glass. A storm front was moving in and a feeling of nostalgia overcame him.
It was days like this that had drawn him to the library as a small boy. Days of clouds and damp air, and the smell of rain and new grass. Late spring days when the promise of summer was just around the corner, and his mother would take him to the Enfield Library every Saturday morning. He would check out an armful of books—enough to keep him occupied for a week. He loved Conan Doyle, Dickens, and H. Rider Haggard. It was a Saturday morning tradition. His mother would bring him to the library to return books and to pick out new ones. He read all of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes twice over in this way, and almost all of Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities remained one of his favorite books of all time.
It had been a fine life growing up in the Valley and a shame that it was now gone, buried under the waters of the great reservoir. But revenge? That word had come up several times in the chapter on Elijah Durman that he had just read. Revenge on whom and on what? The Quabbin region was gone, the towns discontinued, the people and the places just memories that floated on the water like reflections from the shore--here and then gone. And nobody was really to blame. In a different age there would have protests at the destruction of four towns; in a different age there would have been environmental impact studies; and in a different age a project the size of Quabbin Reservoir could not have been completed.
But guilt?
Was he supposed to feel guilt for working on this project? Was he supposed to feel bad that he got away from the doomed valley, and others stayed behind to moan about their lost homes and fractured lives?
Guilt? He felt none.
The Elijah Durman legend talked of revenge. That simply didn’t apply here. He had worked on the reservoir. So had others from the Valley. It had been too easy to wipe out the four towns, but the need for Boston to have a large water supply had been paramount. Nothing else counted in the minds of the state water planners. Move the people, tear down their houses, dig up and rebury their dead. The reservoir for Boston must be built. And so it was.
Was it his fault?
Not likely. He had been but a small cog in a very large machine that produced the reservoir.
And what else did he have to feel guilty for?
Vietnam?
OK, a bit.
He had been the Under Secretary of State for Southeast Asia during some of the bitterest war years, and he had tried his best to win an impossible war. He had ignored the real evidence of his own eyes and the bitter disgruntlement of the soldiers who actually fought. Instead he had shuffled enemy kill ratios around until it became a proven certainty that the United States was winning mightily in Vietnam.
If the outcome had been different, he’d be a hero today and writing his memoirs. Maybe he should have spoken out against the war, called out the truth as he saw it, refused to go along with the cheerleaders in Defense and State. Lots of people had died for a lost cause—like the Flanagan boy whose bones had vanished just the other day. Too bad, really, but he couldn’t take all the blame for the casualties of war.
The Flanagan kid, like over 58,000 other American soldiers, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong war. The winds of history had swept him away; swept him away like millions of others over the centuries; a blizzard of dead swirled by a high wind that blew down the desolate streets and back alleys of time.
Like leaves in a storm they rustled through the dry pages of the past; footnotes at the bottom of the page: the thousands who’d been buried alive in the walls of the newly constructed pyramids to satisfy the whims of Egyptian kings; the Spanish Conquistadors who killed for sport and laughed their way across Central and South America hurling the Incas and other native people to their deaths from high cliffs; The 19th century Australian ranchers who, after Sunday church services and for sport, rode down and shot Aborigines, as if they were hunting rabbits, and in this century the Turks murdering Armenians, Hitler slaughtering the Jews, Stalin murderously starving and shooting his own people, the Cambodians with their killing fields, the Rwandans with their corpses stacked like firewood.
And there was more. You read about it every day—mean-spirited killings in convenience stores, predators stalking the unwary and unwise on city streets, children captured and murdered by mutations that passed as humans. The slaughter went on. If there was one common thread that ran through the history of mankind on the planet earth, it was this senseless killing. Man was the only animal outside of the rat that killed his own. It had always been that way. And there was always some goon who enjoyed it.
The names changed—Cortez, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot--but the killing went on. And in the end there was always a single question.
Why? For what purpose have these dead vanished from this earth?
It was not something he could argue about. When Maria had told him that he needed to apologize for his part in Vietnam, he had agreed. He didn’t have any doubts. It was just that his gesture was so futile, so solitary, and so hopeless that it amounted to nothing more than a spoonful of water extracted from the ocean of terror, pain, and loss that was flooding the world. He felt tiny and false. The only one his apology could possibly help was himself. All those others, from Vietnam and even before, nobody cared.
Thinking about the past made him uncomfortable. He had doubts. He had moments when he asked what if: what if he had stayed at Harvard as a professor of political science and never entered the State Department? What if he had run for an open seat in the U.S. Senate, as he had wanted to, but party leaders discouraged him? What if he had told his bosses—the Secretary of State and the President, the real truth about the great bombing raids on Vietnam—that they made no difference and brought victory no closer? What if he had stood up at one of the closed-door briefing he gave weekly to members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee and told them in plain simple language that the war was unwinnable? He, after all, had studied and taught both history and political science, and he knew one basic fact that remained a cornerstone of truth—you
couldn’t win a war without first winning the hearts and minds of the people.
LBJ had a different view: “If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Possibly? But they had never really had the enemy by the balls. That had proven impossible. There were so many “what ifs,” still stirring through his memories of the Vietnam War, but there was no point wasting time and energy on them now.
Above him, a light rain was beginning to dot the windows of the Jones Library. He looked up and studied the water droplets on the high window. They formed a face, vague but definite. He shook his head and closed his eyes and looked again.
Definitely a face up there.
The face at the window that had terrified him?
No. This face was different.
A child’s face. Somewhere deep in memory he had encountered this face. A child with wide deep eyes and a big smile.
How did he know her?
* * *
Chapter 43
Lester Carlson watched the rain splatter on the library’s alcove window. The image of the child’s face dissolved into droplets skimming across the glass. Why was he seeing these things? He took a deep breath. Was he drinking too much and carrying an alcoholic haze with him into the next day?
No. It wasn’t that simple.
He had searched his mind for connections with his past and the strange present—the face at his window and the presence guiding him through Quabbin. He had searched his memories and come away with very little. Maria had sat with him on several evening, brought him a scotch or two, and listened while he recalled his days helping to build the great reservoir back in the 1930s. She had been the one who pointed out that his job back then—supervising the removal or destruction of buildings in the Enfield, Greenwich area had probably brought him into contact with many of the old Swift River Valley families. And he had also helped supervise the removal and reburial of many old family graves.
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