Embracing Darkness (3 page)

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 at 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 War. 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.

“If it weren’t for these nail-banging sons o’ bitches,” he’d say often enough to himself so that after a while it became second nature to mutter under his breath, when one of them would show up at the mill to buy lumber, “I’d have probably hung up my saw long ago.” On occasion Jack Harmon would sometimes substitute “myself” for “up my saw.” Perhaps it was because he had a wife whom he loved and four kids who all looked up to their father that Jack Harmon found the strength to get out of bed every morning for the rest of his life.

Horace Crosby and his men finished St. Andrew’s in the fall of 1892. He was relieved to finally be done with his contract for several reasons, the two biggest being that the difficulty of building on such an obscure hill with no natural resources nearby was no longer a concern and the constant nagging and squawking of the Bishop, Joseph Hanrahan, who oversaw the project for sixteen months, ceased as soon as the last nail had been pounded into its rafter.

“Irishmen!” said Crosby to himself, as Hanrahan signed the “Acknowledgement of Work Completed” section of the contract. “You go through your whole life without running into one, and when you finally do he’s a goddamn Bishop!”

As time went on, it became evident to the townspeople that the only reason for choosing the hill, which after the church was built people began calling “Holly’s Holy Hill” or simply “Holy Hill” for short, was because the land value so high up from the valley was so low.

Besides the church and rectory there were only two other edifices up there. Both owners had raised their respective properties on the mount for the same reason. Old Ben Benson used to say how glad he was to live up on the hill. “Yep! No townsfolk always comin’ ’round here peskerin’ ya. Yep! No siree, Bob.”

This silver-haired, thick-spectacled relic was a permanent fixture on the front porch of his faded yellow, two-story house, on which he’d sit day after day in his pre-Civil War rocking chair, which sounded like the hinges of an old door that needed to be plunged into a gushing oil well just to quiet it down a bit. In fact, Old Man Benson was the first person Father Phineas Poole saw as he reached the summit of Holly Hill for the very first time in the spring of 1925.

TWO
The Stuttering Priest
 

As the door opened, Father Poole quickly took his eyes off the discolored plaque that adorned the front of St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church. As he entered the rectory, none other than the current yet soon-to-be retiring priest of the parish, Father Albert Carroll, greeted him. Carroll’s clerical white collar was stained by a blotch of brown and was conspicuously crooked. His potbelly, which hung over his excessively tightened belt, jiggled as he walked.

This
priest
, Father Poole thought as they walked through the rectory,
should
be
on
the
front
cover
of
Catholic New England Journal
with
a
headline
reading,
“The
Do’s
and
Don’ts
of
Being
Leader
to
Your
Own
Congregation
.”

Father Carroll was a large and slovenly man of about sixty who stuttered profoundly when saying more than four syllables at once and who reeked of garlic and pickle juice. This curious and frankly nauseating combination was enough to make the young Father’s stomach lurch.