It (141 page)

The summer of '05 was long and hot and there had been many fires in the woods. The biggest of them, which Heroux later admitted he set by simply putting a lighted candle in the middle of a pile of woodchips and kindling, happened in Haven's Big Injun Woods. It burned twenty thousand acres of prime hardwood, and you could smell the smoke of it thirty-five miles away as the horse-drawn trollies breasted Up-Mile Hill in Derry.

In the spring of that year there had been some brief talk about unionizing. There were four lumbermen involved in organizing (not that there was much to organize; Maine workingmen were anti-union then and are mostly anti-union now), and one of the four was Claude Heroux, who probably saw his union activities as a chance to talk big and spend a lot of time drinking down on Baker and Exchange Streets. Heroux and the other three called themselves “organizers”; the lumber barons called them “ringleaders.” A proclamation nailed to the cooksheds in lumber camps from Monroe to Haven Village to Sumner Plantation to Millinocket informed lumbermen that any man overheard talking union would be fired off the job immediately.

In May of that year there was a brief strike up near Trapham Notch, and although the strike was broken in short order, both by scabs and by “town constables” (and that was rather peculiar, you understand, since there were nearly thirty “town constables” swinging axe-handles and creasing skulls, but before that day in May, there hadn't been so much as a single constable in Trapham Notch—which had a population of seventy-nine in the census of 1900—so far as anyone knew), Heroux and his organizing friends considered it a great victory for their cause. Accordingly, they came down to Derry to get drunk and to do some more “organizing” . . . or “ringleading,” depending on whose side you favored. Whichever, it must have been dry work. They hit most of the bars in Hell's Half-Acre, finishing up in the Sleepy Silver Dollar, arms around each other's shoulders, pissing-down-your-leg drunk, alternating union songs with bathetic tunes like “My Mother's Eyes Are Looking Down from Heaven,” although I myself think any mother looking down from
there and seeing her son in such a state might well have been excused for turning away.

According to Egbert Thoroughgood, the only reason anyone could figure for Heroux's being in the movement at all was Davey Hartwell. Hartwell was the chief “organizer” or “ringleader,” and Heroux was in love with him. Nor was he the only one; most of the men in the movement loved Hartwell deeply and passionately, with that proud love men save for those of their own sex who possess a magnetism that seems to approach divinity. “Davvey Ardwell wadda main who walk lak e ohn heffa de worl an haddim a daylah on de resp,” Thoroughgood said.

(Translation: “Davey Hartwell was a man who walked like he owned half of the world and had him a deadlock on the rest.”)

Heroux followed Hartwell into the organizing business the way he would have followed him if he had decided to go for a shipbuilder up in Brewer or down in Bath, or building the Seven Trestles over in Vermont, or trying to bring back the Pony Express out west, for that matter. Heroux was sly and he was mean, and I suppose that in a novel that would preclude any good qualities at all. But sometimes, when a man has spent a life being distrusted and distrustful, being a loner (or a Loser) both by choice and by reason of society's opinions of him, he can find a friend or a lover and simply live for that person, the way a dog lives for its master. That's the way it seems to have been between Heroux and Hartwell.

Anyway, there were four of them who spent that night in the Brentwood Arms Hotel, which was then called the Floating Dog by the lumbermen (the reason why is lost in obscurity, as defunct as the hotel itself). Four checked in; none checked out. One of them, Andy DeLesseps, was never seen again. For all history tells, he might have spent the rest of his life living in pleasant ease in Portsmouth, but somehow I doubt it. Two of the other “ringleaders,” Amsel Bickford and Davey Hartwell himself, were found floating face-down in the Kenduskeag. Bickford was missing his head; someone had taken it off with the swipe of a woodsman's two-hander. Both of Hartwell's legs were gone, and those who found him swore that they had never seen such an expression of pain and horror on a human face. Something had distended his mouth, stuffing out his cheeks, and when his
discoverers turned him over and spread his lips, seven of his toes fell out onto the mud. Some thought he might have lost the other three during his years working in the woods; others held the opinion that he might have swallowed them before he died.

Pinned to the back of each man's shirt was a paper with the word
UNION
on it.

Claude Heroux was never brought to trial for what happened in the Silver Dollar on the night of September 9th, 1905, so there's no way of knowing exactly how he escaped the fate of the others that night in May. We could make assumptions; he had been on his own a long time, had learned how to jump fast, had perhaps developed the knack some cur-dogs have of getting out just before real trouble develops. But why didn't he take Hartwell with him? Or was he perhaps taken into the woods with the rest of the “agitators”? Maybe they were saving him for last, and he was able to get away even while Hartwell's screams (which would have grown muffled as they jammed his toes into his mouth) were echoing in the dark and scaring birds off their roosts. There's no way of knowing, not for sure, but that last feels right to my heart.

Claude Heroux became a ghost-man. He would come strolling into a camp in the Saint John's Valley, line up at the cookshed with the rest of the loggers, get a bowl of stew, eat it, and be gone before anyone realized he wasn't one of the topping gang. Weeks after that he'd show up in a Winterport beerjoint, talking union and swearing he'd have his revenge on the men that had murdered his friends—Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently. All of them lived in Derry, and their gabled gambrelled cupola-ed houses stand on West Broadway to this day. Years later, they and their descendants would fire the Black Spot.

That there were people who would have liked Claude Heroux put out of the way cannot be doubted, particularly after the fires started in June of that year. But although Heroux was seen frequently, he was quick and had an animal's awareness of danger. So far as I have been able to find out, no official warrant was ever sworn out against him, and the police never took a hand. Maybe there were fears about what Heroux might say if he was brought to trial for arson.

Whatever the reasons, the woods around Derry and Haven burned
all that hot summer. Children disappeared, there were more fights and murders than usual, and a pall of fear as real as the smoke you could smell from the top of Up-Mile Hill lay over the town.

The rains finally came on September 1st, and it rained for a solid week. Downtown Derry was flooded out, which was not unusual, but the big houses on West Broadway were high above downtown, and in some of those big houses there must have been sighs of relief. Let the crazy Canuck hide out in the woods all winter, if that's what he wants, they might have said. His work's done for this summer, and we'll get him before the roots dry next June.

Then came September 9th. I cannot explain what happened; Thoroughgood cannot explain it; so far as I know, no one can. I can only relate the events which occurred.

The Sleepy Silver Dollar was full of loggers drinking beer. Outside, it was drawing down toward misty dark. The Kenduskeag was high and silver-sullen, filling its channel from bank to bank, and according to Egbert Thoroughgood, “a fallish wind was blowin—the kine dat allus fine de hole in y'paints and blow strayduppa cracka yo ais.” The streets were quagmires. There was a card game going on at one of the tables in the back of the room. They were William Mueller's men. Mueller was part owner of the GS&WM rail line as well as a lumber potentate who owned millions of acres of prime timber, and the men who were playing poker in the Dollar that night were part-time lumbermen, part-time railroad bulls, and full-time trouble. Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut. It seems very likely that they were at least some of the men who had spent the last two and a half months keeping an eye out for Claude Heroux. It seems just as likely—although there is not a shred of proof—that they were in on the little cutting party in May when Hartwell and Bickford were laid low.

The bar was crowded, Thoroughgood said; dozens of men were bellied up there, drinking beer and eating bar lunches and dripping onto the sawdust-covered dirt floor.

The door opened and in came Claude Heroux. He had a woodsman's double-bitted axe in his hand. He stepped up to the bar and
elbowed himself a place. Egbert Thoroughgood was standing on his left; he said that Heroux smelled like a polecat stew. The barman brought Heroux a schooner of beer, two hardcooked eggs in a bowl, and a shaker of salt. Heroux paid him with a two-dollar bill and put his change—a dollar-eighty-five—into one of the flap pockets of his lumberman's jacket. He salted his eggs and ate them. He salted his beer, drank it off, and uttered a belch.

“More room out than there is in, Claude,” Thoroughgood said, just as if half the enforcers in northern Maine hadn't been on the prod for Heroux all that summer.

“You know
that's
the truth,” Heroux said, except, being a Canuck, what he probably said came out sounding more like “You know
dat
da troot.”

He ordered himself another schooner, drank up, and belched again. Talk at the bar went on. Several people called to Claude, and Claude nodded and waved, but he didn't smile. Thoroughgood said he looked like a man who was half in a dream. At the table in back, the poker game went on. El Katook was dealing. No one bothered to tell any of the players that Claude Heroux was in the bar . . . although, since their table was no more than twenty feet away, and since Claude's name was hollered more than once by people who knew him, it is hard to know how they could have gone on playing, unaware of his potentially murderous presence. But that is what occurred.

After he finished his second schooner of beer, Heroux excused himself to Thoroughgood, picked up his two-hander, and went back to the table where Mueller's men were playing five-card stud. Then he started cutting.

Floyd Calderwood had just poured himself a glass of rye whiskey and was setting the bottle back down when Heroux arrived and chopped Calderwood's hand off at the wrist. Calderwood looked at his hand and screamed; it was still holding the bottle but all of a sudden wasn't attached to anything but wet gristle and trailing veins. For a moment the severed hand clutched the bottle even tighter, and then it fell off and lay on the table like a dead spider. Blood spouted from his wrist.

At the bar, somebody called for more beer and someone else asked the bartender, whose name was Jonesy, if he was still dyeing his hair. “Never dyed it,” Jonesy said in an ill-tempered way; he was vain of his hair.

“Met a whore down at Ma Courtney's who said what grows around your pecker is just as white as snow,” the fellow said.

“She was a liar,” Jonesy replied.

“Drop your pants and let's us see,” said a lumberman named Falkland, with whom Egbert Thoroughgood had been matching for drinks before Heroux came in. This provoked general laughter.

Behind them, Floyd Calderwood was shrieking. A few of the men leaning against the bar took a casual look around in time to see Claude Heroux bury his woodsman's axe in Tinker McCutcheon's head. Tinker was a big man with a black beard going gray. He got halfway up, blood pouring down his face, then sat down again. Heroux pulled the axe out of his head. Tinker started to get up again, and Heroux slung the axe sideways, burying it in his back. It made a sound, Thoroughgood said, like a load of laundry being dropped on a rug. Tinker flopped over the table, his cards spraying out of his hand.

The others players were hollering and bellowing. Calderwood, still shrieking, was trying to pick up his right hand with his left as his life's blood ran out of his stump of a wrist in a steady stream. Stugley Grenier had what Thoroughgood called a “clutch-pistol” (meaning a gun in a shoulder-holster) and he was grabbing for it with no success whatsoever. Eddie King tried to get up and fell right out of his chair on his back. Before he could get up, Heroux was standing astride him, the axe slung up over his head. King screamed and held up both hands in a warding-off gesture.

“Please, Claude, I just got married last month!”
King screamed.

The axe came down, its head almost disappearing in King's ample gut. Blood sprayed all the way up to the Dollar's beamed roof. Eddie began to crawfish on the floor. Claude pulled the axe out of him the way a good woodsman will pull his axe out of a softwood tree, kind of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clinging grip of the sappy wood. When it was free he slung it up over his head. He brought it down again and Eddie King stopped screaming. Claude Heroux wasn't done with him, however; he began to chop King up like kindling-wood.

At the bar, conversation had turned to what sort of winter lay ahead. Vernon Stanchfield, a farmer from Palmyra, claimed it would be a mild one—fall rain uses up winter snow was his scripture. Alfie Naugler, who had a farm out on the Naugler Road in Derry (it is
gone now; where Alfie Naugler once grew his peas and beans and beets, the Interstate extension now runs its 8.8-mile, six-lane course), begged to disagree. Alfie claimed the coming winter was going to be a jeezer. He had seen as many as eight rings on some of the mohair caterpillars, he said, an unheard-of number. Another man held out for ice; another for mud. The Blizzard of '01 was duly recalled. Jonesy sent schooners of beer and bowls of hardcooked eggs skidding down the bar. Behind them the screaming went on and the blood flowed in rivers.