Peyton Place (50 page)

“He's in the woodshed, drunk as a skunk,” said Ginny to those who came to inquire for him. “I can't make him come out but you go ahead and try if you want.”

But for Ginny and his employers alike, Kenny had one answer. “Kiss my arse.”

Ephraim Tuttle, who owned the grocery store, was the only man in town who managed to get another word out of Kenny that day.

“I would, Kenny,” said Ephraim, in reply to Kenny's one remark, “if you'd just come out of that woodshed and down to the store to shovel the walks like you promised.”

“Frig you,” said Kenny hostilely, and those were the last words anyone heard from him that day.

Ginny, who in addition to being cold due to her inability to get into the shed for wood to keep the house stoves going, grew rapidly bored and left the house early in the afternoon.

“I'm going down to The Lighthouse,” she said, referring to Peyton Place's one beer saloon, a horribly misnamed place, for not only was it nowhere near the sea but it was neither light nor a house. It was located on Ash Street, and was a dismal, barnlike affair from which emanated an odor of sweat, stale beer and sawdust every time the door was opened. “I'm going down to The Lighthouse,” repeated Ginny, “where there's a few that appreciates me.”

Ginny Stearns was a tragic example of blonde prettiness gone to ruin. At forty-odd years of age, she had faded from pink-and-white rosiness to a rather pallid flabbiness, but Kenny still believed, with his whole heart, that no man breathed who, after one look at Ginny, was not ready to fall at her feet like—as he put it–“a cockroach after one taste of Paris green.” In her youth, Ginny had been a victim of such insecurity that it had been necessary to her to prove her worth to herself continually, a feat which she had accomplished, in some measure, by sleeping with any man who asked her. Ginny, however, did not put it on any such crude basis as that. In later years, she always said: “I could count on the fingers of one hand the men in Peyton Place and White River who have not loved me,” and by love, Ginny meant a noble emotion of the soul rather than a baser one of the sex glands.

“You hear me, Kenny?” she cried, pounding resentfully against the locked door of the woodshed. “I'm going out.”

Kenny did not deign to answer. He sat on a pile of cordwood in his shed and opened a fresh bottle of whisky.

“Whore,” he muttered, as the tap of Ginny's high-heeled shoes reached him. “Harlot. Slut.”

Kenny sighed. He had, he knew, no one to blame but himself for getting tangled up with Ginny. His own father had warned him against her.

“Kenneth,” his father had said, “no good will come of your mating with Virginia Uhlenberg. The young of the mill hands are all alike. No good a-tall.”

Kenny knew that his father had been a smart man. He hadn't been a handy man like Kenny, but a real landscape gardener who had landscaped the grounds of the state house.

“Pa,” Kenny had said, “I love Ginny Uhlenberg. I'm gonna marry her.”

“God rest your soul,” said his father, who was given to flowery phrases and biblical quotations.

Nope, thought Kenny, taking a drink from the newly opened bottle, ain't got nobody to blame but myself. Pa told me. He told me that he told me so, right after Ginny started runnin’ out. He told me every year ’til he died, the sonofabitch. I'll bet he never got over bein’ sore that he couldn't have Ginny for himself.

Kenny spent the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening in trying to convince himself that Ginny had never cuckolded him with his own father. It was a hopeless task. In the end, the idea became a sharp sword of torture in his mind and he could stand it no longer. He decided to go to The Lighthouse and face Ginny with it.

“Ginny,” he would demand in a terrible voice, “did you ever do it with my father?”

Let her try to deny it, the bitch, he thought. Just let her try. He'd beat the lying words right out of her with the jagged end of a broken bottle.

This last was a prospect which propelled him out of his house and into the cold January night. It kept him warm all the way to Mill Street and then deserted him abruptly. He stood on the street corner, shivering under the thin shirt he wore, and his teeth began to chatter. Up ahead of him lights shimmered in the darkness, and Kenny decided to go into the building behind the lights to get warm. He drank the last inch or so of whisky which remained in the bottle that he was going to break into jagged points to beat Ginny with, and tossed it into the street. He did not realize that he walked erratically as he headed for the lighted building ahead. His only thought was that it was taking him a helluva long while to get there. When he finally reached the steps of the building, he fancied that he heard singing, but he did not notice the black, giltlettered sign next to the entrance which proclaimed this as The Peyton Place Pentecostal Full Gospel Church. Kenny lurched through the door, and spying a long, wooden bench close to the entrance, he sat down abruptly. No one turned to look at him. Kenny sat for what seemed a long time, letting the comfortable warmth of the building soothe him, and hearing, without listening, the voices which testified to the all-powerful healing ability of God. Occasionally, the whole group burst into song, and when this happened, Kenny raised his heavy lids to look around.

Why don't they, for Christ's sake, shut up, he thought resentfully, for the voices, together with hand-clapping and the reverberant booming of the organ, set up a painful throbbing in his head.

When the minister, Oliver Rank, began to preach in rolling, ringing tones, Kenny regarded this as the last straw. A man, he decided, could stand just so much. Goddamn it, where the hell were his feet? Kenny looked down, trying to locate the legs which would not allow him to stand, and when he did so, his head began to revolve in wide, sickening arcs. At last, he raised himself. He took one step forward into the aisle between the wooden pews, and fell flat on his face with a resounding thud.

Well, I'll be a dirty sonofabitch, thought Kenny, if some bastard didn't push me.

He did not realize it, but his thought formed itself on his lips and left them in a low, indistinguishable whisper.

“Hark!” cried Oliver Rank. “Hark!”

Hark yourself, you sonofabitch, muttered Kenny, but fortunately his words came out in a confused jumble of sound. Any man who would shove another man is a sonofabitch, thought Kenny, beginning to feel sorry for himself.

“Hark!” cried Oliver Rank again, for he was ever one to press any advantage which came his way. “Hark! A stranger speaks in our midst. What says he?”

I say, thought Kenny, that you are a sonofabitch who would screw his own mother and sell his grandmother to a white slaver. Any man who'd push another is a sonofabitch.

Kenny did not try to stand, or to change his position. The main aisle of the church was carpeted with a soft red carpeting, and the building was warm and he was extremely cozy.

“It's Kenny Stearns!” exclaimed one member of the congregation. “He must be drunk.”

“Tread easy, brother,” intoned Oliver Rank. “Call not thy brother by vile names. What says he?”

“Oh, God!” moaned Kenny aloud, why don't you keep your bloody mouth shut?

The congregation, which had heard only Kenny's fervent, “Oh, God,” began to murmur among themselves.

Kenny turned over onto his back and winced as the bright lights of the church struck his eyes. “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” he groaned, “why don't somebody turn off the friggin’ lights,” and again, the end of his sentence came out in unrecognizable syllables.

“The unknown tongue!” screamed a hysterical woman. “He speaks the unknown tongue!” and at once, the congregation went into an uproar. The unknown tongue, the minister had told them, was a language of revelation spoken only by the most holy. The ability to speak and interpret this unknown language was a God-given gift, presented only to the prophets.

“Speak, O holy one!” cried Oliver Rank, as excited as any member of his flock, for he, no more than they, had ever seen or heard a prophet who spoke the unknown tongue of the holiest. “Speak! Speak!”

For two hours, Kenny lay on the floor of the church and raved drunkenly in unintelligible words.

“A prophet!” cried those who listened to him.

“A Messiah come to lead us to Jordan!” cried Oliver Rank.

“A holy messenger who brings news of the Second Coming!” screamed the same woman who had first cried out.

One man, completely carried away, ran into the street shouting of the glory which had come to Peyton Place. He ran all the way to The Lighthouse to fetch Ginny Stearns, who first hooted, but then consented to go to the church provided that she could bring her friends with her. The regular churchgoer, followed by Ginny and half a dozen of her cohorts, rushed back to the church where Kenny still held forth. There was Ginny's husband, lying on the floor and raving the same as he always did when he was dead drunk, while a whole churchful of sober and apparently sane people listened as if he were telling them where to find gold.

“Kenny Stearns!” shrilled Ginny, who had been drinking most of the day herself. “Get up off that floor.” She prodded him with her toe. “You're drunk.”

“Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone!” roared Oliver Rank, seeing that Ginny was intoxicated.

Ginny shrank back as if Mr. Rank had breathed fire on her, and the only part of Kenny's next sentence which was understandable was the word “Whore.”

“A revelation!” cried Mr. Rank, pointing an unusually sharp forefinger at Ginny. “The sinners in our midst are uncovered!”

Ginny skittered away from Kenny and hid behind two of her friends.

At the end of two hours, Kenny passed out completely. His eyes rolled back in his head until only the whites were visible, and four members of the congregation carried him tenderly to his home.

In time, Kenny came to believe that it was the sure hand of God which had led him to the church, and that it was the Lord who had put the words of revelation into his mouth. Exactly what words, Kenny was never absolutely sure, but that did not bother him. The members of the Peyton Place Pentecostal Full Gospel Church accepted him as a man of holiness, and before too many years had passed Kenny was baptized and ordained as a minister in the sect. Fortunately, this religious group did not believe it necessary for its ministers to attend a theological school of any kind, for Kenny would have been hard pressed indeed to define his philosophical beliefs.

Peyton Place never recovered from the shock of seeing the ex-town handy man and ex-drunkard walk rapidly down Elm Street clad in a frock coat and carrying a Bible under his arm. The men patrons of The Lighthouse remembered Ginny Stearns wistfully, now that she had reformed and accepted her husband's religion. As for Ginny, whenever Kenny took her in the same uncouth, ungentle way he had done in years past, she did not mind. She felt as if she were the Virgin Mary and Kenny the angel come to tell her that the Lord had chosen her as the mother of a new world hope. Only very, very rarely did something in Kenny pull him up short and cause him to wonder what he was doing as a minister, and also to wonder what road had led him to the path he now followed. At these times, Kenny would shrug and blame it all on the sure hand of God.

In the early winter of 1944, Peyton Place talked of little else besides Kenny Stearns. It did not even cause much of a stir when two men from the Navy Department came to town, making inquiries about Lucas Cross who, it seemed, had been in the Navy and was now absent without leave. The men from the Navy Department went with Buck McCracken to the house where Selena and Joey Cross lived and asked a few questions, but the Crosses said no, that they had not seen Lucas since he had left Peyton Place back in ’39. The Navy men asked a few questions in town, but no one had seen or heard from Lucas, so they went away, and the town went back to talking about Kenny Stearns, who had been the hero in A Miracle.

Before the sensation caused by Kenny Stearns had begun to abate properly, the town was subjected to further excitement, for little Norman Page came home from the war. He returned to Peyton Place in March of 1944 as a hero, with a chestful of campaign ribbons, medals and a stiff leg on which he walked with the help of a crutch. He was helped from the train by his mother, who had gone down to Boston to fetch him home, and he was greeted by the Peyton Place High School Band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the welcoming cheers of the townspeople.

Jared Clarke made a speech in which he welcomed Norman as “a hunter home from the hill, and a sailor home from the sea,” although Norman had served as an infantryman with the Army. The Ladies’ Aid Society, in conjunction with the board of selectmen and the school board, declared the twentieth of March as Norman Page Day, and then proceeded to organize a parade and to give a sumptuous banquet, at which everyone in town was welcomed. Norman, at the head table at the banquet, stood up and made a speech, and when he finished there were very few dry eyes in the high school gymnasium, where the feast had taken place. Peyton Place did, in fact, cover its first returning hero with a surfeit of love and sentimentality.

“Poor boy. He's so white,” they said, and no one pointed out that Norman had always been a pale child.

“The dear boy. So young to have seen so much.”

Seth Buswell photographed Norman as the young hero stood, leaning on his crutch, in front of the monument to the dead of World War I in Memorial Park. There was a lot of unpleasant talk directed toward Seth when this photograph never appeared on the front page of the
Times.
What the town did not know was that on the evening of the day when Seth had taken the picture, Dr. Matthew Swain had approached the newspaper owner. “Don't run that picture, Seth,” said the doctor.

“Why not?” demanded Seth. “It's a good photo. Local hero returns home, and all that. Good stuff.”

“Somebody from out of town might see it,” said the doctor.

“So what?”

“So nothing, except that I'd bet my diploma, my license to practice and my shingle that there's nothing the matter with Norman Page's leg. He's never even been wounded.”