Peyton Place (9 page)

Must be colder than hell in the winter, thought the doctor, and felt that he had said the kindest thing possible about the home of the Cross family.

As he was turning to walk back to town, a sudden shrill scream echoed in the night.

“Christ!” said Dr. Swain aloud, and began to run toward the shack, picturing all kinds of accidents and cursing himself for not carrying his doctor's bag at all times. He was at the door when he heard Lucas Cross's voice.

“Goddamn sonofabitch,” yelled Lucas drunkenly. “Where'd you put it?”

There was a loud crash, as if someone had fallen, or been pushed, over a chair.

“I told you and told you,” came Nellie's whine. “There ain't no more. You drunk it all up.”

“Goddamn lyin’ bitch,” shouted Lucas. “You hid it. Tell me where it is or I'll beat your goddamn lousy hide right off you.”

Nellie screamed again, sharp and shrill, and Dr. Swain turned away from the shack door feeling slightly nauseated.

I suppose, he thought, that the unwritten law about a man minding his own business is a good one. But sometimes I just don't believe it.

He walked toward the road, but before he had gone more than a few steps, he tripped and almost fell over a small figure crouched on the ground.

“For Christ's sake,” he said softly, reaching down and gripping a girl's arm. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”

The girl broke away from him. “What are you doing here yourself, Doc?” she asked sullenly. “Nobody sent for you.”

In the meager light that came through the shack windows, the doctor could barely discern the girl's features.

“Oh,” he said. “It's Selena. I've seen you around town with the little MacKenzie girl, haven't I?”

“Yes,” said Selena. “Allison is my best friend. Listen, Doc. Don't ever say anything to Allison about this ringdangdo here tonight, will you? She wouldn't understand about such things.”

“No,” said Dr. Swain, “I won't say a word to anyone. You're the oldest of the children here, aren't you?”

“No. My brother Paul is older than me. He's the oldest.”

“Where is Paul now?” demanded the doctor. “Why isn't he putting a stop to the goings on inside?”

“He's gone to see his girl in town,” said Selena. “And what are you talking about anyway? There's nobody can stop Pa when he gets drunk and starts fighting.”

She stopped talking and whistled softly, and a little boy came running from behind a tree.

“I always come outside when Pa starts,” said Selena. “I keep Joey out here, too, so Pa won't get after him.”

Joey was small and thin, and not more than seven years old. He stood behind his sister and peered timidly at the doctor from around her skirt. A fierce anger filled the old man.

“I'll put a stop to this,” he said, and started once more toward the door of the shack.

Immediately, Selena ran in front of him and put her hands against his chest.

“You want to get killed?” she whispered frantically. “Nobody sent for you, Doc. You better get back to Chestnut Street.”

A continuous wailing came from the shack now, but the screaming had stopped and Lucas’ voice was still.

“It's all over with anyhow,” said Selena. “If you went in now, it would just get Pa all worked up again. You better go, Doc.”

For a moment the doctor hesitated, then tipped his hat to the girl.

“All right, Selena,” he said. “I'll go. Good night.”

“Good night, Doc.”

He was back on the road when the girl ran and caught up to him. She put her hand on his sleeve.

“Doc,” she said, “me and Joey want to thank you anyway. It was nice of you to stop by.”

Like a lady bidding her guests farewell after the tea party, thought the doctor. It was nice of you to stop by.

“That's all right, Selena,” said Dr. Swain. “Any time you'd like to have me come, just let me know.”

He noticed that although Joey was directly behind Selena, the little boy never spoke a word.

Lucas Cross had lived in Peyton Place all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. Lucas did not know where his ancestors had come from originally, and this fact did not bother him at all, for he never thought of it. If he had been asked, he would have been dumfounded by the stupidity of such a question and, shrugging, would have replied, “We always lived right around here.”

Lucas was a woodsman of a now-and-then variety common to northern New England. Professional lumbermen regarded the forests with respect, knowing that the generations before them had abused the woods, felling them flat without a thought toward conservation and replanting, and approached them now with patience and precision. Men like Lucas looked on them as a precarious kind of security, a sort of padding to fall back on when one was given a shove by life. When all else failed and cash money was needed in a hurry, the task of “workin’ the woods” was always available. The lumbermen had nothing but contempt for men like Lucas, and assigned to him the secondary jobs of the lumbering trade: the stacking of logs on trucks, the fastening of chains and the unloading at the sawmills. In northern New England, Lucas was referred to as a woodsman, but had he lived in another section of America, he might have been called an Okie, or a hillbilly, or poor white trash. He was one of a vast brotherhood who worked at no particular trade, propagated many children with a slatternly wife, and installed his oversized family in a variety of tumble-down, lean-to, makeshift dwellings.

In an era of free education, the woodsman of northern New England had little or no schooling, and in many cases his employer was forced to pay him in cash, for the employee could not sign his own name to a check. What the woodsman knew, he knew by instinct, from listening to conversation or, rarely, from observation, and much of the time he was drunk on cheap wine or rotgut whisky. He lived in rickety wooden buildings which were covered on the outside with tar paper instead of clapboards, and his house was without water or sewerage. He drank, beat his wife and abused his children, and he had one virtue which he believed outweighed all his faults. He paid his bills. To be in debt was the one—and only—cardinal sin to men like Lucas Cross, and it was behind this fact that the small-town northern New Englander, of more settled ways and habits, hid when confronted with the reality of the shack dwellers in his vicinity.

“They're all right,” the New Englander was apt to say, especially to a tourist from the city. “They pay their bills and taxes and they mind their own business. They don't do any harm.”

This attitude was visible, too, in well-meaning social workers who turned away from the misery of the woodsman's family. If a child died of cold or malnutrition, it was considered unfortunate, but certainly nothing to stir up a hornet's nest about. The state was content to let things lie, for it never had been called upon to extend aid of a material nature to the residents of the shacks which sat, like running sores, on the body of northern New England.

Lucas Cross was different from many woodsmen in that he had a trade which he practiced when coaxed with liquor or bribed with outrageous sums of money. He was a skilled carpenter and cabinetmaker.

“Never saw anything like it in my life,” Charles Partridge had said, soon after Lucas had been persuaded to make some kitchen cabinets for Mrs. Partridge. “In came Lucas, not drunk, mind you, but he'd had a few. He had this folding yardstick that looked about as accurate to me as a two-dollar watch. Well, he sat and looked at our kitchen walls for a while, then he started in measuring and cussing under his breath, and after a time he began sawing and planing. The next thing I knew, he was done, and if I do say so myself, there are no finer-looking cabinets in any kitchen in Peyton Place. Look.”

The cabinets were made of knotty pine and they fitted perfectly in the spaces between the Partridges’ kitchen windows. They gleamed like satin.

Over a period of years, Lucas had done much of the interior “finish” work in the houses on Chestnut Street, and most of what he had not done had been done by his father.

“Good cabinetmakers, the Crosses,” said the people of the town.

“When they're sober,” they amended.

“My wife wants Lucas to make her a buffet for the dining room when he gets through working the woods next.”

“She'll have to sober him up first. Whatever money he makes in the woods, he'll spend on one helluva drunk before he starts looking around for work again.”

“They're all alike, those shackowners. Work for a while, drunk for a longer while, work and then drunk again.”

“They're all right, though. Don't do any harm that I can see. They pay their bills.”

Seth Buswell, in a rare philosophical mood, said, “I wonder why our woodsman drinks? One would surmise that he hasn't the imagination to invent phantoms for himself from which he must escape. I wonder what he thinks about. Doubtless he has his hopes and dreams the same as all of us, yet it appears that all he ever dwells upon is liquor, sex and food, in that order.”

“Watch that kind of talk, old feller,” said Dr. Swain. “When you talk like that, the old Dartmouth education shows through.”

“Sorry,” said Seth elaborately and reverted to the patois of his people, the one hypocrisy which he consciously practiced. It might not be honest, this omitting of
r's
and dropping of final
g's
, but his father had made a barrel of money in spite of it, and had gained many votes because of it.

“Mebbe they're a harmless crew at that, our woodsmen,” said Seth. “Sort of like tame animals.”

“Except Lucas Cross,” said Dr. Swain. “He's a mean one. There's something about him, something around the eyes, that rubs me the wrong way. He has the look of a jackal.”

“Lucas is all right, Doc,” said Seth comfortably. “You're seein’ things.”

“I hope so,” said the doctor. “But I'm afraid not.”

Selena Cross lay on the folding cot that served as her bed and which was pushed against the wall on the kitchen side of the one-room Cross shack. She was thirteen years old and well developed for her age, with the curves of hips and breasts already discernible under the too short and often threadbare clothes that she wore. Much of the girl's clothing had been inherited from the more fortunate children of Peyton Place and passed down to Selena through the charity-loving hands of the ladies from the Congregational church. Selena had long dark hair that curled of its own accord in a softly beautiful fashion. Her eyes, too, were dark and slightly slanted, and she had a naturally red, full-lipped mouth over well-shaped, startlingly white teeth. Her skin was clear and of a honey-tan shade which looked as if it had been acquired under the sun but which, on Selena, never faded to sallowness in the long months of the harsh New England winter.

“Put a pair of gold hoops in her ears,” said Miss Thornton, “and she'd look like everybody's idea of a perfect gypsy.”

Selena was wise with the wisdom learned of poverty and wretchedness. At thirteen, she saw hopelessness as an old enemy, as persistent and inevitable as death.

Sometimes, when she looked at Nellie, her mother, she thought, I'll get out. I'll never be like her.

Nellie Cross was short and flabby with the unhealthy fat that comes from too many potatoes and too much bread. Her hair was thin and tied in a sloppy knot at the back of her not too clean neck, and her hands, perpetually grimy, were rough and knobby knuckled, with broken, dirty fingernails.

I'll get out, thought Selena. I'll never let myself look like that.

But hopelessness was always at her elbow, ready to nudge her and say, “Oh, yeah?
How
will you get out? Where could you go, and who would have you after you got there?”

If Lucas was away, or at home but sober, Selena would think, optimistically, Oh, I'll manage. One way or another, I'll get out.

But for the most part it was like tonight. Selena lay in her cot and listened to her older brother Paul snoring in his bed against the opposite wall, and to the adenoidal breathing of her little brother Joey, who slept in a cot like her own. But these sounds could not cover the louder ones which came from the double bed at the other end of the shack. Selena lay still and listened to Lucas and Nellie perform the act of love. Lucas did not speak while thus engaged. He grunted, Selena thought, like a rooting pig, and he breathed like a steam engine puffing its way across the wide Connecticut River, while from Nellie there was no sound at all. Selena listened and chewed at her bottom lip and thought, Hurry up, for Christ's sake. Lucas grunted harder and puffed louder, and the old spring on the double bed creaked alarmingly, faster and faster. At last, Lucas squealed like a calf in the hands of a butcher and it was over. Selena turned her face into her moldy-smelling pillow which was bare of any sort of pillowcase, and wept soundlessly.

I'll get out, she thought furiously. I'll get out of this filthy mess.

Her old enemy, hopelessness, did not even bother to answer. He was just there.

Allison MacKenzie had never actually visited at Selena's house. She was in the habit of walking down the dirt road to where the Cross shack stood, and of waiting in front of the clearing until her friend came out to her. Many times Allison had wondered why none of the Crosses ever invited her into the house, but she had never quite dared to ask Selena. Once she had asked her mother, but Constance had persisted in saying that the reason was that Selena was ashamed of her home, so Allison had never discussed it with her again. Constance could not seem to understand that Selena was perfect and sure of herself, and that it was only she, Allison, who ever had feelings of shame. But still, it was odd the way no one had ever invited her into the house. Most of the time Selena came right out the shack door as soon as she saw Allison, but once in a while she emerged from the enclosed pen that was attached to the side of the house in which Lucas kept a few sheep. Whenever she had been in the sheep pen, Selena always yelled, “Wait a minute, Allison. I got to wash my feet,” but she never asked Allison to come in while she did so. Usually Selena's little brother Joey tagged along behind his sister, but this Saturday afternoon Selena came out of the house alone.