The Devil in the Valley Page 3

  The way I learned, myself, said Dangerfield. The best way.

  “I don’t know. According to Dad, he never did learn much law. But he learned something almost as good.”

  Insurance? Banking?

  “Real estate,” said Taft. “Dad started investing. Nothing grand, just putting his spare change into properties. Raw land. Dad came along, you see, right after World War Two. This whole part of the country was in hard times. It was shut down. The doors were locked. The lights were out. The old-time, tit-squeezing dairy farmers had busted, the mills had busted. Nobody had a pot to piss in. You could have had the whole state for the price of a cut-rate cruise today.”

  How would you know, Chief? Dangerfield asked him. You don’t like cruises, remember? Cruises, boats, so on, they’re for the likes of me, right? They’re for peasants. Not you. You’ve got too much education, right? Too much class?

  “I’m sorry I said that. Whiskey talk. I must be a bit tight.”

  You’re hammered, Chief. You’re hammered, and it’s not even noon. You might want to dial back on the sauce, don’t you think?

  “Hah,” said Taft. “That’s pretty rich, coming from you.”

  Friendly advice, Chief. But think it over. Where you’re going, it can be hard to get a drink.

  “Dry county, is it?”

  Dry as dust. Dry as dry bones.

  “I believe that, anyway,” said Taft.

  Go on with your story, Chief. Your father …

  “Not much more to say. Turned out Dad hadn’t exactly been buying all that land at random. He had those useful friends. Time the interstate highways began to get built into this country up here, lo and behold, Dad owned a good deal of the land they were built on—or, more to the point, he owned the land where they crossed. ‘Mister Interchange,’ they used to call him.”

  How did he know where they’d cross?

  “He guessed.”

  Lucky, wasn’t he? said Dangerfield. You know, Chief? I’m going to have to remember to ask our IT Department to run your name in the archives. I’m thinking we might have more than one file.

  “You think?”

  Oh, yes, said Dangerfield. But either way, here you are. Your old man’s lucky. You’re lucky, too, aren’t you?

  “Well,” said Taft. “You know what they say?”

  What do they say, Chief?

  “Happy the man whose father goes to the devil.”

  Dangerfield showed a thin smile. Put it that way, he said.

  “So, there you have it,” said Taft. “My cushion.”

  That’s it? asked Dangerfield. That’s the cushion? You could hardly get two cats’ asses comfortable on a cushion that size, could you? It amounts to a shit-hook lawyer, not super-honest, who dabbles in real estate. That, and a few gas stations. Some cushion. It’s small time, Chief. Cub Scout stuff. Not high value, not at all. So how about all those tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands you’re going to send to Mass General for poor little what’s-his-name? Can the cushion really front that, like you told Adams?

  “What do you think?”

  Me? I don’t know. How should I?

  “I bet you do, though. I bet you know to the penny.”

  You lose. I’m not your accountant.

  “What are you, then?”

  I’m your spiritual advisor, said Dangerfield. Come on, Chief. Be honest. Can the cushion really cover the kind of bills you say these people are looking at?

  “Not close,” said Taft.

  Well?

  “That’s where you come in, isn’t it? Mass General bills Marcia. Marcia bills me. I bill you. Right?”

  Absolutely. That’s our contract.

  “Another thing,” said Taft.

  What’s that, Chief?

  “It’s more than the bills,” said Taft. “Jimmy, the kid in Mass General? He gets better. Permanent remission. Complete recovery. Got that? He comes home. He’s fine. A long and happy life for little Jimmy.”

  Whoa, Chief, said Dangerfield. Slow down. I don’t know. Our contract’s for the money, here, not for medical miracles.

  “Whoa, yourself. Our contract is for whatever I say it’s for.”

  I’m just telling you, said Dangerfield. It’s not something I can approve on my own. I’ll have to take it to my superior.

  “We have a deal,” said Taft. “Your superior can go to hell.”

  Dangerfield snickered. Put it that way, he said.

  “Hah,” said Taft. “Nor is he out of it, eh?”

  Put it that way, Dangerfield said again. He grinned. That’s a pretty good line, Chief. Did you get that in your reading, too?

  “You bet,” said Taft.

  • • •

  Thought Taft after Dangerfield’s departure: fiends, writers, religious men, and educators—they always want to know about the money. Where is it? Who has it? Where did they get it? How much? Since when? Never was much interested, myself. Figured the poor you have always with you, likewise the rich. Use what you’ve got, not lavishly, but, especially for others, with the free, the open hand. No obligations, no game-playing. Give it out. Give it away. Secret of my unsuccess, no doubt.

  Taft uncorked the Sir Walter’s and poured himself a small one.

  The free, the open hand, that’s the ticket, whoever you are, whatever your line of work. Recall the good old story about Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber. Willie hits the Farmers’ and Drovers’ for a cool million, gets away clean. Then, the very next week, he hits the Merchants’ and Traders’, but there he’s unlucky. Somebody ratted. The law’s waiting for him. He gets caught. Cops have Willie down at the station house. They ask him, they say, “Willie, you just got a cool million from your last score, now here you are working again after only a week. What happened to the million you got from the Farmers’ and Drovers’?” And Willie tells them, “Boys, it was like this. Yes, I walked out of the Farmers’ and Drovers’ with a cool million. But that was last week. Boys, she’s all gone. Three hundred thousand I left at the track. Three hundred thousand I blew across the bar. Three hundred thousand I spent on the ladies of the night. And the last hundred thousand, I guess, I just kind of pissed away.”

  3

  CALLIE AT THE DEPOT

  THE VALLEY HOSPICE HAD A CORNER OF THE CLINIC’S upper floor: two cheerful bedrooms with a shared bath, and another room available as a sitting room for visitors, or, at need, as a third bedroom for—you might say—overflow. In those pleasant, plainly furnished quarters the Hospice workers, mainly volunteers, saw to the needs, to the comfort, if possible to the contentment, of their charges, men and women at the end of their lives and their friends and families. The theory of the Hospice was pretty simple: you went there to die, and perhaps, because nobody on the premises pretended otherwise, that corner of the building was a curiously ungloomy place. Some of the older people in the valley called it the Depot, the depot being where you went to catch the outbound train.

  Calpurnia Lincoln had occupied one of the two ensuite Hospice rooms for a long enough time that her tenure had begun to be treated as a bit of a joke—not least by herself. “Still here,” Calpurnia called to volunteers returned from two weeks’ vacation. “Still ticking over. Still at the old stand.” Calpurnia was ninety-eight. She couldn’t walk very well, and she was a little deaf, but she was a good-humored old girl (at ninety-eight, you’d better be), and though herself without children, she was aunt, great-aunt, great-great-aunt, cousin, second cousin, third cousin to three quarters of the valley. What if she did linger rather long at the Hospice’s feast? Who was going to put her out? She gave the place a good part of its tone. Besides, penniless, she had no place else to go.

  Calpurnia was keen. She had all her marbles and quite possibly a few of yours. At the Hospice, she sometimes helped in the office with the paperwork. She wasn’t a book reader, but she read the news, sometimes she watched the ballgame on her little TV, and she awaited visitors. She seldom waited long. Family and friends came and went. Having lived in th
e valley for a hundred years, close enough, and being perfectly lucid, Calpurnia was especially valuable to those having an interest in local history. She had been interrogated, annotated, commentated, celebrated, interviewed, photographed, recorded, reported, redacted, transcribed, filmed, videotaped—she’d all but been fixed in amber. She more than knew the history of their valley: she was that history. And if in some cases the remarkable detail of her recall had the truth of fiction, nevertheless it came from fact, or if it didn’t, nobody living was in a position to say so.

  Calpurnia Lincoln’s most faithful visitor was Eli Adams. What the family relationship was between them was unclear to both, though in fact Calpurnia’s grandfather’s first wife had been Eli’s mother’s cousin. Not much of a connection, barely kinship at all, but sufficient. Decades earlier, when Calpurnia had worked at the post office, she had boarded with Eli’s family on their farm. Eli was a young boy at that time. He and Calpurnia had become allies; she was his Aunt Callie. Now he dropped in to see her a couple of times a week. They bickered and bantered and batted things back and forth.

  “Let me ask you something, okay?” said Eli. “You know Langdon Taft?”

  Calpurnia sniffed. “That one,” she said. “Your friend.”

  “Langdon. Is he, do you know, related to those Tafts from up the line, the ones who had the President Taft?”

  “William Howard Taft,” said Calpurnia.

  “That’s the one. Are Langdon’s those same Tafts?”

  “They wished they were, I’ll bet,” said Calpurnia. “William Howard Taft, you know, was—I don’t even know—not only president. He was vice president, chief of the Supreme Court, secretary of war, probably more. He was a big fish, and I’m sure your friend Langdon (or his parents) would dearly love to call him a cousin. But I doubt they can.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know as well as I do why not. Come on. Nobody would say your friend Langdon was built out of the kind of stuff that makes presidents and the rest, would they?”

  “Wouldn’t they?”

  “They would not,” said Calpurnia. “No, by the time the soup got passed down to Langdon’s people, it was pretty thin, it looks like. After all, President Taft? His family bailed out of here after a generation or so, didn’t they? Cleared out for Illinois or Ohio or someplace like that. Made their pile out there, not here. Your friend Langdon’s people didn’t have that kind of get-up-and-go. They sat tight. Still here. Never leave, except by way of the cemetery. That’s what I meant about the soup.”

  “You’ve really got it in for poor Langdon today, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Calpurnia. “I’ve hardly met the man. But some of what I’ve heard about him I wish I hadn’t. Everybody knows he’s a drinker. And worse. For example, Polly Jefferson, at the post office? Didn’t she tell me just the other day they had a special delivery for Langdon Taft, and so she drove out there with it, went up to the house. Door was open partway, and Polly could hear your friend inside talking to somebody, just chatting away, some visitor. So, she called his name—‘Mr. Taft?’—and he called out, sure, come on in. He was in his office, there, his study. He was in there, and he told Polly to come on in, so she did, and your friend was in there, alright, but he was all by himself. He was alone. Nobody was with him. He was in there talking to nobody, talking to himself.”

  “Probably talking on the phone, there, wasn’t he?” asked Eli.

  “Polly didn’t think he was. She was pretty sure he wasn’t on the phone, no.”

  “Well, what if he was talking to himself,” asked Eli. “That makes him crazy?”

  “It doesn’t exactly make him regular, does it?” asked Calpurnia. “Now, I don’t say he hasn’t got his points, your friend. He knows how to make his manners. He’s polite. And he’s a generous man, I know, very much so. That’s never nothing. That always counts. For instance, know who came to see me yesterday?”

  Eli shook his head.

  “Sean. He’s been home a week.”

  “I know. I drove Marcia down to Boston to collect him. Carl had to work.”

  “’Course, he’s got to take it easy. But he’s out of trouble, got a clean bill of health. So, that’s something good. Nothing bad about that.”

  “No.”

  “Mind you, his hair all fell out. He basically doesn’t have any hair. Some fuzz.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Eli. “His hair will grow back.”

  “I’m not worried. Fact is, I approve. Sean’s the only boy in the valley would look better with more hair.”

  They sat for a moment in silence. Then,

  “Marcia told me Langdon Taft paid all their bills,” said Calpurnia.

  “That’s right, he did.”

  “She said you fixed that up with him.”

  “I talked to him, that’s all. I told him what their situation was. He agreed to help. Wasn’t much to it, really.”

  “Was for Sean,” said Calpurnia. “Was for Marcia, for Sean’s grandma.”

  “And that’s another question I had, right there,” said Eli.

  “What’s that?”

  “What happened between her, Marcia’s mother, and Langdon?”

  “You mean Mollie? Long time ago. She dumped him.”

  “I got that. Why? What happened?”

  “Gave him his walking papers. Left him at the altar.”

  “Not really?”

  “Near enough,” said Calpurnia. “Why? Well, what have I been telling you? Can you blame her? One thing, a big thing—Mollie’s parents were very strict, stern Sunday people. Lots of church, there. Teetotal? Oh, my, yes. They thought Langdon was pretty wild. Well, he was. They didn’t like him at all. Didn’t think he was—I don’t know—sound. Safe. In spite of his money. This was no President Taft they were getting; it was no Supreme Court judge. And then, I always thought his parents were involved, too, from the other direction, as you might say.”

  “Langdon’s parents?”

  “Langdon’s. They were something. You remember them.”

  “Not really,” said Eli.

  “The old man had a very high opinion of himself. Very high. But why? His own father, your friend’s grandad, was nothing but a jumped-up stock clerk for the hardware, but Langdon’s father had the brain of Almighty God, according to himself, anyway. And his wife, Langdon’s mother? She was from New York, Connecticut, I don’t know, but she had her nose so far up in the air she bumped into low tree branches. Nobody could stand them. I guess Mollie finally took a good look and thought, ‘Do I really want to deal with that pair for the rest of their lives?’ Langdon being an only child, you see. She threw him overboard, and six months later she married Galen Hoover. They all lived happily ever after.”

  “Except Langdon,” said Eli.

  “Come on,” said Calpurnia. “You saying he’s been out there broken-hearted, all these years?”

  “Well, he never married.”

  “No more did I. Am I broken-hearted?”

  “It doesn’t seem as if.”

  “I should say it doesn’t. But as far as your friend, he’s not exactly pining away, is he? It’s not like he hadn’t had plenty of women in and out of there, one time or another.”

  “Not that I ever saw,” said Eli. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve heard what I’ve heard.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “How would I?”

  “One way I can think of,” said Eli.

  “You hush,” said Calpurnia. “Just hush yourself. Don’t you have to be someplace?”

  4

  NIGHT COURT

  IN THE VALLEY, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WESLEY FILLMORE was the cause of little distress and indeed of considerable rejoicing. Wesley figured as a sort of local hero in reverse. His absence compounded negatively, you might have said, for the good of the community. Scale is everything. Where in a larger setting conspicuous saints and sinners, however rare proportionally, may be numerous in abs
olute terms, in the valley their numbers, like everything else, were small. Therefore, as Taft, pouring himself a light Sir Walter Scott and shaking out the Brattleboro newspaper, remarked to Eli, the same names kept coming up.

  “Court filings,” said Taft. “The police report. Car wrecks, DUIs, break-ins, drug deals, domestic disputes, fights, assaults. The same half-dozen people must make seventy-five percent of the trouble. The same names, over and over. It’s like Shakespeare, isn’t it, old sport?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Eli. “Who have we got today?”

  Taft returned to the paper. He read. “Well, for example,” he said, “here’s Katie Harding, twenty-nine. Arrested for fighting with some guy—boyfriend?—doesn’t give a name, at the bridge, the swimming place there. She hit him over the head with an ironing board.”

  “An ironing board?” asked Eli. “What did they have an ironing board for at the swimming hole?”

  “Ask Katie. Alcohol was involved, needless to say. As for the ironing board, it might not be the weapon you or I would choose, but Katie made it work. She put the guy in the ER.”

  “Whatever comes to your hand, I guess,” said Eli.

  “Then a couple of days later,” Taft went on, “here’s Katie again, stopped on Route 10 for speeding, DUI, and had a carful of dope. She took a swing at the arresting officer. She and her male companion, both in the lockup.”

  “Not the same fellow, though, this time, probably,” said Eli. “The ironing board fellow?”

  “I hope not. But, point is: twice in the same paper? Same girl? I doubt this is her maiden voyage, either.”

  “I know it isn’t,” said Eli. “Katie’s a frequent flyer. There are others. Look at Wes Fillmore.”

  “Who?”

  “Wesley Fillmore. Don’t know Wes? Keep reading the paper, and you will. Jack of all trades, Wes is. Breaking and entering, weed, pills. Mainly, though, Wes is a beater.”

  “A beater of what?”

  “Well, of anything that’s within reach, I guess,” said Eli. “You know: dogs, cats, horses, other livestock. But specializing in women. Wives, girlfriends, cousins, nieces, sisters. Wes loves to beat up his women. The girls like it, too, it seems. At least, they keep coming back for more. And it’s not as if they don’t know what they’re dealing with. All those boys and girls, Wes, Katie, the others—everybody knows about them. How wouldn’t they? It’s like you say: those guys are in the paper more than the governor.”