“You, now,” she said to one child, “you must be an angel. And you,” she said to the other, “you’re a wolf-man or something, I bet.” She stared down at them from her considerable height, and the children withdrew their bags and looked at their feet. “Shy,” Alma observed.
The mother smiled apologetically through blotches of freckles. The mother’s name is Pearl Diehler. She has been living on welfare and food stamps since her husband left her and moved to Florida two years ago — Alma Pittman knew this, of course, and Pearl knew she did. Everyone knew it. Small towns are like that.
Alma quickly smiled back and swung open the door and waved the children and their mother inside. As the three passed by her into the warmly lit living room, Alma glanced down at her stoop and saw that her jack-o’-lanterns were gone. Both of them.
For a few seconds she stared at where they had been, as if trying to remember placing them on the stoop earlier, trying to recall carving them out herself that afternoon on her kitchen table, trying to remember buying them from Anthony’s Farm Market last Friday — a solitary irritable woman more organized and better educated than most of her neighbors, and though somewhat intolerant of them, trying nonetheless to be kind to them, to join them somehow in their holiday.
As if waking from sleep, she blinked, turned quickly around and went inside her house, closing the door firmly behind her.
A fast-flowing river, the Minuit, runs south through the town, and most of the buildings in Lawford — homes, stores, town hall and churches, no more than fifty buildings in the center in all — are situated on the east side of the river along a half-mile stretch of Route 29, the old Littleton-Lebanon road, replaced a generation ago by the interstate ten miles east.
The Minuit was named and then fished for centuries by the Abenaki Indians, until in the early 1800s woodcutters from Massachusetts came north and started using the river to float tree trunks south and west to the Connecticut. By the time the burgeoning muddy lumber camp had evolved into a proper village and shipping point called Lawford, there was a pair of small brick mills on the river manufacturing wood shingles and spools. For a brief period the town prospered, which accounts for the dozen or so impressively large white houses strung along the road at the south end of town, where the valley widens somewhat and the glacial rubble, filtered by a long-gone primeval lake, becomes glacial till and, cleared by those early lumbermen, for a few years offered speculators several thousand acres of good salable farmland.
In the Great Depression, the mills got taken over by the banks, were shut down and written off, the money and machinery invested farther south in the manufacture of shoes. Since then, Lawford has existed mainly as someplace halfway between other places, a town people sometimes admit to having come from but where almost no one ever goes. Half the rooms in the big white colonial houses that face the river and the high dark ridge in the west have been emptied and sealed off against the winter with polyurethane and plywood, imprisoning in the remaining rooms elderly couples and widows and widowers abandoned by their grown children for the smarter life in the towns and cities. There are, of course, grown children who stay on in Lawford, and others who — after serving and being wounded in one of the wars or messing up a marriage elsewhere — come back home to live in the old house and pump gas or style hair in town. Such children are regarded by their parents as failures; and they behave accordingly.
Lots of homes in town double as businesses: insurance; real estate; guns ‘n’ ammo; haircutting; arts & crafts. Here and there a particularly well maintained and — discounting the greenhouse, the sauna in the barn and the solar heat panels— lovingly restored mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse accommodates the complex social, sexual and domestic needs of a graying long-haired man and woman with an adolescent child or two in boarding school, svelte couples who have come north from Boston or New York City to teach at Dartmouth, twenty miles south, or sometimes just to grow marijuana in their large organic gardens and live off inherited money in the region’s dead economy.
Most of the rest of the townspeople live outside the center, nowadays usually in mobile homes or small ranch-style bungalows built by the owners with borrowed money on rocky three-acre lots of hilly scrub. Their children attend the cinder-block elementary school on the outskirts north of town and the regional high school in Barrington, where the Lawford boys even today have enviable reputations as athletes, especially in the more violent sports, and the girls still have reputations for providing sexual favors at an early age and for going to their senior proms pregnant.
These are not the only people who reside in Lawford. There are a small number of part-time residents, summer people with houses built on the gravelly shores of the lakes in the area, sprawling wood-frame structures they call “camps,” built back in the 1920s by large wealthy families from southern New England and New York forcing themselves to spend time together. A few of these family compounds came later, in the 1940s and ’50s, but by then it was difficult to buy attractive lakeshore property from the early comers, and they often got built on marshy land with no easy access to the road.
Beyond this, there are only the deer hunters to speak of, and one must speak of them, for they will play an important role in Wade’s story. Almost all of the deer hunters are men from lower New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, who every November come north brandishing high-powered rifles with scopes and normally spend no longer than a weekend in the area. They drink all night in motels and roadhouses on Route 29 and tramp from sunup to sundown through the woods, firing at anything that moves, sometimes even killing it and hauling it back to Haverhill or Revere on the fender of a car. More often than not, they return home empty-handed, hung over and frustrated — but nonetheless sated from having participated, even if only marginally and ineptly, in an ancient male rite.
Near the center of Lawford, three houses north of the town hall and situated on a large flat lot, are a pair of incongruous buildings — a huge slate-blue hundred-year-old renovated barn and next to it a matching blue sixty-foot cathedral-ceiling mobile home — the pair of them surrounded by an acre of asphalt paving, as if the blue buildings were dropped by helicopter squarely into the middle of a shopping center parking lot. This is the business place and home of Gordon LaRiviere, well driller, who, unless you count those who went away, is Law-ford’s only success story — despite his motto, painted on every vehicle and building he owns: LARIVIERE CO. — OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!
LaRiviere’s story, too, will get told in due time, but at this particular moment, still early on Halloween Eve, let us picture six teenagers, four boys and two girls, out in the field behind LaRiviere’s blue barn — his combination office, workshop, garage and warehouse — working in darkness in LaRiviere’s garden, a meticulously laid out and maintained plot of earth half covered with black plastic and mulch for the winter, the other half, with rattling dry cornstalks and dead tomato plants and sprawling pumpkin vines, not yet turned over. The teenagers guzzle king-sized beers and laugh through harsh whispers as they strip the few remaining vines of the few remaining pumpkins. I know this because I myself did it, not to Gordon LaRiviere’s pumpkin patch but to someone else’s. And I did it because my older brother Wade did it, and he, too, had merely followed the example of an older brother, two of them.