Boston newspapers and television stations. Camera crews from the four networks. Time and Newsweek. Reporters and writers and producers in fancy clothes, standing in the middle of the common, wanting to know where the “downtown” was and the taxi stands. When this onslaught started I had some serious thoughts to myself and spoke with Chief Parnell, finding him at his basement office in the Town Hall. He had lost a lot of weight, his usual sleek green police uniform a baggy and greasy-looking mockery. His eyes were red-rimmed and almost lifeless, like those belonging to a man fighting an invisible and spiteful foe.
I said, “Chief, when these media types get here, you be on your best behavior.”
This stirred him some from his seat, huddled against a paper-filled desk. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean these are pros, out-of-state, sent up here to do a story. They don’t give a hoot about you or Purmort. They can buddy up to you and say, ‘Don’t worry, whatever you say will be off the record,’ and it’ll be on the six o’clock news that night. They’re up here for one story and then they’re gone, and you’ll never see them again. They don’t care what happens once they leave.”
The chief seemed to take that to heart, but not Ryan Duffy, the volunteer fire chief who worked days in Tannon. He was quoted in almost every story, and his fat, bearded face was on a lot of newscasts. It backfired, of course, with some of his own men griping about him, and eventually the state police sat on him and told Ryan to shut up. Before that, unfortunately, there were two camera crews on hand the night Mrs. Olson started screaming at the firefighters in the Congregationalist Church basement. That made the evening news, with a lot of analyzing about “small town pressures” and “coping mechanisms” and a lot of false sympathy from the television people.
One afternoon I was halfheartedly typing up some deed transfers at the Sentinel’s office when a familiar-looking man came in, dressed in casual clothes — designer jeans and sport shirt — that blinked a high price tag at you. He was about my age, beefy-looking and grinning, with dark, thinning hair. He had a gold watch about his thick wrist, and as he approached I stood up and stuck out my hand and said, “Well, I’ll be jigged. Harmon Kirk. Harmon, I don’t think I’ve spoken to you for five years.”
His grip was strong. “Right with that, Jerry.”
I said, “Still with the Courant?”
“No, that was two papers ago. Got my own column, syndicated in a lot of dailies in the Northeast. Hope to go national next year.”
Well, I knew what he was up here for, but for a while, at least, we were polite to each other, trading war stories and lies about past editors and stories. As we talked I admit I looked about my office, noticing the three mismatched desks and the piles of newsprint and the manual typewriters. A long distance from the many computerized newsrooms I had worked in.
Harmon finally said, “I guess you can figure why I’m here, Jerry. I’m doing a piece on your fires, and when I found out you were here, I knew I had to come by.”
“Not my fires,” I said, trying to smile. “And I’ll be happy to tell you what I know, so long as I’m not quoted in any way.”
Harmon’s smile flickered a bit, like an old light bulb. “Not even for an old drinking companion?”
I tapped on my chair arm a few times. “Harmon, drinking companion or no, I’ve been interviewed and re-interviewed by a dozen of your colleagues and I’m—”
“They’re your colleagues, too,” he interrupted.
I said, “True, but I also live here. This is my home.”
He said nothing for a moment, making me think he was going to leave, and he said, “Okay — off the record, I hear rumors that there are vigilantes up in the hills, trying to track down the arsonist. Any truth to that?”
I had heard the same rumors, but I didn’t want hundreds of thousands of Harmon’s readers thinking that we were all crazy hill people up here, armed with rifles and the like. I shook my head no.
It was a fairly dispirited interview. After a few minutes Harmon slapped shut his notebook and said, “Sorry to say, Jerry, you sure as hell have changed since we were in the same newsroom. I don’t think the old Jerry would’ve stonewalled me like that.”
“The old Jerry never had a home — just rental agreements,” I said. “You can imagine I feel a sense of responsibility here.”
“What about your responsibility to your readers?”
I tried to smile, tried to make him see what I had become. “My readers all live within ten miles of here — they’re my neighbors. And all of them, even me, are scared of losing our homes. And they see you folks coming in, making fun of them and using their tragedies for your own gain. Harmon, I like this town, I like it a lot, and I’m proud of living here.”
A few days later — after the Unitarian Church burned down — I ran across Harmon Kirk’s column in one of the larger dailies, and he had quoted me, of course, but by covering up my identity and naming me only as a “local newsman.” Being as I’m the only local newsman in Purmort, it didn’t do much.
Another effect of the media barrage was to focus some of the townspeople’s hostility on me. Even though I owned and wrote the local paper, and had done so for five years, the fires stripped away the thin layer of acceptability which I had so diligently grown over the many months. Hardly anyone talked to me on the streets, and sitting down at the lunch or breakfast counters at Ruby’s Diner or the Common Coffeeshop meant people on either side of me would silently pick up their plates and move elsewhere.
Subscriptions to the Sentinel — never big to begin with — started to dwindle, and I found myself caught in the middle of two opinions. Some people in Purmort thought my stories only encouraged the arsonist, and that I should report nothing (nothing!) at all about the fires. And another group of people felt I was hiding news and information, important items that the state police and the chief were hiding.
As for the first point, I could never have kept the Sentinel silent about what was going on in Purmort, and as for the second point, I had to plead a modified guilty — I never printed everything I knew.
For one thing, I accidentally learned — through a thoughtless comment by one of the state police boys in the chief’s office — how the fires were set. A set of oily rags, jammed into a corner or in a woodpile, and then set ablaze with three wooden matches. Repeated, every time. Seconds after I found this out Chief Parnell was practically on his knees, begging me not to use it.
“Jerry, this is the only thing we’ve got on the son of a bitch,” the chief said. “The only thing. You write it up in the Sentinel and he’ll switch to something else, and we’ll never be able to tie him in to all the fires when we get him.”
I had to think long and hard on that one, but in the end, I gave in. I wanted to report the news, but most of all, like everyone else in Purmort, I wanted the arsonist caught. If this made me a bad newsman, well, it was something I could live with. I wanted to save my home.
On a Wednesday late in September, I gained back some of the acceptance and respectability of the people of Purmort.
I had spent the afternoon having lunch and doing some work at home, and I was a mile on the road into town when I realized I had forgotten some notebooks in my kitchen. I turned the pickup truck around in a school bus turnoff, and a few hundred feet from home, I saw a black cloud of smoke above the trees. I sped up, thinking maybe it was a car fire, or grass fire, or some kids camping out in my back yard.