“But... but he isn’t part of my family.”
“Mr. Hinton, he’s lived there for at least three decades. At least three. Do you really want to be responsible for evicting this man from his home?”
Of course that was the best argument in the world to use with my father. He caved. Claud became a permanent fixture at the Hinton country house — as he’d been before the Hintons had the country house.
Naturally, at the time, my sisters and I knew nothing of these events or the dismay produced in my mother when she learned we had acquired a permanent houseguest. What we did know was that Claud was always at the farm. In the way of children, we did not question his presence, did not question who he was, did not question what his function might be. The adult world was filled with things too complex for us to understand, so there were things we seldom questioned and this especially included why certain adults happened to be in certain places. We always assumed, for example, that a waitress was a waitress because that’s what she was, not because it was what she chose to be or what she had to be. We never looked into anyone’s motives for being in a certain job or a certain place. Claud was Claud and he was at the country house; that was all there was to it.
Perhaps some questions might have formed in our minds if we had come to know him better. But we never did come to know Claud. He appeared at meals; otherwise we saw him infrequently. Sometimes we would see him walking toward the front gate, going somewhere, and sometimes we would see him coming from the front gate, coming from somewhere, but he never did anything on the farm itself. He never worked or played. He just came and went. Indoors, other than at meals, the only times we saw him — and they were seldom — were when he was seated at the otherwise empty dining table playing patience. On those occasions he wore a green plastic eyeshade.
It was because of Claud that we kept the country house when Father experienced severe financial trouble during a recession. He needed money, and he wanted to sell the farm. But he couldn’t because of Claud. Father was simply too much of a gentleman to allow a broker not to warn a potential new buyer about Claud, yet obviously nobody would buy it knowing that a permanent houseguest came as part of the package. So we kept the farm and Father barely avoided bankruptcy. It put him through the wringer. In the end it turned out well because Father survived without selling the farm.
Claud died last summer. It was sudden and unexpected. He was walking down the road and just dropped dead of a heart attack. The doctor said that sort of heart attack seldom happened. Father claimed it was the best way to go. I’m not so sure; I think I would want some warning.
Father paid for Claud’s burial in the nearest cemetery and for a nice headstone after a quick investigation confirmed that he had no family.
It was only then, when Father was going through Claud’s papers in his room (the court appointed him and a local lawyer co-executors) that he found the promissory note. Forty years earlier it had been given to Claud Heister, farmhand, by the then owner of the farm, John Williams. The note was for accumulated back wages, which Williams was unable to pay, amounting to two thousand three hundred dollars. The interest was eight percent a year, compounded annually. An attached statement signed by Williams stipulated that Claud Heister would be allowed to live on the farm rent-free until the note and interest were paid and that the promise was binding on Williams’ heirs, assigns, and other successors in ownership of the farm.
We have since wondered, and probably will wonder ever after, whether Claud had slyly refrained from mentioning the debt to later owners after it had been forgotten, realizing that the free room was a better deal than the money (although the money would have amounted to almost fifty thousand dollars by the time he died), and if someone ever did order him to leave he could always produce the note and collect the money. But maybe that wasn’t the reason he’d never referred to the note. Maybe he’d simply been too polite to mention it.
That’s a Switch
by John H. Dirckx
At twilight the crickets and frogs began serenading one another, the bats made their first low flights over the tree-tops, and Midgy Lunken emerged from her underground burrow into the shadows of the night. Everything she wore had been salvaged from trashcans or stolen from careless shopkeepers. Everything she possessed in the world she carried in a dingy, threadbare knapsack.
Her home was the transformer vault of an abandoned tire factory where mice ate anything not stored in metal and sometimes bit her while she slept on her bed of newspapers and rags. Midgy Lunken was just under five feet tall, with eyes like a ferret’s and a nose like a blob of putty. It was three weeks since she’d washed her hair, in the ladies’ room at the bus station, when both of the female security guards were off on the same night.
She started her nightly round at the trash receptacle behind the Elite Bakery. Working in the dark, she searched a long time before finding and consuming a couple of stale rolls. Then she emptied a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag of its contents and set off to fill it with aluminum cans picked up from the wayside and salvaged from the hundred or so trashcans along her regular route.
She kept to the alleys, the unlighted passages, the dark sides of walls and fences. It wasn’t other nocturnal predators she feared — on them she could exercise nails and teeth, and fists hardened by hunger into hammers. But the police were merciless toward vagrants, and she had vowed not to survive another stretch in the workhouse.
Around two o’clock in the morning, with her bag full of cans, she slipped through a hedge and followed her usual course along Pemberton Avenue, a.k.a. Business Route 5. A high chain-link fence followed the curve of the road here, hugging the gravelly shoulder so closely as to leave no room for pedestrians. Midgy Lunken’s path lay between the fence and a dense thicket that cloaked the slope rising sharply to her right, above which the rooflines of houses showed vaguely against the velvet sky.
The traffic on Route 5 never quite died down at any hour of the night. Guided by the lights of passing cars, Midgy made her way with ease through the shadows. All the same, she nearly fell over the figure huddled motionless on the path before a stray beam of light limned it momentarily.
A hungry belly has no conscience, much less a scrap of compassion. Midgy had rolled a few drunks in her day. Her only concern was that some sharp-eyed driver would see her at it and have the police on the scene before she could get away. She knelt quickly in the mud and ran her hands over the prostrate form. A man — a big man, muscular, but just now limp as a rag. A wallet where it ought to be. She snatched it and scampered back along the path by which she’d come, trailing her bag of empty cans noisily behind her.
At length she stopped under a viaduct to examine her spoils by the feeble glow of a streetlight. Besides the usual cards and papers, the wallet contained a substantial wad of bills. With many a glance over her shoulder she counted them out — sixty-eight dollars’ worth of them.
Midgy Lunken dropped the plundered wallet down a storm sewer and left her bag of cans tumbled in the gutter for somebody else to find and redeem. She padded off into the night, her mind astir with plans for spending her windfall. First a visit to the coffeeshop at the bus station. Then a bath and a four dollar bed for the rest of the night at the Brethren’s Hostel. And in the morning, Eleanor’s Beauty Salon as soon as it opened — if they’d let her in.
Not long after first fight, two people on their way to work called the police on cellular phones to report that they’d seen what looked like a man lying inert against the fence alongside Route 5. A patrol crew dispatched to the scene found the dead body of an adult white male in his thirties facedown on the narrow path that ran along the fence on the side away from the road. Death had apparently resulted from a severe head wound, which had crushed in the right temple. No identification was found on the body.