In less than five minutes, I had found a dozen such posts, located in a rectangle.
Making my way to the woodline, I snapped off a piece of pine branch and swept the grass in front of me, and in another hour on Shay’s Meadow, I found about a dozen rectangles, each made up of a dozen concrete posts.
I sat on one of the posts and thought for a while, wondering about mass murder and this peaceful place. I stared at the slow-moving river for quite a while, until the mosquitoes finally drove me home.
The next day I waited in the bureau until deadline had passed and Rita Cloutier had gone out for lunch. That left me and Monty Hughes. Monty was somewhere between forty and fifty and lived alone in an apartment on the north side of town. He had a good-sized beer gut and wore black slacks and white long-sleeve shirts in winter and white short-sleeve shirts in summer. His black hair was slicked back and never touched his shirt collar, and the color of his hair matched both his moustache and frames of his eyeglasses.
Each morning and each afternoon he would smoke a single cigarette at his desk, as he worked on audit numbers or made phone calls. Not once had I ever seen him get upset, and believe me, newspaper circulation manager is another description for lightning rod. Dealing with irate customers, lazy paperboys and papergirls, and irritated parents who can’t believe that their hardworking sons and daughters would dump newspapers in shrubbery instead of doorways would drive many a man to shaky hands and blurry eyes. But not Monty. He’d just nod and listen to all the rants and raves, and go about his business.
His business included more than just the Granite Times. Monty was one of those unsung and nearly invisible people who keep a small town like this one alive. He served on the conservation commission, the zoning board, the local Boy Scout council, and for my purposes today, he was head of the Boston Falls Historical Society.
When Monty had snubbed out his single cigarette of the afternoon, I called over to him. “Got a sec for a question, Monty?”
“Sure, sport, go ahead,” he said, going through a handful of papers on his desk.
“Got a question about something historical, thought it might be right up your alley.”
“And what’s the question?”
“Shay’s Meadow, out by the gravel pit on Timberswamp Road. What was there before?”
Monty kept his eyes on his papers. “Before what?”
“Before all that was left was the concrete posts. I was up there yesterday and found all these concrete posts, in some sort of pattern. They looked like footings for buildings. What kind of structures used to be there?”
Monty’s voice didn’t change. “And why were you up on Shay’s Meadow?”
Voice change or not, I didn’t like the question. “Just wandering around. So what was there? Buildings belonging to the town? A farm? A business?”
A small shake of the head. “Don’t rightly know, Jack. Sorry, I can’t help you.”
I leaned across my desk. “Oh, come on, Monty. You’ve grown up here, you know everybody in town, you’ve been with the historical society for years. What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Just what I said. I don’t know.”
“Monty...”
He looked up at me, his face expressionless. “Tell me, sport. Who killed JFK?”
“Hunh?” By now I was equal parts confused and frustrated, a mixture I didn’t like.
“You heard me. The most powerful man in the world was shot and killed before a movie camera and dozens and dozens of witnesses, including Secret Service agents, government officials, and members of the news media. All of this took place on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. So tell me. Who killed him?”
I said, “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Monty nodded. “An easy answer. But you know the truth. Hundreds of books and dozens of TV specials and movies have all been made around that single question: Who killed the President? And despite all that occurred, despite the movie camera and all those witnesses, nobody can agree on who did the shooting, why the shooting occurred, and how many shots were fired.”
“Nice little lesson, Monty, but—”
He interrupted me. “So listen here, sport. If all that’s true, that something so violent could happen in public to such an important man, then don’t go telling me that I should know everything here in Boston Falls. Small towns like their secrets and they manage to keep them nice and tight. Which means not everything’s out there for answers.”
I had a thought. “Are you telling me you don’t know what’s out there, or you do know and won’t tell me?”
Monty went back to his paperwork. “Don’t be offended, sport, but what I’m telling you is that you’re just like every other young man and woman who’s sat at that desk. You roll in here with your college degree and fresh ideas, full of energy and enthusiasm, and you go through this town, stirring things up and writing your stories. Not a problem, if any of you would learn what this town is about and how the people live here, year after year. Nope, all you reporters care about is making your mark and then moving on.”
“That’s the way the business is, Monty. You know that.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Rita’s been here ten years, I’ve been here eleven. You know the longest duration of any reporter that’s stayed here? Ten months, that’s all. Not even a full year. Not even time to learn enough about the people here and show the proper respect. So there you have it, sport. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said, turning to my computer terminal. “Don’t call me sport anymore.”
For a moment it looked as if he might smile. “All right, Jack.”
Later that night, after having dinner by myself in my apartment in Boston Falls, I went out on the tiny rear deck that probably added about fifty dollars a month to my rent. In Manchester, I had lived in a condo complex downtown, where the old mill buildings were being rejuvenated with fresh money and fresh people. I hardly ever ate dinner by myself back then. My usual schedule included drinks and get-togethers after work with my fellow reporters, editors, and whatnot from the paper. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, one of those fellow newspaper types would come back and visit me at my rented condo, with its high cathedral ceilings and great views of the renewed waterfront.
Here, my colleagues were Rita and Monty, neither of whom seemed particularly interested in seeing me after work — and to be truthful, I shared their disinterest. Now dinner was a frozen pizza, cooked in an oven that had to be nursed along, since its temperatures varied widely according to the time of day. My apartment was one of four in a building that had been built in the early 1800’s, before the concept of insulation and soundproofing. The apartment next-door was occupied by a mother and daughter on public assistance who seemed to get great joy from yelling at one another. One of the apartments downstairs was rented by a little old lady who loved action movies, and since she was hard of hearing, she liked to play them so loud that each explosion and machine gun burst would make the walls shake. The other apartment downstairs was rented by a young couple with three children, trying to make a go of it by working at the mills, and while they were fine, children can be children.
Which is why I spent a lot of my free time at home sitting on the tiny rear deck, looking at the dirt parking lot that abutted Tony’s Towing and Auto Salvage. A funny thing: often I would do a story about a car accident and see the crumpled remains on one of the town’s twisty roads, and by the time I got home, Tony would be there, backing in the same crushed debris.