he’d feel covered — they should sign the deed of the house over to him, and he and his new wife would move into the house right off, ‘to help take care of Pa,’ he said. Now if you knew Ham’s wife, you’d know how likely that was — she was his second wife, a fancy New York City tap dancer, used to be one of those June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show? You’ve probably seen her on TV, but it’s hard to remember one from all the others. Anyhow, I can’t blame her, not after what I know now, but that’s how Ham put it: ‘Annie and I want to be able to help take care of Pa, and we can do it a lot easier if we’re living right there in the house with you,’ he told his poor old mother, who naturally was terrified by all those bills and by the idea of having to take care of a man who’d become practically a vegetable — no disrespect, but that’s truly what he’d turned into since the second heart attack, kind of leaning all the time off to one side there in his chair while he looked at the wrestling and the cowboy shows, which is what he liked the best, the wrestling and the cowboys, with the whole left side of him stiff as a door and the rest of him spastic as a cat with distemper. It was something horrible to see, so I used to go over there twice a week, to visit Alma and try to cheer her up some, and naturally I’d have to see Horace too, and even though he’d turned a lot sweeter, a whole lot, since the second attack and the operation, it was kind of sickening, if you know what I mean. I used to almost wish he was still all sour and grouchy, so he wouldn’t try to talk to me, because now when I’d go over to spend the afternoon with Alma, he’d try to talk and smile, but all he could do was make these pathetic moans like a cow and toothy kind of crazy-looking smiles, which I know must have embarrassed Alma so much that probably even she was wishing the old man would get cross and silent again. I don’t know, maybe Alma didn’t have any other choice, because after all, Ham was her son and she had to pay those bills; so anyhow, she agreed to sign over the house and take out the mortgage and let Ham make the payments — he paid her a dollar, a single dollar bill, for the house, because when they signed it over there had to be some money change hands — and she also agreed to let him and his second wife Annie move into the house. They sold this little ranch over to Concord they’d owned and moved in that same week, going right to work fixing up the second floor entirely for themselves with a new bathroom and converting two of the little bedrooms up there into one ‘master bedroom’—that’s what he called it, a ‘master bedroom’—and his mother and father went on using their old bedroom and bathroom downstairs. That was when the big dormer in back of the house got put in too, because Ham and Annie wanted a view of the mountain from their ‘master bedroom.’ It wasn’t enough they already had a view of the mountain from the kitchen; no, they had to have one from their bedroom too. But of course all this time everyone, Alma too, thought that Ham was being kind to his mother and father. No one knew what he had in his head. No one knew that when the old man finally died, as he did that spring — very peacefully, thank heaven, just went to sleep and didn’t wake up again, just like his own father died, only that was in a snowbank and he was dead drunk at the time — anyhow, when Ham’s father finally died, no one knew six months later everything would blow up like it did. Ham went and put in a garden like his father had done every summer, and Annie got herself involved a little bit with the town, joined the Ladies’ Aid Society and so forth, and Alma seemed happier than I’d ever remembered seeing her, because everyone knew that Horace had been a difficult man to live with. He was so cross all the time, even as a young man. Anyhow, as fall comes on, Annie stopped going to Ladies’ Aid, and Ham was seen drunk a lot in town, and ever since he was a boy in high school, practically, he’s been nasty when he’s drunk, and he was being nasty all right, scrapping and fighting in the Bonnie Aire over to Pittsfield, wrecking his car one night by driving it dead drunk into the Civil War Memorial down to the Parade. So people started getting the idea that things weren’t going all that smooth at the Stark place. And they sure weren’t, as we later found out. What was happening was that Annie had decided she didn’t like living way out in the country with no one but her mother-in-law for company all day, and so she’d started nagging Ham about moving to Connecticut or someplace where she could have the kind of life she preferred, and like I said, I can’t really blame her. After all, being married to that man must have been no picnic, like they say, and since she was a big-city girl, a famous dancer and all, living way out at the end of a dirt road in an old house with an old woman must have been pretty boring for her. She was sort of a pretty woman then, and she was actually a nice woman when you got to know her, and she couldn’t help it if fate and Ham had put her in a place that could only be boring to a woman like that. So they did a lot of fighting, she and Ham, and one of the ways she got around being so bored and doing so much fighting was to take week-long trips down to New York City, where she stayed with her aunt in an apartment in the Bronx, she once told me. That made it easier for everyone, I suppose, probably even for Ham, though who can say what makes things easier for that man? Anyhow one night in October when Annie was down to New York, Ham came home drunk and late, around nine o’clock or so. Alma’d made supper for him, and so she was ticked off that he’d come in so late and drunk, and I guess she must have let it out a little, because he got to fighting back at her, yelling that this was his house and he’d come home when and how he damned well pleased to come home, and so forth, until finally she said, out of anger, you understand, not really meaning it, ‘All right, then, I’ll leave,’ and he said, ‘Fine.’ He went and phoned up his sister Jody, who thank God lives in town with her husband Chub, the chief of police, and Ham told Jody to come pick her mother up, she was moving out. Jody was shocked, naturally, but what could she do, so she drove up to the house and picked up her mother, who had refused to show that man any emotion over the thing and had gone right ahead and packed her bags, and Jody drove the old woman back down to the Center where she and Chub and their twin boys have a trailer, and lucky for everyone, it’s one of those two-bed room trailers, so they had room for Alma. Then Chub went and called Ham and asked him what was going on, sort of man to man, and when Ham told him to mind his own GD business, Chub got mad — and he’s not the kind of man you want to get mad — so he hopped into his car and drove up to the house and stormed in, but when he got into the house he found Ham standing in the middle of the living room with a rifle pointed at him. I mean it. A rifle. Pointed right at Chub’s heart. That’s the kind of man Ham Stark is. Or was. I really wouldn’t know now, because I haven’t seen the man to talk to, even assuming I would talk to him, which of course I wouldn’t, for what, twelve years now, ever since that night…”