THERE ARE TWO versions of what happened following the moment when Hamilton confronted his brother-in-law with a 30.06 rifle. Both are widely believed. Here is Chub’s version:
“I come in there and the bastard’s got his thirty-ought-six aimed and cocked. I can see he’s drunker’n a fiddler’s fart, so I start trying to humor him, you know, because your drunk man can pull the trigger when your sober man won’t. So I start saying things like, ‘Hey, Ham, ol’ buddy, you don’t want to shoot your ol’ buddy, get yourself in all kindsa trouble.’ You know, stuff like that, just talking to him, while all the time I’m circling around the room and closing in on him, trying to look real casual, like I’m just checking out the furniture or something, but with each step getting closer to the guy, not being obvious about it or anything, of course, until finally I’m maybe only two feet from the tip of the barrel. That’s when I make my move. I look quick off to my left, like there’s someone at the window, and he follows my look, and I grab the barrel of his gun and yank the thing out of his hands, and then I throw it on the couch behind me with one hand and reach around his neck with the other arm, yank his head back, and throw a hammer lock on him until he blacks out and goes limp. He’s a pretty big guy, bigger’n me, but he doesn’t have my training, of course, so there’s not much he can do against me, especially since he’s drunk and all. Anyhow, after a few seconds he comes to, and realizing what he’s done, the guy starts bawling like a baby, pounding his fists on the floor and everything, just like he’s a little kid. I can see he really isn’t right in the head, so I says to him that he ought to get himself to one of those psychologists or something, a head doctor, only he tells me to go to hell, starts laying me out like that, so I says the hell with him and I walk out, and I haven’t seen the bastard, not socially, since that night.”
THE SECOND VERSION of that confrontation was, naturally, Hamilton’s own, which he conveyed by means of a typed post card to his daughter Rochelle, when in a letter she asked him specifically what had happened at that particular point in the evening, “the night you and your family quarreled,” was how she delicately put it. Here is his post card:
Big Chief broke into private domicile. H. S. ordered him off property with aid of 30.06 Winchester. B. C. eagerly complied. Nothing else. Later phone call from B. C. threatened H. S. with bodily harm. Promises never kept. Boring story. Tell about how your great-great-great-great-grandfather stole 700 acres from Abenookis. You need some humor in your book.
Her father’s literary advice, offered gratuitously, was not followed, which is perhaps unfortunate, because possibly the only significant flaw in Rochelle’s novel is its lack of humor.
At the time she received the above card from her father, she was especially unlikely to heed the kind of advice he was offering, for at that particular moment in the writing she was exploring and expounding her theory that her hero, Alvin Stock (Hamilton Stark), was actually possessed by a little-known demon named Asmodeus. Although, to be sure, Rochelle later on gave up this somewhat bizarre notion, so that in the completed manuscript there is not a single reference either to demons or possession (with one possible exception, in her Chapter Two, “Conversion,” where she describes a vision of the archangel Raphael that was experienced by the hero, Alvin, at the age of sixteen one night after a high school dance in the Pittsfield High School parking lot), nevertheless, the terms of her theory are significantly revealing, not only of how Rochelle perceived the extremity of her father’s behavior, but also of the man’s behavior itself.
While in many ways a courageous and rigorously rational young woman, Rochelle, especially during the period when she was writing her so-called novel, was nonetheless capable of profound superstition, and further, was capable of structuring her superstitions to help her evade uncomfortable truths. Of course, she was very young at the time (still is), and besides, one can hardly blame her. Even if she had been drawing on nothing more than her own direct experiences of her father, she would at some point have been forced to confront the facts that he had mistreated her mother, that he had deserted her in her infancy, that later, as she grew into young womanhood, he had mocked her attempts to express her love for him, and that he had rejected outright her final attempts as an adult to create a friendship with him. Additionally, he had done all this as if he had intended to do it from the beginning! As if nothing could have pleased him more! His villainy was all of a piece. Thus, no matter how much one would have liked to, one could not have forgiven Hamilton Stark for his weakness, nor understood him for his stupidity, nor sympathized with him for his pathology — because he so consistently had insisted that everything he did was intentional, was deliberate, and in the long run was happiness-producing. And if all this, which was no more than her own direct experience of the man, were not sufficient to send her flying to the warm solace of superstition, at the time of her novel-writing Rochelle was interviewing and corresponding with many other people who had been involved with her father, either as wife, sister, brother-in-law, or even friend, and thus she was being literally overwhelmed with tales of selfishness, of rage, drunkenness, lust, greed, of eccentric violence and destructive manipulation, of betrayal, disloyalty and deceit. She could find people, men as well as women, who said they had loved him, who even seemed to be obsessed with him, but she could find no one who could tell her tales of sweetness, of gentleness, kindness and generosity, of affectionate big-heartedness, humility and steadfastness. And yet, oddly, the more of the man’s nature she uncovered to herself, the more she loved him and the more her obsession with her father dominated her thoughts and actions.
How else, then, to explain to herself (or to others) such a compelling attraction to a man she knew in all ways to be morally obnoxious — unless she could believe that he was possessed? An otherwise sweet, gentle, kind and generous man, she decided, an affectionately big-hearted man, a humble and steadfast man, was tragically possessed by a demon, she believed, and he had thus been transformed into a wholly selfish man, a raging, drunken, lustful man, a greedy man, a man of eccentric, unpredictable violence and pointless manipulation, a master of betrayal, disloyalty and deceit.
And it was not unnatural, once she had determined that her father was possessed in the first place, that Rochelle would happen on the demon Asmodeus. She had what might be called a lively religious curiosity, possibly the guilt-motivated residue of an adolescent conversion experience and the falling away that had followed. She had been raised rather casually as a Presbyterian, southern (and therefore highly emotional regardless of how casual one might be in keeping the rituals), and when she underwent what in those sects is referred to as the “conversion experience,” whereby Jesus Christ, heretofore a mere abstraction, becomes one’s “personal savior,” she brought with her the intellectual apparatus and energy that were her genetic birthright, and as a result she succeeded in making herself into something of a biblical scholar before, at the age of eighteen, she commenced to fall away from the organized forms of religion. Thus, later on, when the young woman began looking around for the proper demon, she had little difficulty remembering Asmodeus. (It might be worth noting also that in the meantime, between her falling away from her religious faith and her “discovery” that her father had been possessed by the demon Asmodeus, she had undergone almost a year of Jungian psychoanalysis, and consequently it was not especially difficult for her to credit non-Christian deities and other mythical figures with immense power in determining the behavior of individuals who in all ways were unconscious even of the mere existence of such deities.)