“Our inaction here,” he proclaimed, “will mean our ultimate demise.”
He contended that the prison would in no way interfere with Gilchrist’s integrity or daily life. The town would go on as it always had, uncompromised, with the only measurable change being the influx of prison employees and their families, the quantity of which could be set by the town. Indeed, housing subdivisions would have to be planned and constructed, requiring the sale of hundreds of acres of privately owned farmland at prices easily ten times the current recessionary rate. This last fact was not lost on the oldest families in town, who owned the most land and wielded the most influence.
And so the motion carried. The bond was issued, roads were built, pipe and wire were laid, and in the end the long shot paid off. Gilchrist won its prize prison. Tom Duggan himself ceremonially heated and broke ground on the 312-bed facility in the northern outlands, before a cookout on the town common to celebrate the return of solvency to Gilchrist.
And now, tomorrow, a bust of his likeness was to be installed inside the town hall foyer, alongside the rest of the town’s founding fathers and Revolutionary War heroes, including Colonel Gilchrist himself.
Tom Duggan rolled the swelling franks around the pan with a wooden spatula, still concerned about the coming snow. Clara Nibe had passed on two days before, so with her wake soon after the ceremony, he had arranged for Dickie Veal to drive his mother home. He would check the propane tank outside before leaving. She had plenty of food. It was the isolation of the house that bothered him.
He sliced the franks and served them with the beans and a splotch of ketchup, fixing place mats on the table as he told her about the wake arrangements, making conversation.
“Wasn’t Clara Nibe whosit’s sister-in-law?”
“Yes,” Tom Duggan said. Family pride prevented his mother from uttering Marshall Polk’s name.
“Think he’ll come down out of the hills for that one?”
“I doubt he even knows about it.”
Marshall Polk had been the town postmaster for forty-four years, cranky yet beloved, as much a Gilchrist institution as the town hall. But he had been one of the two sitting selectman removed from office when Tom was anointed town administrator; and he never forgave the town for its slight, nor was he ever the same afterward. When Tom proposed his prison bailout plan, Polk formed a small but vocal opposition group. He retired from the postal service and turned vehemently antigovernment, protesting at town meetings in his lumberjack coat and fur-lined boots, railing against the dark specter of federal intrusion on Gilchrist land. Toward the end, even his small cadre of supporters abandoned him, but Polk persisted as the lone voice of dissent, growing more and more radical, eventually calling for the destruction of the town either by his own hand or by God’s. He fled before seeing the turnaround of the town’s fortunes. On the first day ground was broken at the prison site, Polk announced his secession from Gilchrist and declared war on the town, withdrawing into the northeast mountains.
People claimed to see him fishing now and then, or rummaging through the abandoned buildings out by the asbestos mine. Some sympathetic outland residents left food for him that routinely disappeared. But never had a single shot been fired in this one man’s revolution. And he had departed the town before what would have been partial vindication for him, Tom Duggan’s one glaring error of judgment.
Among the five official security-level classifications of the Bureau of Prisons — high-security, medium-security, low-security, minimum-security, and administrative, listed in that order — Tom Duggan had reasoned that “administrative” dealt with the lowest-risk inmates, and neglected to investigate the matter any further. He later learned, along with the rest of the town, that in fact an “administrative” facility is a specialized institution charged with the containment of extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates.
The Administrative Maximum Unit Penitentiary at Gilchrist became the United States’s twenty-first century Alcatraz, a high-technology Devil’s Island of no parole, no release, no escape. It was, in the words of one pundit on TV, “the latest advancement in the Bureau of Prisons’s legacy of maintaining ‘Control Unit’ penitentiaries, the government’s instrument of revenge upon the country’s most infamous or dissident criminals.”
But this incredible gaffe was overlooked by the townspeople as soon as the enormous financial benefits began to roll in. The guards’ neighborhood, a seventy-house subdivision in the old village of Gilchrist Falls, went up like a boomtown, a planned community of three-bedroom colonials, thirty-by-fifteen-foot asphalt driveways, and freshly sod front yards. The police force was rehired full-time and repairs were made to the crumbling granite steps of the town hall. The three streetlights were updated and two new ones were added, bringing Gilchrist Common’s total to five. The town truck got four new all-weather tires as well as its slide-in sander, and the iron fence around the cemetery next to the church was widened and improved. The 312 felons were quietly added to the population rolls, allowing for even more tax income due to census-based state support. With the growing budget surplus, the school and fire department buildings were revamped and the old police station was replaced by a modern brick facility. Five years after the penitentiary received its first inmate, tax rates had plummeted to a thirty-five-year low. A high, white flagpole, the second-tallest structure in town after the church steeple, was erected next to the bandstand on the common. Town revenues grew and grew, allowing for a second snow-clearing truck for public roads, a two-man DPW staff and a generous retirement plan for Dickie Veal, a modernized water and septic system, and, by special vote, the construction of a municipal golf course and country club at the foot of the eastern hills.
But, for the most part, the town went on as before, only more prosperously. The prison in the northern out-lands turned out to be an excellent, if exceedingly private, neighbor.
“How are the beans?”
“Delicious,” Mother said.
“That’s the brown sugar.”
It was a conversation they had shared many times before, but Tom Duggan found comfort in the repetition. His mother’s house was a sanctuary, unassailable by time. He often thought of the fine mahogany he kept in storage over at Fred Burnglass’s mill, the other half of the order that he had placed for his father. And he had saved yards of the best ivory satin fabric over time. Knowing that she would be well attended at the end pleased Tom Duggan as much as it did his mother. It gratified him to know that she was a woman at peace.
A waxy paper bag from Mae’s Pantry lay atop the table, full of the usual Friday night treats: a plain cruller for her tea and a Bavarian crème donut for him. Tom Duggan smiled during a quiet moment, watching his mother’s dry, hardening eyes focused on the television as the lively theme music from Wheel of Fortune played.
The first day
Chapter 3
The story of Rebecca Loden’s divorce reached a wider audience than her recently published novel, the bestselling thriller Last Words, ever would. The upheaval had begun, in true literati fashion, with a cheeky blind item on “Page Six:”