I brought Hathaway up to date on the Newbury family, adding: "I'm on my way to Panther Falls to help my aunt on a real-estate deal. Seems she's in trouble with some local group"
"Ayuh? What kind of trouble?"
"I don't know. Sore sort of terror, I hear."
"Jeepers! What you need, Willy, is some good old Indian medicine man to put a hex on 'em. Like that guy on the Tonawanda Reservation, who came through here nineteen years ago. He'd fix your terrorists."
"Thanks," I said. "I'll bear it in mind."
Wilderfarm, which Phyllis Wilder was planning to sell, adjoined another tract in the patrimony of my greatgrandfather. This other lot contained Floreando, the Victorian-rustic mansion that Abraham Newbury built in the eighties. One passed this house on the way to the farm. After my great-aunt and great-uncle died, none of the heirs wanted the place, which needed a platoon of servitors to make it livable. Where, nowadays, would anyone but an oil billionaire retain a platoon of servitors?
First came a grand share-out of movables. A swarm of Abraham Newbury's descendants carried off furniture, pictures, chinaware, and so on in cars, trucks, and station wagons. Then, just before the War, the property was sold. It passed through several hands; but I had not kept up with its vicissitudes.
With a sudden attack of nostalgia, I turned in between the two big stone pillars that flanked the graveled driveway. I wanted one more look, to revive my childhood memories of rollicking parties, with swarms of cousins riding, swimming, picnicking, and horsing around. My cousin Hereward—the one who became a playwright—used to put us through abridgments of Shakespere's plays; I once played Hamlet's father's ghost.
The big old three-story stone house was still there; so was the iron deer on the lawn. A porch ran three-quarters of the way around the building, ending on one side in a shingled, porte-cochere. An upstairs porch, surmounted by a conical roof like those on castle towers, jutted out from the second story. If Floreando did not have a resident ghost, it ought to have had.
I took the branch of the driveway leading back to the highway, instead of continuing on the loop, which went around the house and under the porte-cochere. I stopped the car and sat, remembering.
The fountain on the spacious lawn played no more. The grass was so long that it needed a scythe or a reaper instead of a mower. Something else, too, had changed.
On the strip of lawn, between the porte-cochere and the trees, stood half a dozen shiny motorcycles in a row. These were no little one-lung gas-savers, but big, heavy, two and four-cylinder road bikes.
"You looking for somebody, mister?" said a voice.
A burly fellow in his twenties slouched up to my car. He put one hand of the roof and leaned forward, thrusting his face within a foot of mine. He had a mane of blond hair, hanging over his shoulders, chest, and back, and a full blond beard. He wore a suit of blue denim, with the pants tucked into heavy boots. These boots had half a dozen straps and buckles down the side, metal toes, and curved metal shin plates, rather like an ancient warrior's greaves.
"No," I said. "I just drove in to take a look. I used to play here when I was a kid."
"Oh," he said.
When the young man continued to stand beside the car, blocking my view to the right, I glanced the opposite way. The land across the Black River still rose, dim in the drizzle, in green tiers towards Tug Hill.
"Seen all you want to, mister?" the young man said at last.
"I think so," I said.
Having no intention of getting into a fight, I forbore to remark on his opacity. This youth was half my age and at least as big as I—and I am above average. He looked quite able to take a middle-aged banker apart.
"Who owns the place now?" I asked.
"The—the Lewis County Motorcycle Association."
"Oh." When the young man still stood, with beady blue eyes boring into me from under shaggy blond brows, I started up and drove back to the highway.
At the Farm, on the porch of the old white clapboard house, my aunt welcomed me with her usual extravagance. She hugged me to what they used to call her ample bosom. I said:
"Aunt Phyllis, you didn't use to have lightning rods on the farm, did you?"
"No, but so many places have been struck lately that I thought it wise."
"That's funny. I haven't heard of a change in the local climate."
"Neither have I," she wheezed. "I can't quote figures, but there have been a strange lot of local strikes. That's what set the Reverend Grier's house on fire. Some superstitious people think it was meant that way."
"How do you mean? Unless it's one of those climate-control experiments, I hadn't heard that anybody could govern the direction of lightning."
She shrugged, making her fat quiver. "I shouldn't say anything about anybody ..."
She broke off, listening. A snorelike, sawmillish noise was heard from the west. We looked in that direction, where the sun had begun to break through the rain clouds. A parade of motorcycle riders went past on the highway. A ray of the afternoon sun sparkled on their handlebars.
Aunt Phyllis jerked a thumb. "Especially them."
"The Lewis County Motorcycle Association?"
"Or the Huns, as they call themselves."
"What is all this? Are they staging a reign of terror?"
Aunt Phyllis made fluttery motions. "I oughtn't to talk about them—but so many queer things—you know, they say they make members of the gang do things that would turn a normal person's stomach, to show their manhood. And now, when somebody gets in their bad graces, his house gets hit by lightning or something. I called up the troopers to complain about one of their wild parties—they bring in their girls, and you can hear them clear to Boonville—so I got hit. It only knocked off a couple of shingles, praise be, but then I had the lightning rods put up. So now they just wheel in and out of the driveway, throwing beer cans and shouting vulgar things at me."
"Why doesn't somebody lower the boom of them?"
"It's hard to prove anything, because they all look alike in those helmets. Besides, their head man, young Nick, is the son of Jack Nicholson, the richest man in the county. Jack is getting a little senile now; but he's still a power in local politics, so nobody dares to touch his son. Jack's money bought Floreando."
"Trouble is," I said, "you've got a one-party system here. By the way, I drove in to Floreando to look it over."
"Run down, isn't it? But we have to expect it. Our family has come down in the world since Abraham's day. Only you, Willy, had the sense to get where the real money is, praise be."
"More by accident than design. I only hope I'm as able a banker as I might have been as an engineer." I told her about the Wagnerian character in blue denim.
"That would be Truman Vogel, Marshall Nicholson's second in command. Watch out for him. He kicked Bob Hawley with those iron boots and sent him to the hospital. They burned a cross on Doctor Rosen's lawn. They're talking about making this a white man's country."
I sighed. "The nuttier the program, the more nuts you'll find to join it. How about that sale of yours?"
I briefed Phyllis Wilder on the intricacies of mortgages, settlements, titles, agents, and lawyers. At the end, I promised to come back three or four days later, when the developer would have made a firm offer. Then I set out for Lake Algonquin, hoping to reach the Colton camp for dinner.
Passing through Panther Falls, I spied a name plate, saying "Isaiah Rosen, M.D.," on a lawn. I glanced at my car clock and drew up.
I had known Rosen slightly before the War, when I was an undergraduate and he a young physician who had taken over old Doc Prescott's practice. I remembered mentioning Rosen at one of the gatherings of cousins. My cousin Winthrop Colton—the one who was killed in the War— looked down his nose and said, with a kind of sniff: "Oh. You mean the Jew."