“Maybe I was helpful to him. Maybe he didn’t view me as no monster. I could see it in your friend’s face out there, and I could see it in yours when I opened the door. You tried to hide it with politeness and good manners, but I knew what you were thinking. And then you came in here, and you saw the pictures on my wall, and how clean and neat everything was. I wasn’t wallowing in my own filth. I wasn’t stinking, or dressed in filthy, tattered clothes. You think I want the outside of my place to look the way it does? You don’t think I want to paint it, to fix it up some? Well, I can’t. I do what I can around here, but there ain’t nobody going to help a man like me to keep his house in order. I paid for what they said I done, paid with years of my life, and they’re going to make me keep paying until I die, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of being ground down. You want monsters, you look elsewhere.”
“Was Daniel Clay a monster?”
The question seemed to shock him into silence, then, for a second time, I saw the intelligence at work behind the withered façade, that creeping, nasty, corrupted thing that had allowed him to do what he had done and to justify it to himself. I thought it might even have been what the children of Gilead had glimpsed as he moved upon them, his hand clasped across their mouths to stifle their cries.
“You got your suspicions of him, like the rest,” said Dubus. “You want me to tell you if they’re true, because if we shared something like that, if we both had the same tastes, then maybe I’d have known, or he’d have opened himself up to me. Well, if you think that, you’re a fool, Mr. Parker. You’re a fool, and someday you’ll die for your foolishness. I got no time to talk to foolish men. Why don’t you head off now? Drive on up the road there, because I know where you’re going. Could be you’ll find the answer in Gilead. That’s where Daniel Clay found the answer to his questions. Oh yes, he found what he was looking for up there, but he didn’t come back from that place. You best step carefully, or else you won’t come back neither. It gets inside your soul, old Gilead.”
He was smiling broadly now, the keeper of the truth of Gilead.
“Did you ever meet a man called Jim Poole, Mr. Dubus?”
He pantomimed deep thought.
“You know, I think I did. He was a fool, just like you.”
“He disappeared.”
“He got lost. Gilead took him.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I know it. Doesn’t matter where he is, or if he’s alive or dead, he’s a prisoner of Gilead. You set foot in Gilead, and you’re lost.” His gaze turned inward. His eyes stopped blinking. “They said that we brought evil to that place, but it was there already,” he said, and there was a touch of wonder to his voice. “I felt it as soon as I set foot there. Old Lumley picked a bad spot for his city of refuge. The ground was poisoned, and we were poisoned too. When we left, the forest, or something under it, took it back.”
He gave a small, sick laugh. “Too much time to myself,” he said. “Too much time to dwell on things.”
“What was the Project, Mr. Dubus?”
He laugh faded away. “The Project. The Hobby. The Game. They all mean the same thing.”
“The abuse of children.”
He shook his head. “You may call it that, but that’s because you don’t understand. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s what I try to explain to those who come here, but they don’t listen. They don’t want to know.”
“Did Daniel Clay listen?”
“He was different. He understood.”
“Understood how?”
But Dubus did not reply.
“Do you know where Daniel Clay is?” I asked.
Dubus leaned forward. “Who knows where dead men go?” he said. “You head north, and maybe you’ll find out. It’s time for my show.”
He hit the remote again, adjusting the volume as he did so, and the TV blared into life. He turned in his chair, no longer facing toward me. I let myself out.
And as we drove away, I saw the drapes move at Dubus’s window. A hand was raised in farewell, and I felt sure that, in his clean, neat house, the old man was laughing at me.
In the days that followed, the police would attempt to piece together the chain of events, to connect body to body, contacts to killings. During the final hours of his life, Dubus made two telephone calls, both to the same number. After his death, the cell phone would be found beside his body. He had hidden it under a loose plank beneath his bed, and to discourage any of those entrusted with monitoring him from discovering it, he kept a half-filled chamber pot above it, its stink enough to ensure that no fastidious parole officer would dare to venture there, although it might have struck a careful searcher that, in his otherwise pristine house, it was the only place where Dubus’s orderliness appeared to have lapsed. The phone was prepaid, and had been bought for cash at a bigbox store one month previously. It was not, the police guessed, the first time that Dubus had circumvented the restrictions on his telephone use in this way.
Dubus made the second-to-last call of his life minutes after Louis and I had departed, then presumably returned the phone to its hiding place and went back to watching his TV shows. Tick-tick-tick went the seconds, counting down to the moment when Mason Dubus would at last depart this earth and face the greater justice that waits for every man.
But that was all to come. For now, the daylight was gone. There was no moon. We drove on, speaking rarely. The music was low, the National on the car stereo singing of doves in the brain and hawks in the heart, and I thought of men with the heads of birds.
And in time we came to Jackman, and old Gilead got into our souls.
Five
Revenge proves its own excutioner
– JOHN FORD, THE BROKEN HEART
Chapter XXX
It is often said that there are two Maines. There is the Maine of the summer tourists, the Maine of lobster rolls and ice cream, of yachts and boat clubs, a Maine that occupies a neat strip of coastline about as far north as Bar Harbor, with high hopes and property prices to match, apart from those towns without the good looks or good fortune to attract the tourist dollar, or those that have seen their industries fade and die, marooning them in a lake of prosperity. The rest of Maine derisively refers to the inhabitants of this region as “flatlanders” or, in even darker moments, dismisses them entirely as residents of “ Northern Massachusetts.”
The other Maine is very different. It is a Maine primarily of forests, not ocean, dominated by “the County,” or Aroostook, which has always seemed a separate entity due to its sheer size, if nothing else. It is northern and inland, rural and conservative, and its heart is the Great North Woods.
But those woods had begun to change. The big paper companies, once the backbone of the economy, were slowly relinquishing their hold on the land, recognizing that there was more money in property than raising and cutting trees. Plum Creek, the nation’s largest paper company, which owned nearly five hundred thousand acres around Moosehead Lake, had earmarked thousands of those acres for a massive commercial development of RV parks, houses, rental cabins, and an industrial park. For those in the south, it represented the despoiling of the state’s greatest area of natural beauty; but for those in the other Maine, it meant jobs and money and an influx of new blood into dying communities.
The reality was that the forest canopy hid the fastest-growing poverty rate in the nation. Towns were shrinking, schools were getting smaller, and the bright young hopes of the future were leaving for York and Cumberland, for Boston and New York. When the mills shut down, high-paying jobs were replaced by minimum-wage labor. Tax revenues fell. Crime, domestic violence, and substance abuse increased. Long Pond, once bigger than Jackman, had virtually died with the closure of its mill. Up in Washington County, almost within sight of the summer playground of Bar Harbor, one in five people lived in poverty. In Somerset, where Jackman lay, it was one in six, and a steady stream of people made their way to Youth and Family Services in Skowhegan, seeking food and clothing. In some areas, there was a waiting list of years for a Section 8 voucher, at a time when rural rental assistance and funding for Section 8 was steadily falling.