Hamilton Stark

Chapter 5. Back and Fill: In Which the Hero’s Ditch, Having Got Dug and the Pipe’s Having Been Laid Therein, Gets Filled; Including a Brief Digression Concerning the Demon Asmodeus, along with Certain Other Digressions of Great and Small Interest

AN ANONYMOUS CALL TO THE CHIEF of the two-man Barnstead Police Department, the large, barrel-chested, crew-cut man named Chub Blount, who happened to be Hamilton Stark’s brother-in-law, brought the chief, as he preferred to be called, out to Hamilton’s house early one morning in February. The call had come in to the chief’s home around one A.M., waking the burly man from his peaceful, nearly dreamless sleep. His wife Jody, Hamilton Stark’s sister, punched her husband’s side with one of her sharp elbows and woke him.

“Chub! Answer the phone!” she ordered crossly.

“Whut, whut, what?” His hand clumsily groped for the telephone in the darkness above his face. Then he realized that the instrument was beside him on the night table, and at last he stopped its shrill ringing by picking up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Barnstead Police?” It was a man’s voice, hurried, thin, slightly overarticulated.

“Yeah. This’s the chief.”

“Good. There may have been a murder in your town. I thought you should know.”

“Whut the hell… Is this Howie? Who the hell is this?” The chief sat up in bed and looked into the mouthpiece in the dark, as if trying to see who was talking into it at the other end of the line.

“Who is it, Chub?” Jody impatiently snapped.

“Never mind who this is. I just thought you might like to know that Hamilton Stark may have been killed this afternoon. You ought to look into it, that’s all.”

“What kinda crap you handin’ me, pal? Hey, is this Howie? C’mon, Howie, is it you?”

“What on earth is going on, Chub? Is Howie drunk?”

“This is an anonymous phone call.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe you, pal. It’s Howie Leeke, I know your voice, Howie, and I don’t think it’s funny, I gotta get up in the fuckin’ morning and I don’t like getting pulled outa bed in the middle of the fuckin’ night to play games with a drunk.”

“No, seriously, this is an anonymous phone call.”

“Hang up, Chub.”

“Howie, look, whaddaya doin’, pullin’ my chain like this in the middle of the fuckin’ night?”

“You don’t seem to understand. I’m anonymous. I’m not Howie Leeke or anybody else, either. I’m anonymous.”

“Chub, hang up on him.”

“Bullshit you’re anonymous. It’s Howie.”

“No, really. I’m dead serious. I think Hamilton Stark has been murdered.”

“Chub, will you hang that thing up!”

“Hey, Howie, ol’ pal, where’re you calling from? You calling me from a bar? You over the Bonnie Aire?”

“Why? Why do you want to know that? I’m anonymous.”

“Jesus, Chub, it’s one in the morning!”

“Shaddup, Jody. Howie…”

“Seriously, why do you want to know where I am? Are you going to try to trace the call? Go ahead, I’m calling from a public booth. It’s only a waste of your time, though, because I’m calling to give you an important message about Howie, I mean Hamilton Stark…”

“Yeah, sure. Now listen up, Howie, whyn’t you tell me where’s that booth you’re callin’ from, you know, so’s I can come on over an’ have a drink with ya.” Covering the mouth-piece with his hand, he said to his wife, “I’ll get the bastard to tell me where he’s calling from, see, and I’ll send Calvin down there to pick him up for Drunk and Disorderly or Driving while Intoxicated. Teach that gabby bastard a lesson…”

“Listen here, now, this really is an important message. I think you ought to drive out to Hamilton Stork’s place and look for him.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s all I got to do is drive around lookin’ for that silly asshole. Now, c’mon, Howie, where ya callin’ from?

I’ll come on down an’ having a drink with ya. How’s that?”

“I’m not Howie Leeke. I’m trying to remain anonymous, and you’re not making it very easy for me, Mr. Blount.”

“Okay, Howie, ol’ pal, thanks for the tip about Ham,” he drawled, reluctantly giving up the attempt to entrap his friend. “But one of these fine nights I’m goin’ to catch you drivin’ drunk or D and D, ol’ buddy, and when I do, I’m goin’ to hang your fuckin’ ass from a fuckin’ tree.”

“No—”

The chief cut him off and hung up the phone. He flopped down into the warmth of his bed, bumping against his wife’s bony knees and elbow as he squirmed back into the gully he had been sleeping in earlier, and quickly, with no further words, the two of them fell asleep.

But the next morning after breakfast the chief remembered the call, and saying to himself, What the hell, I haven’t got anything better to do, he decided to drive out to his brother-in-law’s house. He hadn’t seen the man in several months, so they’d probably be able to think of things to say to each other, and what if the bastard had been murdered? It wouldn’t be a shock to anyone — there were plenty of people in the world, hell, in the whole state of New Hampshire, who would be happy to see Hamilton Stark dead. Hung up on a tree with flies clotted around his mouth and eyes. Down a well, green in three feet of water, his body swollen like a jelly doughnut and held there with concrete blocks. Tied to a tree, with KILL THE PIG carved into his chest, his boots filled and overflowing with the blood from the carving job they’d done on him.

It wouldn’t be any great loss, as they say, but even so, it would be murder, Murder One, right here in Barnstead, New Hampshire, where there hasn’t been a genuine killing for several generations — not since the one over in Gilmanton, the one that woman wrote the filthy book about, Peyton Place. They should have burned that damned book. Maybe someone would write a book about this one, too. Killings up here are unusual. A few accidental shootings, hunting accidents, suicides, that sort of thing, sure, but no real live killings, he thought as he drove out of town, along the river, and turned left at the Congregational church, the only church in town, onto the dirt road that led to the narrow end of the Suncook Valley, where, in the shade of Blue Job Mountain, Hamilton Stark lived.

It was a cold, dark gray day, with the sour sky sagging down almost to the treetops. Along the sides of the narrow, winding road, the tin trailers and tarpaper-covered shacks seemed frozen into the several feet of old, leathery, late-winter snow that surrounded them, the vehicles outside and the leaning, dilapidated outbuildings scattered around them. Behind the dwellings and vehicles lay the woods, the dark, tangled third-growth pines and spruce — twisted, erratically spaced trees and groves laced together by the ruins of ancient stone walls and low, scrubby brush, a forest for squirrels and porcupines, creatures that run close to the ground or high above it.

As he drove, the chief squared his Stetson on his head, checked himself in the rear-view mirror, and hated his brother-in-law. He had not forgiven him. Although of course he told everyone that he had forgiven him long ago, which usually made the listener shake his head with surprise and admiration, for many of the things that Hamilton had done to the chief — not so much to the chief himself as to his wife Jody and her mother Alma Stark — were generally thought to be unforgivable. The chief usually explained the generosity of his spirit by saying, “Look, hey, the bastard’s just not right in the head. I mean, what the hell, you don’t think the bastard’s happy, do you?” And no, no one thought for a minute that Hamilton Stark was happy, which proved the chief’s assertion that the bastard wasn’t right in the head. The chief liked being right, especially when he could prove it logically.

Two miles beyond the church there was a large cleared field on the right and, at the far end of the field, a driveway that led from the road along the edge of the field to a white-painted metal gate and, a little ways farther, the house. The chief turned off the road onto the driveway and in a few seconds pulled up at the gate. Easing his bulk out of the car, he walked around to the gate and unlatched it, stopping for a few seconds to study the piles of trash, most of them half-buried in snow that lay in the field in front of the house. Shaking his heavy head with disbelieving disgust, he squeezed back into his car and drove through the gate, following the driveway to the front of the house, where he came to a stop behind Hamilton’s pale green Chrysler limousine.

Shutting off the engine of his own car, a Plymouth station wagon with the standard blue bubble on the roof, the chief slid out, zipped up his storm coat, slowly approached Hamilton’s car from the driver’s side, and immediately saw the three bulletholes in the window, which caused him to unzip his storm coat and draw his revolver from the holster on his left hip. It was a smoothly executed series of moves. For a large man the chief was fast and balanced, and he practiced all his moves diligently in his free time. Poised on the balls of his feet, his head laid back and slightly to one side, and holding his revolver with his left hand, he switched off the safety and reached for the door handle with his right hand, slowly, as if he were trying to catch a butterfly without damaging its wings. He whipped open the door, shoving the snout of his gun down into the space where the driver’s head ordinarily would have been situated.

Nothing. Empty. No blood on the seat. Slugs probably in the upholstery someplace — send the lab boys out to look for them later. Course, the slugs might be buried inside Ham’s body. Hit the bastard clean and fast, got the body out of the car right away so they could wipe it down, dumped the body in the trunk of the hit car, then took off to where they could drop it into some open water. The nearest open water would be the Atlantic Ocean, the chief figured. Kittery, Maine. This was going to be a tough case to crack alone, he thought grimly. He was going to need some help.

Jamming his gun into the holster, he walked back to his own car and sat down in the driver’s seat. He slammed the door behind him and started the motor and the heater, after which he slid a few inches to the right of the steering wheel to a position on the seat from which he could operate the radio comfortably. He stretched out his legs, plucked the microphone from the hook, and barked into its face. “Hawk! Come in, Hawk! This’s Eagle! Come in, Hawk. This is Eagle, come in, Hawk!”

After a few seconds of answering static, a high-pitched voice cried, “Hawk here, Eagle! Come in, Eagle!”

“That you, Calvin?”

“Sure is, Eagle. What’s up?”

The chief scratched at the nest of curly blond hairs where his throat met his chest. “I’m over to the Stark place, where Ham Stark lives? You know the place?”

“Sure. The place up on Blue Job Road, used t’ be his mother’s place—”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, listen,” the chief interrupted. “I think there’s been some kinda trouble up here. Looks to me like there’s been a little shooting.” Suddenly, as if the bank of clouds had parted and the sun had come out, the chief became frightened. Terrified. His head was located in his car precisely where he supposed Hamilton’s head to have been when he had been shot. Whoever had shot Hamilton could as easily shoot his brother-in-law. The chief flopped down on the seat, his right cheek pressed flat against the cool upholstery, and went on talking into the microphone. “Look, Calvin, get over here right away, will you? Where the hell are you now, for God’s sake?” he puffed. He was lying on his side, facing the glove compartment, and it was difficult for him to breathe.

“I’m over on Route Twenty-eight, on my way to that guy Yanoff’s, you know the guy, takin’ his goddamned dog home to him. Herb Kernisch says he seen it runnin’ deer last night and he’ll shoot it next time it’s out loose, you know Herb…”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. How long will it take you to get here?” The chief was terrified. He’d walked into a trap. Shit, shit, shit. Those were rifle slugs for sure. Hit men from Boston. Probably Cosa Nostra. Mafia. Italian. They’d as soon kill him as pick a flower, and they could do it, too, the way he’d set himself up. They could pick him off from fifty yards, and all he had was his damned service revolver.

“Oh… I dunno, twenty minutes, I guess, if I come straight over an’ don’t take this mutt back to Yanoff’s. I ain’t there yet.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, hit your fuckin’ siren an’ get the hell over here!” he cried into the mike.

“You okay, Chief?”

“Yes. Yeah, sure. Just get the hell over here, will you, Calvin?” The chief was sweating, and his eyes were darting wildly back and forth across the narrow slab of leaden sky that he could see from his position on the seat. It was everything he could see — a rectangle of low, dark sky — but he expected that any second even that would go black on him, as three soft-nosed slugs penetrated his large, soft body.

“Ten-four, Eagle.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ten-four.” He looked for his hat, the white Stetson he’d bought last spring at the police chiefs’ convention in Dallas. It was on the floor in front of him, getting dirty. He retrieved it and started brushing it clean with his hand. That goddamned Ham Stark, he fumed, as he brushed his hat with his thick fingertips. Getting me into this. Why does he always have to … whatever it is he does. I ought to just get the hell out of here, drive off and forget the whole thing. Not even mention it to anyone. Not even Jody. Except that Calvin’s already on his way over here. He knows. Shit. Never should have called him. Jesus Christ, why don’t things go right for me? Shit, shit, shit. Who the hell made that phone call last night, anyhow? That’s who probably did it, got me into this in the first place. He studied his hat. It was white again, sparkling white, without even a bruise of dirt from the floor.

Taking a long-handled plastic windshield scraper from under the seat and sticking the wide end into his hat, the chief slowly raised his hat above him, hoping that, if they shot at it, they would miss. But no one shot. Silence. He held the hat in what he assumed was plain view for a minute, joggled it temptingly, and then slowly sat up beneath it, took the hat off the scraper, and squared it on his head, checking himself out in the rear-view mirror. He tried a little smile, the one that started with a sneer and ended there too, the smile he used to answer backtalking out-of-state speeders. He’d started practicing it when state troopers caught Ethel Kennedy, the murdered senator’s wife, speeding on Route 93 on her way home from a ski weekend at Waterville Valley. The smile looked good. Tough, smart, mean. A smile that said he’d seen it all, seen it all twice last week.

How the hell had Hamilton got himself mixed up with Mafia hit men? the chief wondered as he settled back into his seat to wait for Calvin. Ham was a plumber, for Christ’s sake, a pipefitter. Not a bookie or something. Maybe he was mixed up with a woman of some kind. Maybe this time the bastard went too far, got himself involved with a woman who belonged to someone who’d kill him for it. Serve the bastard right. Serve him right if some tough little wop in a three-piece suit kicked him in the nuts three or four times and then shot him in the face. Some women a man has to steer clear of. The chief thought of his own wife, Jody, her long, angular body, her grim mouth and flat voice. He studied the house in front of him, and as he hoped, forgot his wife. It was a nice place, he observed, a handsome white house, square, well kept, large but not too large, situated well off the road, with the mountain behind it and the valley in front. No wonder Ham was so attached to the place, he thought.

The house was a two-hundred-year-old, traditionally proportioned Cape, with an ell at one end that was connected to a small barn Hamilton had converted into a garage. Behind the house was another, larger barn, several outbuildings, and then the woods. Behind the woods was the mountain. The main house and the small barn had been built by Josiah Stark, and the place had remained in the hands of the Starks until now, which of course was a mightily significant fact about the place. But not to the chief. He could see only that it was a solid-looking, attractive and well-kept place, and that alone made it desirable. Oh, he knew that Hamilton had been born and raised in the house, and he imagined that that, too, probably made it desirable, at least to Hamilton. I can see why the bastard wanted the place so bad, he conceded. But I’ll never know why he couldn’t wait for his mother to die first. Never.

Though the chief had been a visitor to the house for decades, though he had courted and eventually married a woman who had been born and raised there, and though afterward for years he had visited his in-laws there, nevertheless, whenever he saw or thought of the house, he remembered only one event, a single night, the night Hamilton had taken possession of the house. Here is how it happened.

Or rather, here is the version of what happened that was generally accepted as the truth, accepted by all but one of the participants in the events of that monstrous evening, accepted as well by the townspeople of Barnstead, and accepted by hundreds of others who were told the story only because it could be said to have a certain universal “human interest,” or because it was an example of horrid behavior, say, or of long suffering, or of a bizarre turnabout.

At any rate, almost any native of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the librarian, perhaps, or the town clerk, visiting a cousin named Mattie in Daytona Beach, Florida, might look up from her knitting and say, “Well, if you want to talk about your bizarre turnabouts, here’s one for the books.” Or, “If you think that’s one of your long-suffering parents, let me tell you about Alma Stark…” Or, “Now, that’s horrid, all right, but I can tell you something so horrid, Mattie, that it’ll make you never want to have a son.” And this is what she’d say:

“Up to Blue Job Road, oh, maybe a mile, mile and a half from town, you’ve got the Stark place, which has been in the family since it was built, probably some two hundred years, though of course it’s lots different now, different from the way it was when it got built, because the Starks have always been hardworking and mostly in the building trades, the men, so they’ve fixed the place up quite a bit over the years — not so much the land, I mean, which is over five hundred acres, at least that’s what they always got taxed for, ‘in excess of five hundred acres’—no, they didn’t so much fix up the land as the house and barns, putting on a dormer here, a new porch there, sort of constantly renovating was how the Starks have always taken care of their place, so by the time poor Alma and Horace Stark were up in their seventies and their children were all grown and married — there were three, the son Ham and the daughters Jody and Sarah — well, by that time the place was all modernized, you know, with electricity and aluminum storm windows and a new oil furnace, and the plumbing was just about the best you could imagine, because Horace was a pipefitter, like his father, who died pretty young in a sad way, but that’s another story — anyhow, if there was one thing the Stark house was going to have, it was good plumbing. Oh, I guess Horace’d got to be about seventy or maybe seventy-one, and Alma was about the same age, when he got his first heart attack and had to retire from the pipefitting and stay in the house all the time, though of course he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stay in the house all the time, he was outside working on that place as soon’s he could walk again, no matter he couldn’t move half his face and couldn’t even talk right anymore, though he never talked much anyhow. But now he couldn’t even remember what you’d told him five minutes ago. Anyhow, all that man knew about life was work, work, work, and if he couldn’t keep on working, he was dead, so he kept on working, putting in the garden, shingling the barn roof, building fences, cutting firewood — just about anything needed doing around the place, and lots that didn’t need doing too. Poor Alma. She couldn’t keep that man in and down the way the doctor had told her to, ‘You keep that man in and down,’ he told her, and Horace’d never been the easiest man in town to live with anyhow, kind of cross all the time, not very talkative and then grouchy when he did talk, but after he got the heart attack he got even crosser, scowled all the time, even when he didn’t know you were looking at him. And because he couldn’t talk right anymore, he stopped talking completely, left it up to Alma to do the talking for both of them, wouldn’t even answer the telephone, would stand right there beside it and let it ring and ring and ring. He’d look at it like it was a design on the wallpaper or something. And the cost. Well, I know that heart attack of his cost them a pile of money, because Alma let me know with a few well-chosen words, she said, ‘It’s twice as expensive to be sick when you’re old,’ she told me one day, and I could have just cried for her, the poor thing. So proud, you know. But at least they owned the house clear and free, I told her, trying to comfort her, and at that time they did own the house clear and free, no mortgage, no debts of any kind, the way I heard it, so all they had to do was make do from month to month on Social Security, and I guess for a while that’s what they did. Then Horace went and got his second heart attack, this time one of your real strokes, and he had to have surgery this time, so when he come out of it he couldn’t even leave his chair without help from Alma, and all he could do now was sit in the living room in his rocker or his armchair, he liked to switch around, and watch the wrestling on television, a nice twenty-one-inch color set his son Ham, who was living over in Concord with his new wife, had bought him for Christmas. Ham was nice about that, the color TV, because he really didn’t have to, they already had a black and white, but when it come to the question of how they were going to pay all the doctor and hospital bills, Ham told his mother, who was now the only one capable of making a decision, he told her to borrow the five thousand dollars from the bank and take out a mortgage on the house to guarantee it. Now naturally there was no way that poor old couple was going to be able to make the payments on a loan that size, so the son, a pipefitter like his father, but young, of course, and making good money working heavy construction over to Concord, he offered to make the payments for them, but so’s he’d feel covered — that’s how he put it, so’s 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-bedroom 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…”

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.)

Rochelle knew that Asmodeus, or Ashmedai, though imported from Persian mythology into Palestine, showed up rather frequently in Jewish literature, where his original function was to cause frustration in marriage, usually by provoking rage and violence. There was a crucial link with lust, however, a particularly non-Jewish and non-Christian (although perhaps not non-Protestant) link between rage and lust. Rochelle’s adolescent studies had shown her that the Jewish Asmodeus had probably originally been the Persian “fiend of the wounding spear,” sometimes Aeshma Daeva, from the root aesh, meaning “to rush forward” or “to be violently self-impelled.” He was a storm spirit, a personification of rage, one who took deep pleasure from filling men’s hearts with anger and desire for revenge. In contrast to the modern world, where anger is regarded as a thing of great value, as something not to be suppressed but rather as a “feeling” to be experienced as a type of ecstasy, in the ancient world anger was regarded as something pre-eminently evil and nonhuman and, therefore, dependent upon interference from outside forces for its visible expression.

According to Jewish stories, Asmodeus was the son of a mortal woman, Naamah, either by one of the fallen angels or possibly by Adam himself before the creation of Eve. In the testament of Solomon, written between A.D. 100 and 400, he is reported to have remarked, “I was born of angel’s seed by a daughter of man.” Described there as “furious and shouting,” he not only prevents intercourse between husband and wife, but also encourages adultery. “My business is to plot against the newly married,” he boasts, “so that they may not know one another… I transport men into fits of madness and desire when they have wives of their own, so that they leave them and go off by night and day to others that belong to other men with the result that they commit sin…” A peculiar function: to frustrate desire so that he may arouse it elsewhere. In another account, the book of Tobit, written around 250 B.C., Tobias marries Sarah, who has had seven husbands before, all of whom were strangled by Asmodeus to prevent them from lying with her. On the advice of the archangel Raphael, Tobias cooks the heart and liver of a fish, and the smoke repels the demon and drives him off.*

For Rochelle, the peculiar sequence of the demon’s evolution — from a demon of rage to one who infected men with uncontrollable lust to one who meddled with the mainsprings of marriage — was sufficient to qualify him as the one responsible for her father’s equally peculiar combination of what she had no choice but to regard as social and moral inadequacies. Of course, to connect Asmodeus to the life of her father, Rochelle was also forced to ignore or to explain away as “corrupted sources” and “mistranslations” long chains of bizarre imagery and anachronistic, minor attributes of the demon. All she cared about was the fact that he was the only figure who combined rage with lust and loosed these emotions onto the institution of marriage. To do this, she had to overlook, for instance, the efficacy of the smoky fish liver. She also had to sidestep all ancient attempts to describe the demon physically, because his attributes, if she visualized them, would have made her suspect herself of having drifted into “imaginative zeal,” which she abhorred in others as much as in herself. How, for instance, could she have pictured her father as being possessed by a figure who was said to have the enormous feet of a cock (a bird, one might note, well known for its indiscriminate sexual vigor)? How could she have accommodated herself to those several Jewish tales that have Asmodeus as the king of the demons and residing on top of a mountain from which he regularly journeys to heaven where he takes part in the learned discussions that supposedly go on there? How to make peace with the tale that has the master magician, King Solomon, force Asmodeus and the other devils to construct the Temple at Jerusalem,* after which Asmodeus takes his nasty revenge by seizing the ring in which all Solomon’s magic power resides and, tossing the ring to the bottom of the sea, sends Solomon into exile and reigns in his place until, miraculously, Solomon recovers the ring from a fish’s belly and proceeds to imprison Asmodeus and all the other devils in a large jar? And how to honor the source called the Lemegeton, a highly respected magic textbook, which, providing a long list of demons, asserts that when Asmodeus shows himself to human eyes he rides a dragon, carries a long spear, and has three heads, that of a ram, a bull and a handsome youth, asserting further that only a bare-headed magician may summon the demon, whereupon the demon will respond by making the magician invisible and will lead him to great treasure? How indeed? And what is meant by “bare-headed”?

Nevertheless, despite such pathetic imaginings, Rochelle successfully managed to incorporate the demon into her vision of her father and, for a single, early version of her novel, her vision of Alvin Stock as well. Happily, she saw the irrationality and the personal psychological use such a vision implied, and because she is as brave a woman as she is intelligent, she purged the novel of all references to demons and possession, and though she did not in that way simplify the character of her father, she did succeed in seeing him more clearly, more realistically, one might say.

On the other hand, perhaps by coming to regard her father in such a critically analytical light, she lost something, too — a depth, the shuddering, vibratory quality that a proper description of his character required, especially if the reader were to understand the intensity with which Hamilton Stark (Alvin Stock) could simultaneously attract and repel people who, for whatever reason, came close to him. One is left, with regard to Hamilton Stark, with the two-dimensional vision of the chief of the Barnstead Police Department, Chub Blount, who, unable to imagine (or if he imagined them, to care about) the qualities of life associated with the Stark house simply because it had been owned and lived in by the Stark family for over two hundred years, and not mentioning those qualities to himself, thus saw the house in what may be called a “realistic” light. To continue the analogy, one would be forced to deny oneself any vision of the house that explained how a man could commit irrational acts of loyalty to a mere wooden structure. One would not be capable of understanding why a man, who from adolescence had resolutely refused to pray for anything, suddenly had found himself on his knees one night next to his bed in his modest ranch house in Concord, steadfastly praying for ownership of the same house his ancestors had owned. No, if the reader relied on the chief’s view of the relationship between Hamilton and the house his ancestors had owned, he would see a merely selfish, aggressive man using the occasion of a deed and his old and sick parents’ desperation to work out his hostilities and gratify his greedy whim to own the house outright and exclusively.

Knowing about the patina of time and family that in Hamilton’s mind had surely been laid over the image of the house — an inescapable aura, when it’s available, for any imaginative American of our time — knowing that, however, the sensitive reader may add to the chief’s opaque view of the dispossession the vision of a man obsessed and terrified, a man determined to attach himself to the one thing in his life that seemed capable of connecting him to the thread of time that potentially runs through the fabric of every family. In most cases, especially in this country and among the members of all classes but the most privileged, this thread is broken at every turn. Given geographic relocation, eager divorce, homes for the aged, distant, private schools for the young, housing developments for the middle-aged and insistence by all generations that the adult life of one generation will not be repeated as a life again, it should be no wonder when, having endured all that discontinuity, a man who sees a possibility to attach himself to his familial past by means of a two-hundred-year-old farm and house will grow desperate and impatient beyond reason. He will conceive plans and schemes, will see potential heirs (such as his two younger sisters) as threats to his very life, will even see his own mother as a likely breaker of the thread, and will see his father’s death as a piece of great good luck. Who then is to say this is mere selfishness and aggression? For a man such as Hamilton Stark, emotionally severed from his parents and sisters since childhood (and perhaps, because of the conventions, since birth), a man unable to attach himself to the life and history of a wife or even, at the deepest level, of a friend or of his only child, a daughter he can barely remember and for whom he is unable to create any loyalty except in terms of conventional guilt, which he rejects as both inappropriate and insufficiently personal — for a man such as this, it seems natural that an old frame house and seven hundred acres of rocky, overgrown hillside would become, for all practical purposes, mystical emblems, badges which, if his, would connect him to the rest of the universe.

Obviously, while the chief sat in his patrol car in front of this very farmhouse and let his mind drift across the unpleasant details of his near-violent (or possibly violent, in fact) encounter with his brother-in-law, even though the encounter had taken place some eleven years ago, nothing like sympathy or understanding organized his thoughts. They merely drifted across the surface of the remembered event, and if a question were raised about any possible deeper motivation lying behind Hamilton’s outrageous behavior, he answered it immediately, saying to the questioner with complete confidence that what happened is what happened, and what happened is the kind of man Hamilton Stark is, a guy who’s mad at the world and wants as much of it for himself as he can get, no matter who gets in the way, no matter if it’s his mother or his sisters or anybody else. That’s how the chief would probably put it. In fact, that is pretty much how he did put it when, one afternoon, he was asked about that particular evening by Rochelle.

Poor Rochelle. Even though she loved her father, she still did not understand the potentially mystical aspect of real estate in New England (the reader may recall that Rochelle was raised in central Florida), and thus she was unable to understand what storms of emotion Hamilton had been responding to when he had dispossessed his own mother. Naturally, this created a sharp conflict for her. No matter how diligently she analyzed the details of that evening, no matter how many interviews she conducted, visits to the house, careful reconstructions of the minutes of the evening and the months that preceded it, she was unable to get around the conclusion that her father had behaved in a wholly reprehensible way. And as a result of her examination, she (unlike the chief, who had no need of, nor interest in, neutralizing all emotions but love for the man) experienced considerable pain. If the chief were to read the final version of her novel, which describes in agonizingly honest detail her pain in this regard, he probably would agree fully with her description of the events that prompted her painful judgment of her father, but he would not understand why that judgment, once she had made it, gave her any trouble. As far as he was concerned, when you love somebody who turns out to be a bastard, you stop loving him. And not without a certain relief, probably.

Some of this was going through the chief’s mind that gray February morning while he sat in his car outside the Stark house and waited for his assistant to arrive. I.e., When you love somebody who turns out to be a bastard… Yes, even for the chief, it was difficult to look at the house and not drop into examinations and speculations concerning the kinds of love and hate these Starks bore for each other and for themselves. They were no noisier than any other family in town, nor were they unconventional by way of education, travel or economics, and except for Hamilton, they were as careful to avoid eccentricity or drawing attention to themselves as practically everyone else in town. All this made it difficult to explain the intensity of their feelings — not so much the fact of the intensity as the fact that people were allowed to see that those feelings existed at all. It was unusual to know that much about a person or a family, especially when the family was as reticent and close-mouthed, as ordinary, as the Starks.

Suddenly the chief’s ruminations were intruded upon by the whining voice of his assistant, Calvin Clark. “Hey, Chief!” the man cried through the closed window of the chief’s car. “What’s up?”

The chief squeezed his large belly past the steering wheel and got out. “I got an anonymous tip last night that Ham Stark might’ve been shot,” he said, “so I came up here this morning to check it out. I figured it was just Howie Leeke calling me drunk from the Bonnie Aire or someplace — you know Howie, how he does — or I would’ve come out here last night.”

“Sure, sure, Chief.” Calvin was gulping air, a habit that made it almost impossible for him to lie successfully. Whenever he became even slightly insincere, he found himself unable to keep from gulping while he talked, as if he were about to be beaten for his insincerity. Luckily for him, or perhaps merely as a result of his habit, he rarely lied outright. Politeness, however, often made it necessary for him not actually to lie but rather to speak with little or no sincerity, and since he was a polite man, he frequently found himself gasping like a fish out of water.

“Yeah. So anyhow, I come out here this morning. Just to check it out, you know?”

“Sure, Chief, sure.” Gulping.

“And I found these,” the chief said dramatically, pointing with a thick finger at the trio of bulletholes in the window of Hamilton’s Chrysler.

“Holy shit!” Calvin gasped appropriately. “What are they?”

“Bulletholes. Thirty-thirty, I’d say. Maybe bigger.”

“Yeah, sure, sure. Where’s Ham? He seen these yet? Boy will he be pissed. You know Ham.”

“No, you …Jesus!” The chief stomped back to his car and got into it.

“Where you going, Chief?” Calvin called.

“Nowhere,” he answered, almost whispering it. Then, with authority, “Listen, take a look in the house for Ham. I’ll poke around out here and in the garage.”

“Right, Chief,” Calvin said, promptly jogging toward the front door of the house. It was locked, and in a second he had disappeared around the corner of the house, checking the side door at the porch. The chief, sweating, restarted the engine of his car. After a few moments, Calvin appeared at the front of the house again, spreading his empty hands to show that he’d been unable to find Hamilton.

“Not out here either!” the chief hollered out the car window. “It’s probably just some kind of crazy… Let’s head back to town, you can check by here late this afternoon!”

Calvin walked slowly up to the chief’s open window. “You don’t think somebody shot him, do you? I mean, somebody hadda shoot them holes in his car,” Calvin reasoned.

“The bastard probably did it himself. You know Ham.”

“Yeah. Then who was it called you last night?”

“I dunno. Probably Ham. It still could’ve been Howie, but I kinda doubt it now. Probably Ham made the call, just to get me pissed.”

“Yeah,” Calvin gulped. He was shivering from the cold. The gray sky had seemed to tighten and lift a bit, and flecks of snow were drifting slowly down.

“I’ll see you later, back at the office,” the chief announced. He cranked up the window, dropped his car into reverse, and backing around Calvin’s car, entered the turnaround behind it, spun the wheel hard to the left, and fled down the long driveway to the road.

By the time he reached the center of town it was snowing hard, as if blankets of the soft flakes were being tossed against the ground. Boy, snow in February is depressing, the chief thought, and then he decided to go home for the rest of the day. He figured, with the snow and all, he’d be out on emergency calls most of the night, so he’d better catch some sleep while he could.