"What's a Manitou?" she asked him, but didn't pay any attention to his answer-some story about an Indian who chased a deer for days up a mountain, but when he got to the top the deer turned on him and wasn't a deer anymore…
and bundled-up Ricky Hawthorne, driving to Wheat Row one morning (he now had his snow tires) saw a man wearing a pea jacket and a blue watch cap beating a child on the north side of the square. He slowed, and just had time to see the boy's bare feet kicking in the snow. For a moment he was so shocked that he could not think what to do; but he stopped, pulling the car over to the curb, and got out. "That's enough," he shouted, "that's quite enough," but the man and the child both turned to stare at him with such peculiar force that he put down his arm and got back in the car;
and the next night, sipping chamomile tea, looked out of an upstairs window and nearly dropped the cup, seeing a forlorn face staring in at him-gone in an instant when he jerked to one side. In the next instant, he realized that it was his own face;
and Peter Barnes and Jim Hardie come out of a country bar, and Jim, who is only half as drunk as Peter, says hey, shithead, I got a great idea, and laughs most of the way back to Milburn;
and a dark-haired woman sits facing the window in a dark room in the Archer Hotel and watches the snow fall and smiles to herself;
and at six-thirty in the evening an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson locks himself in his den and telephones a receptionist named Florence Quast and says, "No, I don't think I need to bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?"
and the woman in the hotel sits and smiles, and several more animals, part of the fun, are butchered: two heifers in Elmer Scales's barn (Elmer having fallen asleep with the shotgun across his lap) and one of the Dedham girls' horses.
2
That was how Freddy Robinson came in. He had written the policy for the two Dedham girls, the daughters of the late Colonel and the sisters of long-deceased Stringer Dedham. Nobody bothered about the Dedham girls much anymore: they lived out in their old house on Willow Mile Road, they had their horses but rarely sold one, they kept to themselves. The same age as most of the men in the Chowder Society, they had not aged as well. For years they had talked obsessionally about Stringer, who had not died immediately when the threshing machine pulled off his arms but had lain on the kitchen table, wrapped in three blankets during a sweltering August, babbling and passing out and then babbling again until the life ran out of him. People in Milburn got tired of hearing about what Stringer was trying to say while he died, especially since it didn't make much sense; even the Dedham girls couldn't properly explain it-what they wanted you to know was that Stringer had seen something, he was upset, he wasn't fool enough to get caught in the thresher if he was really himself, was he? And the girls seemed to blame Stringer's fiancée, Miss Galli, and for a little while eyebrows were raised at her; but then Miss Galli just upped and left town, and after that people lost interest in whatever the Dedham girls thought of her. Thirty years later not many people in town even remembered Stringer Dedham, who had been handsome and a gentleman and would have turned the horses into a business and not just a half-hearted hobby for a couple of aging women, and the Dedham girls got tired of their own obsession-after so many years, they weren't so sure what Stringer had been trying to say about Miss Galli-and decided that their horses were better friends than Milburn people. Twenty years after that they were still alive, but Nettie was paralyzed with a stroke and most young people in Milburn had never seen either of them.
Freddy Robinson had driven past their farm one day not long after he had moved to Milburn and what made him reverse and go up the drive was the name on the mailbox, Col. T. Dedham-he didn't know that Rea Dedham repainted her father's name on the box every two years. Even though Colonel Thomas Dedham had died of malaria in 1910, she was too superstitious to take it off. Rea explained it to him; and she was so pleased to have a spruce young man across the table from her that she bought three thousand dollars' worth of insurance. What she insured were her horses. She was thinking of Jim Hardie, but she didn't tell that to Freddy Robinson. Jim Hardie was a bad 'un, and he'd had a grudge against the girls ever since Rea shooed him away from the horse barn when he was a little boy: the way young Robinson explained it to her, a little insurance was just what she needed, in case Jim Hardie ever came back with a can of gasoline and a match.
At that time, Freddy was a new agent and his ambition was to become a member of the Million Dollar Roundtable; eight years later he was close to making it, but it no longer mattered to him-he knew that if he'd been in a bigger town he'd have had it long before. He had been to enough conferences and conventions and sales meetings to think that he knew most that there was to know about the insurance business; he knew how the business worked, and he knew just how to sell life and property insurance to a scared young farmer whose soul belonged to the bank and whose nest egg had just vanished into a new milking system- now a fellow like that really needed insurance. But eight years of living in Milburn had changed Freddy Robinson. He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned that it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed; and he had learned half-consciously to despise most of his fellow salesmen-in the company's phrase, the "Humdingers."
It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey's house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave-five Methuselahs padding out their time.
Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street-it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he'd ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, "I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall."