Thoroughgood's chin sank down to the top button of his food-spotted vest. His eyebrows drew together. He said nothing for a long, long time. Outside it was winter, and I could hear - very faintly - the yells and laughter of the children sliding down the big hill in McCarron Park. The silence in Thoroughgood's room, small, cramped, and medicinal-smelling, spun out so long that I was about to repeat my question, when he replied: 'We knew. But it didn't seem to matter. It was like politics, in a way. Ayuh, like that. Like town business. Best let people who understand politics take care of that and people who understand town business take care of that. Such things be best done if working men don't mix in.'
'Are you really talking about fate and just afraid to come out and say so?' I asked suddenly. The question was simply jerked out of me, and I certainly did not expect Thoroughgood, who was old and slow and unlettered, to answer it . . . but he did, with no surprise at all.
'Ayuh,' he said. 'Mayhap I am.'
While the men at the bar went on talking about the weather, Claude Heroux went on cutting. Stugley Grenier had finally managed to clear his clutch-pistol. The axe was descending for another chop at Eddie King, who was by then in pieces. The bullet Grenier fired struck the head of the axe and richocheted off with a spark and a whine.
El Katook got to his feet and started backing away. He was still holding the deck he had been dealing from; cards were fluttering off the bottom and onto the floor. Claude came after him. El Katook held out his hands. Stugley Grenier got off another round, which didn't come within ten feet of Heroux.
'Stop, Claude,' El Katook said. Thoroughgood said it appeared like Katook was trying to smile. 'I wasn't with them. I didn't mix in at all.'
Heroux only growled.
'I was in Millinocket,' El Katook said, his voice starting to rise toward a scream. 'I was in Millinocket, I swear it on my mother's name! Ask anybody if you don't believe meeeee . . . '
Claude raised the dripping axe, and El Katook sprayed the rest of the cards into his face. The axe came down, whistling. El Katook ducked. The axe-head buried itself in the planking that formed the Silver Dollar's back wall. El Katook tried to run. Claude hauled the axe out of the wall and poked it between his ankles. El Katook went sprawling. Stugley Grenier shot at Heroux again, this time having a bit more luck. He had been aiming at the crazed lumberman's head; the bullet struck home in the fleshy part of Heroux's thigh.
Meantime, El Katook was crawling busily toward the door with his hair hanging in his face. Heroux swung the axe again, snarling and gibbering, and a moment later Katook's severed head was rolling across the sawdust-strewn floor, the tongue popped bizarrely out between the teeth. It rolled to a stop by the booted foot of a lumberman named Varney, who had spent most of the day in the Dollar and who, by then, was so exquisitely slopped that he didn't know if he was on land or at sea. He kicked the head away without looking down to see what it was, and hollered for Jonesy to run him down another beer.
El Katook crawled another three feet, blood spraying from his neck in a high-tension jet, before he realized he was dead and collapsed. That left Stugley. Heroux turned on him, but Stugley had run into the outhouse and locked the door.
Heroux chopped his way in, hollering and blabbering and raving, slobber falling from bis jaws. When he got in Stugley was gone, although the cold, leaky little room was windowless. Heroux stood there for a moment, head lowered, powerful arms slimed and splattered with blood, and then, with a roar, he flipped up the lid of the three-holer. He was just in time to see Stugley's boots disappearing under the ragged board skirting of the outhouse wall. Stugley Grenier ran screaming down Exchange Street in the rain, beshitted from top to toe, crying that he was being murdered. He survived the cutting party in the Silver Dollar - he was the only one who did - but after three months of listening to jokes about his method of escape, he quitted the Derry area forever.
Heroux stepped out of the toilet and stood in front of it like a bull after a charge, head down, his axe held in front of him. He was puffing and blowing and covered with gore from head to foot.
'Shut the door, Claude, that shitpot stinks to high heaven,' Thoroughgood said. Claude dropped his axe on the floor and did as he had been asked. He walked over to the card-strewn table where his victims had been sitting, kicking one of Eddie King's severed legs out of his way. Then he simply sat down and put his head in his arms. The drinking and conversation at the bar went on. Five minutes later more men began to pile in, three or four sheriffs deputies among them (the one in charge was Lal Machen's father, and when he saw the mess he had a heart attack and had to be taken away to Dr Shratt's office). Claude Heroux was led away. He was docile when they took him, more asleep than awake.
That night the bars all up and down Exchange and Baker Streets boomed and hollered with news of the slaughter. A righteous drunken sort of fury began to build up, and when the bars closed better than seventy men headed downtown toward the jail and the court-house. They had torches and lanterns. Sonic were carrying guns, some had axes, some had peavies.
The County Sheriff wasn't due from Bangor until the noon stage the next day, so he wasn't there, and Goose Machen was laid up in Dr Shratt's infirmary with his heart attack. The two deputies who were sitting in the office playing cribbage heard the mob coming and got out of there fast. The drunks broke in and dragged Claude Heroux out of his cell. He didn't protest much; he seemed dazed, vacant.
They carried him on their shoulders like a football hero; down to Canal Street they carried him, and there they lynched him from an old elm that overhung the Canal. 'He was so far gone that he didn't kick but twice,' Egbert Thoroughgood said. It was, so far as the town records show, the only lynching to ever take place in this part of Maine. And almost needless to say, it was not reported in the Derry News. Many of those who had gone on drinking unconcernedly while Heroux went about his business in the Silver Dollar were in the necktie party that strung him up. By midnight their mood had changed.
I asked Thoroughgood my final question: had he seen anyone he didn't know during that day's violent activities? Someone who struck him as strange, out of place, funny, even clownish? Someone who would have been drinking at the bar that afternoon, someone who had maybe turned into one of the rabble-rousers that night as the drinking went on and the talk turned to lynching?
'Mayhap there was,' Thoroughgood replied. He was tired by then, drooping, ready for his afternoon nap. 'It were a long time ago, mister. Long and long.'
'But you remember something,' I said.
'I remember thinkin that there must be a county fair up Bangor way,' Thoroughgood said. 'I was having a beer in the Bloody Bucket that night. The Bucket was about six doors from the Silver Dollar. There was a fella in there . . . comical sort of fella . . . doing flips and rollovers . . . jugglin glasses . . . tricks . . . put four dimes on his forrid and they'd stay right there . . . comical, you know . . . '
His bony chin had sunk to his chest again. He was going to sleep right in front of me. Spittle began to bubble at the corners of his mouth, which had as many tucks and wrinkles as a lady's change-purse.
'Seen him a few now' n thens since,' Thoroughgood said. 'Figure maybe he had such a good time that night . . . that he decided to stick around.'
'Yeah. He's been around a long time,' I said.
His only response was a weak snore. Thoroughgood had gone to sleep in his chair by the window, with his medicines and nostrums lined up beside him on the sill, soldiers of old age at muster. I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona. Pennywise had been there, guiding them down the path toward another gaudy sacrifice - just one more in Derry's long history of gaudy sacrifices. That one, in September of 1905, ushered in a heightened period of terror that would include the Easter-tide explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks the following year.