We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original value would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing less. Our town is dying. I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in the year of my retirement, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.
At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then our fertilizer plant went bust and the farm-implement dealership moved to the other side of the reservation. We were left with agriculture, but cheap transport via the interstate had pretty much knocked us out of the game already. Our highway had never been improved, so we began to steadily diminish, and as we did, I became the repository of many untold stories such as people will finally tell when they know there is no use in keeping secrets, or when they see that all that’s left of a place will one day reside in documents, and they want those to reflect the truth.
My friend Neve Harp is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator Frank Harp, who came after the first town-site party failed in its survey. Frank arrived with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Town Site Company, who were establishing a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit. These town sites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risk takers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers to every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.
Now, of course, the trains are gone and we are still here, stranded.
The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and had used up in naming their sites presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, North American mammals, and the names of their own children. To the east lay the neatly marked out town sites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. It was always called Pluto, but the official naming of the town did not occur until the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony, now, that Pluto is the coldest, loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable body in our solar system, but that was never intended to reflect upon our little municipality.
Dramas of great note have occurred in Pluto. In 1911, five members of a family — parents, a teenage girl, and an eight-and a four-year-old boy — were murdered. In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time “rough justice.” The town avoids all mention. My thoughts veer off, too. As it turned out, it was soon found that a neighbor boy apparently deranged with love over the daughter had vanished, and so for many years he remained the only suspect. Of that family, but one survived — a seven-month-old baby who slept through the violence in a crib pushed unobtrusively behind a bed.
In 1928, the owner of the National Bank of Pluto fled the country with most of the town’s money. He tried to travel to Brazil. His brother followed, persuaded him to return, and most of the money was restored. By visiting each customer personally, the brother persuaded everyone that their accounts were now safe and the bank survived. The owner killed himself. The brother took over as president. At the very apex of the town cemetery hill, there is a war memorial. In 1949, seventeen names were carved into a chunk of granite that was dedicated to the heroes of both world wars. One of the names, Tobek Hess, is that of the boy believed to have murdered the family. He went to Canada and enlisted early in the First World War. Notice of his death reached his older sister, Electa, who was married to a town council member and had not wanted to move away like the mother and father of the suspect did. Electa insisted that his name be added to the list of the honorable dead. But unknown community members chipped it out of the stone so that now a roughed spot is all that marks his name, and each Veterans Day only sixteen flags are set into the ground around that rock.
There were droughts and freak accidents and other crimes of passion, and there were good things that happened, too. The seven-month-old baby who survived the murders was adopted by the same Oric and Electa Hoag, who raised the baby in pampered love and, once she grew up, at great expense sent her away to an Eastern college, never expecting that she would return. When she did in nine years, she was a doctor. The first female doctor in the region. She set up her practice and restored the house she had inherited, where the murders had taken place — a small, charming, clapboard farmhouse that borders the cemetery on the western edge of town. Six hundred and eighty acres of farmland stretch from the house and barn. With the lease money from those acres, she was able to maintain a clinic and a nurse, and to keep her practice going, even when her patients could not always pay for her services.
One thing shamed her, only, one specific paralysis. She was known to turn Indians away as patients; it was thought that she was a bigoted person. In truth, she experienced an unsteady weakness in their presence. It seemed beyond her control, as was the other thing. She loved someone far too young for herself, inappropriate in that other way, too, but in his presence her feelings gripped her with the force of unquestionable fate. Or a mad lapse, she now believes.
At the same time those feelings were often the only part of her life that made sense. To try and break that bond, she married, but was widowed. She formed a final relationship with a university swimming coach whose job did not permit him to leave the campus for long. They had always intended that he would move to Pluto once he retired. But instead, he married a student and moved to Southern California, so he could have a year-round pool.
THE BROTHER OF the suicide banker was Murdo Harp. He was the son of the town’s surveyor and the father of my friend. Neve is now in her seventies like me; she and I take daily walks to keep our joints oiled. Neve Harp was married three times and kidnapped once — she survived all four events. She has returned to her maiden name and the house she inherited from her father. She is a tall woman, somewhat stooped for lack of calcium in her diet, although on my advice she now ingests plenty. She is one of those interested in restoring authenticity to town history. Both Neve and I have always had the habit of activity, and every day, no matter what the weather (up to blizzard conditions) our two-or three-mile walk takes us around the perimeter of Pluto.