The Tommyknockers Read online

  "What the fuck are you talking about?" Moran screamed.

  "I'm trying to tell you that the courts take a dim view of a man leaving his dog untied so it can bite a woman soliciting for a charitable organization like the American Cancer Society. Put another way, I'm trying to make you see that in court, they make you pay for acting like an asshole."

  Stunned silence from the other end of the line. Mr. Moran's muse had fled forever.

  Ruth paused briefly and fought off a wave of faintness as Daggett finished the disinfecting process and put a light sterile bandage on the wound. "If you took me to court, Mr. Moran, could my lawyer find someone to testify that your dog had bitten before?"

  Silence from the other end of the line.

  "Perhaps two someones?"

  More silence.

  "Perhaps three--"

  "Fuck you, you highbrow cunt," Moran said suddenly.

  "Well," Ruth said, "I can't say it's been pleasant talking with you, but listening to you air your views has certainly been instructive. A person sometimes believes she's seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful. I'm afraid I'll have to hang up now. I'd hoped to canvass six more houses today, but I'm afraid I'll have to put them off. I have to go up to Derry Home Hospital and get some stitches, I'm afraid."

  "I hope they fucking kill you," Moran said.

  "I understand. But do try to help the Cancer Society if you can. We need all the help we can get if we're going to stop cancer in our lifetime. Even ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, idiotic, misbegotten sons of bitches such as yourself can do their part."

  Mr. Moran did not sue her. A week later she received a Cancer Society pledge envelope from him, however. He had not stamped it, on purpose, she suspected, so it would be delivered postage-due. Inside was a note and a one-dollar bill with a large brown stain on it. I WIPED MY ASS ON THIS, YOU BITCH! the note cried triumphantly. It was written in the large straggling letters of a first-grader with motor-control problems. Ruth held the bill by the corner and put it in with the rest of the morning wash. When it came out (clean; among the many other things Mr. Moran did not seem to know was that shit washes off), she ironed it. Then it was not only clean, it was crisp--it might have come from the bank only yesterday. She put it in the canvas bank bag where she kept all her collection money. In her record book she noted: B. Moran, Amount Contributed: $1.00.

  3

  The Haven Town Library. The Cancer Society. The New England Conference of Small Towns. Ruth served Haven in all of them. She was also active in the Methodist church; it was a rare church supper at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland casserole or a bake-sale at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland pie or loaf of raisin bread. She had served on the school board and on the school textbook committee.

  People said they didn't know how she did it all. When asked directly, she would smile and say she believed busy hands were happy hands. With all of this going on in her life, you would have thought she'd have had no time for hobbies ... but she did in fact have two. She loved to read (she particularly enjoyed Bobbi Anderson's westerns; she had all of them, each signed) and she collected dolls.

  A psychiatrist would have equated Ruth's doll collection with her unfulfilled wish for children. Ruth, although she did not much hold with psychiatrists, would have agreed. Up to a point, anyway. Whatever the reason, they make me happy, she might have said if this psychiatric viewpoint had been brought to her attention. And I believe that happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.

  In the early Haven years she and Ralph shared a study upstairs. The house was big enough so each could have had one to him-or herself, but they liked to be together in the evenings. The big study had been two rooms before Ralph had knocked out the wall between, creating a space even bigger than the living room downstairs. Ralph had his coin and matchbook collections, a wall of bookshelves (all of Ralph's books were nonfiction, most military history), and an old rolltop desk which Ruth had refinished herself.

  For Ruth he made what both came to call "the schoolroom."

  About two years before the headaches began, Ralph saw that Ruth was fast running out of space for her dolls (now there was even a row of them atop her own desk, and they sometimes fell off when she typed). They sat on the stool in the corner, they dangled their small legs nonchalantly from the window-ledges, and still visitors usually had to hold three or four on their laps when they took a chair. She had a lot of visitors, too: Ruth was also a notary public, and there was always someone dropping by to have her notarize a bill of sale or frank a promissory note.

  So for Christmas that year, Ralph had constructed a dozen small pewlike benches for her dolls. Ruth was delighted. They reminded her of the one-room schoolhouse she had attended at Crosman Corner. She arranged them in neat rows and set the dolls upon them. Ever after, that part of Ruth's study was called the schoolroom.

  The following Christmas--his last, although at that point he felt fine, the brain tumor that would kill him no more than a microscopic dot in his head--Ralph gave her another four benches, three new dolls, and a blackboard in scale with the benches. It was all that was needed to complete the amiable schoolroom illusion.

  Written on the blackboard were the words "Dear Teacher, I love you truly--A SECRET ADMIRER.

  Adults were charmed by Ruth's schoolroom. Most children were equally charmed, and Ruth was always happy to see the kids--boys as well as girls--play with the dolls, although some were quite valuable and many of the old ones delicate. Some parents became very nervous when they realized their children were playing with a doll from pre-Communist China or one that had belonged to the daughter of Chief Justice John Marshall. Ruth was a kind woman; if she sensed that a child's enjoyment of her dolls was making a parent really uncomfortable, she would take out a Barbie and Ken she kept for such occasions. The children played with them, but listlessly, as if they realized the really good dolls had for some reason been put off-limits. If, however, Ruth sensed that parents were saying no because they felt it was somehow impolite for their kids to play with the grownup lady's toys, she would make it clear that she really didn't mind.

  "Ain't you afraid some kid'll break a bunch of them?" Mabel Noyes asked her once. Mabel's Junque-A-Torium was well-supplied with signs such as LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT IF YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT'S SOLD. Mabel knew. that the doll which had belonged to Justice Marshall's little girl was worth at least six hundred dollars--she had shown a picture of it to a dealer in rare dolls in Boston and he had told her four hundred, so Mabel guessed six as a fair price. Then there was a doll that had belonged to Anna Roosevelt ... a genuine Haitian voodoo doll ... God knew what else, sitting cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh with such common old things as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

  "Not a bit," Ruth responded. She found Mabel's attitude as puzzling as Mabel found hers. "If God means one of these dolls to be broken, He may break it Himself, or He may send a child to do it. But so far, no child has ever broken one. Oh, a few heads have rolled, and Joe Pell did something to the pull-ring in Mrs. Beasley's back, and now all she'll say is something like 'Do you want to have a shower?', but that's about all the damage that's been done."

  "Well, you'll pardon me if I still think it's an awfully big risk to take with such fragile, irreplaceable things," Mabel said. She sniffed. "Sometimes I believe the only thing I've ever learned in my whole life is that children break things."

  "Well, perhaps I've just been lucky. But they are careful with them, you know. Because they love them, I think." Ruth paused, frowning slightly. "Most of them do," she amended after a moment.

  That not all children wanted to play with "the kids in the schoolroom"--that some actually seemed to fear them--was a fact which puzzled and grieved her. Little Edwina Thurlow, for instance. Edwina had burst into a shrill spate of screams when her mother took her by the hand and actual
ly pulled her over to the dolls on their rows of benches, looking attentively at their blackboard. Mrs. Thurlow thought Ruth's dolls were just the dearest things, cunning as a cat a-running, sweet as a lick of cream; if there are other country cliches for "fascinating," Mrs. Thurlow had undoubtedly applied them to Ruth's dolls, and she was totally unable to credit her daughter's fear of them. She thought Edwina was "just being shy." Ruth, who had seen the flat unmistakable glitter of fear in the child's eyes, had been unable to dissuade the mother (who, Ruth thought, was a stupid, pigheaded woman) from almost physically pushing the child at the dolls.

  So Norma Thurlow had dragged little Edwina over to. the schoolroom and little Edwina's screams had been so loud they had brought Ralph all the way up from the cellar, where he had been caning chairs. It took twenty minutes to coax Edwina out of her hysterics, and of course she had to be brought downstairs, away from the dolls. Norma Thurlow was ill with embarrassment, and every time she threw a black look Edwina's way, her daughter was overcome again by hysterical weeping.

  Later that evening, Ruth went upstairs and looked sorrowfully at her schoolroom full of silent children (the "children" included such grandmotherly figures as Mrs. Beasley and Old Gammar Hood, which, when turned over and slightly rearranged, became the Big Bad Wolf), wondering how they could have scared Edwina so badly. Edwina herself certainly hadn't been able to explain; even the most gentle inquiry brought on fresh shrieks of terror.

  "You made that kid really unhappy," Ruth said at last, speaking softly to the dolls. "What did you do to her?"

  The dolls only looked back at her with their glass eyes, their shoebutton eyes, their sewn eyes.

  "And Hilly Brown wouldn't go near them the time his mother came over to have you notarize that bill of sale," Ralph said from behind her. She looked around, startled, then smiled at him.

  "Yes, Hilly too," she said. And there had been others. Not many, but enough to trouble her.

  "Come on," Ralph said, slipping an arm around her waist. "Give, you guys. Which one of youse mugs scared the little goil?"

  The dolls looked back silently.

  And for a moment ... just a moment ... Ruth felt a stir of fright uncoil in her stomach and chase up her spine, rattling vertebrae like a bony xylophone ... and then it was gone.

  "Don't worry about it, Ruthie," Ralph said, leaning closer. As always, the smell of him made her feel a bit giddy. He kissed her hard. Nor was his kiss the only thing hard about him at that moment.

  "Please," she said a little breathlessly, breaking the kiss. "Not in front of the children."

  He laughed and swept her into his arms. "How about in front of the collected works of Henry Steele Commager?"

  "Wonderful," she gasped, aware that she was already half ... no, three-quarters ... no, four-fifths ... out of her dress.

  He made love to her urgently, and with tremendous satisfaction on both their parts. All their parts. The brief chill was forgotten.

  But this year she remembered on the night of July 19th. The picture of Jesus had begun to speak to 'Becka Paulson on July 7th. On July 19th, Ruth McCausland's dolls. began to speak to her.

  4

  The townsfolk were surprised but pleased when, two years after Ralph McCausland's death in 1972, his widow ran for the position of Haven town constable. A young fellow named Mumphry ran against her. This fellow was foolish, most people agreed, but they also agreed that he probably couldn't help it; he was new in town and did not know how to behave. Those who discussed the matter at the Haven Lunch agreed Mumphry was more to be pitied than disliked. He ran as a partisan Democrat, and the gist of his platform seemed to be that when it came to a position such as constable, the elected official would have to arrest drunks, speeders, and hooligans; he might even be called upon to arrest a dangerous criminal from time to time and run him up to the county jail. Surely the citizens of Haven weren't going to elect a woman to do such a job, law degree or not, were they?

  They were and did. The vote was McCausland 407, Mumphry 9. Of his nine votes, it would be fair to assume he had gotten those of his wife, his brother, his twenty-three-year-old son, and himself. That left five unaccounted for. No one ever 'fessed up, but Ruth herself always had an idea that Mr. Moran out there on the south end of town had had four more friends than she would have credited him with. Three weeks after the election, Mumphry and his wife left Haven. His son, a nice-enough fellow named John, elected to stay, and although he was still, after fourteen years, often referred to as "the new fella," as in "That new fella, Mumphry, come by to get his hair cut this mawnin; member when his daddy ran against Ruth and got whipped s'bad?" And since then, Ruth had never been opposed.

  The townsfolk had rightly seen her candidacy as a public announcement that her period of mourning was over. One of the things (one among many) the unfortunate Mumphry had failed to understand was that the lopsided vote had been, in part, at least, Haven's way of crying: "Hooray, Ruthie! Welcome back!"

  Ralph's death had been sudden and shocking, and it came close--too very damn close--to killing the part of her which was outward and giving. That part softened and complimented the dominant side of her personality, she felt. The dominant side was smart, canny, logical, and--although she hated to admit this last, she knew it was true--sometimes uncharitable.

  She came to feel that if that outward and giving side of her nature were to lapse, it would be something like killing Ralph a second time. And so she came back to Haven. Came back to service.

  In a small town, even one such person can make a crucial difference in how things are and in what jargonmeisters are pleased to call "the quality of life"; that person can become, in fact, something very like the heart of the town. Ruth had been well on her way to becoming such a valuable person when her husband died. Two years later--after what seemed in retrospect to be a long, bleak season in hell--she had rediscovered that valuable person, as one might rediscover something moderately wonderful in a dark attic comer--a piece of carnival glass, or a bentwood rocking chair that was still serviceable. She held it up to the light, made sure it was unbroken, dusted it, polished it, and then returned it to her life. Running for town constable had only been the first step. She could not have said why this seemed so right, but it did--it seemed the perfect way to at the same time remember Ralph and get on with the work of being herself. She thought she would probably find the job both boring and unpleasant ... but that had also been true of canvassing for the Cancer Society and serving on the Textbook Selection Committee. Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore. And, she told herself, if she really didn't like it, there was no law to make her stand for reelection. She wanted to serve, not to martyr herself. If she hated it, she would let Mumphry or someone like him have a turn.