It

probably only another old Mainer could understand what he was saying if his talk were written down phonetically. Sandy Ives, the folklorist from the University of Maine whom I have mentioned previo usly in these wild pages, helped me to translate my audio tapes.
Claude Heroux was, according to Thoroughgood, ‘Un bat Canuck sonofa-whore widdin eye that’d roll adju like a mart’s in dem oonlight.’
(Translation: ‘One bad Canuck son of a whore with an eye that would roll at you like a mare’s in the moonlight.’)
Thoroughgood said that he — and everyone else who had worked with Heroux — believed the man was as sly as a chicken-stealing dog . . . which made his hatchet-wielding foray into the Silver Dollar all the more startling. It was not in character. Up until then, lumbermen in Derry had believed Heroux’s talents ran more to lighting fires in the woods.
The summer of ’05 was long and hot and there had been many fires in the woods. The biggest of them, which Heroux later admitted he set by simply putting a lighted candle in the middle of a pile of woodchips and kindling, happened in Haven’s Big Injun Woods. It burned twenty thousand acres of prune hardwood, and you could smell the smoke of it thirty-five miles away as the horse-drawn trollies breasted Up-Mile Hill in Derry.
In the spring of that year there had been some brief talk about unionizing. There were four lumbermen involved in organizing (not that there was much to organize; Maine workingmen were anti-union then and are, for the large part, anti-union now), and one of the four was Claude Heroux, who probably saw his union activities mostly as a chance to talk big and spend a lot of time drinking down on Baker and Exchange Streets. Heroux and the other three called themselves ‘organizers’; the lumber barons called them ‘ringleaders.’ A proclamation nailed to the cooksheds in lumber camps from Monroe to Haven Village to Sumner Plantation to Millinocket informed lumbermen that any man overheard talking union would be fired off the job immediately.
In May of that year there was a brief strike up near Trapham Notch, and although the strike was broken in short order, both by scabs and by ‘town constables’ (and that was rather peculiar, you understand, since there were nearly thirty ‘town constables’ swinging axe –
handles and creasing skulls, but before that day in May, there hadn’t been so much as a single constable in Trapham Notch — which had a population of 79 in the census of 1900 — so far as anyone knew), Heroux and his organizing friends considered it a great victory for their cause. Accordingly, they came down to Derry to get drunk and to do some more ‘organizing’ . . . or ‘ringleading,’ depending on whose side you favored. Whicheve r, it must have been dry work. They hit most of the bars in Hell’s Half-Acre, finishing up in The Sleepy Silver Dollar, arms around each other’s shoulders, pissing-down-your-leg drunk, alternating union songs with bathetic tunes like ‘My Mother’s Eyes Are Looking Down from Heaven’, although I myself think any mother looking down from there and seeing her son in such a state might well have been excused for turning away.
According to Egbert Thoroughgood, the only reason anyone could figure for Heroux bein g in the movement at all was Davey Hartwell. Hartwell was the chief ‘organizer’ or ‘ringleader,’ and Heroux was in love with him. Nor was he the only one; most of the men in the movement loved Hartwell deeply and passionately, with that proud love men save for those of their own sex who possess a magnetism that seems to approach divinity. ‘Davvey Ardwell wadda main who walk lak e ohn heffa de worl an haddim a daylah on de resp,’ Thoroughgood said.
(Translation: ‘Davey Hartwell was a man who walked like he owned half of the world and had him a deadlock on the rest.’)
‘He wadda great main inniz way; no use sayn he woint. He haddim foce , he haddim some big dinnity iniz walk anniz talk. Ainno use sayin he wadda good main. Just trine dellya he wadda great un.’
Heroux followed Hartwell into the organizing business the way he would have followed him if he had decided to go for a shipbuilder up in Brewer or down in Bath, or building the Seven Trestles over in Vermont, or trying to bring back the Pony Express out west, for that matter. Heroux was sly and he was mean, and I suppose that in a novel that would preclude any good qualities at all. But sometimes, when a man has spent a life being distrusted and distrustful, being a loner (or a Loser) both by choice and by reason of society’s opinions of him, he can find a friend or a lover and simply live for that person, the way a dog lives for its master. That’s the way it appeared to have been between Heroux and Hartwell.
Anyway, there were