It

hands in a warding-off gesture.
‘Please, Claude, I just got married last month!’ King screamed.
The axe came down, its head almost disappearing in King’s ample gut. Blood sprayed all the way up to the Dollar’s beamed roof. Eddie began to crawfish on the floor. Claude pulled
the axe out of him the way a good woodsman will pull his axe out of a softwood tree, kind of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clinging grip of the sappy wood. When it was free he slung it up over his head. He brought it down again and Eddie King stopped screaming. Claude Heroux wasn’t done with him, however; he began to chop King up like kindling-wood.
At the bar, conversation had turned to what sort of winter lay ahead. Veraon Stanchfield, a farmer from Palmyra, claimed it would be a mild one — fall rain uses up winter snow was his scripture. Alfie Naugler, who had a farm out on the Naugler Road in Derry (it is gone now; where Alfie Naugler once grew his peas and beans and beets, the Interstate extension now runs its 8.8 mile, six-lane course), begged to disagree. Alfie claimed the coming winter was going to be a jeezer. He had seen as many as eight rings on some of the mohair caterpillars, he said, an unheard-of number. Another man held out for ice; another for mud. The Buzzard of ’01 was duly recalled. Jonesy sent schooners of beer and bowls of hardcooked eggs skidding down the bar. Behind them the screaming went on and the blood flowed in rivers.
At this point in my questioning of Egbert Thoroughgood, I turned off my cassette recorder and asked him: ‘How did it happen? Are you saying you didn’t know it was going on, or that you knew but you let it go on, or just what?’
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 inMillinocket, 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