As it turned out, we both walked around another four years before I heard the story of what happened at the Black Spot that night, and by then my father's walking days were all done. He told me from the hospital bed where he lay, full of dope, dozing in and out of reality as the cancer worked away inside of his intestines, eating him up.

February 26th, 1985

I got reading over what I had written last in this notebook and surprised myself by bursting into tears over my father, who has now been dead for twenty-three years. I can remember my grief for him — it lasted for almost two years. Then when I graduated from high school in 1965 and my mother looked at me and said, 'How proud your father would have been!,' we cried in each other's arms and I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn't it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which

may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death?

He left the army in 1937 with a disability pension. By that year, my father's army had become a good deal more warlike; anyone with half an eye, he told me once, could see by then that soon all the guns would be coming out of storage again. He had risen to the rank of sergeant in the interim, and he had lost most of his left foot when a new recruit who was so scared he was almost shitting peach-pits pulled the pin on a hand grenade and then dropped it instead of throwing it. It rolled over to my father and exploded with a sound that was, he said, like a cough in the middle of the night.

A lot of the ordnance those long-ago soldiers had to train with was either defective or had sat so long in almost forgotten supply depots that it was impotent. They had bullets that wouldn't fire and rifles that sometimes exploded in their hands when the bullets did fire. The navy had torpedoes that usually didn't go where they were aimed and didn't explode when they did. The Army Air Corps and the Navy Air Arm had planes whose wings fell off if they landed hard, and at Pensacola in 1939, I have read, a supply officer discovered a whole fleet of government trucks that wouldn't run because cockroaches had eaten the rubber hoses and the fanbelts.

So my father's life was saved (including, of course, the part of him that became Your Ob'dt Servant Michael Hanlon) by a combination of bureaucratic porkbarrelling folderol and defective equipment. The grenade only half-exploded and he just lost part of one foot instead of everything from the breastbone on down.

Because of the disability money he was able to marry my mother a year earlier than he had planned. They didn't come to Derry at once; they moved to Houston, where they did war work until 1945. My father was a foreman in a factory that made bomb-casings. My mother was a Rosie the Riveter. But as he told me that night when I was eleven, the thought of Derry 'never escaped his mind.' And now I wonder if that blind thing might not have been at work even then, — drawing nun back so I could take my place in that circle in the Barrens that August evening. If the wheels of the universe are in true, then good always compensates for evil — but good can be awful as well.

My father had a subscription to the Derry News. He kept his eye on the ads announcing land for sale. They had saved up a good bit of money. At last he saw a farm for sale that looked like a good proposition . . . on paper, at least. The two of them rode up from Texas on a Trailways bus, looked at it, and bought it the same day. The First Merchants of Penobscot County issued my father a ten-year mortgage, and they settled down.

'We had some problems at first,' my father said another time. 'There were people who didn't want Negroes in the neighborhood. We knew it was going to be that way — I hadn't forgotten about the Black Spot — and we just hunkered down to wait it out. Kids would go by and throw rocks or beer cans. I must have replaced twenty windows that first year. And some of them weren't just kids, either. One day when we got up, there was a swastika painted on the side of the chickenhouse and all the chickens were dead. Someone had poisoned their feed. Those were the last chickens I ever tried to keep.

'But the County Sheriff — there wasn't any police chief in those days, Derry wasn't quite big enough for such a thing — got to work on the matter and he worked hard. That's what I mean, Mikey, when I say there is good here as well as bad. It didn't make any difference to that man Sullivan that rny skin was brown and my hair was kinky. He come out half a dozen times, he talked to people, and finally he found out who done it. And who do you think it was? I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count!'

'I don't know,' I said.

My father laughed until tears spouted out of his eyes. He took a big white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away. 'Why, it was Butch Bowers, that's who! The father of the kid you say is the biggest bully at your school. The father's a turd and the son's a little fart.'

There are kids at school who say Henry's father is crazy,' I told him. I think I was in the fourth grade at that time — far enough along to have had my can righteously kicked by Henry Bowers more than once, anyway . . . and now that I think about it, most of the pejorative terms for 'black' or 'Negro' I've ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four.

'Well, I'll tell you,' he said, 'the idea that Butch Bowers is crazy might not be far wrong. People said he was never right after he come back from the Pacific. He was in the Marines over there. Anyway, the Sheriff took him into custody and Butch was hollering that it was a put-up job and they were all just a bunch of nigger-lovers. Oh, he was gonna sue everybody. I guess he had a list that would have stretched from here to Witcham Street. I doubt if he had a single pair of underdrawers that was whole in the seat, but he was going to sue me, Sheriff Sullivan, the Town of Derry, the County of Penobscot, and God alone knows who else.

'As to what happened next . . . well, I can't swear it's true, but this is how I heard it from Dewey Conroy. Dewey said th e Sheriff went in to see Butch at the jail up in Bangor. And Sheriff Sullivan says, "It's time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening, Butch. That black guy, he don't want to press charges. He don't want to send you to Shawshank, he just wants the worth of his chickens. He figures two hundred dollars would do her."

'Butch tells the Sheriff he can put his two hundred dollars where the sun don't shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch: "They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after you've been workin there about two years, your tongue goes as green as a lime Popsicle. Now you pick. Two years peelin lime or two hundred dollars. What do you think?"

'"No jury in Maine will convict me," Butch says, "not for killing a nigger's chickens."

'"I know that," Sullivan says.

'"Then what the Christ are we chinnin about?" Butch asts him.

'"You better wake up, Butch. They won't put you away for the chickens, but they will put you away for the swastiker you painted on the door after you killed em."

'Well, Dewey said Butch's mouth just kind of dropped open, and Sullivan went away to let him think about it. About three days later Butch told his brother, the one that froze to death couple of years after while out hunting drunk, to sell his new Mercury, which Butch had bought with his muster-out pay and was mighty sweet on. So I got my two hundred dollars and Butch swore he was going to burn me out. He went around telling all his friends that. So I caught up with him one afternoon. He'd bought an old pre-war Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pick-up. I cut him off out on Witcham Street by the trainyards and got out with my Winchester rifle.