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been ordained by his flock. He was not a pre-millenarian, one of those who
believe that chaos on earth is an indication of the imminence of the Second
Coming and that the faithful should therefore do nothing to stand in its way.
Throughout his preaching, Faulkner had shown an acute awareness of earthly
affairs and encouraged his followers to stand against divorce, homosexuality,
liberalism, and just about anything else the sixties were likely to throw up.
In this he showed the influence of the early Protestant thinker John Knox, but
Faulkner was also a student of Calvin. He was a believer in predestination:
God had chosen those who were saved before they were even born, and it was
therefore impossible for people to save themselves, no matter what good deeds
they did on earth. Faith alone led to salvation; in this case, faith in the
Reverend Faulkner, which was seen to be a natural consequence of faith in God.
If you followed Faulkner, you were one of the saved. If you rejected him, then
you were one of the damned. It all seemed pretty straightforward.
He adhered to the Augustinian view, popular among some fundamentalists, that
God intended his followers to build a City on the Hill, a community
dedicated to his worship and greater glory. Eagle Lake became the site of his
great project: a town of only six hundred souls that had never recovered from
the exodus provoked by World War II, when those who came back from the war
opted to remain in the cities instead of returning to the small communities in
the north; a place with one or two decent roads and no electricity in most of
the houses that didn't come from private generators; a community where the
meat store and dry goods store had closed in the fifties; where the town's
main employer, the Eagle Lake Lumber Mill, which manufactured hardwood bowling
pins, had gone bankrupt in 1956 after only five years in operation, only to
stagger on in various guises until finally closing forever in 1977; a hamlet
of mostly French Catholics, who regarded the newcomers as an oddity and left
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them to their own devices, grateful for whatever small sums they spent on
seeds and supplies. This was the place Faulkner chose, and this was the place
in which his people died.
And if it seems strange that twenty people could just arrive somewhere in 1963
and be gone less than a year later, never to be seen again, then it was worth
remembering that this was a big state, with one million or so people scattered
over its 33,000 square miles, most of it forest. Whole New England towns had
been swallowed up by the woods, simply ceasing to exist. They were once places
with streets and houses, mills and schools, where men and women worked,
worshiped, and were buried, but they were now gone, and the only signs that
they had ever existed were the remnants of old stone walls and unusual
patterns of tree growth along the lines of what were formerly roads.
Communities came and went in this part of the world; it was the way of things.
There was a strangeness to this state that was sometimes forgotten, a product
of its history and the wars fought upon the land, of the woods and their
elemental nature, of the sea and the strangers it had washed up on its shores.
There were cemeteries with only one date on each headstone in communities
founded by Gypsies, who had never officially been born yet had died as surely
as the rest. There were small graves set apart from family plots, where
illegitimate children lay, the manner of their passing never questioned too
deeply. And there were empty graves, the stones above them monuments to the
lost, to those who had drowned at sea or gone astray in the woods and whose
bones now lay beneath sand and water, under earth and snow, in places that
would never be marked by men.
My fingers smelled musty from turning the yellowed clippings, and I found
myself rubbing my hands on my trousers in an attempt to rid myself of the
odor. Faulkner's world didn't sound like any that I wanted to live in, I
thought as I returned the file to the librarian. It was a world in which
salvation was taken out of our hands, in which there was no possibility of
atonement; a world peopled by the ranks of the damned, from whom the handful
to be saved stood aloof. And if they were damned, then they didn't matter to
anyone; whatever happened to them, however awful, was no more or less than
they deserved.
As I headed back to my house, a UPS truck shadowed me from the highway and
pulled up behind me as I entered the drive. The deliveryman handed me a
special delivery parcel from the lawyer Arthur Franklin, while casting a wary
glance at the blackened mailbox.
You got a grudge against the mailman? he asked.
Junk mail, I explained.
He nodded without looking at me as I signed for the package. It's a bitch,
he agreed, before hurrying into his truck and driving quickly onto the road.
Arthur Franklin's package contained a videotape. I went back to the house and
put the tape in my VCR. After a few seconds some cheesy easy-listening music
began to play and the words Crushem Productions presents appeared on the
screen, followed by the title, A Bug's Death, and a director's credit for one
Rarvey Hagle. Let the Orange County prosecutor's office chew on that little
conundrum for a while.
For the next thirty minutes I watched as women in various stages of undress
squashed an assortment of spiders, roaches, mantids, and small rodents beneath
their high-heeled shoes. In most cases, the bugs and mice seemed to have been
glued or stapled to a board and they struggled a lot before they died. I
fast-forwarded through the rest, then ejected the tape and considered burning
it. Instead I decided to give it right back to Arthur Franklin when I met him,
preferably by jamming it into his mouth, but I still couldn't understand why
Al Z had put Franklin and his client in touch with me in the first place,
unless he thought my sex life might be getting a little staid.
I was still wondering while I made a pot of coffee, poured a cup, and took it
outside to drink at the tree stump that my grandfather, years before, had
converted into a table by adding a cross section of an oak to it. I had an
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hour or so to kill before I was due to meet with Franklin and I found that
sitting at the table, where my grandfather and I used to sit together,
sometimes helped me to relax and think. The Portland Press Herald and The New
York Times lay beside me, the pages gently rustling in the breeze.
My grandfather's hands had been steady when he made this rude table, planing
the oak until it was perfectly flat, then adding a coat of wood protector to
it so that it shined in the sun. Later, those hands were not so still and he
had trouble writing. His memory began to fail him. A sheriff's deputy, the son
of one of his old comrades on the force, brought him back to the house one
evening after he found him wandering down by the Scarborough cemetery on Old
County Road, searching fruitlessly for the grave of his wife, so I hired a
nurse for him.
He was still strong in body; each morning, he would do pushups and bench
presses. Sometimes he would do laps around the yard, running gently but
consistently until the back of his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He would be a
little more lucid for a time after that, the nurse would tell us, before his
brain clouded once again and the cells continued to blink out of existence
like the lights of a great city as the long night draws on. More than my own
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