Lights Out Read online

  We never thought outsiders would make it so far inland.

  First there were maybe six of them.

  Within a week or three, we could count at least fourteen on Main Street on a morning so bright you had to shield your eyes from the sun to make out their crowd hanging around the butcher shop.

  Tom Raleigh, who worked the register, told us the foreigners always asked for cuts of meat that nobody ever ate.

  “You mean like marrow bones?” Ruby asked.

  “Heads,” I guessed. “Or hooves.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not even sure these parts got names. We usually throw that stuff out.”

  I looked at my wife and she at me, with a crooked, slight smile breaking the calm of her face.

  In the pause, Tom added, “it’s a little disturbing.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the end of the world,” I said. “I mean, these people seem okay, don’t they?”

  “Sure,” Tom said as he weighed and wrapped up the pork loin we’d have for supper. “I got nothing against them. Nothing at all. I just don’t think it’s normal. But what do I know? I mean, to each his own.”

  “I’m going to be up all night wondering what those cuts are,” Ruby said on the way out as I held the door open. “It’s not like they’re cannibals or anything.”

  “He made it up,” I said when we got to our car.

  “Now, why would Tom do that?”

  I opened the car door for her; she slid in. Once I’d gotten in on the other side, I said, “He’s like everyone else. He’s got to put his two cents in, have a story about them, spread a little dirt. This town’s too damn small.”

  After that, other strange and unsavory Smith stories began cropping up. Lois Abbott, who ran the library, said Smiths had been stealing books. Paul Lockwood said he caught some of their men peeping through windows at night when most people were asleep. May Peters, at the coffee shop, swore on her father’s grave that they went through the trash early in the morning “like a gang of raccoons.” Even Helen Cooper — usually less gossipy than most — told my wife she didn’t like the way the Smith men eyed teenage girls in town, “like they’re sizing up which ones to kidnap as brides.”

  The Smiths, it was said, held strange celebrations out in the autumn woods accompanied by ghostly chanting and drumbeats “like in Tarzan.” Two Smith women were seen bare breasted down at the stream, washing sheets against the rocks.

  And then some idiot spread the rumor that some Smiths had been caught out at the cemetery “doing voodoo.”

  You could attach any cockamamie story you wanted to the name Smith, and nine times out of ten, it would stick.

  We called our foreigners the Smiths because nobody could pronounce their names. “Smith” became a joke that we’d never in a million years mention to their faces. Little Smith, Smith Junior, Uncle Smith, Big Smith, Old Smith, Pretty Smith, Ancient Smith — that kind of thing.

  Most of their clan grabbed the lowest rung mill jobs. They never complained these were beneath them or that they were made for better things. They took them happily, and by all accounts, turned the mills around.

  We’d see Smiths wandering around on weekends or sometimes early Monday morning. They’d arrive to town in packs of four and five to pick up sundries and fabric or when a big brown trunk arrived from the old country to our post office.

  The Smiths didn’t drive cars. They used ox-drawn wagons and bicycles. The older ones walked into town clutching hand carved staffs like Biblical shepherds. The elder Smith ladies carried groceries on wooden crossbars at their shoulders or in baskets balanced perfectly on their heads. They’d slowly trudge back — barefoot in summer — to their rented rundown farm, a two mile walk on a blistery afternoon.

  You couldn’t even offer them rides — I tried once or twice but just got nods and dismissals from the Smith crowd, along with that chattering sound they made when trying to be polite.

  At first, we were all proper with the Smiths and respected their customs. You could say — despite the gossip about them — that there existed peace in the land.

  But then there was that incident at the cider mill.

  3. The Battle of Dunwoody Farm

  The rowdier boys in the village claimed a Smith started it.

  The boys who raised the flag and ran up the hill mainly came from the Crocker family, six tawny-haired scoundrels between the ages of 12 and 17, all of them destined for prisons in some distant future, all of them getting away with their crimes (stealing a few sawbucks from a till, spying on a local Venus in her bath, egg-fights along Main Street, a window shot through, the murdered parakeet incident, the famous joyride in a jalopy ending in a crash and tumble, whisperings of girls-in-trouble leaving town under mysterious circumstances).

  There were others, too, the sheep-boys who followed the bad ones. These little disciples were as guilty; and yes, I counted my own son in that. Caleb had turned twelve at the time with just enough rambunctiousness in his blood to do the wrong thing.

  The boys of the village first threw hard, green apples like grenades; then the warm pies sitting out along cooling shelves; finally rocks and marbles and anything that could gain velocity between fist and back-of-head.

  The Smith boys — most of them under the age of fifteen — fought back, of course, but with less dumb luck.

  A skirmish ensued, war declared. What began at the cider mill ended with a chase out to the Dunwoody farm. Cows fled their pen, chickens flew, windows smashed, a threshold trespassed.

  A flaming arrow made it into a barn window and someone — I suspected Paul Lockwood’s kid — dumped manure in the well.

  After the whuppings — and there were several — we all made our sons apologize.

  It was quite a spectacle: twenty boys of varying shape and size, prodded forward by their fathers in a kind of Death March through town, out along the little bridge over the stream that went to the Dunwoody place.

  Their heads hung low, they scratched at imagined itches, some hands clasped in droopy prayer or slow hand-wringing, some (mainly those Crocker boys) cast sidelong glances to the fields beyond the stone walls as if plotting escape routes.

  My boy Caleb bowed his head and said he was sorry to every single Smith, though he only marginally participated in the fracas and received not a single belt to his behind. Still, I gave him a good talking to and there’d be no privileges for a good long while.

  He had, I told him, better damn straighten up before he ended up like a Crocker.

  The kids cleaned up their mess. An offering of cash for repairs. A calf given as a gift. A fence mended. We — of the Selectmen — got out and repaired the barn.

  The Smiths themselves quickly offered the olive branch, spoke slowly and formally in a language none of us understood but I guessed was their way of telling us to put it in the past and leave them alone and please — in their eyes a sliver of fear — don’t ever bother us again.

  A cloud came over our town that day and remained.

  We felt ashamed of our sons’ behaviors. We didn’t like the idea that we’d become the bad neighbors. We preferred to think of foreigners as a kind of benign tumor to be watched for signs of malignancy.

  We were not arrogant people. We liked to live in peace. We didn’t nurture disagreements, though they existed. We didn’t want to get involved in conflicts with any foreigners. We’d heard that some towns created battle lines with their own versions of the Smiths and sometimes this ended in terrible consequence for everybody.

  Turns out, in their exuberant and uncalled-for attack, our boys managed to desecrate some sacred cow or other.

  Young Smith — one of the eldest of their boys — explained the whole thing to me in halting English without actually naming our sacrilege.

  A blasphemy had occurred. Our boys had no idea what they’d really done. Young Smith told us that their women stopped eating because of it. Two middle-aged Smiths had to leave at once — at great expense — for the journey to the motherlan
d to offer propitiation. Offerings were being burnt even as we were informed of this.

  We had crossed into the territory of taboo and Young Smith warned us that the older men of his tribe wept with this injustice, a strong-hearted young man lost his left hand in a mill accident and a young wife miscarried twins with misshapen limbs, among other signs of tribal apocalypse.

  “This house is no longer holy,” Young Smith told us. “It is a place of darkness to us now. We must avoid a war.”

  A war?

  Foreigners! Invaders! War!

  All the things we didn’t want in our little off-the-beaten-track borough.

  Later, at our town meeting, we scratched our heads and came up with possibilities of which line had been crossed. Was it the hay that burned in the barn? The well? The escaped cow? Someone even suggested it might be that apples were sacred to whatever hundred gods and goddesses the heathens worshipped.

  Or the pies?

  We never figured it out, but nobody wanted to start a war — “their word not ours” — with the Smiths because “nobody knows where that’ll end.”

  The lowest of our minds — and we had more than our share — imagined machetes, spears, little knives, or shrunken heads all in a row.

  The Smiths moved a little further out of town.

  For their new tribal home, the Smiths grabbed the big house at the edge of the marsh.

  Malvern House — enormous and colonial and crumbly — was somewhat hidden from an untrammeled dirt road behind high stone walls and jagged trees. The marsh stench was impossible to avoid. Who else would choose to live there but outsiders?

  My friend, Cormac Danielson, their landlord and a man who owned several dilapidated properties in the deep woods, took some heat over this rental, a few nasty looks by the harsher folk in the village, but most of us didn’t care. Few ever traveled that road, no one hunted at the marshes anymore, it was a dead end off an out-of-the-way half-past a nowhere. The place came surprisingly cheap and held a good twelve bedrooms — perfect for the Smiths — and not a single indoor toilet.

  By then, there were at least twenty of them living at Malvern, all loosely related, most coming down the matriarchal side from the old lady we called Ancient Smith.

  Twenty became forty. More Smiths arrived over a two year period.

  One winter, they bought Malvern House for what was reportedly a tidy sum. Well of course, some people said, they could buy it and the damn marsh and even the fields around it when they lived forty to a house and they all took the mill jobs away from more deserving people. They’d been moving up in their jobs, and rumor went that one of them was about to make an offer on the paper mill.

  “They’re going to own us all soon enough, just watch,” Paul Lockwood said, though we all laughed at the time.

  Local boys — expressly warned to never bother the Smiths again — reported strange goings-on out there. Wild animal cries. Smells of strange spice and odd bonfires along the marsh. Music played on weird drums, screechy fiddles that sounded like mating cats and oddly shaped clarinets that produced even odder whines. Lights in the sky. Bizarre sounds of strangulation that might pass for singing.

  Paul Lockwood began calling Malvern House the city of foreign relations by the time my boy turned fifteen. People eventually forgot that it was ever called Malvern House and instead, it became known as Smithville.

  By then, they owned the paper mill and had bought one hundred fifty acres of woodland along the river, including the old Shalcross farm. A much larger Smith settlement arose, and the boundaries of Smithville continued nudging out along the county line.

  We pretty much stayed away from them, and they — in turn — kept their distance.

  Until something happened to change it all.

  4. The Coffee Shop Debate

  One summer morning, the oldest Smith boy came riding his bicycle to town.

  He was tall and scrawny and wore only a cloth at his waist. He dropped the bike in the street and went running up to Dr. Knowles’ office, across from the bank where I worked. The kid shouted so much that we all went to the windows to watch as the doctor stepped out and exchanged a few words with the boy. Then, Dr. Knowles went back inside.

  The boy paced, striking the air with his fists. He glanced over at those of us watching. The look on his face was devastating — tears streamed down his face, his mouth open and sagging, his eyes pleading.

  “Something bad’s happened with those people,” one of the bank tellers said.

  Dr. Knowles came out to the street, spoke with the boy, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. They left together in the doctor’s sleek Chrysler.

  It was the first time — to any of our knowledge — that a Smith sat in a car seat.

  This became a topic of interest down at the coffee shop where several of us watched the Chrysler return and park across the street, just after the work day had ended.

  Dr. Knowles, noticing our stares as he got out of his car, came striding over.

  Once inside the coffee shop, he called an informal meeting of the Selectmen.

  This was easily accomplished because we were all sitting around with half-drunk cups of coffee in our hands.

  “The old lady’s so sick, I wanted to put her out of her misery,” Dr. Knowles told our group when we’d pushed tables together and gathered with our lemonades and coffees and pastries. “They don’t believe in hospitals. And it doesn’t matter — she won’t make it to one. I got her as comfortable as anyone can be in that condition.”

  He stirred his coffee and looked down into it as if it were a crystal ball. “She’ll be dead by tomorrow.”

  “Terrible,” I said.

  Ruby sat opposite me, next to Helen Cooper, whose husband Josh — my closest friend in town — was to my left. Paul Lockwood sat to my right, while Dr. Knowles had squeezed in between Willie Crocker and Dave Neary at table’s end.

  “Awful,” Ruby said. “I feel as if I just saw her at the store last Wednesday. She’s old but I didn’t think…”

  “As weepy as this is,” Paul Lockwood said. “What’s it got to do with any of us?”

  “They need to perform funerary rites,” Dr. Knowles said.

  “Sounds heathen,” Paul grumbled.

  “Well, everybody has customs,” the doctor said. “And they have a particular way they bury their dead in that country.”

  “But they’re not in that country.”

  Dr. Knowles laid out the basics:

  “The boy told me his family fasts for three days. There’s some holy man of theirs in Manhattan who will come up. Preparations may take a full week. The body stays above ground. They say prayers night and day. The women cover themselves in ash and the men will wear nothing but a plain cloth around their waists. No one washes until after a customary period. The children won’t speak during sunlit hours. There are a few less savory aspects to the customs, but there’s no need to talk about it here. By week’s end, they’ll have a feast — and even games.”

  “I assume this won’t be like the Olympics,” Willie Crocker joked.

  “Sounds heathen,” Paul Lockwood groaned. “I mean, I’m not saying it’s wrong. I hate to judge people, but it sounds so damn heathen.”

  We all looked across the table at him.

  “Never seen you in church,” I said.

  “Church is for hypocrites and sinners,” Paul said.

  Dr. Knowles continued, “The son took off immediately. There’s a larger community of his mother’s relatives over in Boston. They have a whole process to this. It’s very regulated, I suppose. Now, I may not agree with it but I know these people. I know how hurt — and angry — they’ll be if we can’t accommodate this one night.”

  I shrugged. “Let them do whatever they want out there.”

  The doctor offered an inscrutable look. “It’s more involved than that.”

  A few among us muttered things, but I kept my eyes on Dr. Knowles’ face.

  “Drop the other shoe,” I said.


  He rubbed his eyes. The man was exhausted.

  “They need to parade her through our streets,” he said.

  “That’s necessary?” Paul Lockwood jumped in. “A parade?”

  “This was their matriarch,” the doctor said. “She’s sort of — well, I suppose you’d call her a queen of their tribe. She gets a royal procession.”

  “Like Fourth of July?” Dave Neary said.

  “Maybe we should roll out a red carpet,” Paul Lockwood said. “Bow down. Pray to their gods.”

  “Damn Smiths,” Willie Crocker said. “They should just take the boat back to where they come from.”

  Dr. Knowles sighed. “This is no different than our funerals. You go along the streets, the hearse, all that. If this were our President, or even the Governor…” He looked around at the rest of us. Then at me, as if I might help convince the others.

  “Sure,” I said to our group. “It’s a little unusual. But it’s not like we didn’t go all out when Vernon Browne kicked off a few years back.”

  “Not the same thing,” Willie Crocker said. “He was an American war hero.”

  “I don’t see why we need to let them bring their customs here,” Helen said, avoiding all our looks.

  “We were here first,” Willie Crocker said. “When those Smiths have lived here for two hundred years, then they can have some say in this.”

  “I have nothing against them. Honestly,” Helen said. “But they don’t live in the village.”

  “They buy from us,” Ruby said. “They bank here. I mean, I’d hate to lose their business, Helen. Wouldn’t you? The store’s grown because of them. They could just as easily go to Remington or Hazelford if they had to, and I’d hate to think of the money we’d lose, if nothing else.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s heathen,” Paul Lockwood said for the umpteenth time, and on went the arguments.