Hamilton Stark (27 page)

15. “If I was governor of this state, I’d let them all go to hell. That’s the only way to govern.” (He was speaking to Democratic and liberal Republican critics of the present governor’s policies.)

16. The most horned-pout
*
he ever caught in one night was twenty-two, on June 17, 1964, on Bow Lake, alone.

17. Because of his size, he often had difficulty buying clothes until he was about thirty, when he came across an L. L. Bean catalogue in a privy. After that he always bought his clothes by mail order from L. L. Bean.

18. This is the sequence in which he read the several sections of the Sunday newspaper: comics; sports; obituaries; headlines and front page; editorial page; letters to the editor; classified ads. He followed this pattern with the weekday editions too. On Sundays, however, he was more conscious of there being a pattern and of his being free not to follow it if he so desired.

19. He talked to dogs in a gruff voice that seemed to send them cowering away. Once, however, he was almost bitten by a friend’s unusually courageous dog, which ended the friendship, such as it was.

20. Drawn into a leather-goods shop in Concord by the attractive window display, he was about to purchase an eighty-dollar briefcase, but at the last minute he changed his mind and bought a new wallet instead. “I like the smell of new leather,” he later explained.

21. To an insurance salesman as the man stepped from his car: “Get the hell outa here! If I’d wanted to buy anything, I’d have sent for you!” The frightened salesman drove off quickly enough to satisfy him.

22–39. Once a week, at various, though unvarying, times, he performed the following chores:

a. dumped his rubbish in the field in front of his house;

b. buried his garbage in a pit in the field in front of his house (except in winter, when the ground was frozen solid, in which case he simply permitted the garbage to freeze solid, until spring, when he could cover the moldering heap with earth);

c. swept out the barn and cleaned off his work-benches;

d. added a quart of STP additive to the crankcase of his car;

e. checked the tire pressure of all four tires, plus the spare, of his car;

f. in summer, mowed the lawns; in winter, chipped off any ice or snow that had accumulated on the gutters and scraped away any ice or snow on the walks and driveway that he had missed during the week (he shoveled and plowed out his walks and driveway immediately after every snowstorm, but often, because of the lateness of the hour or other responsibilities, had to leave the finish-work for the weekend); in the fall, raked any leaves that had fallen that week into a pile, which he burned (the ashes he piled next to the garden in back of the house until spring, when, before turning the soil, he spread them); in the
spring, worked at least three hours cutting and pruning in the wooded areas surrounding the house and along the path up the mountain.

g. drove to Pittsfield, where he bought groceries at the IGA for the coming week, filled his car with Shell gas, stopped at Maxfield’s Hardware Store for any tools, nails, screws or other items he might need or had run out of during the previous week, stopped at the state liquor store for a half-gallon of Canadian Club and at Danis’s Superette for a case of Molson ale, and returned home;

h. except in winter and late fall, tended his flower beds and vegetable garden, usually between 4:00 and 6:30
P.M.
on Saturday; in the late fall and winter, during these same hours, he cut and stacked firewood for the fireplace and the two wood stoves in the kitchen and barn;

i. read the New Hampshire
Times
(the Sunday edition of the Manchester
Union-Leader
);

j. repaired any furniture, appliances, tools, machinery, lamps, cupboard doors, faucets, shutters, shingles, gates or fence posts that, during the previous week, had broken or had begun to malfunction, leak, buzz, flap, or lean;

k. drank half a gallon of Canadian Club and a case of Molson ale, one shot and one bottle at a time;

l. watched one, and no more than one, sporting event on television;

m. sharpened, on the wheel in his workshop, all his butcher knives, axes, hatchets, and handsaws; sharpened his Swiss Army pocketknife while he was at it;

n. fired at least twenty rounds from his Winchester
30.06 rifle—at bottles and tin cans in the field in front of the house; sometimes he shot idly at crows in the field in front of the house; sometimes rats and woodchucks, and when his garden was up, rabbits;

o. as a spiritual exercise (though he never called it precisely that), once a week went twenty-four hours without uttering a word to another person; because of the requirements of his job, this usually took place at home on Sundays, where it was easier to accomplish without complications;

p. walked to the top of Blue Job Mountain behind the house and looked out over the land below, wished it were his as far as he could see, all the way to the limits of the horizon;

q. checked all the above items off his list, one by one, as he performed them, and when necessary, revised the list to accommodate the upcoming week and any changes in routine that might be necessitated.

40. As a matter of course he tossed all mail addressed to Occupant into the trash can in the kitchen or in winter directly into the wood stove. Once, though, as if on a whim, he opened and read a plea for contributions to Boys’ Town. After that he resumed tossing all such mail into the trash can or wood stove, as before.

41. He liked to open the glove compartment of his car and find it neat and orderly. Flashlight, registration, New Hampshire road map, sharpened pencil, matches, extra fuses tightly rolled in a strip of electrician’s tape.

42. To his third wife (Jenny): “I’d as soon wipe my ass with a corncob as this damned stuff. Can’t you buy better toilet
paper than
this?
It’s like sandpaper, for Christ’s sake!” To his fourth wife (Maureen): “You trying to give me piles or something? How much d’you save, buying this cheap shit? It feels like emery cloth!” To his fifth wife (Dora): “This stuff feels like pie crust, for Christ’s sake! What
gives?”
He figured that, because of his size, he was more sensitive to the texture of toilet paper than normal-sized people were. He also knew that made no sense, but he didn’t care. Whether a thing made sense or not had nothing to do with whether it was true or not.

43. He didn’t like dogs. “All tongue, lips and flapping tails. No sense of their own worth. Which makes them worth
less
.”

44. He didn’t like cats. “Sneaky bastards. They love dying even more than death. Which in
my
book makes ’em unreliable.”

45. He didn’t like horses. “Should’ve gone extinct forty or fifty years ago, when they couldn’t compete with tractors or trucks anymore for work or with cars and bicycles for transportation. Besides, they’re ridiculous-looking. Bodies’re too big for their legs. I’d like ’em if they were the way they used to be, before the Arabs started screwing ’em up—dog-sized things, like white-tailed deer, only smarter. Probably made good eating.”

46. He hated domestic fowl of all kinds. “I don’t even like to eat one of the bastards, unless it’s cut up so I can’t recognize what kind of animal it was when it was still alive.”

47. He liked pigs. “Now you take your typical pig. That’s an animal with a developed understanding of its life. No delusions. Not like cows. Cows are under the impression that people keep them around because they
like
them. Pigs never make that mistake.”

48. What he hated about sheep was the way most people regarded them: “Most people think sheep are sweet and gentle. The truth is, sheep sleep twenty-four hours a day. As far as being alive goes, they’re located only one step this side of lawn furniture. Three stomachs covered with a woolly mitten. Personally, if it wasn’t for the mutton, I’d rather see a flock of cotton bales.”

49. “I’d make a lousy farmer,” he confessed. “Plants are okay, though. I don’t mind being around plants, long as they don’t get too cute, if you know what I mean.”

50. He claimed not to know his birth date. “I was barely there, for Christ’s sake.” When asked how old he was, he would answer, “About thirty-seven,” or, “About forty-two,” or whatever, always, of course, giving his correct age. He claimed his sense of time was different from most people’s in that it was more precise. Doubtless he knew his birth date and, when required by law, provided it, for he possessed a driver’s license, union card, Social Security card, and so on, like the rest of us.

51. Whenever in conversation the word “Florida” came up, he would interject, “Coney Island with palm trees.”

52. He did not believe in God. He said that when God believed in
him
, then he’d believe in them
both
. He made his statement somberly, with care, apparently with full awareness of its theological, philosophical and psychological implications.

53. He had lifetime subscriptions to
The Farmer’s Almanac, Reader’s Digest
, and
National Geographic
. Frequently, however, he sneeringly referred to an individual as, “The type of man who has a lifetime subscription to
The Farmer’s Almanac,”
or, “… to
Reader’s Digest,”
or, “… to
National Geographic.”
Once, when someone had the temerity to point out that he
himself owned lifetime subscriptions to these very periodicals, he answered, “Of course. How else do you think I’d know the types?”

54. He woke at six o’clock every morning of his adult life, even when he did not have to go to work. He did not own an alarm clock and could when necessary wake himself earlier than six and at exactly the time he wished to waken. He seemed to require no more than five hours’ sleep a night. In providing this information, he explained that this was because when he went to bed he went to sleep immediately and when he slept he concentrated on it. “Like a machine,” he explained. “No, like a rock,” he added.

55. Exposés and public scandals seemed to make him sad, as if he were suddenly reminded of some great loss from his childhood.

56. “I hate a melee. If you want a fight, you ought to make it personal. Insult somebody. Insult his mother, his girl friend, his manhood, whatever it is he thinks needs protection.”

57. He never permitted any of his wives to make breakfast for him. Once Jenny, attempting to curry his favor, got up an hour earlier than he and prepared a breakfast of fried eggs, pancakes, sausages, fresh biscuits, coffee, and melon, and when he came downstairs and discovered this lovely meal, he was enraged and stormed out of the house. Later, when describing the event, he explained his rage by pointing out the control a woman can obtain over a man if he lets her imitate his mother. “Good intentions can’t dull a sharp knife,” he aphorized. In fairness, he also pointed out the control a man can have over a woman if she lets him imitate her father. “It’s how I kept all my women in line. While I kept them.”

58. He despised throw pillows, bric-a-brac, knickknacks, and
souvenirs, scatter rugs, doilies, and imitation chandeliers, flower decals, pink appliances, the color off-white, and white-wall tires, decorated mailboxes, and lawn sculpture, and David Susskind, and game shows, and television weathermen. He believed that you are what you love, and therefore he despised people who loved any or all of these things. He also believed that you are not what you despise, and since you cannot very easily control what you love and thus cannot very easily control what you are, you therefore ought at least to make a concerted attempt to avoid being what would disgrace you. For him, then, the most interesting person was the one who hated more things than anyone else, and the least interesting was the one who loved more things than anyone else. Errol Flynn, he thought, was an example of an interesting man. Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer were interesting. Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles were not.

59. He loved compression when, as a quality, it was joined to symmetry—as in algebra or symbolic logic, a portable tape recorder, a double-bitted ax, or a Maltese cross. In fact, his favorite design was a Maltese cross, and he frequently left it doodled behind him, on restaurant tablecloths, condensation on windows, sand, snow, and dust.

60. He wore no jewelry and carried no watch. “On principle,” he claimed. As with so much else.

61. He did not wear glasses.

62. The men were unloading a truckload of twenty-foot lengths of six-inch galvanized pipe. He was the foreman on the job site, and because it was only eight-fifteen in the morning and the four men unloading the truck were moving very slowly, two men to each length of pipe, he grew annoyed
and left the shanty, where he had been laying out the day’s work on the blueprints, and told the crew they were unloading the pipe as if their intent were not to get the truck unloaded but were instead to avoid hurting themselves or tiring themselves out too early in the day, at which point he himself began unloading the pipe, yanking a length by himself from the pile, hefting it to his shoulder and carrying it to the stack twenty feet away, and there laying it gently, so as not to damage the threaded ends, down. The men looked at the sky and the ground. He came back to the truck and did it again. Then again. The men stood aside and watched him work, confused as to the point he was making. After he had unloaded ten lengths of pipe, he stopped before the men and calmly said to them, “You have to lift until everything turns black. Lift till you black out. You have to do it every day. The job will always be more than you can handle, anyhow, so the only point is to lift until everything turns black.” Then he walked back into the shanty and resumed laying out the day’s work. The men turned to each other for a second, grinned good-naturedly, and went to work unloading the pipe, as before, two men to each length, and moving slowly, with care, pacing themselves.