Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

In contrast to my schedule, Gail’s was awash in work, she being the lowest on the totem pole and the one with the most to learn. On the other hand, after countless months of juggling a clerkship, a correspondence course, cramming for the bar exam, and applying for jobs, even she was feeling comparatively sane. We still didn’t have enough time to ourselves, but we were at last enjoying what little we could get.

I was therefore in an unguarded mood when Chief Tony Brandt appeared in my office doorway and inquired, “You have much on your plate right now? Or anyone you can spare?”

I waved a hand at the paperwork before me. “My head’s above water. I don’t know about the others. Why?”

He entered and sat in my guest chair, wedged between the door and a filing cabinet. “I just got a call from Emile Latour. He needs a little digging done on one of his officers.”

Latour was Tony’s counterpart in Bellows Falls, a small industrial-era town a half-hour’s drive north of Brattleboro, just inside the northern reaches of Windham County. “Who’s the officer?”

“Brian Padget. Two-year man, good record, well liked. It’s a sexual harassment claim filed by some woman’s husband. Emile was wondering if we could lend him someone to conduct a quick internal on it.”

I made a face. The request was not unusual. If a grievance was filed against a department or one of its officers, and the outfit was too small to have its own Internal Affairs division, it was routine to ask another agency to supply an investigator. The task was usually mundane-often going through the motions to make everyone feel better. The majority were crank cases resulting in the officer involved being cleared, a happy circumstance that never helped the guy conducting the investigation-that poor bastard was always stamped a Judas before he even reached town.

I hedged my response. “I take it you’d like us to accept.”

“Latour’s a decent guy. It helps to be friendly.”

“Have they even looked into it? Sexual harassment’s a bit of a catchall. Maybe they could handle it themselves.”

Brandt shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Could be they’re just playing it safe.”

“You give him a deadline on how many days we can spend on it?”

“Not in so many words, but I’m guessing a couple.”

I flipped the pencil I was holding onto my desk. “All right, but I won’t saddle anyone else with it. I’ll do it myself.”

Bellows Falls is a troubled community. A village swallowed whole by a cantankerous township, developmentally stalled since the Great Depression, and, reduced to being the bedroom to almost every other town within a half-hour’s commute, it has a dour and pessimistic self-image out of all proportion to its size.

It is not big. The village covers a single square mile. It is also strikingly photogenic, as much for its glut of statuesque nineteenth century mansions as for its glumly quaint, abandoned factories. Seen from the air, Bellows Falls protrudes like a pregnant stomach into the Connecticut River, forming a tight half-circle, at the apex of which is the dramatic, rocky cascade that gives the town its name. It owes its existence to that water’s energy, which in the early years gave the upstart, industrially minded settlers an advantage over their more staid agrarian neighbors. For a succession of grist mills, rag-paper plants, and pulp mills, the ceaseless water became literal life blood, supplying power, spawning river, rail and road transportation, and creating other tangential manufacturing. Now, as if personifying the village’s current impotence, the Connecticut’s flow is controlled by a dam sluicing water down the remains of an old canal to feed the turbines of a local utility company.

Its picture postcard prettiness may in fact best represent Bellows Falls’ most paradoxical irony-that while most other places proudly point to a few older buildings as standard-bearers of an earlier time, the past is about all this town has left to brag about. It is a pantheon of long-vanished industrial might. Ancient red brick shells can find but a few new tenants, a once thriving railroad junction has been reduced to a single platform, and the elaborate mansions have mostly been diced up into apartments by out-of-state landlords who care little about upkeep and less about their welfare tenants.

Periodically, the village erupts with face-saving activity. Meetings are held and committees formed to identify and solve the place’s underlying problems. But whether it’s half-heartedness from within, or the sheer magnitude of the task, these groups never seem to last long and sink below the surface with little flotsam left behind: a few new benches on the square, a coat of paint on an old wall, a scattering of shrubs to eventually die of neglect or abuse. Another movement was afoot right now, in fact, dedicated to the usual renaissance. It seemed better organized than its predecessors, but no one I knew was placing any bets. A museum of glories past, the name Bellows Falls had become a statewide joke, solely equated with failure.

The police station, my intended first stop, was located north of the village in a modern building it shared with the fire department, and which local wags had dubbed the House of the Seven Gables for its tortured profile. But I took the southernmost of the two interstate exits servicing Bellows Falls so I could drive through downtown. I was one of those who genuinely liked the town, despite its pratfalls and ill fortune. Its mere existence spoke of the same perseverance that drove Vermont farmers to till soil that was more rock than dirt-and to dismiss it as merely “bony.”

The southern approach to the village, no enhancement to its self-image, features a nondescript cluster of filling stations, pizza joints, video arcades and one porno store; and the first building beyond the official historical marker is a bar. But the old village center, when it appears around a gentle corner, comes as a refreshing reward. A Y-shaped “square,” with the Y opening toward the north, it is defined by the weathered red brick that once symbolized New England as an industrial powerhouse. Among the bas-reliefs and the odd crenellation or granite molding, the clock tower of the town hall looks startlingly like a miniature version of the same structure in Florence, Italy.

There are gaps in this facade-empty asphalt lots or tiny bench-equipped parks-which testify to Bellows Falls’ most biblical of afflictions. Through the decades, with the regularity of mythic rite, fire has eaten at the village. Factories, retail buildings, homes, and a few bars have gone up in smoke, all from unrelated causes. Over time, bikers, dopers, and train-delivered New York misfits had all had their turns at stamping the town with their identities. The ceaseless fires, therefore, played in some people’s minds as an eerie form of divine retribution-a viewpoint that both irritated the hard-core village boosters and occasionally left them wondering.

Currently that reputation was less lurid, sadder, and looked much tougher to cure. Bellows Falls, during the go-go eighties, had been the place to live cheaply if you worked in Springfield, Brattleboro, Walpole, or Keene. The mansions of onetime magnates went for twenty thousand dollars and rentals were plentiful and affordable. But times had changed. Values climbed, taxes kept pace, and absentee landlords carved their holdings into ever smaller and shabbier tenements. Businesses increasingly moved out or shut down, and Bellows Falls became a welfare town, rife with domestic disputes, drinking and drug use, larceny, theft, and vandalism, and a pervading undercurrent of teenage parenthood and sexual abuse. At twenty percent, the school system had a higher percentage of “special ed” kids than any other in the state.