Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

I looked down the street and saw the Channel Eight van rolling up from Main. Walking along the sidewalk next to it was my mother. She didn’t go to many town council meetings, so the rumors about a Haskell apology must have reached her. Mom took her place at the end of the line, craning her neck to see what was going on at the entrance. Then she slung her purse over a shoulder and started to jostle her way around and past the waiting throng, meeting their annoyed stares with smiling hellos and good afternoons until she came face-to-face with Shirley McBride.

What are you doing, Mom? I thought. I jumped out of my truck and started walking, then trotting, toward the hall. Mom tried to take Shirley by the hand, but Shirley shook her off and thrust the sign into Mom’s face, saying something I couldn’t hear amid the voices rising around them. Now Mom disappeared in the mob. I heard Shirley telling her, Go to hell, I’m not your charity case, and Mom saying, Shirley, please listen to reason, for once just listen.

I made my way through the line just as D’Alessio stepped between my mother and Shirley. Shirley was yelling louder and Mom didn’t like it but she wasn’t backing off. I grabbed her by a shoulder. “Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?” She shrugged me off without a glance and put her hands up to Gracie’s mother in supplication. “We can work this out, Shirley,” she said. “We can work this out like adults.”

“OK, ma’am, that’s enough now,” D’Alessio said. But Shirley lunged toward Mom, almost knocking D’Alessio over. He grabbed her by her down-filled vest and forced her back against the wall. Her sign fell to the sidewalk. “Take her to jail where she belongs,” some old guy shouted. D’Alessio struggled with Shirley, who was just as short as Gracie but twice as wide. “Settle down, Mrs. McBride, or I will take you in.”

She turned and shouted in his face. “Why don’t you go do your job and find my daughter’s killer instead of picking on me? Oh, I’m sorry-we need every penny we can find for a goddamn hockey rink.”

“Please calm down, Shirley,” my mother said.

“Mom,” I said, pulling at her again. She took a step back, still without acknowledging me, as the others closed in around us, shouting things about the rink and Haskell and Gracie and Shirley. D’Alessio had one hand on the cuffs dangling from his police belt and the other palm up in front of Shirley’s face, warning her back. Her headband had come off and her hair flew around her pickled beet face as she screamed and pointed at my mother. “She wants my money. She got my Gracie, now she wants my goddamn money.”

“No, Shirley,” Mom said. “Please.”

Once more Shirley tried to force her way past D’Alessio. The cuffs came out. She kept yelling as he dragged her away. “You can’t have it. You bitch. You got what you wanted. You got what you wanted. Now you don’t get a penny. Not a fucking penny. Do you hear me? Not a goddamn penny.”

Mrs. B stepped between me and my mother and embraced her. “Bea, are you all right? Never mind her, sweetheart.”

Mom pressed her face into Mrs. B’s parka. “My God,” she said.

I stepped around Mrs. B and took my mother by an elbow. “Mom?” Behind me I heard the town hall doors being opened. The line began to move past us. I saw Philo beneath one of the trees, snapping photographs. “Come on. It’s all right. Let’s go over here.”

She yanked her elbow away. The look on her face was defiant.

“Mom, what is going on?”

“I came for the meeting, Son. Come on, Phyllis.”

She and Mrs. B locked arms and pushed past me. I watched the rest of the people pass, heard them mutter, “Some people should just avoid each other” and “Like a couple of damn cats.”

I entered last. Just before I turned to go in, the Suburban pulled up to the curb across Elm and parked. The driver must not have seen the fire hydrant half buried in snow.

Laird Haskell turned his back on the seven members of the Starvation Lake town council and faced the rest of the room.

“This,” he said.

Next to his head he held up a copy of that morning’s Free Press. He pointed to Mich’s story. He turned slowly to his left then to his right so that everyone in the room could see.

He read the headline aloud to the people filling all the seats to his left, standing along the wall beneath photographs of former council members, most of them dead. “‘Feds Investigating Car Makers’ Nemesis,’ ” Haskell said. He swiveled toward his right, where I was standing, but he avoided my eyes just as I was avoiding those of Jim Kerasopoulos, sitting at the opposite end of the front row, eight seats down from Haskell. On the wall beyond Kerasopoulos stood Jason Esper, his neck wrapped in gauze. Philo sat in the back row on my side of the room, scribbling in his notebook.

“‘Feds Investigating,’ ” Haskell repeated. He let the paper fall to his side. He was wearing his denim shirt and a tan corduroy jacket with cocoa-brown patches on the elbows. Denim and corduroy went over fine in Starvation Lake, but usually not with starch and elbow patches. At the moment, it didn’t matter. Laird Haskell was going to bring a new hockey rink to Starvation Lake, a new attitude, new championship banners to hang in the rafters. We just had to help him a little more than he’d told us before.

The council had dispensed quickly with the early items on its agenda, referring one concerning potholes back to the roads commission and approving the Girl Scouts’ request to set up cookie tables at hockey games. All that remained was the executive session that folks had been hearing would get the new rink back on track to open for the start of the next season.

Before the council went behind closed doors, though, Haskell wanted to say a few words.

“Forget the rest of the headline,” he said. “All I could see this morning, as I was sitting down to breakfast with my wife, Felicia, and our beautiful son, Taylor, was ‘Feds Investigating.’ ” He bowed his head. I took note of Taylor Haskell, in his blue-and-gold River Rats jacket, and Felicia, her hands enfolding her son’s, sitting in the front row next to Haskell’s attorney, Parmelee Gilbert. Haskell looked at his wife and son.

“I’m so sorry that I’ve brought this on our family,” he said. Felicia nodded. Taylor just sat there, probably not knowing what to do. I felt uncomfortable watching him. Haskell turned back to the room.

“And I’m sorry-deeply sorry-that I have brought this opprobrium on you, the good people of Starvation Lake. You’ve been so good to me and my family.” He set the Free Press down on his chair and brought his hands together gently in front of his chest. I’d seen the moves before, in front of a jury. “But you won’t see Laird Haskell issuing any blanket denials. Those might go over well down in the big city. But not here. You deserve better. You deserve an explanation. No more hiding. I want to come clean with all of you.”

Two or three people clapped. Then a few more, until the council chair, Elvis Bontrager, lightly rapped his gavel.

Then Haskell explained. It took a while. In fact he had gotten over his head financially on “certain unrelated projects” downstate. He’d had to follow through on some charity commitments he’d made when things were better. He hadn’t expected some of the rink construction permits to take so long to obtain, not that he was blaming anybody here.

He’d shifted money around among his businesses to make sure the new rink was taken care of before anything else. In doing so, he may have neglected to cross some T’s and dot some I’s, tax-wise. The IRS had noticed. Now he was “cooperating fully” with the IRS to ensure that he paid his fair share of taxes. It was an “unrelated matter” that would have “zero effect” on his ability to complete the rink “so long as I have the support of your elected officials today.”