Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

12. At the end of each year he threw away the old calendar and posted a new one, making a careful point of using a different calendar altogether, different size, picture, advertiser, etc. He preferred calendars from plumbing and heating wholesale supply houses. The pictures were usually of New Hampshire winter scenes, though sometimes they were of bathrooms or furnaces.

13. One winter morning, as he prepared to leave for work, he observed that he always put his left glove on before his right. He reasoned that this was because he was right-handed. For the same reason, he reasoned, he always shaved the right side of his face before the left.

14. One summer afternoon, a Sunday, he tried to draw a picture of his house from the field in front of it. He made three careful attempts but wasn’t satisfied with any of them, so he threw them away.

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.”