Russell Banks - Trailerpark

In the trailerpark itself, there were an even dozen trailers, pastel-colored blocks, some with slightly canted roofs, some with low eaves, but most of them simply rectangular cubes sitting on cinderblocks, with dirt or gravel driveways beside them, usually an old car or pickup truck parked there, with some pathetic, feeble attempt at a lawn or garden evident, but evident mainly in a failure to succeed as such. Some of the trailers, Leon LaRoche’s, for example, looked to be in better repair than others, and a few even indicated that the tenants were practically affluent and could afford embellishments such as glassed-in porches, wrought-iron railings at the doorstep, tool sheds, picnic tables and lawn furniture by the shoreside yard and a new or nearly new car in the driveway. The trailer rented to Noni Hubner’s mother Nancy was one of these — Nancy Hubner was a widow whose late husband had owned the Catamount Insurance Company and was rumored to have had a small interest in the tannery — and Captain Dewey Knox’s was another. Captain Knox, like Nancy Hubner, was from an old and relatively well off family in town, as suggested by the name of Knox Island, located out at the northern end of Skitter Lake where the turkey’s eye was. Captain Knox enjoyed recalling childhood summer picnics on “the family island” with his mother and his father, a man who had been one of the successful hemp growers before and during the war, or “War Two,” as Captain Knox called it. His father prior to that had been a dairy farmer, but after the war decided to sell his land and moved to Florida, where he died within six months and where Captain Knox’s mother, a woman in her eighties, still lived. Captain Knox’s return to Catamount after his retirement, he said, had been an act of love “for this region, this climate, this people, and the principles and values that have prospered here.” He talked that way sometimes.

Two of the twelve trailers, numbers 5 and 9, were vacant at this time, number 9 having been vacated only last February as the result of the suicide of a man who had lived in the park almost as long as Marcelle Chagnon and who had been extremely popular among his neighbors. Tom Smith was his name, and he had raised his son alone in the park, and when his son, at the age of twenty-one or so, had gone away, Tom had withdrawn into himself and one gray afternoon in February shot himself in the mouth. He had been a nice man, everyone insisted, though no one had known him very well. In fact, people seemed to think he was a nice man mainly because his son Buddy had been so troublesome, always drunk and fighting at the Hawthorne House and, according to the people in the park, guilty of stealing and selling in Boston their TV sets, stereos, radios, jewelry, and so forth. Tom Smith’s trailer, number 9, wasn’t a particularly fancy one, but it was well located at the end of the land side of the park, right next to Terry and Carol Constant and with a view of the lake, but even so, Marcelle hadn’t yet been able to rent it, possibly because of the association with Tom’s suicide, but also possibly because of there being black people living next door, which irritated Marcelle whenever it came up, bringing her to announce right to the prospective tenant’s face, “Good, I’m glad you don’t want to rent that trailer, because we don’t want people like you living around here.” That would be the end of the tour, and even though Marcelle felt just fine about losing that particular kind of tenant, her attitude certainly did not help her fill number 9, which cost her money. But you had to admire Marcelle Chagnon — she was like an old Indian chief, the way she came forward to protect her people, even with nothing but her pride, if that was all she had to put up, and even at her own expense.

Number 5, the other vacancy, was located between Doreen Tiede, the divorcée who lived with her little girl, and Captain Knox, and was on the lake side of the park, facing the stones and sticks where the lake flowed into the Catamount River and where the Abenooki Indians, back before the whites came north from Massachusetts and drove the Indians away to Canada, had built their fishing weirs. It was a sleek, sixty-eight-foot-long Marlette with a mansard roof, very fancy, a replacement for the one that had burned to the ground a few years ago. A young newly married couple, Ginnie and Claudel Bing, had moved in, and only three months later, returning home from a weekend down on the Maine coast, had found it leveled and still smouldering in the ground, the result of Ginnie’s having left the kitchen stove on. They had bought the trailer, financed through the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, and were renting only the lot and services, and their insurance on the place hadn’t covered half of what they owed (as newly weds, they were counting on a long and increasingly rewarding future, so they had purchased a new car and five rooms of new furniture all on time). Afterward, they broke up, Claudel lost his job, became something of a drunk and ended up living alone in a room at the Hawthorne House and working down at the tannery. It was a sad story, and most people in the park knew it, and remembered it whenever they passed the shining new trailer that the Corporation had moved in to replace the one that the Bings had burned down. Because the new trailer had been so expensive, the rent was high, which made it difficult for Marcelle to find a tenant for it, but the Corporation didn’t mind, since it was being paid for anyhow by Claudel Bing’s monthly checks. Corporations have a way of making things come out even in the end.

There was in the park one trailer, an old Skyline, that was situated more favorably than any other in the park, number 8, and it was out at the end of the shoreside line, where the road became a cul-de-sac and the shore curved back around toward the swamp and state forest. It was a plain, dark gray trailer, with the grass untended, uncut, growing naturally all around as if no one lived there. A rowboat lay tilted on one side where someone had drawn it up from the lake behind the trailer, and there was an ice-fishing shanty on a sledge waiting by the shore for winter, but there were no other signs of life around the yard, no automobile, none of the usual junk and tools lying around, no piles of gravel, crushed stone or loam to indicate projects underway and forsaken for lack of funds, no old and broken toys or tricycles or wagons, nothing out back but a single clothesline stretching from one corner of the trailer back to a pole that looked like a small chokecherry tree cut from the swamp. This was where the man Merle Ring lived.

Merle Ring was a retired carpenter, retired by virtue of his arthritis, though he could still do a bit of finish work in warm weather, cabinetmaking and such, to supplement his monthly social security check. He lived alone and modestly and in that way managed to get by all right. He had outlived and divorced numerous wives, the number varied from three to seven, depending on who Merle happened to be talking to, and he had fathered on these three to seven women at least a dozen children, most of whom lived within twenty miles of him, but none of them wanted him to live with him or her because Merle would only live with him or her if, as he put it, he could be the boss of the house. No grown child would accept a condition like that, naturally, and so Merle lived alone, where he was in fact and indisputably the boss of the house.

Merle, in certain respects, was controversial in the park, though he did have the respect of Marcelle Chagnon, which helped keep the controversy from coming to a head. He was mouthy, much given to offering his opinions on subjects that involved him not at all, which would not have been so bad, however irritating it might have been, had he not been so perverse and contradictory with his opinions. He never seemed to mean what he said, but he said it so cleverly that you felt compelled to take him seriously anyhow. Then, later, when you brought his opinion back to him and tried to make him own up to it and take responsibility for its consequences, he would laugh at you for ever having taken him seriously in the first place. He caused no little friction in the lives of many of the people in the park. When one night Doreen Tiede’s ex-husband arrived at the park drunk and threatening violence, Merle, who happened to be nearby, just coming in from a long night of hornpouting on the lake, stopped and watched with obvious amusement, as if he were watching a movie and not a real man cockeyed drunk and shouting through a locked door at a terrorized woman and child that he was going to kill them both. Buck Tiede caught sight of old Merle standing there at the edge of the road, where the light just reached him, his string of hornpout dangling nearly to the ground (he was on his way to offer his catch to Marcelle, who had a deep-freeze and would hand the ugly fish out next winter when, rolled in batter and fried in deep fat, they would be a treat that reminded people of summer and got them to talking about it again). “You old fart!” Buck, a large and disheveled man, had roared at Merle. “What the hell you lookin’ at! G’wan, get the hell outa here an’ mind your own business!” He made a swiping gesture at Merle, as if he were chasing off a dog.