All Is Not Well E-Book

Tom Evans

• Herausgeber: BooxAi
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Consider this, then, the antithesis of a Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce campaign, an attempt to set the record straight. No judgment, merely a forthright account of what might have been observed during an innocent bystander’s own peculiar experience growing up there in the late fifties through the sixties, when it was abandoned for more enlightened climes, i.e., the city.” Excerpted from All Is Not Well.

All Is Not Well is the story of a town, a sheriff, and a precocious young girl as she matures into womanhood. The girl is a once in a generation athlete, able to beat most of the boys in any sport of their choosing, therefore shunned by the boys who are intimidated by her, and the girls because she is not interested in girly-girl things. She faces a life-altering event at nineteen, and the rest of the story tells how she reacts to this, with the town and the sheriff playing their part in it, and finally finds closure.

Leseprobe

ALL IS NOT WELL

TOM EVANS

Tom Evans

All Is Not Well

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2022 by Tom Evans

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Published by BooxAi

ISBN: 978-965-577-998-1

DEDICATION

For Dodie

The specific indignities of girlhood – the dehumanising demands of men, the casual violence with which those demands are enforced, the constant ‘campaign for her own existence’ that every girl will eventually be defeated in.

EMMA CLINE, "THE GIRLS"

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Gracie tells her story

Part II

Chapter 22

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

Most of Wilsonville is sleeping, but all is not well, not only because there wasn’t a black person within miles (most would think that was a good thing), as black people were persona non grata there and still are to this day. It wasn’t even because many of its denizens grew wealthy through ill-gotten gain because, let’s face it, the same can be said for many places around the country. The main reason was because Wilsonville thought it was much better, not much worse than it actually was. Not that anybody living there should be out in the streets (that would come soon enough), but enough people knew what was going on down south and in the ghettos (including in their own city) to do something about it, but chose to look the other way. Everyone was complacent and complicit, and all things were exactly as they should be. God was in His heaven, blessing them abundantly on the backs of the poor.

Consider this, then, the antithesis of a Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce campaign, an attempt to set the record straight. No judgement, merely a forthright account of what might have been observed during an innocent bystander’s own peculiar experience growing up there in the late fifties through the sixties, when it was abandoned for more enlightened climes, i.e., the city.

Wilsonville is a paradigm of Cheever’s suburbia, with its swimming pools, manicured lawns, country clubs, cul-de-sacs before they were a thing, and chilled martinis. Many, many martinis. The village, nestled in the midst of a larger town, grew from humble beginnings as most places did. You have to start somewhere, after all. It evolved ever so gradually over a period of years from the time of the French and Indian War to the present, with the concomitant accretion of land, property, and material goods, until, with little left to spend their money on, it merely became a matter of keeping up with the Joneses.

It was the early beneficiary of its location on one of the principal land routes (ironically named The Great Iroquois Trail, whose namesakes were literally trodden over in the march of progress) between the East and West, serving the much less prosaic function as a rest stop for various wayfarers, be they pilgrims or preachers, confidence men or speculators, stagecoach drivers or just ordinary settlers who did most of the living and dying along the way.

Although it’s difficult to imagine when looking through the jaundiced eye of planned obsolescence, before Wilsonville was even a gleam in the eye of future town fathers, there were Native Americans (mainly Algonquin) in the area, who, after being displaced, left behind artifacts of pottery, flint arrowheads, tomahawks, and sundry other weapons and implements, as well as the skeletons of their ancestors, in a large burial ground right in the middle of what would become the village proper, a profoundly mute record of their existence.

Like most towns, which came to be because of the nationwide land grab otherwise known as “manifest destiny,” the origins of the deeded territory were murky, with many nebulous land transactions eventually resulting in the majority of real estate being parceled out among a few families, who controlled it for a century or more.

One of these families was the Wilson family, whose patriarch Josiah grew relatively wealthy from establishing the first tavern in the area, as well as the first brewery adjacent to it, an oasis for the thirsty sojourner. This gradually morphed into a full-fledged inn, again the first one in these parts, offering rooms for travelers wishing to stay the night, as well as, for an additional nominal fee, partaking in the evening’s particular bill of fare, usually cornmeal mush and beefsteak in the winter, and tomatoes and beefsteak in the summer, as well as mugs of hearty ale or cider, mulled in the winter if so desired.

As it will, competition came as a slew of small taverns sprung up seemingly overnight, but they could never overcome the foresight (or cash) of Josiah Wilson and gradually vanished as though mirages from the landscape.

New settlements were often given the name of the first postmaster or a prominent storeowner, or another type of merchant. Thus, the dubbing of “Wilsonville,” after its most prominent citizen, who wouldn’t have it any other way.

Gradually the population grew, aided in part by people fleeing there from the nearby city of Buffalo after the British burned most of it down. In addition, other settlements were being formed around Wilsonville in all directions, with their own dwellings and civic institutions (modest though they were), and eventually (unavoidably), political organizations, who held town meetings, wrote and passed laws pertaining to their peculiar constituents, mostly mutually exclusive to their neighbors.

Interestingly enough, one of the first orders of business and the first examples of cooperation between villages and towns was for the supervisor and overseer of the poor of each town or village to get together to divide them up and “assign” them to towns and villages along with the tax revenues apportioned to each, and that each town would “forever thereafter” support their own poor with said tax revenue, affirming the Biblical prophecy that their poor would always be with them.

What was once primarily an agricultural area was rapidly becoming urbanized, and consequently, even if its older citizens caviled, they were being overruled by the town fathers, and more and more small farms gave way to more and more small businesses and industries.

As a result, just after the Civil War ended and through the turn of the century, Wilsonville was acquiring all the trappings of a thriving, if small, village.

Among these were the Wilsonville Hose Company, the whole gamut of Christian church denominations: Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist-much later even a synagogue; several elementary schools, and a junior and a senior high school were budgeted for and built. The XL-o Sponge Factory, the latest iteration of the building owned by the Wilson brothers (no relation to the founder, though they often tried to take credit for it), a quaint little industry, the only manufacturing concern in the area for many years, giving steady employment to a dozen men, rapidly polluting the streams it had been built on, and ultimately abandoned. Development of new subdivisions with attendant street-building and road-paving plans and sewer and water installations were announced practically on a monthly schedule.

Yet, no matter how hard the little village tried to modernize, no matter how many high rollers moved in, it was still and always would be in the main a small village with a turn of the century flavor and mores, with remnants of hitching posts, a blacksmith shop (now an auto repair garage), ice house, the Mennonite church, a water mill (there had once been several), and the houses.

And what houses they were! Large stone houses with wide verandas and fireplaces made of the same stone as the exterior, with expansive yards and copious shade trees, houses for the town fathers, and other assorted movers and shakers. The rest of the townsfolk (many proud first-time homeowners) made due with turn of the century housing, postwar tract houses, with many new prefab houses interspersed everywhere, and to the north, where acre upon acre of wooded land was being cleared for endless subdivisions. What all had in common was their unshakeable belief in God, country, and upward mobility.

All of this by way of explaining how Wilsonville, as we now know it, came to be, for better or for worse.

PARTONE

CHAPTER1

I've seen it all, boys, I've been all over, been everywhere in the whole wide world…

It was true of him, all right, he’d seen it all, seen it all, Jim Weatherly had done it all, from riding the blinds, dishwashing, following the seasons as a migrant worker, gold-mining in Alaska, semi-pro baseball player at a mill town down south, roughnecking in West Texas, hoboing to shoveling shit- you get the drift- jack of all trades, master of none, weathered to the max. Lasted him through his thirties, but it’s a rough road to hoe, and he realized he had to settle down after a fashion eventually. Still, every now and then, when he got the urge for going, he picked up and hitchhiked wherever he pleased. He’s got a good gig at Muck’s Car Repair garage and hires himself out in village households to repair whatever needs repairing- stoves, furnaces, water heaters, toilets, lawnmowers- you name it- anything at all that needed fixing. In his spare time he walks up and back Main Street through the village all the way to the town line, so much so that he’s called “the Wilsonville Walker” (which he doesn’t mind), stopping in at stores along the way or talking to people he knows (and he knows most everybody). He even lives above the shop. Simplify, simplify. Other than that, he just sits out in front of the garage in a chair up against the wall, whittling, watching and listening. His handiwork is considered a “collectible,” so he’s told, but he gives it away, mostly to kids or passersby that take an interest. He grew up here in the town orphanage, never knew his parents, had been on his own since he was eighteen. You can learn a lot about a place, especially a small town, by observing and listening. He’d come to find every person has a story, whether they tell it, someone else tells it, or it remains untold. He had no doubt if people knew they were going to be in a book, they’d either be better or worse than they already were, but they wouldn’t be their true selves, that is, life as they’ve lived it, because you can’t both live life and portray it at the same time. But nevertheless, he’s chosen a few characters in the small village in Western New York whose story you may or may not be interested in. Nevertheless, here they be.

* * *

Chief Grimes, for instance, walking what he called his “beat,” a misnomer in that the whole damn village was his beat. It was a daily ritual after having lunch, usually in his office, then it was downstairs and out the door and he was practically in the park. Oakgrove Park was its name, after the many oak trees that lined its perimeter. It was usually deserted at this time after the mothers with their children had left off their swinging to go home and have lunch.

In addition to the swings, there was a gazebo with a recently erected bandstand inside, raised in preparation for Old Home Days, an annual week-long event the village sponsored, lending a carnival-like atmosphere to the town. A carnival indeed, the very path he walked on would be surrounded by the brightly lit midway filled with all sorts of games, arts and crafts, clowns, food, even a Ferris wheel, all culminated by the Friday night beer tent. The beer tent, a conglomeration of the townspeople and their families, also an informal annual class reunion of sorts, classmates catching up on their success and failures, whatever the case might be, asking about others who hadn’t made it that particular year, which spilled over across the street into the Eagle House after the beer tent closed at eleven sharp, for the more serious drinkers. He could see it in his mind’s eye, even though it was hard to believe, given the usual quiet, pristine, almost stately nature of the place he was used to. But at the beer tent all hell might break loose at any time, and then there would be plenty for his men to do: keeping the riffraff (bikers and such) out, arresting a few drunk and disorderly persons nursing an old grudge here and there against someone they hadn’t seen in a while, one year even making a drug bust in the men’s lavatory.

He didn’t mind; it was just one week out of the year, his only objection being having to sit up on the dais with the Village Board while the politicians made their introductory remarks before the parade began, marking the official opening of Old Home Days, part of the price for being a duly elected public official. At least he wasn’t expected to say anything, just smile and wave at the proper time and otherwise look official.

As he returned to his office, he saw Joseph Wilson standing in the parking lot conferring with several of the Board members, never a good sign as far as he was concerned, as it was no doubt some money-making scheme concocted by his lawyer to sell some property for more commercial development.

He didn’t look forward to that resulting debacle because, while not involved, it made his superiors on the Board surly, half of them all for progress, the other half wanting no part of it. He had a feeling whoever got paid off last was often the deciding vote.

He ducked in the back way before anyone saw him.

“Muckety-muck warning,” he winked and said to his office assistant Betty as he closed his door, ”do not disturb unless absolutely necessary.”

* * *

Before he was Chief John Grimes, he was Deputy John Grimes, and before that, Johnny Grimes, who’d grown up in Wilsonville and witnessed many of the changes that had been wrought there since he was a boy, and that continued to change, not always to his liking. He hardly recognized the place anymore. It was getting to be almost crowded and busier than he ever remembered it. It just didn’t seem like the place he’d grown up in any longer, a place where a kid could just get up and roam around in the wide-open spaces, with less land and more houses and people now, at least that’s how he saw it.

He was a mild-mannered man, even-tempered, not easily riled, but all these changes happening and forthcoming in his town were bringing him to a slow boil, and you wouldn’t like him when he was angry. He cared about his village, and it seemed to him these out-of-town city boys (he privately referred to them as carpetbaggers) were taking it over. Enough is enough, was his thought.

Widening Main Street, for instance, to twice its original size, and for no good reason that he could see, except for the added tax revenue. It took away a lot of greenery, and for what? So a lot more cars could clog up the road and things could get noisier and more polluted? He had to bite his tongue at those mandatory Town Board meetings (though most of it went in one ear and out the other, as far as he was concerned, and he would never really say anything, knowing which side his bread was buttered on), hearing how they planned on building more subdivisions across Sherman Drive and were already talking about how the influx of families might cause them to have to build another high school when the one they have (Wilsonville High) is already twice as big as when he went there.

They’re getting ahead of themselves with all this, he thought, but, as all the other proposals floated out there, he would have to wait and see. Some of those Village Hall blowhards were just blowing smoke, liking to hear themselves talk, with their schemes not amounting to a hill of beans. Not old man Wilson, though, when he wanted something (or was told he did (Wilson never had an original thought in his head), it was his mouthpiece Bill Burnham, the Village Lawyer, who did the dirty work and got it rammed through with a strategy, the result of his business acumen, inculcated to bring about a favorable resolution, at least for Wilson.

It was all greed if you asked him, though nobody would. Build up the tax base. That’s what it’s all about; that’s the master plan. Still, despite all this, even he (who always tried to look on the bright side) had to admit there might be a silver lining to all this: the bigger the town, the more manpower he’d need to police it. He’d take that in a heartbeat.

A constant stream of strangers was moving in and settling down, although the village proper was still pretty much the same, as there was very little turnover of property there if it could at all be helped, and it could. A cadre of sixth-generation WASPS (including the Wilsons) had definitely kept it in the family. Mostly comprised of the wealthiest class, they’d had things to their liking for as long as they could remember, a case in point being able to choose from several Protestant denomination churches throughout the village, whereas the Catholics, mostly working-class types, were relegated to the one church/school (albeit by far the largest of them all) right at the halfway point on the village’s Main Street.

“Dirty Catholics, keep ‘em all herded together, I say,” he’d heard one board member remark, “easier to see what they’re up to that way.”

Some of his best friends were Catholic, and though they’d often given him a hard time growing up because he wasn’t, he took that remark as a shot across the bow. ‘That guy’s due for a ticket of some kind,’ he figured and vowed to keep an eye on him.

CHAPTER2

If there was ever an example of someone being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Joe Wilson was one. As is usually the case, he did nothing to deserve or perpetuate it except being born, while his brother Jim, the brains of a family whose line would soon run out, infinitely the better man, expanded and diversified the business during his lifetime, which was cut short by his suicide after his wife left him for another man a few towns over. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a streak of insanity and misfortune running through the family, usually with dire consequences, as with Jim. That left the family fortune to Joe, who was fortunate to have a smart man to oversee things, who literally thought and spoke for him. Due to his (Bill Burnham Esq.’s) machinations, everything seemed to turn to gold for Joe Wilson, but a more dull, obtuse person you would be hard-pressed to find. Everyone in the village knew the way he was but had to give him his due as the wealthiest man in town, earned or not. There would always be enough sycophants tapping into his influence to give him his due, which he never acknowledged if he was even aware of it. He was not a bad man. He was just unaware of the things he should have been, i.e., like what was going on in his own family. If and how much longer this luck will last, we will soon find out.

* * *

Mr. Joseph Wilson (not to be confused with the original Wilson family, whose line by then had died out, although the current clan claimed this distinction for themselves when convenient, and who was still around to refute them?) was no dummy. Well, actually, he was, but, as they say in the sewers, he was one of those people who could fall into a pile of shit and come up with a $100 bill. And boatloads of money could cover up any past mistakes or indiscretions he had blundered into, one of which was a failed attempt to rebuild old man Altman’s amusement park and nightclub after it was burned down, which, ironically, against his vehement wishes, was ultimately turned into a recreational park after.

His father may have been an old fuddy-duddy, but Mr. Wilson could read the handwriting on the wall, and it said Progress! Progress! Progress! Onward and upward! Secretly he wished his old man had lived long enough to see the rapid expansion happening in Wilsonville after WWII. That alone would have killed him, his father being a man who in his early years proudly drove through the village on a horse and buggy when he could have easily afforded an automobile and a luxury one at that if he so chose. ‘The old skinflint,’ his son thought unceremoniously. Not being a sentimental man, soon after his father’s death, he felt it was incumbent on him to bring the village into the twentieth century, which meant constant development, investment, reinvestment, and expansion everywhere possible, never mind that it was its pristine quaintness that had drawn many from the city to live there in the first place. Live in a beautiful setting, get away from the rat race, jump on the new expressway and be to your downtown office in ten minutes. The best of both worlds- that was the ticket!

Mr. Wilson cared nothing about this. It was up to him to overcome his father’s anachronism (certainly not his word) and enable his village to catch up with the relative modernity of the surrounding villages whether it wanted to or not. In other words, there was a lot of money to be made in developing and expanding the village, and he made sure other businessmen of his ilk would see it that way also.

Befitting the patriarch of a minor fiefdom, the Wilsons lived in a colonial brick and wood mansion on Main Street, in a prominent spot in the village, the house being the site of the original tumbledown dwelling erected by his great-great grandfather, who’d come to these shores from Scotland in 1840 or thereabouts. The Wilson clan had done it all - sheep ranching (including purportedly being the original sheep-dippers in the area), farming, running a distillery and eventually acquiring a lot of land in the area, whether by hook or by crook or merely being at the right place at the right time. At the time most of the land was prairie land for a long stretch, culminating in hills blanketed with large stands of trees further south and densely forested land to the north. That the land could be had for a reasonable price was self-evident, as the Wilsons never overpaid for anything.

Mr. Wilson had inherited a quarter of the land (by then a vast amount) in Wilsonville from his forebears. His older brother James had inherited slightly more, so between them, they owned over half of Wilsonville, a good position to be in, on the ground floor of what promised to be booming times. James ran a factory that produced many different products over the years, prophylactics and gelatin, to name a few. The rest (mostly several buildings lining Main Street and the factory) they held jointly, believing, as wealthy families are wont to do, that every thin dime should be kept in the family. Having a degree in chemical education (he got the brains in the family), he was constantly experimenting and, shortly before World War II, began working with polyurethane, landing a highly lucrative contract with the DOD producing high-gloss finishes for a massive airplane factory nearby. After the war he came up with the idea of manufacturing sponges made of it. After his tragic death he left his brother with not only all the family’s land holdings, but the business, too, which, despite his general incompetence, still managed to thrive, as, consequently, did Joseph Wilson.

And since, thanks to James Wilson, the XL-o Sponge (the sponge that wipes it all away) Company was run so smoothly and was self-sustaining, after his brother’s demise, Mr. Wilson became a so-called man of leisure, having his accountant and financial adviser ensure the business continued to thrive and helped him acquire even more land. This enabled him (as advised) to become a member of every club in the village: country, trap & field, curling, and sit on the boards of several important institutions, including the school, village, Rotary, Kiwanis, as well as being a Freemason. In short, a veritable mid-century Babbitt!

That these were merely figurehead appointments was a given, as he had not one iota to

contribute, becoming more addled the older he got. But it would be a scandal of major proportions if the richest man in village didn’t maintain a high visibility in body if not in mind.

Mr. Wilson was tall, tan, and angular, with a salt-and-pepper brush cut growing in, and a constantly bemused smile on his face, as if not quite believing how he got where he was or how much he was worth. Being taciturn and dull himself, he was a hard person to warm up to and seemed to live in his own little world. He was prone to walking around stores in the village, not buying anything, mind you, just picking up items and checking the price, then putting them back. He was also a notoriously cheap tipper, oftentimes leaving only loose change no matter how large the bill.

As previously mentioned, he couldn’t have accomplished what he had if he’d not had a more than competent adviser (brilliant actually), Bill Burnham, bank president as well as lawyer, who also doubled as his accountant and informal real estate agent. A very astute man, assiduous in all his duties, Mr. Burnham, was a devout Catholic, with a requisite passel of kids as testimony.

They were also golf partners (though you would never call them friends) and could be seen most summer days (except Sunday, Mr. Burnham at least) on the links at one of the village’s two country clubs. All in all, it seemed a strange pairing, Mr. Wilson towering over the short squat florid Mr. Burnham, which was tolerated by all parties concerned (Mr. Burnham usually being the only Catholic in the group, back when those things mattered)) because it was seen as a purely business arrangement mutually beneficial to everyone. And that’s what most of these golf outings were, informal business meetings either with just themselves or a foursome with a couple of clients who could be ad men, investors, village cronies, high-powered salesmen, professionals, and executives from all sectors of the business community. They seldom played with other members of the club and, despite the frequency of their play, were both hackers.

No, you couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination call them friends. They never socialized together (though neither socialized all that much anyway), the families hardly knew each other, and the rumor was that neither had ever darkened one another’s doorway. While that was never challenged, the nature of their relationship would later prove to be scandalously otherwise.

CHAPTER3

As a chronicler of Wilsonville’s oral history, Jim Weatherly noted the rapid influx and efflux that was taking place in the Village proper as well as the burgeoning neighborhoods cropping up north of Sherman Drive, which had previously been mostly woodland. After the War was when this all began, although in the Village proper, it was more like musical chairs, where people were becoming “upwardly mobile,” leaving their old neighborhoods behind but still staying in the village. Whereas in the new neighborhoods, there was a lot of turnover, many of its residents being corporate executives and upper management types, which often required moving around the country at their company’s beck and call, not unlike the military. Sometimes you needed a scorecard to keep track and Jim Weatherly was that scorecard. While there was no real animosity between the villagers and newcomers, and vice versa, not one single newcomer ever moved into the village, and vice versa.

* * *

Chief Grimes was a Wilsonviller through and through. A hefty, likable man with a bum knee, the result of an old football injury, he had worshipped at its churches (not so much anymore), attended its schools, played sandlot baseball on its playgrounds, fished, trapped and hunted in its woods, streams and fields, and played on the greatest high school football team in Wilsonville history, if not the state.

But that was a long time ago, so long only the old-timers remembered it, and he wished they wouldn’t bring it up practically every doggone time they saw him. It only made him feel that much older and often made his bad knee flare-up, though Mrs. Grimes said it was psychosomatic or some such thing. He’d torn the anterior cruciate ligament (the surgeon having told him it had been gradually wearing away for a while) in his knee playing tackle on both the offensive and defensive lines right through to the state championship game, even though in excruciating pain the entire time. They had to help him off him the field then after the chop block that finally severed it completely in the waning moments of the game, not because he was a conquering hero (nobody paid any attention to linemen), but because he couldn’t walk off under his own power. He’d had it operated on shortly after but was never the same again, as was the case back in those days. At the time it had seemed worth it, he supposed: state champs and local legends with shiny trophies and their names permanently in the record books, but now he wondered. It seemed that ever since then, the guys on the team had been cursed with more than their fair share of problems, especially the best players, a quartet who all played in the backfield, save one.

Swede Patrick, the quarterback who could throw a football from end zone to end zone and seemingly run under and catch it at the same time, he was so fast. They didn’t have hardly any passing attack, but he was a good runner on the option play and could bootleg his way out of trouble if need be, throwing a bomb every now and then to one of the lonesome ends on the team to keep a defense honest. He was the penultimate of five tough brothers in a family willing to throw down at the drop of a hat, often at the dinner table. After high school he had become an alky working odd jobs around the village and hustling pool at the Pool Hall, hooked on vodka stingers. Not that he was one of those “I coulda been a contender” guys, crying in his beer (or stinger in this case) about how great he once was. He merely took his frustration and inadequacies out on some pour soul in the bar who looked at him crosswise, intent on beating him to a pulp unless the other patrons tore him away.

Joseph Pierre, their scatback, part Indian, was a squat, quick, tough runner who exploded through a hole or flashed around end on a sweep and an excellent pass-blocker out of the backfield. He was barely ever seen at school, just enough to keep him eligible. Rumor had it he was working full-time at his old man’s gas station out in the boondocks. He was immensely strong, though you couldn’t tell it to look at him unless you saw him up close when he somehow seemed twice as big as he was. Right out of high school he became a Golden Gloves boxer briefly until he accidentally killed a guy in the ring. He never got over that and became even more of an erratic recluse. His feats of strength were legendary. One night, driving home in a blizzard, he noticed a car in the ditch near his house. He got out of his car and went over to it and, seeing someone was in there, picked up the back end of the car and pulled it out of the ditch with his bare hands. Incredible as that was, no one had any trouble believing it when they heard about it. He once walked two miles in another blizzard (Buffalo being the Blizzard City, as you’re probably aware) just to punch a guy in the mouth who insulted his girlfriend, immediately turning around after cold-cocking the unfortunate soul and heading back from whence he came. He was reputed to be slightly off, a fair assessment in light of the things that transpired when he was in the vicinity. He was rarely seen after his dad’s gas station closed shortly after his death, relegated to collecting disability and food stamps, which he most likely spent on booze, if the ramshackle condition of the house he inherited from his dad was any indication.

Still, as unfortunate as these are stories are, Gary Graham’s was the worst, being that Johnny Grimes had known him since he was a kid, even considered him a friend, albeit at times, a very difficult one. Who wouldn’t be after the childhood he’d endured? Oh, not that he’d ever once mentioned it in all the years Johnny had known him, no sir. But word gets around quickly in Wilsonville, and Johnny gradually learned he’d lived in a bunch of foster homes after he was born and finally was adopted when he was five, but the mother was an alcoholic and the father, a ne’er-do-well traveling salesman, was on the road most of the time, with very little to show for it. They lived just down the street from the Grimes family, and while Johnny knew his mother was strict, which might imply she cared for him, like most alcoholics, she somehow had no idea what his life with them was like, or how she could make it better for him, leaving him pretty much to his own devices, which mostly meant playing by himself out in the yard, or up alone in his room.

It was always sports sports sports with them when they were kids, especially baseball, but Gary never participated in the neighborhood games, though Johnny’d ask him to time and time again until he finally gave up. He never really learned how and where Gary spent his time when he wasn’t in school. He was just never around. Johnny always spoke up for him when people talked about him behind his back, which was the only thing they could do. They’d never say it to his face, him being so massive and all. Massive is the only word for him. He’d had a lot of baby fat on him when he was younger, but even then, he was strong, as he proved time and time again in any gym or recess activities he was forced to unwillingly participate in, and, not only that, he was fast, beating all challengers in any speed races they made him run during gym class. It was hard to believe anyone that big could move so fast. In short, he was a natural athlete. Because he was the biggest kid in the class (if not the whole school), gym teachers picked on him, making him wrestle, rope climb, or throw a ball against their favorites, assuming he’d be humiliated. Instead, it backfired. It was no contest, he won easily against all challengers. And as he grew older, he shed the fat so sudden-like it was as if he’d been wearing a fat suit up to that point. He was now muscle on muscle, never having or having to lift a weight. One of the gym teachers, who was also the varsity football coach, was salivating just thinking about what he could do with him on the team. But Gary showed no interest, no matter how many times the coach and Johnny begged him to come out for the team.

Around that time, the police were at Gary’s house so often, Johnny’s parents didn’t want him associating with Gary any longer, worried that the blowback from him doing so might somehow affect the course of his future, which they were constantly worrying about. Johnny didn’t think this was fair, as, like most kids his age, Johnny never gave his future much thought at the time, and, to be honest, the few times he did, he didn’t think it looked too bright anyway.

Then suddenly, Gary’s mother was institutionalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, just as he was starting high school, and his father, unable or unwilling to take care of him, never returned from his weekly business trip. It was thought he’d moved away to parts unknown, as no one ever heard from or saw him again. As a result, with no guardian, Gary was also about to be institutionalized. Johnny didn’t dare ask his parents to let him live with them, and none of the town’s churches, including his, would help. He couldn’t believe no one would take him in. If no one did, being too old to likely be adopted, he would become a ward of the state and spend the remainder of his adolescence at “The Home”, a county facility for wayward boys. That was, in fact, where he stayed the first few nights until a more permanent situation could be found.

At this critical juncture, help, though not entirely altruistic, arrived in the person of Coach Jenkins. Gary could live with him, no strings attached until he finished high school. Married with no children and always wanting a son, it seemed a win-win situation. Some of the barber shop wags may have been skeptical of the coach’s motives but were as happy as anyone when Gary showed up for JV football practice that fall. Played sparingly that season while he got the hang of things, the few times he got in (mostly in crucial situations), he made the most of it, bulling into the endzone from five yards out to win one game and stuffing an opposing runner on a goal-line stand in another.

He was a man among boys physically, if not mentally. He quickly became a good teammate and a great football player, the greatest in that area’s history, not to mention Wilsonville High School football. And State Champs said it all! As a middle guard, he knocked over hefty linemen like bowling pins, often getting to the runner right as the quarterback handed it off to him. But it was at fullback he became a holy terror, with his chiseled 232 lbs. and immense strength (with his shoulders, humped like a bull’s, he was literally capable of bending iron bars), and was as fast as anyone on any defenses in the league. Defenders hung off him like sheets on a clothesline flapping in the breeze, if not already having been run through and stomped over. He carried the ball the old-fashioned way, cradling it in both arms in front of him, and you couldn’t pry it loose with a crowbar. And Johnny Grimes (no lightweight himself at 225 lbs.) had been honored to pave the way for him to get a full head of steam from his tackle spot, not that he often needed it, usually getting a face full of turf for his efforts, having been trampled over by Gary on his way to pay dirt. He looked as if he didn’t even need to wear a helmet, if he could even find one big enough to fit him properly.

But while he became well-known, he still kept pretty much to himself, and people, even Swede, a perpetual burr in anyone’s saddle, learned to leave him alone early on after snapping a towel at Gary’s posterior in the locker room after practice one day and getting himself jerked off the ground above his head with one hand for his efforts. ‘Let him take that pent-up anger out on his opponents,’ was Coach Jenkins’ thought when he heard about it. He admonished everyone on the team to leave him alone. Not only didn’t he have to ask twice, he needn’t have asked any of them once.

Lest it be forgotten, there was a fourth star on the team, the sole non-backfield member, who was perhaps the strangest of them all. His name was Paul Brennan, a 167- pound pulling guard and middle linebacker. He was a workout demon, running up and down the bleachers at Billie stadium year-round in work boots, with not an ounce of fat on him and the look of the zealot in his eye. Purportedly mild-mannered off the field, he was a silent assassin on it, flying around to make bone-jarring tackles (breaking several helmets in the process) and crushing blocks well down the field, picking off impediments one by one as Pierre or Gary tailed closely behind him, their escort to the end zone. He was the quiet leader of the group, the most respected and dreaded, and the unquestioned captain of the team, though because of his size, it seemed difficult to fathom why at first glance. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had Gary Graham playing in front of him, anchoring the middle of the defensive line and controlling the line of scrimmage almost single-handedly. When Coach Jenkins gave an order, Paul could be counted on to enforce it. Johnny Grimes saw it up close and personal, so to speak. Well, actually, he didn’t really see it because his job was to engage the defensive end by any means necessary so Paul could go around him and pull for Joseph on a sweep, and it happened so fast that often by the time he had looked over to see if he’d done his job correctly, Paul was already gone.

* * *

The original Fearsome Foursome (except for Gary) were as close-knit on the field as off it, and even Gary joined the frat they formed with a couple of other motorcycle crazies named Marty Modifari and Greg Zimmer, their ostensible purpose being to raise hell both in school (the rare times they were all there) and out, where they threw weekend beer blasts, and rumbled with frats from neighboring towns, often hanging out at Greg Zimmer’s father’s auto parts place near the high school.

None of the backfield trio were at their high school graduation, Joseph and Swede because they never graduated, Gary because he had no family to see him graduate, even though Coach Jenkins was hurt by that because he was going anyway. Paul graduated in the middle of his class though it was common knowledge he was the smartest guy around.

Joseph and Swede both stayed in town after school doing much of nothing, while Gary, with Coach Jenkins pulling some strings and calling in several favors just to get him noticed, had gotten a full ride at the University of Nebraska, a national powerhouse at the time. No one questioned his motives for taking Gary in after that. It had worked out just fine for both of them. He was rumored to have done pretty well, making All-American at fullback as a freshman, in fact, though it wasn’t mentioned in the Wilsonville Bee, most likely because he’d only lasted one season before he half-killed someone in a bar fight shortly after being honored, and was banished permanently from the team, All-American or not. He came home with his tail between his legs and more pissed off than ever.

Paul Brennan was indeed an especially talented and intelligent individual. No one heard much from him after he graduated high school, though several crazy rumors surfaced from time to time: that he was studying to be a doctor, that he’d entered a monastery in Kentucky, that he’d become a demolitions expert and was working in Alaska, finally, even joined a commune, all plausible scenarios.

Whatever their situations, it seemed the Fearsome Foursome was no more.