Hamilton Stark Read online

  HAMILTON

  STARK

  RUSSELL BANKS

  for Mary—still, and again

  Epigraph

  “The individual has a host of shadows, all of which resemble him and for the moment have an equal claim to authenticity.”

  —Kierkegaard, Repetition

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 By Way of an Introduction to the Novel, This or Any

  Chapter 2 The Matrix: In Which Certain Geographic, Historic, Economic & Ethnic Factors Get Described and Thence Enter the Drama; Also Flora & Fauna & Other Environmental Marginalia; Some Local Traditions; A Fabled Place & an Early Murder There

  Chapter 3 Three Tales from His Childhood

  Chapter 4 Her Mother Speaks to Her of a Man She Calls “Your Father”

  Chapter 4 Addendum A

  Chapter 4 Addendum B

  Chapter 4 Addendum C

  Chapter 5 Back and Fill: In Which the Hero’s Ditch, Having Got Dug and the Pipe’s Having Been Laid Therein, Gets Filled; Including a Brief Digression Concerning the Demon Asmodeus, along with Certain Other Digressions of Great and Small Interest

  Chapter 6 Chapter Beginning as “His Second Wife Speaks of a Man She Calls ‘Your Father’ (from a Tape Recording)”

  Chapter 7 Ausable Chasm

  Chapter 8 100 Selected, Uninteresting Things Done and Said by Hamilton Stark

  Chapter 9 The Uroboros: Being a Further Declension of the Central Image

  Chapter 10 Graveside

  Chapter 11 An End

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Works

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  By Way of an Introduction to the Novel, This or Any

  IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO ME to write a novel with A. As the prototype for its hero, Hamilton Stark, until fairly recently, a year ago this spring, when I drove the forty miles from my home in Northwood across New Hampshire to his home outside the town of B. Upon written invitation (via post card, as was his habit), I was on my way to visit him for the afternoon and possibly the evening. The post card read:

  4/12/74. If you don’t show up here Sat. with a fifth of CC and a case of Molson I’ll stop up your plumbing with my toe. Number 5 has gone back to Mother and I’ve gone back to my old habits. Bring me a box of 30.06 rifle shells too. We’ll do some shooting. A.

  Typically, he had typed his message, and the four-color photograph printed on the reverse side was of a building he had helped construct, in this case a Tampax factory in the southwestern part of the state. A. was a pipefitter with a wide range of practical engineering skills, and on that job he had been the foreman for all the plumbing, heating and air-conditioning systems.

  After leaving my home around noon, I stopped in Concord, the state capital, and as instructed, purchased a fifth of Canadian Club whiskey and a case of Molson ale, which also happens to be Canadian. A. loved practically everything Canadian and thought Canada a truly “civilized” country, especially its far northern regions, where no one lives. “Up there,” he once told me, “there’s so many rocks and so few people, the people act like rocks. There aren’t even any goddamn trees up there, once you get far enough north! Now that’s class,” he pronounced.

  I had nodded my head in agreement, as was my habit, but I wasn’t actually sure—wasn’t sure that I agreed with him, of course, but also was not sure that he had meant what he had said, that he hadn’t been criticizing the Canadian landscape and people rather than praising them. I didn’t bother to pursue the subject; I knew my confusion at his ambiguous tone would only have been compounded by the further, inclusive, ambiguously hostile pronouncements that he would have heaped upon my head. He was like that. Once he perceived a crack in his listener’s confidence in the meaning and intent of his remarks, he gleefully hurled himself like a boulder against the crack until he had split the egg of assured understanding wide open and had it lying in pieces like Humpty Dumpty at the bottom of the wall. And like a fallen Humpty Dumpty, the listener always felt foolish and guilty, as if the fall and the consequent shattering were all his own fault, a just punishment for his exceeding pride.

  In many ways, A. was a peculiar man.

  I was saying, though, that I had left Concord, and a half-hour later, as I was driving past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stovepipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or half-covered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now in this generation to scrubby choke-cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap-toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank, gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car—as I drove through this melancholy scene and thus neared the home of A., it occurred to me for the first time that I might write a novel with A. as the prototype for its hero.

  I will tell you how I arrived at such a notion.

  It fascinated and amazed me that a person born into squalor such as this could grow to his adulthood in that same neighborhood and yet could possess qualities which, upon close examination, could be seen as both wisdom and passion.

  How was that possible? I asked myself.

  And then I asked myself if A. possessed these qualities (wisdom and passion), in fact, or if he were merely peculiarly mad. But on the other hand, I countered, even if he were peculiarly mad, and if his peculiar madness, which sometimes took forms that could be construed as wisdom and passion, happened to be a condition necessary for the man’s mere survival—after having been born and raised in social circumstances that ordinarily dun a human being to death, turning him wormy with passive, quiet desperation long before he reaches adolescence—why, then madness was indeed wisdom, and to cling to such madness was passion!

  That way, spiritual survival became, in my eyes, self-transcendence, practically an evolutionary move on the part of the organism. The question of love, its mere possibility, a question that had haunted me in my long consideration of A.’s character, thereby became wholly irrelevant. He was beyond offering love, above it and superior to it—at least the kind of love that I, from my indulgent background, had learned long ago to value in myself and seek from others.

  This was, for me, a welcome series of insights, and I felt greatly relieved, as if from a dreaded, demeaning chore, like cleaning out a septic tank. I thought: Any person whose life provides us with that particular relief is worth writing a novel about. For who among us has not wished to be freed of his need to love and be loved?

  It was with considerable excitement, then, that I approached the turnoff from the paved to a dirt road, practically a trail, that led through a quarter-mile of approximately flat and unkempt fields to A.’s home. The fields on both sides of the deeply rutted road, lined with slowly collapsing stone walls, had retreated to furzy bushes and scrambling tangles of wild blackberries, sumac, and poison ivy. Scattered over the fields in no discernible pattern were ten or twelve rusting shells of windowless cars and trucks, some of them further decomposed and more nearly destroyed than others, also several farm vehicles—harrows, plows, cultivators—a one-handled wheelbarrow, an outhouse lying awkwardly on its side, rusty bedsprings and swollen mattresses spitting yellowish stuffing onto the ground, a pile of fifty-gallon oil drums, an engine block and a transmission housing, both lying atop
a child’s crushed red wagon which lay atop an American Flyer sled in splinters, next to a refrigerator (with the door invitingly open, I noticed), and a red, overstuffed couch which had been partially destroyed by fire. None of this wreckage was new to me. I had observed, enumerated, and reflected on all of it many times, both alone and with friends, especially with my friend C. (about whom more later).

  The fields and the road were all part of A.’s property, but a stranger, noting the broad, carefully maintained lawns, gardens, house and outbuildings which spread out from the closed gate at the end of the cluttered fields, would surely infer two separate and probably quarreling owners, one for the fields and badly maintained roadway, another for the house and grounds. But that was not the case. A. was fastidious and energetic, even compulsive, about the maintenance of the house and the yards, gardens and outbuildings that surrounded it. The region that lay beyond the white, iron rail fence, however, he cared for not at all, even though some seven hundred acres of that region was his private property, had been deeded to him with the houses and outbuildings by his parents.

  Actually, it was fortunate that so much of the world beyond the fence was A.’s private property, because for years he had been tossing his garbage over that fence, throwing his rubbish, all his used-up tools, vehicles, furniture, even his old newspapers, over the fence and into the field. Every now and then, perhaps once a year, depending on domestic changes, he rolled out his bulldozer, took down a section of the fence, and shoved the rotting garbage and trash roughly toward the main road and away from the house, to make more room near the fence. It was a casual operation. The vehicles stayed pretty much where he had left them, and he usually left them where they had got stopped, either because of running aground on a huge boulder, of which the field had an abundance, stalling or coughing out of gas, getting stuck in the mucky, tangled ground, or ramming into another car or truck from a previous year’s trash. He used his vehicles until they were too weary and broken to drive any farther than to this odd burial ground, and he always tried to make that last drive as exciting as possible. Then he would hitchhike twenty miles to Concord, where there were half a dozen automobile dealers, and buy a new vehicle, usually a different type from the one he had just interred—a pickup truck if last year’s had been a sedan, a station wagon if a convertible. Because of the intense way he drove them, his new vehicles rarely lasted longer than a year.

  Similarly, whenever he disposed of furniture, tools, garden implements, waste or rubbish of any kind, he took from the act whatever last pleasure he could wring from it—making bets, and usually winning them, that he could lift and throw a sofa over the fence, or hurl a transmission housing from his pickup bed onto a pile of old toys, and then an engine block onto the transmission housing; or that he could carry a refrigerator in a broken wheelbarrow for a quarter of a mile over a rough surface under a hot August sun. Afterward, to complete the act, he liked to sit up on his porch, usually in the admiring company of a friend or one of the local adolescent boys he permitted to hang around him, and while guzzling Canadian whiskey and ale, fire his rifle at the new trash. He shot his rifle at many things, animate and inanimate, but he always seemed to enjoy it most when he was shooting at the things he had used up and thrown out.

  On this particular day, a blotchy, glutinous gray afternoon with a cold rain lightly falling, as I neared the gate where the road ended and A.’s wide, paved driveway began, I noticed a high, wobbling stack of what appeared to be new furniture—a Formica-topped kitchen table and four chairs, a double bed with bookcase headboard and matching dresser, several table lamps, and two or three cardboard cartons filled with pastel articles of clothing and possibly curtains and bedding. This carefully constructed stack, with all the articles balanced and counterbalanced, was located a few feet from the fence and about twenty feet from the roadway, and I had never seen it before. I assumed, therefore, that these were his fifth wife’s leavings, her effects, an assumption which later proved correct.

  I got out of my car, walked up to the gate, unlatched it, and swung it open. I could see A. in the distance, sitting on the porch of the house at the far side, swinging slowly in the wood glider. Neither of us waved or signaled to the other. That was customary. I returned to my car, drove it through the gate, got out again, and closed the gate behind me, as I knew I was supposed to do, and then drove up the long, curving driveway past the smooth, freshly greening lawns to the house, and parked next to the house on the side opposite the porch, where the driveway ended, facing the entrance to the small barn, which under A.’s care had been converted after his father’s death into a modern garage and workshop. Behind the house loomed the humpbacked profile of the mountain, Blue Job, adding its shadow to the day’s gray light and casting the darker light like a negating sun across the house and onto the fields in front.

  It occurs to me that I really needn’t bother with all this. Certainly not at this point. Perhaps later in the narrative such descriptions will be of significance, but here, now, I’m merely attempting to explain how I came to write a novel with a hero whose real-life prototype is my friend, my own “hero,” as a matter of fact. And though that notion had occurred to me barely moments before, by the time I had parked my car and had started walking around the front of the house to greet A. at the porch, I had already completely forgotten the idea. I was worrying over whether or not I had properly secured the gate at the end of the driveway.

  We spent the remainder of the day and most of the evening cheerfully drinking, first out on the porch, where until dark we sat and took turns shooting at the furniture A. and his fifth wife had bought as newlyweds the previous November. After dark, we lurched into the house and sprawled on the floor of the kitchen (the chairs and table were all in the field, ripped apart by high-powered rifle slugs), finishing the bottle of whiskey and the case of ale. I remember that A. had recently installed a central vacuum-cleaning system in the house, so that one could simply plug the hose into outlets located in the baseboard of every room without having to drag a heavy cannister or tank along from room to room, and he was quite proud of the system. He said to me, “I’ve got a dishwasher, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave oven that bakes a potato in forty-six seconds. And now I’ve got this vac’ system. Now, you tell me, what the hell do I need a woman for?”

  I said nothing. I was too drunk to speak clearly, and also, his question had seemed rhetorical.

  Then he said, “I can get laid when I want to get laid. And if the day ever comes when I can’t get it, it’ll only be because I don’t want it enough.”

  This last statement seemed wise to me then, and it does now, too.

  I was quite drunk, naturally, but I somehow got myself safely home, and that was the end of the day last spring when it first occurred to me to write a novel about A., or rather, about someone very much like A., so much like him that I would have to give him the name of Hamilton Stark, or A. would know that the novel was about him, a thing he would hate me for. I did not want A. to hate me. Luckily, he is no longer alive, or naturally, I would not be writing this introduction.

  (I should say that I believe he is no longer alive, and although technically he does not exist, that is, his body has never been located, it would certainly be strange and ironic if the publication of this novel brought him out of a hiding place. I can imagine the letter I would receive, postmarked in some tiny, far-northern Canadian village where he is thought of as a hermit:

  The only reason I’m not suing you is that a lawyer would cost me more than you could make from such a piece of crap as your so-called novel. Just know that if I ever run into you I’ll run right over you. You are an asshole. And a lousy writer too. You’re going to get everything you deserve, you faggot.

  And then, for the rest of my life, silence. Cold, stony silence. It would be a hard thing to bear.)

  It wasn’t until almost a full year later, a Sunday early in February of this year, that I again thought of writing about him. This is how it happene
d.

  I was in the neighborhood, as they say in New Hampshire when you are within ten miles of a place, photographing birds in winter scenery at a state park not far from A.’s home, and as it was still early in the afternoon when I finished, I decided to stop by for a brief visit. I rarely visited him unannounced or uninvited, but for reasons too vague and smokily intuitive to go into here, I decided that this time it would be permitted and perhaps even welcomed.

  When I arrived, I noticed immediately that he had parked his car in the driveway outside the garage, which was not his habit. At that time he was driving a pale green Chrysler. It was an airport limousine, an unusually long vehicle that he took considerable pride in being able to park wholly inside his garage. Swinging open the garage door, raising it like the curtain at a stage play and revealing the blunt green tail of an automobile that, like a dragon, seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the far, cavernous darkness of the converted barn, was an exquisite pleasure for him. As a matter of fact, on several occasions I myself, as the audience, had found the experience oddly satisfying and had broken spontaneously into applause.

  But on this day the car was parked outside the garage, and the garage door was locked. I walked quickly around to the side door at the porch, knocked, and then called. That door, too, when I tried it, was locked. It was a cold, diamond-clear day, with about eight inches of dry, week-old snow on the ground, and there were hundreds of footprints in the snow, most of them probably A.’s. But fresh prints could not be distinguished from week-old ones. A narrow path had been tramped from the porch down to the fence in front of the house, and on the other side of the fence was a waist-high pyramid of the last week’s garbage and trash, most of it frozen solid. Across the snow-covered, bumpy fields in front and into the woods behind the house and on either side were numerous chains of footprints—but it was impossible to tell when in the previous week any of the chains had been laid down. Beyond the woods hunched the mountain, mute, seeming almost smug.