Читать книгу Peyton Place - Grace Metalious - Страница 10

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Lucas Cross had lived in Peyton Place all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. Lucas did not know where his ancestors had come from originally, and this fact did not bother him at all, for he never thought of it. If he had been asked, he would have been dumfounded by the stupidity of such a question and, shrugging, would have replied, “We always lived right around here.”

Lucas was a woodsman of a now-and-then variety common to northern New England. Professional lumbermen regarded the forests with respect, knowing that the generations before them had abused the woods, felling them flat without a thought toward conservation and replanting, and approached them now with patience and precision. Men like Lucas looked on them as a precarious kind of security, a sort of padding to fall back on when one was given a shove by life. When all else failed and cash money was needed in a hurry, the task of “workin’ the woods” was always available. The lumbermen had nothing but contempt for men like Lucas, and assigned to him the secondary jobs of the lumbering trade: the stacking of logs on trucks, the fastening of chains and the unloading at the sawmills. In northern New England, Lucas was referred to as a woodsman, but had he lived in another section of America, he might have been called an Okie, or a hillbilly, or poor white trash. He was one of a vast brotherhood who worked at no particular trade, propagated many children with a slatternly wife, and installed his oversized family in a variety of tumble-down, lean-to, makeshift dwellings.

In an era of free education, the woodsman of northern New England had little or no schooling, and in many cases his employer was forced to pay him in cash, for the employee could not sign his own name to a check. What the woodsman knew, he knew by instinct, from listening to conversation or, rarely, from observation, and much of the time he was drunk on cheap wine or rotgut whisky. He lived in rickety wooden buildings which were covered on the outside with tar paper instead of clapboards, and his house was without water or sewerage. He drank, beat his wife and abused his children, and he had one virtue which he believed outweighed all his faults. He paid his bills. To be in debt was the one—and only—cardinal sin to men like Lucas Cross, and it was behind this fact that the small-town northern New Englander, of more settled ways and habits, hid when confronted with the reality of the shack dwellers in his vicinity.

“They’re all right,” the New Englander was apt to say, especially to a tourist from the city. “They pay their bills and taxes and they mind their own business. They don’t do any harm.”

This attitude was visible, too, in well-meaning social workers who turned away from the misery of the woodsman’s family. If a child died of cold or malnutrition, it was considered unfortunate, but certainly nothing to stir up a hornet’s nest about. The state was content to let things lie, for it never had been called upon to extend aid of a material nature to the residents of the shacks which sat, like running sores, on the body of northern New England.

Lucas Cross was different from many woodsmen in that he had a trade which he practiced when coaxed with liquor or bribed with outrageous sums of money. He was a skilled carpenter and cabinetmaker.

“Never saw anything like it in my life,” Charles Partridge had said, soon after Lucas had been persuaded to make some kitchen cabinets for Mrs. Partridge. “In came Lucas, not drunk, mind you, but he’d had a few. He had this folding yardstick that looked about as accurate to me as a two-dollar watch. Well, he sat and looked at our kitchen walls for a while, then he started in measuring and cussing under his breath, and after a time he began sawing and planing. The next thing I knew, he was done, and if I do say so myself, there are no finer-looking cabinets in any kitchen in Peyton Place. Look.”

The cabinets were made of knotty pine and they fitted perfectly in the spaces between the Partridges’ kitchen windows. They gleamed like satin.

Over a period of years, Lucas had done much of the interior “finish” work in the houses on Chestnut Street, and most of what he had not done had been done by his father.

“Good cabinetmakers, the Crosses,” said the people of the town.

“When they’re sober,” they amended.

“My wife wants Lucas to make her a buffet for the dining room when he gets through working the woods next.”

“She’ll have to sober him up first. Whatever money he makes in the woods, he’ll spend on one helluva drunk before he starts looking around for work again.”

“They’re all alike, those shackowners. Work for a while, drunk for a longer while, work and then drunk again.”

“They’re all right, though. Don’t do any harm that I can see. They pay their bills.”

Seth Buswell, in a rare philosophical mood, said, “I wonder why our woodsman drinks? One would surmise that he hasn’t the imagination to invent phantoms for himself from which he must escape. I wonder what he thinks about. Doubtless he has his hopes and dreams the same as all of us, yet it appears that all he ever dwells upon is liquor, sex and food, in that order.”

“Watch that kind of talk, old feller,” said Dr. Swain. “When you talk like that, the old Dartmouth education shows through.”

“Sorry,” said Seth elaborately and reverted to the patois of his people, the one hypocrisy which he consciously practiced. It might not be honest, this omitting of r’s and dropping of final g’s, but his father had made a barrel of money in spite of it, and had gained many votes because of it.

“Mebbe they’re a harmless crew at that, our woodsmen,” said Seth. “Sort of like tame animals.”

“Except Lucas Cross,” said Dr. Swain. “He’s a mean one. There’s something about him, something around the eyes, that rubs me the wrong way. He has the look of a jackal.”

“Lucas is all right, Doc,” said Seth comfortably. “You’re seein’ things.”

“I hope so,” said the doctor. “But I’m afraid not.”