Prologue
Aroostook Almanac, available in Bangor, Houlton and Presque Isle for 10 cents a copy.
Late spring this year will be marked by cosmic drama as a rare alignment marks the changing of the seasons. In mid-June, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be visible at twilight moving steadily together in the western sky. It’s a rare grouping of planets that began two years ago and which will culminate on June 21, the summer solstice. The coinciding of the solstice and the planetary gathering will not occur again for nearly a hundred years and is considered a marvel by both astrological and scientific standards. Those with mystical proclivities will recall that ancient civilizations regarded planetary groupings as a show of force from the gods. Those with more scientific leanings will enjoy the chance to observe the cosmic landscape as it has not been seen since the era of Vikings.
In 1912, the stretch of land that would someday be called Mulberry was not yet established. The rugged, mountainous region near the northern tip of Maine was mainly a resting point for loggers. These men were mostly French Canadians, hired to clear swaths of land near the border and to prepare the timber for the long journey south.
These were the lumberjacks of lore — rugged, hard men who worked the woods by day, drank and fought at night. Most spoke English, though it was fragmented and clipped. When they came to the township that would later be known as Mulberry, it usually meant a day to rest tired muscles, to drink at the saloon and to fish in the chain of lakes that surrounded the area.
The afternoon of June 21, 1912 was unlike any other in the small oasis in the Maine woods. Woodsmen were loud with song and bickering inside the saloon that occupied the bottom floor of Tookey’s Inn. Canadian and American currency mingled as the men paid for showers and shaves, bought bottles of booze and played poker with local farmers who bluffed poorly. The wide room smelled of pipe smoke, sweat and whiskey. A disoriented wanderer through this anachronistic township might have believed the year was 1812 rather than a century later.
By 8:30 p.m., the sky had darkened to a deep blue and most of the shadows had vanished. Pale stars twinkled in the moonless sky and the temperature never dipped below 55 degrees. The air was thick with mosquitoes and black flies and night birds seemed particularly agitated.
At Tookey’s, a mood of merriment had given way to a collective gloom that manifested itself in mutterings and a few fistfights. Card games turned ugly. Arm wrestling bouts turned into brawls. Nobody paused to wonder why the normally congenial men found themselves averse to the company they kept.
At 9 o’clock, a Frenchman was thrown through a window and then beaten as he lay bleeding in the gravel outside. The barman who tried to intercede was jumped by a pair from the same group and pummeled until he was unconscious.
A cocker spaniel that ran into the bar, barking and snarling, was seized and picked up by the biggest and strongest of the woodsmen, a 45-year-old Canadian named Francois Robitaille, who raised the yelping animal above his head and then brought it down with frightening force upon his upraised knee. A collective gasp and then a brief silence followed the sharp, explosive sound of the animal’s spine snapping. The cocker spaniel twitched and quivered and a milky string of blood dripped from its snout. Robitaille, with forearms and biceps bulging beneath a red, woolen shirt, hurled the dog across the bar where the carcass crashed through long rows of liquor bottles before smashing into a mirror on the other side.
The killing of the cocker spaniel was particularly troubling because Francois Robitaille was known as a gentle man. He had a special affinity for critters and once kept a raccoon as a pet after rescuing the animal from a washout.
A year back, when Francois was running a crew up near Van Buren, they had come across a dying fawn in an area where the land turned marshy. The work had become more difficult because no maps had shown these spongy areas — the lumber here was soft and there were disagreements over what to take and what to leave.
Francois, who once ordered his men to keep working after one of them lost half a foot to an axe blade, came to a stop before the struggling doe and ignored his men as they gathered around him. He bent and scooped the animal into his arms, walking away with it solemnly, like a pall bearer. He lowered his six-foot-seven inch frame down onto a fallen tree, cradled the fawn’s head in his lap, and stroked its fur as it died.
The men stood in silence, leaning on axes, meal bags slung over their shoulders. Those who were wearing hats removed them. One began to pray under his breath, detected someone looking at him, cleared his throat. A few of the men later swore that tears glistened in the big man’s eyes as he watched the fawn die in his arms. Others refuted that idea and at least one scrap resulted from the debate.
In either case, it was particularly troubling to see Francois Robitaille break the back of a 30 pound cocker spaniel the night of June 21, 1912 in Tookey’s Inn. And after the deed was done, the big man turned his hot gaze from table to table, daring anyone to question him. Under normal circumstances, that gaze would have been greeted by averted eyes and the heaviest of silences from brutish, but wise men.
Things were far from normal this night. A short but bearish man by the name of Claude Desjardins decided that he would be the one to call Francois on this brutal display. It wasn’t that Desjardins particularly liked dogs. He was a bluenose from New Brunswick and it was well known that Desjardins would butcher a puppy and feed it to his mother if it meant a few pennies in his pocket. He was also a bit of a coward who ducked out of danger whenever possible and then made up wild tales of heroics and bravery.
But tonight, as silence filled Tookey’s for the first time all day, the 19-year-old jumped from his chair, knocking it over just a few feet away. A glass danced back and forth on the table before tumbling and breaking on the wooden floor. Desjardins hitched up his grungy, green pants, spat upon the floor, licked the entire length of his greasy mustache and leveled a finger at Francois Robitaille.
“You sonoma bitch. Whatchoo do dat for, you big fugging bastard? Cog sugger. Why you kill dat dog?”
At that, Francois grinned. And as fond as the woodsmen were of fisticuffs, they were not eager to seen the tiny Nova Scotian ripped to pieces by the gentle giant gone bad. And that surely would have happened had Rodney Saucier not, at that precise moment, appeared in the doorway pale, trembling, bleeding and half naked.
Saucier was 62 and easily the oldest of the woodsmen who typically came through the town that would someday be Mulberry. He was tall and thin with an almost artistic, gray mustache. Saucier was the funniest of them, the smartest and the best storyteller the men had ever encountered. He was also calm, stoic and as emotionally sturdy as any man could be.
Only tonight, he was a quivering, blubbering and babbling mess.
The business of the cocker spaniel and the likely demise of Desjardins forgotten, the men rushed to Saucier, eager to learn what nastiness had reduced him to this state. They forced a shot of whiskey into him, offered him a hit of the pipe and shook him by the shoulders.
The man only babbled nonsense.
“M-m-my mother,” he said, squatting on the floor, hugging his knees with both arms. “For hours. Hours! She been chasing me for hours with that long, brown strap she like to beat me wit’. Oh, she was growling and laughing and...she moved so damn fast through the woods!”
Of course, Saucier’s mother had been dead for decades. As far as any of them could remember, she had died when Saucier was ten years old. But there was no consoling the man. The normally slow and deliberate speech was replaced by the staccato stammering of a frightened child. Saucier insisted his mother, “dressed in that old, wool cloak, and her hands all gnarled and strong” had pursued him through the woods at Olive Hill where he’d been trying to spook loose some partridge. She clawed him, bit him, slapped him and pushed him down as he tried to flee.
“I don’t know when I came to the road, but I fell onto it, crying and screaming and I wouldn’t open my eyes. I ain’t sorry to admit it, neither. I could feel her breath on my face and it smelled like rhubarb. I could hear her giggling in my ear and then her lips...then her lips...”
There was an earnest debate over whether someone should slug old man Saucier to put him out for the night. They liquored him up instead and he eventually slept under a bar stool.
Rodney Saucier’s encounter with his dead mother was not the strangest thing to happen in northern Maine that night. Francois Robitaille’s deadly assault on the dog was not, either. It was hard to quantify the strangeness. Few people tried.
Ovilda Gerhaty, the 17-year-old daughter of a preacher, came to the township from St. Agatha that night and gave herself to three woodsmen, one-by-one. Gerhaty had never entertained the idea of losing her virginity in such a fashion. She had not thought about it much at all; not until the sun went down and the air smelled so sweet and she fancied she heard murmuring behind her wherever she went.
Gerhaty returned home at midnight and faced the wrath of her father. She was sore between her legs and her crotch had been dripping for hours. After the beating, she hobbled to the tub, drew some water and then slit her wrists with her father’s razor.
St. Agatha had a population of 300 then which was huge by the standards of the townships around it. Greater numbers didn’t mean greater strangeness. Just more of it.
Everett Meade, the wealthiest man north of Houlton, hanged himself in his barn after waking from a nap on the porch. He’d had the most dreadful dream. In it, his dead wife stood over him, dropping beetles onto his face and reminding him what he had done to their 10-year-old daughter all those years ago — the night he got really drunk at the grange hall. Everett woke up, shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He then wandered off to hang himself with the kind of forethought and precision that had made him rich.
Amos Duprey burned his house down because he was sure there was something underneath it he needed to have. He watched with hypnotic calm as flames devoured the farmhouse he had saved all his life to build. When the last of the walls came down in thunderous, blackened heaps, Amos Duprey tried to remember what he had been searching for. It wouldn’t come to him. After an hour of considering in the smoke clogged air, he decided it was pointless. He had destroyed his beautiful home and now he could not remember why.
Sonny LeMasse, teenage son of a wealthy lumber man, spent a sinful hour making unrestrained love to his older sister. It was something he had dreamed of many nights for the past two years. And it was wonderful how she gave herself to him.
In the throes of his orgasm, he screamed her name and gazed into her beautiful eyes. Only it wasn’t Sandra LeMasse, age 19, who lay beneath him. It was a dead and reeking goat he had apparently strangled in a fit of erotic insanity.
Robin Baxter, the town dentist in Frenchville, came face to face with a man he had killed seven years ago in a medicinal experiment gone awry. The man was a blackened, grotesque horror. And mean. The man pinched Baxter with rotted, puffy fingers. He kneed Baxter in the groin. He called Baxter vile names. Ultimately, he instructed the dentist to drink from a can of lye and Baxter complied, if only to make the rotting man go away.
Catherine Corriveau threw her children’s kittens into the wood stove and giggled as she listened to them screech and thrash. Mark Gellineau put ground glass in his nine-year-old son’s food. Tony Baril, a school teacher, dug up the remains of his mother, father and little brother and burned their bones right there in the family plot.
It was collective insanity in a straight slash through a small swath of northern Maine. Fourteen people died, through suicides and strange mishaps. Completely sane men and women awoke from dreams that they had visited with long dead loved ones or bitter enemies. Upright men committed atrocities that would shame their family names for generations.
The strangeness lingered, though the intensity of it diminished. For days following the solstice, people reported feeling out of sorts. Things felt off center, that was all. The world looked the same, but felt different. They felt pressed upon, influenced, by forces they could neither see nor hear, smell nor touch.
No one noted that the forces of dementia appeared to overtake people in a straight line across the northern tip of the state. To do so, a person would have had to acknowledge the phenomenon and to reveal his own indiscretions. It was best not to talk about what madness had befallen them for that short time. It was best to forget about it and not to wonder.
Some forces of the world could not be grasped by the intellect of mortal man and it was foolish and dangerous to try.