Tale of the Taconic Mountains
by: Mike Romeling
All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblances to actual people, living or dead are entirely coincidental. The undead of course are on their own.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0624-4
© Mike Romeling 2012
All rights reserved
All wrongs forgiven
CHAPTER ONE
CEDAR FALLS
Mostly the mountain broods. That’s what folks said about it if they said anything at all. Indeed, exposing its north face toward the town of Cedar Falls, the mountain, except in high summer, showed mostly a shadowed and gloomy countenance to the town. Cedar Falls was nestled along the upper Bluejay River, a river born and fed by the two racing streams that cascaded around the flanks of the mountain to finally come clashing together in the eighty foot falls that gave the village its name and its last surviving paper mill. Few actually lived on the mountain and those who did were considered to have “gone queer” and had become something of an embarrassment to those in town who kept their noses stuck in the air.
Yet in truth there was little reason for the town dwellers to feel superior to their neighbors higher up the mountain because, after all, the town itself seemed to be dying. Everyone had said so at least once even if most of the time it was best not to dwell on it. If you did, the scars began to leap out at you. The remaining paper mill seemed not long for this world. Owner William Stark was so awash in EPA regulations that he’d been forced to lay off a third of his work force and spend money hand over fist trying to stay legal. In the meantime, he was drinking his stress and possibly his life away.
Gil Brady’s bowling alley was in trouble as well, but Gil’s fate will unfold slowly as it weaves its way strangely and tightly into the other threads of the odd and disturbing happenings in Cedar Falls in the coming months.
Then there were the buildings with boarded up windows or no windows at all. Three or four of them were haunted, as any child would have told you while his mother laughed tolerantly and explained the lure deserted houses offered to stray cats and wild raccoons. Once in a while, when some of the men were drinking hard, they’d talk about how every night you could hear blood-curdling cat fights and how the raccoons were totally stinking up some of the abandoned houses so badly you could smell them as you passed by on the road. Then they’d drink more beer and later might fetch their rifles, creep into one or two of the abandoned houses and “fire away at the bastards.” It was a grim business, and one more thing it was best not to dwell on afterwards. The town sheriff, Ron Bosley, eventually had quiet but firm conversations with these men until finally the practice stopped and the town’s animal control officer took over and had some success trapping the creatures alive.
But the worst scar—more like an open wound—was the closed school standing cold and empty on the outskirts of town. One rusting bicycle still stood in the metal rack as though waiting for the bell to ring, the doors to fling open, and all that exuberant young life to rush out and spread through the town like the bubbling river rapids. For a while the kids still used the playground behind the school but soon the grass turned to tall weeds and there were bugs and snakes.
The parents were both saddened and angry. Just seeing the closed school every day reminded them of Bennetsville, twenty miles down into the valley where their kids were now bussed to school. Not only were there separation anxieties to suddenly deal with, but also the frustration that their kids were at a disadvantage. During bad winter weather the buses wouldn’t come up to Cedar Falls. Then the parents would have to either keep the kids home or form car pools for the treacherous ride down into the valley. The same applied if their kids wanted to join after-school sports or other activities.
“They’re chicken shit in that cruddy town,” Gil Brady had once said, and that pretty much summed up the general feeling Cedar Falls residents had for Bennetsville, a feeling that stemmed chiefly from what folks in town called “the water problem.” This referred to the fact that Cedar Falls received nearly the entire runoff of water from the mountain and rarely did a year go by when the Bluejay River, running alongside the town, didn’t overflow its banks in the Spring. What followed would be dismal weeks of smelly mud, flooded basements, and whining sump pumps. All this could be avoided, it was generally agreed, if the chicken shits down in Bennetsville would let the water through their own town as God intended. But of course they wouldn’t because years ago, Bennetsville had built a dam to form Bennet Lake, a three mile stretch of water that brought in tourists and jobs and tax dollars.
There was supposedly an agreement between the two towns that Bennetsville would run as much water through their dam as possible in the Spring, but everyone knew it wasn’t happening as promised. The dollars rolled in to Bennetsville because the fishermen came in April to catch the rainbow trout and the bass and the pike. The tourists came to shop in overpriced boutiques and dine alfresco on the back decks of the restaurants that were quickly erected by the side of the lake. All of these folks were looking for clear water lapping placidly all the way up to the docks and up to the clean, rocky shoreline. They were definitely not looking for mud with creepy crabs crawling over dead snails and sunken beer cans. And so Bennetsville kept the lake high, raked in the dollars and smiled. Meanwhile Cedar Falls swept and pumped out the floodwaters amid curses and forlorn lamentations. There were official complains and petitions, but the county politicians knew which side their bread was buttered on and of course did nothing but pretend to be concerned.
Indeed, no one in Cedar Falls would ever quite forget about Homer Jebs either. People liked Homer, he worked hard when someone would give him some work, went to church most of the time, and never had a bad word for anyone. It could be overlooked, then, that Homer couldn’t so much as change a fuse without asking for help. “He’d be living in a cave if it weren’t for good neighbors,” folks said.
One Spring morning, Homer awoke to a torrential downpour and flooding that had already let three or four inches of water seep into his tiny house—a shack really—that had no basement. Homer decided to check the weather report on the radio to see how much worse things were going to get. As it turned out, they got a lot worse for Homer Jeb. He was still using some old decrepit coil heater that an old uncle had given him years before, a heater that should have been condemned long ago. He kept it on a table near his bed because he could never seem to get that room warm enough. His radio was beside the heater. When, in his early morning grogginess, he went to turn on the radio to check the forecast, he knocked both the radio and—far worse—the coil heater into the standing water, promptly zapping himself into the Great Beyond.
“You can chalk this one up to the bastards in Bennetsville,” Wesley Wheeler said not quite under his breath right in the middle of Homer’s funeral service. Wesley received his wife’s elbow in his ribs by way of a reply as the pipe organ moaned on interminably. But everyone agreed with him. Later at burial time, Mother Nature, in a final capricious act against a gentle soul, brought more torrential rain. The old tarp above the grave, a tarp in use now for one too many funerals, tore to shreds in the gusty winds. Before they could get Homer lowered down in a decent way, there was about as much water in the grave as had been on Homer’s floor.
When it was over, Father Francis Mancuso trudged his way down the dirt road that led from the cemetery back into town and turned left toward the Catholic Church. His gait seemed almost reluctant and weary, perhaps because the church was fast becoming another scar in the town, and that was heavier on his mind after the sad funeral. Attendance was down in church and so were the collections. Father Mancuso had been harboring the forlorn hope that hard times would draw the community closer together in faith and prayer. He still hoped and prayed for that, but lived in constant fear that someday soon he would get the dreaded letter from the Bishop telling him that his beloved Saint Joseph’s Parish would be closed and he would be sent off, perhaps to suffer the oblivion of being an assistant pastor in some suburban parish—God