“It happens,” said the server.“I’ll bring you another.”
“There’s no need.We’re done.Just the check, please.”
The server took a leather holder from his apron, the check already in place, and stood it far away from the spilt wine.Angel and I did not speak as I settled up, or as we left the restaurant.Only outside did Angel repeat his question.
“What else do you remember?”
“Falling,” I said.“I remember falling.”
Chapter 27
We had spoken enough for one night, and I knew the ride back to Portland would be quiet.
I’d parked on Orient Street.Only as we reached the car did I spot the bar on the opposite side: Long’s Ale House.A neon sign read: HOME OF THEIRISHWELCOME!
“One for the road?”I said to Angel.
“Seriously?”
“A soda.Out of curiosity.”
Inside, Long’s was quiet.I counted four customers, one server, and one bartender who, when last I’d seen him, was wearing the uniform of a prison guard.The bartender glared at us.
“You!”said Joe Long.“Get the fuck out of my bar.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“What about the Irish welcome?”asked Angel.
Long produced a heavy walking stick with a knob on the end and placed it on the bar.
“Here’s your welcome,” he said.“Come get it.”
“I can see why someone shot him,” said Angel, as we climbed in the car, light one anticipated soda each.
“At least he hasn’t changed,” I said.“In a volatile world, that’s kind of reassuring.”
II
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Marcus Tullius Cicero,Philippics,9.10
Chapter 28
The Spero School was located on the site of a former National Guard training camp, which utilized buildings left over in turn from the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, better known as Trappists.The Trappists had raised a monastery on the plantation in the 1950s, intending it as a long-term proposition, since they constructed their church and a pair of other buildings from stone, not wood.Unfortunately, life in Somerset County proved too much even for the monks, plaguing them with insects from early summer into late fall, and tormenting them with ice and snow for winter and much of spring.Reluctantly, the Trappists admitted defeat in the 1980s, deconsecrating and abandoning the monastery, with the abbot opining that, with The Plains plantation, they had mistaken Edom for Eden, Edom being the biblical template for desolate wildernesses.
In the late 1990s, the Maine National Guard, undeterred by desolation—viewing it, in fact, as a means of toughening up doughball recruits—invested federal and state funds to transform the existing buildings into barracks, kitchens, classrooms, and indoor firing ranges, adding new structures as required.They succeeded only in creating a money pit, one that enriched a handful of local contractors to a degree still spoken of in hushed tones in The Plains, but failed to serve its intended purpose beyond a few years of uncomfortable drill weekends and two-week summer training camps, exercises so legendarily unpleasant that they led to a noticeable drop-off in recruits completing the standard eight-year enlistment period.
And so the old edifices might have been allowed to decay, or return to nature except, in the second decade of the new century, the property was acquired at a knockdown price bySpero School LLC, registered in Wilmington, Delaware, home to countless shady companies.Private money raised the existing infrastructure to the minimum level regarded as acceptable for a residential school, and so a location that had beaten monks from a reclusive order at ease with hardship and fasting, and led to threats of legal action from members of the US military, was deemed an appropriate place to house troubled youths.Spero was where children went when the traditional educational establishment failed them—or if you were the adult responsible for enrolling them, where children went when they failed the establishment, educational or otherwise.Those who could not or would not conform would instead be reformed.They would be laid low with firm but fair discipline before being encouraged to rebuild themselves in a new image, one more conducive to the requirements of a conservative American society.Yes, it would sometimes be challenging and tough, but these young people were themselves challenging and tough.While it would take a lot to break them down, it would be worth it in the end.They could handle it.They would not have been at Spero otherwise.
The boy’s name was Anthony Marshall, and he was not tough: challenging and complicated, yes, and prone to violent tantrums, but not tough, which was unfortunate for him.It meant he had all the flaws required of a candidate for correction without the physical, psychological, or emotional resources to withstand the process.He was fifteen years old and there were Department of Education commissioners who had seen the insides of fewer schools.His parents were decent people, if of a narrowminded, deeply religious stripe, and had tried their best with their son, but for them he possessed a disposition inimical to guidance or household chastisement.Tell Anthony to turn right and he’d turn left.Warn him that to go left would mean being bitten by a snake, and snakebitten he would become.He was a lodestone for boredom and distraction, and out of this came destructiveness, yet there was no vindictiveness to his actions and his contrariness brought him no pleasure.
Anthony had three siblings—two older, one younger—whowere as different from him as sheep from a coyote, and as their happiness and development were increasingly threatened by this creature of the id with which they were forced to share a home, the decision was taken by Anthony’s mother and father to send him to Spero.If that experiment failed, the remaining options included a course of medication that would effectively zombify him, or so they had been informed.He would, his mother feared, end up like the Nilsens’ boy, who was forty-three, weighed three hundred pounds, didn’t work, lived in his parents’ basement, and was once arrested for taking a dump on the floor of the local McDonald’s.But medicating Anthony would also be an admission that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, and he had come out of the womb defective.If that was the case, would the ultimate blame lie not with him but his sires?If he was impaired, so also must his parents be, and those deficiencies could only be regarded as a judgment fromGod.
Had they been more enlightened, the Marshalls might have sought a more appropriate educational environment for Anthony than Spero, but they were at their wits’ end, ground down by fights, suspensions, expulsions, and a fear of God.Also, they could not shake the view, or abandon the hope, that Anthony was “acting up,” and under a firmer hand he might yet emerge from this adolescent storm as a young man to be proud of, or at least one that did not take dumps on the floors of fast-food restaurants.Ultimately, what the Marshalls wished for was a cure.But sometimes there is no cure, only ways of coping; to accept this is hard for everyone and impossible for a few.The Marshalls, regrettably for all involved, fell into the second category, which made them acutely susceptible, because the easiest people to whom to sell hope are balding men and desperate parents.The Spero School dangled a hook, and the Marshallsbit.
But what of Anthony himself?He had not been consulted about his transfer to Spero, because nobody saw the point.Anthony would only have objected, or tried to flee, resulting in more trauma and greater embarrassment for the family.While his parents watched, Anthony was bundled into a van in the dead of night by three male strangers and driven two hundredmiles north, into the Maine wilderness.Anthony had been terrified, but then, Anthony was always terrified.That was what nobody grasped, and what he had never been able to explain: Anthony Marshall existed in a perpetual state of dread.The world was beyond his comprehension, just as he appeared to be beyond the comprehension of the world, and what we do not understand, we fear.
