The Winchesters Read online

  My great-great-grandfather expanded into making steam gauges, and then various kinds of steam pipe, and finally whole steam engines. By the time he died, in 1921, he had a big factory going and had made himself rich. He was the one who bought the land for the Winchester estate and built the first part of the big house, using a kind of stone that was quarried right around Everidge. The house was square, then: four rooms downstairs, four rooms upstairs, and some little rooms on the third floor for the servants and storage.

  After he died his son, my great-grandfather Edward, took over the mill and the house and everything. Automobiles were coming along then. He expanded into carburetors, and then electrical parts for cars—generators and so forth. He made even more money and expanded the mill and added a wing to the house with a ballroom in it, and guest rooms upstairs.

  His oldest son turned out to be a black sheep. He ran off to live in Paris and be a writer and a Bohemian, and spent all of his life trying to get money out of the family. So the mills and the house went to the second son, who was my grandfather. He was called Ernest, but nobody in the family ever called him anything but Skipper. That was because he loved boats and had twelve-metres and even raced one in the America's Cup trials once. He had a big yacht that he kept down in Rhode Island, even though by now he lived in Switzerland, where the taxes were lower.

  My grandfather put the rear wing on the house, with a new kitchen and flower room my grandmother wanted when she married him. He was the boss of the whole thing when the Depression came, and the townspeople always blamed him for a lot of what happened. When business went bad at that time, my grandfather shut the mill and laid off nearly everybody. The old people in Everidge remembered those days and would talk about them. They remembered eating nothing but potatoes for dinner night after night, and patching the holes in their shoes with cardboard because they couldn't afford to buy new ones. My grandfather said that he had to lay everybody off to save the business, and it's true that when times got better he hired them all back again. But the old people said he didn't have to do it, he could have kept the business going if he'd been willing to risk his own money in it.

  My dad was born in 1945. He was the oldest son, and by rights he would have become head of the family. But my dad was different from most of the Winchesters—different from most people. When he got out of college he told Skipper that he didn't want to spend his life sitting in that fancy office down at the Winchester Mills, trying to figure out ways to make more money. According to Mom, he said he knew what you had to do to people sometimes when you ran a business. He said he didn't blame old Amos Winchester for cheating that inventor, and he didn't blame Skipper for shutting down the mills during the Depression. He said he understood that if you were in business, sometimes you had to do these things. But he didn't want to do them himself. So when he graduated from Harvard, where the Winchesters always went, he joined the Peace Corps. His younger brother, my uncle Foster, took over the Winchester Mills, and instead of me living up there in the big house and looking forward to being rich, Ernest got it.

  The day after Ernest and I almost got into a fight with those guys at the pond, Uncle Foster called us in to his office to give us a talking-to. Of course he had an office down at the mills, where he went most days. I'd been there a couple of times when I'd had to take papers down to him. That office was bigger than most people's living rooms. It had a fireplace and a window looking out on the mills, antique furniture, and a huge Oriental carpet that covered most of the floor and cost fifty thousand dollars.

  But he also had an office in the house. For example, Mom kept all her papers and junk in a little cardboard file. When she had to pay the bills or figure out her taxes, she dumped the papers out on the old oak table in the kitchen that we ate on, and sat there with her cup of tea, adding and subtracting—mostly subtracting, she usually said.

  But Uncle Foster had a whole lot more than his taxes to worry about. He was on the board of trustees of two colleges; he was on the board of directors of three or four charities, including the Winchester Foundation, which gave money for research into heart disease; he was on the board of the Everidge Bank, which the Winchesters pretty much owned; he was on the boards of a couple of other big companies. Running a rich family was like running a business. Mom had the job of taking care of the bills and paying the servants and such. She said that managing the house alone was like running a small hotel.

  The office was in a back corner of the house, at the side away from the pond. It had been Skipper's office before it was Uncle Foster's, and my great-grandfather's before him. Ernest and I went along the hall from the small dining room. I felt pretty nervous. “What's he going to do to us?” I asked.

  “I don't care,” Ernest said. “We didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to argue with him.” What worried me most was that Uncle Foster would want to know who those kids in the pond were. We got to the office door and knocked. He told us to come in.

  There were a lot of books along the walls and pictures of various famous ships that Skipper had had painted, an old barometer that came from some ship the Winchesters had owned, and a couple of easy chairs. Uncle Foster sat behind his desk—an old teak-wood desk that had been bought by my great-grandfather when he put in the office. Uncle Foster liked to sit leaning back with his feet up on his waste-basket. He was reading some papers. Ernest flopped down in one of the easy chairs, but I didn't dare. I stood there by the door, looking out the window. The crushed stone driveway swung around behind the house here to get to the stable, where they kept the riding horses, and the old carriage house, where the cars were garaged. They had a Porsche, a Mercedes, a big Lincoln limo, a four-wheel-drive Jeep for emergencies in the winter, and a Datsun pickup for Durham to use around the place.

  Durham was out there now, polishing the Lincoln limo in the sun. He went over it every morning, so there would never be a speck of dirt on it. He once told me, “Chris, you never know when they'll want it. Your uncle Foster, he'll get on the house phone and tell me to shoot into Logan Airport to pick up Senator Whosis or Secretary Whatzis. I don't hardly have no time to put on my uniform, I can't fool around cleaning no car.” The stable boy did the Mercedes and the Porsche, but Durham took a lot of pride in the limo, and wouldn't let anybody else touch it. It was almost like he thought he owned it.

  Finally Uncle Foster put the papers down and swiveled around in his chair to face us. “Ernest, sit up straight. You can sit down, Chris.” I sat down in the other easy chair. Uncle Foster looked at us for a minute. Then he said, “What was it all about, boys?”

  Ernest was sitting up straight. “Those guys shouldn't have been in the pond. We were going to kick them out, only Durham came with Duchess.”

  “There were three of them, Durham told me.”

  “I wasn't scared of them,” Ernest said. “We'd have beat them if Durham hadn't come.”

  Uncle Foster didn't pay any attention to that, but looked at me. “Do you know who they were, Chris?”

  I knew he was bound to catch me if I lied. I began to blush. “I don't think they would have hurt anything,” I said.

  “I didn't ask that,” he said.

  Ernest looked at me. “That one guy knew you.”

  I went on blushing, because they knew I was thinking about lying.

  “I know who one of them is, Uncle Foster. Benny Briggs. He's a year ahead of me in school.”

  “Benny Briggs?” He took a pen out of the fancy pen holder on his desk and made a note on a yellow pad. “What do you know about him, Chris?”

  “Well, I don't know him too well, Uncle Foster. We were on the baseball team when he was in eighth grade and I was in seventh. He played shortstop.”

  “Shortstop? I played shortstop in school. Is he any good?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “He has a real good arm.”

  “Really good,” Uncle Foster said.

  I wasn't doing anything right. “Really good,” I said.

  “You don't want to start pick
ing up that kind of language from these fellows,” he said.

  I thought, if I wasn't supposed to pick up that kind of language, maybe I ought to go to prep school where I'd meet different fellows. “Yes, sir.”

  “Where does he live, this Briggs boy?”

  I hated being grilled about it. I didn't want to tell on Benny, but I hated lying. There wasn't much harm in telling Uncle Foster where Benny lived, because he could find out easily enough. “Up on Granite Street. I think, anyway. Somewhere up there.”

  “What about the other two?”

  I was safe there, because I really didn't know who they were, I only thought I knew who one of them was. “I don't know them,” I said. “Friends of Benny's, I guess.”

  Uncle Foster stared at me. “You sure you don't know them, Chris?”

  Of course I wasn't sure. I hoped I wouldn't blush again. “I might have seen them around or something, but I don't know their names.”

  “Would you be able to identify them if I decide to do anything about it?”

  I sure didn't want to have anything to do with that. “I'm not—”

  “I could,” Ernest said. “I could identify them, all right.”

  “It might not be worth pursuing,” Uncle Foster said. Then he swiveled his chair around, put his feet on the wastebasket, and leaned back, staring out the window. I took a look out. Durham was going over the upholstery with a little vacuum cleaner that plugged into the cigarette lighter. I knew about it, because I'd helped him clean the limo a few times. “But I'm bringing it up because there may be more to it than it seems.” He went on looking out the window. “I don't want to say too much at this point, but I think I'd better tell you something about it, because you may be facing a lot of animosity in town. Especially you, Chris. People will be saying things to you, and you'll have to learn how to handle it better than you boys did yesterday.”

  “It's the strike, isn't it, Dad?” Ernest said. “There's going to be a strike.”

  Uncle Foster took his feet off the wastebasket and swung around to look at us. “I don't know how much you know about this, Chris, but Ernest knows something. We've had some problems with foreign competition over the past few years. Foreign manufacturers can make some things cheaper than we can. Especially in the electronics area. Our electronics division has been losing money recently. Cheaper labor abroad is the reason, mostly. In some countries they can pay their workers a third or a quarter of what American workers have to be paid. It doesn't take much calculating to see what that means. We think we'll be able to get around it in the end, but it's going to take some doing. We're going to have to make some economies, and about the only place we can reduce expenses in any substantial way is by cutting wages. Our union contract is coming up soon, and we're going to ask our people to take a cut. If we don't, we'll go on losing money, and we can only bleed so long. Eventually we'd have to close down the electronics division. That would throw three thousand people out of work here. That's a quarter of the families in town.”

  He paused and gave us a long look. “Word's already going around about it, boys. They don't like it. There's going to be a lot of animosity. The chances of a strike are good. Maybe other kinds of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Ernest said. I could see he had a liking for the idea of trouble.

  Uncle Foster shrugged. “There's no way of knowing. But once you get a strike, you get violence. The only thing we can hope for is that the majority of people will see our point. They have to understand that if we can't compete with foreign competition we'll go out of business. It's as simple as that.”

  I didn't want to say anything. What was it going to be like at school for me if half the town was mad at the Winchesters? Ernest said, “Why couldn't they understand that?”

  “A lot of them will,” Uncle Foster said. “Most of our people are good people. They'll see what we tell them makes sense. It's the union officials who'll be the problem. They can't come in and quietly work it out with us. They've got to show the membership that they're standing up to us, that they're making a fight of it. They're afraid that if they don't make a fuss, somebody will accuse them of rolling over and playing dead, and use it against them in the next union election. So they'll fight.”

  “But what kind of an argument can they put up, Dad?” Ernest asked.

  “Oh, the usual things. They'll say we're lying, we're not losing money, we're just using foreign competition as an excuse to cut wages in order to increase our profits. They'll say we're really out to destroy the union. Union-busting, they'll call it. And a lot of people will believe them.”

  I was still thinking about what it would be like at school if there was a strike. Would they think I was on the side of the Winchester Mills just because of my name? Would they stop talking to me?

  “Dad, why not show them in black and white that we're losing money?”

  Uncle Foster slapped his hand softly on the desk. “Ernest. You never show your books to anyone. Ever. That's the first rule.”

  “Oh,” Ernest said.

  Uncle Foster raised his finger. “Remember, this is a family business. We own it, lock, stock, and barrel. We don't have to show our books to anybody but the U.S. tax collector, and we don't show him any more than we have to, either.”

  “Oh,” Ernest said again. “But we're losing money, aren't we?”

  Uncle Foster softly smacked the desktop again and leaned forward to give us a long look. “That,” he said, “is none of the union's business.”

  Out the window Durham had finished vacuuming the car. He got in and drove it around toward the front of the house, out of sight. There were a lot of questions going around in my head, and I couldn't answer any of them. Was the company really losing money? What was going to happen to me if there was a strike? What would my dad have done about it?

  Now Uncle Foster leaned back in his chair. “Okay, I don't want you two guys to worry about any of this too much. I just wanted to warn you. Now, about this business of going after those kids in the pond. I admire your guts and all of that, but you're not to do anything of that kind again.” He looked at Ernest, then me, and back at Ernest again. “You've got to get control of your temper, Ernest. You've got to learn that getting into fist fights with people isn't the way to handle these problems.”

  “But Dad, they didn't have the right to go into the pond.” Ernest would never take anything without an argument.

  “That isn't the point,” Uncle Foster said. “There are better ways to handle things like that. That's what we have Durham for. I didn't hire him just because he knows how to fix an engine and change a tire. I hired him because he did two tours of duty in Viet Nam. I pay him well, and it's his job to deal with problems like that.”

  “But Dad, we didn't want to be chicken.”

  Uncle Foster didn't say anything for a minute, but looked at us. Then he said, “That's the thinking of an eight-year-old, Ernest. You can't think that way at your age. This family has a lot of power, and when you have power, you use it. We don't go out brawling like drunken truck drivers. We have the courts, the law, the police—the national guard if we need it. We make sure that things around here go the way we want them to go. But we don't do it by brawling. If you do us wrong, we stay calm, we speak politely to everybody. But we move quietly. Sooner or later we'll catch you between a rock and a hard place and then you're going to feel it almighty bad.”

  “But those guys would have thought we were chicken if we didn't go after them.”

  Uncle Foster smacked his hand softly on the desktop again and leaned way forward to stare at Ernest. “Ernest.” We were dead still. “In your position you do not care what people like Benny Briggs think about you. It does not matter. You are going to be very rich and very powerful. These people will never like you. They will envy you, they will defer to you, and some of them will even admire you. But they will never like you. For that you must go to your own social class. What the others think does not matter.”

  Until n
ow he had been talking to both of us. But now he was talking to Ernest. As far as he was concerned I wasn't even in the room. And I wondered: Was I supposed to be one of those people whose opinion didn't matter, either?

  CHAPTER 3

  When my dad joined the Peace Corps they sent him down to Guatemala, because he had learned Spanish at Harvard. My mom was down there, too, and they fell in love. My mom's family were a whole lot different from the Winchesters. She was Welsh. Her grandparents came over from Wales in the 1920s, and they landed in Pittsburgh and worked in the steel mills all their lives. They never had much money. Her dad drank and spent a lot of his money in bars, and finally he got killed in a car crash when Mom was around fourteen. All her mother had after that was a small pension from the union. Her relatives never had much money, either. But Mom was smart, and she worked her way through college at night while she was a secretary during the day. Then she joined the Peace Corps.

  “It was the best way I knew of getting out of that place. I couldn't stand anymore seeing those tired guys coming home from work every night with nothing to do but go down to the bar and watch the Steelers or the Pirates on TV. I couldn't take seeing my mom trying to hold the family together with nothing but that pension and whatever she could pick up cleaning for people. I saw my older sister getting married to a guy from the steel mills, six months pregnant on her wedding day, and I knew I had to get out of there. So I joined the Peace Corps and they sent me to Guatemala and I met your dad.”

  It was very romantic, Mom said. They got married in a little wooden chapel in a village in the mountains. I was born out there, and lived there in that little Indian village in the mountains for the first six years of my life. It's kind of hazy in my mind now, but I still have snapshots in my head of the jungle and the mountains, and the Indians we lived with—the kids running around naked, the wrinkled old grandmothers in the dirt square of the village pounding corn meal in stone troughs, the men bringing in wild boars slung upside down from poles and roasting them over a fire in the square for everybody to share. I can remember the flames leaping and sizzling as the fat dripped out of the boar; I can remember the smell of the meat cooking; I can remember the Indians getting drunk on the funny kind of beer they had and singing around the fire as the meat cooked.