The Winchesters Read online

  There was one special place we went to a lot, a little state forest about five miles outside of town, where there was a meadow in the middle of the woods that was always full of wildflowers. We'd sit at the edge of the woods to eat our lunch, with the sun coming through the leaves onto us like pennies, looking out at the flowers all red and blue and white. It was beautiful. Then after we'd eaten we'd lie down together and kiss. I'd start to feel sexy and I'd hint something about it. But it wasn't any use hinting anything like that to Marie. She was Catholic, and didn't even like me to say “damn” or “hell.” As far as sex was concerned, she always said she wasn't ready for it yet, she wanted to wait. I didn't even bother to argue with her about it because I knew she would never change her mind, and arguing would only get us into a fight. But she liked me, and she liked to kiss, all right.

  And now what? Was she going to become my enemy? Would she start going around with Benny Briggs? What about the rest of the family—her father, her mother, her younger sister, her older brother, Frankie. I figured Frankie was bound to be on Benny's side. Frankie was only a couple of years ahead of me in school, but he'd got left back once and was older than that. Mr. Scalzo wanted him to go into the store with him and take it over when it was time for Mr. Scalzo to retire. Frankie was a kind of good-natured guy that everybody liked, but not nearly as smart as Marie. He was more Briggs's type and would take his side, I figured.

  But I didn't think Marie would. Benny wasn't her type. I figured he wouldn't go around with any girl who wouldn't let him have sex with her. That was the kind of guy he was. But still, even if she didn't start going with Benny, would she take his side against me because my name was Winchester?

  When I got back to the gatehouse Mom was in the kitchen, frying chicken. It smelled pretty good. I sat down at the old oak table. It was always sort of dark in the gatehouse because the windows were small, and the beaded lamp that hung down over the table was on a lot of the time. Out the window I could see the sun, kind of red, going down over the pine trees by the pond. The window was open, and when the breeze blew a little, I could smell fresh-cut hay along with the frying chicken.

  “What else are we having?” I asked.

  “Spinach,” she said. “And corn bread.” She had a way of making corn bread she had learned from the Indians in Guatemala that I really liked. She said we'd eaten it almost every day when we were down there. I liked the way Mom looked. She was thirty-eight, but she still looked pretty young. She had a dark face like mine and dark brown hair, which she wore in braids the way Indians did.

  I had a habit of talking things over with Mom when I was confused about something. Mom always had clear ideas about what people should do and what they shouldn't. She'd had a hard upbringing and was pretty realistic about things. And she didn't talk down to me—she always talked to me like I was grown up. I figured that was because, since Dad died, she didn't have another grown-up around to talk to, and had to use me for that. I decided to get into all of this stuff about Benny Briggs.

  She twisted away from the stove and looked at me over her shoulder. “What did Uncle Foster have to say?”

  “It was sort of complicated,” I said. “He wasn't sore at us for going after those guys, but he said he didn't want us to do it anymore. He said we were supposed to be better than that, or something.”

  “What did he mean by that exactly?”

  “He said he was paying Durham to handle that stuff and we should stay out of it. He said we shouldn't solve problems by brawling like drunken truck drivers.”

  She went on turning over chicken in the frying pan. “I agree with him there for once. You and Ernest should have better sense than to take on some tough kids from town.”

  There was something wrong about that. Wasn't I a kid from town? I decided I'd better not tell her that Benny was out looking for me. She'd get all upset. “They weren't so tough. I know one of them.”

  “All the more reason for staying out of trouble,” she said. “What else did Uncle Foster say?”

  “He said there might be a strike. Did you know about that?”

  She bent over to look under the frying pan and lowered the flame. Then she came over and sat down at the table with me. “There's been a lot of talk about it. That's all anybody knows.”

  “From the way Uncle Foster was talking, it sounded like there was a good chance of it. He said there might be violence.”

  “Let's hope not,” Mom said. She looked at the big old clock on the wall and frowned. “The twins ought to be home by now.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Casey took them swimming.” Casey was one of the maids. She liked kids because she didn't have any of her own, and because she figured we were basically servants like her, she didn't mind doing things for us.

  “Listen, Mom, tell me about that time during the Depression, when they closed the mills. Did they really have to do it?”

  “What got you thinking about that?”

  “Something Mr. Melas said. He said that the old people around town haven't forgotten about it. He said a lot of people in town don't like the Winchesters.” I decided not to say anything about not liking me, either. “Did Dad ever say anything about that?”

  “He didn't talk about his family very much. He was wrapped up in his work, and that's what he talked about. Down there in Guatemala the Winchester Mills seemed pretty far away.”

  It came to me that one of Dad's reasons for going into the Peace Corps in the first place was because he didn't like a lot of the things the Winchesters had done. That was the kind of guy he was. I wished he were there to tell me about it. I sat there, feeling sad that I couldn't remember more about him than I did. He was always busy, always going off here and there to little Indian villages to show them how to purify their water or fertilize their crops, or which medicines to take. Most of what I remember about him wasn't memories at all, but stuff from the pictures that Mom had in a photo album of those years we were in Guatemala. I just wished he could come back again, even if it were only for a day, so I could ask him questions and see what he was really like.

  I shook him out of my mind. “I wish I knew the truth of it. Mr. Melas says that during the Depression people lived on boiled potatoes and handouts from the breadline.”

  “I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Chris. It was a long time ago.”

  “Mom, did Dad believe that the Winchesters were doing something wrong? Did he believe that they were too hard on the people who worked for them? Is that why he joined the Peace Corps?”

  She gave me a quick look. “Where have you been getting these ideas from?”

  “No place,” I said. “I just have a feeling about it.”

  She looked me in the face. “Chris, so long as we're accepting your uncle Foster's hospitality, I don't think we ought to talk about them that way.”

  “What hospitality are we accepting?”

  “This house,” she said, waving around her cooking fork. “Our car. Lots of things.”

  “But you work for it, Mom. You work up at the big house every day.”

  “Part-time. I work part-time. I don't earn enough to support this place, three kids, a house, clothes, food. One person can't support a family like that on a part-time job. Who do you think paid for our car? Who do you think pays for gas, and for the taxes on this place? Your uncle Foster has been very generous with us. I don't think we ought to start bad-mouthing him.”

  I could see that, but still, there was something that bothered me about it. “Maybe we shouldn't take so much from them. Maybe we shouldn't live here.” I was thinking: If we moved into town and weren't part of the Winchesters anymore, the kids might see me as being more like them.

  “Maybe we should,” she said. She got up, fished around in the cabinet over the sink, and took out a bottle of sherry she kept there. Mom never drank very much, but sometimes when she got upset she drank a glass of sherry. She poured some sherry into an orange juice glass and sat down at the oak table again. “W
e could move into town and I could take a full-time job. But then I wouldn't have much time left for you or the twins. You don't need me so much now, but they do. Remember, I'm the only parent they have. And of course you'd have to get a real job—working in the mills, probably, instead of keeping the grounds with Durham. It wouldn't be so nice.”

  What would Dad have done? I wondered. How I wished I could ask him. “Mom, there must have been something about the Winchester business that Dad didn't like, or he wouldn't have gone off and joined the Peace Corps.”

  She didn't say anything for a minute, but sat there looking down into her sherry glass, thinking. “Chris, your dad knew that to be in business you had to be ruthless sometimes. He knew that the company could be very tough when they had to, and sometimes a lot of innocent bystanders got hurt.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, you take this situation with the foreign competition. It isn't the Winchesters' fault that the Koreans or Taiwanese or somebody else can pay their workers a lot less than the Winchesters can here in America. But that's the situation they're faced with, and they're going to do what they have to do to survive. And if it means cutting wages, or even closing down the electronics division, they'll do it, no matter how many people lose their jobs. Your father knew that the Winchesters run the business out of self-interest. They're not a charitable institution. No business is. He wasn't against it, necessarily. He just didn't want to be involved himself. He always said he didn't want to spend his life trying to figure out a way to make an extra dollar.”

  I thought about it for a minute. Then I said, “Mom, are they really losing money because of foreign competition? Do they really have to cut wages?”

  She didn't say anything, but took a sip of her sherry and thought about it. “Chris, nobody will ever know, except Skipper and your uncle Foster and a few others at the top.”

  The whole thing didn't sit right. If the people at the top who ran things didn't have to worry about doing right by other people, who did? “Mom, if it wasn't right for Dad, why is it right for anybody?”

  She was getting cross with me, I could see that. “Chris, people are different. People don't all look at things the same way. You're not the same person as your dad.”

  “Well, but maybe I think like him,” I said. “I mean, if something's wrong for me, it should be wrong for everybody.”

  She stared at me. “Why? What right do you have to decide what everybody's morality should be?” She finished off her sherry. “Well, this isn't getting supper cooked.” She went to the stove and began turning the chicken again.

  But it still didn't sit right. “Mom, look. The Winchesters—”

  She whirled around from the stove, her hands on her hips, the big fork she had been turning the chicken with dripping grease on the floor. “Chris, I don't want to hear any more of this. I want an end to it right now.”

  I was pretty surprised. Mom didn't blow up like that very much. Mostly she kept cool. If there was a problem between us, she'd sit down with me and she'd give her side of it, and I'd give mine. But this time she was plain angry, and I couldn't see the reason for it. What had I done? “Mom, I can say what I want.”

  She bit her lip, and then she said in a quiet voice, “Chris, don't you realize that Uncle Foster might make a place for you in the business if you show promise? Don't you understand that if you do well in school he might send you to Harvard? Don't you know that if you did well at Harvard he might bring you into the business—not just as an ordinary employee, but as somebody who can go to the top? Don't you realize any of that?”

  I sat there, feeling shocked. It was kind of a numb feeling, like everything in the world had come to a stop. Nothing that Mom had just said had ever occurred to me at all. I'd never thought much about what I would do when I grew up, except maybe try to make it as a professional baseball player, which wasn't actually too realistic. Or maybe go into social service, the way Dad did. But it had never occurred to me that I could go into the business with Ernest. “Mom, Ernest's going to inherit the business and the house and everything. Ernest and Anne.”

  “He might. And he might not. A lot of things could happen. Look what happened to Uncle Foster. He grew up thinking that your dad would get it, and then your dad announced he was going into the Peace Corps and it landed in Uncle Foster's lap. Or look at your great-great-uncle Asa, the one who ran away to Paris to become a Bohemian. He lost out, too. It's happened twice in this century. It could happen again.”

  But I knew Ernest. He wasn't the type to go into the Peace Corps. He liked to fight too much. He was already training himself to be boss of the mills. “Ernest wouldn't do that.”

  She thought about it. “No, he wouldn't, that's true. It would be out of character. But things happen. A car accident...”

  “Mom.”

  “All right, I didn't mean that. I'm certainly not wishing anything like that on Ernest. The odds are that he'll take over when he grows up. All I'm saying is that life is unpredictable.”

  I was feeling very strange. The whole world had changed. I wasn't sure I liked it. It was like the taste of electricity, kind of interesting, but sour. “Do you really mean that if Ernest—if Ernest decided to be a painter or something—I'd get it? I'd get the whole thing—the mills, the big house, all that money, everything?”

  “It isn't that simple, Chris. In a powerful family like the Winchesters, they don't think of the wealth as belonging to anybody in particular. It belongs to the family as a whole. The way they see it, whoever is head of the family has the responsibility to preserve the wealth and the power, and increase it if possible. But the head of the family makes the final decisions. That's why they're always so careful to make sure that they don't put somebody incompetent in the job. If the first son isn't up to it, they'll pass right over him. They'll give it to the second son or a nephew or a son-in-law or a cousin.”

  “Uncle Foster will give it to Ernest,” I said. “He won't give it to me.”

  She shrugged. “It won't be entirely up to Uncle Foster. Skipper turned the day-to-day operations of the mills over to Uncle Foster a few years ago, but Skipper's still got the final say. You've got to remember, you're just as much his grandchild as Ernest is.”

  I'd never thought about it that way. It had always seemed to me that Skipper was more Ernest's grandfather than he was mine. He'd lived in the big house when Ernest was a little kid and I'd been growing up in Guatemala. Ernest knew him much better than I did. But it was true—he was as much my grandfather as Ernest's. “What about Anne?”

  “The Winchesters are not about to turn the company over to a woman, you can count on that.” She thought for a minute. “Look, Chris, even if Ernest goes on to take over, that doesn't mean you'll be cut out. Ernest will need help, he'll need people around him he can trust, and that means members of the family. Besides, they'll want somebody available in case something does happen to him. Suppose Ernest were to die early, before the next generation was ready to step in. They'd want to have somebody like you on tap to fill in. The whole point is that if you show promise, if you work hard at school and do the things they expect of you, they'll take care of you.”

  “I'd be rich?”

  “If you were rising up in the company they'd make sure you had plenty of money, because they would want you to have a life-style suitable for a Winchester—a big house, expensive cars, the best clothes, riding horses if you wanted or a ski lodge or whatever. They wouldn't want you living in a gatehouse and driving an eight-year-old car.”

  I sat there saying nothing for a minute. Then I said, “It all seems so strange and new to me, Mom. I just never thought of it.”

  “Chris, I'm surprised you never thought about it before. I thought you were aware of these things.”

  “No. It seems so strange. I figured that Dad had given it all up and we were just lucky that Uncle Foster let us live in the gatehouse.”

  She leaned over and ran her hand through my hair.

 
“Poor Chris. Life is full of shocks. I guess we should have talked about it before.”

  Then we heard Casey coming along with the twins and we stopped talking about it. But that night, when I lay in bed in my little room, looking out at the moon rising through the leaves of the maple tree and lighting up the field beyond, I couldn't sleep. I felt strange —good and bad all at once. I felt like I had just come into the world again, a different person. I kept thinking: What if Ernest decided to be a painter and the big house were mine? What if I owned five cars and sat in Uncle Foster's office telling Durham to get the limo ready, I wanted to go to Logan Airport and fly to Paris? What if? I knew one thing, though: If anything like that were to happen, I couldn't go on. I'd have to make up my mind whose side I was on.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days later I was mowing around the white cast-iron table and chairs that sat on the grass by the side of the pond. My mind was still full of what Mom had told me, and ideas kept going through my head about how strange it would be twenty years from now, if I was living in the big house, remembering the time when I was still a kid, mowing that lawn I was standing on. What would I be like then? What would it be like to be rich and powerful?

  I cut up to the lawn furniture, and then I stopped the mower so I could move a cast-iron chair out of the way. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I got a glimpse of something over near the edge of the pine grove by the pond. I set down the chair I had picked up, straightened up, and looked.

  The edge of the pine grove was maybe thirty yards away, but I could see something there that seemed out of place. It looked like a chunk of wet black log or a heap of weeds. Whatever it was, it was my job to clean it up. So I shut off the mower and trotted over to have a look.

  As I got closer I began to see that it was some kind of animal—a skunk, maybe, or a woodchuck. Then I realized that it was a whole lot bigger than a woodchuck. Suddenly I saw what it was and I began running. In a minute I was looking down at Duchess.