wouldn't; we had those police prosecutors and the defense lawyers beltin' out plea-bargains left and right as soon as we broke for lunch Chassy'd grab his coat-n'-hat and run out the door, jump in his Chrysler and high-tail it down to the brokers in Springfield. The rest of the day that's where he'd be, happy as a pig in shit at Tucker, Anthony and R. L. Day, down there on State Street; in his element. It was home to him there; he belonged. His daddy'd started taking him there when he was a little boy. And because he was happy, and also outta here, everybody in the courthouse who didn't like him was happy too. Me especially, of course, because he was making me money.'
'When Chassy called the Canterbury District Court 'my court,' he meant it,' Lane told Merrion. 'He acted like he owned the place and could do anything he liked. When people said he was arrogant, they were right.
Whether he did it on purpose, to piss people off, or he never realized how people took it; that I really never knew. I didn't really mind it, myself. He was a smart son of a bitch and he treated me all right. He helped me make money. Naturally I'd think he was a pretty okay-type of guy.
'And anyway, the fact of the matter was that when he said 'This is my courthouse,' he had it about right.' Spring had grown up in Holyoke.
He had gone to Deerfield Academy and then to Harvard ('46) and Harvard Law School ('49) with Roy Carnes. Carnes in 1952 had won the first of the five terms he would serve in the state House of Representatives, representing the easterly part of Holyoke along with the towns of Canterbury, Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland. In 1960, Holyoke voters approved his all-but-hereditary succession to the state Senate seat held by his uncle, Arthur, forced by failing health to retire.
Virtually by acclamation, Arthur had won what became known as 'the Carnes senate seat' when the death of the incumbent opened it in 1946.
That had been less than a year after he was invalided home from World War II army service in Europe. He had lost his left arm during the drive for the Rhine. When he died in May of 1966, a fellow WW II veteran and friend of many years, Holyoke Transcript Telegram city editor and weekly columnist Reg Gault collected and published a full page of tributes to him, ending with his own: 'Arthur was entitled to wear the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He seldom did.
'He figured in many eyewitness stories of combat heroism. I didn't hear them from him; I heard them from other soldiers, who had fought alongside him. Arthur was born in this city in 1913. He went away to school, and then he spent those war years in Europe. He took his legislative work seriously, as he took everything except himself, and so until his health forced his retirement, he kept an apartment in Boston, where he spent much of his time. 'Far too much of it,' he would tell you, voicing just about the only complaint I ever heard him utter, 'too far from my home, from my friends, and much too far from Grey Hills,' the club he'd been instrumental in creating on the abandoned estate of Jesse Grey, and the golf game he'd astonishingly somehow learned to play again with one arm 'not quite as well, though,' he would say after his war wound.
'His home, then, always was here. Wherever his life and work and service to his country took him, he never really left. His heart and spirit remained in Holyoke and this valley along the Connecticut River, with the people that he knew and served so very well. He never forgot where he came from.
'He always knew who he was. He never lost sight of the job he had to do. He was a devoted son, husband and father, an honest and far-sighted public servant, the kind of candidate who gives meaning to the term 'public service,' a hero and the best friend a man could have.
Raise a glass today to Arthur Carnes Ave atque vale.'
The Carneses, Arthur in the Senate and Roy in the House, had first combined in 1954 to carve the Canterbury District Court jurisdiction out of the Holyoke, Chicopee, Palmer and Northampton Districts. There was merit to the rationale they publicized. The continuing escalation of the Cold War made it likely the civilian population around the US Air Force Strategic Air Command base at Westover Field would increase, as more and more Air Force dependents moved in. The Fisk Tire Company was working two shifts to meet the booming demand for real rubber tires to replace the synthetics rationed in wartime. The new Monsanto plant in Springfield was attracting young workers and their growing families.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst was expanding. And, as Larry Lane said, there didn't seem to be any reason to think business would be tailing off at the Tampax factory in Palmer.
'Like it or not,' Arthur said in the Senate, 'more people means more work for our court system, just as surely as it means more work for our school systems and our hospitals, more demands upon our water systems and our highways. Either we expand our facilities and agencies or we overcrowd and overload them to the point at which they simply cannot get their jobs done, and break down. If we expect and want the prosperity of our cities and towns to continue, with the population growth that good times economically attract, we have to be prepared to pay the price in necessary services. We need another court.'
The Carneses had intended that Arthur would become its first presiding justice, but by the time Chassy Spring's building committee Chicopee assistant clerk of court Larry Lane served it as consultant and Fiddle Barrows's construction people had the building ready for occupancy, early in 1957, Arthur's prostate cancer had been diagnosed. The prognosis was encouraging, Arthur's regular physician having digitally detected the growth early. But his cancer specialist said that in his view with radiation treatment and chemotherapy ahead of him, Arthur was probably going to find himself having to spend a lot of his time in a hospital Johnny at Mass. General in Boston, and would most likely be more comfortable and have a better chance of recovery if he stayed close by. 'Particularly since you've already got your apartment in Charles River Park. Instead of getting yourself into a new situation where you have to travel a hundred miles every time you have to come in.'
'So there they were,' Larry Lane said. 'Arthur and Roy with their brand-new courthouse and nobody to put in it. Except me, of course, I was ready enough. Anything to get out of Chicopee and away from that bastard Popowski. Maurice was a son of a bitch. So they had a clerk.
But they also needed a judge.
'Roy thought about it and decided he didn't want it. Too early for him to put himself out to pasture. He was still in his thirties, waiting to take Arthur's seat in the Senate, still thinking maybe some day he might make a run for Congress.' In 1962, when Roy moved up, Dan Hilliard, a Holyoke alderman because of strong though private Carnes support, won his first election to Roy's former seat in the House.
'It's hard for me to think now only fifteen years've gone by since we opened the place,' Larry said to Merrion. 'So much's happened since then. Take me for example, what's happened to me. You want the truth, I thought what happened to the Carneses was kind of funny. The two of them had it all planned out so neat, so firm, so fully packed, so quick and easy on the draw. Then the doctor sticks his finger up Arthur's ass, finds a little bulge up there that don't seem right to him, and 'That's it. All bets're off. It's time to make new plans.' Serves me right, I guess, that now it's happening to me. I'm on terminal leave.'
Bureaucratically terminal meant 'using up vacation time before formally commencing retirement,' but in Larry's case it carried another one of its meanings as well. He hadn't told anyone outside of his family.
Until his mind was changed by Merrion's visit, he hadn't planned to tell anyone else.
His eyes had instantly filled up when he saw who was at his door.
'Where the hell've you been?' he said, his voice clogging up, grabbing the Christmas whiskey with his left hand, using his right to pull Merrion into the apartment.
'I just found out, Thursday,' Merrion said, shutting the door behind him. 'I would've come over yesterday but I hadda stay with my mother.
My brother Chris didn't show up again, the shit, and she got all upset I couldn't leave her on Christmas. But I didn't know, you're here by yourself. I just assumed you're okay. I know now I should've asked.
But no one told me. I feel awful bad about this, Larry. Should've given you a call.'
'Ahh,' Lane said, shaking his head, clearing his throat, 'never mind the details, pal; stick to the important things. First thing is to get some ice here. Then we can figure out who's to blame, you for not calling or me. Not all your fault, you didn't know. Glad to see you's what's important. Kind of lonesome here. Not as tough as I thought.'
He put the bottle on the red Formica counter dividing the kitchen from the dining area and opened the refrigerator freezer door. He put the tray on the counter and then rested his hands on the surface and gazed at Merrion. In a flat voice he said: 'Doctor says I'm dying, Amby. He gives me a year to live and says it's not going to be fun. It's lung cancer, both of them. I'm too old for one of those new transplant-operations and it's too far along to stop. I'm numberin' out my days and as far's my family's concerned, I can do it by myself.'
His wife and his kids had made his choice clear: he'd 'either quit drinking, get a second opinion, maybe have
