The Time Traveler's Almanac

It stirred to life, briefly, during the First World War; money and importunities from Washington effected a partial resolution of the chaos into which Dappling’s estate had fallen and the mill was put into operation for a year, although the already archaic equipment was hopelessly inefficient. After the Armistice the ponderous machinery of the law again clanked into operation; the gates were re-locked, the new railroad sidings left to rust. The tedious succession of suit and countersuit, stay and deferral, lien and attachment and injunction was resumed and dragged its dusty way through courtrooms and sheriff’s offices and lawyers’ chambers. If Dappling had died with his family, there would have been no problem; his affairs would have been carried on without even a pause by an existing establishment. But he lived on for seven years, and there was no way to appoint an executor or administrator for a living man. They might have had him certified incompetent, but no one dared. And so no taxes were paid or rents collected; no one voted shares of stock or gave proxies for them; no one guarded or was responsible for property and accounts. Sheriff’s deputies nailed notices to doors; servers of process came and went; various bank accounts stagnated or were looted. Numbers of small suppliers went bankrupt; certain bankers and lawyers prospered greatly.

And all the while the town shrank and rotted and waited for the better times that had to come, and Henry Dappling, grown hairy and filthy and emaciated, crept through the dark haunted rooms of his mansion and endlessly asked his unanswerable question. One day in the seventh summer, McVay, who each week left a supply of food for the hermit at the kitchen door, found the previous week’s provisions still on the step. He called the sheriff, who came with a fat deputy, broke into the shuttered house, and found Dappling’s body. The screaming had stopped at last.

Lawful administration of the estate began at once, but it was too late. Except for the federal cutting of the Gordian Knot for wartime purposes, there had never been a hope of bringing enough order out of the chaos to make the mill a going enterprise again. Vultures and then beetles picked the carcass clean and left the town to its own devices.

It could devise nothing but stagnation. When the Great Depression came, the event would have passed unnoticed by the people had it not been for the fact that money began to arrive from the government. They were at first too proud to accept it, and then they accepted it and were ashamed, and in due course they were not ashamed but came to think of it as rightfully theirs. The relief checks became the way of life of the town, an assurance of a livelihood for even the most indolent and feckless. When times at last improved, there was a leaching away of the brighter and abler young, who went to seek a future elsewhere; and by the time “relief” became “welfare,” no one there worked at all except for a few torpid merchants, whose customers paid with government checks. The town would not die, but it lived – or half-lived – as a parasite.

The citizens know no other life. Loob was born to it, and so was his mother, and his grandmother came to it before her adolescence. These are people who do not know want, but have never known prosperity. They do not know ambition or thrift; neither do they know toil or hunger. Their possessions are cheap and gaudy and soiled, their diet deficient in nourishment and abundant in sugar, their music a commercial debasement of the folk music of their fathers. They drink fiercely and are given to casual incest and sometimes slice each other with knives. Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows. These are the descendants of the stern mountaineers who were Henry Dappling’s people. Down the years each generation has been more misshapen than its predecessor. Loob is their ultimate fruit.

And so a circle is completed. Because Loob is what he is, he shattered the mind of Sam Dappling and so damned the town. Because the town was damned, Loob is what he is.