On Friday morning last, Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost hislife due to electrocution. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I willgive you rest.
Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It had happenedwhen he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging brass socket while standing on the wet floor in aneighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull. For some reason that nobody couldunderstand, he was not wearing his rubber boots.
All over the countryside that spring, there was a sound that would soon disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already, if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who already had tractors could not get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring plowing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be varying degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn't hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls were saying on their inland flights, or decipher the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could probably tell when the farmers were swearing.
With one man, it was all swearing. It didn't matter which words he was using. He could have been saying "butter and eggs" or "afternoon tea" and the spirit would have been the same. As if he were boiling over with bitter rage, with loathing.
His name was Bunt Newcombe, and he had the first farm on the highway that curved southwest from town. Bunt was probably a nickname given to him at school, for going around with his head lowered, ready to bump and shove anybody aside. A boyish name, when you thought about it, not well matched to his behavior, his reputation as a grown man.
People sometimes wondered what could be the matter with him. He wasn't poor, after all—he had two hundred acres of decent land, and a banked barn with a peaked silo, and a drive shed, and a square red brick house, though the house, like the man himself, had a look of bad temper. There were dark-green blinds pulled most or all of the way down on the windows, no curtains visible, and a scar along the front wall where the porch had been torn away. The front door must, at one time, have opened onto that porch, which no steps had been built to replace; now it opened three feet above weeds and rubble.
Bunt Newcombe was not a drunk. Nor was he a gambler—he was too careful of his money for that. But he was mean in both senses of the word, and he seemed to have been born that way. He mistreated his horses, and it goes without saying that he mistreated his family. In the winter he took his milk cans to town on his sleigh just at that time of the morning when everybody was going to school, and he didn't slow down, as other farmers did, to give you a ride. He picked up the whip instead.
Mrs. Newcombe was never with him, on the sleigh or in the car. She walked to town, wearing oldfashioned galoshes even when the weather got warm, and a long drab coat and a scarf over her hair. She mumbled hello but never looked at you, and sometimes turned her head away, not speaking at all. I think she was missing some teeth. That was more common then than now, and it was more common also for people to make plain their state of mind, in their speech and dress and gestures, so that everything about them said, "I know how I should look and behave and nobody can say otherwise," or, "I don't care— things have gone too far with me, and you can think what you like."
Nowadays, Mrs. Newcombe might be seen as a serious case, terminally depressed, and her husband, with his brutish ways, might be looked on with concern and compassion as someone who needed help. In those days, they were just taken as they were and allowed to live out their lives without a thought of intervention—regarded, in fact, as a source of interest and entertainment. Some people were born to make others miserable, and some let themselves in for being made miserable, and that was all there was to it.
