Lincoln Square, 1920I’m in Chrissy’s kitchen stirring the poppy seed mix for her kolache when we hear it: a single, flat bagpipe lurching from some simple scales into “Over There.” I walk down the front stairs to the sidewalk, drying my hands on a dish towel, and the bagpiper leads four soldiers, some flag bearers, and a clutch of little blonde girls timidly gripping batons around the square and to a makeshift stage—the Powers Market porch and the picnic table below my apartment windows.
Powers sits in the center of North Bennington like a pristine layer cake on the potluck table. Edward Welling, a long-dead businessman whose name is carved into everything from my college housing to the railroad station, opened it in 1833 as a company store for his paper mills. For a while it was the Hathaway’s, before the Powers family bought it in the 30s. Larry, the son of the original owner Michael Powers, has lived his whole life within two blocks of North B, except for the time he spent overseas in the Air Force.
Today is his 87th birthday, and the town has turned out to celebrate it with proclamations, videotaping, and free hot dogs. Town elders in polyester pantsuits hold great-grandchildren on their laps, and it strikes me that this looks a lot like “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s own testament to our village, written in her head as she walked through Lincoln Square to buy her groceries from the elder Powers.
Larry holds court from a rocking chair on my front porch, his wife beside him, cradling a bouquet of lilies in her arm like the homecoming queen. Local politicians bear greetings from Governor Douglas, announcing August 12, 2007 as a Vermont-wide Larry Powers Day. The Select Board, the head of facilities at Lake Paran, and members of the Water Board all read tributes to Larry, the latter presenting him with the one and only bottle of North Bennningtonian water, the best tap water in the state of Vermont, pumped straight from the creek that Mrs. Jennings gifted to the village. North Bennington (pop. 1,500) has always stood separately from the town next door, and Stuart, Bennington’s town manager, approaches the picnic table while Tim, the event organizer, introduces him: “And now, to represent the town of Bennington—" A row of seated ladies in their 80s and 90s boos. “I’m just the messenger!” Stuart protests, laughing. An elderly man behind me shouts, “Shoot him!” Everybody laughs.
Father Demasi, the pastor at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church from the mid-60s through the 90s, leans on the main tent in a black suit and collar. He gets the microphone next and starts, “Larry used to help us with the food pantry, you know, and one day he pulls me aside and tells me, ‘Father, maybe you should reconsider this charity,’ because the woman he’d just finished helping, well, she’d left and her husband came right in and paid for a pack of cigarettes with a twenty dollar bill.” Everybody laughs again, and it occurs to me that about half those present know which family he’s talking about.
There are families in this village—Powers, Scully, Welling, Park, McCullough, White, Mooney, Poore—who watched the trolley get taken out and the asphalt get put in, who swam in Lake Paran before it had the floating dock anchored in its center. I lower some ice from my living room window to the barbershop quartet below, and the oldest member squints up at me and says, “Well. Didn’t know they had people up there now—what happened to all the garden tools?” Later in the afternoon, as I hold a plate of refreshments for his wife, Larry explains that the second floor where I lived, just on the right-hand side of the main store, used to store barrels of sugar and flour, all the garden equipment for sale, and besides that, a little room for cutting window glass. “Jumped out that window, once,” he says, pointing to my bedroom. “Me, too,” I confess, and his eyes sparkle under his embroidered LARRY POWERS DAY hat.
