The Hundred-Dollar Bill

"Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson. "Charge of the Light Brigade"

June 19th, 1995 was a windy day--so peculiarly windy that many Michaelton residents remember it simply for that, even with everything else. The eyes of the grocer, Daniel Hardigan, scintillate in speaking of it, as if it were something (eh) supernatural, as if one could understand (eh) only by having been there.

"Eh, (snort) a strange day," he says. "I mean, strange . . . how everything happened all at once. Doesn't happen often, I . . . eh (snort) . . . imagine."

Tom Wolfson, the hardware store owner, only discusses it with his most frequent, and most spendthrift, customers. He simply stops, even if he's ringing up a sale, and purses his lips and strokes them, as if searching for the most finely tuned words to describe it. Usually, he gives up, meaning his loss of words to be a description in itself. On his most talkative days he simply repeats over and over again, "strange, strange, strange."

And it is a "strange" story, but some of the world's craziest stories have been the most true.

By 9 a.m. on June 19th, 1995 James Winslow had already left for the Herald office. As he walked past his father's house, he could hear the clipped radio voice blaring out the open kitchen window. "Skies clear today. 10% chance of thunderstorms. Wind minimal." A pause here, apparently for effect. "0 to 5 knots."

The forecast was right.

For about an hour. The wind began at about ten a.m.

Ronald Winslow, James Winslow's father, was about to follow his son to Decataur St., for Hardigan's Grocery specifically, at 10:03 a.m. He had just donned his hat when he felt the pain climbing his arm again. He had always brushed this pain away, seemingly not caring, like it was a fly, but there was an added tiredness, this time, in the way he ignored it.

Now what was it I wanted to do? He stalled for time to remember by opening his windowless, wooden front door and looking out on his lawn and the street. Leaving the door open for the fresh air he walked back to his favorite room in the house--the kitchen.

The pain came again, but if somebody had been watching his almost sixty year old face (he was seventy-three) they would have noticed nothing different. Now what was it I wanted to do? His suddenly sweaty hands felt in his pockets for something to remind him. He didn't care about his absent-mindedness when others--like his son or his sister--were around. At least then he could blame it on nervousness. But when alone, he could only blame it on his mind.

"Dunce," he said to himself out loud, without realizing it, as his hand felt his wallet's smooth, leather surface, as he remembered. He closed his eyes, shaking his head, not wanting to forget again, like he had done so often before, so he took the hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and practiced clenching it tightly. He seemed like an old man, past his glory, walking toward the kitchen, but he would have replied: "Why do we need glory to live? Isn't everybody, from the minute they are born, past their glory? Isn't everybody? Perhaps it's only that, nearer the end, we realize it more." He would have said it just so, like he was reading it from a piece of paper, formally, before a thousand people, having practiced for an hour.

He felt the pain shoot up his arm.

"Dear boy," he said, as if speaking to his son. "Oh dear . . . ." And the pain in his arm was alive. He tried to speak but couldn't, as the hundred-dollar bill fell from his hand. Then, like a butterfly that has alighted on a tree-branch, and whose wings have stopped fluttering, his heart refused to beat. There was nobody to hear his groans, and the hundred-dollar bill slipped past him a few minutes later, past a man who had just died.

"Hardigan, my fine fellow, you're a handsome dude," Daniel Hardigan, the grocer, decided, looking into a full-length mirror behind his desk. His early morning monologue, with no audience until about ten-thirty, when staff help would arrive and when his self-appraisals would be quenched, had begun. "Am I not," he stated, quite sincerely to a side wall of canned Del Monte peaches, "a fine example of my kind," and here he specifically meant grocers. "Fine . . . eh . . . specimen." He chuckled to himself and seemed to decide, since there were no dissenting opinions, that he was right. There was no question on the matter. It was unanimous.

Hardigan had, for roughly five years, walked to his same window overlooking Decataur, and this day was no different. His eyes knew the street so well that he sometimes noted a change in a large pebble or stick from the day previously. From 1:15 to 1:45, after the lunch hour was over, he liked to stand at the window and simply watch, letting his staff appease any customers. For the last five years, he had stood at that window every Monday through Saturday just after lunch hour, resting. I'll do it again today he promised himself.

On Decataur past Hardigan's, a small girl in a green and white crossed dress, a little too large for her bony shoulders and arms, sat-quiet, weak-on her porch in her light brown rocking chair. She rose and moved, a little as if walking underwater in a pool. Her eyes looked toward the small sidewalk leading to the porch steps where she stood and then towards Decataur Street sidewalk.

"Oh dear Lord," she said, craning her head to look down the sidewalk, as if expecting her salvation would come from there. With this done, she turned back towards the rocking chair. Not much energy she thought. None.

Like Hardigan, Tom Wolfson, owner (naturally) of Wolfson's Hardware, liked to stand at his window, at exactly the same time, so that Hardigan would know he wasn't intimidated. It was wonderful to watch them as you walked past sometimes after lunch. Two old businessmen neighbors, gazing out on the street without looking at each other, as if the view of the ugly red brick warehouse across Decataur were scenic, edifying.

But this was the morning, and Wolfson dusted a piece of lint off his jacket and growled. It always made him feel a little better-growling when nobody else was around. He walked past the grocer's window with his friendly nod for Hardigan followed by a grunt as the grocer returned to his peaches. Wolfson opened the door to the store, turned on the light and growled again. He decided to look out the window. He expected a new shipment, which meant the hardware store shelves would be relatively full. He would much rather they be empty, because that meant somebody had been buying something. He growled a little as he saw Morris the policeman walk past with his wife, holding each other's hand.

The policeman, Jeffrey Morris, leveled his shoulders and glared casually ahead, irritated by the lack of people along Decataur, because he liked being among people. His wife looked at him, understanding. The early hours of his shift were always the tensest. Usually, by about twelve, there were people everywhere, a situation perhaps even tenser but somehow more bearable.

"What you gonna' do today?" he asked, pretending that he wasn't nervous. He had been married to his wife a year and five months, and he still didn't feel like it. It was almost as if she was another entity. But he expected the child to change that.

Mary Morris patted her protuberant stomach, perhaps already patting her child's head.

"I think I will write my parents," she said.

He laughed a little to calm himself.

"Why are you gonna' do that?" he asked her.

"Well, they've had a new child before, haven't they?" she said, enjoying her own excitement. "They might know what to do." There was a pause. "Problem is, do you have an extra pen?"

He laughed, although not quite sure why, and gave her one from his shirt pocket. She told him she would see him again at about 12:30 when she would return to the grocers to shop. He nodded at her and, smiling, watched her walk down Decataur until she finally turned left, toward 2300 Tippeny Lane, their home.

He walked down Decataur--thinking about all the things a man with a wife and a child loves to think about--almost to the projects. He passed houses of all different kinds-brick and stone and wood-and, at one, he remembered a little girl on a porch, vacuously staring off into space. She saw him and waved, but slowly, and the movement of her hand made him think of how thin she was. He stopped at that house and began his walk back down Decataur, past The Michaelton Herald, Hardigan's Grocery and Wolfson's Hardware.

Outside in the wind something blew to and fro. It was a crisp, slightly faded, green, hundred-dollar bill. The windy day made it seem like a lot of other leaves, and it had lost its crispness over the past hour. The wind controlled its course and blew it against thorny rose bushes and garbage cans. The violent wind blew the hundred-dollar bill against the part of the brick house from which it had come.

James Winslow sat down to the 1991 PC on an incongruous, much older, mahogany desk. The publisher had wanted to establish old-fashioned charm and had bought new computers every five years reluctantly. The ancient, wooden grandfather clock acquired over a year ago loomed over James. He was, understandably, a little frightened by it. At least he wasn't the only person whom the grandfather clock intimidated.

James worked, after all, in The Michaelton Herald copy room full of writers typing and sawing and, sometimes, slamming at their respective machines, depending on the time of day. James was the closest staff writer spatially to the grandfather clock, so that his tiny yelp and start were (fortunately for him) drowned in the clock's booming at a new hour. Others weren't so blessed.

"Yelp, yelp, yelp," came the cries, accompanied by sudden starts, muttered profanities, and violent gestures. Sometimes, if the Herald's older veterans were lucky, somebody, so incredibly focused on the run-on sentence they had just noticed, would fall out of their chair. This was a rare treat, however, and it usually happened only to amateurs or new hires, those who had a month or less experience with grandfather clocks in newspaper copy rooms. Most staff writers, of course, generally pretended to ignore any sharp cries, however amusing, from one's neighbor. Any unexpected landings on the floor led, collectively, to a slight pause, as the veterans enjoyed an ogle, but even this greatly wonderful and riotous event lasted, in a maximum way, perhaps four or five seconds, tops.

It was exactly that event, involving a new hire from a smaller newspaper that saved James. There came a loud crash, and this reminded him of the time, that the noon hour had turned. He realized suddenly that he was late for his walk with his father. He finished the morning's last line.

He was quite good at his escape. He was lucky enough to have a deskmate as messy, or messier, than himself. No other staff worker could tell whose mess it was, which made them both individually less responsible, and so his desk hardly ever had to be cleaned. They both had worked it out a long time ago.

"Frank's stuff," James would always say.

"Jim's stuff," Frank would say, when he had to leave quickly. They tried not to work together. James always kept his hat in reach, mostly for moments like this when "jettisoning" was probably a more appropriate word than "leaving." He never took his coat off, complaining of coldness to the other, quizzical Herald employees. It made his escape easier.

He soon banged against the copy room's two swinging doors and was gone. It would be only about a four minute walk to his father's lived at 2306 Tippeny. About two minutes passed, and he turned down Tippeny, and he could see his father's two-story brown-brick house, with massive windows and two front bays, one on top of the other, one to a story. Another strong gust of wind began, stinging his eyes. Then, James started and stopped instantly. He had seen something strange.

Tippeny Lane was actually a densely wooded canopy road, so much that behind him toward Decataur the sky opened much larger and ahead of him he felt about to enter a dark Sherwood Forest. His eyes had been caught by something green but something different-about the size of a leaf-but not a leaf. It had been smoothly, regularly shaped, like a notebook piece of paper, except smaller. He had seen it, and then it was gone again. His eyes glanced at where he thought he had seen it, and it must have blown quickly away.

He continued walking. The wind gust swirled leaves around him. That was what it must have been. A leaf. But then, for less than a second, so briefly he couldn't even remember where he had seen it, he saw it again. There could be no doubt. It was not a leaf, but what was it? He muttered something, although there was nobody on the whole sidewalk, which he always did when confused. He decided to think about something else.

He turned onto 2306 Tippeny Lane's sidewalk, head down. If a postman had been on that sidewalk, there would have been a collision, but there wasn't, and he walked up toward the door.

He started. His father's door was open. How peculiar. His father wasn't that absent-minded. His eyes glanced at the curtainless and blindless front windows. Shut, like they usually were.

He bounded up the steps, past the door. That was when he saw him, lying there, mouth open, head hanging to the left side, his right, callused hand open beside him, left hand with its pale, blonde hair closed.

Somehow, someway, he was able to think clearly. He reached down and felt just under his father's left wrist. Nothing. He pressed his lips against his father's and breathed hard. But soon he had realized he didn't know what he was doing, and, even if he did, it wouldn't help.

His father, Ronald Winslow, had died of a heart attack--at the doorway between his kitchen and his foyer--at the age of 73 on Monday, June 19th, 1995-one of the windiest days of the year-as most Michaelton residents would remember it.

His father had died. There was nothing anybody could do to change that. He pounded himself unmercifully, trying to imagine why. Why? Why? In a seemingly disordered world, he felt there to be some order, some reason behind it. He put his head in his hands after the police had left, trying to cry.

Finally, a strong gust blew the hundred-dollar bill against a window to the kitchen where James Sutton sat with his head in his hands. If he had looked up at just the right moment, he would have seen it, very clearly, lying against the window. He would have been able to tell that it was a one hundred-dollar bill. In his eye's corner, he had seen something, an unusual little flash of artificial, counterfeit greenness, but by the time he decided to look up at the window, the hundred-dollar bill had been blown somewhere else. He looked back down, and the tears finally came, like they often did when he was able to think of something else, even if for just a second.

"Why, why, why?"

Perhaps if she hadn't been listening so intently to the scratch of her own pen as she tried to make it work again, she might have heard the gust of wind blowing a little louder. She didn't, but even that wouldn't have mattered, for if only she hadn't examined the letter with such concentration, she might've looked up to see a hundred-dollar bill plastered against the window. So hard did the wind blow that the bill lay flat against the pane, and she could have clearly seen the one and two zeroes. She could have opened the window and it would have blown right into her hands. But she didn't look up, and suddenly, the wind let the bill tumble to the ground, and it was swept away.

The little girl's mother had told her to play in the back and not to come home until the HRS lady had gone. The HRS lady had come and looked at her mother suspiciously, and she saw that they'd been talking, and then the HRS lady had left, with a quick glance, and she had realized that then was perhaps her last chance.

"Mom, can I have something to eat," she had said as loudly as she had energy to, almost screaming it, and her mother had glared at her and said nothing, but the HRS lady had heard because she had stopped and looked back at her and seen her, and there had been a look of deep sympathy in her eyes.

The little girl had known then she would be back. She only had to survive until then. Her mother didn't respond with words but told her with her eyes to be quiet, and this was almost worse, for her, than being told by her lips.

She walked out on the wooden porch that badly needed weather treating, and she liked to feel the wind blow through her unbraided, unbrushed, unkempt hair. The wind couldn't make her less hungry, but it made her feel better. She saw everything that came along that sidewalk. She saw everything. But the worst part was that nobody saw her. She could tell nobody about how long it had been. If she did her mother would never forgive her.

Tom Wolfson told everyone who would listen afterwards that he was astounded. One minute the sky had been clear. He remembered walking outside and looking at it, although he had been really looking for the delivery truck. But, of course, the wind changes clouds in the sky quickly.

Mary Morris, with the letter finished, placed it in her purse and began her walk to the grocer's. Tippeny Lane was quiet, except for the wind that blew loudly. She only saw one or two people walking down it, but as she turned right on Decataur, there was an explosion of people. She guessed that she saw thirty to forty people walking down that road. She enjoyed shopping at lunch hour, because she enjoyed seeing people, feeling like she was in the middle of something and not the only one, like she felt in the mornings. She walked gingerly, careful of the baby in her stomach, as if she could lose it by walking. The contractions were still slow. She was so focused on her baby that she noticed nothing else around her, not even a piece of paper, a hundred-dollar bill, blowing down Decataur on her left.

Three minutes later, she felt a little strange, like something was moving inside her, but she opened the grocer's door carefully, so that the bell tinkled, instead of ringing, and trailed off behind her. She enjoyed entering any room at the sound of a bell. It announced her presence. She cast her eyes quickly over the shelves, the peaches, and the honey underneath them.

Outside there was a loud crack of thunder and then another, followed by another, and then a shocking flash of lightning, that made her realize how dark it was. Mary Morris would have noted the darkness to the grocer and that there still wasn't any rain, but she didn't because she had felt something move inside her. Something had broke.

"Oh dear," she said, out loud. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," and each of these, although the same words, were uniquely different sounds, and few human beings upon hearing them would have recognized them as linguistically the same. The first "oh" was tinged with panic, and the "dear" was sharp, very apparent, and Hardigan's ears tingled when he heard it. The second "oh dear" was garbled and sounded like a groan with a few vowel sounds thrown in. The third was as if Mary were simply gasping, in a calm way, to whoever was nearby: "I'm having a baby."

Hardigan stood up straight. "What's . . . eh (snort) . . . that?" he said, his head still ringing.

"I'm having a baby," Mary Morris said.

"Oh," Hardigan replied. "Quite right. Well, then . . . ." But a scream silenced any of his sage advice, and he paused, attempting to recover from the shock. About five seconds later, he was at the door, yelling.

Next door, Tom Wolfson stood, startled, and a little excited.

And it was about 1:20 when the hundred-dollar bill was blown down Decataur. The violent wind continued to blow the bill directly past the grocer's and the hardware store, where everybody in the street had crowded around an ambulance. All forty or fifty of them were so focused on a lady, hyperventilating, heaving, as she was slowly placed into the ambulance, that none of them saw the hundred-dollar bill. And so at 1:22, when both Hardigan and Wolfson had, every day for the past five years, looked out the window, scanning the street carefully, when all Decataur Street was normally covered with dozens of people, the hundred-dollar bill blew down the street unnoticed. Somebody did note the strangeness of the wind blowing straight down Decataur, but they were shushed.

"Shh," somebody said.

Finally, it blew towards the house where the little girl sat listlessly on a rocking chair on the front porch. She instantly knew she had seen a counterfeit green, different from the splotched grass on her lawn, and she rose for the first time since talking with her mother, and her limbs swung back and forth quickly. She grabbed at it, and finally, merely through luck and desire, managed to touch and hold it. She smiled and looked at it proudly. She wouldn't even tell her mother. She cradled it in her hands like it was food to eat.

When the HRS lady came for her about four weeks later, she didn't mention it, but smiled a full, warm, well-fed smile.

I believe it is a story that happens all the time.