Free The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams

afraid to bend over, and kept his shoulders level as though balancing a book on his head. Twenty-three, and he couldn’t run, jump, somersault, bend very far from the waist. Once he came to college and was seen and known, it was too late to take the last wish and wish with all his heart that the wig (or toupee, or hairpiece) had never happened.
    Harold was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, a northern town set among blue-green mountains covered with white birch, spruce, pine, beech and ash—great rolling forests of these and other noble trees. Into Berlin flows a beautiful river, graced with rapids, called the Androscoggin, a river hospitable to rainbow trout and salmon, those quicksilvery fish of clear cold waters. When the Androscoggin flows out of Berlin it is the color of lead, its surface frothed from bank to bank with puslike yellowish strings and globs of filth, a river so far beyond mere death its carrion stench takes the paint off houses. The great red brick paper mills of the Brown Company are here, towering out of the river gorges, their tall chimneys pushing out such volumes of smoke it seems the explosive density of the brown and gray billows could never have been contained in vents even as monstrous as these. At ground level huge conduits vomit whole rivers of sulfite wastes down ancient ledge into the Androscoggin. The massive heights and complications of the industrial fortresses, pulsing smoke and steam, gushing torrents of raw poison, awaken myths of the dark sulfurous glories of hell.
    Unsuspecting travelers who drive down from the mountains into this charnel reek have been known to accuse each other of unbearable flatulence; then, as they frantically crank down the car windows, the full force of Berlin’s miasma flows over them in all its claustrophobic power. It is a sweet stench, so nearly tangible one fears nausea and asphyxiation. It is said that the natives of Berlin and the towns downriver get usedto it, but at what price, the traveler wonders, to the delicate senses through which life reveals itself and is judged?
    Aaron Benham hears his heart’s labor in his chest. Would Harold Roux use those sonorities, those ganged superlatives, he wonders. No, and he’d never mention farts. That voice is Allard Benson’s—one of his voices, for he is a chameleon of voices.
    Berlin’s pride is to call itself “Hockeytown, U.S.A.” It is a somber place of drab, mostly wooden buildings made to fit odd levels and corners. To the west a sheer granite cliff rises above the town, as if to crowd it down closer toward the sewer it has made of its river. And it was here, in August of 1923, Harold Roux was born. He grew up living above a small grocery store, where the crooked, soiled back windows of the apartment looked across the water to the cloacal bases of the mills.
    Harold had four older sisters—actually three sisters and a half sister, the child of his mother’s first marriage. That first husband had died beneath an avalanche of pulp logs. Harold’s father also worked for the Brown Company. A minor demon, he presided over a vast, jiggling tank of chemicals he was responsible for stirring and cooking properly. He was a borderline alcoholic, one of those who, though a terror at home, managed to keep his job. Quite often he beat upon his wife; random blows sometimes made it dangerous for everyone. Harold’s mother worked in the grocery store below, which belonged to her sister and brother-in-law, Tante Louise and Oncle Hébert. It was his mother who mainly supported the family; his father mainly supported his habit. With the precision of young surviving animals, all the children knew that beer was not too bad, but wine was dangerous and whiskey a disaster. Harold remembered something the youngest of his sisters once said when asked what sort of man she would likesomeday to marry: “I want to marry a man who won’t be drunk when I come home from work.” She was quite serious about that.
    When Harold was