The Truth about Clayton

The New York Central tracks go through Clayton, Mich. (pop. 467), but there is no station, and the trains seldom stop. U.S. Highway 223 bypasses Clayton, and except for nearby farmers, few people stop there, either. It is a poor little place: half a dozen old red brick buildings, two gasoline stations, a few blocks of houses, a few sheds. Clayton is a dull, insular village, not friendly to outsiders.

Last July one Floyd McFall and his wife Sylvia used their savings to open a little restaurant and soda fountain between the post office and the bank. They were ignored; almost everyone who wanted a snack away from their own kitchens went, as always, to the lunch counter in the J. F. Hathaway Market & Grocery across the street. Morose, 58-year-old McFall, an ex-house painter who had lived his whole life in the town of Adrian, only twelve miles away, was considered a stranger.

The young hoodlums of the village started hanging out at McFall's, but otherwise life in Clayton droned on exactly as before. Then the town experienced an incomprehensible act of violence. Russell Simpson, a 19-year-old local ne'er-do-well, walked into Hathaway's market and lunch counter at closing time, pulled out a pistol and cried, "I want your money!" The 71-year-old grocer grabbed a butcher knife and hacked at the youth's face and arm. Simpson began shooting. His pistol fired, clicked twice, and fired again. The grocer fell dead. The bleeding youth ran home and was arrested almost immediately. That was last autumn.

In the last fortnight, shocked and startled, Clayton learned more about the holdup--and about itself. After nearly two months of silent brooding in the red brick jail at Adrian, young Simpson talked. Floyd McFall, full of dull anger at being ostracized and in fear of going broke, had put him up to the robbery, he said, and had agreed to hide him and help him get away afterward. McFall was jailed. Police said that he confessed, but at Simpson's trial McFall denied any part in the holdup.

The case shook Clayton to the core. "I feel scared," said white-haired Widow Hathaway. "I'm all tight inside, like nervous tension." Then, looking out of the window at McFall's restaurant, she cried, "Oh, how can they just sit over there looking at us?"

But across the street Mrs. McFall and her son were equally horrified. "We haven't any money to pay the lawyer," said McFall's wife. Said his son: "Business? There won't be any business now."

One of Clayton's young men, 23-year-old Dorman Curtis, was bitter. "Simpson," he said, "never had a chance. Just drive by his house and take a look. No water. Just ... the pump there on the main street. No light. He never went to school much. How would you have grown up if your old man had never worked, and there was never any money in the house for food or anything? If you didn't have a nickel for candy? Sure, Russ has been in trouble all along ..."

"This is a small town, mister," said the telephone operator in a voice of protest. "This ain't Detroit, you know, and we're all kinda upset ..." But last week Clayton knew in its heart what it had long denied: it harbored poverty, fear, meanness, and the base passions, too. Clayton would not be the same for a long, long time.

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