Like other stories by our fine writers of whodunits, Don Bredes’ The Errand Boy has page-to-page pull and fascinating characters you keep wanting to get back to.  

 

Chief among these is of course his Vermont village constable hero Hector Bellevance, organic farmer, quiche chef, and o yes, mysteriously disgraced former big-city cop.  Hector protects his community, the fictional Vermont northeast kingdom town of Tipton, with such a passion that we sense something more here than his responsibilities as a sworn officer.

 

Hector’s passion has something ironic about it, because he also at times seems emotionally remote, if ultimately reliable, in his relations with his wife Wilma and his eleven-year-old daughter Myra.  Is this the tough-guy’s dislike of sentiment, or the pathological avoidance of feeling?  For me, the center of the Hector books, and I’ve read all three of them, is not the who and why of the murder but the enigma of Hector himself.  Is he laudably self-possessed in his manly reserve and dignity, or has he been stunned into withholding by some unexplained trauma?  Surely this is a man who would disdain self-indulgence but whose attachment to paths of violent danger trumps his responsibility to protect his child.  Is he reckless in pursuit of right, or is dirty business repeatedly thrust upon him as a deal he can’t refuse?

 

Hector is a rationalist, not a romantic.  Is the protection of one’s community from meth labs and murderers bigger and more essential than the protection of one’s own child?  Sure.  That’s rational.  

 

But is it not also rational when warned off the case by both crooks and cops to tend the garden and keep the homefolks from harm while leaving the care of the community to the state police and the feds with their superior numbers, firepower, labs, and legal mandates?  Wouldn’t that be rational?  And parental?  And community-minded?

 

But though Hector thinks rational, he chooses like most of us with some other faculty.  He is compelled to fight bad guys, magnetized by evil when it comes too close and the law seems too slow, mechanistic, biased, and doltish to do what’s needed.  The crafty self-reliant Yankee knows better than the government what needs to be done.  But it’s dark duty.  His family and friends support him with resignation, knowing by now that he gets like this when the monsters bellow too close to the fold.  He must transgress to stop the transgressors, and so he goes outside the law as we wonder if we might, enters the gnashing chaos of brutal evil, endures its beatings, slays its demons, and comes back to get the three trays of spinach to the food co-op and bake the blueberry pie for his smiling wife and daughter.  

 

Hector’s compulsion to thwart evil, whether for love of community or just a stubborn personal need born of some oath sworn in a victimized childhood, has something in common with the allegiance to honor borne as a cross by the protagonists of Cormac McCarthy novels.  The intrusion of extreme circumstances in their lives calls for the apotheosis of everyday virtue to an extraordinary heroism that most of us would consider irrational and needless, but that the self-reliant, self-judging Yankee/cowboy knows – even if it puts his loved ones in jeopardy – is the simple fact of what he must do.  Hector is the stoic we admire but don’t want to be, the man of wits and force we want to think will be there when we need him, the enigmatic balancing act between our judgment and our animality, the character we can eagerly read plenty about and never understand.