Atlas and Alice, Issue 19
Kathryn Fitzpatrick
Raggies: A Natural History “Mount Raggie is somewheres over beyond Salisbury. I met an old farmer up there…I was walkin’ along the road and I see this lad lookin’ at this pile of bones over in his pasture. ‘That there used to be a cow, mister,’ he says. ‘That’s all they left me.’” – Ed Robertson, Thomaston, Connecticut, 1939 Cindy Garry’s been a teller at Torrington Savings Bank for fourteen years. She walks to work every day in slippers, carries her satin kitten heels and her Danielle Steel paperback and her cigarettes in a Stop & Shop bag she’s been saving on account of the plastic bag ban in Connecticut. She lives with her son and grandson on Center Street, in a twobedroom apartment above Sawyer’s Bar, which she’s never been to ’cause the crowd is too trendy, and anyway, she goes to the packy twice a week after work for her fifth of Dubra, which Sawyer’s doesn’t keep on hand. Sometimes Cindy yells at customers. When they enter the lobby shirtless or pull pints of Fireball out of their briefcases or ask too many dumb questions or loiter too long or want their cash back in small bills. Most customers at Torrington Savings Bank want small bills. Cindy yells at most customers. Before, Cindy was a server at the Bertucci’s in Simsbury, in a plaza with an AMC and a Banana Republic and a Kiehl’s. She still pronounces bruschetta with the crunchy “c” because she thinks she’s classy, and she makes it every year for the office potluck for an excuse to pronounce it that way. But Cindy’s been wearing the same kerchief-hemmed dresses since ‘93, so when she whispers fuckin’ raggies after the lobby’s cleared out, it feels more like an acknowledgement than a slur. Raggies live in northwest Connecticut, in the armpit between upstate New York and Massachusetts. If you drive around Torrington, down past Coe Park and the Cumberland Farms that always gets robbed, near the Knights of Columbus building with its monument for all the dead babies lost to abortions, you’ll see them walking. They 49
