Percival Alden Quimby

Percival Alden Quimby died in Rutland on August 18, 2026. He was eighty-six. Born there on July 7, 1940, he grew up knowing marble as a rumor that paid and a pickup as a set of honest problems. He learned stone the way other boys learned baseball statistics. A block, he believed, was a set of honest problems. People were harder, but he liked them anyway. He ran a cutting bench in a quarry shed for most of his adult life. He did not advertise. He did not need to. Word moved along the rail: Percy will tell you if you do not need the cut. He kept a handwritten ledger and a jar of extra wedges. He hired a neighbor's kid every summer and taught him that a set is not a suggestion. When the catalogs arrived with televisions in the waiting rooms, he kept the radio on an AM station and a pot of coffee that was never quite fresh and never empty. He married Denise Quimby in 1962. They raised two sons in a house with a shed that was cleaner than the living room. Denise worked at the clinic. Percy grilled on Sundays and considered a Saturday in the hills a civic duty. After the quarry slowed he still came out when a neighbor's well pump died, moving slower, charging less. Customers remember a man who wiped his hands before he shook yours, who would jump a battery at dusk without calling it a favor, and who could diagnose a wander from the curb. He liked the Otter Creek at evening, a plate of apple pie he did not finish, and a church he stood through in the back because his knees had opinions. He died in Rutland, the high dry town that had always been home. The bench is down. A lot of stones in the county still sit true because he was stubborn about a job.