The Great Northern Express Read online

  For the record, I will report that I had two gold bands about the size of ordinary staples fired into my ailing organ. The prostate gland is something of a gadabout. This free spirit of the male pelvic region floats around with an altogether cavalier insouciance, sometimes rubbing molecules with other organs that you decidedly do not want bombarded by millions of killer X-rays. The thin gold bands enable the radiation machine to determine the precise location of the peripatetic prostate before each treatment.

  Next came forty-four ten-minute sessions at the Norris Cotton Cancer Clinic in Hanover and St. Johnsbury, supervised by Dr. John Marshall, a renowned radiation oncologist who interned under a former student of Marie Curie. Also an award-winning team of nurses and technicians who were as supportive of this talking-out-loud-to-himself storyteller as they were ruthless in their scorched-earth assault on those voracious little night-of-the-living-dead cells that can, if they start to spread, kill a man in a few short months.

  Other than some “increased frequency,” by which I mean that, when driving, I had to stop to pee about every eight miles, I coasted through the first trimester of my fellowship period without much apparent difficulty. It occurred to me that my attempt at dark humor actually made good sense. A brush with any potentially fatal illness can be a wake-up call, a reminder—as if we needed one—of our mortality, and an opportunity. In a way, my personal MacArthur was better than a real one. What good would half a million bucks from the magnanimous John D. and Catherine T. outfit do me if I had only three months to spend it before bidding my family and friends a tearful farewell?

  In fact, my treatment gave me something infinitely more precious than cash—it gave me time, though the jury was still out on how much. Now, what would I do with it?

  4

  I Decide to Hit the Road

  From the MacArthur Foundation guidelines:

  1. RECIPIENTS MAY ADVANCE THEIR EXPERTISE.

  For a novelist, expertise is a tricky proposition. Each time I start a new novel, I have to teach myself how to write one all over again. Like confidence, and the women speaking of Michelangelo in the T. S. Eliot poem, expertise comes and goes, with maddening unpredictability. In the fiction-writing game, there is no equivalent to the little gold staples implanted deep in my gut.

  2. ENGAGE IN BOLD NEW WORK.

  I was willing to keep this possibility in mind. But I’d already started work on a new Civil War novel with a young firebrand from Vermont as its hero. How much bold new work could one writer handle at once?

  3. CHANGE FIELDS.

  Nope. At sixty-four I didn’t have the faintest notion how to do anything else. I hadn’t held down a job in the real world for more than thirty years. What’s more, writing isn’t merely my “field.” It defines who I am. Too late to change fields now.

  4. ALTER THE DIRECTION OF THEIR CAREER.

  At last we were getting somewhere. Writing may well be a glorious profession, but it’s a hellishly uncertain career. Anything I could do to alter my decades-long holding pattern would have to be an improvement.

  That spring, as I reclined under my new friend, the gigantic, humming Varian Clinac 2100 EX radiation machine that was frying my prostate gland and God knows what else to a crisp, I began thinking that maybe the time had come to alter the direction of my career.

  I love to travel cross-country. Seeing new territory delights me, as does visiting bookstores. The June publication date for my latest novel would be within a week of my final radiation treatment and my sixty-fifth birthday, and as the date approached, I became increasingly excited. Why not combine my long-delayed uncle-nephew road trip with a book tour? And not just any book tour. Instead of the usual perfunctory, eight-city flying tour, I would drive, both to see the country, as my uncle and I had planned, and to stop at bookstores in smaller cities as well as the bigger ones. I’d economize by touring in my twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity, with 280,000 miles on the odometer, the vehicle I often referred to as the Loser Cruiser. I would, by God, spend the entire summer out on the open road promoting my new novel, on what I was already thinking of as the Great American Book Tour. An adventure that might, with luck, enable me not only to alter the direction of my writing career but to gain a fresh perspective on what I loved enough to live for in the time I had left.

  5

  Harold Who Calls Ahead

  “Hi, there. This is the novelist Howard Frank Mosher.”

  Silence.

  I soldiered on. “May I please speak with your bookstore events coordinator?”

  “Yeah, well. That would be me. I guess.”

  “Terrific. I’ll be publishing my tenth book this summer, and I’m putting together, if you can believe such a thing, a one-hundred-city book tour. Let’s see, I’ll be in New Mexico in the second week of July. I was hoping we could arrange—”

  “Who’d you say this was?”

  “Howard Mosher? The novelist?” Good grief. Could I possibly be losing momentum already?

  “Harold who?”

  “Howard. Howard Frank Mosher.”

  “So are you a local author or what?”

  “Well, actually, I’m from Vermont, but—”

  “Vermont?” The events coordinator, who might have been all of fifteen, could hardly have sounded more outraged if I’d announced I was from Guantánamo.

  “Hey, Harold. I’m with a customer. Okay? E-mail me.”

  “Howard.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s Howard. Not Harold.”

  Mercifully for us both, the line went dead.

  Scores of phone calls later, by virtue of sheer, bullheaded stubbornness, I had somehow managed to set up about one hundred and fifty book events in one hundred or so towns and cities nationwide. In introducing my new novel to the overflowing audiences that I would no doubt attract, I had decided to start by talking about my life and work in the place I have long called Kingdom County. I might even show some slides. That was it! For my old-fashioned Great American Book Tour, I would put together an old-fashioned slide show. I’d call it “Where in the World Is Kingdom County?”

  “Go for it,” Phillis said. “There are worse things to promote than novels.”

  “Like what?”

  She thought for a moment. “Amway products?”

  “It’s come to this, then,” Reg said to me a week later as we headed up the sidewalk toward my friend Linda Ramsdell’s renowned Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont, for the launch party of my new book.

  “Lighten up,” I replied, to the consternation of the polite elderly gentleman who had offered to carry my slide projector into the store.

  The milestone that authors work for years to read was at hand. Publication date. And, for me and my ever-present uncle, the eve of an adventure we’d been waiting half a century for.

  6

  Where in the World Is Kingdom County?

  It was the last day of April 1964, and Phillis and I were headed from the rolling farm country of central New York to the mountains of northeastern Vermont to interview for teaching jobs. In less than a month, Phillis would receive her degree from Syracuse University in science education. She would then be qualified to teach biology and earth science. With luck I might be awarded a degree from the liberal arts college. Though I’d majored in English and had always, from the time I was six or seven, planned to become a writer, a teller of tales like those my parents read to me by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, I was not qualified to do much of anything. Still, we planned to be married that August. We needed to earn some money, and after that, our future was open-ended. Perhaps we’d go on to graduate school. Scarcely more than a kid myself, I was naive enough to suppose that somewhere, maybe at one of the MFA creative writing programs that were becoming popular at American universities, I would find a blueprint for how to write stories that someone besides my mother might want to read.

  We’d learned about two teaching vacancies in a tiny town in Vermont. Though we had no idea what or exactly where the
Northeast Kingdom was, we’d found Orleans on a Vermont road map, been intrigued by the sparsely populated terrain, the mountains, the numerous lakes and streams, and decided to drive up and have a look. If nothing else, it would be a fine spring lark.

  In Burlington the maple trees were beginning to leaf out. Daffodils were blooming on the quadrangle of the university. Students in shorts lounged on the newly green grass. But as we continued northeast over the Green Mountains, the maple buds were just turning red. Soon we entered an austere region of big woods, relieved here and there by rough-looking farms. Scattered through the forest were speckled patches of old snow.

  Pushing on, we lost the Red Sox game on the radio. Then we lost reception altogether. We noticed that as the season retreated from spring to late winter, we seemed to be traveling into an earlier era. We passed a farmer collecting maple sap in a wooden vat on runners pulled by two black-and-white oxen, their horns tipped with gleaming brass balls. In a clearing in the woods, a shaggy horse in a working harness stood near a man stacking pulpwood. We caught the scent of wood smoke from a farmhouse attached to a barn by a ramshackle shed. A bedraggled wreath adorned the boarded-up front door. Some of the barns and sheds were decorated with rural scenes that could have been inspired by the poetry of Robert Frost. Who, we wondered, had painted them? A school bus from the ’40s, converted to a hunting camp, with a set of deer antlers over the cracked windshield, slumped in a clearing. We passed mailboxes with the names Desjardins, Thibeau, Lafleur, and Lanoue lettered on them. Had we blundered over the border into Canada?

  7

  The Christly Kingdom

  We arrived in Orleans around six that evening. The town consisted of a furniture factory across the river from several gray row houses; a main street lined with storefronts reminiscent of those in a nineteenth-century prairie town; a single railroad track; a squat brick bank; and a white, three-story wooden hotel. On an abandoned siding near the river sat an ancient Great Northern boxcar. Some wag—perhaps one of our prospective students—had painstakingly inscribed, in bold capital letters, the word EXPRESS on the side of the boxcar: Great Northern Express. Somewhere, we trusted, there was a high school.

  There was no traffic at all, so I stopped in the street to consult the hand-drawn map that the superintendent of schools had sent us. As we studied the map, two men wearing red wool jackets, wool pants, and muddy lumbering boots came staggering out of the hotel, apparently engaged in a fistfight. The combatants were too drunk to hurt each other much, but the slugfest raged all over Main Street. Grappling for advantage, they crashed into the grille of my grandparents’ Oldsmobile, which we’d borrowed to drive to our interview.

  Now—showing how absolutely green in the ways of the world I was, how sopping wet behind the ears—I rolled down my window and called out to those two lugs, in all seriousness, “Excuse me. Could one of you gentlemen please tell us how to get to the high school?”

  “Well, hell, we can do better than that,” the taller one said. “We can take you there.”

  Whereupon, without invitation, the pugilists piled into the backseat of Gramp’s Olds, bearing more than a whiff of damp wool, evergreen pitch, chain-saw gas, and beer. But there was another scent in the air, one I’d been vaguely aware of since our arrival in Orleans, a sweetish odor that seemed familiar, though I couldn’t quite identify it.

  “Hang a Christly right at the hotel,” the tall brawler shouted in my ear.

  I hung a right. After several more abrupt turns, mostly into private driveways that our inebriated guides had mistaken for public thoroughfares, we pulled up in front of a small brick school building. The back doors of the car opened and our benefactors poured themselves out. Waving off my thanks, they weaved up the middle of the street, arms around each other’s shoulders like two affectionate school chums. But as I turned into the parking lot, I glanced back and saw them shoving each other. The smaller man threw a wild haymaker, and they were at it again. “Well, sweetie,” Phillis said as we headed up the granite steps of the school for our interview, “welcome to the Christly Northeast Kingdom.”

  The superintendent—“Just call me Prof”—made a strong pitch. The classes were small, and the students, he assured us, were farm and small-town kids, unsophisticated but hard-working and bright, who did not want to go directly from high school into the local furniture factory. Above all, Prof told us, our job would be to “keep the kids out of the mill.” Admittedly, the salaries were abysmal: $4,100 for a beginning male teacher, $3,900 for a woman. Incredibly, in many Vermont schools in those days, men were routinely paid more on the assumption that most women would leave the classroom after a few years to have children—and thus were worth less. Prof allowed that even though the salary schedule was discriminatory, he’d had no luck getting the school board to change the policy. A broad-shouldered former English teacher and coach, now in his fifties, with a big, red, earnest face and a loud voice, the superintendent shrugged. You fight the battles you have some chance of winning, he told us.

  To be sure, a heavy redolence of fermented grain mash hung about the stocky old educator. Could it be that everyone in this boreal enclave was an alcoholic? I supposed that Prof had just finished dinner and had had a couple of drinks with his meal—and his personal habits weren’t our business, anyway.

  We’d come prepared to be quizzed about our college classes and grades, educational philosophies, extracurricular activities, and how long we intended to stay in the area. None of those subjects came up. It quickly became apparent that Prof was desperate to find two warm bodies to fill the science and English vacancies at Orleans High School. He did inquire whether we thought we could make the kids behave. “I’ll just tell you one thing on that score,” he said. “If you have to knock ’em down, make sure they stay down. That includes my two boys, Big Prof and Little Prof. They’re the worst of the lot. Do you have any questions?”

  The only query we could think of was how the Northeast Kingdom had gotten its name. Happy to be back on safe ground, Prof explained that the Kingdom was usually considered to comprise the three northeasternmost counties of Vermont: Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex. As for its name, during the 1950s, the then-governor of Vermont, George Aiken, had coined it in recognition of the region’s rugged beauty.

  To clinch the deal, having learned that we both liked to fish, Prof walked us down School Street to the Willoughby River and showed us, in the April dusk, the very large rainbow trout leaping the falls on their way upriver to their spring spawning beds. The jumping trout did the trick. Back in the superintendent’s office, we signed our contracts on the spot.

  Not until we walked out to my grandparents’ car, however, did I recognize that pervasive aroma I’d noticed earlier. Then I understood my deeper affinity for this remote northern mill town and the mountains surrounding it. The scent of varnish from the furniture factory was identical to that in the air of my hometown in the Catskills when the woodworking factory was open. Like the odors of sawdust, lumber seasoning in the open air, evergreen woods, and the cold river where Prof had taken us to see the leaping trout, the fragrance of varnish was, to me, the scent of a potential home.

  8

  A Run of Hard Luck

  It was the dawn of June 2, my sixty-fifth birthday, and the Loser Cruiser and I were headed east out of town on the first leg of the Great American Book Tour. In the rear-view mirror, I could see Phillis waving from our front porch. Suddenly, I found myself remembering my first day of high school. We’d just moved again to the tiny, rural village of Cato, in the snow belt of central New York, where my dad had recently been appointed superintendent of schools. I was sitting in my homeroom when I looked up and noticed, coming through the door, arms laden with books, a pretty, slender strawberry blonde with the sweetest smile I’d ever seen.

  I soon learned that Phillis was the kindest, smartest, funniest girl in my new school. We began sitting next to each other in our classes, and my early adolescent attempts at fiction were satirical portrai
ts of our teachers written solely to amuse her. Later, when we began dating seriously, our romance had a delicious and, to us, mostly hilarious Capulet-Montague flavor, since Phillis’s mother was suing a politically controversial teacher my dad firmly supported, and our families were arch enemies. For a year or so, Phillis and I had to meet on the sly, stealing passionate kisses and laughing ourselves silly behind the walnut tree in her front yard. Today, however, these recollections threatened to derail me before I was out of sight of home. Ten seconds into my journey, I missed the light and love of my life so badly I could have burst into tears.

  “Get a grip on yourself, Howard Frank,” Reg said. He was sitting beside the front passenger-side door in what, from that moment on, I would think of as the catbird seat. “This was your idea, remember? A book tour is Murphy’s Law writ large. My advice is to brace yourself.”

  My uncle, the realist, was right. Over the next two weeks, during my New England “saturation tour,” I

  1. Received an e-mail in Blue Hill, Maine, from my publisher, informing me that the first national review of my new book had trashed it as a prime example of “storytelling run amok.”

  2. Learned in Boston that there’d been a good review of my novel in Publishers Weekly. “Too late,” said the gleeful critic in my head. “But look at it this way, Harold. Who wants to read something good about an author, anyway?”

  3. Was rebuked by a well-fed gentleman in a clerical collar in Northhampton, Massachusetts, for “contributing to the addictions of panhandlers,” because I slipped a buck to a young man with a cardboard sign reading HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. That same day the gas tank fell off the Loser Cruiser in Portland, and I had to bum a ride to my downtown event in a commercial bread truck.