Wild
Mountain
Wild Mountain
NANCY HAYES KILGORE
© 2017 by Nancy Hayes Kilgore
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Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
EMILY DICKINSON
Wild
Mountain
1
March 2008
ON THE DAY SHE RESCUED FRANK MACFARLAND, Mona had been thinking of condiments. Red salsa, green salsa, yellow mustard, Dijon mustard, barbeque sauce, teriyaki sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chutney, sweet relish, green olives, black olives. Every time she stocked more of one thing, they’d clean her out of something else, and the last time she had restocked mustard, no one had bought any for a year. She moved the little credit card machine back two inches and sat down on the stool behind the counter, directing her gaze to the light. Through a layer of dust on the window, the sky transformed from light to dark, and then to light again, and Mona Duval, the still point within the flickering dance, decided to order more pickles.
She made a note on her notepad and raised her eyes to the window. This was mountain light, reflecting off the river in summer and the snow in winter, and shining back from the clouds so that her little store on the hill was bathed in a kind of glow. She had always felt it, this shining quality of the world here in Wild Mountain, especially on a sunny day—but it had only been recently that she could name it.
The smell of damp wood arose from the floor, the result of a succession of wet boots, and Mona wondered again if she should redo the floor with vinyl tile. She opened the cash register and sifted through a pile of checks under the stack of twenties, then studied the credit card receipts, but she already knew the answer: she couldn’t afford renovations. Well, she liked the plank floors, after all, even though they tended to absorb the damp. They were homey, indigenous—a word old Bea Vargas used about anything that was weathered or funky.
The store had been quiet today, but now a voice boomed out from the back. “I didn’t—!” Young Edson Perry’s Vermont accent was so pronounced that the words came out as “Oi di-n’t,” and the rest of his speech was obscured in a murk of vowels punctuated by abrupt breaks serving as consonants. Who was he talking to?
“We don’t want it!” Edson’s voice grew to a roar, a contentious roar. What could Edson be getting so riled up about? Mona fingered the end of her braid, twisted it in her fingers, and craned her neck to see around the aisles to the back. Oh, yes—Alice Spinelli, the town minister, had been meandering between the aisles.
Mona had owned the general store for eight years now, and she still woke up every day thankful. When she was married, she’d lived in Rutland, with its drugs and crime and ugly strip malls, and with Johnny O. Duval, whose jumble of charm and malice had surrounded her life with a desperate gray cloud all year long. She’d wandered into that cloud and lost her way.
Thank God, the threatening phone calls had finally stopped. And thank God for the store and her house above the river. The Abanoosic River, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a roaring torrent, its colors changing from day to day and from morning to night, was alive with light and power as it ran beneath the covered bridge.
Today, though, the river wasn’t running beneath the bridge. The river wasn’t running at all. Today, the river was packed with ice: chunks and blocks of ice as big as boulders, jammed together along the banks and strewn haphazardly in the center.
Alice Spinelli arrived at the counter, Edson just behind her. “Over my dead body!” shouted Edson, a big round-faced guy who smelled like engine oil and manure.
Alice placed three containers of yogurt, a can of dog food, and a Rutland Herald on the counter. “This is two thousand and eight, you know,” she said with a haughty look. Alice, who stood head to head with Edson, was tall, with sloping bosoms and dark brown hair flowing loose over her shoulders. She flung her hair back over a brown coat that sported a huge campaign button reading MARRIAGE EQUALITY, and raised an eyebrow at Mona.
“Vermonters believe in real marriage!” Edson bellowed, pounding on the counter with his fist and making both women flinch. “We have family values!”
Pipe down, Edson, Mona thought but didn’t say, as that would probably have inflamed him more.
Same-sex marriage. There was a bill for it supposedly coming before the legislature, but most people thought the idea was pretty far out. Gay people getting married? Mona couldn’t imagine it. Strangely, gay marriage had just become legal in Massachusetts, but it was common knowledge that the law would be rescinded.
Not that she agreed with Edson, of course. She believed that everyone should have equal rights. But marriage was a heterosexual thing. Even Heather Brae, who was a lesbian, agreed with that. Or was the whole idea just too new for her to understand? Maybe it was like the Berlin Wall and apartheid. Most people had never imagined those conditions ending, and maybe now, we just can’t imagine a world with gays and lesbians getting married, she thought. Just as she hadn’t imagined herself not being married, not having to be married, to Johnny O.
“We’ll ban gay marriage first,” Edson shouted as Alice made to leave.
Mona shook her head. Of course, we won’t do that.
Alice gave Edson a cool, sarcastic smile. “I wouldn’t call that very good values.” She picked up her grocery bag and walked calmly out the door.
“What would that lezzie bitch know about Vermont?” Edson hissed. “Go back to Massachusetts,” he muttered to the door. Edson wasn’t usually such a chauvinist. He was ten years younger than Mona, and she had babysat for him when he was little. She couldn’t help remembering him sniveling and cuddling up to her after his sister had hit him. Probably, to him, the idea of gay marriage was not only strange, but also scary and threatening.
Mona rang up his purchases: a box of Pampers, a six-pack of Bud, and two boxes of spaghetti. She put the items in a bag and looked up, frowning. “You don’t have to antagonize my customers like that.”
“Oh, so now you’re in favor of lezzies getting married?”
“I didn’t say that. And I don’t like your language. The word is lesbian. And you know perfectly well that Alice is not a lesbian, but I have some dear friends who are.”
“Oh, sure,” he snickered, raising his voice again, “the organic dykes at Allingw
orth Farm.”
Mona gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. He was baiting her, but defending Heather and Roz would just aggravate him more, so she held her tongue.
“Cool it, Edson,” said Leo Bailey, who had just come in the door. Mona gave him a grateful smile. Leo, a small, thin man who had been the postmaster in Wild Mountain for twenty years, was headed toward the post office in the back of the store. He stopped and looked at them both, pulling on his white goatee. Since he had become town moderator last spring, Leo had taken on a new gravitas, an air of authority that seemed to enhance his down-to-earth personality. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Seen the river?”
“Whoa!” Edson widened his eyes. “It’s weird! I can’t remember it being this bad in March, all jammed up like that!”
Leo resumed his course down the aisle toward the post office. “Seventy-four!” he shouted. “It was worse in seventy-four!”
Edson projected his nasal voice to the back of the room. “I weren’t alive in seventy-four, you might recall.”
When Edson left, Mona grabbed her binoculars, stepped out onto the porch, and headed around the corner. She sat down on the bench. The sky had clouded over, and snowflakes now materialized, gently filling the air like feathers, the only sound a trickle of water from the millstream dripping into some melted spot. The river was still a chaotic hodgepodge of frozen lumps. Through the binoculars, Mona watched a seagull, landlocked and stymied by the ice, flapping its wings and squawking above the chunky river surface. She raised her fist. “You tell ’em!” she called, and the gull took off downriver into the falling snow.
Edson had been right about one thing: this weather was pretty weird.
2
FRANK MACFARLAND SLIPPED HIS COWBOY CD into the player and opened the window. He stuck his head out like a dog, and felt the air ruffle his hair and beard as the car rode the curves of Route 100. “Back in the saddle again!” he howled.
It was March, and the hills of Vermont were not yet green. Through the snow, patches of earth glowed pale and brown on the southern slopes. The sky was a dazzle of light, and little winds erupted here and there, spontaneous fits of warmth and cold.
For more than twenty-five years, Frank had been riding this trail, New York to Wild Mountain, but today the air was so clear, it was as if the layers of time had evaporated with the clouds. Here on the open road, with the Green Mountains rising behind the valley, Frank was reborn into his younger self: the young Frank who could harvest downed trees in the morning and hike the Long Trail in the afternoon. Or barrel down Pinnacle on his skis. Maybe he was fifty, but his energy was surging like the sap rising in the sugar maples. Maybe tomorrow he would snowshoe up Mt. Badger.
In the old days, when he was first married, Patsy would have been sitting beside him. She would have been singing a harmony to the music or arguing with him to change that schmaltzy stuff. When they arrived at the cabin, they’d make a bean stew and cook it in the cast iron pot over the woodstove. Then they’d take off their clothes and run outside to the shower, laughing and chasing each other around the outhouse.
He turned up the volume. “Where the longhorn cattle feed,” he wailed, “on the lonesome gypsum weed….” Five wild turkeys, sleek and black, disturbed out of their stately procession, fluttered across the road and into the woods. He slowed down, and a cold draft whipped in the window, a force that thrashed up out of nowhere like the mistral on the Algarve—and suddenly the sky turned dark. Frank closed the window.
The car bounced over a hill and onto Wild Mountain Road, coasting down toward the river. The Abanoosic River meant he was almost home.
The river. He hit the brakes, and the car jerked. What had happened to the river? Frank swerved, barely missing the ditch, and the car thudded, hitting the edge of a craterlike pothole. He fell sideways, and his head slammed against the window. Dazed, he pulled onto the narrow shoulder and stopped the car.
He stared at the space that used to be the Abanoosic. In January, this had been a placid scene, a smooth stretch of ice, a Hans Christian Andersen illustration. What was this crazy mess? Giant blocks of ice, piled and shoved onto the riverbed, a shattered moonscape. Treetops stuck upside-down in the crust, and gnarled roots jabbed like contorted fingers into the sky. The scene stretched around a bend to the distant covered bridge, where the steeple of the Unitarian church materialized above it.
He touched his head. A bump was beginning to swell. Ouch. This called for something a little more serious in the music department. Pushing the eject button, he replaced the cowboy music with Wagner’s Die Walkürie. Sturm und drang, thunder and drama. He lifted his arm to conduct the orchestra, the god Wotan sending the warrior women into battle, restoring life to the dead, life to the river, and protection to the wounded warrior Frank.
When he turned the key in the ignition, the old BMW sputtered, but after a few well-timed pumps on the accelerator, it started up again. “Good Old Faithful.” He patted the dashboard and drove more slowly now. Jagged boulders of ice, each more distorted than the last, as though the Furies had tumbled them like colossal dice, lined the riverbed. By the time he got to the bridge, the whole scene had metamorphosed into a Wagnerian phantasmagoria, and a light snow had started falling.
On the hill to his left sat Mona’s Store, with its peeling white paint and standing seam roof, in the same spot it had occupied for two hundred years. He saw a splotch of red on the side porch and slowed down. Mona, in her lumber jacket with her long, silver hair pulled back into a loose braid, sat on the bench, binoculars held to her eyes. Ah, Mona on her porch. He didn’t know Mona well, but for the past ten years or so, she’d been a fixture at that store, something fundamental in his conception of Wild Mountain.
Now, New York was truly in the past tense, and he was home.
Mona stood up and headed back around the corner. A couple more cars had pulled into the parking lot: Heather Brae’s Subaru, and another that looked vaguely familiar. She opened the door, turned around to take off the binoculars, and bumped into the back of a canvas jacket—and above it, a balding head fringed by grayish-brown curls.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he bellowed, and turned, enfolding her in a big bear hug.
Mona smiled, and shrank a little from the hug. Frank MacFarland, like the winds of March, blew in and out of Wild Mountain in random patterns. “Where you been, Frank?”
“Great Barrier Reef!”
“Oh, yeah?” she laughed, not sure whether to believe him. Frank was an average-looking guy, with a graying beard and a bit of a paunch, but when he came into the store, he lit it up in a way she hadn’t figured out yet.
Heather, standing behind Frank, paused from rummaging through her Guatemalan tote bag and stared. Abundant strawberry-blonde hair framed her freckled face and proliferated in clumps over her red wool coat.
“The most fantastic scuba diving in the world,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “We tagged along with this Norwegian guy who runs treasure-hunting expeditions. Dived down to a ship that sank in the 1850s, during the gold rush in Australia.”
Heather’s son Eli, standing by the magazine rack, looked up from behind a skateboarding magazine. Eli was a slight thirteen-year-old with dark tan skin and an afro burnished gold at the edges, like a halo. “Cool,” he whispered.
Frank glanced sideways toward Eli and lowered his voice. “I was down there between the sharks and the gold. Trying to get a picture of the sharks. They didn’t look dangerous to me, but Nils made me go back up. Turns out, I was lucky. . .”
“Some kind of life you lead, Frank.” Mona winked at Eli and started to ring up Frank’s purchases. He was actually a very nice-looking man, with those shaggy eyebrows and that spark of passion beneath the laughter.
She rang up a jar of Green Mountain Gringo salsa, the hot kind; a six-pack of Otter Creek beer; paper towels; onion bagels; a frozen Indian curry dinner; a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chili Con Chocolate; and a bag of garlic barbeque chips. What a stomach this guy mu
st have. She made a mental note to order more of the Indian dinners. They seemed to be selling.
“You should have come along, Mona. I invited you.”
“Nah, that was the hiking in Tibet you invited me to.” The banter between them was spiced with these running invitations: come to Santa Fe, come to Africa, come to Tibet. Frank was always joking. “Anyway,” she shrugged, “you know how I feel about sharks.”
“You would have loved these sharks, Mona. They were beautiful!”
“I like it right here in Wild Mountain, Vermont.” She put the ice cream, bagels, and paper towels in the bag. “Just give me my beat-up canoe and my fishing rod, and I’ll be happy as a coon cat right here, thank you.”
Back at the cabin, Frank built a fire in the wood stove, chugged a couple of beers, checked his email, and took two Ibuprofen. He sank down in the overstuffed chair and popped open another beer. He felt the protrusion on his head, hot and sore and the size of a walnut, and no one there to sympathize. “Ooh,” he moaned.
Frank was fine with having his own time and space. In fact, after all the noise and multitasking he did in the city, he treasured this quiet. He didn’t need a lot of patting and cooing, but when you were hurting, it would have been nice to have company. And what if he were really injured? What if he had a heart attack? Who would find him? How many days would it take before they found the body? He sighed. Maybe it was turning fifty that made him think of these things. He slipped his feet into his old sheepskin slippers, practically worn out now, and stared at the window, wet snow swirling and spattering on it in complex patterns, sealing him into his solitude.
When he was twenty-three, just before starting grad school, his grandmother had died and left him this land, with enough money to build something small. Of course, he had been to Wild Mountain once before—when he was in college, “the summer of the commune,” as he thought of it now—but when he inherited the land, he and Patsy had come up and camped out. They drew water from the brook, built a fire pit, and ate vegetables from the farm stand. They walked every inch of the thirty-five acres, saw deer and moose, picked wild blackberries and raspberries, and found a spring with watercress. Every night, they would sit around the fire, play their guitars, and smoke pot. They thought they were in heaven. The next spring, while Patsy planted the garden, he’d started building: framed out the cabin, nailed on the clapboards, sheetrocked and painted, even added a little porch in the front. He’d done it all himself, using a plan he got from The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
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