Fiddler's Green, Or a Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

by Van Reid

  Alice paled to think of what she planned to do. She gazed at her mother’s face so that her anger would chase away fear, though with anger another fear visited her—the fear that, in her anger and in her cleverness, she was more like her father than she cared to admit.

  I will turn it to good use, she promised herself, but then there was an unwelcome qualification. If only to my own good use. She wondered what the Moosepath League would think to have themselves put to her purposes.

  Alice went to the window and looked out over Newbury Street. Mr. Peat was long gone. He always went south, toward the waterfront. He could get away from her father, and yet he came back whenever he was called. She wondered why he had turned away the money she owed him for crossing her father.

  A solitary walker on the sidewalk caught her eye, and she leaned a little to see past the trunk of the oak. It was her grandfather, the old rake. He hadn’t come home last night, and her father would be furious, not the least because Grandfather would simply yawn in the face of his son’s fierce objections. She didn’t know how the elderly man dared.

  Her grandfather disappeared from sight as he wandered up the walk to the front door. She could hear him enter, and she listened for her father’s voice, which should momentarily issue from the study. “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is,” she said to herself. “And he’s no more clever than I.” She had been working her plans right under his nose, and he hadn’t suspected a thing—she hoped.

  Something in the window caught her eye, and her sight foreshortened upon a reflection in a single pane. The day darkened briefly beneath a broad cloud, and the ghost of her face, caught in that single pane against the oak before her window, looked in at her and seemed, for a moment, to expunge everything that wasn’t of her mother.

  Author’s Note

  Robin Oig, Robin Orge, and even Robin Oar—the name varies, but older denizens of several Maine communities still recall the tales that their parents and grandparents told about a quiet, resolute man who marched through their villages and unorganized townships in the latter days of the nineteenth century. By some accounts he was little more than an eccentric and possibly sea-addled sailor, by others a perceptive visitor who found long lost objects and even dowsed a new well for the town of Anson using an oar of seemingly mythic proportions. The further north and west one goes, the stranger and wilder these tales become, till Robin begins to sound like an old world wizard or a mystical Paul Bunyan.

  The trail of tales ends abruptly at Jackman Station and its correlation with the history of the League might never have come to light if not for Ms. Judith Stoone of Rock Creek, Ohio. It was while interviewing an old woodsman from Jackman (about the 1914 Moosepathian dust-up with the Engine Gang), that Ms. Stoone first came to suspect the connection between the vanishing sailor (mentioned only in passing) and the man accidentally involved with Sundry Moss, Melanie Ring, and the strange events on Dutten Pond in the summer of 1897. It was fortunate for those who care about the Moosepath’s history that a year-long bout with hepatitis did not close the curtain on this insight, and after a period of convalescence, Ms. Stoone finished the legwork for her well-considered monograph, Oig, Orge, and Oar: What Disappeared from Dutten Pond?

  Sundry Moss, who never did write anything like a journal or a memoir (though there are many of his letters extant), did in latter days tell people that he often wondered what befell the big fellow with the great long oar. It was some years later that an early chronicler of the Moosepath League, Henry Dare, fell into a chance meeting with none other than Maven Flyce and asked the man what he remembered of Robin Oig. “I was so surprised!” was all Maven could summon for answer.

  The Nesbit well, some yards from the ancient oak at the old farm in Jackman Station, is still used by the present-day owners. Even in the worst drought, it has never dried up. The house has only been sold with the stipulation that the gold pocket watch will not leave the parlor mantelpiece, except for winding, cleaning, or repair. To this day, no one has come to claim it.

  The tale of the Droones and Normells has engendered a lot of puzzlement and even skepticism, but one can hardly recall the behavior of cults in the twentieth century and be surprised at what might occur among two close-knit clans in a small nineteenth-century community. There were in fact some fairly obscure groups that sprang up in Maine (and indeed all over the country), often centered around clan and kin. Peculiar communities and eccentric groups that isolated themselves from their communities were often the result of hardscrabble lives in confluence with Victorian mysticism. Sundry Moss’s oft-heard statement that he “never met a story [he] couldn’t add something to,” should not put the reader off. This was one tale he never varied.

  A look through the present day directories of Albion and China will turn up no Droones or Normells. In the past hundred years and more, the presence of these families and the very foundations of their houses have been allowed to fade and fall into memory and forest.

  The events of June 3 through June 15, 1897 are known (among members and historians of the Moosepath League) as “the Adventure of Fiddler’s Green,” and also “the Adventure of the Midstream Horse” (which, by my best guess, might refer to Melanie Ring). These days, members of the Grand Society enjoy remembering it as “the Adventure of the Gentleman’s Gentleman.”

  The first rumbling of the club’s next extraordinary experience would begin (if not actually be heard for what it was) when an agent for Colonel Cobb’s Wild West Show appeared at the Waltons’ front door with free passes as an appreciation for Mister Walton’s and Sundry Moss’s rescue, during the previous July, of Maude the bear. The first anniversary of the meeting of Messrs. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump with Mister Walton would prove itself memorable, not the least for their introduction to Al-bus Crowstairs, the man who (in Sundry Moss’s plain manner of speak) “blew up things.” It was this meeting, as well as their run-in with Alice Trowbridge, that would eventually lead to the Moosepath League’s hair-raising involvement with the Dirigo Tontine (late summer 1897) and so to the Original Moosepathian Hunting and Fishing Expedition (fall 1897).

  But it was the Trowbridge affair that came next, as the disappearance of Alice Trowbridge and a long-awaited telegram from Mister and Mrs. Walton propelled the gentlemen of the club into what has been called “the Missing Mission of the Moosepath League”—but sometimes spoken of, in Moosepathian circles, as “the Adventure of the Wild Westerners” and “the Adventure of the Cloistered Conspiracy.”

  Someday it may be told.

  The writing of a book can be a solitary thing, but I often come blinking out of my study to discover that kind thoughts and encouragement have arrived by post and by e-mail from “Friends of the Moosepath League.” Ideally, Mister Walton, Sundry Moss, and the charter members would be here to read them. From all of us to booksellers and readers, book clubs and libraries—thank you. The Moosepath League can be found at www.moosepath.com. I can be reached at vanreid@midcoast.com.

  Continued appreciation goes out to my agent, Barbara Hogenson, and to her assistant, Nicole Verity, who field practical matters, dumb questions, and authorial angst with unwavering graciousness and poise.

  And much gratitude goes out to Carolyn Carlson, senior editor at the Penguin Group, who has shepherded the exploits of the Moosepath League into print; and also to all the folks at the Penguin Group who have copy edited, designed, and otherwise worked over this book and its five predecessors. Thanks to assistant editor Audra Epstein. Best of luck and many thanks to Lucia Watson.

  It’s been more than a year—at this writing—since I worked at the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta, but it continues to be “bookstore central” for me and I would like to thank everyone there, including Susan and Barnaby Porter, Penny and Ewing Walker, Frank Slack, Joanne Cotton, Bobbi Brewer, Lauri Campbell, Tyler Dobson, and Sue Richards for their continued friendship and support. Extra appreciation goes to Kathleen Creamer, Trudy Price (whose marvelous memoir of life on a Maine Dairy Farm, The Co
ws Are Out, is due to be published in the fall of 2003) and those wonderful Waldoborians Jane and Mark Biscoe. I’ll be right over for some of that Hires root beer!

  Thanks to the bookstores, libraries, and organizations that have hosted me this summer and fall (in chronological order)—Machias High School, the Lincoln County Historical Society, the Maine Writers’ Conference at Westbrook College, the Kennebunk Free Library, Oxford Books ’n’ Things, Sherman’s Bookstore in Boothbay Harbor, Books Etc. in Falmouth, Bookland of Brunswick, Bridgton Books, Devaney, Doak and Garrett in Farmington, the Rockland Public Library, the Falmouth Library, the Owl and the Turtle in Camden, and Nonesuch Books in South Portland.

  Continued thanks to author James L. Nelson and his family for friendship and nautical advice and to author Nicholas Dean for the same. As always, thanks to David and Susan Morse.

  My gratitude to my family grows in near geometric progression as I grow older—to my parents, to my brother and sisters, and to my terrific nephews and nieces. Thanks to my wonderful in-laws.

  But most of all, my gratitude goes to my wife, Margaret Hunter. Without her love and support, not to mention her keen eye for a grammatical misstep and a gifted ear for what is true, these volumes would not exist. This is fitting, for they were, first and foremost, written for her. Also under “most of all” are our children, Hunter and Mary, who cannot yet know (but hopefully will someday realize) how, with their mother’s sterling example, they inspire me with their generosity and goodness, their curiosity and their laughter, and therefore inspire those very traits as manifested in the hearts and deeds of Mister Walton, Sundry Moss, and the honorable members of the Moosepath League.