I have to confess that I’m no fan of misogynistic old Paul (formerly Saul). I’ve always suspected that on the road to Damascus, he was either falling-down drunk or struck by lightning. How else to account for his promptly going out and inventing a new religion that would consign me, for the better part of my youth, to that exquisitely cruel inner circle of Hades known as Sunday school? Still, personal epiphanies do happen. I experienced a small one in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library that day. And I’m pretty sure I’d had another one, many years before.
On the day of our wedding, Phillis and I drove from upstate New York to the Northeast Kingdom, just as we had done in the spring for our teaching interview. We arrived in Orleans around midnight, but Verna, our new landlady and soon to be our dear friend, was waiting up for us. “Welcome home, Moshers!” she called out as we approached her lighted porch. “Welcome home.”
Until that moment we’d had doubts, and plenty of them, about deciding to come to this little outpost a few miles south of the Canadian border to start our married life. With her simple, warm greeting, Verna laid those doubts to rest. Whatever lay ahead for us, we knew that at least for the next year, this was the place we would call home.
14
The Bad Boy and the Battle-ax
Phillis was loyally waiting for me outside Prof’s office at six o’clock on the evening of my less-than-triumphant first day as a teacher at Orleans High School. That’s when the red-faced old superintendent finally finished explaining to me why lending my car to a bona fide juvenile delinquent and taking the name of the Lord in vain at the top of my lungs in front of my senior English class were pedagogically unsound decisions. Prof told me that in all his years in the school business, “No damn fool of a first-year teacher ever got off to a worse start than Howard Mosher.”
Well. Like Phillis, I was teaching six classes and supervising two study halls and a shift of lunch duty. I was coaching various sports and directing student plays. Not to mention advising the senior class, which would entail writing multiple college or job recommendations for thirty or so kids. We’d received dinner invitations to the homes of students and offers to take us fishing and hunting. Despite my blasphemous outburst on that first day of school, the officials of the United Church of Orleans beseeched us both to teach Sunday school. “Just be sure to buy your beer in the next town over,” Prof said when I told him the news.
My problem wasn’t that I did not like teaching, which I did, or even that I wasn’t very good at it, which I wasn’t. My main concern was that I didn’t have an hour of time for my writing. Maybe that’s just as well. At twenty-one I wasn’t ready to write the stories of the Northeast Kingdom. But I was more than eager to hear them, and as those busy early weeks in our new home raced along, it soon became obvious that in the Kingdom we had discovered a mother lode of stories. Our landlady, Verna, a twice-widowed woman in her late sixties, had lived most of her life on a Kingdom hill farm. The morning after we moved in, she invited us downstairs to her apartment for coffee with several elderly neighbors. “These are the Moshers, Howard and Phillis,” Verna announced. “They got married yesterday in New York State and drove clear up here to Vermont to go to bed together.”
One evening not long after we arrived, Verna told us how, during the Depression, she had saved her farm by manufacturing and selling moonshine. Years later she married the revenue agent who had caught her red-handed but declined to arrest her because he knew she’d lose her home if he did. When Verna finished her story, I looked across the kitchen table at Phillis, and she looked back at me. Neither of us spoke. But I knew, and Phillis knew, not only that I wanted to write stories about the Northeast Kingdom, but that one way or another, I was going to write them.
First, though, I had to learn something about teaching, and quickly.
Phillis was a well-trained science teacher. She knew how to prepare interesting lessons, set up labs, devise fair tests. I was an aspiring storyteller who did not know jack. “Read aloud to the kids, a little every day,” Prof suggested. “Even high school kids love to be read to. Read them something they wouldn’t be apt to read on their own. Dickens, Frost. They’ll love it.”
Under his desk Prof kept several quarts of Budweiser. He assessed his school days according to whether they were one-quart or two-quart days. A two-quart day was a bad one. “This is number three,” he said the day he advised me to read aloud to my students.
As the fall progressed, I discovered that not only did the kids I taught like to be read to. They wanted me to tell them stories, especially from my boyhood in the Catskills. For survival purposes, I bribed them. Two stories a day, one at the beginning of class, the other at the end, if they turned in their homework on time and did their outside reading. For their listening pleasure I invented a character I called the Bad Boy of Chichester, whose life and times we followed from one misadventure to the next. The Bad Boy was a composite of several rapscallions I had hobnobbed with as a kid, mixed with a great deal of my own personal history. Of my many Bad Boy of Chichester stories, my students’ favorite was “The Bad Boy and the Battle-ax.” The kids begged me to tell it at least once a week.
Now, my aforementioned junior-high English teacher, Mrs. Earla Armstrong, aka the Battle-ax, hated kids. Not just some kids—all kids, everywhere. It was confidently retailed in the Chichester of my boyhood that there was never a child Mrs. Armstrong did not despise. Her favorite prediction was that not one of us would “amount to a hill of beans.”
“Look here, Mosher,” she said one day when she apprehended me writing a Wild West outlaw tale instead of starting my homework. “If you want to write stories, you have to do three things. Read the classics. Revise your work. Write what you know. But even if you do,” she added with delphic certitude, “I very much doubt that you’ll ever amount to a hill of beans.” With this happy prophecy, she tore my little attempt at a Western to shreds and threw it in the wastepaper basket.
To which I replied, “Thank you, Battle-ax.”
A dreadful silence ensued as Mrs. A, who had a cruel flair for the dramatic, let that “Battle-ax” hang on the dusty air of the classroom. Then she nodded grimly, marched back to the Bad Boy’s desk, and, without breaking stride, belted him smack upside of the head with her big, hard, meaty hand, knocking him clean out of his seat onto the floor. Seeing many fine constellations never viewed by any astronomer, ancient or modern, the Bad Boy of Chichester struggled to his feet, slumped into his chair, and raised his hand.
“What now?” she said.
“Thank you, Battle-ax,” I said again, to the horror of everyone, most of all myself. “I deserved that.”
And I will be damned if the old buzzard didn’t hammer me again, knocking me into the other aisle.
Two quick footnotes. When I complained about Mrs. Armstrong to my father, by then the school principal, he readily agreed that she was a battle-ax but suggested I not call her one to her face again. Many years later, when I resurrected Mrs. A as the draconian schoolteacher in my novel Northern Borders, she was the only real person I ever used in a work of fiction without changing her name. I don’t think I did this for spite. By then Mrs. Armstrong had long since been recruited to lord it over some unruly classroom in the celestial beyond. The truth is that I simply could not think of my fictional schoolteacher-character as anyone other than Earla Armstrong, whose advice to me about writing stories remains, to this day, the best I have ever received: “Read the classics. Revise your work. Write what you know.”
What else can I say? Thank you, Battle-ax.
15
Washington, D.C.
The novel I’d been searching for over the past thirty years certainly wasn’t a classic. Not, at least, in the sense that Mrs. Earla Armstrong had meant. (Mrs. A read Pride and Prejudice and Emma at her desk during lunch hour while sipping coffee laced with gin out of an enormous black thermos.) The book I was looking for was a comic novel about a Canadian con man, set during World War I and the
Great Depression. I’d loved it, just roared over page after page, but I had loaned it to my mother-in-law, who loaned it to a schoolteacher friend, who passed it along to someone else, and do you think that I could remember either the title or the author? My search for that damn novel had, over the years, turned into a quest, and if every journey is to some extent informed by a private agenda quite different from its stated purpose, my private agenda on the Great American Book Tour was to find that con-man story.
What better places to look than the great independent bookstores I was visiting, sometimes several a day? Not that I really expected to find the book. The search had become an end in itself, a perfect excuse to haunt the fiction sections of bookstores, new and used, and libraries, small and large. While I love to write, and can do so almost anywhere and under almost any circumstances, like many other writers of my acquaintance, I live to read. There’s no place I’d rather hang out than a bookstore or library.
I didn’t find the con-man novel in the extensive fiction section of 192 Books in New York City, where I had a terrific event on the evening after my visit to the Catskills. Or in the public library on Fifth Avenue, where the marble lions kept their own counsel and were of no help to me at all. Nobody at Chester County Book and Music, the wonderful indie on the western outskirts of Philadelphia, had heard of it, though my bookseller friend Michael Fortney suggested that after I got home from my tour, I should send a summary of the story to the book-search Web site ABE.com and see what I could find out.
No luck at Baltimore’s fine Ivy Bookshop or at the world-famous Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington. Just good, lively book discussions at every indie on my itinerary, and several copies of my latest book sold at each store. Right now I was walking along the dusky side streets of Washington, trying to remember where I’d left the Loser Cruiser, when, hello, what’s this? In the gutter near a speed bump, I noticed a green Vermont license plate: my own. Evidently the plate had fallen off earlier that evening.
Nearby a tow truck was bellying up to my ancient Chevy. Two burly men with shaved heads, resembling nothing so much as a World Wrestling Federation tag team, got out and eyed the Cruiser. “There’s hardly enough left of her to hook onto,” one of them remarked.
“Excuse me,” I called out. “That’s my car. Is it parked illegally?”
“It’s abandoned illegally,” the larger tag team member said. “No license plate.”
I waved the battered plate I’d salvaged from the gutter. “It fell off. Back up the street.”
The guys continued to search for a place sufficiently rust-free to attach the tow hook.
“For God’s sake,” I said. “I’m a novelist from Vermont. Out on a book tour. I’ve been signing books at the store around the corner.”
And I will be hornswoggled if the head WWF brother didn’t unhook my car, straighten up, grin at me, and say, “Oh, Politics and Prose? Why didn’t you say so? My wife and I buy all our books there. Have for years. What’s the name of yours?”
16
Rescue Mission in the Land of the Blue and the Gray
The following morning, on the pretext of doing research for his Civil War novel-in-progress, Harold Who drove over to the Manassas National Battlefield Park at Bull Run. Where, almost a century and a half ago, his great-great-great-grandfather, one Padraig Mosher, fresh from County Cork and newly enlisted in the preening New York Zouaves, took to his heels at the first volley, leaped Bull Run Creek in a single bound, and skedaddled back to Washington in record time.
I drove around the battlefield with an eye out for anything that might work its way into my story. Should my Vermont hero come this way? Should he participate in the Battle of Bull Run? Catch a glimpse of fiery old Stonewall harrying my fleet-footed ancestor back to the Union capital? On that sunny June morning nothing jumped out at me as potential material. Until, that is, I approached the creek my forebear reportedly had vaulted—a feat no gazelle could accomplish—and noticed a dozen or so cars backed up before the bridge. Was this a historical reenactment? I detest historical reenactments.
On the bridge, basking in the sunshine, sat a monstrous snapping turtle.
“Go ahead,” said my uncle. “Show these city slickers how to handle this situation.”
I got out of the car and walked up to the reptile, which must have weighed a good thirty-five pounds. She was covered with moss and creek scum and had wise, courageous, no-nonsense eyes. “Good morning, turtle,” I said.
Mrs. Snapper was unimpressed. So unimpressed that she opened her cotton-white mouth and gave out a hiss like a steam kettle. I sprang back, in the grand old tradition of Grandpa Padraig, to considerable laughter from the occupants of the nearby cars.
Approaching the turtle again, I distracted her with my left hand and, as I’d seen my uncle do any number of times, lifted her by the tail with my right hand. Holding her well away from my legs, I started off down the bank toward a sandy little spit along the creek.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to pick up an irascible snapper weighing thirty-five pounds, hold the thing out so it can’t take a fist-sized chunk of your calf, and walk a hundred feet with it. But suddenly, from a Hummer on the bridge, came a woman’s angry voice. “Put that animal down. I’m going to report you on my cell phone to the Humane Society.”
Oh, gladly, madam, gladly. Gingerly, I released the now-furious snapper on the nice warm sand beside the stream and started back toward my car. Why were the spectators laughing and honking their horns? They were laughing and honking because, posting along behind me hell-bent for election, came Mrs. Turtle, determined to get back to the road, where she’d wanted to lay her eggs in the first place.
Once again I distracted her with my left hand. Once again the Samaritan in the Hummer shrieked at me. This time it was something about the SPCA.
I ran, yes, ran with the hissing, snapping, washtub-size turtle—how Reg would have laughed—toward a reedy swale upstream, where I deposited my reptilian friend for better or for worse, then bolted for the Loser Cruiser. Horns, mock applause, more threats from Mrs. Battle-ax Armstrong’s sister up on the bridge. Padraig Mosher probably ran faster, spurred on as he was by the Rebel cries. But he was no more relieved to reach the safety of our embattled nation’s capital than I was to pile into the Cruiser and move on down the line on my Great American Book Tour.
17
Five Tips for Cancer Survivors
From the start of my trouble, I made a conscious choice not to open my file and confront what doctors believed was the worst.
—REYNOLDS PRICE, A WHOLE NEW LIFE
During my just-concluded treatment, I too had chosen not to pore over my X-ray images and medical charts, though what was brave defiance and profound faith in Reynolds Price’s case was something closer to terror-stricken denial in mine. Still, I found a certain amount of sneaky self-deception useful, so long as it didn’t preclude treating the problem immediately. For instance, information I’d gleaned on the Web from the National Cancer Institute stated that radiation usually makes patients “very tired.” How could I possibly set out on a hundred-city book tour in a state of fatigue? No, no, I resolved, I damn well was not going to be very tired. Or, if I was, I wasn’t going to admit it to myself. As for the “diarrhea and frequent and uncomfortable urination” that the booklet What You Need to Know about Prostate Cancer warned I would almost certainly experience, well, I’d deal with it, too—as long as I didn’t have to dwell on it.
Toward this end, I found that the following activities kept me from perseverating on my disease during my fellowship period:
1. Writing. Anytime I was writing or just transcribing notes into my journal late at night at a cigarette-scorched Motel 6 desk, I felt exactly like my old, hopeful, precancerous self.
2. Helping others. Another truth universally acknowledged is that writers are as solipsistic a pack of ne’er-do-wells as any on the face of the earth. Prolonged illness merely exacerbates our self-centeredn
ess. Still, throughout my treatment and the book tour, I found that any little kindness I could perform for family, friends, or even total strangers lifted me out of myself.
3. Laughing. It may or may not be the best medicine, but I cannot imagine stopping at every interstate rest area between Irasburg, Vermont, and the Pacific without a good sense of the ridiculous.
4. Driving. Driving? How could cajoling the ancient and decrepit Loser Cruiser (whose dash lights and radio had shorted out back in Boston) through the labyrinthine interchanges of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Richmond, much less Los Angeles; over the Rockies; across the broiling American Southwest; and through the interminable Dakotas with nothing to do but wonder whether my PSA count would be up when I got back to Vermont in the fall for my first posttreatment checkup—how could spending all that time alone in my fallingapart Chevy Celebrity, with a cockeyed license plate wedged in its rear window, possibly distract me from the forty-four radiation sessions I had just undergone, with the jury still very much out on the results? It’s simple. Besides the allure of the open road, which has always raised my spirits like a lark at break of day, I had the strongest sense that with every mile and every rest area, I was somehow outdistancing the accursed cancer.
A delusion? Absolutely. You can’t run away from cancer, any more than you can run away from yourself. But if hard traveling, often hundreds of miles a day, in an automobile that should have been junked years ago, was a palliative to keep me from going crazy with worry, self-pity, and stark terror, it was a good one.
5. Reading and discussing books. Already, a few weeks into my tour, I was astonished by the number of books I had acquired. The backseat of the Cruiser was overflowing with them. (The trunk was permanently jammed shut from an encounter with a ten-foot-high Vermont snow-bank several winters before.) Driving south toward Richmond, I could not recall a time, during or immediately after my treatment, when I was unable to attain a measure of serenity, and very often joy, by immersing myself in a good book.
The Great Northern Express Page 4
