“Oh, that’s just some kids having a party a few rooms down,” I said. “Yes, yes, I’m perfectly safe. What was it Verna used to say? I’m as safe as a toad in the palm of God’s hand.”
From the Vermont end of the line, silence.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” I said. “This is a really good place. They let the homeless stay here.”
“Lock your door,” Phillis said. “Use the security lock.”
Security lock? The [B]udget In[n] was evidently so safe a place that they didn’t even need security locks. I told Phillis that I loved her, and on that happy connubial note our conversation was punctuated by a nearby crack, very much resembling that of a pistol shot. “Christ Almighty, a mouse ran up my nightie!” my wife shouted. “BARRICADE YOUR DOOR, HOWARD FRANK!”
About midnight what might once have been called in the Deep South a “jollification” got under way in the room adjacent to mine. Rock concert–volume music, with a thumping, vibrating bass that set the headboard of my bed quivering. An unholy din of screams and laughter. Car doors slamming. Screeching tires.
“When you become very tired, Mr. Mosher—and you will—you must rest. Do not drive yourself harder. REST.”
What was my ultracompetent, entirely businesslike radiation/oncology nurse doing here in Miami at the [B]udget In[n] at 12:02 in the morning? Over the soothing strains of the nocturne next door, I could hear her voice distinctly. How very kind of her to come all this way to check up on me and remind me to REST.
Though it runs against my grain to admit it, as my good nurse had warned me, I really was very tired. My stern maiden great-aunt Jane used to say, with a hard look right at me, “Why lie, boy, when the truth serves as well?” Why indeed? Constitutional optimism and the grand old Mosher tradition of flat-out denial will take one only so far in this vale of tribulation, and the fact is, Harold Who was exhausted. But now a herd of North American bison seemed to be stampeding through the room next door—nothing else could possibly account for the thundering. Also, someone was pounding on our shared wall with a sledge hammer. REST, said the no-nonsense nurse. REST, said my friend Dr. Marshall, who had studied with the student of Madame Curie. REST, enjoined the (rather terrifying) National Cancer Institute booklet on prostate radiation therapy.
Jesus of Jerusalem! Neither my good-natured dad nor my irascible uncle would have put up with this ruckus for a Catskill Mountain minute. Barefoot, clad in pj bottoms and T-shirt, I lurched to my feet, padded outside, stepping over the desiccated remains of the horned toad (I made a mental note to bag it up and take it home to show Phillis), and tapped politely on the partyers’ door.
A young man holding a red, white, and blue tall boy appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a brand-new pair of cowboy boots and not one stitch else. Behind him was a seething press of similarly unattired young people, America’s hope for tomorrow, dancing wildly to a boom box as big as an old-fashioned steamer trunk.
“And you are?” the guy said.
“Howard. Howard Mosher? From the next room over?”
For some reason, this disclosure struck my neighbor, standing there in his birthday suit and boots, with a full-blown Saturnalia going forward in the room behind him, as the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He doubled over with pealing gales of laughter. I laughed, too, I wasn’t sure why. Then I said, “I was wondering. If maybe you could pound on the other wall for a while? Instead of mine?”
Whereupon, he handed me his tall boy to hold, shouted, “This one’s for old Howie,” turned around and, naked as a jaybird in snakeskin boots, executed a neat piece of full-tilt broken-field running across the crowded room, driving his right boot clean through the flimsy partition opposite our shared wall.
“Thank you, sir,” I said insanely, handing him back his beer, and returned to my room. Was this what my oncology nurse and whoever wrote the NCI posttreatment tips meant when they said REST? Was I, in fact, as I had blithely assured Phillis, as safe as a toad in the palm of God’s hand at the [B]udget In[n]? The merrymakers next door did not look homeless. Unless I missed my guess, they were coked-up young rich kids on orgiastic holiday from up north.
Over the infernal racket I heard the welcome sound of a siren, followed shortly by a knocking at my door. My door? The evening had attained the surreal hilarity of a madcap late-night-inn scene from a novel by Fielding or Smollett. Except that the young officer standing outside the door seemed very real indeed. And he was not laughing.
“Are you Mr. Howard?”
I gave him my full name and, for reasons that are not clear to me, my social security number.
“Would you be surprised, Mr. Mosher,” the officer said, “if I told you that the party in the next room just knocked down half a wall?”
“No sir,” I said.
“Would you be surprised if I told you they said you authorized them to do it?”
What was the title of that endearing movie with Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei? The one where two college kids get thrown in a southern jail and charged with murder? And why did it bother me so much that, under these rather more urgent circumstances, I couldn’t summon up the name of the film? Fortunately, the officer just shook his head, told me to leave further “interventions” to the Dade County Sheriff’s Department, and said goodnight.
As I lay back down on the [B]udget In[n]’s cigarette-scorched bedspread, like a beached Florida weakfish, it occurred to me that this might very well turn out to be my last book tour, American or otherwise. Surely tonight had to be the nadir of my fellowship period. If I could just get through until dawn without being shot, trampled, hospitalized for exhaustion, or arrested, matters had to improve. Somehow or other, I still had faith that all of this foolishness—my so-called writing career, the book tour, my attempt to stave off, through radiation, what is probably nature’s way of keeping us from turning into vegetables—would all work out for the best.
Wouldn’t it?
27
Taking Stock in Lucinda Williams Country
As in the silly old conundrum about the chicken and the egg, I’ve never been able to decide which comes first, faith or hope. A cynic might say that faith is what we fall back on when we run out of hope. A strict evolutionist might add that faith, at least when it comes to an afterlife, is a psychological extension of our survival instinct. To me, faith boils down to the belief that, as Uncle Reg liked to remind me, “It’s a glorious thing just to live.” That may not be a lot to go on, metaphysically speaking. But when it comes to faith in the basic goodness of life, it seems like a promising starting point.
Hope, on the other hand, strikes me as a more modest sentiment. For me, hope has little to do with metaphysics and a lot to do with the here and now. It is the day-to-day credo of farmers, teachers, doctors, writers, and baseball players who, even when they’re on a tear, are probably going to make at least two outs for every clean base hit—but look forward to each upcoming at-bat with optimism and excitement.
On the evening after my interlude in the [B]udget In[n], I took inventory over the phone with Phillis from my motel in Beaumont, Texas. The practical purpose of an author’s tour, of course, is to sell the author’s latest book. How many of mine had I sold thus far? Well, several thousand more than I would have had I used my fellowship period to stay at home in Vermont and REST. I’d met dozens of marvelously independent and knowledgeable booksellers, augmented my personal library with thirty or so great new (and old) titles, weathered an attack review, and had a chance to tell my audiences about the roller-coaster ride of our first year in Vermont, when it often seemed that we were living on hope and hope alone.
Certainly that was the case when it came to my hope to write the stories of the Kingdom.
Phillis and I were busier than we’d ever been in our lives. Besides teaching, we attended covered-dish suppers, put on pageants with the Sunday school, and drove over the Green Mountains to Burlington many nights and weekends to take graduate courses. I showed my new friend and colleague Jim Hayfo
rd a draft of my master’s-thesis proposal on Shakespeare’s villains. “This is all well and fine,” Jim told me. “Just don’t neglect your own stories.”
Sometimes in the evening we’d slip away from grading stacks of papers, cut across the footbridge over the river by the mill we’d been enjoined to keep the kids out of, and climb the hill to 5 Cliff Street for a cup of tea and a restorative visit with the Hayfords. Those evenings remain some of the best of our lives. We’d talk about everything under the sun, coax Jim and Helen into telling us Northeast Kingdom ghost stories, and listen to Jim read aloud from The Life of Samuel Johnson.
As a child, Jim had been quite frail. In the thirty years I knew him, I was never able to talk him into going trout fishing with me. He was the best speaker I’d ever heard, but he shied away from large groups. Otherwise the most skeptical of Northeast Kingdom Vermonters, Jim was utterly persuaded that the plays of Shakespeare, which he knew and loved as much as if he’d written them himself, had been composed not by the glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon but by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. I took the more conventional side, and we amiably debated the question for the rest of Jim’s life.
Best of all, Jim and Helen Hayford, who were keenly interested in local history, introduced us to the stories of the Northeast Kingdom in ways no one else could. One evening they took us on a picnic to the Brownington Stone House, a four-story former boarding school a few miles north of Orleans. The Stone House was built in 1835 by the Reverend Alexander Twilight, whom Middlebury College claims as the first African American college graduate. Perched on a hilltop overlooking much of the northern Kingdom, it is a great mystery. To this day no one knows exactly where its beautifully cut granite blocks came from or how Twilight, working with a team of oxen, constructed the building. We loved sitting with the Hayfords atop Prospect Hill, overlooking the Kingdom from the Willoughby Gap in the east to Jay Peak in the west, to Lake Memphremagog, stretching north deep into the mountains of Canada, and to the Cold Hollow Mountains in the south. Jim pointed out Allen Hill, a few miles to the west, granted to General Ira Allen, Ethan’s brother, for his service in the Revolutionary War. And Lake Willoughby, the setting of Robert Frost’s terrifying poem of madness and isolation, “A Servant to Servants.”
From Prospect Hill the Hayfords traced out for us the route followed by the Bayley-Hazen Military Road, built during the Revolutionary War by a crew of bold Vermont hearties with the modest intention of invading and annexing Canada. And just west of Jay Peak, in 1856, a band of Irish Fenians mounted their own grand invasion of Quebec. (They were promptly driven back over the border by a few angry local farmers armed with muskets and pitchforks.) Some miles to the north, in the flat farming country of the St. Lawrence River Valley, Dr. William Henry Drummond had written his popular French Canadian dialect poems “The Habitant” and “The Voyageur,” and as dusk settled over the mountains, Jim recited passages from them. History and literature had never seemed this immediate to me before. How could it be that no one had written fiction about this wondrous kingdom without a king?
As if he’d read my thoughts, Jim, with his kind eyes and long, ascetic scholar’s face, said to me, “About ten years ago I worked up the courage to read one of my poems aloud to Robert Frost. We were sitting on the front porch of his cottage at Breadloaf. ‘Well, Hayford,’ he said when I finished, ‘I wouldn’t say that the way you do. But I have to remember that you need to go at things your way. You’ve found your way. You’ve found your own voice.’ ”
Jim looked off at the miles of mountains, purple in the fall dusk. With a flicker of a smile he said, “It had taken me nineteen years to find that voice. I guess waiting for it is what hope is all about. Maybe you’ll find yours quicker. It all comes down to application, you know. Application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”
I hoped so. But now, as I talked with Phillis from my rundown motel on the Louisiana-Texas state line where I had just discovered five black-as-night, deadly poisonous toadstools as big around as dessert saucers growing beside the empty in-room bar (shades of the [B]udget In[n]!), what I really hoped was that those two 24-karat-gold staples that Dr. Marshall had fired into my ailing prostate to help minimize damage to the adjacent plumbing critical to one’s, ah, romantic capabilities, had done the trick.
Pray Jesus, no, I thought, trying not to look at those toadstools, an image that I feared might have the same long-term effect. I was sorely tempted to jump into the Loser Cruiser and head straight home to the love of my life in Vermont.
“I’m sure your romantic capabilities will be fine, hon,” Phillis reassured me. “And think of the stories you’ll have to tell me from the rest of your tour.”
True. Still, as we said goodbye, Phillis from Kingdom County and I from the Toadstool Motel two thousand miles away, I could not have envisaged all that lay ahead of me in the next month or who I would meet along the way.
28
Two Lone Star Hitchhikers
At Houston’s “premier literary marketplace,” as the New York Times has called Brazos Bookstore, I bought a copy of Oliver Sacks’s latest book. The following morning, at a McDonald’s on the eastern fringe of San Antonio, I read a chapter. Sacks, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, probably knows more about certain kinds of savantism than any other man or woman alive. He searches out the most idiosyncratic geniuses of our times, real-life counterparts of the Don Quixotes of literature, and, with respect and affection, he celebrates their individualism, their nearly superhuman abilities, and their dignity. He is also a wonderful writer and, by crikey, there in the parking lot of Mickey D’s, thumbing a ride up to the Alamo, was the great man himself.
“So, Dr. Sacks,” I said, pulling back onto I-10 and coaxing the Loser Cruiser up to its maximum nonshimmying speed of 58.5 mph. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mosher. And I you.”
Oh?
Hurrying on, “I mean, Doctor, I love, absolutely love, your stuff. Great reads … transformative experience … funny …” Fiddlesticks. I didn’t have the faintest notion what to say to an author I admired.
The gracious Dr. Sacks seemed genuinely pleased. “Why, that’s very kind of you to say so.”
“I wonder if you might be willing to …” Extending my copy of his new book toward him. “I don’t know where you usually like to sign your—”
“Of course,” he said, opening the book to the title page and inscribing, very neatly, under his printed name, “To my fellow author, Howard Mosher, with great interest, Oliver Sacks.”
With great interest? Good Jesus. Dr. Sacks had not appeared out of nowhere just to bum a ride over to the Alamo. No. He had traveled—traveled a very great distance—to examine me.
What a kindly gentleman was the learned Oliver. I felt I could tell the famous alienist anything.
“Ever since I was a small boy, Dr. Sacks, I’ve imagined myself carrying on conversations with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Roderick Usher from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and sometimes David Copperfield …”
Out popped Dr. Sacks’s notepad. “This is most intriguing. You actually hear their voices talking to you?”
“Yes, yes! Dead authors, in my head. Lots of them. Sometimes they all natter away at the same time.”
What had come over me? That business about the voices jabbering all at once, like a scene from The Exorcist, was a boldfaced lie.
“Is hearing voices bad?” I inquired, with the sly sidelong smile of the perfectly mad.
“Not necessarily,” the doctor said. He was writing rapidly now. “Not as long as the voices don’t tell you to do bad things.”
And suddenly, despite my long training as a prevaricating novelist, the truth spilled out. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that they told me to be a writer.”
The doctor’s pen paused mid-word: “Patient reports full-blown audio hallucin—” His
face looked very, very grave.
“Not,” Dr. Sacks said, “a writer?”
I nodded.
Oliver flipped his notepad shut and tucked it into the breast pocket of his white coat. “In that case, Mr. Mosher,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid that there’s nothing I can do for you.”
There’s no better place to begin a tour of an American city than the regional history and literature section of its independent bookstore. At San Antonio’s fine independent, The Twig, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a modern-day Alamo, I discovered a whole shelf devoted exclusively to the works of the Texas author John Graves. I snapped up a copy of Goodbye to a River, Graves’s account of a 1950s canoe trip down a stretch of the upper Brazos that was about to be dammed. An hour later, ambling along San Antonio’s downtown river walk, I wondered how many of the hundreds of tourists who take this stroll each day know anything about the history of Graves’s beautiful river and the Conquistadors who ventured up it in their “dented armor” but “didn’t stick.”
WATCH YOUR STEP. NATIVE TEXAS LANDSCAPE. The discreet sign peeking out of the sky-blue bluebells at the rest area between San Antonio and Austin gave me pause. It was as pithy as Gus McCrae’s WE DON’T RENT PIGS sign in Lonesome Dove. But what did it mean? Was it an injunction, Lone Star–style, not to step on the wildflowers? Or a heads-up to watch out for a stray sidewinder? Whichever, I liked the sign a lot. I whipped out my notebook, and when I looked up again, there he was. One beat-up cowboy boot cocked against the WATCH YOUR STEP sign. His once-white cowboy hat raked back on his brow. A face the color and texture of a hundred-year-old Mexican saddle. Looking right straight at me. A Corona in one hand, in the other a cardboard sign: HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. AMARILLO OR BUST.
Big as life. Right out of the blue southwestern sky and Harold Who’s perfervid imagination. The West Texas Jesus.
The Great Northern Express Page 8
