The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  We went to “kitchen tunks” or “junkets” at the homes of our French Canadian students. While the sap boiled in the sugar houses, we danced and hummed and clapped the night through to the music of the champion fiddler Wild Bill Royer playing “Sucre d’érable” and “L’église de Québec,” often with a Québécois grandmère in the background accompanying on the “bones”—a pair of clacking dessert spoons. We feasted on tourtière and, though it wasn’t Christmas, Bûche de Noël, the traditional frosted log cake, while grandmother told tales of the fearsome loup garou, the werewolf of the deep forest just over the border, who lured unsuspecting travelers to their deaths in the wilderness, and of the Three Ghostly Fishermen and the Little Blue Virgin of Quebec. About half of our students could claim French Canadian ancestry on at least one side of the family. Perhaps a quarter still spoke French at home.

  As spring approached, Phillis marched down to the Orleans slaughterhouse and returned with a few cow hearts and lungs for her biology class to dissect. She took her kids on expeditions along the Willoughby River and showed them how to identify skunk cabbage and wild ginger and bloodroot and coltsfoot and spring beauties. She helped them assemble entries for the county science fair and taught them the periodic table and how their own smart brains worked. My own teaching improved—a little. I was learning what to expect from my students, though I didn’t expect Bill the brain to say, when I asked what they thought was the practical use of the stone wall in Frost’s “Mending Wall” that divided the narrator’s pines from his neighbor’s apples, “Well, it might keep him from getting pineapples.” Bill had just gotten a full scholarship to Middlebury. Queedle queedle! In general, the more I asked of the kids, the better they did. By dint of their own hard work, they were writing pretty passable essays on Othello and Hamlet.

  Then came hopeful news of my own. Coming down the stretch on my master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s villains, I learned that I had received a teaching fellowship to pursue my PhD in Elizabethan literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Queedle? Why wasn’t I more excited?

  On the first day of trout season, with plenty of snow still in the woods, I assembled my fly rod and drove to a brook a few miles north of Margery Moore’s farm on the Willoughby River.

  I wasn’t surprised to discover that my chosen stream was still frozen in places. It would be tough to cast, tough to avoid spooking the trout in the icy, crystalline water. But I tied a small red-and-white Coachman fly onto a light leader and headed upstream into the snowy forest, just as Dad and Uncle Reg and I used to do on opening day on the little mountain stream running down through Ox Clove into the ghost town of Chichester.

  Though I had to creep along more like a hunter than a fisherman, stalking the few open pools so the trout wouldn’t see me, I immediately felt the incomparable sense of well-being that I have experienced in the woods since early boyhood. In a stand of still-leafless poplars, I passed a cellar hole marked by a lilac bush not yet in bud. Nearby a Model A sat rusting on its wheel rims. Ages ago someone had tried to make a go of a farm here, then given up. But the little native trout were as lovely as ever, with emerald backs and flaming speckles, and even in the early spring of 1965, within a few miles of the new ski resort being built at Jay Peak, the only tracks I saw were those of a single river otter, which had fished up the stream a few hours ahead of me.

  Suddenly I pulled up short, overcome by a sensation of foreboding. It came as unexpectedly as a thunderclap out of the still-wintery Vermont sky, and it somehow seemed to be connected with the murmur of the brook. At first I could not put a name to it.

  I tried to continue fishing. But I was overwhelmed by a physical sickness, similar to the sickening horror that has come over me when I’ve seen old footage of World War II concentration camps. I hurried away from the stream toward a hardwood ridge, found a deer trail that eventually turned into an ancient lumbering trace, and just at sunset, came out on the road about half a mile from my car. Twenty minutes later, still shaken, I drove down the mountain toward Margery’s.

  45

  Spring Comes to the Kingdom,

  Part 2

  Margie ushered me into her kitchen for coffee. I told her about my eerie experience up in the woods, which reminded her of a tale about a first cousin whose home had been willed to her by an elderly maiden aunt. The place was rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a handsome young dress peddler who, during the Depression, visited Orleans for a few days each year and boarded with the aunt. The peddler, a natty dresser with flashy, two-toned shoes, drove a shiny black Model T Ford, new each year. One year he failed to show up, though for the past several months the aunt, wearing a different new dress each Sunday, had driven to church in a new Ford. The sheriff came calling, but the aunt was not one to brook impertinent inquiries. She smiled thinly and said that the peddler had left his car and wares with her and, assuring her he’d be back in a few days, had taken the train north to Canada. That was the last she’d seen of him. Time passed, and eventually the aunt herself passed, from her irreproachable status as a maiden lady to narrower confines in the resting place of her ancestors. As for Margery’s cousin, some years after moving into the house she’d inherited from her famously straitlaced aunt, she removed a downstairs partition. Inside the wall she discovered a skeletal human foot and part of an ankle—in a two-toned shoe.

  Some of Margery’s tales were even darker. Not far from her farm, she said, a haunted house used to stand alone in the woods near a brook. When she was a girl, a couple from town rented the place but were frightened away by specters. Some years later, as Margery approached the empty house with a horse and wagon, she noticed a woman searching for something in the overgrown dooryard. As the wagon drew closer, the horse reared up and bolted. The woman vanished.

  “He was a good, steady horse,” Margery told me. “He never would have shied at the sight of a common person.”

  “This wasn’t a common person?”

  “It was the ghost of an alleged murderess.”

  Margery waited while I dug out my notebook.

  “Her husband was a laudanum addict,” she continued. “It was widely believed that one day when he was doped up, she took him out near the brook and killed him by pouring an entire bottle of the stuff down his throat. Some years later, the town fathers sent a local foster girl out to board with the woman and her grown son. My grandfather knew that the girl was being mistreated. More than once he’d seen her out doing chores barefoot in the snow. He reported the incidents, but nothing was done. A few months later the girl turned up dead.”

  “From what?” I asked, writing fast.

  “Blows to the stomach. The coroner ruled that she was pregnant and had been killed by repeated blows to the stomach. Somehow, the woman and her son got out of it at the trial. But not long afterward the son committed suicide.”

  For the second time that day I felt sick, imagining the defenseless girl, the psychopathic woman, and her brutal son in that terrible remote place.

  “After the son killed himself,” Margery said, “the woman went mad. She spent the rest of her life ranting.”

  I thought for a minute. “From guilt?”

  “Probably,” Margie said. “But the form it took was unusual. She claimed that the sound of the nearby brook had become unbearable to her. First it made her sick. Then it drove her insane.”

  I sat forward in my chair. “What brook? Do you remember?”

  Margery didn’t know its name but offered to draw a map in my notebook. Painstakingly, she penciled in the mountain road leading north from her farm, the old haunted house, and the nearby brook.

  It was the stream I’d fished that afternoon.

  Just before leaving Margery’s place that chilly April night, I asked a final question. “What was the woman’s name? The supposed murderess?”

  Margie told me. Then she shook her head. “I think who she really was,” she said, “was evil personified.”

  46

  Big S
ky Country

  “I could spin a tall tale myself, back in my heyday,” the West Texas Jesus boasted to me the next morning on our way through the mountains to my event in Missoula. We were following Clark Fork, one of the most beautiful trout streams in the West. My guy was eyeing it, spooling along in the valley a thousand feet below us through a series of deep green pools, white-water rapids, and trouty-looking runs of broken water.

  “Back in your heyday?” I said. By now I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about playing steel guitar and singing backup (he claimed) for Marty Robbins in a roadhouse in El Paso City, or telling stories from a mountaintop in Galilee.

  Then, trouble. I’d been expecting it for the past week or so. It had been building day by day, and frankly, I was surprised that it hadn’t come to a flash point sooner. Since Austin, Reg and the West Texas Jesus had been arguing, arguing about everything under the sun. Back in northern California, in a motel near Mount Shasta, they’d argued over whether the Catskills were true mountains or the remains of an eroded plateau. Reg said that the New York State history text he’d used with his kids at the one-room school in Chichester explained, in detail, that the Catskills were an eroded plateau. The West Texas Jesus said that for his money, a mountain was a mountain, period.

  In Oregon, I’d spent the better part of an afternoon listening to them hash over the earth-shattering question of whether an eastern brook trout was a “true trout” or a char. Reg said a char. Jesus averred that a trout was a trout was a trout. On they jangled until I thought I’d go crazy.

  This morning in western Montana, all of their wrangling came to a head over—baseball. That’s right. Not religion. Not politics. Baseball.

  What got them started was the old debate over whether a pitched baseball actually curved or only appeared to. (Dad and Reg argued interminably over this.) Reg took the affirmative and, while I think the West Texas Jesus probably knew better, he claimed that it was all an optical illusion. “Get a bat,” Reg said. “We’ll settle this at the next ball diamond we come to.” Jesus said he could put any pitch in Reg’s repertoire “over the wall.”

  Since there was no way to settle this latest hoo-ha immediately, my traveling companions fell into a sullen silence. Below us as we continued east through the Rockies—at least we could all agree that these 10,000-foot-high peaks were not the remains of a plateau—the Clark Fork ran cold, fast, and clear.

  “Let’s wet a line,” the West Texas Jesus said as we dipped down toward the river. “Pull into that fishing access, Harold.”

  “I’ve got a one o’clock in Missoula.”

  “We’ll sink a six-pack in the river, fish up, and walk back down. Catch us some trout. Drink some ice-cold beer.”

  “I said, I have an event in Missoula.”

  “Fuck Missoula,” said the West Texas Jesus, getting out of the car. “I’m going fishing.”

  “Wait!” I said. “I never did get to tell you about that unfinished business with my uncle.”

  But he was already headed down over the bank toward the river, six-pack in one hand, a fly rod in the other. A fly rod very much resembling the split-bamboo, seven-and-a-half-foot Orvis my grandparents gave me when I graduated from college.

  I thought he called something over his shoulder as he started fishing up the river. I caught the words “about it.” About what? I had no idea.

  The last I saw of the West Texas Jesus, in the rearview mirror, he was tied into a good fish, his rod—or mine—bent and throbbing, his beer can lifted exuberantly, while the Loser Cruiser and I puttered on toward home and my reunion with Phillis.

  47

  Missoula

  “About face!” I said on my way back to the Cruiser after my event that afternoon in Missoula.

  Sitting on the sidewalk was a ragged young man with a pack of tarot cards fanned out in front of him.

  “I’ll give you five dollars if you’ll answer one question for me,” I said. “All you have to say is yes or no.”

  The five-spot seemed to vanish as I held it out toward him.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m a writer. On a book tour. What I’d really like to do, though, is stay right here in Montana and fish for a week, then go straight home to my wife in Vermont. Should I?”

  He scooped up his tarot deck, shuffled the cards, and spread them out on the sidewalk again, facedown. “Choose one,” he said.

  I should have anticipated this, but of course I hadn’t. Truth to tell, those arcane tarot figures, up to God alone knows what devilment, have always spooked me a little. But I couldn’t back out now. At least the cards wouldn’t tell me I was going to come down with cancer. I’d already managed to do that on my own. Reluctantly, I pointed to one.

  “Pick it up,” the guy said.

  Oh, Lordy. It was the seven of rods, a skeletal, malignant-looking bastard lugging seven sticks of wood on his back. Seven seven seven. Seven surgeries. Seven months to live. Seven Viagra prescriptions for radiation-related erectile dysfunction …

  The reader took the card and studied it briefly. Then he said, “I think you’ve had a really bad setback at some point in your writing career that’s made you wary of touring.”

  I couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Man,” I said, “like every writer I know, I have had hundreds of really bad setbacks in my career.”

  The tarot reader, no doubt sensing a kindred spirit in the charlatan standing on the sidewalk before him, said, “Finish your tour, buddy. It’ll go fine. As for those other little matters you didn’t mention”—and at that moment I would have sworn that, like the Howard of Moses Lake, he gave me a knowing wink—“no need to worry on those scores, either. At least not for a long time.”

  Oh, prescient Mr. Fortune-teller. Kind Mr. Fortune-teller. Even if you are a street-conning, scheming, lying-through-your-teeth Mr. Fortune-teller. Let me sign a book for you, give you the remaining two dollars in my wallet, erect a statue of you on the village green at home or right here in downtown Missoula, Montana. Go fine. Other little matters. No need to worry. Oh, happy afternoon. Thank you, thank you, thank you. “What do you think?” I said to Phillis on the phone that night. “Was he right?”

  “He was,” she said. “I could have told you that much for nothing. By the way, do you think your road bud will reappear?”

  “The West Texas Jesus? Now that he’s latched on to my fly rod, I doubt it.”

  “Howard Frank?”

  “Yes?”

  “You didn’t really give your favorite fly rod to some old drunk who thinks he’s Jesus, did you? On second thought, don’t answer that. I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  That, gentle reader, was the one thing I was sure of. But what more, really, could anyone hope for?

  48

  Mr. Quimby and Mr. F Nichols

  Partly to clear my head so that I could make a sensible decision about the fellowship I’d been offered at Pennsylvania, partly to earn a few extra bucks, and in part to acquire some insight into a side of the Kingdom I wouldn’t encounter in my classroom at Orleans High, I spent our spring break working for a neighbor, Mr. Aloysius Quimby. Mr. Quimby, a Northeast Kingdom jack of all trades, was a good-natured octogenarian religious zealot. He’d hired me to help him remove a gigantic dead elm that was bidding fair to topple over onto Jim and Helen Hayford’s upper-story roof.

  The third member of our strange little triumvirate was a raging alcoholic who lived in a round-shouldered school bus dating back to the 1940s. The bus had double layers of newsprint taped over the windows to keep out the light when he holed up, with several fifths of Seagram’s Seven Crown, each Friday after work until Monday morning. Mr. F Nichols, as Mr. Quimby referred to him, had an unusual vocabulary, consisting principally of the word “fuck,” delivered with an astonishing variety of inflections and sometimes prefaced or followed, for emphasis, by “yes” or “no.” Thus the initial F, which Mr. Q came up with to replace Mr. Nichols’s real first name, which I never did
learn.

  Throughout the Kingdom, Mr. Quimby was famous for a kind of surreal ingenuity. After spending a full day studying that behemoth of a dead elm, which loomed over the Hayfords’ home at an angle that made the Tower of Pisa look plumb, he constructed a soaring trestle of disused railway ties between the tree and the house, a kind of brace for the first thirty or so feet of the elm’s massive trunk to rest on while he severed the base with his chain saw. It took us a full week to build the trestle, which was the wonder of Orleans. Mr. F Nichols owned an elderly woods horse, with which he skidded the old railway ties up Cliff Street from the tracks below, where a half-mile section had recently been replaced. My job was to help Mr. Quimby hoist and lever them into place.

  Mr. Quimby drove me to work in the morning. His pickup was, as he described it, a “rig-put-together,” a camelopard of a contraption that he had assembled from the bed and cab of a Model A truck, a 1952 Buick engine, and a homemade transmission. At eighty-eight, Mr. Q was as tough as a keg of ten-penny nails, but his joints stiffened up overnight, and for a few hours each morning, he was unable to turn his head more than a few degrees. He drove like a man wearing horse blinders. At the top of School Street, where just a few months ago—to me it now seemed like twenty years—young Cody had driven my car hell-for-leather backward on the first day of the semester, Mr. Q would stop and cut his eyes to the left to see what might be coming out of town on Route 58, which met School Street at a very dangerous, V-shaped intersection at the bottom of the hill. When all was clear he’d yell “Hang tight, Ezekiel!” and gun the rig-put-together down the hill like Dale Senior putting a rival into the wall at Daytona. On the third day I rode with him, we shot out onto the state highway directly in front of a loaded milk tanker. “Enjoy your fucking little ride with Mr. fucking Quimby, did you?” Mr. F Nichols inquired. From then on I walked to work.