The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Ezekiel,” Mr. Quimby said to me one afternoon as we stood atop that insane trestle, surveying the village below. “It is a fine spring day in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, praise the Lord.”

  “It is,” I said, wondering what the Lord would think of our outfit: a stiff-necked evangelist, a drunk, and a first-year schoolteacher and would-be writer at a loss to know what to do with the rest of his life.

  Mr. Quimby paused to mop his brow with his slouch hat, then looked off into the distance. “Behold the new green foliage, Zeke. Vermont’s foliage, fall or spring, is as glorious a sight as any this world has to offer.”

  No argument there.

  “But, Ezekiel, the splendors of this spinning blue sphere”—Mr. Q fancied himself something of a poet-orator—“are as naught to the glories of paradise. Where, by the by, I expect soon to be seated at the right hand of Him who shaped us in His sublime image.”

  “I hope not too soon, Mr. Quimby,” I said, remembering that we had both come perilously close to exactly such a translation earlier in the week at the foot of School Hill. I could still hear that tanker’s bleating horn.

  Mr. Quimby chuckled knowingly, as if his friend on high had vouchsafed to him the exact moment of his celestial ascent.

  “How about the Hayfords?” I said. “Will they be seated up there with you?”

  Mr. Quimby gave this a moment’s consideration. “James and Helen are good enough folks,” he said rather cautiously.

  At that point Mr. F Nichols appeared, sweating out his hangover, shouting fuck this and fuck that, repeatedly whacking the back of his overloaded horse with a makeshift cudgel he’d cut for that purpose. “What about him?” I asked.

  “Not a chance in the world,” Mr. Quimby said, and he clambered down off the trestle, yanked the cudgel away from the drunk, and sent it sailing end over end onto the neighbor’s lawn. He said something quick and low to Nichols, then turned his back on him. To this day I don’t know what Mr. Q told Mr. F Nichols, but at least on that job the guy never beat his horse again.

  As for me, building that Babel-like monstrosity—it worked like a charm, by the way—with Mr. Quimby and Mr. F Nichols turned out to be another small but memorable part of my apprenticeship in the Kingdom. Still, trudging back to Verna’s in the early evening, inhaling the sweet fragrance of varnish from the mill, I wondered. Did I really want to live in Philadelphia for three years? If not, what was I doing with my life?

  D. B. Cooper had yet to hijack an airliner and leap into the dark sky over thousands of square miles of western wilderness. But as I drove south out of Missoula on Day Fifty of the Great American Book Tour, heading for an event in Hamilton and remembering our long-ago first year in the Kingdom, I understood what the West Texas Jesus had meant by comparing us callow storytellers to the flying bank robber who made his fateful plunge.

  49

  The Continental Divide

  This morning I was parked beside my favorite western trout stream, in southwestern Montana’s Pioneer Mountains, contemplating the five hundred miles the Loser Cruiser and I still had to cover to make our engagement that night in Salt Lake City. Even by western standards, it seemed like a haul, though as Russ Lawrence chronicles in his lively history, Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, the Native American ambassador Old Ignace walked from the Bitterroots to St. Louis and back, on behalf of his people, not once but twice. So I slid back behind the wheel and headed off through the Big Hole Valley at my customary 58.5 mph. Approaching the Idaho state line, I coaxed the Cruiser up to 70, hoping the speed might transcend the shimmying. Instantly, the entire front end of the car went into a deep grand-mal shuddering. Back to 58.5.

  It occurred to me, as I cajoled the old Chevy up the hill above the Babylonian-looking metropolis of Salt Lake City to the King’s English Bookshop, that to a storyteller like me, Joe Smith’s marginally more outlandish retelling of a wondrous old tale made a fine American yarn. With, what’s more, an appropriately American capitalistic touch—Moses’ tablets, after all, were made of mere stone. Joe’s were pure gold.

  The King’s English, Betsy Burton’s renowned independent on the ridge above the city, shares its name with Betsy’s memoir of her life as a bibliophile and bookseller. One of her cardinal rules is “never host an event for a book you aren’t passionate about.” As I waited for my event, it struck me that the same precept ought to apply to writing a book. How many of the nearly half-million new books published or distributed in the United States each year would ever see daylight if writers wrote only those books they were passionate about? A well-behaved and attentive shepherd dog attended my talk that evening at the King’s English. There were no after-dinner nappers. (At one venue in New England a guy had actually fallen asleep before my reading and slept soundly through it from beginning to end.) Thank you, Betsy. I’ll be back.

  This place they call Wyoming is one tough and beautiful country. You need only drive along Route 90 from Evander to Rock Springs to Rawlins, past tin-can horse trailers and cattle-sorting pens and railyards and petroleum pumping stations, past walking beams extracting oil with a dreary, seesaw monotony, past mile-long coal trains and interstate exchanges that look like sets for B Westerns, past bone-white alkali streambeds and grazing Angus and Shorthorns and Whitefaces and a few long-abandoned sod huts slumped into sidehills, and then, suddenly, profiled on a distant butte, a single antelope. Like the Kingdom, Wyoming seemed a good place for a man or woman of a certain sanguine temperament to live. And a hard, hard place in which to make a living.

  So, like the cowboy in the ballad, I’m walking the streets, not of Laredo but of Laramie, which, with its squat brick utilitarian downtown buildings, looks like any other western town. I slipped up a flight of stairs that could have led to a Prohibition-era speakeasy or whorehouse—an impression enhanced when a Burlington Northern freight rumbled by not thirty feet away, shaking the building to its foundation—and into Personally Recommended Books (aka The Second Story), where, staring me in the face, was a display of my latest with a RECOMMENDED READING tag. Any writer will tell you—that’s a moment worth the drive from Vermont to Wyoming.

  Later, though, in Cheyenne, I was the only one on hand to admire the vase of freshly cut yellow and orange chrysanthemums beside my books on the signing table at City News & Pipe Shop, since by then it was raining too hard for anyone to venture onto the streets, with plenty of rolling thunder and great sheets of electricity lighting up that big western sky like the approach of doomsday.

  That night, after dodging more cloudbursts under a lime-green sky the likes of which I’ve seen between storms in Montana and once in a Charlie Russell painting but never back in New England, I bunked in at a rundown motor court next to a roadhouse, where I drank too many Silver Bullets. For weak-headed Harold, that’s two cans. I lurched back to the Bates Motel, keeping a watchful eye out for Norman and his mother. I huddled on top of the bedspread, fully clothed and wearing my Red Sox jacket—I’d be damned if I’d climb in between Mother Bates’s gray sheets—and read myself to sleep with Annie Proulx’s Close Range.

  Wyoming, I thought, just before drifting off. Tonight I was content just to be in Wyoming.

  50

  The Great Northern Express

  Back in Vermont in the wintry spring of 1965, our lives got even busier. Sometimes we’d fall asleep over our lesson preparations, stagger to bed too exhausted to make love, wake up at three or four in the morning, remedy that, then up again at five—keeping farmers’ and hunters’ and, by God, teachers’ hours. How did we do it? How does any teacher do it? I have no idea. And we were frequently reminded by Prof, now that negotiations for next year’s salaries were under way with the school board, that we weren’t even close to earning the $1.15 an hour we had calculated we were being paid. The hourly rate at the mill was $1.25, not counting piecework. “Keep the kids out of the mill?” I thought indignantly—maybe we should keep them out of teaching. Yet from watching Jim and Helen Hayford and Phillis, I knew that teac
hing, done passionately, was a noble profession. And soon it might be my profession on the college level. Or at least “something to fall back on” if writing didn’t pan out. A poem Jim Hayford had written the fall before he graduated from college kept going through my head:

  Senior Year

  The fall wind touches the man who hoes

  His upland garden clean for spring,

  While faraway autos sing

  And a faraway rooster crows.

  The fall wind hurries the man who goes

  On foot a stony village road

  In the service of his Lord,

  And hugs his cassock close.

  The fall wind whispers to him who knows

  Only the breathless air of stacks,

  Tracing in ancient books

  The roots whence man arose.

  The fall wind searches out all those

  Who feed man’s body or soul or mind,

  I ask it which it will find

  Me doing when next it blows.

  We continued to see a lot of the Hayfords. Jim and I both loved trains, and often on spring evenings when it didn’t happen to be snowing, he and Helen and Phillis and I would take a picnic supper over to the railroad station at the south edge of Orleans and sit on the wooden benches beside the track to watch the mile-long early evening freight go by. Out of Helen’s wicker picnic hamper came fried chicken, thick slices of well-buttered homemade bread, oven-baked beans laced with this year’s fancy-grade maple syrup. And for dessert, Phillis’s no-egg chocolate wonder cake. Like many countrymen of his generation, Jim carried his round dollar watch in his trousers pocket and his change in a small black snap purse. He’d take out the watch and consult it with a judicious air, like a dutiful station-master. Soon we’d hear the train whistle at the crossing north of town, still far enough away to sound hollow and fluty, but when I put my hand on the rails, I could feel the deep vibrations of all those onrushing tons of steel. Away up the line, we’d see the Cyclopean light of the lead engine, brilliant in the twilight, accompanied by a louder, sharper whistle, then the first of four 100-ton diesel locomotives would pound by scant feet away, followed by 150 cars. Flatbeds loaded high with fresh lumber, tawny gold in the mountain dusk, fragrant with resin. Canadian pulpwood bound for paper mills in Maine and New Hampshire. Grain from the Midwest. Alberta oil in tankers black as night, and oh, the stirring names on the sides of the cars: Santa Fe, Southern, Delaware and Ohio, Grand Trunk. And then, in the heavy silence as the train vanished into the dusky hills south of town, that lone, battered Great Northern “Express” boxcar would reappear on the siding across the tracks, reminding me of the day we first came to town, one year before.

  That year I was on my own Great Northern Express, riding deep into the heart of this northern Kingdom on a train that, like those still barreling through Orleans in the ’60s, had a bad case of Arlo Guthrie’s disappearing-railroad blues. I needed to chronicle what I saw rushing by outside the window right now because soon it would be all gone. How could I possibly cut myself off from this gold mine of material before I’d even staked a claim and begun to pan the surface? How could we leave this “last best place” that almost despite ourselves was becoming home?

  Then Margery Moore told me a story from her own life that framed my question precisely without quite answering it.

  Reeking of hot creosote and train oil and diesel smoke, with an occasional whiff from the nearby stockyards, the railyards of Dodge City sprawled out before me in the savage heat of the August afternoon. They must have looked much the same as in the mid-1940s (absent the steam locomotives) when a beautiful but heartbroken young woman, leaving behind a failed marriage, loaded onto a rented boxcar several cows, a flock of Plymouth Rock laying hens, a tall rooster with a flaming comb, a nanny goat, three sheep, a strutting tom turkey, a Morgan riding horse, two geese, and a very large and very pregnant sow. Then Margery Moore swung aboard herself and rode the rails east out of Dodge toward her true home in Vermont, some 1,800 miles away.

  I know that at twenty-five Margery was beautiful because I have a picture of her at that age, posing with her handsome young husband at a Dodge City photo studio just a few months before her flight back to Vermont. I know she was heartbroken because years later, in the spring of 1965, she told me so. Still, she never wept, even once during the next ten days, as she shepherded her menagerie of farm animals through an uncertain connection in Kansas City, bullied officious freight agents in St. Louis and Chicago, joked with brakemen in Akron, gave half a dozen eggs to a half-starved hobo in Cleveland, watered her stock at nameless little junctions in western Pennsylvania, and fended off a railroad detective with an eye toward an impromptu romantic interlude on a siding in Buffalo. She arrived in Orleans just in time for the blizzard of the century. Commandeering a cattle truck from the local auction barn, Margery drove her animals three miles east to the Moore family farm, then led the horse, cows, and other four-footed critters half a mile through waist-deep snow to the barn, carrying the turkeys and chickens and geese over her shoulder in feed sacks. Not until dawn, with the wind howling like the mythical loup garou that had terrorized her Native American ancestors and the sow birthing the first of thirteen piglets, did Margery finally break down and cry. She was home.

  51

  The Great Plains

  On I went, through the tall-as-an-elephant’s-eye cornfields of Dorothy and Toto’s Kansas, suffused with the hot, gritty scent of corn in full fruit. Past ten-mile-long fields of grain being harvested by ten-ton green combines that did everything but bake it into bread. I flushed lemon-breasted Western larks—with their short wings and shorter tails they scarcely looked aerodynamic—and yellow-headed blackbirds from storm ditches and rest-area dog walks. Then, right on the Nebraska state line, I saw my first-ever giant swallowtail butterfly. At sixty-five, that’s a splendid thing to be able to say.

  When my great-grandfather Eugene Hart was a very old man, he made a pilgrimage by train from upstate New York to Nebraska to visit a boyhood chum who’d come west decades earlier. They tottered over the friend’s section of rich, black-dirt farmland, took a gander at the sod house he’d lived in for his first five years in the territory, then sat out on the porch together after supper for a couple of hours without speaking a single word, since they were both as deaf as fenceposts. At the end of the evening, Great-Grandpa’s friend nodded, stood up, and shouted in my ancestor’s good ear, “Gene, aren’t we having the grandest visit in all the world?”

  And I love the way small cities on the plains loom suddenly up out of the level landscape, their two or three modest downtown skyscrapers shimmering in the late-summer heat. Once the blue-eyed grass covering the unbroken prairie in these parts would snag in the curved horns of the sodbusters’ oxen, as it had in the spurs of the buffalo hunters before them. Today the people those hunters and farmers dispossessed are clerking at casinos. The remaining buffalo are low-cholesterol curiosities, as docile as steers milling in a feedlot. Our Great Plains, too, are somewhat diminished, but I wouldn’t have missed seeing them on this trip for the world. I wouldn’t have missed any of the sights and experiences my journey had afforded me. The first human beings to pass this way heard messages of great import in the eternal winds sweeping over the prairie. Perhaps the wind and the songbirds and the dwindled bison herds had a message for me, if I could slow myself down long enough to hear it. Maybe that was the message. Slow down. Enjoy every minute in this lovely rolling land of yellow-headed blackbirds and giant swallowtails. Enjoy it and then, like your friend Margery, find your way home.

  Only after I returned from the Great American Book Tour did Phillis confide how worried she had been about my launching out on such an extended journey so soon after my radiation treatments. She said that each night when I called her, she was relieved that I’d made it through another twenty-four hours and was one day closer to home. As usual, she had understood me better than I’d understood myself. All along I had conceived of this trip as something I
wanted to do. Phillis, despite her unspoken concerns, realized that it was something I needed to do.

  But what, you may be wondering, was she doing back in Vermont while I was plying the highways, canvassing the independent bookstores of America? In early June, when I’d set out on my trip, Phillis was in the flurry of the end of the school year. A decade before, she had become increasingly aware that many of her students had serious personal needs that were interfering with their learning. In her mid-fifties she returned to graduate school and, working nights, weekends, and summers, earned an MA in counseling. As a school counselor, her work week lengthened from the ordinary sixty or seventy hours most teachers put in to something like one hundred, many of which were spent helping parents and other teachers help the kids.

  World-class caregiver that she is, Phillis was also, that summer, helping my wonderful ninety-year-old mom live independently in an apartment just up the street; attending students’ baseball games, motocross dirt-bike races, and, in consequence of said races, hospital bedsides; tending our gardens and apple orchard; answering my e-mail; and searching for Monty, her six-foot-long ball python, who had squeezed out from under the lid of his cage and, she feared, gotten into the school’s heating ductwork.