The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Years before, Monty had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a neighbor’s lawn, an unclaimed escapee. Phillis gladly adopted him. In time, not a child at her school was afraid of snakes. Indeed, the kids came to love Monty. Not so the school principal and several teachers.

  That night, from a lonely little motel on the Great Plains, I asked Phillis if Monty had turned up. Not yet, she told me, but she was confident that he would.

  “Couldn’t you call him? Like a dog? He seems to like you a lot.”

  “Snakes don’t have ears. He’ll show up when he’s thirsty.”

  Dear Jesus. I’m not in love with snakes myself. I envisioned Monty shouldering aside a tile—do snakes have shoulders?—in the ceiling of the principal’s office and leisurely extending two or three feet of his cream-and-brown snaky self down, down, down to peer, split tongue flickering inquisitively, into the principal’s face.

  “You’re a lucky one, Harold,” a raspy voice in the prairie wind informed me after I turned out the light.

  Him again.

  “To have a gal like that Phillis,” he explained.

  “I know it,” I said. “How about you? Ever married?”

  “Only four times,” he said, and then there was a snap, like a cap being popped off a bottle, and then there was just the wind.

  52

  Reading the Heartland

  When Vivien Jennings was a little girl, visiting her grandparents’ red-clay farm in the hills of Arkansas, she discovered a handsome, bronze-colored snake behind her grandfather’s barn. Always an adventurous kid, she picked it up and began to play with it, slipping the reptile in and out of an empty Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar. When she showed her grandparents her find, they were horrified. Vivien’s new playmate, it turned out, was a poisonous copperhead.

  To me, the copperhead story reveals a lot about this well-known civil rights activist turned world-class bookseller. Vivien and Roger Doeren, her partner at Kansas City’s Rainy Day Books, recommend titles to 150 area book clubs. Rainy Day Books co-sponsors scores of events each year with local libraries, restaurants, and community service groups. Vivien or Roger attends every author function. “If writers honor us by coming, we want to be there for them,” she told me on the day after I saw the giant swallowtail in Nebraska.

  After my reading, Vivien and Roger took me out for supper at the Bluebird Bistro, where they’d recently cohosted an event for a cookbook author. Over fresh rainbow trout and a garden salad grown in the lot across the street, the conversation turned to handheld electronic readers. Would they, I wondered, eventually replace books?

  Roger grinned. “Has anyone ever asked you to sign one?”

  “Books don’t need batteries,” Vivien said. “You can get sand on them. And”—she smiled, and for a moment I could see in her eyes that venturesome little girl, barefoot on a backcountry Ozark farm, with the deadly serpent in the Hellmann’s jar—“books work. One hundred percent of the time.”

  Midnight in a motel in Kansas City. Paying dearly for that salad (try going six months without a fresh tomato) but not regretting it. Taking inventory: one (1) twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity; two (2) author interviews slated for tomorrow in St. Louis (during a recent radio interview in Denver, the host had introduced me as Chris Bohjalian and asked what it had been like to go on Oprah); three (3) book events to do in the next two days; four (4) good novels on my bedside table; and five (5) imponderable questions that had just popped into my head:

  1. Why isn’t man ever called the reading animal? After all, isn’t reading the one thing, in addition to causing mischief for its own sake, we can say, with assurance, that we do better than manatees, armadillos, and pangolins?

  2. Why isn’t Jesus ever reported as reading anything? “It is written,” he loved to say. When did he do his reading? Why didn’t I think to ask him before he jumped ship back in Montana?

  3. Why hasn’t Vivien Jennings (or another great independent bookseller) won the Nobel Peace Prize? Aren’t independent booksellers the last public guardians of our human rights and, along with librarians and teachers, the keepers of our cultural and literary traditions?

  4. Why is it that, in a rundown motel on the outskirts of Kansas City, with the witching hour upon me and a fried gizzard, running to the can every six minutes, a large bottle of Kaopectate in hand, because I had the temerity to eat that tomato—why is it that I’m about as content as a touring writer can be? I can answer that. It’s because in the other hand, the one not grasping the Kaopectate, I’m holding Richard Russo’s novel Bridge of Sighs, and I can’t remember when I’ve met a more likable and compelling townful of folks in any book since Russo’s own Empire Falls.

  5. Which reminded me. What was the name of that Depression-era con-man novel I read and loved and gave away thirty years ago and have been searching for, like the Holy Grail, ever since?

  “The book is dead, long live the book,” I said aloud. “Goodnight moon. Goodnight man with the red balloo—”

  That’s not funny, Harold. That’s just silly. Go to sleep.

  Still hunting for that maddeningly elusive novel the next afternoon in the fiction section of the St. Louis County Library, where I’d be speaking that evening, I found myself remembering some of the high points of my personal history as a library habitué. I remembered exactly where I was sitting in the library of our small-town high school, the slant of light over the baseball field outside the window, even the time—it was 10:20 a.m. on the big, round Seth Thomas library clock—when I first read D. H. Lawrence’s great short story “The Rockinghorse Winner.” And the very chair at the very table in the reading room of Syracuse University’s now long-demolished old library where, on my second time through, I realized that Faulkner’s Light in August was a masterpiece. Not to mention the Saturday afternoon in the periodical alcove at the village library in Orleans when I picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly and suddenly it was an hour later and I’d read the entire long excerpt from James Dickey’s Deliverance without moving an inch. “Mr. Mosher, are you all right?” the librarian finally asked. And right here in this library in St. Louis a few years ago, I read the first few chapters of Undaunted Courage, standing like a sleeping horse or a catatonic writer in front of the new nonfiction display near the main desk. Reading.

  Then there was the spring afternoon in 1965, during my first year as a teacher, when I harried my juniors into the school library to acquaint them with the Dewey Decimal System. With which, it must be said, Harold Who had only the slenderest acquaintance himself. We’d no more than started when, out of a little hedgerow of chokecherries bordering the deepest part of center field on the school baseball diamond, stepped a small deer. Up shot Little Prof’s hand. “Mr. Mosher, Mr. Mosher! Can I get my bow out of Dad’s car and shoot that deer?”

  Now, I hereby invite any of my readers who have ever taught high school kids in a rural area to tell me what I should have said. Admittedly, what I probably should not have said—hunting season having ended months ago—was, “Sure, L.P. Just be careful to check your background. Don’t shoot any first-graders.”

  Little Prof was already out of the room. Two minutes later, with the deer now grazing behind second base, I saw him sneaking around the corner of the school, bow in hand like Natty Bumpo, just as, dear Jesus, the library door opened and, stumbling into the room in all his red-faced glory came Prof himself, flush from a two-quart day and intent on conducting a teacher observation.

  “Stand down, boys and girls, stand down. Continue as before,” bellowed the old educator, dropping into a chair, his clipboard and pen at the ready.

  “So,” I said, trying to position myself between my semi-intoxicated employer and the window overlooking the ball field, “we will turn now to the 500’s and biography …”

  “Mosher,” Prof said, craning his neck. “Is that my boy out there?”

  “Out where, Prof?”

  “Out in the school yard, you dumbbell. Stalking that Christly little skipper.”
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  I pretended to scan the ball diamond. “Oh, no, I don’t think—” By now Little P was within range. Arrow nocked, he raised the bow—and hurried his shot. The arrow flew harmlessly over the startled animal, which took three bounds and vanished into the hedgerow.

  Prof shook his head. “Buck fever,” he said. “I just don’t know about that boy.”

  And, forgetting all about evaluating me, he wandered out of the library and repaired to his office to commiserate with himself over a third quart.

  53

  Chicago

  We sell books the old-fashioned way … we read them.

  —ANDERSON’S BOOKSHOP, NAPERVILLE, ILLINOIS

  Chicago has the damnedest highway toll system in the United States of America. If you’re on one of the numerous interstates crisscrossing the city and you don’t have an Illinois freeway pass, you have to keep pulling off to throw quarters into an automatic collector. Like calculus, it’s simple enough if you understand it. I didn’t, and ran half a dozen toll booths before I realized what they were. Good work, Mr. Vermonter, and now for an appearance at a Chicago mall—how did I get roped into this?—next door to a strip joint with bars on the blacked-out windows. A neon sign read ONE NITE ONLY MISS FIFI FYRE AND LITTLE EGYPT IN FIREROTICA.

  Judging by the numerous cars and pickups in the strip-joint parking lot that evening, the glamorous Miss Fifi and Little Egypt had a good turnout for their brief stand in Chitown. Nearby at the mall bookstore, I did not. Two people showed up: Harold Who and the store manager, who was in a white heat to close for the evening and get over to catch Firerotica.

  “E-GYPT. LIL EGYPT. YOU LET ME IN THERE, GIRLFRIEND. IT’S FIFI.”

  I started upright. A rain of blows fell on the door of my motel room, accompanied by more injunctions to let my nocturnal visitor the fuck into the room or else.

  I staggered to the door, which seemed ready to pop off its hinges. Thank God it was just my prostate gland and not my heart that was at risk. Shades of Miami and the [B]udget In[n].

  “Excuse me,” I called out, as if I were the one waking up half the city of Chicago. “Excuse me, ma’am. This is 202. Howard Mosher? I’m afraid you have the wrong room.”

  “ROOM SCROOM. LET ME IN THERE, GAL, OR I GONE KICK YOUR LYING ASS ALL THE WAY TO DE-TROIT.”

  I opened the door. There, in some kind of skimpy terry-cloth getup, stood (I judged) the celebrated Miss Fifi Fyre. “Say,” she said. “You ain’t Lil Egypt. You got my girlfriend in there somewhere, young man?”

  It was that “young man” that did it. I began to laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still laughing. (Why was I sorry, for the sake of the West Texas Jesus?) “You really do have the wrong room.”

  Miss Fifi was up on her tiptoes, bobbing around and peering past me to see what I’d done with her sidekick.

  “What’s your room number?” she said.

  “This is 202.”

  “Two-oh-two? Why didn’t you say so? We’re in two-oh-four, boy. I got the wrong room.”

  More laughter, this time mutual.

  “Well,” Miss Fifi said, “you go back to sleep now, Mr. Two-oh-two. Get your beauty rest. Ha.”

  “Sorry,” I said again, and just before Miss Fifi began to beat on 204 with all her might, she waved back at me like a railway switchman giving the highball signal and called out, “No problem, dude. No problem at all.”

  54

  Harry W. Schwartz: The Bookstore That Made Milwaukee Famous

  In 1921 a two-fisted, fearless kid named Harry Schwartz, who had the ironclad sense of right and wrong of a Horatio Alger hero combined with a love of books and more than a touch of the iconoclastic exuberance of the young Mark Twain, hopped a freight in Milwaukee and bummed his way west to Los Angeles. He landed a job at a downtown bookstore, sweeping up and tending the nickel book bins on the sidewalk. For Harry it was love at first sight. Head over heels, he fell for the bookselling business.

  A few years later, Schwartz returned home to Milwaukee and established Casanova New, Old and Rare Books, stocked initially with books from Harry’s personal library. Over his long, illustrious career as an activist bibliophile, Schwartz championed the early work of Faulkner and Hemingway, fought tooth and nail against every kind of censorship, risked going to jail for selling banned novels by James Joyce and Henry Miller, raised funds for the freedom fighters in Spain, and, in partnership with his son David, expanded his shoestring operation to half a dozen Harry W. Schwartz Milwaukee-area neighborhood bookstores. I was shocked to discover that the stores had been forced out of business by online book buying and electronic books since my last visit to Milwaukee, three years before.

  Fortunately, a noted bibliophile and long-time buyer for the Harry W. Schwartz stores, Daniel Goldin, now owns and operates the Boswell Book Company in a former Schwartz location near Lake Michigan. On the night I visited Milwaukee, Daniel had invited the senior advanced-placement English class from a nearby high school to attend my event. Afterward, threading my way through the outskirts of town, hunting for a cheap motel, I found myself feeling nostalgic about my long-ago stint as a teacher. I was saddened, too, by the disappearance of the Harry W. Schwartz stores, though I knew that Harry and David would have been heartened to know that Daniel Goldin is continuing to provide very good books to the city made famous by several very good brews.

  55

  The Legacy, Part 1

  Reg Bennett lived to be ninety. I visited him a few weeks before his death and was shocked to see how frail he’d become during the past several months. We drove up the mountain road above Chichester and, although he was too tired to get out, stopped at the pull-off beside the brook where he and my father and I had come in Dad’s DeSoto to hear the Yankees–Red Sox games. And this was where, decades later, at the beginning of my book tour, the current property owner would offer me a job as a caretaker. Looking down the valley at his village, Reg asked if I thought that the manuscript of his Chichester stories was publishable. I said that it was and that I would see to it that The Mountains Look Down found a good home. Reg nodded. Then he said he had something important to tell me. After perhaps thirty seconds, during which neither of us spoke, he seemed to change his mind. All he finally said was, “You’ll understand.” A moment later he repeated himself. “You’ll understand.”

  The envelope arrived by registered mail a few days after Reg’s death. Inside was a copy of Reg’s will, naming me as his principal heir, the recipient of his home and property. Like Pip’s legacy in Great Expectations, it was an unexpected and valuable inheritance, particularly for a scrambling writer with two kids approaching college. I also inherited most of the contents of the house, including Reg’s extensive library, with several first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, as well as his antique fly rods and his Chichester stories, for which I had promised to find a publisher. Yet as the leaves blew down that fall, and the Green Mountains turned gray for the long winter ahead, I felt sobered by the responsibility I had inherited. Reg had devoted his life to education. One way or another, I would use the inheritance for our children’s education. And one way or another, I would find a way to publish Reg’s stories.

  One evening later that week our phone rang. The caller identified herself as the executor of Reg’s will. “Of course,” she said, “there is no property. Reg gave it all away.”

  I was stunned to learn that a few weeks before he died, Reg had turned over his house, his land, and most of his stock certificates to a young woman friend. I was told that he had given Margaret, as I’ll call her, every last possession except for some furniture, the fly rods, his first editions, and the manuscript of The Mountains Look Down, which would still belong to me in accordance with the provisions of his otherwise invalidated will. But when, still in a state close to shock from my conversation with the executor, I called Margaret to inquire about the fly rods, books, and Chichester manuscript, she informed me that Reg had given them all away, as well. I was welcome to co
me and look through the house—now her house—she said. But I would find nothing.

  I probably could not do anything to reclaim the house and property, even if I were disposed to try. But I had to find out what had become of Reg’s memoir of our hometown.

  Clearly, it was not going to be easy.

  56

  A Prairie Home Blockhead

  There’s a lot of human nature in all of us.

  —GARRISON KEILLOR, PONTOON

  I did not need a GPS to notify me that I was heading west again. Nor did I need a West Texas Jesus, an Oliver Sacks, or my deceased uncle to tell me that by doing so I was pressing my luck and the Loser Cruiser’s. Probably I was pressing my luck by including Minnesota on my itinerary to begin with, given the highly problematic and personal nature of my mission. Nevertheless, I was determined to seek out Mr. Garrison Keillor, fellow author and host of the delightful Prairie Home Companion radio show, and, Red Sox cap in hand, apologize to him.

  Dawdling along through the big woods of Aldo Leopold’s and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Wisconsin, I half-hoped I’d be late arriving in St. Paul and therefore not have time for the apology before my event that evening. But like all of us sorry Lords of the Moss, yea, back to the peat dwellers themselves, no doubt, I am—for better or for worse—compulsively punctual. I hit St. Paul right on schedule in the late afternoon, with enough time to scout up Mr. Keillor and try to set things right between us.